This Day in New Age History (Human Potential Movement Crystallizes at Esalen)

February 2, 1965—Dinner chat that spilled over into the wee hours of the morning helped to solidify disparate trends in social justice, psychology, and health into the “human potential movement,” giving rise to a whole cottage industry of seminars, books, music—and one of the great satires of the late Sixties—much of it centered on the California spiritual retreat, the Esalen Institute.

The gabfest was the first meeting between Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy and journalist George Leonard. They started talking while dining at a female friend’s, then continued elsewhere, trading ideas that they wrote down on paper.

When the session ended at 3 am, recalled Leonard (who died last month at age 86), “the accumulated paper looked like a snowstorm.” He admitted that it changed his life.

What had engaged this ferocious interest? The talk built on the energy of ideas already out there in the intellectual ether.

Two-thirds of that phrase “human potential movement” apparently derived from a speech given by Aldous Huxley at the University of California—San Francisco Medical Center in 1960. “The neurologists have shown us,” said Huxley, “that no human being has ever made use of as much as ten percent of all the neurons in his brain. And perhaps, if we set about it in the right way, we might be able to produce extraordinary things out of this strange piece of work that a man is.”

(Time out: This remark would give rise, nearly 50 years later, to Owen Wilson’s immortal pickup line in Wedding Crashers: “You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts.”)

In the audience was Richard Price, who related it to his partner at Esalen, Murphy. Correspondence and visits with Huxley and another British expatriate, Gerard Heard, induced Price and Murphy to explore health food, yoga and alternative lifestyles.

Going in a direction that ended up intersecting with Murphy’s was Leonard, whose 1964 article for Look Magazine on education had also used the term “human potential.” Intense reader interest in that phrase led Leonard to research a follow-up piece—which is how he wound up meeting Murphy. In the news that year was the civil-rights movement and the Berkeley-based free speech movement, so Leonard suggested taking the word "movement" onto "human potential" to suggest the sort of humanistic psychology they hoped to foment.

The conversation with Murphy intrigued Leonard enough that he began making pilgrimages to Esalen. And really, what was not to like about the place? Its main campus was by the sea, in central California, with redwoods nearby.

Take a look at that accompanying image. If you couldn’t find yourself there, you were well and truly lost.

The humanistic psychological theories of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow (see my prior post on the latter) were explored in due course here, but at points it seemed that every aspect of self-actualization was being tried, in one context or another, on the grounds. The place became overrun with counterculture legends of the Sixties: Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, Joan Baez, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, R.D.Laing, Susan Sontag, Sharon Tate, the Beatles and Ravi Shankar —and others too numerous to mention.

With its frequent explorations of the mind-body connection, Esalen also developed not just a touchy-feely but a loosey-goosey reputation. Tom Wolfe summed up this sentiment in his much-talked-about 1976 essay, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening”: “Esalen's specialty was lube jobs for the personality. Businessmen, businesswomen, housewives—anyone who could afford it, and by now many could—paid $220 a week to come to Esalen to learn about themselves and loosen themselves up and wiggle their fannies a bit.”

Esalen would inspire Sandstone, the Southern California sex spa profiled (and frequented, in the course of his research!) by Gay Talese in his 1980 bestseller, Thy Neighbor’s Wife. But more than a decade earlier, its fame has spread enough that it came to the attention of writer-director Paul Mazursky. What caught the filmmaker’s eye would have caught yours, too—a picture in Time Magazine of gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, “sitting in a hot tub with five or six people who were naked up at Esalen.”

The 24-to-48-hour marathon session the Mazurskys endured after their arrival figured strongly into Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which created a sensation in 1969 with its depiction of wife-swapping. What tended to get lost in the media hoopla, however, was the cunning dissection of the Bob and Carol characters (played by Robert Culp and Natalie Wood).

Bob is thrilled that his stay at the Esalen-like institute has gotten him past all kinds of hang-ups about infidelity, but wife Carol, despite her best efforts, is having a tougher time with the issue. The plot shows that, no matter how idealistic the characters are, self-delusion and self-interest continue to play a role in the sexual Eden they try to create. Over the years, the human potential movement has had a more ambiguous influence, because of the hydra-headed nature of the many types of sessions conducted at Esalen. Some of these influences have been frivolous, to be sure, but some have enabled people to achieve much-needed greater inner peace.