So much of the twenty-first-century self finds a path back to this hundred-and-twenty-acre patch beneath Highway One, from our fetishization of personal authenticity and ‘being real’ and its concomitant hatred of ‘fakeness’, to the normalization (not least on social media) of living the intimate details of our private lives as public, to our deep interest in concepts such as ‘mindfulness’ and ‘wellness’ – new, secular retellings of Christian narratives of conscience and soul. But, perhaps most portentously, it was also at Esalen that the Western self began being lovingly penetrated by
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