Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion - Jeffrey J. Kripal...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/books/review/Johnson.t.html...

May 6, 2007

Sex, Drugs and Hot Tubs

By DIANE JOHNSON

People of a certain age will remember Esalen, the famous (or infamous) spa in Big Sur on the California coast, founded in the 1960s as a center of the human potential movement. In his book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Jeffrey J. Kripal describes it as a utopian experiment creatively suspended between

ESALEN
America and the Religion of No Religion.

By Jeffrey J. Kripal. Illustrated. 575 pp. University of Chicago Press. $30.

the revelations of the religions and the democratic, pluralistic and scientific revolutions of modernity. In 1990, someone painted graffiti (unprintable in its entirety here) at the entrance: Jive ... for rich white folk. Both descriptions are justified, it turns out. It wont escape any reader of this interesting book that almost all the players are good-looking and rich, but we learn that along with the sex and drugs with which it was synonymous, the Esalen Institute, as it was formally known, had considerable intellectual seriousness and was unexpectedly influential in global affairs, with leaders like Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev having some connection. It was Esalen, for example, that beat out the Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others, to be the sponsors of Boris Yeltsins 1989 visit to America, during which he experienced his famous conversion to capitalism in a Texas grocery store. More conventionally illustrious guests and other boldface names who make appearances in this book, if sometimes fleeting and rather tenuous ones, include mystically inclined scholars like Gregory Bateson, Carl Sagan, Joseph Campbell and Fritjof Capra (author of The Tao of Physics); as well as astronauts and Apple executives, Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel, B. F. Skinner and Erik Erikson, not to mention a panoply of countercultural figures including Joan Baez, Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Leary and even poor Bishop James Pike, the Episcopal prelate who was put on trial for heresy after repudiating the dogmas of the Virgin Birth and the Holy Trinity. Esalens intellectual framework contained, among much else, the philosophical and psychological ideas of Mesmer, Swedenborg, Freud, Abraham Maslow, Christianity and Eastern mysticism of various kinds, not to mention parapsychology, the occult, hallucinogenics, even space aliens. (The extraterrestrial, to the amateur ethnobotanist and Esalen stalwart Terence McKenna, represented the human soul exteriorized into three-dimensional space as a religious experience, in Kripals paraphrase.) Whats striking is how the already thin line between culture and counterculture was nearly effaced at this period of New Age optimism and scientific breakthrough. This reviewer also spent a weekend at Esalen in the early 1970s, with the novelist Alison Lurie, who was researching it. These short visits were meant to provide a sampling of the therapies then on offer

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Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion - Jeffrey J. Kripal...

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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 gives in considerable, maybe even too much, detail both the gossip and the intellectual developments at Esalen since its founding as a center to explore those trends in the behavioral sciences, religion and philosophy which emphasize the potentialities and values of human existence, as the first brochure put it. He gives particular emphasis to the work of one co-founder, Michael Murphy, whose family happened to own the priceless seaside real estate, 150 acres of fabled beauty and abundant natural hot springs. By now, Richard Price, the other founder, is dead, and Murphy is described as being impatient with New Age bunk. But Kripal presents Murphy as the author of a considerable body of philosophical writing, sometimes in the form of occult novels (including An End to Ordinary History and Jacob Atabet) or pop-mystical tracts like Golf in the Kingdom, which has sold more than a million copies and made a culture hero of its protagonist, a deep-thinking Scottish golf pro named Shivas Irons. (Golf, Murphy has said, is a mystery school for Republicans.) It is in relation to Murphys work and his own general thesis that Kripal may lose some readers. A history of Esalen is one thing, but this long book also 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 Esalens connection to world events. According to Kripals 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.) Murphys 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, Reagans ambassador to Russia, whom they persuaded to try to melt cold war relations through some hot-tub diplomacy. Though the first experiments with LSD were conducted at respectable universities like the University of California, Los Angeles, Esalen was famously a laboratory for the psychopharmacological inquiries of the period. It also trafficked in Rolfing, the orgone theories of Wilhelm Reich, you name it, some of it now mainstream, some discredited. Where did it all go wrong, or did it? Were the seekers at Esalen on to something, or should they have forborne to shock native American puritanism with too much free love and LSD, which began to seem like hypocritical self-indulgence and just more of what Kripal calls a stunning

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Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion - Jeffrey J. Kripal...

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array of misogynistic metaphysical systems that indulge male sexuality and control women? Kripal poses another challenging question: With the world gripped anew by terror, if not ... the apocalyptic variety expressed so dramatically by a Soviet-American Armageddon, where are all the countercultural actors, erotic mystics, psychedelic visionaries, ecstatic educators, esoteric athletes, psychic spies, gnostic diplomats and cultural visionaries who emerged the last time around? For his part, Kripal continues to believe that spirituality and science should not contradict each other, and that the Cartesian split between mind and body can be transcended. We still dont know whether the soul resides in the pineal gland. Most important, he asks, can we revision America not as a globally hated imperial superpower, not as a Christian nation obsessed with mad and arrogant apocalyptic fantasies abroad and discriminatory family values at home but as a potentiality yet to be realized? Can we learn to say, I am spiritual, but not religious? Whatever the answer, Esalen itself soldiers on, its cliffs stabilized with wire mesh and plantings, its baths redesigned to be tastefully luxurious, its scholarly arm renamed the Center for Theory and Research and preoccupied with organizing seminars on such topics as survival of bodily death. Diane Johnson's most recent novel is L'Affaire.

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