Word: esalen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Compared to Esalen, Primal Screaming and similar trendy behavior therapies, Transcendental Meditation is downright dull, says Associate Editor Gerald Clarke: "You don't shout, you don't take off your clothes, you don't blurt out your sex life to a bunch of strangers." Thus Clarke, who describes himself as "superrational," decided to try it. Last April-long before he knew he would write this week's Behavior story on TM-he invested $125 and four days in TM training. "I can't claim any miracles," says Clarke, "but I write with greater ease...
...Thompson does not believe in straight lines of logic, his thought is often hard to untangle. Yet a theme runs through his work. Edge of History laid the foundations. Initially it seemed to be the first-person adventures of an intellectual picaro charting his disenchantment with Los Angeles, the Esalen Institute, M.I.T., think tanks and other outposts of American culture. But in the final chapter, when Thompson soared into a free-form essay on myth as futurology, his intent became clear: he is a man questing for evidence of man's perfectibility...
SIDDHARTHA is set in the India of 25 centuries ago, but it has the contemporary familiarity of a quickie weekend at Esalen. Hermann Hesse's novel has been adapted with stuporous devotion by Conrad Rooks, who in 1967 unleashed Chappaqua, a shambling phantasmagoria of the hallucinatory world of alcoholism and drug addiction. His skills have become no sharper in the intervening years. Siddhartha (Shashi Kapoor), as any campus sophomore would know, spends the better part of his lifetime beating the bushes in search of spiritual insight and fulfillment. It is a hard job achieving nirvana, and seems to require...
Ward W's regimen is rather like a crash course at Esalen. Privacy, leading as it can to evasions and delusions, is not esteemed. Public confessions are required. Severance admits to "23 years of alcoholic chaos, lost wives, public disgrace," indignities unspeakable, yet spoken. When his fellow patients unravel their histories, Severance listens intently. Few in Ward W can share anything like the scope and depth of his interests, but he must make his peace with them before he can return to his pregnant wife and small daughter...
...Encounter Game (Stein & Day; $7.95), is one piece of the evidence assembled by Manhattan Psychotherapist Bruce Maliver to make a case against the human potentials movement (TIME, Nov. 9, 1970). Maliver, who has degrees in psychology from Yeshiva University, blames Steve's death largely on his experiences at Esalen, although he admits that the man had problems and took drugs before he went there. Arrested for possession of marijuana and chemicals for LSD, for example, Steve had spent a few days in jail...