I got hold of a book called Esalen, America and the Religion of Non Religion by Jeffrey J Kripal (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Once past the academic and theoretical introduction it's scholarly but readable and includes a varied and fascinating cast of characters who have appeared in posts on this blog (Wilhelm Reich, Fritz Perls) or in my books (Stanislav Grof in Gary Lachman's essay in Secret Tunnels of England: Folklore & Fact.
The gamut of New Age therapies is covered (although they disliked the term New Age at Esalen): encounter groups, massage, meditation, gestalt therapy, Rolfing etc together with such esoteric interests as remote viewing and telepathy. Hallucinogenic drugs played their part and there is a section on Terence McKenna and other experimenters with such mind-blowers as DMT. The author is very keen on Tantra and makes his case for it being one of the principal influences on Esalen's healing strategy. There is also quite a lot about Esalen's visits behind the Iron Curtain and contribution towards cooling East/West tensions in the Cold War.
Kripal emphasises the importance of texts in the transmission of ideas and describes founder Michael Murphy's reading of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine as 'deeply hermeneutical':
'a model that recognises a truly profound engagement with a text can alter both the received meaning of the text and one's own meaning and being ... That is, we need to recognise that the act of reading, far from being a mechanical, disembodied exercise of vocabulary and grammar, is in fact an immeasurably complex psychophysical event in which two horizons of meaning and being (the reader and the read) are "fused" and transfigured in a mysterious process that we do not, and perhaps cannot ever, fully understand. Elsewhere I have referred to a hermeneutical mysticism in the life and work of twentieth century scholars of mysticism - a disciplined practise of reading, writing and interpreting, through which intellectuals actually come to experience the religious dimensions of the texts they study, dimensions that somehow crystallise or linguistically embody the forms of consciousness of their original authors. In effect, a kind of initiator transmission sometimes occurs between the subject and object of study to the point where terms like "subject" and "object" and "reader" and "read" cease to have much meaning. And this of course is a classically mystical structure - a twoness becoming one, or perhaps better, a not-two. Reading has become an altered state of consciousness.' (p.61)
Something else to bear in mind: ''The literary critic David Noel once observed that whether or not Carlos Castaneda's stories faithfully reflect his peyote rituals, whether or not his teacher Don Juan even existed, what we have, in the end, are not sacred plants or Indian sorcerers, but Castaneda's texts, which are themselves a kind of mind-altering substance. "Words," Noel observes, "are the only psychotropic agents Castaneda gives us."
It was, however, disconcerting to find that the author, 'Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University', thinks that the Feast of Epiphany occurs on 6 February!
That final episode of Mad Men
I also intend to read Henry Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957) see here
Also of relevance is a film I watched last week Altered States directed by Ken Russell. See here
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