In 2007, I wrote a history of the institute, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, and today help lead the intellectual-spiritual direction of its private symposia after Murphy’s vision (and Spiegelberg’s paradoxical mystical theology of the “religion of no religion”), which I have described as an evolutionary esotericism or, in Murphy’s words, an evolutionary panentheism.5 I mention such autobiographical facts because I want to make it clear that I do not write here out of some academic neutrality but out of a deeply felt and long practiced intellectual-spiritual activism.
