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In between sessions, many of the veteran "seminarians" reminisce about the bad old days, when encounter groupies were encouraged to roll around like snowballs or get out their feelings at the salad bar. Those were the days that fixed Esalen's image in the collective unconscious as a sort of spiritual singles bar, Californication Central. "When I tell my friends at home I'm coming to Esalen," says a Manhattan screenwriter, "they just roll their eyes and say, 'Oh yeah! The place where all the girls run around naked!' And when I say, 'Look, I'm going to hear an 80-year-old man talk about God for five days, they say, 'Oh, sure.' "
In other circles, of course, that image of hippie looseness is exactly what draws people to Esalen. As the institute's co-founder and chairman Michael Murphy cheerfully admits, "Esalen's reputation gets better the farther away you go." These days up to half the people who stay for a season or two, paying their way as work scholars, are foreign grandchildren of the revolution, come here from West Germany, Switzerland, Argentina or Brazil for a dose of good old-fashioned American Utopianism. Sleeping four to a room, working on the community farm or helping out at its school, they drift around the place in peasant skirts, dreamily smiling and strumming guitars in the sunshine. "In Esalen, I find all the joys of paganism!" exclaims a German- Rumanian therapist, explaining why he is living in a trailer and washing dishes to support his stay. "When I had rolfing, it changed the colors of my day. At first I felt the sadness of when I was a little child. Then the rage and rioting of when I was 18. And when I get the spiritual massage -- ah, I feel as if I have been touched by an angel!"
For Murphy, however, Esalen's greatest promise is probably that of an outlaw university, a place that can pursue "rigor in the service of adventure," rescuing learning from both the dryness of the academy and the wishy-washiness of many alternatives. Certainly, aphorisms fly every evening in the central redwood lodge, where seminarians cluster in excited groups over cups of coffee and thrash out Rilke and reincarnation deep into the night. "You do not visit India; you visit yourself," a New York investment analyst tells an Italian woman from Houston and her 18-year-old son. "Whether man finds things on Mars is a reflection of whether he can find them in his subconscious," opines a crystals dealer from Santa Cruz, Calif. At another table, former All-Star Pitcher Vida Blue is buried in a book; at still another, a Balinese dancer chats with the former lead flutist of the London Symphony Orchestra.