Michael Murphy

Around 1961 Aldous Huxley said at a U.S. State Department-sponsored conference at the California Medical School in San Francisco: "There will be in the next generation or so . . . a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel—by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." Timothy Leary recalled his conversation with Huxley who told him to be a brain-drug cheerleader for evolution like he and his grandfather before him. However, Huxley told Leary that the obstacle to the evolution was the Bible: "Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived."

Huxley was among those who encouraged Michael Murphy and Richard Price in their decision to open Esalen in 1961. Murphy and Price wrote to Huxley, who believed science and mysticism were complementary activities, and whose elucidation of "the perennial philosophy" and ideas about the human potential shaped Esalen's work for the next 32 years. It is said that Aldous Huxley, that modern of moderns, went to a few Ouspensky meetings in London. Eventually Huxley settled for Gerald Heard who drew heavily on Eastern philosophy. In Huxley we may find a symptom of a desperate tendency to turn in our crisis to ideas and teachings that stand outside the stream of Western culture. At Huxley's suggestion, Murphy and Price sought out Gerald Heard, philosopher and mystic, who cast a deep Irish spell with accounts of people and events that revealed the secrets of human transformation. An afternoon with Heard in the summer of 1961, in which Heard displayed his characteristic enthusiasm and sense of a cosmic mandate, confirmed Esalen's two founders in their decision to start a seminar center. In the first three years of the Big Sur human-potential center, the lecturers included Alan Watts, Arnold Toynbee, Gerald Heard, Linus Pauling, Carl Rogers, Norman O. Brown, Paul Tillich, Rollo May and Carlos Castaneda. Esalen's first brochure "flew under the title of a series of 1961 lectures by Aldous Huxley: 'Human Potentialities.'"

Like the hero in Maugham's The Razor's Edge, Michael Murphy went to India seeking enlightenment. He lived for eighteen months at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry—an institute combining the wisdom of East and West. Michael Murphy and Richard Price decided in 1961 to open the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California as a center for humanistic psychology. The institute, which was opened in 1962, conducts workshops, seminars, and symposia. The late Hindu Geru Sri Aurobindo has a follower by the name of Maurice Strong who has connections with David Rockefeller, the Rothschilds and other groups of the money elite.

One evening in 1962, Abraham Maslow was forced to seek shelter at the nearest residence due to fog: "He arrived in time for an Easlen study group that was unpacking a case of twenty copies of his latest book."

In 1962 Billy and Tommy Hitchcock purchased Millbrook. It became "the shrine where acid was sanctified." Tommy had become friends with Leary toward the end of the 1950's.

Michael Murphy

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