Word: esalen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...feeling good is a religion, its cathedral is Esalen. The nerve center of the counterculture, the cradle of Gestalt therapy, the inspiration for a thousand adult-education courses (with the emphasis often on adult), the Esalen Institute, perched on the windswept cliffs of Big Sur, Calif., along one of the loveliest stretches of unreal estate in the world, has long been the Platonic model of an Aquarian think tank. From Buenos Aires to Berlin, it has also become a symbol for the beauty, and something of the folly, of the peculiarly American belief that perfection is just a day away...
Such are the questions that linger in the air as 50 people sprawl on pillows inside one of Esalen's mirrored conference rooms, gathering one radiant week for a five-day seminar called "Our Myth-Body to Live By." The topic is vintage Esalen: an attempt to marry impulses physical and metaphysical. So too are the seminar leaders: Joseph Campbell, mythologer supreme and godfather to many a '60s quester, and Chungliang Al Huang, a Chinese-born master of Tai Chi. For six hours each day, the octogenarian Campbell sits cross-legged on the floor and improvises passionate lectures about Navajo...
...between sessions, many of the veteran "seminarians" reminisce about the bad old days, when encounter groupies were encouraged to roll around like snowballs or get out their feelings at the salad bar. Those were the days that fixed Esalen's image in the collective unconscious as a sort of spiritual singles bar, Californication Central. "When I tell my friends at home I'm coming to Esalen," says a Manhattan screenwriter, "they just roll their eyes and say, 'Oh yeah! The place where all the girls run around naked!' And when I say, 'Look, I'm going to hear...
...other circles, of course, that image of hippie looseness is exactly what draws people to Esalen. As the institute's co-founder and chairman Michael Murphy cheerfully admits, "Esalen's reputation gets better the farther away you go." These days up to half the people who stay for a season or two, paying their way as work scholars, are foreign grandchildren of the revolution, come here from West Germany, Switzerland, Argentina or Brazil for a dose of good old-fashioned American Utopianism. Sleeping four to a room, working on the community farm or helping out at its school, they drift...
...Murphy, however, Esalen's greatest promise is probably that of an outlaw university, a place that can pursue "rigor in the service of adventure," rescuing learning from both the dryness of the academy and the wishy-washiness of many alternatives. Certainly, aphorisms fly every evening in the central redwood lodge, where seminarians cluster in excited groups over cups of coffee and thrash out Rilke and reincarnation deep into the night. "You do not visit India; you visit yourself," a New York investment analyst tells an Italian woman from Houston and her 18-year-old son. "Whether man finds things...