Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

by Will Storr

grief being expressed. Just “Ach, people who play games.” You know, his way.’ In 1970 an attendee named Sunshine shot himself in a barn. Then a Harvard graduate named Nick Gagarin, who’d written about Esalen several times in the Harvard Crimson before attending a four-month residency, shot himself at his father’s house. Another former member of that programme, Jeannie Butler, apparently threw herself into the Pacific: her clothes were found on the edge of the cliff. Art Rogers, the shy psychotherapist who was chased and attacked in Schutz’s group, would also go on to kill himself. And if all that wasn’t enough, like some strumming, soothsaying demon, Charles Manson dropped by to play some tunes just three days before the mass-murder that would make him famous, and would mark, for many, the spiritual end of the 1960s. *