Cutting Edge: Esalen

Organizers of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair planned for a crowd of 50,000 at their August gathering 40 years ago in rural New York. Instead, nearly 500,000 people showed up to hear Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Who, transforming the festival into an iconic -- and some say spiritual -- event that still resonates in America.

Craig Hamilton, of Integral Enlightenment has been conducting a series of interviews with various integral notables. You can find his first four interviews, including links to related websites and important background information, posted on Integral NHNE...

Here's another great interview with Esalen Co-founder, Michael Murphy. For those of you who continue to wonder what all the commotion is about "integral", this informative interview helps fill things out...

Michael Murphy is one of the most inspiring integral thinkers and pioneers of our day. As founder of the Esalen Institute, Michael has befriended the best and the brightest evolutionary leaders for over forty years in fields from bodywork to philosophy. On a personal level, he always seeks the next edge of human potential, from building citizen diplomacy programs to creating the Esalen Center for Theory & Research to explore frontier subjects such as the survival of bodily death, subtle energies, and integral capitalism. With George Leonard, he's also created Integral Transformative Practice to empower people in their personal journey. In this radio show with Stephen Dinan, Michael explores “Integral Evolution” as a synthesis of his lifework and his books such as The Future of the Body – a synthesis that is both scholarly and practical. Join us for an exciting show with one of the founders of the human potential movement.

There were way too many fascinating conversations about religion, politics, media, conspiracy, occultism, Psi, superheroes, supersoliders, psychedelics and all the rest of it to possibly recount here, so let me just run through the schedule and touch on some of the main topics covered...

Esalen Institute exists to promote the harmonious development of the whole person. It is a learning organization dedicated to continual exploration of the human potential, and resists religious, scientific and other dogmas. It fosters theory, practice, research, and institution-building to facilitate personal and social transformation and, to that end, sponsors seminars for the general public; invitational conferences; research programs; residencies for artists, scholars, scientists, and religious teachers; work-study programs; and semi-autonomous projects...

Dr. J. chats with Jeffrey Kripal, author of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, a history of the Big Sur retreat center that helped create the human potential movement.

“This is it: the definitive history of the original American human potential center and the people who first envisioned it and made it work. A truly astonishing story of spiritual inspiration, global vision, political adventure, and delightful humor, and just at the right time. A genuinely hopeful vision of what we yet could be in the mirror of what we have been. Stunning.” -- Deepak Chopra

These archives are designed to support inquiry of the kind pioneered by William James, Frederic Myers, Marghanita Laski, Herbert Thurston, Abraham Maslow and others into extraordinary human functioning. Beginning in 1976, Michael Murphy, James Hickman, Margaret Livingston, Steven Donovan, Dulce Murphy, and others began to collect materials related to such inquiry from scientific and scholarly journals, dissertations, and other sources. The materials contained in this collection were drawn from experimental, anthropological, and scholarly research studies, as well as from the lore of contemplative, martial arts, athletic, and other practices.

The Esalen Center for Theory & Research supports essential philosophic, academic, and research aims of the Esalen Institute. It evaluates frontier inquiry, creates networks of pioneering individuals, and works to catalyze new discoveries that promote personal and social transformation. It carries forward projects at the growing edge of philosophy, psychology, comparative religious studies, education, sociology, somatics, the arts, ecology, and related disciplines that bear upon transformative practice and the continued evolution of humankind. Among these projects are an archive of extraordinary human functioning and a bibliography of scientific research on meditation.