Miss this thread and this type of post at RI.
Earlier in this thread posted about a boarding school I attended in high school for several years. Note I am deliberately not naming the school.
The school still exists but is a day school 1-12 for rich people not a much smaller 9-12 boarding school for mostly rich kids but all "gifted". The school is still considered progressive.
I was one of the scholarship kids, the claim was made that 25% of the students were on scholarship.
The founder of the school had previously been a Ford Foundation VP. The school started the same year as Esalen which also was birthed out of the Ford Foundation. Two of the students had parents who were never famous but then were on staff at Esalen. While I was in attendance, Esalen did two sessions that were optional for the students to attend. Basically, students were isolated together in the Student Lounge building for a weekend doing various touchy-feely exercises (this was in school years 68-69 and 69-70, my sophomore and junior years). One session, a number of the student took lsd which was a bad idea. There was another student there who introduced me to Huxley and Crowley's tarot. Chuck B. had met Huxley who was a friend of his parents.
Aldous Huxley’s Influence on the Esalen Institute
Although Murphy and Price [Michael Murphy and Dick Price, Esalen’s founders] actually met Aldous Huxley only once, in January of 1962 when the author visited them briefly in Big Sur shortly before his death on November 22, 1963 (the same day, it turns out, that JFK was assassinated), his intellectual and personal influence on the place was immense. His second wife, Laura, would become a long-time friend of Esalen, where she would fill any number of roles, including acting as a sitter for one of Murphy’s psychedelic sessions.
Aldous Huxley’s writings on the mystical dimensions of psychedelics and on what he called the perennial philosophy were foundational. Moreover, his call for an institution that could teach the “nonverbal humanities” and the development of the “human potentialities” functioned as the working mission statement of early Esalen. Indeed, the very first Esalen brochures actually bore the Huxley-inspired title, “the human potentiality.” This same phrase would later morph in a midnight brainstorming session between Michael Murphy and George Leonard into the now well-known “human potential movement.” When developing the early brochures for Esalen, Murphy was searching for a language that could mediate between his own Aurobindonian evolutionary mysticism and the more secular and psychological language of American culture. It was Huxley who helped him to create such a new hybrid language. This should not surprise us, as Huxley had been experimenting for decades on how to translate Indian ideas into Western literary and intellectual culture.
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, writing about the founding of New Age retreat and spiritual center the Esalen Institute in his book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. The above excerpt comes from a chapter that has been reprinted on the University of Chicago Press’s website.
https://longreads.com/2015/06/09/aldous ... institute/
