Esalen "CTR" and the New Human Story
Esalen President Gordon Wheeler's Blog
December, 2011
Where do all the new ideas at Esalen come from? We know that for nearly 50 years Esalen has been a thought-leader and cultural shapeshifter in a whole range of domains, from psychology to diplomacy, from somatics to spiritual activism, from experiential education to integral health and more. We know that this creative outreach and tool-building goes on vigorously today, and our pioneering "quadruple bottom line" model is inspiring other organizations to hold a new level of complexity thinking and planning in their vision and in their work.
But where does all this come from? How can it be that a little place on the cliff edge of the western world has exerted such an outsized influence on the wider culture, across these past five decades? How do all the Big Ideas get generated, and then how do they build from inspiration to application?
Well, the obvious answer is, ideas come from all over. They're "in the air," nobody owns them, and as science writer and Esalen presenter Steven Johnson points out in his recent book Where Good Ideas Come From, whenever one person "comes up" with something really new, it always seems to turn out that the same insight has popped up in a number of other places.
But a new idea can't take hold and shift our lives until it's put together with other ideas, shaped and developed in conversations and labs, and road-tested and refined - most of which happens in creative contact among those who hold different pieces of the new emergent picture. Today we know that the "lone genius" model we've had a romance with in the West in recent centuries is just that - a romantic myth. It doesn't really happen that way.
Thus the idea of evolution was "in the air" in Europe for a hundred years and more before Darwin "came up" with it. His own grandfather was a leading exponent of evolutionary thinking, and Darwin himself had been corresponding with scientists and other colleagues about it for a generation before he suddenly rushed something into print at last, to avoid being scooped by a younger naturalist named Wallace. What both Darwin and Wallace added that made the idea so much more user-friendly (or user-shocking, as it still is to many), was the concept of "selective pressure" operating on traits that were heritable (although he had no idea how they were heritable at the time.)
The idea of natural selection of heritable traits doesn't have to contradict anybody's belief in a pervasive spiritual principle, a larger purpose to creation - or even a personal God. But it did have the effect of removing the necessity of a single planning mind as an explanatory principle, magically coordinating each step in the giant cosmic process. And that's what was and still is so upsetting to religious fundamentalists, then and now.
Which leads us back to Esalen - and today's initiatives at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, or "CTR." Over the past 150 years since Origin of Species, Darwin's ideas have mostly been combined (as ideas always are, one way or another) with a Western materialist ideology of extreme individualism - the notion that we're born only to compete and dominate, it's the "survival of the fittest" out there, the "law of the jungle," - where "jungle" is somehow understood as a seething mass of separate individuals programmed by their genes to grab what they can, kill where they can, copulate where they can, and then die. As opposed to, say, an incredibly intricate, dynamic balance of mutual and symbiotic ecosystems, each element a balance of assertion and cooperation.
Small wonder then that this harsh picture has been a hard sell: you don't have to be a religious fundamentalist to find this narrative cold, very far from anybody's lived experience of attachment and interdependency - and frankly totally unbelievable. After all, if this picture were really true, and only the most ruthlessly aggressive, competitive, rapacious individuals survived to propagate and pass on their genes, then wouldn't the human species be getting progressively more savage and aggressive with each passing generation? And yet we know, even with the perilous state of the world today, that the level of violence, warfare, and murder by any reasonable measure has gone pretty steadily down over the centuries, not up! So something else is at work, beyond the old "law of the jungle" thinking.
In fact, all the scientific evidence tells us that this old, "selfish gene" narrative, which dominates the popular and scientific cultures alike, is sadly, tragically out of date. From anthropology, primatology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, attachment theory, biochemistry, climatology, paleontology and more comes a flood of new data and findings, discrediting old assumptions and telling us that the real story of our species is far, far more cooperative, more empathy- and attachment-based, more "pro-social," and in every way more hopeful, than the bleak picture of yesterday's "genetic determinism" narrative.
But where is this story? Where can you read it? Where is it for the religious doubter, forced to choose between the cold, hard reductionism of yesterday's science, and the rigid reassurances of fundamentalisms all around? Where is it for the politician looking for answers in health care reform? Where is it for the banker looking to maximize profit? Would a "New Human Story," one based in the evolution of cooperation more than competition, make a difference in our real, practical lives? You bet it would! But where is it?
The answer is, it's all over the place - but mostly in bits and pieces, here and there in academic "silos," one piece here, another piece there, right at the forefront of a dozen different disciplines. But nowhere is it being put into user-friendly language, articulated in a way people can make sense of and use, and promoted widely where it counts. There are some attempts to tell the new story, at least some parts and pieces - but it isn't yet landing. Just look at our contemporary political landscape: the forces of greed and obstruction have a ready narrative to fall back on, of why anything else is impossible: human nature is selfish and bad, and there's nothing you can do but go with it. The forces of problem-solving and compromise look mumbly and muddle-headed all too often, when it comes to explaining how their ideas don't just run afoul of this supposed "basic human nature."
Now, what can Esalen do about it? Maybe more than you think! Last week Esalen CTR hosted the first of a new series of invitational colloquium-style mini-conferences, bringing together a dozen world-class thinkers and model-builders from a variety of scientific and applied science domains to see what can happen if you put the necessary voices holding pieces of the New Human Story together in one room together for five days. We wanted to see how far they can and want to get in putting those pieces together. Where will the stuck places be - the disagreements that are fundamental, as opposed to those which are just academic habits? Where and how will these different elements of the new emergent story all get put together into a "human nature" story that could be coherent, simple and clear enough to be taught to children and politicians? What's getting in the way of this new story's "landing" now - and then what needs to happen, to unblock those bottlenecks?
As one recent CTR conference guest put it, in a wonderful oxymoron, this is a process of "proactive emergence." That is, emergence - the "popping up" of a new gestalt, a new whole picture that is different from the simple summation of all the individual parts - is by definition something you can't force. And yet, you can promote it! Think of is as, say, matchmaking. It's way more than a blind date - but at the same time it's not planned marriage: you can put the people in the room, but the chemistry has to bubble on its own.
Or as Esalen Co-Founder (and CTR founder and longtime visionary steward Michael Murphy) puts it, this kind of structured conversation is a process of "social acupuncture" - finding the sensitive pressure points that make a difference, and then doing the minimum that starts a chain reaction. Esalen was founded, remember, to provide a venue to every dimension of our full human adventure and experience that was "excluded from the mainstream academy." What is it that's not being looked at, what conversations should be happening across disciplines, that are not yet happening? It's been Michael Murphy's and Esalen's openness to the new, and at the same time an uncanny "antenna" for what's missing or stuck, that has led to so many of these inquiries that have shifted and fertilized whole new cross-disciplinary fields for 50 years.
That's been Michael's magic recipe, for inspiring and magnifying creativity and influence: find the conversations that need to be happening and aren't: then get diverse leaders who hold pieces of the new thinking that needs to emerge, put them together in the magic environment of Esalen - and watch the new integral thinking emerge. (It's for good reason that the "track two" and direct citizen initiatives across tense boundaries at Esalen during the wind-down to the nuclear standoff of the Cold War were dubbed "hot tub diplomacy" in the press.)
And like the New Human Story Project, all these series and so many more began at some particular time, with just one invitational meeting. In fact, there have been over 200 of these miniconference/symposium series hosted pro bono by Esalen/CTR over the past 5 decades - not just 200+ meetings, but 200+ series of meetings. Some of these fellowships have met for one or two years; others for a decade and more. Out of them have come many, many of those "new ideas" we were tracing above.
These ideas and more like them make up what I think of as the "toolbox for the 21st Century" - all those skills, ideas, and capacities that enable us to deal with complexity thinking, the crucial relation of embodiment and empathy to spirit and business and politics which together are the hallmark and the signature of Esalen. By the same token, ideas flowing out of CTR over the decades are everywhere in the Esalen catalog as well, from somatics to spiritual activism, from lntegral leadership to sustainability, and others still looking for the label for their own emergent cross-domain field.
Do all the brainstorms and all the invited events at CTR then pan out? Do all of them go on to create a new human lever which, applied in just the right place with just the right pressure, shifts the world? Of course not. "If all your ideas succeed," again quoting Michael Murphy here, "then you're playing it way too safe!"
At a practical level, that's why your donation to Esalen - no matter where you may apply it - is such a multiplier. If you give to particular programs, or Programs in general, you're helping shift the lives and minds of thousands of students each year - many, many of whom turn around and go out and act as the multiplier themselves, founding new ventures, taking new leadership, standing up in their work and families and communities for Esalen's vision of our extraordinary human potential, personally and collectively. If you give to CTR, you're supporting the "think tank" function of Esalen - and through Esalen, right on out to the emergent world culture, where so many areas are ripe for inspiration and up for grabs. And if you give to the Esalen general fund, then you're helping platform all these things and more.
The New Human Story is all about our natural evolutionary capacity to dream, to imagine beyond limits, to spark each other through competition in the context of a larger cooperation, a larger sense of wholeness and belonging. Like Esalen itself, it's all about the human adventure, and seeing it and living it to the full, beyond the limits of past thinking.
As Esalen moves into its 50th Anniversary year, this process of identifying, incubating, and promoting new ideas and methods that shift our consciousness and our world goes on apace - in CTR conferences, in workshop courses, in the residential internship and training courses at Esalen and more. Join us in the ferment - and join with us at Esalen for a special extended 3-day weekend celebration next fall, Oct 4-7 2012, marking Esalen's 50th Anniversary itself: honoring the past, celebrating the present, and embracing the future, the 3rd generation of Esalen.
Welcome to the adventure! Welcome to Esalen!
Gordon Wheeler, Big Sur, December 2011