Esalen Institute

Esalen Institute is a residential retreat and education center on the Big Sur coast of California, founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Richard "Dick" Price to host seminars on what Aldous Huxley had called "human potentialities." Built on a clifftop property with mineral hot springs that Murphy's family had owned since 1910, it became the principal gathering place of the Human Potential movement and a laboratory for humanistic and transpersonal psychology, Gestalt therapy, encounter groups, bodywork, Eastern meditation, and psychedelic research.¹² The name comes from the Esselen, the Native people who frequented the springs before European settlement.²

The 1962 Founding

The land at Slate's Hot Springs, where the writer Thomas Slate had homesteaded in the 1880s, was bought in 1910 by Dr. Henry Murphy, a Salinas physician and the grandfather of Michael Murphy, who intended to run a health spa there. After California's hot-springs resorts lost their custom and the Big Sur Hot Springs property fell into disuse around 1960, Murphy and Price, two Stanford graduates who had met in 1960 at the American Academy of Asian Studies and the Cultural Integration Fellowship circle in San Francisco, visited the property in 1961 and began planning an educational forum. Both had studied under the Stanford comparative-religion scholar Frederic Spiegelberg, and both had spent time in Eastern spiritual practice, Murphy at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry and Price studying with Alan Watts.¹²

The first program ran in the fall of 1962 under the title "The Human Potentiality," a phrase drawn from Aldous Huxley, who in lectures and writings of the late 1950s and early 1960s had argued that ordinary people use only a fraction of their latent capacities. Alan Watts gave one of the earliest Esalen lectures in January 1962, and Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychologist whose theories of self-actualization and "peak experience" supplied much of the movement's vocabulary, arrived in the summer of 1962 and became an important patron after stumbling on the place by accident. Esalen incorporated as a nonprofit and published its first catalog in 1963.¹³

Fritz Perls, Gestalt, and the Encounter Groups

The German-born psychiatrist Fritz Perls, co-founder of Gestalt therapy, began offering workshops at Esalen in late 1963 and became a permanent resident in 1964, running his confrontational present-moment sessions until he left in 1969. Perls made Esalen the center of the Gestalt revival and worked alongside Ida Rolf, the originator of the deep-tissue bodywork called Rolfing, and Moshe Feldenkrais, whose somatic methods Price championed; Perls and Rolf collaborated on the relation of mind and body.⁴⁵ The phrase "human potential movement" was coined in 1965 by the Look magazine senior editor George Leonard in conversation with Murphy, after Leonard's 1964 article on education drew heavy reader interest in the term "human potential"; Leonard suggested adding "movement" to name the humanistic current he and Murphy hoped to foster, and he later served as an Esalen president emeritus.⁶

The psychologist Will Schutz arrived in 1967 and made the encounter group, an intense small-group practice aimed at emotional honesty and the breaking down of social masks, synonymous with Esalen; his sessions drew on techniques from Maslow, Huxley, Margaret Mead, Feldenkrais, Rolf, Perls, Alexander Lowen, and Virginia Satir. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson, a figure central to Cybernetics and to the Whole Earth Catalog milieu through his "ecology of mind," lectured and lived at Esalen in his later years, and the Czech-born psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, a pioneer of LSD psychotherapy who developed Holotropic Breathwork after psychedelics were banned, became a scholar-in-residence. Joan Baez led a folk-music workshop in 1964, and Hunter S. Thompson worked as a caretaker on the property in the early 1960s.⁴⁵

The Soviet-American Exchange and Track Two

In the 1970s Murphy grew interested in Soviet parapsychology and telepathy research and traveled to the USSR to meet its experimenters, contacts that opened a channel between Esalen and Soviet officials. In 1980, with Cold War relations frozen, American figures convened at Esalen and concluded that action beyond official diplomacy was needed, and Murphy, his wife Dulce Murphy, and Jim Hickman founded the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program, a form of unofficial "track-two" or citizen diplomacy. The program ran exchanges of astronauts and cosmonauts, scientists, writers, and business figures, and helped produce the first satellite "spacebridges" linking Soviet and American citizens in live televised conversation; within a few years its participants included people who had worked for the CIA and the KGB.⁷⁸¹⁰

The program invited Boris Yeltsin, then a rising Soviet politician, to make his first visit to the United States in September 1989; Yeltsin arrived in New York on September 9, 1989, toured ten cities, and was reportedly struck by an ordinary Houston supermarket, an episode his biographers describe as deepening his doubts about the Soviet system. The exchange was renamed Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy in 2004 and continues as an independent organization. Esalen's own histories, and the historian Jeffrey J. Kripal's Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (2007), credit the program with contributing to the climate of glasnost and perestroika that preceded the dissolution of the Soviet Union.⁷⁸¹⁰

CIA and FBI Monitoring

The Soviet exchanges drew the attention of intelligence agencies on both sides. Hickman, the program's operational director, said his policy was to answer honestly any questions from American or Soviet intelligence about the program's activities in the Soviet Union without volunteering information, and he reported that the FBI would appear at locations worldwide to request polygraph interviews; both the CIA and the KGB initially suspected Esalen of being a front for the other side. CIA monitoring is documented by the agency's retention of a January 10, 1983 Newsweek clipping headlined "Esalen's Hot-Tub Diplomacy," filed in its records as document CIA-RDP90-00806R000100380026-1, and the FBI maintained Esalen surveillance files, including electronic-surveillance records, from at least 1978 through 1992, released through the FBI Vault. Murphy has said that both the CIA and the FBI tried to recruit him and that he declined, telling an interviewer "I never succumbed."¹⁰¹¹

Intelligence Community Overlap: Kit Green and SRI

The intelligence community's interest in the California consciousness-research milieu extended to the overlap between Esalen's human-potential circle and the remote-viewing program at the Stanford Research Institute. Christopher "Kit" Green, a CIA neurophysiologist who joined the agency in 1969 and rose to Deputy Division Director for Life Sciences, was the CIA's principal liaison to the SRI remote-viewing program from its inception in 1972. On June 27, 1972, Hal Puthoff wrote to Green, then at the "Life Science Desk" in the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, about Ingo Swann's magnetometer experiment at SRI, a letter that initiated the agency's covert funding of what became a 22-year, roughly 20-million-dollar remote-viewing research program.¹²

Esalen's human-potential research community and the SRI remote-viewing program overlapped through shared figures and a shared intellectual culture, and several individuals moved between the two. Green received the CIA's National Intelligence Medal for classified work in the period 1979 to 1983, though whether that work was institutionally connected to Esalen specifically, as distinct from the SRI research with which he was documented to be involved, is not established in public records.¹²

The Courtship of Silicon Valley

By the 2010s the center, long known as a "hippie hotel," had turned toward the wealth of the nearby San Francisco Bay Area technology industry. Under a new generation of leaders, including the former Google product manager Ben Tauber, who became chief executive in 2017, Esalen began inviting ethicists, futurists, and technologists to retreats addressing the moral quandaries of the people building consumer technology, drawing executives and engineers from companies such as Google and Facebook. Press coverage of the period described the institute marketing its programs on personal transformation to a Silicon Valley clientele anxious about the social effects of the products it was shipping.⁹

Gregory Bateson had spent his last years lecturing and living at Esalen, and his cybernetic "ecology of mind" had also shaped Stewart Brand, who published Bateson in the Whole Earth Catalog he launched in 1968 and in the WELL online community he later cofounded. Esalen's later programming on artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the psychology of technology was reported by outlets including The New York Times and Quartz.⁹