Back in the Day With Rick Tarnas

“The ’70s at Esalen were a good time,” says Rick Tarnas. The cultural historian, astrologer, and author remembers heading out west with all his possessions — “a suitcase, a typewriter, and a guitar” — meeting Stan Grof, exploring LSD, and raising his son in the deep pluralism of a growing community: “There was definitely a feeling of living at the edge.”

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I first heard about Esalen when I was at Harvard.

Part of my major was in the department that was called Social Relations, which, in earlier years, is where Tim Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner were — all of whom I became friends with later. But at the time, they had already been kicked out of Harvard. Still, the psychedelic influence was definitely strong.

I read a three-part series of articles written by a Harvard student called, “After Harvard, Esalen.” One of them had a two-page spread on psychedelics and LSD psychotherapy. It had a great quote from Abraham Maslow, describing Stan Grof's work as being something like the most important contribution to psychological thinking since Freud. The more I read, the more I realized what an important place it was to go to.

So I packed up and went to Esalen March 3rd, 1974. Came in with all my belongings — a suitcase, a typewriter, and a guitar.

I got a position as a volunteer, and after some time, Tony Fletcher, the head of the gate, offered me a night guard position, which was the most exciting and romantic of all of the positions.

Soon I met a young woman, a “masseuse” at the time, who unexpectedly became the mother of my first child, Christopher Flash, who I raised at Esalen. At a certain point, she and I separated. She left. And I just was very happy to raise our son, Flash, by myself.

We started the Gazebo preschool at that point for Flash and Dick and Chris Price’s daughter, Jenny Price, who was born the same year. They were the first two little babies that were born right there at Esalen.

There was a real interest in starting something which would provide a place for little children to grow up: a kind of combination of camp and preschool and idealized kind of Gestalt environment for a child to come into their own. Janet Lederman in particular wanted to see this unfold. So, we cleared the brush and poison oak, and by 1975 or ’76, the Gazebo School was open.

As luck would have it, I met Stan Grof soon after I got to Esalen. I would've been 24 and he would've been 43. We immediately connected. He was even more compelling in person than I might have imagined. Here was a person who had somehow managed to both integrate the Western kind of psychoanalytic psychodynamic tradition with a deep appreciation of the various Asian mystical traditions, as well as shamanic practice.

I remember asking him, “What do you do with people who are undergoing a bad LSD trip, a kind of panic attack?”

He explained that “the full experience of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion.” If a person is undergoing a tremendous condition of fear or of guilt or of despair, that's already in that person. It's in their depths. It's coming from the deep unconscious and it's seeking to be released by coming into consciousness.

If the person can stay with it, and experience their psyche and body fully saturated with and almost possessed by the energy and the effect, it can be released and go out into the vast universe that can absorb it.

I really got that: it's only through undergoing some emotion, not trying to suppress it, but surrendering to it, that it moves.

Dick Price was an enormous influence as well. He had really taken in Fritz Perls’s work and had become a very skillful gestalt therapist or healer. But doing it in his own way. He was deeply into Taoism. He had a kind of quiet way of being, even though underneath the surface, he was carrying these kind of Titanic energies that he would discharge through his strenuous mountain climbing or ridge climbing hikes through the Big Sur wilderness, and all his body work and Rolfing and bioenergetic release, and so forth.

In those days, the entire Esalen staff and community lived right at Esalen. All our homes were right there. We all knew each other very well. People fell in love and fell out of love, had children, occasionally got married. They lived their lives and their dramas. There were births and there were deaths, Christmases and Thanksgivings and so forth.

We were a deeply engaged community — both a community of people who were practicing what was being taught at Esalen, and also exploring the new frontiers — psychologically, spiritually, somatically, relationally, psychedelically. The business didn't take precedence over the community, nor vice versa.

It wasn't an intentional community, in the sense that everyone was devoted to a particular teaching or guru — in fact, quite the opposite. If ever there was an effort to bring one strand or teacher to dominance, we called it the attempt to “capture the flag,” and that was never allowed. That was one of the great things about Mike Murphy and Dick Price's overseeing of the place. They were committed to a deep pluralism. The ’70s at Esalen were a good time. There was definitely a feeling of living at the edge. There was a creative balance between the great edginess of the '60s and the form and solidity of the '80s.