Back in the Day with Keith Thompson

“Vast ideas like this were in the air, and my windows were wide open,” says Keith Thompson, recalling his days at Esalen in the late ’70s. The acclaimed journalist and author of Angels and Aliens and The UFO Paradox tells us how he went from being a senatorial staffer to helping to coordinate a series of annual think tank-style conferences packed with new intellectual and spiritual energies.

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The day I discovered the existence of Esalen is as clear in my mind as a bell that has never stopped ringing. The year was 1976. I was in my 20s and working on staff for US Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum of Ohio. None of my politically-driven colleagues knew my bookshelves included titles by Alan Watts and Abraham Maslow. 

I was living a double life — part of me wedded to the promise of political change inspired by the equality and peace movements of the 1960s, another part drawn to the idea that exploring untapped human capacities could be as much an evolutionary imperative as the rise of life from inorganic matter and humankind evolving from its primate ancestors. Vast ideas like this were in the air, and my windows were wide open. 

My friend Marge, a free-thinking firebrand and intellectual mentor of sorts, had phoned to catch up. When I said I’d been looking into the human potential movement, she declared this a bona fide synchronicity as she’d just finished reading a long magazine article about a California educational center focused on matters having to do with untapped human potentials for creativity, love, embodied wisdom, emotional intelligence, and spiritual vision — with a decided emphasis on societal transformation. 

“The place is called Esalen,” Marge said. I was all ears.

When I read the article (“New Paradigms,” The New Yorker, January 5, 1976)* describing Esalen’s founding and early years, I learned that young Mike Murphy and Dick Price’s idea was to use the Murphy family property at Big Sur “to explore their own interests in philosophy, psychology, social anthropology, and the more esoteric disciplines,” free of the dogma that so often limits both religion and science. The article recounted their plan to create a forum where multiple perspectives and practices could be presented, with a key proviso: no single approach or idea would predominate or be allowed to “capture the flag.”

As a kid, I’d had unexpected experiences that left me convinced there’s inherent direction and purpose in life, and this had to include my own. The very idea that such a center existed or might even be possible sent a chill up my spine. It was only a matter of time before I would come to this unmatched place on California’s mythic central coast. I had no idea how my life would change as a result. 

Within the year, I quit my Senate job and moved to the Bay Area. I got to know George Leonard at an Esalen workshop he led, and we stayed in touch as residents of Marin County’s Mill Valley. One day, I asked George if he would introduce me to his buddy Mike Murphy. 

When I first spoke with Mike, a fellow distance runner, by phone, he suggested we put in some miles on one of his favorite Mill Valley routes. Setting a challenging pace, he talked about Esalen’s opening years as a time of grandiose thinking about what Maslow had called the “farther reaches of human nature.” He described “a kind of drunkenness in the air” and more than a few psychic casualties during the Institute’s "Big Bang” period. 

Citing William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Mike described Esalen’s process of learning from its fever-pitched startup phase and his desire for Esalen to take up new initiatives with staying power. He and George Leonard were pondering inaugurating a series of private symposia bringing together world-class intellectuals and practitioners to discuss focused themes or ideas with implications for expanding prevailing paradigms of science and society. 

This very format was crucial to how Esalen began: as a series of conversations with invited guests like Alan Watts, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, B.F. Skinner, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Buckminster Fuller, Linus Pauling, and Jerry Brown. Esalen’s programming later emphasized experience-based approaches to matters fundamental to life yet not ordinarily studied in academia — what Watts termed the “‘nitty-gritty,’ the utterly basic question of our relationship with others, to ourselves, and to cosmic existence. Talk it out, feel it out, get down to the roots of what is actually happening … direct experience of mental and physical reality…

I was there when Mike began a series of invited conferences for key thinkers and practitioners across diverse fields and disciplines to come to Big Sur for several days to discuss big ideas and issues related to various societal challenges. Esalen had held a 1975 invited conference on the UFO phenomenon, a subject I had followed with keen interest for years.

The goal was to encourage cross-disciplinary conversations that so often fail to take place in the highly specialized settings of academia and science. I enthusiastically accepted Mike’s invitation to provide logistical support for this rolling series of conferences over the better part of a decade. The meetings would become formalized as Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research in 1998. 

It’s fair to say many in the established Esalen community didn’t know quite what to make of the sudden influx of nerdy intellectuals holding heady conversations about new approaches to governance, US-Soviet relations, empirical evidence for the survival of death, and rapid developments in the field of somatics over meals at the Lodge. Since I was Esalen staff but not a resident of the community, it often fell to me to account for these visitors who seemed passionate about the life of the mind community members in much the same way staff were passionate about the life of the body, emotions, and spirit.  

Did the invited conferences portend some momentous shift away from Esalen’s trademark emphasis on the nitty-gritty of experiential learning toward the arid cognitive discourse of a stereotypical “think tank”? The best proof that the answer to this question was “no” would come as conference visitors and community members (probably equally exotic through the eyes of the other) got to know each other on site, over meals and conversations at the baths or in the Lodge late at night or before dawn the next day. 

My short reflections here can’t begin to capture the array of intellectual, moral, and spiritual energy that these conferences coalesced, but I can share a few highlights of how the invited conferences became part of Esalen’s culture and invited it to blossom in new directions. 

Here is a classic only-at-Esalen exchange: social psychologist and futures planner Donald Michael and I had walked into the Lodge where we intended to plan his impending invited conference on "Appropriate Governance," which would explore modes of governance for nations and groups at a time when paradox, ambiguity, and complexity increasingly dominate the social landscape. Looking for an open seat, I spied the stately anthropologist Gregory Bateson sitting alone at a table. He nodded us over.

Just as what promised to be an invigorating conversation was getting underway, an Esalen resident named Laurie came over carrying a plate of garden-fresh greens and wearing on her head what seemed to be a triangular device that might have been made of tin foil. Gregory once again nodded, this time with the slightest twinkle in his eye, and Laurie took her seat at the table. After a quiet moment, Don Michael asked about her unusual headgear. She was conducting an experiment to align her personal bioenergies with the larger fields of the cosmos.

Laurie leaned toward Gregory to ask him if he would like to try on her cranial fedora. Not missing a beat, Gregory leaned impishly in her direction and said in his sonorous Cambridge dialect, “I’m already wearing mine; can’t you see it?” Laurie brought her hands together in a bow to Bateson, who returned the gesture. 

Years later, I was talking in the Lodge late one night with shamanism pioneer Michael Harner, who was in residence for an invited conference on the emergence of shamanic practice in the United States. We were chatting bull-session style about the challenges of integrating extraordinary transpersonal experiences with daily life. Will Schutz walked into the Lodge and we motioned for him to join us. We asked Will what he had learned about this topic in all his years of facilitating groups. He put a hand to the side of his mouth and whispered aloud, “Here’s the secret, gentlemen. Beware the chakra skippers.” 

This was Will’s gradual recognition that transformative change, in order to be lasting, must speak to body, mind, heart, and soul. “Skipping chakras” was his phrase for methods that prioritize the development of one aspect of our nature while marginalizing other dimensions. For Michael Harner, it clarified the importance of comprehensive approaches to growth long before “integral” became a watchword in human potential circles.

Mike and I would talk about “the patterns that connect” (a signature phrase of Gregory Bateson) UFO close encounters, near-death experiences, shamanic journeys, and Mike’s research into supernormal human capacities. In 1986, I convened and chaired an invited conference of my own, assembling leading-edge thinkers and researchers to compare notes about the UFO phenomenon. This gathering, along with future invited conferences on the subject convened by Professor Jeff Kripal, bolstered my work on two books exploring UFOs as a “call from the cosmos” for humanity to open to greater dimensions of reality and recognize that our understanding of the universe is still far from complete.

Like so many thousands of pilgrims, I came to Esalen for experiential immediacy of the kind that Fritz Perls made famous: “Lose your mind and come to your senses.” I stayed to appreciate and participate in the welcoming of embodied ideas to Esalen’s offerings, via the invited conferences. My tweak on Fritz’s credo might be: Let mind and senses together thrive.

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*Still available at The New Yorker’s online archive, the article gives a rich literary account of Esalen’s beginnings. 

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