Back in the Day with Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy, who will celebrate his 94th on September 3, 2024, shares tales of the Institute’s earliest days — the “bohemian gathering place” he created with Dick Price. It’s the Esalen origin story only Esalen’s co-founder could tell, complete with genius ideas, psychedelics, and legendary figures such as Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Paul Tillich, Alan Watts, Fritz Perls, Dick Alpert, Tim Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Hunter S. Thompson, Gia-Fu Feng, Arnold Toynbee, and the Monterey sheriff who told Michael to get some guns. “It was that wild,” he recalls.

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The first month of Esalen, my mother cooked. She was a fabulous French cook. Dick and I would wash dishes and wait on tables. 

We raised a flag and people flocked around. The idea was to run seminars led by thought leaders such as Huxley, Maslow, and, eventually, Paul Tillich, who was espousing a similar doctrine of a new way to look at Christianity, a kind of evolutionary panentheism. Alan Watts had been leading seminars here on the property before we started. He'd even tried to buy the Murphy House. 

The land that Esalen is on had been in the Murphy family since 1910, with my grandfather's hopes that it would be turned into a spa. But then World War I came, and the whole thing was shut down. 

Right after the war, my grandfather died. My grandmother was running the place by the early 1960s when my friend Dick Price and I became interested in it. She had hired several people to handle the daily operations, some of whom were part of a Pentecostal church sect. There was a lot of whooping and hollering in the Lodge on various nights, speaking in tongues.

At the same time, it was quite a bohemian gathering place. Henry Miller and friends from Europe like Anais Nin and Lawrence Durrell and others would be down here. Joan Baez was living here, too. She was 19. When the place got out of control, my grandmother hired Hunter S. Thompson, of Fear and Loathing fame, to be a caretaker. He hadn't written any books yet, but he had an arsenal of weapons, including a lot of automatic weapons. 

In those years, you didn't have any sheriff's posse. The sheriff in Monterey wouldn’t send his men down into Big Sur. He called it “that bad land.” There were a lot of “Big Sur Mountain men” growing marijuana — a lot of them were Marxists and didn't believe in private property, so we were being accosted by people saying, “You think you own that property? No, the people own it.” The sheriff told us, “You know, boys,” he said, “you boys have to have guns because I'm not sending my men down there. You've got to take control of that property.” It was that wild.

Eventually, my father was able to persuade my grandmother. “Let Michael take it over for his dream,” he said, “or we're all going to go to jail.” So we created a little business. We started inviting the people who informed and amplified our vision. Our idea was that this was going to be a meeting place to open up a conversation for the wide world about the human potential in its further reaches. We gathered a little crew. Our bookkeeper, Gia-Fu Feng, was from China.  He did our books on an abacus. He was a huge intellect — high IQ — and he had come from this high-falutin family, you know, escaping Mao Tse Tung and communism. He was a rebel, just like us.

I found this wonderful designer in San Francisco, designed a brochure, and scheduled six programs. The first ones were people either suggested to us directly or whose books we'd read. We were just writing letters to these people. I've always been persuasive. Dick Price often said to me, “You know, you missed your real calling. You should have been a used car salesman. You could have made some serious money selling old broken-down Buicks.” 

Aldous Huxley was very important in the early days. From him, we got the conceptual framing of the human potential, human potentialities. Likewise, Abraham Maslow's thinking and writings around peak experience and self-actualization were very important. 

In 1963, or the second year, Fritz Perls came and moved down there. He made Gestalt therapy famous at Esalen. He brought Ida Rolf, and then Charlotte Selver came, so in the first two or three years, we staked out the perimeter of our thoughts. 

Everything broke our way. Our first four seminars were so oversubscribed that we scheduled two more immediately. For the next brochure, instead of one a month, it was one a week. And then, within a year, our seminars were going every single day. 

The gift of Esalen and the genius of Esalen is how wildly divergent the crowd is around here now. You have to remember in the early sixties, what we think of as the sixties hadn't quite started yet. We had the remnants of the whole Beat Generation. Many of the people in the core of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, had been frequenting this place. So in the early years of Esalen, we had these poetry readings quite a bit. But it was not what we think of as hippies yet; that really hadn’t exploded onto the scene yet. 

Up until 1966, I went to nearly all of Esalen’s workshops. I would never recommend this to any other human should have to do such a thing. I mean, it's a miracle I survived. Luckily, I was so anchored in meditation practice. I had never been psychoanalyzed. I hadn't done any prolonged psychotherapy, but I had read so much and there was so much conversation about all this stuff that, in effect, I got secondhand psychoanalysis by hanging out with so many people who are into these things. And so, the practices themselves, for the most part, did not have a heavy transformative change in me. 

Likewise, for whatever reasons, psychedelic drugs just have not been my ally. I had eight trips. The first LSD trip was with Laura Huxley, Aldous’s wife, in 1962, and then with Dick Alpert and Tim Leary in ’64. And all of them launched me into these spaces, but they weren't as deep, as satisfying, and as liberating as my deepest meditation practices. Meditation really came to me fast. And when you sat as much as I did, you don't have to be some sort of spiritual genius to have the results. Just by the law of averages, if you're sitting nine hours a day, you're going to have some extraordinary disclosures. And they were never equaled for me by the psychedelics. 

Now, at the same time, we were doing seminars here on psychedelics, and I was seeing the impact it had on people. In a way, it's a miracle that we steered our way through this psychedelics thing. We had to steer through because more people were having bad trips in those days. There's no doubt if they're done the right way, they can be hugely door-opening, liberating, but they are not the vehicle for permanent practice. 

I'll never forget the night historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee lectured here. It was in the fall of ’62. He lectured and most of the people there were wearing neckties over at the Lodge. Afterward, my parents had a reception where people were dressed in sports jackets, a very swell crowd, all dressed up. At the same time, Allen Ginsberg was at the Lodge, and there were guys with feathers and hand drums who were semi-nude, and some of them stoned, and he was reading from Howl and all of this kind of stuff. That was a kind of marker of what was to be.