Homegrown

This month saw the publication of a spiritual biography, not of a person, but of a place. That place is none other than Esalen, the uber-crunchy, hot-tub dippin' spiritual think tank of the '60's and '70's. Nestled in the highlands of Big Sur, the Esalen Institute - which was the birthplace and permanent sanctuary of the New Age - is arguably as responsible for a shift in how Americans think of religion as the Second Great Awakening of the 1800's.

Or so author Jeffrey Kripal would have you believe.

No one's going to argue that what went on in the 1960's changed the way we think about religion. The upheavals of the east-west, body-mind head trips of the time went so deep, that now almost a third of Americans now believe in astrology, and over a quarter believe in reincarnation (according to a Harris poll). But how much was due to Esalen?

I haven't read the book. NY Times reviewer Diane Johnson has this to say:

...this long book... advances its own theory that Esalen and New Age culture more generally are furthering the evolution of religion in America, and perhaps worldwide, toward “no religion,” by which he seems to mean not secularism so much as a sort of transcendent fusion of Eastern and other religions to the negation of all existing ones and a resolution of the Cartesian mind-body split. Despite some turgid sentences (“It is simply to locate their important critiques in a more nuanced social context and problematize their sometimes simplistic readings”), Kripal makes many sympathetic points about the present spiritual state of America, even if his argument gets somewhat lost in the more lurid details of suicides, strange deaths and amazing paths to enlightenment.

The book is most startling when describing Esalen’s connection to world events. According to Kripal’s sometimes rather infatuated account, it was Esalen that “enlisted the support of” Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer in helping to bring the Soviet Writers’ Union into International PEN. It was also of use to the C.I.A., which spent a lot of money looking into ESP, with experiments involving “the laser physicist turned C.I.A. psychic spy turned American mystic” Russell Targ, who gave parapsychology lectures at Esalen. (He would later give a demonstration to the Soviet Academy of Sciences as well.) Murphy’s wife, Dulce, Kripal claims, “was with” Jimmy Carter when he announced the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics; and through their extensive involvement with American-Soviet citizen exchanges (an outgrowth of their interest in Russian mysticism), the Murphys became friends of Arthur Hartman, Reagan’s ambassador to Russia, whom they persuaded to try to “melt” cold war relations through some “hot-tub diplomacy.”

But there are also accusations that Esalen, which fostered the growth of spiritual trends like gestalt therapy and Rolfing, was a just playground for salacious intellectuals. Diplomats in the hot tub nonwithstanding.

Johnson doesn't help when she recalls her own visit to the research institute in the '70's:

This reviewer also spent a weekend at Esalen in the early 1970s... encounter groups and body work (mostly involving a sort of nude round-robin massage) stick in my memory, along with rather good food, emphasizing groats and the like. It was terrific fun, and it was there, clambering down the rickety wooden steps to the glorious beach below, that we surprised an elderly, naked Henry Miller, who modestly put his hat over his lap at the approach of two equally embarrassed ladies with beach bags and towels.

Kripal did an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle about the book. In response to the accusations of elightenment over tea leaf massages, he has this to say about Esalen's role in our larger American story:

When I look at American religious history, I see a long history of puritanism, of Christian fundamentalism. It's been there from Day One. But I also see what some historians would call American metaphysical religion. I see people who are not religiously intolerant, people who have very open worldviews and who are very interested in metaphysical dimensions but are not literal about it. It's the latter stream, the metaphysical stream that's open to other cultures, and particularly those of Asia, from all the way back to Emerson and Thoreau and further back.

I hope that when we think of America and define it, we don't forget about that metaphysical stream and we don't see it as just another form of fundamentalism or nationalism. But I'm not arguing that that's where we are at. Not at all. In some ways, the book for me was a cry of the heart over the state of our culture in our country. It's an attempted intervention. Maybe not a very effective one, but nevertheless an attempt.

You can find Kripal's book here.