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

Esalen. For those familiar with new and alternative spiritual and psychological practices in North America, the word has an almost mythic resonance. Founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Richard (Dick) Price, located near Big Sur on the rugged California coast 45 miles south of Monterey, the Esalen Institute was the epicenter of the human potential movement, the place from which thousands of men and women charted the centrifugal and centripetal forces of spiritual, sexual, chemical, psychological, and, underpinning all, experiential exploration and experimentation. In Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, historian of religions Jeffrey Kripal traces the story of Esalen mainly through the people who created and recreated it over the course of four decades, as well as through the programs, workshops, and seminars they organized to facilitate their search. Many of the principal actors are well known: psychologist Abraham Maslow, whom Kripal considers central to “early Esalen vision” (135); psychotherapist Fritz Perls, who pioneered “gestalt therapy”; Stanislav and Christina Grof, among the founders of transpersonal psychology; mythographer Joseph Campbell, who celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday at Esalen (188); George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, who played his sitar on Esalen's front lawn (107). Others are less well known (at least in terms of their association with Esalen): Henry Miller, who left Paris for Big Sur in the mid-1940s and for many years occupied one of the cabins near the (in)famous baths (35–40); Hunter S. Thompson, the guru of gonzo journalism, who was hired in 1961 to guard the Esalen property shortly after Murphy and Price purchased it, but for whom the birthplace of the human potential movement was simply one more brief stop on a manic road trip through life (94–96); and Monty Python alum John Cleese, whom Kripal calls “an Esalen aficionado” (443). Organized in eight parts comprising 20 chapters, in many ways the book resists a straight-through read, Kripal's vignette style of writing instead encouraging a more opportunistic approach, scanning the index and dipping in where one notes the presence of a particularly interesting (or notorious) character, program, or event.

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