Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy (born September 3, 1930, in Salinas, California) is an American writer and the cofounder, with Richard Price, of the Esalen Institute, the Big Sur retreat center that became the seedbed of the Human Potential movement. A Stanford psychology graduate who spent sixteen months at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in India, Murphy built a body of work, above all the 1992 book The Future of the Body, cataloguing what he called the "metanormal" or extraordinary capacities of human beings, and he steered Esalen from 1960s countercultural therapy through 1980s citizen diplomacy with the Soviet Union toward the wellness and technology circles of the present-day Bay Area.¹²

Stanford, Spiegelberg, and Sri Aurobindo

Murphy was raised in Salinas in an Episcopalian family and entered Stanford University as a pre-med student. In April 1950 he wandered by mistake into a lecture on comparative religion by the scholar Frederic Spiegelberg, an encounter that redirected him toward the integration of Eastern and Western thought; he described a transformative meditative experience by Lake Lagunita on the Stanford campus in January 1951. He took a B.A. in psychology in 1952 and served two years as a U.S. Army psychologist stationed in Puerto Rico during the Korean War.¹² Spiegelberg, who taught the Indian philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and helped found the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, shaped a circle that drew both Murphy and the future Esalen cofounder Dick Price.²

From 1956 to 1957 Murphy practiced meditation for some sixteen to eighteen months at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, immersing himself in Aurobindo's "integral yoga," a system aimed at a progressive divinization of body and mind rather than escape from the world. Aurobindo's idea that evolution could continue consciously into supernormal human powers became the philosophical backbone of Murphy's later writing. On his return he met Price in 1960 in the Aurobindo-influenced milieu around San Francisco, and the two conceived the project that became Esalen.¹²

Founding and Running Esalen

In 1962 Murphy and Price opened Esalen on roughly 120 acres of clifftop land at Big Sur that Murphy's grandfather, the physician Henry Murphy, had bought in 1910. Murphy ran the institute through its formative decade, hosting Abraham Maslow, Aldous Huxley's legacy of "human potentialities," Fritz Perls and Gestalt therapy, Alan Watts, and the encounter-group movement, before stepping back from day-to-day management in 1972 to concentrate on writing. He remained cofounder and chairman emeritus of the board and continued to direct Esalen's research arm, the Center for Theory and Research.²³

Murphy's interest in documenting exceptional human functioning became institutional at Esalen. In 1976 he launched what he called the Transformation Project, an effort to compile a scientific archive of extraordinary psychophysical capacities seen in sport, meditation, and healing traditions, the research base for his later books.⁴ Through the Center for Theory and Research, Esalen hosted conferences on meditation research from 1988 to 1995 that produced The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation, which Murphy wrote with Steven Donovan.⁴

The Books on Human Capacities

Murphy's first and most popular book was the 1972 novel Golf in the Kingdom, a mystical fable set on a Scottish links course that became a long-running bestseller and was later filmed; he followed it with the novel Jacob Atabet (1977) about a painter pursuing bodily transformation. With the parapsychology researcher Rhea White he published The Psychic Side of Sports (1978, later reissued as In the Zone), cataloguing reports of altered perception, telepathy, and other anomalous experiences among athletes.¹⁵

His major nonfiction work, The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature (1992), is a sprawling cross-cultural compilation of documented cases of what Murphy termed metanormal functioning, exceptional perception, vitality, movement, and cognition, organized to argue that most ordinary human attributes have extraordinary expressions that point toward a further evolution. With George Leonard, the Look editor who had coined "human potential movement," he wrote The Life We Are Given (1995) and cofounded Integral Transformative Practice, a structured program of long-term physical and contemplative training.¹⁴

Soviet Parapsychology and Citizen Diplomacy

In the 1970s Murphy became absorbed in Soviet parapsychology and traveled to the USSR to meet its experimenters in telepathy and related phenomena, contacts that opened an unusual channel between Esalen and Soviet officialdom. In 1980, with official Cold War relations stalled, Murphy, his wife Dulce Murphy, and Jim Hickman founded the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program, a "track-two" citizen-diplomacy effort that arranged exchanges of astronauts and cosmonauts, scientists, and writers and helped stage the first satellite "spacebridges" between Soviet and American citizens.⁶

The program invited Boris Yeltsin to make his first United States visit in September 1989, a tour that Yeltsin's biographers describe as sharpening his disillusionment with the Soviet system. Renamed Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy in 2004, the program outlived the Cold War, and Esalen's accounts credit it with helping create the atmosphere in which glasnost and perestroika unfolded. Murphy continued to write and to lead the Center for Theory and Research into his nineties.⁶