Esalen: In the Air - "Esalen Statement of Purpose"

Esalen Institute
Statement of Purpose

Esalen Institute exists to promote the harmonious development of the whole person. It is a learning organization dedicated to continual exploration of the human potential, and resists religious, scientific and other dogmas. It fosters theory, practice, research, and institution-building to facilitate personal and social transformation and, to that end, sponsors seminars for the general public; invitational conferences; research programs; residencies for artists, scholars, scientists, and religious teachers; work-study programs; and semi-autonomous projects.

Though most of its programs started in Big Sur, it is not limited to a single locale. From time to time it creates new program formats to further its work.

In the course of history, new institutions appear to meet emerging needs or possibilities. The Academy and Lyceum, for example, nurtured the philosophic inquiries initiated by Plato and Aristotle, creating a model for other schools of learning in Greco-Roman antiquity. The monasteries of Western Europe furthered Christian contemplative life. The universities invented by medieval scholars, most of them clerics inhibited in their secular studies by the Church, provided oases for the development of modern science. In these three cases, new social forms were invented to support new kinds of intellectual or spiritual activity arising in Hellenic, early Christian or medieval European cultures. There is a need now for analogous social invention to support the exploration of human possibilities that are neglected by mainstream education, philosophy and science, and by traditional religious groups. Esalen Institute was founded in response to that need. The difficulties that modern culture has in supporting the wide range of human potentials that Esalen explores is especially apparent in the limitations of:

modern education, which by emphasizing conceptual skills and vocational guidance, neglects sensory, kinesthetic, emotional, interpersonal, volitional and spiritual training, though such training has been advocated by Greek philosophers, Renaissance educators, and modern thinkers such as John Dewey and William James.
contemporary social science, which emphasizes the study of ordinary or diseased behavior even though a number of prominent psychologists and medical people have developed ways to study and cultivate good health and exceptional functioning.
religious and quasi-religious groups that do not support the diversity of opinion and intellectual freedom which long-term exploration of human potential requires. To the extent that they are bound by their dogmas and authoritarianism, they inhibit or prevent open inquiry and personal growth.

Esalen has fought off every attempt to capture its curriculum in the service of a single limiting point of view. It has promoted reflection upon the non-cognitive domains of sensory, kinesthetic, emotional, and transpersonal experience, and has initiated new programs to accomplish these ends. Unlike most religious groups, it remains an open system, and unlike most contemporary education, it explores non-cognitive areas of human functioning. In this sense, it is a new kind of institution.

The Institute's dialogues on philosophy have embraced religious experience, metaphysics, social action and everyday life in an attempt to broaden formal philosophic discourse beyond its academic confines. Its program of somatic education has joined anthropology, psychoneuroimmunology, sports medicine and other fields to explore the body's mysterious capacity for change. Its study of exceptional functioning has examined evidence from numerous fields that demonstrates human responsiveness to imagery, intention and spiritual energies. Through programs such as these, Esalen explores subjects that universities and scientific research centers often neglect without the dogmatism that characterizes many religious and therapeutic schools.

Esalen encourages both direct experience -- whether physical, emotional, cognitive, or transpersonal -- and reflections upon that experience. With a grant from the National Council of Churches, it sponsored workshops in which theologians participated in Gestalt therapy, sensory awareness, and encounter groups, then reflected upon their experience from a theological perspective. Working with a similar format, elementary and high school teachers adapted various psychological and somatic disciplines to their curricula in its Confluent Education program. And its workshop leaders and senior staff frequently examine their own practice, studying the successes and failures of various approaches to improve the quality of the Institute's public programs.

The Institute has also emphasized the complementary nature of personal and social development. With a grant from the Ford Foundation, for example, it began a program for Confluent Education in 1967. This project joined affective and cognitive learning, developing ways in which sensory, emotional, imaginative, and spiritual capacities could be cultivated in elementary schools and high schools. Eventually, it became the Department of Confluent Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which has awarded more than 200 graduate degrees. Esalen has initiated other outreach programs, among them the Institute for Humanistic Medicine, which introduced alternative health care approaches to doctors, nurses and public health experts; a Sports Center that presented somatic disciplines, mental training programs, and martial arts to coaches, trainers and athletes; an innovative childhood learning center in Big Sur; and a Soviet-American Exchange Program. All of these programs have been animated by Esalen's belief that significant and lasting personal change is impossible without social change.

To support the exploration of neglected human capacities, Esalen has often sponsored the work of educational or therapeutic innovators. The disciplines of Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldendreis and Fritz Perls, for example, gained their first widespread recognition at the Institute, while Assagioli's Psychosynthesis, Charlotte Selver's Sensory Awareness, George Leonard's Energy Training, Alexander Lowen's neo-Reichian therapy, Emilie Conrad's "continuum", and other practices were presented to large audiences at its seminars in Big Sur and elsewhere.

Esalen is dedicated to the continuing exploration of positive human capacities, and to the creation of a healthier and more humane world.