In California: Being 25 and Following Your Bliss

By Pico Iyer

Below, far below, is the ceaseless crash and sighing of the sea. Behind, tall redwoods climbing up the mountainside. Off to one side, hot mineral baths laid down on ground once sacred to the local Indians. And out in the distance, along the blue horizons, the spouting of a distant whale. There, on a sunlit lawn high above the sea, a score of visitors assemble at first light. Retired schoolteachers, lay therapists, dentists from Ohio -- all move their limbs slowly, to the sound of a flute, through the Tai Chi motions of fire, water and gold.

Later, after night has fallen, a naked lady lies back in one of the clifftop hot tubs. The darkness is lighted by candles, the stillness scented with incense. Beside her, a photographer and a chef from San Francisco are discussing the novels of Tanizaki. "The cuticles are very important," the woman proclaims, wiggling her toes furiously. "Very important. I learnt that in class last Wednesday." "Hunh, what?" exclaims her equally naked, equally graying male companion. "That's wisdom flowing through you, knowledge," she explains above the roar and recession of the waves. "That's energy being liberated, energy being balanced." "Whatever it is," mutters her friend, "it sure feels good!"

If feeling good is a religion, its cathedral is Esalen. The nerve center of the counterculture, the cradle of Gestalt therapy, the inspiration for a thousand adult-education courses (with the emphasis often on adult), the Esalen Institute, perched on the windswept cliffs of Big Sur, Calif., along one of the loveliest stretches of unreal estate in the world, has long been the Platonic model of an Aquarian think tank. From Buenos Aires to Berlin, it has also become a symbol for the beauty, and something of the folly, of the peculiarly American belief that perfection is just a day away.

This month, however, the growth center that held its first seminar on "The Human Potentiality" marks its 25th anniversary. A full generation has passed since Aldous Huxley, Arnold Toynbee and Buckminster Fuller first haunted these groves. Now that many of its ideas are available at your neighborhood seminar, while others are gathering dust, how does a place dedicated to state-of-the- heart fashions stay fresh? And has it come any closer to proving that feeling good can lead to being good?

Such are the questions that linger in the air as 50 people sprawl on pillows inside one of Esalen's mirrored conference rooms, gathering one radiant week for a five-day seminar called "Our Myth-Body to Live By." The topic is vintage Esalen: an attempt to marry impulses physical and metaphysical. So too are the seminar leaders: Joseph Campbell, mythologer supreme and godfather to many a '60s quester, and Chungliang Al Huang, a Chinese-born master of Tai Chi. For six hours each day, the octogenarian Campbell sits cross-legged on the floor and improvises passionate lectures about Navajo paintings, the dangers of spiritual feudalism and why Hindu elephants are "clouds condemned to earth." Whenever the talk gets too cerebral, Huang, a beady-eyed Boswell to Campbell's Johnson, leaps up and leads the group in dance.

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.

In recent years Esalen's directors have made a concerted attempt to refurbish their image of sensual monasticism by moving farther out into the world. In 1980 they established a Soviet-American exchange program, which has opened up contacts with Soviet writers, academics and cosmonauts, and in 1982 they helped launch the first "spacebridge," or satellite linkup, between the superpowers. "We want to apply all that we have learned in personal psychology and interpersonal Gestalt to the most intractable relationship in the world," explains Jim Garrison, the Cambridge University Ph.D. who directs the program. For some loyal seminarians, however, all such gestures are a kind of heresy. "Who needs public credibility?" complains a man in textiles from Santa Monica, Calif. "I come here to get away from politics, international relations, all that stuff. I come here to hang out with my feelings."

Is Esalen then just a fancy holistic hotel? It certainly has all the amenities of a dream resort: a spray of hibiscus on every bed, ocean views from every rustic cabin. For days on end, no roar of traffic, no blast of television; nothing but the song of wind chimes. And as the Gestaltifying days of old recede, the place seems to be settling into a comfortable calm -- less a crisis center, perhaps, than an otherworldly spa where affluent mid-life professionals can come to chop vegetables, lose themselves in books and enjoy a little quiet.

The real secret of Esalen's durability may lie, in fact, precisely in its willy-nilly eclecticism, its willingness to accommodate everyone, whether in search of a perfect tan, a perfect stranger or some higher kind of perfection: here is idealism without ideology. A curious blend of anarchy and serenity has, after all, been the only guiding spirit here ever since the days when its earliest residents included Hunter Thompson and Joan Baez.

In the end, perhaps the best explanation of why Esalen will always leave outsiders bemused at best, while devotees return as faithfully as salmon to their birth waters, is delivered by Joseph Campbell, soon after the entire community celebrates his 83rd birthday with a giant cake and a night of dances, stories and songs. "This is a kind of sacred space," the scholar suggests, "where we come not to rework our practical life but to discover an inner life, to respond to a vocation, to find a calling. As I always say, 'Follow your bliss!' " And all around him, as he speaks, the clean white light of sea and stars.