esalen: the real estate he was given

Following hard on the heels of that last post and its promise -- "I'll be sure to let you know what I find out" -- here's what I found out. For starters. Note the unintended high irony of the book title. The time frame is 1962... Murphy's family owned land on California's Big Sur coast, with redwood canyons, hot mineral springs, high cliffs, and magnificent outlooks on the Pacific Ocean. With Richard Price, a former Stanford classmate, Murphy started an institute there, which he and Price named after the Esalen Indians who had lived on the coast. In its first years, Esalen hosted seminars on Eastern thought and religious practice. Christian mysticism, shamanism, psychedelic drugs, humanistic psychology, ecology, and other subjects loosely grouped under the banner of human potentialities and the education of the whole person. ~ The Life We Are Given, p. 5 George Leonard and Michael Murphy from Booklist: "Readers meet, for instance, Marshall Herff Applewhite, the bizarre Heaven's Gate founder who persuaded 39 people to commit suicide at the cult's California headquarters; Julia 'Butterfly' Hill, the environmental activist who frustrated the state's lumber industry for more than two years by living in a treetop; and John Walker Lindh, the California-born Taliban fighter captured in Afghanistan." we are all just prisoners here of our own device ~ eagles check out "any time you like"

The Life We Are Given: A Long-term Program for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, and Heart

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