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This introductory chapter details the history and philosophy behind the Esalen Institute, its impact on society since its inception in the 1960s, as well as the background of research in exploring Esalen and its enduring influence. The Institute's founding generation had started lasting organizations and social networks that facilitated the development and spread of alternative spirituality and humanistic psychology in the twenty-first century. Esalen encouraged widespread enthusiasm for an enormous range of spiritual paths that offered possibilities for individuals to live joyfully and discover fresh truths about themselves and the cosmos. It democratized spiritual privilege by popularizing options that had once been available to relatively few Americans and made the religious marketplace more diverse and open. Esalen played a critical role in introducing and promoting esoteric spirituality so that it flowed into mainstream culture.

This chapter describes the Institute's creation narrative and charts Esalen's history through the twenty-first century. This creation story described how Michael Murphy and Dick Price's dream of a modest retreat had spontaneously morphed into the reality of an influential institution dedicated to personal and social transformations. Because of benign supernatural influences emanating from both Esalen's location and more general cosmic forces, the two young men were able to create a hub for spiritual and personal exploration that has survived for six decades. According to the narrative, the stars had aligned so that Esalen could be conceived. Supernatural synchronicity had shaped Esalen's beginnings, and Murphy and Price's road trip ushered in a new era for Americans hungering to expand their lives.

This chapter examines the work of photographer Ansel Adams, particularly his pictorial engagement with the landscape. It argues that the context in which to appreciate Adams’s production is neither the modern museum nor the modernist photographic discourse that often justified it, but through the ostensible counterculture recurrently grasped in terms coeval with its most easily satirized iconography (of nudists, stoned musicians, etc.). Adams’s images offer an instance whereby artworks might look nothing like the milieu in which they find their theoretical justification, but are rendered legible through it in a way otherwise obscured. In this case, thinking about Adams together with the Esalen Institute recommends his images as manifestations of sensate connection with the land, itself privileged as the site of, and often the very vehicle for, personal revolution.

This chapter narrates a peculiar event that happened to a group of intellectuals—neuroscientists, psychologists and historians—who were meeting at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California for breakfast. One of the members of the group, Bruce Greyson, the founding editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, was eating cereal from a bowl, which he finished and pushed into the center of the table. After some time, Greyson noticed that his concave spoon became half-convex, hanging like a tongue in the bowl. Each member of the group had varying opinions regarding the event. Psychotherapist Adam Crabtree said that a certain kind of group inner dynamic might have triggered the bending of the spoon. Neuroscientist Edward Kelly pointed the peculiarity of event to the “uncertainties of ‘field’ observations.” Meanwhile, Psychologist Charles Tart stated that the event was “a wonderful mischievous or trickster quality” of the paranormal.

In the adopting religion approaches to Buddhist traditions explicated in this chapter, clinicians actively and openly take up Buddhist teachings, practices, and identities. Instead of treating Buddhist traditions as resources for clinical work, therapists taking adopting religion approaches sometimes frame psychotherapies as resources to aid Buddhist communities. The chapter briefly surveys the impact this has on Buddhist communities in the United States, a number of which have been established by psychotherapists. Such approaches can appear to upend a hierarchy between the religious and not-religious as clinicians characterize therapy as merely a tool to, for example, clear psychological obstacles from meditation practice. This reversal can be traced back to humanistic and transpersonal therapists of the 1960s-1970s like Abraham Maslow who, critiquing secularity and “the medical model,” remade therapeutic goals to include the activation of “human potential.” While contemporary therapists who take adopting religion approaches could be defined as fully practicing religion (some describe their psychotherapies as new hybrid Buddhist schools), this arrangement of religious/not-religious also remains unstable: the specific Buddhist traditions they adopt can themselves be characterized as secularized forms, already bereft of features coded as more “conventionally” or “self-evidently” religious (merit-making practices, propitiation of deities, etc.).

During the counter-culture era of the 1960s and early 1970s, Big Sur became a magnet for hippies, back-to-the-land activists, and New Age visitors exploring the mind-expanding retreats at the Esalen Institute. Added to these arrivals were the more mainstream families flocking to the state parks and beaches, and wealthy new residents. Chapter 5 examines the arrival of these various admirers and their influence on Big Sur’s image and land management. This chapter also broadens the picture to examine the statewide impact of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. The spill was a wakeup call to the state and the nation, and it reinforced the linkage between the quality of the environment and Americans’ quality of life. It spurred the passage of Proposition 20 in 1972 to protect California’s prized coastline. New state regulations required environmentally sensitive land management plans from all coastal counties. This chapter argues that Big Sur residents understood the importance (and accepted the irony) of coalescing as a vibrant community as they began to draft one of the most stringent antidevelopment plans in the state. Their sophisticated knowledge of land management helped retain this coastline’s distinction and their prized place within it.