Milestones
Esalen President Gordon Wheeler's Blog
October, 2010
Here at Esalen, we know we're in a season of milestones and anniversaries — this year and for the next several years to come. This fall marks the 80th birthday anniversaries of both Esalen's Co-founders, Michael Murphy and the late Richard Price. Dick died tragically, and far too young, in an accident in Hot Springs Canyon twenty-five years ago this fall. Michael continues at the visionary helm of this transformational Institute, still coming up with new inspiration, new ideas and plans for shapeshifting our world, nudging us ever onward toward his dream of a grand new synthesis of all the dimensions of our shared culture: science, spirit, psychology, embodiment, and politics — in a single, sweeping evolutionary vision. To say that Michael is undiminished, going into his ninth decade, is just an understatement. With a new book and new conference series in the works — plus a new movie coming out this month (Golf in the Kingdom, a worldwide bestseller for nearly 40 years — coming at last to the screen) — he's actually picking up speed.
Dick's loss is immeasurable, and all the more so for us today in that he didn't write; yet his unique legacy lives on, at Esalen and around the world, through his teaching and through oral transmission. You can step into that rich heritage and see its continuing evolution this fall at a special anniversary 5-day course event, November 14-19.
Michael's birthday will be marked, and his living legacy celebrated, at the annual Esalen Benefit Weekend this fall, November 5-7, in an exciting and festive program featuring an array of notable presenters and well-wishers.
We hope you will join us at both of these landmark events here at Esalen this November.
Esalen itself, as we know, is stepping up to the threshold of a year-plus-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Institute's opening in 1962. The official start date of our 50th anniversary year is 2012, but it was 1961 when the young Dick Price and Michael Murphy drove a borrowed truck back to Rancho La Puerta just over the border in Tecate Mexico, stopping along the way on the advice of Aldous Huxley to see the philosopher Gerald Heard. Both these elder eminences counseled the two young dreamers to push ahead with their remarkable brainstorm of a visionary new kind of Institute here on Mike's grandmother's property in Big Sur. Together they opened a new kind of space for a new kind of conversation - experimental, open-ended, across disciplines, across methodologies and practices, between and among open-minded spirits who would have the confidence to stand at the edge of their own questing and doubts, and reach for something more. From integral education to citizen diplomacy, from round-table philosophy to hot-tub diplomacy, as we know, the results have changed our world.
But – none of this would have happened without an earlier visionary act which took place here on this land in 1910: the purchase of the Big Sur Hot Springs property by Michael's grandparents, Dr. Henry Murphy and his wife Vinnie Murphy, from one Thomas Slate, the original land-claim settler (following the land-grant Spanish, following ages-long stewardship by the Esselen Nation). We celebrate this act of foresight and imagination every day that we are here on this magic land, by enacting the dreams of this remarkable family of visionary seekers. And this year, 2010, we formally mark the Centennial of Murphy family vision and stewardship of this sacred site.
The idea of the elder Murphys, back a century ago, was to develop the salutary springs — already legendary on the Central Coast, after millennia of healing use by the Indians — into a California version of the traditional European hot spring spas. Something like this had been done at Tassajara Hot Springs (also used by the Esselen Indians since time immemorial: "tassajara" means "a place for curing game or meat" in the Esselen language — in other words, a camp for a bit of celebration and R&R following the hunt). As locals know, according to Monterey County lore the Laureles Grade Road, which crosses the hills to connect Carmel and Salinas Valleys, was first put in or upgraded in the late 19th Century to serve the Tassajara Stage, a day-long journey by horse-drawn coach from the Salinas train station to the Victorian hotel at Tassajara Springs, where the Zen Center Mountain Retreat is located today.
The world of medicine was utterly different a century ago: the modern gulf between medical science and the healing arts, both timeless and new, was only just beginning to open up. It was a world where, as an ancient physician cousin of my grandmother's once told me, looking back on those years, "We had five drugs to work with — period." One was aspirin, I remember his saying, and one was quinine — such was the primitive level of medical science at the time (I was a kid when he told me this, decades ago, and I've always been sorry I didn't note the other three. But you get the idea).
Two World Wars interrupted Dr. Murphy's original vision, first by delaying the arrival of the automobile road to Esalen till the mid-30s, and then by the coastal blackout for the duration of World War II. Still, by 1938, the senior Murphys had built Big House and rededicated themselves to their old dream. Tubs were hauled in by fishing boat (and landed by pulley-and-rope sling, since boats can't put in on Big Sur's treacherous South coast); the kernel of the lodge was built, along with the first guest accommodations.
And so Big Sur Hot Springs, still known locally as "Slate's Hot Springs" in those days, continued to operate through the post-War years — years when the world of "medicine," in the mainstream sense, would become steadily more divorced from the world of healing and health itself. How fitting, how right it is, that Esalen itself should have been so often and so importantly the site of new integrations of that old split, as of so many others — mind and body, science and spirit, medicine and health.
Esalen would not be here today, and the landscape of our culture would be subtly, importantly different, without that original visionary impulse of Henry and Vinnie Murphy, a full century ago. Without that — and without the sustained, inspired stewardship and largesse of generations of the Murphy family down to this day, — very likely the property would simply be in private hands today – either as gated community, South Coast Sheraton, or one more mini-San Simeon, locking up the coast. And all our lives would be subtly impoverished, by the loss of something we and the world never knew, that might have been.
What a family. What a legacy, to hand on to future generations. We know today that the hope of a sometimes dark, ever-chaotic world rests with the "outliers," thinkers and searchers at the forward edge of cultural evolution, where experiments and new and renewed practices take the human spirit into what can yet be, for all its painful birth, a new age of human creativity, and a new dawn of sustainable human stewardship of life on the planet.
Esalen itself is one of the most fertile of those new experiments and renewed practices. Thank you, Dr. Murphy and Vinnie Murphy. Thank you, five generations (so far) of the remarkable Murphy family. And thank you, Michael and Dick, at your 80th birthday anniversaries, for daring to dream, and even more, daring to turn your dreams into our shared reality.
Gordon Wheeler, President, Esalen Institute