Retreat — TANKtv

Today, the Esalen Institute, a retreat centre on the coast of California, is where Silicon Valley elites go in search of profound spiritual truths. But the institute’s history reveals how our contemporary ideologies of wellness and individual self-improvement are related to the acid-tinged and arcane world of the counterculture.

Esalen Institute

To reach the Esalen Institute I drove down from San Francisco, past Carmel where transactional analyst Eric Berne lived, along the Big Sur coastline and over Bixby Canyon where Jack Kerouac saw a cross in the sky. Founded in 1962, Esalen is as busy and vibrant as ever. The institute has been enshrined in the popular imagination by the final scene in Mad Men, in which Don Draper sits cross-legged in Siddhasana atop the Pacific cliffs intoning (not “Aum” but) “Om”, in a dramatic recreation of the retreat.

On a fresh, brilliantly sunny day in June the youthful Sam Stern showed me round the grounds. Sam started out at Esalen as a volunteer, and now does some works management, guides a meditation class, and puts together the excellent Voice of Esalen podcast. We wander talking past charming, motley wooden shacks built on the clifftops and through two vegetable gardens bursting with produce, the larger of which, “the farm”, grows what they cook in the kitchens. One large white building is full of people participating in a yoga retreat. There’s an intimate, low-ceilinged wooden meditation hut. We pass through a Tolkien-esque valley with
a spring running through it, upstream of which Sam said Esalen founder Dick Price had been struck in the head by a boulder and killed. A sweat-lodge yurt has been erected which later they will fill with the fumes of liquid tobacco. There’s “The Big House”, with its little annex on the right, in which before his fame as a “gonzo” journalist, Hunter S. Thompson lived, and opposite it Dick Price’s small home. Finally, we traverse the large lawn.

Esalen and the Counterculture

In his definitive and official study of the institution, Jeffrey Kripal insists that the counterculture and Esalen were different things. “It is no accident, for example, that the explosion of ‘comparative religion’ in American universities coincided exactly with the counterculture and its famous turn East … The same counterculture, of course, also helped produce Esalen. It would be a serious mistake, though, to conflate the two. A broad view of this place and its people shows that the inspirations of Esalen well predate the counterculture, and that most of the institute’s history – and virtually all of its social activism – came well after the counterculture had closed.”

However, of course, “the inspirations of Esalen,” to which Kripal refers were, by and large, the same inspirations which fostered the counterculture. While they differ in sensibility, it’s simpler and more accurate to say that Esalen’s culture and the counterculture grew from the same seeds. If there is a primary distinction to be drawn between them it is that Esalen was more constructive, more integral and survives; the counterculture, more etheric, and like Icarus burnt itself flying too close to the sun.

Esalen features like a backdrop against which countercultural events play out, but somehow the counterculture was too wild to fully belong within its schema. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Merry Pranksters stop by Esalen: “Esalen was a place where educated middle-class adults came in the summer to try to get out of The Rut and wiggle their fannies a bit … Kesey had been invited to conduct a seminar called ‘A Trip with Ken Kesey’. Nobody had quite counted on the entire fully-wired and wailing Prankster ensemble however.”

In The Family, Ed Sanders says that Manson’s alibi on 3 August 1969 was that he was visiting Esalen and enjoying the hot springs and steam baths. Sanders makes much of the institute’s “extremely uptight” disavowal that he had been a visitor. Kripal has a fuller account of what actually happened. “Seymour Carter” – early Esalen teacher – “remembers being awakened by a young woman in the middle of the night in the waterfall house, where he was living with his girlfriend. The waking woman wanted to get her friends into Esalen. Sleepily, Carter agreed to meet the group, which turned out to be three women, a baby, and a scruffy hippie man in a bread truck van parked up on Highway 1. After offering Seymour some grass to smoke, the man began playing his guitar and singing, both badly. Carter sensed that something was wrong, that they were, in his own words, ‘bad news’. He thus refused them entry and sent them on their way. Within two weeks, the murders happened, and within another two Esalen was receiving phone calls about rumoured links. Carter then realized just whom he had sent away that night. It was true, though that Abigail Folger, the coffee heiress who was among the murdered, had attended an Esalen seminar. It was also true that Sharon Tate happened to be at Esalen the night before the gruesome events. Both were there to work with [Gestalt pioneer Fritz] Perls. But there certainly was no causal link between Esalen and the Manson crimes.”

Timothy Leary too was in the Esalen orbit, but Kripal claims that: “unlike Huxley and Watts, [he] was not a major actor at Esalen. Indeed during one of his visits he decided to ‘escape’ the grounds for more exciting venues by hiding in the trunk of a friend’s car. Still, he and Richard Alpert were guides for Murphy’s third LSD trip in 1964 on the grounds.”

A Yantra With Tamil Om Symbol In Center, At A Mariamman Temple

Common within the Tantric traditions, yantra are mystical diagrams used for the worship of deities and to aid in meditation. Licensed under Creative Commons

Tantra

Kripal sees tantra, the anti-ascetic Hindu philosophy, as being the organising principal of Esalen. Tantra tries to steer a course to enlightenment through pleasure as a means of establishing non-attachment. This differs from the traditional Vedic approach we recognise from tales of ascetic gurus living in celibacy and monastic silence in the caves of the Himalayas, with its attempt to cultivate non-attachment by renunciation. Kripal paraphrases Theodore Roszak, who coined the term “counterculture”, as saying: “Tantra had overtaken Vedanta through the American counterculture.” The heady licentiousness of tantra, manifested most famously in the drug-fuelled orgies orchestrated by Bhagwan Rajneesh in Pune and then Wasco County, would sit more comfortably with both the liberal imperative of the counterculture and the high-rolling freedom of 1960s American capitalism.

There’s no question that, as much as its official histories try to cast Esalen’s reputation in sincere, strictly theological terms, people had a lot of wild fun between “therapies” on the grounds. Unlike in the counterculture though, there was a limit on this abandon. The following anecdote from Walter Truett Anderson’s The Upstart Spring undermines the notion that Esalen was, like the celebrated “free-love” sexual retreat Sandstone Ranch, a giant rolling orgy. “Once in the mid-1960s, while he was still living at Esalen, [founder] Mike Murphy went down to the baths late at night, remained sitting quietly in the tub after his friends had left, and discerned in the semi-darkness a couple who believed themselves to be alone, making love on one of the massage tables – not merely making love, but going at it in a leisurely and artful manner, with many changes of position. Murphy, too considerate even to clear his throat, sat there steeped politely in the dark corner until they left.”

Since 2017 the Esalen hot spring baths have been reserved strictly for guests only, so I was surprised when Sam, having by now sized me up, tossed me a towel and pointed me down the hill to the Bath House. From life-drawing classes at art school I’ve always known that in matter-of-fact contexts there was nothing sexually arousing about the human body. Being surrounded by the naked Californians was perfectly natural. I lolled, nude, in the warm, sweetly sulphurous water of one of the concrete tanks and gazed out across the Pacific in the afternoon sunshine and counted my blessings.

Murphy and Price

“Brahman!” The moment Esalen founder Michael Murphy, who had accidentally wandered into a lecture on comparative religion, heard his Stanford University lecturer Frederic Spiegelberg utter this single word, his entire world changed. He knew that “it was all over.” “‘Wake up!’ Spiegelberg shouted to his class. ‘The brahman is the atman.’” The supposedly unitary human consciousness itself, the ego, is nothing but an artificially secluded fragment of the cosmic essence, the self. In 1949 Spiegelberg, a student of Heidegger and Jung, had taken darshan from Ramana Maharshi and Sri Aurobindo in India. He was also responsible for bringing Alan Watts to America from the United Kingdom. Aurobindo’s magnum opus The Life Divine (1919) became Murphy’s bible.

The other Esalen founder Dick Price also encountered Spiegelberg at Stanford, enrolling on a course on the Bhagavad Gita. Kripal tells of how Price was particularly moved by “Watts and his unique brand of Beat Zen Buddhism and countercultural Taoism”. In 1955 Price was “entering a manic stage”, going on only two hours of sleep a night as he experienced tremendous rushes of energy and enthusiasm that he feared he could neither contain nor control. This culminated in a “seminal life event” when, “finally, one night in a bar in [the Beatnik district of San Francisco] North Beach, all the energy came to a head. He felt a tremendous opening-up inside himself, like glorious dawn. The place he was in had a fireplace, and he thought it would be appropriate for them to light a fire in there, in celebration of this great and mysterious event. ‘Light the fire,’ he kept saying; ‘Light the fire’.” The bartender apparently saw it differently and Price was dragged by six police officers to a “paddy wagon” and to Letterman’s Army Hospital.

Price spent three months experiencing intense “spiritual energies” that even psychiatric drugs could not suppress. He later described this episode as a “transitional psychosis” – and actually felt “washed clean” by the experience of it, but his parents connived to keep him under the military’s psychiatric supervision. Price was apparently unaware that he was technically free to discharge himself and his wealthy father pressured him to consent to treatment at the exclusive and expensive Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, where over the next nine months he would receive 59 insulin shock treatments, approximately 10 electroshock treatments, and large doses of phenothiazines.

The effects of this psychiatric intervention, straight out of the pages of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, were unspeakably brutal upon Price’s physiology and psychology. His autopsy in 1985 showed residual brain damage which was attributed to the effects of ECT. Just as, in the early Sixties in the United Kingdom, Cooper, Berke and Laing were trying to see the value of psychotic experiences, Price would describe his own psychosis as “an attempt towards spontaneous healing ... a movement towards health, not a movement toward disease”. Murphy once referred to Esalen as “Price’s revenge on the mental hospitals”.

Murphy, who is author of the mystical golfing classic Golf in the Kingdom and the fascinating The Psychic Side of Sports, had a rich grandmother who owned the estate with its hot springs on the Big Sur coast. Convincing her of his good intentions, and inspired by Henry Miller, Alan Watts, Freud (over Jung and Reich), and Aldous Huxley’s books The Perennial Philosophy and Island, together he and Price formed the institute.

Fritz Perls

Perls first appeared at Esalen around Christmas of 1963 as one of seven leaders in a larger symposium in the Bay Area that had been cancelled there owing to a lack of participants. Fritz then summarily announced that he was moving in, apparently to the consternation of Price and Murphy who had been “more impressed by his rudeness than skill”. Perls went on to become the institute’s leading light, even having his own house built for him on the site so he didn’t have to struggle up the hill with his bad heart.

On the Nazi party blacklist, the Jewish Perls had fled Germany in 1933, leaving behind an almost comically awful upbringing in which his mother beat him with whips and carpet beaters and his father often referred to him as “a piece of shit”. Perls had been analysed by Wilhelm Reich in Berlin, but later had the dishonour of being snubbed both by Reich, who “staring and brooding … hardly recognized” him at a psychoanalytic conference at Marienbad where Perls was giving a Reichian paper based on earlier formations of Reich’s theories, and Freud, who was irritated by Perls door-stepping him in Vienna.

At Esalen, Perls shed his more conventional image, took LSD, grew out his hair and wore brightly coloured jumpsuits. He would utter cosmic slogans like, “I am I. You are you. I do my thing. You do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations. You are not in this world to live up to my expectations.” Another version of this was, “I am who I am, I fuck when I can. I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.”

The Hot Seat

Perls’ technique at Esalen centred on a group-therapy setting, in which participants volunteered to take “the hot seat”, a chair arranged at the centre of the gathering in which they would be subjected to an essentially humiliating character assassination in which Perls strove to break down their defence mechanisms and, by brute force if necessary, cause the protagonist to recognise their ego as their own construction. According to my guide, Sam Stern, hundreds of hours of video, film and audio recordings still fill the Esalen archives of Perls working his magic in this manner and according to Kripal: “They witness again and again how he was able to isolate a psychological block or complex almost instantly and then go after it, often with stunning results.” Apparently “miracle cure” stories abounded in the Esalen lore: “To take just one example, Sukie Miller notes that Perls had a wall in his room decorated with eyeglasses from clients who had recovered normal eyesight following a gestalt session.” In retrospect one fears for the poor attendees, driving along the winding and precipitous Big Sur Highway 1, as they wended their ways back to San Francisco and Los Angeles without their spectacles.

In The Center of the Cyclone (1972), LSD and dolphin-consciousness researcher Dr John Lilly describes his experience with Fritz Perls at Esalen. “A few days later I got into the hot seat again, this time about the death of my mother. I had some unfinished business which caused a continuous tape loop [in his head], having to do with guilt about her death, to rotate below my levels of awareness. I had spent seven years working to keep her alive and then at the end, when the cancer finally killed her through a respiratory death, I blamed myself for having kept her alive by artificial means for so long. I got in the hot seat and Fritz said, ‘Okay, go back to your mother’s death.’ I went back to that particular day and began to hear her dying, became frightened, and came back to the group. Fritz said, ‘Go back.’ I went back again and started going through the fear, the grief, and the guilt concerned with the doctors, with my own part in it. I examined very carefully the whole tape having to do with her death. I cried. I became extremely fearful, got into panic, then I cried with grief again. Three times Fritz put me through it and finally he said, ‘Okay, you haven’t quite finished with that but you have dealt with most of it.’ He let me off the hot seat.”

In Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Kripal recounts the experience of the Hollywood starlet Natalie Wood in the hot seat which conveys Perls’ frequently unpleasant and transgressive qualities: “It was another part for her to play, and she was enjoying herself immensely. Fritz tried to get her to admit she was acting. She skilfully slipped out of his verbal traps. Fritz let her have it. ‘You’re nothing but a little spoiled brat,’ he said in a voice harsh enough to stop time, ‘who always wants to get her own way.’ She gasped and her mouth fell open. A moment later Fritz somehow had her over his knee, spanking her. It was a brief episode, hard for the sense to register or credit. Natalie flounced away, and her friend Roddy McDowell offered to fight Fritz. Fritz ignored this offer. About two minutes later, Natalie marched out of the party with no goodbyes, her nose angled sharply upward.”

Extracted from Matthew Ingram, Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness, Repeater Books, 2020

Gestalt Therapy

Articulating the goals of his own Gestalt therapy seemed beyond Perl. He viewed himself more in the vein of an abstract quantity to be encountered, rather than as an author or communicator. Of his most well-known books, one is a transcription of sessions at Esalen, in another authorship is partially delegated to the tedious psychoanalyst Paul Goodman, and his autobiography In and Out of the Garbage Pail is a stream of consciousness ramble. Even a short, supposedly explicatory documentary Fritz Perls Explains Gestalt Therapy could not be more vague or oblique.

In concordance with this staged formlessness Gestalt therapy is appositely described as being a form of Taoism by Theodore Roszak in The Making of a Counter Culture. Roszak provides probably the clearest description of what Gestalt therapy implied, so good it bears quoting in full. “It is not the case, therefore, that the body need be made to function, that human beings need be made sociable, that nature need be made to support life. For the Gestaltist, individual and social neurosis sets in only when the seamless garment of the ‘organism/environment field’ is divided by a psychic factionalism that segregates from the ecological whole a unit of defensive consciousness that must be pitted against an ‘external’ reality understood to be alien, intractable and, finally, hostile.”

He continues: “The sign of this losing faith in self-regulating processes is the construction of an alienated self which fearfully retreats from the ‘outside world’ and progressively diminishes in size until, at last it is envisioned as some manner of homunculus besieged within the skull, manipulating the body as if it were an unwieldy apparatus, feverishly devising strategies of defence and attack.

“Health, which is properly a matter of letting the chips of life fall where they may, a trustful yielding to the needs and urges of the body, community, nature, now becomes a matter of piecemeal cerebral organization via pills, dieting, authoritarian doctoring, etc – all of which seems to finish by producing a degree of iatrogenic disease greater than any illness that existed in the unitary state of the organism/environment field.

“We have lost touch with the self-regulation of a symbiotic system and have given over to a compulsive need to control, under pressure of which the organism freezes up and seems to become unutterably stupid. The major therapeutic technique of Gestalt, therefore, is an ingenious form of directed physical activity which aims at locating and thawing frozen organic energy.

“Now, I think this Gestaltist conception of reality is true, but it is also fundamentally mysterious … one must imagine processes happening of their own accord, producing the numberless symbiotic patterns and balances we call ‘nature’, and among them that pattern of mind, body and society we call human consciousness. Thus one recognises that Gestalt theory is, fundamentally, a species of Taoism disguised rather cumbersomely as Western psychiatry. What is this ‘organism/environment field,” after all, but Lao-tzu’s Way?’” Eventually, Perls too recognised that his approach was, “the Western equivalent of the teaching of Lao-Tzu”. ◉

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