He has used his mental clarity to think up a new way to sell sugar water. (There are also scholarships, and a work-study program.) Another iconic image of Esalen is a fictional one: the final scene of “Mad Men.” Don Draper sits, cross-legged and ill at ease, on the Esalen lawn. A weekend of room and board now costs four hundred and twenty dollars, and that’s if you’ve brought your own sleeping bag the higher-end accommodations cost around three thousand dollars. In practice, the institute largely functioned as a retreat center for the wealthy. Esalenites, for all their comfort with sex and drugs and ecstatic encounters with the divine, were less comfortable talking about politics or money, or the politics of money-that is, about their fraught relationship with capitalism. Still, some orthodoxies went largely unquestioned. “That could be an individual’s psychological truth, or a timeless spiritual truth, or the ethical truth of how we ought to behave in society.” “Our whole intention was, and still is, to allow people to get out of their inherited orthodoxies and into the business of discovering truth,” Murphy, who is eighty-eight, told me recently. The world was awry, and Esalen wanted to help bring it into alignment.
Even later, as much of the country acquiesced to the greed-is-good eighties and the end-of-history nineties, Esalen clung to its exceptionalist vibe. (Both came from families of means Esalen was built on land that was owned by Murphy’s grandmother.) They described their venture as “a laboratory for new thought”-an independent think tank for the counterculture. Esalen’s co-founders, Dick Price and Michael Murphy, were Stanford grads turned spiritual seekers. This is where, in the sixties, Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary facilitated sessions of “drug-induced mysticism” where the psychotherapist Fritz Perls led “Gestalt workshops,” often involving crying and primal screams where Joni Mitchell sang “Get Together” and Ravi Shankar gave George Harrison a sitar lesson. The iconic image of Esalen is of its central lawn, as brilliant as an emerald, ringed by oceanside cliffs. There’s a redwood dining hall, appointed in the ascetic-chic style there are pine groves and an organic vegetable farm there are yoga studios and massage tables and a wrought-iron fire pit there’s a warren of hot tubs fed by sulfurous underground springs, so when the wind shifts in a northerly direction, the ambient aroma of lavender and patchouli sometimes takes on a middle note of rotten eggs. All visitors must announce themselves at the gatehouse, where a staffer wearing performance fleece is likely to dispense a Northern Californian bundle of mixed messages: Namaste, the light within me bows to the light within you, let me confirm that we’ve received your credit-card deposit and then I’ll point you to your cabin and/or Tesla Supercharger.
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Its full name is the Esalen Institute-a tax-exempt nonprofit, founded in 1962. To be clear, it is also a place: twenty-seven acres of Big Sur coastline, laid out lengthwise between California Route 1 and the Pacific, a dazzling three-hour drive south of San Francisco. “It’s a diaspora, a guiding light out of our collective darkness, an arrow pointing us toward the best way to be fully human.” sightings? “This isn’t a place,” a staffer told me while rolling a joint on a piece of rough-hewn garden furniture. Have you heard the one about the poet and the astrophysicist who met in the Esalen hot springs and eloped the next week? How about the accountant who visited for the weekend, cured his depression with a single dose of ketamine, and became a Zen monk? The secret full-moon dance parties? The billionaire-C.E.O. In response, you’ll get either an uncomprehending stare or an effusion of tall tales. To find out which kind of person you’re talking to, simply utter the three syllables (stress on the first, slant-rhyme with “mescaline”) and wait. There are two kinds of people: those who know nothing about Esalen and those who purport to know everything about it. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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