Find the Otters

A postcard from Esalen

I’m at Esalen for a seminar on mysticism and psychosis, organized by religious studies scholar Jeffrey Kripal and anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann.

Esalen is a hotel, workshop centre and hot spring on the Pacific coast near Big Sur, belonging to Michael Murphy. Since 1962, it’s been the home of the ‘human potential movement’, visited by such luminaries as Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Alan Watts, George Harrison, Stan Grof, Joan Baez, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Terrence McKenna, Gregory Bateson, Joseph Campbell, BF Skinner, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Don Draper, and so on. So much history here, so so much drama, so many ghosts.

I’ve been here once before and I remain convinced it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever stayed. The hot springs / hot tubs especially - they’re right next to a cliff, so you hear and see the waves pounding beneath you, and all sorts of wildlife. Yesterday evening as the sun set, I saw several otters, two dolphins and a whale!

One of the treats of the week has been getting to meet Michael Murphy, co-founder and owner of Esalen, to hear a little about how Esalen has somehow managed to survive for 64 years, navigating through various issues - sex, drugs, psychosis, wokeness. Murphy said he recalled two people having sex on the lawn. He told them: ‘You need to stop that’. ‘I thought you were about free love, man.’ ‘No, really you need to stop.’ ‘But it feels so good!’ Then there were all the drugs - he remembers having to face down Big Bad Bill, a drug dealer, and ask him to leave the grounds. He says he never really got into psychedelics himself.

And psychosis? Dick Price, co-founder, was hospitalized for mania for over a year. He thought of Esalen as a place of sanctuary and innovation for those in altered states. Then, in the 70s and 80s, Stanislav and Christina Grof developed the idea of ‘spiritual emergency’ here. Grof, whose 95th birthday was this week, inspired Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, and the concept of ‘spiritual emergency’ is taught to underground guides in many psychedelic training courses.

I was invited (I think) because Tanya Luhrmann had read Breaking Open, the 2020 book I co-edited about spiritual emergencies. I spoke about the concept and how some people in crisis find it helpful, but also how the Grofs’ idea of ‘spiritual emergency’ has been clumsily used by the psychedelic movement to minimize harm and defend psychedelics. As MAPS’ guide to difficult trips puts it:

A true psychedelic experience, even a so-called bad trip, is sacred. In earth-oriented, shamanic cultures, even a psychotic breakdown, induced by a psychedelic, is part of the initiation.

The day after I gave my talk, there was an op-ed in the LA Times by a woman whose husband took part in an MDMA trial:

Over the next six months, my spouse was institutionalized five times for suicidal ideation and a nervous system he couldn’t control. With his symptoms deteriorating, doctors recommended electroconvulsive therapy: 16 rounds that erased significant portions of his memory…One of the MDMA trial researchers suggested Kurt’s unraveling was evidence of progress.

As I tried to suggest in my talk, any idea or practice can become harmful if clumsily, coercively or greedily applied, even practices intended for healing and liberation. Especially practices intended for healing and liberation. There’s so much more to say about the dark side of the human potential movement - I learned this week about the thread from Synanon to the billion-dollar ‘troubled teen industry’, but that’s a topic for another week.

The big hit of this week’s seminar has been Richard Saville-Smith, Scottish author and champion of ‘mad studies’. He loves having manic episodes even though he usually spends all his money and then gets arrested at the end of them. I don’t know what I think of ‘mad pride’, there’s a lot I could say about how madness affects the people around the mad person, but Richard is an amazing, funny performer and a thinker who challenges my preconceptions.

Another stand-out figure has been Kevin Cann, who is a sort of outsider-mystic, high-functioning autist and UFO summoner, author of 22 strange books on Amazon. He claims to have summoned a UFO on his last visit to Esalen. No sightings this week. Kevin went through a great deal of trauma as a child. Did he construct a rich fantasy world to cope with the deprivation he experienced, or did the deprivation he experienced open him to the ‘liminal world’? I have no idea. But he did say a sort of mantra that will stay with me: ‘I am pure unbounded awareness, and I watch all the movies.’

One of the most beautiful moments of the week was meeting Elaine Pagels and Alan Trist and hearing about how they got together. They knew each other as teenagers in the Bay Area, and were both friends with the teenage Jerry Garcia - later the founder of the Grateful Dead. One night in February 1961, Alan and Jerry were in a car-crash that killed one of their friends and sent them both through the windscreen. Jerry Garcia described it as the ‘slingshot for the rest of my life. I got serious’. Elaine has said the name ‘Grateful Dead’ was partly inspired by that crash.

Elaine then left the Bay Area, became a religious studies scholar and wrote a book in 1979 - The Gnostic Gospels - that made her an academic celebrity. She married a physicist, Heinz Pagels, and they had three children. One of the children tragically died when he was six, and the next year (1988), Heinz died in a hiking accident - a death he’d actually prophesied at the end of his final book. This is the final passage he ever published:

I often dream about falling…Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I felt into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative: there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written in the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark voice, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.

It was of course deeply traumatic for Elaine to be widowed, having just lost her child. At one point she sensed the presence of her husband. “So how do you feel about this?” she asks him. She receives the reply: “This is fine with me. It’s you I’m concerned about now.” “Fine with you? You leave me with two babies and it’s fine with you?”

She recounted her grief and recovery in a 2018 book called Why Religion. It’s not a loud testament to faith, but hints at the possibility of grace: ‘sometimes hearts do heal, through what I can only call grace.’

She gave an interview about the book to NPR’s Terry Gross, and in the interview, she mentioned knowing Alan Trist when they were teenagers with Jerry Garcia. They hadn’t seen each other in 54 years. In that time, Alan had left a burgeoning academic career in Cambridge to work with the Grateful Dead, and spent 40 years as part of ‘the family’. Someone in the Dead network sent him Elaine’s NPR interview, he got in touch, and now they’re a couple.

When you open your heart to life, to married life, to parenthood, to friends, to pets, when you have emotional attachments to this world, you’re acutely aware that this world is a death-trap. No one gets out of it alive. It can seem like the best way to get through life, emotionally, is to shut your heart and take as few risks as possible. But you’re still going to experience loss. Perhaps you minimize the suffering but at the cost of minimizing the love as well.

Amid the adversity, there is also grace and rebirth.