Join us at Esalen this Nov 5-7 – Celebrating our Past, Building our Future
Esalen President Gordon Wheeler's Blog
August, 2010
As foggy summer mornings turn toward the glorious sun-filled days of autumn in Big Sur, we step into a special time of celebration here at Esalen. This fall marks the 80th birthday season of both Esalen’s Co-founders, Michael Murphy and the late Dick Price. Dick died 25 years ago this fall, but the movements in psychology of which he was an important pioneer – the authenticity of the practitioner/client encounter, the integration of the spiritual into the full essential range of human experience, the validity of extreme experiential exploration – these things and more have only grown in importance and influence in the field all through the past generation.
Meanwhile, Michael's contributions have only continued to shapeshift our larger world, always through an expansion of our notions of what is humanly possible, a stretching of the "human potential." Do competitive athletes and other extreme practioners really develop extraordinary human capacities, analogous to the siddhis and charismas of spiritual traditions? – yes, and you can read about it in any one, really, of Michael’s many books. Can a "small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world" (as anthropologist Margaret Mead put it)? – definitely yes, check out the Esalen Soviet-American project and its many productive offspring projects, here and around the world, who are doing this every day. Or here’s another one: does something of the individual human mind and spirit, each one being the most complexly organized entity we know of in the universe, survive the death of the body? And if so, can this be demonstrated empirically, in the scientific model, not just through personal or religious revelation? – stay tuned on this one, the evidence is still being organized and deepened all the time through the work of Michael's "Survival" seminar series at Esalen’s Center for Theory and Practice. And there's so much more –
Surely the most remarkable creation and contribution of these two remarkable men, Michael and Dick, is Esalen itself, the little outlaw institute on the western edge of the American continent, which like Michael himself, only continues to reshape and open up our shared world. Esalen opened to the public in 1962 – which means that come January, we enter the 50th Anniversary year of the incubation period of Esalen itself, the time when the two young founders were planning and consulting their own mentors about whether there was room in the world for something utterly new, neither ashram nor traditional college, a space dedicated to the cross-fertilization of "everything excluded" from the mainstream universities of the day. Aldous Huxley among others gave them an emphatic yes, and went on to become one of Esalen's first presenters the following year.
Now if you weren’t around in 1962 – or maybe you weren't old enough to read the papers (which is how we got our news back in those days), – there's still a handy way to get a real hit of what that world felt like, and what a huge list that "everything excluded" really was, half a century ago. Just Tivo (or Netflix) any episode of the sit-drama series "Mad Men" on AMC. The depiction of those times – frantically materialistic, imaginatively limited, deeply racist and sexist and of course homophobic (those two always go together), – may strike you as a caricature of that era. Believe me, it's not. It was a world of drastically constrictive roles, rigidly impoverished imagination and possibilities for living. It's not as if all those things aren’t with us today; of course they are. The difference is that back then we had few or no alternatives. Even to notice the materialism, the blind jingoism, the discrimination that still exist today, is to see what a different world those dark energies operate in. And Esalen – together with all the centers and movements of radical inquiry and liberation of those times and since – has had everything to do with making that difference.
This fall you can join in celebrating our Founders' legacies in very special ways on two upcoming dates. The week of November 14-19 at Esalen will feature a special 5-day program honoring the legacy and contributions of Dick Price to the worlds of psychology, personal growth and healing, and lifelong integral development and change, with an accent on the meaning and future of those essential developments today and tomorrow.
Before that, on November 5-7, our annual Donor Weekend at Esalen will feature a gala celebration of the ongoing contributions of Michael Murphy, in special honor of his 80th birthday season. This festive event will center around a deep assessment of Michael's inspired contributions in a whole range of areas, especially through his visionary leadership of Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research over the years, where so many initiatives continue to be birthed and incubated, that go on and out to reshape Esalen’s curriculum as they reshape our world.
Meanwhile, we celebrate and build on the legacy of these two pioneering geniuses in social and cultural innovation, with every program and presentation at Esalen. Join us for any of these special events – or any of over 500 other courses and programs at Esalen (not even counting the many open classes, talks, lunch tables, healing arts sessions, web bulletins and more coming out of Esalen every day and every week of the year).
Our world today, as we know, is bursting with new potential and possibility – and fraught with new menace of catastrophe. In place (we think) of the nuclear Armageddon staring us down in the days of "Mad Men," we’re faced with other menaces, environmental and epidemic – but all of them driven, now as then, by the division of the world on every continent and almost every country between complacent, mindless "haves" and disempowered, desperate "have-nots." The difference today is that now we have so many more tools, not just technologically but personally and socially, for approaching these dire challenges. And those tools in important ways are the legacies of Esalen, and our ever-growing number of partners in pushing the frontiers of human inquiry and capacity.
We're still pushing those frontiers at Esalen, still developing those new tools. Join us and be part of the ongoing co-creation of a newer, better world – November 5-7 in special celebration of Michael; November 14-19 in celebration of Dick's legacy; or anytime you can, to stretch your own capacity to imagine a new life and a new world. See you soon at Esalen!
Gordon Wheeler, President, Esalen Institute