SEX, DRUGS AND HOT TUBS

ESALEN America and the Religion of No Religion. By Jeffrey J. Kripal.
Illustrated. 575 pp. University of Chicago Press. $30.

People of a certain age will remember Esalen, the famous (or
infamous) spa in Big Sur on the California coast, founded in the
1960s as a center of the human potential movement.

In his book "Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion,"
Jeffrey J. Kripal describes it as "a utopian experiment creatively
suspended between the revelations of the religions and the
democratic, pluralistic and scientific revolutions of modernity." In
1990, someone painted graffiti (unprintable in its entirety here) at
the entrance: "Jive . for rich white folk."

Both descriptions are justified, it turns out. It won't escape any
reader of this interesting book that almost all the players are
good-looking and rich, but we learn that along with the sex and drugs
with which it was synonymous, the Esalen Institute, as it was
formally known, had considerable intellectual seriousness and was
unexpectedly influential in global affairs, with leaders like Ronald
Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev having some connection. It was Esalen,
for example, that beat out the Rockefeller Foundation and the Council
on Foreign Relations, among others, to be the sponsors of Boris
Yeltsin's 1989 visit to America, during which he experienced his
famous conversion to capitalism in a Texas grocery store.

More conventionally illustrious guests and other boldface names who
make appearances in this book, if sometimes fleeting and rather
tenuous ones, include mystically inclined scholars like Gregory
Bateson, Carl Sagan, Joseph Campbell and Fritjof Capra (author of
"The Tao of Physics"); as well as astronauts and Apple executives,
Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel, B. F. Skinner and Erik Erikson, not
to mention a panoply of countercultural figures including Joan Baez,
Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Leary and even poor Bishop James Pike,
the Episcopal prelate who was put on trial for heresy after
repudiating the dogmas of the Virgin Birth and the Holy Trinity.
Esalen's intellectual framework contained, among much else, the
philosophical and psychological ideas of Mesmer, Swedenborg, Freud,
Abraham Maslow, Christianity and Eastern mysticism of various kinds,
not to mention parapsychology, the occult, hallucinogenics, even
space aliens. (The extraterrestrial, to the amateur ethnobotanist and
Esalen stalwart Terence McKenna, represented "the human soul
exteriorized into three-dimensional space as a religious experience,"
in Kripal's paraphrase.) What's striking is how the already thin line
between culture and counterculture was nearly effaced at this period
of New Age optimism and scientific breakthrough.

This reviewer also spent a weekend at Esalen in the early 1970s, with
the novelist Alison Lurie, who was researching it. These short visits
were meant to provide a sampling of the therapies then on offer --
encounter groups and body work (mostly involving a sort of nude
round-robin massage) stick in my memory, along with rather good food,
emphasizing groats and the like. It was terrific fun, and it was
there, clambering down the rickety wooden steps to the glorious beach
below, that we surprised an elderly, naked Henry Miller, who modestly
put his hat over his lap at the approach of two equally embarrassed
ladies with beach bags and towels.

Kripal gives in considerable, maybe even too much, detail both the
gossip and the intellectual developments at Esalen since its founding
as "a center to explore those trends in the behavioral sciences,
religion and philosophy which emphasize the potentialities and values
of human existence," as the first brochure put it. He gives
particular emphasis to the work of one co-founder, Michael Murphy,
whose family happened to own the priceless seaside real estate, 150
acres of fabled beauty and abundant natural hot springs.

By now, Richard Price, the other founder, is dead, and Murphy is
described as being impatient with New Age bunk. But Kripal presents
Murphy as the author of a considerable body of philosophical writing,
sometimes in the form of occult novels (including "An End to Ordinary
History" and "Jacob Atabet") or pop-mystical tracts like "Golf in the
Kingdom," which has sold more than a million copies and made a
culture hero of its protagonist, a deep-thinking Scottish golf pro
named Shivas Irons. (Golf, Murphy has said, is "a mystery school for
Republicans.")

It is in relation to Murphy's work and his own general thesis that
Kripal may lose some readers.

A history of Esalen is one thing, but this long book also advances
its own theory that Esalen and New Age culture more generally are
furthering the evolution of religion in America, and perhaps
worldwide, toward "no religion," by which he seems to mean not
secularism so much as a sort of transcendent fusion of Eastern and
other religions to the negation of all existing ones and a resolution
of the Cartesian mind-body split.

Despite some turgid sentences ("It is simply to locate their
important critiques in a more nuanced social context and problematize
their sometimes simplistic readings"), Kripal makes many sympathetic
points about the present spiritual state of America, even if his
argument gets somewhat lost in the more lurid details of suicides,
strange deaths and amazing paths to enlightenment.

The book is most startling when describing Esalen's connection to world events.

According to Kripal's sometimes rather infatuated account, it was
Esalen that "enlisted the support of" Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer
in helping to bring the Soviet Writers' Union into International PEN.
It was also of use to the C.I.A., which spent a lot of money looking
into ESP, with experiments involving "the laser physicist turned
C.I.A. psychic spy turned American mystic" Russell Targ, who gave
parapsychology lectures at Esalen. (He would later give a
demonstration to the Soviet Academy of Sciences as well.) Murphy's
wife, Dulce, Kripal claims, "was with" Jimmy Carter when he announced
the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics; and through their extensive
involvement with American-Soviet citizen exchanges (an outgrowth of
their interest in Russian mysticism), the Murphys became friends of
Arthur Hartman, Reagan's ambassador to Russia, whom they persuaded to
try to "melt" cold war relations through some "hot-tub diplomacy."

Though the first experiments with LSD were conducted at respectable
universities like the University of California, Los Angeles, Esalen
was famously a laboratory for the psychopharmacological inquiries of
the period.

It also trafficked in Rolfing, the orgone theories of Wilhelm Reich,
you name it, some of it now mainstream, some discredited. Where did
it all go wrong, or did it? Were the seekers at Esalen on to
something, or should they have forborne to shock native American
puritanism with too much free love and LSD, which began to seem like
hypocritical self-indulgence and just more of what Kripal calls "a
stunning array of misogynistic metaphysical systems" that indulge
male sexuality and control women?

Kripal poses another challenging question: With the world gripped
anew by terror, "if not ... the apocalyptic variety expressed so
dramatically by a Soviet-American Armageddon," where are all the
"countercultural actors, erotic mystics, psychedelic visionaries,
ecstatic educators, esoteric athletes, psychic spies,
gnosticdiplomats and cultural visionaries" who emerged the last time around?

For his part, Kripal continues to believe that spirituality and
science should not contradict each other, and that the Cartesian
split between mind and body can be transcended. We still don't know
whether the soul resides in the pineal gland.

Most important, he asks, "can we revision 'America' not as a globally
hated imperial superpower, not as a 'Christian nation' obsessed with
mad and arrogant apocalyptic fantasies abroad and discriminatory
'family values' at home" but "as a potentiality yet to be realized"?
Can we learn to say, "I am spiritual, but not religious?"

Whatever the answer, Esalen itself soldiers on, its cliffs stabilized
with wire mesh and plantings, its baths redesigned to be tastefully
luxurious, its scholarly arm renamed the Center for Theory and
Research and preoccupied with organizing seminars on such topics as
"survival of bodily death."