Memory #2330.23-g

Founding Esalen Institute:

“In May 1960, Dick Price returned to San Francisco and took up residence at the East-West House with Gia-Fu Feng. That year he met a fellow Stanford University graduate, Michael Murphy, at Haridas Chaudhuri’s Cultural Integration Fellowship where Murphy was in residence. Dick moved into the Cultural Integration Fellowship as well. In 1961, Murphy and Price visited the oceanside property in Big Sur, California, that was owned by Murphy's family. The property included a natural hot springs.

In 1962, using the Murphy property and capital that Dick had accumulated, along with assistance from Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Laura Huxley, Gerald Heard, Gregory Bateson and Frederic Spiegelberg (with whom both had studied at Stanford), Price and Murphy founded the Esalen Institute. Among other objectives, Price saw Esalen as an alternative to then current mental health practice, especially the practices of mental hospitals. Esalen was to be a place where inner process could move forward safely and without interruption.

Previously, the natural hot springs baths on the Murphy property were part of a run-down resort (known as Slate's Hot Springs). The security guard was a young Hunter S. Thompson. Joan Baez was also in residence. Thompson was soon fired by Murphy's grandmother, although Baez remained in residence through the beginnings of Esalen. Henry Miller regularly visited the hot springs during this early period of Esalen's history.

In the middle of 1962, Abraham Maslow happened to drive onto the Esalen grounds and soon became an important influence on the development of the institute. Julian Silverman came to Esalen in 1965, in order to work on the schizophrenia project at Agnews State Hospital, and ended up serving as Esalen's general manager. Will Schutz came to Esalen in the 1960s and worked on aspects of his "encounter group" process. George Leonard, Joseph Campbell and Ida Rolf were among the many people who had an impact upon Esalen's development. In 1974, Price married his second wife, Christine Stewart Price, a Gestalt practitioner who became his primary collaborator at Esalen.”

(Hunter Thompson...imagine that..he was at Esalen)

**

Ever attend an “encounter group?” I did. I didn't even know it at the time either. And the people who were running it weren't your average Beat Poets who hung out at the North Shore Beach.

In our senior year at St Rays, there was a required course called “Christian Action” where the students would have to go out into the world and perform some sort of community service. You finally were a well developed Catholic and it was time to act as Jesus would. But Jesus was never ordered by a court or a school to perform “community service,” was He? We were.

I was placed in a local school with some slow kids to show them flash cards to improve their spelling abilities. Did I do any good? Probably not. Did I feel better as a person? Nope. What did I learn from this? That, as a teen, you tell adults exactly what they want to hear and were easily duped once they thought you “understood.”

Another aspect of this course was the “Retreat!” This day long retreat was held at the DeLasallian New England headquarters in Narragansett. The purpose of it was to deepen your Catholicism. The big event was run by Sister Johnelle (she deserves a whole story herself on here one day, but in short, imagine a hippy/Beat Generation/”with it”/radical leftist nun who tried her hardest to “be one of the kids”). She, along with a one of the lay teachers who I can't remember his name but we all called him “Ajin-San.” He looked like Richard Chamberlain in the Shogun TV series. God I get off the subject. She and Ajin-San ran the main reason for the retreat, to expose yourself before God. Or so they thought.

Anjin-san

So, here's how they went about it and it was a bit sneaky too. We all sat down and formed a circle, where upon Sister Johnelle distributed poster board and markers to all of us and told us to just “draw a person with anything around it.” We did.

This is an old “one time only use” psychological test. If asked to “draw a person” the theory is that you inadvertently draw yourself, including all the deep seated mental illnesses, fears, hopes and in essence, completely expose your true self.

When the drawings were done she picked someone and asked each of us to comment on the “picture” that was shown. Sister Johnelle guided the questions further deeper and more intimately toward the person that was in the hot seat. As I watched this, I figured out what was happening, you were supposed to divulge the ugliest truths about yourself which made you aware of them. But there was one HUGE FUCKING problem which dawned on me fast.

At the beginning of this retreat, you SWORE on Jesus's soul that you would NEVER repeat anything you heard here. We all swore we would. But I knew in my heart of hearts, no one would keep a secret in high school society. Anything you divulge, honestly, will be spread across the entire school in nanoseconds. By the next day, and I witnessed this, very personal secrets people talked about were spread about as malicious gossip. One girl had admitted to becoming pregnant and having an abortion. She had trusted the others with that once, very private issue. Too late now, I knew about it the next day. I knew about it and I didn't even really know the girl. How's that for building trust?

Knowing people can't shut up, I clammed up fast. Or rather, I stealthily guided Sister Johnelle's own game of exposing myself by guiding them all down a lane of secrets that I didn't care who knew. I considered them minor but acted like it was a NSA secret. This satisfied Sister Johnelle and she moved onto the next. What was the secret? Easy, I admitted as an 18 year old, that I smoked pot and drank to get silly falling down drunk to “avoid” stress and pressure. Big Fucking Deal. Who didn't do this?

Then I witnessed a witch burning. I saw this encounter group turn bad and use every ugly teen tactic at conformity to pressure another classmate to open up totally. What was even uglier, Sister Johnelle headed up the mob carrying the pitchforks and torches. He, on the other hand, was having none of this.

His picture was a dazzling, Jimi Hendrix-ed, splattering of colors and monsters with twenty eyes and the such. He explained that it was a great experience he had while ripped on LSD. The group, led by Johnelle, then really ripped into him when he steadfastly REFUSED to accept his use of drugs was an escape. Since the prisoner won't break, you roll out the rack, the electrical cables to his balls and every other form of pressure to make him “talk.” I swear they kept at him for 40 minutes.

He never did break. I give him credit for standing up to this cheap attack. I on the other hand, just used my sleazy lying abilities to avoid it. But he fought them off.

I sat there, watching all of this and thought it pretty grotesque. This is “Christian Action?” It also made me deepen my incredible distrust of Sister Johnelle. I hadn't had much for her to begin with after watching her closely throughout the semester and how she operated. She was a great one for using sly tactics to maneuver the kids into what she wanted them to do, or say. I concluded she was complete bullshit long before this retreat. The retreat just made my decision about her stiffen even more.

This is what happens when you put therapeutic methods into the hands of morons. "Do No Harm" is the Hippocratic oath. Well, that Retreat had no qualified Dr's in residence at all.  Encounter groups, when run by amateurs, do more damage than good. 

I once knew a psychologist who had spent a month at Esalen to learn the then new EMDR techniques. A whole damn month. In fact, it takes longer. He went to Esalen to find the inventor of EMDR herself, Francine Shapiro, in order to learn it correctly.  He would go back at times to recharge his technique or to add to it when they found other methods improved upon it.  

Esalen, built into the cliffs at Big Sur. There is a whole compound up and behind these cliffs as well. 

And a little more about Hunter Thompson and Big Sur and Esalen. 

Bunny (owner of the property) had long turned down her grandson’s repeated requests to hand the grounds over to him. She was particularly concerned that Michael would “give it away to the Hindoos.” But things were getting out of hand at Big Sur Hot Springs, and she would soon change her mind after events that have since become legendary. Much of it, unsurprisingly with hindsight, revolved around Hunter Thompson.

Thompson, it turns out, sometimes picked verbal fights with the homosexual bathers. One night, he returned to the property with his girlfriend and two hitchhiking soldiers from Fort Ord (a base just north of Monterrey). Thinking it was safe to go down to the baths in such a crowd, Thompson ventured down the dark path. But some of the bathers jumped him, the soldiers and his girlfriend ran away, and Thompson was left alone to slug it out. As the story goes, most of the slugging was done by the bathers. The men beat Thompson up and came very close to throwing him off the cliff that night. Bloodied and bruised, he got back to his room in the Big House, where he spent the next day sulking and shooting his gun out a window, which he never bothered to open.

Not long after this incident, Bunny would read one of Thompson’s early published essays in Rogue magazine, “Big Sur: The Tropic of Henry Miller,” in which he described the folks of Big Sur as “expatriates, ranchers, out-and-out bastards, and genuine deviates.” Such language did not go down well with Bunny. She may have been in her eighties, but she was also tough. According to Anderson, she then “made one of her rare trips down to Big Sur, in her black Cadillac with her Filipino chauffeur, for the specific purpose of firing Thompson's ass.” Exit Hunter Thompson.

Opening page to that particular article: