Huxley and Tech come to Esalen

  Picture it: the golden glow of late afternoon, and you, immersed
in a hot tub on a cliff overlooking the Pacific….

 Now cut to 1962. That’s when Aldous Huxley was among the
first visitors at a then-new retreat center called Esalen. Within months, this
hippie hotel in Big Sur became the capital of the human potential movement and
a center for spiritual techniques of all stripes.

  Enter
the new and unlikely occupants of Esalen: the denizens of Silicon Valley. Workshops for the first “cohort,” as described on the new website, will take place next
month, in March of 2018. More
about how this came about in a minute.

  Since 1962, seekers and tourists have been drawn to this 27-acre
site overlooking the Pacific, located a three-hour drive south of San Francisco.
They have come to practice meditation and yoga and bathe in its natural hot
springs, ideally at sunset. And let’s not forget Esalen’s history as a magnet
for experimentation with psychedelic drugs.

  Such techniques were dear to Huxley in his life and work, as
seen in three of his many books: The Perennial Philosophy, his expansive survey
of world mysticism; The Doors of Perception, his personal interpretation of
mescaline and LSD, and Island, his utopian final novel.

  About the time Esalen opened its doors Huxley had finished
writing Island, in which he shows how the human potential movement might play
out on an isolated Pacific Island society he calls Pala. By the end, though, Pala
is taken over by a neighboring country eager to exploit it.

  Cultures thereby come and go. The locale of Esalen has a
history dating back about six thousand years, and before hippies arrived, before
software engineers arrived, it was the site of a spring sacred to a Native
American people called the Esselen.

  Now back
to the new overlords of Esalen. After
a hiatus, the institute resumed operation
in fall of  2017 with a new
director and a new agenda, primarily as a retreat for workers in the I.T.
field. Apparently they, and their big tech employers, see a need for life-code balance.
Goodbye funky, hello optimization. Goodbye spiritual techniques, hello spiritual technology. Enter tech-plus-yoga,
along with plenty of Tesla chargers.

  How did
this change come about? Well, nature brought about an economic disruption and that
ushered in change. It happened when spring storms in 2017 triggered landslides
and wrecked the two-lane Highway 1 south of Carmel. Esalen was shuttered for
many months. This wiped out the revenue from paying guests, making it
vulnerable to a take-over.

  Looking
back on Huxley’s life, as I did in my recent book Aldous Huxley’s Hands, I
reflect on his sojourns to Esalen, In the latter part of his life he lived in
southern California, but he was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in the
spring of 1962 – the year Esalen was founded. He also took part in a conference on Technology in the Modern World at UC
Santa Barbara that same March. Those gigs placed him in reach of Esalen. I also
know from records of his university talks that he cast a wary eye on the unintended
consequences of technology.

  As I
write today about the birth of Esalen in the early 1960s, I think about how I might
have crossed paths with Huxley. I missed him by two years. In 1964, as a
student at San Francisco State, I drove my VW bug south on Highway 1 to Big Sur and spent a
weekend at Esalen. I tried to cast off inhibitions in a workshop, and I immersed
myself in the steamy, sulfuric waters from the springs. Had it been two years earlier,
I might have glanced over and seen Aldous, perhaps submerged to his shoulders,
soaking in one of the individual hot tubs, watching the sun set over the
Pacific.

Photo: esalen.org

Also see story in New York  Times Dec. 4, 2017