Mind/Body/Spirit– the Baths at Esalen
Esalen President Gordon Wheeler's Blog
June, 2010
What's the relationship between "mind" and "body"? In a sense this question is at the heart of what Esalen has always been all about. After all, our unique location on this magic shelf of land between mountains and sea is given by the fact that there are hot springs here, bubbling naturally out of the cliffs some 50 feet above the rolling surf. These springs have drawn pilgrims to this place in search of restoration and bodymind healing for literally thousands of years, going back into deep Amerindian times. For nearly 50 years now these baths have served as a container and a basic practice underlying everything else that has gone on at Esalen. (It's not for nothing that the pioneering "Track Two" diplomacy breakthroughs led by Esalen during the Cold War years were referred to in the press as "hot tub diplomacy!")
The experience of the baths grounds us, relaxes us into the possibility of new experience, connects us with others and our deeper selves in a whole new way. The conversations we're then open to, in seminars and conferences and over the dinner table, are different conversations. Nearly everyone who teaches and studies here feels it – and Esalen's remarkable record as a leader in new thought and new cultural forms over the past half century – from psychology to integral health to embodied spirituality to integral/sustainable business and participatory politics and diplomacy and more – proves it.
And then what about "spirit"? What's the relationship between "mind/body" and what we think of as Spirit, creativity, inspiration – even soul, and spiritual or religious practice? Aren't those quite different things, with "body" over "here," and "spirit" over "there?" This is a question that has preoccupied Western philosophy, and more recently Western psychology, for at least 2500 years – leaving "mind" up for grabs between the two poles, matter and spirit, depending on which thinker you're reading at the moment. And then where would we put relationship, community, and politics, our real embodied lives with other people, on this kind of map? Too often, the philosophers of mind and consciousness don't address "real life" questions like these.
And certainly the dominant answer in Western thought and religion alike down through the millennia has been yes: mind and body, and even more body and spirit, are utterly separate dimensions, connected (if they are connected at all) only in the mind of God. In the Western tradition, most often body has been seen as inert (or at best mechanical), while mind comes from "somewhere else" – most often some more spiritual realm. More recently, since the dawn of the scientific age, more and more the view has been that materialism – the body "all by itself" – is all there is, and "mind" is just some kind of by-product of the electrical activity of an individual brain. As for Spirit – well, for most of the past two centuries that hasn't even been a topic on the agenda, in the Western scientific model.
If the old, "cartesian" view was that body was the car, while mind got on board as the driver, then in the contemporary scientific version of this there is no driver: the car/body is an amazing robot which somehow not only drives itself, but also has a sort of built-in i-phone sort of device (reflective self-consciousness) which watches itself and maybe texts or makes a few calls while it drives (and perhaps this explains a lot, since our Western science-saturated world is certainly full of smash-ups…)
Whether or not this model does any justice at all to the reality and apparent power of Consciousness is then the great debate of philosophy of consciousness and neuroscience through much of the 20th Century. (Though maybe we should call this extreme materialist view not real science but "scientism" – the ideology that insists that the empirical findings of science are ultimate truth. Real science is radically committed to its own evolution, radically insistent that its current findings are always provisional, never final).
Somehow when you're soaking in the tubs at Esalen, outside in sun, fog, or storm, deeply relaxed in body and mind, your view drawn out to a limitless horizon of sea and sky – none of all this academic debate seems to make much sense. On the contrary, we start with what is, what's real to us right here, right now: the sky, the hot water, the surf below me; my own body, alive, aging and achey, or erotic and vibrant, or all of those as the case may be; other people, in the rich texture and flow of relationships; my goals and our intentions, everything we're trying to do, in and with and for each other and our shared world.
To be sure, all natural hot springs are deeply relaxing, even healing to the body (and there are thousands of them in California, developed and undeveloped, products of the churning of tectonic plates opening fissures to the earth's deep magma core). Many of them are powerfully contemplative as well, places for deep reflection, connection with self, other, and nature. If many find the baths at Esalen to be something even more than all this, perhaps that "something more" comes from the unique joining of cliff and surf at the edge of the continent, the awesome power and endless vista that open up before you. Something about this magic confuence of healing waters and the muscled, surging Pacific deeps makes it clear that our dominant Western view is inadequate – too thin to capture either the world's reality or the depths of our own psyche. Sitting in the baths, you may experience directly – I know I do – that Consciousness is everywhere, and mind/body can never be separated from Spirit – any more than mind/body/spirit can be torn apart from our living, felt and know world of emotions, relationships, community and politics.
As a teacher of mine used to say, "Some people want to get away from the world, to find God. Why? – when God is all around them, right here, just look at the person sitting next to you, and see the Self in their eyes." (well, actually his translator, now his successor, said that. It's odd how I always remember that, and so many other things like it, so clearly in his own voice in English!) He also liked to tease his own swamis, saying, "Just look at them, aren't they spiritual, in their nice orange robes? They've given up everything, for spirit. And do you know why they don't pursue Self-knowledge out in the world, with families and jobs and politics? I'll tell you why: because they can't do it, it's too hard for them." The swamis would all crack up, while the householders in the audience cheered (and wept with the affirmation – because hey, it is hard).
Reflecting on all this in the Esalen baths, it seems perfectly natural (and naturally perfect) that Esalen Co-founder Michael Murphy would be drawn here to realize the vision he brought back from a seminal year in India nearly six decades ago at the ashram of one of his own teachers, the mystic philosopher (and political activist) Sri Aurobindo. In Aurobindo's magisterial vision, Consciousness embodies and evolves right here on this living plane – as spirit manifesting as mind, body, relationship, emotion, science and politics and evolution itself, all of them together cocreating the evolution of a conscious universe. When we do our work – on the mat, in a workshop, out in the world of service – we're participating in that evolution, affecting the whole of the Conscious universe in some way.
No wonder that Esalen then, the great mecca of somatics and mind/body health and healing, has also been the crucible for so many explorations and applications of embodied spirituality, psychology and trauma healing, group and relational methods, sustainability and permaculture, philosophical explorations in consciousness and evolution, participatory politics on a community and international level, and so much more.
Or maybe we should turn that around as well. Perhaps it was something about this land and these springs, this transpersonal vista that deepens and opens out at the same time, that took Michael to India in the first place – and then drew him specifically to the integral teachings of Aurobindo in particular (because we know India is as full as the West is of separatist puritans and fundamentalist politicians, insisting that Spirit must separate from mere matter, that the body is a dead end, and not at all an opening to deeper connection with Spirit, and with others on the path). Aurobindo's philosophy of Consciousness evolving rises above all that – and takes all the dimensions of our felt, daily, messy and complex relational/political living along with it.
But if Consciousness is more than just a byproduct of electrical events in the body/brain, then what happens to Consciousness after the body dies? More specifically, does anything of individual awareness survive bodily death? Science scoffs of course (or rather "scientism" scoffs: a real scientific view can only be open-minded about the not-yet-known). Yet an enormous body of empirical findings – from near-death research to lab science on ESP and telepathy to our own experiences, oftentimes, of intuitive practices with uncanny predictive accuracy – suggests that this area of Consciousness research at least merits much further study.
And that's just what Esalen has been facilitating and supporting for over a decade now, in its Survival of Bodily Death seminar, a fellowhip of academics and others from the worlds of medicine, psychology and parapsychology, philosophy of consciousness and others, gathering to synergize their empirical findings and trial models, coming out of their own (mostly) university-based research activities. Much new scientific research, a number of important publications, and considerable professional journal reviews and other attention have come out of this series already, essentially revivifying a field that was "off the page" of serious study just a generation ago. Stay tuned on this one– !
Jeffrey Kripal's big book Esalen: the Religion of No Religion treats the history of the Institute from this integrative, "tantric" point of view. To Kripal, the deepest meaning of Esalen is this exploration of an embodied spirituality, "the West" not just meeting "the East," but assimilating Eastern traditions deep into Western culture – and transforming those traditions in the process. The evolution of Consciousness on this plane, you might say. Think about this the next time – or the first time – you soak in the baths at Esalen, gazing deeply westward across the ocean toward "the East." And think about it, if this intrigues you, with the whole of your mind/body/spirit, our full evolving selves in integration with the whole of our embodied, relational, emotional political lives and values in and with community. Let those artificial boundaries dissolve – and feel the richer, deeper sense of connectedness with both self and other people that may emerge. And then take those realizations with you, into your seminar and then into a richer life back out in the world, wherever your path and service may take you.
And see you soon at Esalen!
Gordon Wheeler, President, Esalen Institute