Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. By Jeffrey J. Kripal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".