Michael Murphy: Esalen’s Wild West and the Pursuit of a Greater Consciousness

Elizabeth Rovere:

Hello and welcome to season two of Wonderstruck.

I am your host, Elizabeth Rovere.

I’m a clinical psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School.

I’m really curious about our experiences of wonder and awe and how they transform us.

My guest today is Mike Murphy, co-founder of Esalen Institute in Big Sur California.

Esalen is remarkable in a number of ways—from the breathtaking land it inhabits to the ongoing beauty and rigor of its mission.

Since opening in 1962, Esalen has served as an incubator for human potential. Guests come from all over the world to engage openly and meaningfully in their own transformation.

Having visited last year, I started to wonder about Esalen’s origins, its guiding vision, and how the institute and its co-founder came of age together during a time of great spiritual awakening in the United States.

Now 93, Mike Murphy recalls his own evolution, and Esalen’s, with a detailed clarity that feels cinematic.

His grandfather first arrived on the land by horseback.

An armed Hunter S. Thompson worked the grounds as a security guard.

Mike himself–a student of the religion scholar Frederic Spiegelberg and a yogi trained at  Sri Aurobindo’s ashram in India—had a showdown with a drug dealer named Big Bad Bill and later, fought hard to keep cults out of Esalen.

In a conversation that spans the better part of a century, Mike talks about living a life out ahead of the game plan and tapping into a greater consciousness that serves both the self and the world.

That’s actually something he said about Taylor Swift, but it also applies to how he’s lived as an innovator, a visionary, and a true believer in helping others access the tools that will change their lives.

Welcome Back to Wonderstruck.

So, we had a small glitch with the first part of our video. So, we hope you enjoy some archival images from Esalen over the years. You’ll see Mike and I around the ten-minute mark.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I am speaking to Mike Murphy, the founder of Esalen, a best-selling author, a visionary. And so, I’ve heard a great Celtic storyteller. So maybe, I mean, just, most people do know about Esalen to a certain extent, and some people don’t know as much about it. And, you know, essentially, we know that it’s a holistic center looking at human potential, that you all look, take science, the fine arts, the humanities, metaphysics, spirituality, and look at it from a holistic perspective, which is just fantastic. And I think it’s even in your mission statement that says, you know, that you have, like the curiosity and the daring to look at questions that often academia, and seminary, religious studies places don’t look at. Just also the fact of walking into Esalen and the beautiful land, and the scenery and the landscape, is almost, it actually is kind of a transcendent experience. So maybe you could just tell us a little bit about Esalen and the land and the baths.

Mike Murphy:

Well, okay, very briefly. It’s Esalen. The reason we’ve been able to do what you just described, to be unbound by academia, or business or government or whatever, is that when I had the dream for the place originally, okay, I had grown up on that land, not as our kind of getaway place, but my grandfather had bought this land, the two miles of Big Sur coast in 1910. And there was no highway—Oakland, through that coast, that Highway 1, until 1937. And it didn’t get to that property until ‘35. They had to, the early people in my family had all had to come here on horseback. Well, it’s a kind of a wild west, the last shred. And, in fact, when we did get underway in 1961, and ‘62, we turned to the sheriff for help because there were a lot of people camped there who didn’t believe in private property. And these were, well to describe these characters that in itself would take an hour here, but the sheriff refused to send his men. He says, you boys have guns? He said, no, we don’t have guns, although the previous caretaker, who had been Hunter S. Thompson. He was just 21 years old. He hadn’t published any books yet. But in any case, we said to the sheriff, he said, well, you boys, he was a southern guy, you boys get yourself some guns, because I’m not sending my men down to your bad land. Bad land, wow. Well, anyway, so this was a blessing and a difficulty. So, we were born to the freedom to do what we wanted. We have succeeded. The property really is part of the basis, of the blessing we have there because it has a very evocative power over people, which it still is much discussed, how it works. And one reason is, you know, being right there on the property rolls along from 40 to 100 feet above the ocean, right on the cliff. So, there’s the ocean, but there are there are these high hills, you could say small mountains behind you going up to 1500 feet. So, it’s on your on the front edge of a sled, it’s actually moving, you know, it actually is the tectonic plates are shifting, and we have this volcanically produced water that comes out of these cliffs. And that was why my grandfather bought the property. For those that are hot springs, he wanted to create a spa. He was a doctor. He had a couple of hospitals. He had originally come out from a Tennessee in the early 1890s and ended up in Salinas. And so, okay, so he wanted to go to spa down on the coast. And those hot baths are there, and they are a pervasive influence. And plus, those waves breaking in on some of the big ones come in 20-feet tall, bang against those cliffs. We can actually sit in these hot tubs. And in the stormy day, when it’s going, and you’re safe in a hot tub that is anchored into the cliff, and these waves come rolling in, so, you’re raw and exposed to the elements. And so, there’s a lot of theory, you know, negative ions, for example, but people get high on the land. And so that helps. And, you know, well known teachers who come and leading different workshops, compare the experience there to say doing it in a Hyatt House, or when we’re doing it somewhere in a hotel, it just is completely different. And it also has different microclimates. So, one part of though, we’d have to spend the rest of the hour describing this, but temperatures and so forth. So, I like to say there are also different psychic microclimates, different moods that result from these workshops. So, people’s range of emotion, and range of conversation is for most people richer than anywhere else. But we’ve managed and I think we’ve gotten a lot better of it through the years, in a sense, inviting safe emergencies. People do explore into this or that. In an edgy way, you just couldn’t get away with it in a classroom at Harvard or Stanford. I mean, you couldn’t do it or in a hotel, or, or in a church. So, it has that freedom, but I think we’ve really learned how to keep it basically safe. In the 60s, it wasn’t altogether safe. And we were lucky that, well, I had to consult with the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency in ‘64. We started in ‘62. But in ‘64, I met with the head of the DEA for Northern California. He’s actually a great guy, and he lectured me on the Fourth Amendment. You cannot go into people’s rooms searching them for whether they’ve got anything on them because they can sue you out of existence. You leave that to us. But what you do have to do is get rid of the dealers. And yes, we do have are men, occasionally, patrolling. I had to confront the first the famous, we had a famous dealer down there, Big Bad Bill and it was when I won my spurs as the young innkeeper when I had to tell Big Bad Bill he could never come back again and it was a kind of a showdown out of High Noon, you know, he’s six-foot-four cut and buffed, wore a big black hat. And he was about as alpha male as alpha male can get. So, word got out that I was going to confront, that little Mikey Murphy was going to confront Big Bad Bill. So, oh my god, my so-called friends gathered around to watch this thing. Right in this lodge we had.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You had a show down.

Mike Murphy:

We had a showdown in front of 30, my good buddies, watching with a vast amusement and wonderment. Anyway, he came in and I told him, I said, Bill, all is well, you know, it’s all good. Nobody’s going to get in trouble. But I do have to tell you right now, the DEA is onto us. And onto you. I told a lie I. I said one of them is watching us now. But I have to just telling you, Bill, you can never come on this property again. Well, he tried to control himself, but I could just feel him, you know, the nostrils dilated. He looked like this. And he a little crisis but sitting still and looking at me is this imposing character. Then he relaxed, reached out and said, Thank you, Mike. Thank you.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well done!

Mike Murphy:

And he stood up. And we walked out, and I was promoted in the eyes of the onlookers.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes, very, very good success in conflict resolution, handling that super smoothly. You make a point, though, Mike about how Esalen, you know, it’s like the land is transcendent. Being there is a profound experience and that you just need, I mean psychedelics can be a great pathway to something but it’s only one pathway. There’s so much more and so much more of what you all do there involves other types of research and experiences beyond the psychedelics. And it makes me come back to the original question I wanted to ask you is that you ended up even from what I understand, you ended up by accident in Frederic Spiegelberg’s class at Stanford instead of your pre-med class. Like you were moving into the science, and by accident or serendipity, you ended up in this religion, comparative religion class by a guy he was taught by Carl Jung, right?

Mike Murphy:

He, he was, he was good friends with Jung at the Eranos meetings in Europe. But he was a very close friend of Paul Tillich’s. And, you know, when Hitler came to power in ‘33, fortunately, a few were out of the property that were targeted for immediate control, Einstein, Tillich a few others. So as Frederic had to take over Tillich’s teaching role in Dresden, and luckily got out. He waited too long. But anyways, in ‘37 he got out and came to America. So anyway, he brought this rich European culture, and he had a great presence. And I was lucky. And yes, it was by mistake. I was 19. I was a sophomore and pre-med and so forth. And I’d heard about it. This was the second lecture I, I said, well, I’m going to stay here just for this lecture. And he came out and immediately quieted these restless Stanford kids, 600 of them, because it was an auditorium. That’s the reason they shifted classes. And this is one of these big lecture things. That he was coming in and they, okay, and came in and stood in for up on a on the stage and waited for silence which came right away. And then he just said one word, Brahman, one word and then he lectured on the Vedic, Vedic hymns, and the early Upanishads. And at the end of this lecture in which he held us spellbound. I was, and I had been religious kid, but in the first wave of staffers, I like kind of abandoned forever the Virgin Mary and the Trinity. And, and I’d been an altar boy in the Episcopal Church, a religious kid, but I had abandoned the Christian apparatus. But I heard that and then at the end of the lecture, he said one other word: Atman, which is Brahman. Well, I had to go back up to my fraternity walking out of there, and just one sentence kept going through my head, like an obsessional thought: you will never be the same, you will never be the same. It was really, Elizabeth, it was really an exaltation. So, I quit my course and stayed in this thing for the spring semester of my second year there and make a long story short, that led to me dropping my pre-med. I thought I was going to be a doctor. It was kind of a role assignment from the family, basically. And I quit the fraternity and shocked my family. Who, you know, thought, as my father said to me, son, you know, if you could have shifted to anything else, except a yogi. What does a yogi do?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Did your dad finally think like, oh, wow, look what you’ve done with Esalen. And look at this a human potential movement that you’ve created and influenced the world in this way? Did they finally get it or?

Mike Murphy:

They got it even before that. I have to tell you, oh god, my parents were incredible. My father, at first threatened to sue Stanford, you know, for ruining their son, destroying their son. But after I graduated, I was on fire. You know, I was lit up. At that point, I was, you know, a certified religious nut. At this point, I was meditating six or eight hours a day. I was on fire. But in any case, I had to be in the Army. And so, I was in the Korean War. At a big check, came in the mail, I was stationed it for heroic duty in Puerto Rico, in the great war of the mosquitoes down there, but in comes this check, and it says, Mike, this is if you decide to go to India, this will get you there. And my parents are fantastic.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s wonderful that they kind of turned around. I mean, it was kind of dramatic. And I’m thinking about for you, like, as you describe it, that exaltation. Like you go into that class. And that’s, you know, Brahman, and then Atman, and you walk out, you walk out changed, and then you’re going to India at some point, and then you’re founding Esalen. And I think about that, again, going back to the psychedelics, you know, from when I was reading, Jeff Kripal’s book on the history of Esalen, I understand that, you know, in your life, you’ve had, you know, you’ve had a psychedelic experience, or tried it only six or seven times. And so that’s not that many, you know, relatively speaking. And so, it’s just curious if you would, maybe tell us, you know, why so little or maybe that seems like a lot, I don’t know. And then I also understand that Aldous Huxley and his wife Laura guided you in, I guess, your first or second experience, so it’s like, I just wonder if there’s something fascinating to hear about that.

Mike Murphy:

Well, yeah, well, these are great questions for me. When I lit up as a 19-year-old and it came even in that first course, in the spring of 1950 with an introduction to a wide range of metaphysical framings. Why Spiegelberg? Who was steeped in this, and he knew, okay, and I learned about Sri Aurobindo, the Indian philosopher, who, whose mystical vision was based on the idea, it’s an ancient idea, that the entire cosmos is emanated from the divine and into in what he called the inconscient, into matter. And in the course of time, is manifesting its implicit divinity. That’s the basis of yearning we secretly all have to go further with our lives. And that yearning gets refracted through this immense prism of the evolutionary process itself. And then through the culture we inhabit and through our schooling and through our family, and it’s always pressing to be born in us. And so, the task of the Aurobindo yoga was to broker that and bring it into existence. That’s the guiding idea. For me: let’s just start Esalen. That’s why I wanted to do it. And then to find all these companions, comrades pressing in the same direction, so we became a rallying place. This is in the early 60s. At first, it was basically, a lecture programs for a couple of years. But we had quite an all-star cast. And when we started, we had a kind of vertical takeoff. I mean, you know, I mean, yeah. Half the leaders were famous. We have never lacked for people wanting to be at Esalen. And it’s not that big a place I mean, now, we’ve reduced the number of people on the property because it got to be like Coney Island. I mean, pretty soon. Oh, my God, people were all over the place and we had to get it under control. Learn how to manage it, bring it to where it is today. It’s better-managed than ever now. We’ve gotten more professional. but we’ve remained open and free, and nobody’s captured the flag. This is what we said.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Completely, will you explain what you mean by nobody’s captured the flag because that’s a great, that’s a great philosophy.

Mike Murphy:

Well, this was when Dick Price and I made common cause my grandmother first said, we can never give this property to Michael because he will immediately give it to Hindus, immediately. So, when I came to her in 1958-59, I was 27-28 by then and had been living in India. And but then through you know, there’s been a lot written about this, and Jeff Kripal’s book describes it, we had a kind of breech birth, you know, with gunfire and everything, and Hunter Thompson. He helped give birth to this whole thing through the trouble he was, oh my god, what a thing. So okay, so that came with a lot of excitement and more psychedelics than we realized.

Elizabeth Rovere:

But you mean, like, nobody captures the flag. Is that like….

Mike Murphy:

I had been vaccinated against cult before this started. First, while I was at Stanford, a group of us students formed in my junior and senior years, and around a very charismatic graduate student. And you know, you’re raw to the world at a university like that there are more than a few charismatic graduate students forming circles. I don’t care what university it’s at. Nobody’s written yet a great history of this. But, alright, so fortunately I ducked out of that. It became a cult. I mean, there were originally about nine and then it got down to four or five. So that was a mini cult. But then, later, a few years later, when I went to live in India at the at the ashram of Sri Aurobindo, a really elite group of people who were in Sadhana, of about 1500, with servants, who, you know, you would be meditating, and a servant would be cleaning your room while you meditated. So, it was an upper-class cult. And under this the flag , Aurobindo had died and his great coworker, The Mother, Mirra Alfassa, she was from Europe, French, Jewish. Came up. Well, it’s a very compelling, and the life there was fantastic. But the dogmas were reinforced, and everybody recited Aurobindo by memory. And it was like, the Episcopal Church all over again for me. Yeah. And when I would deviate in any way, I could feel it. And then that really alerted me to this tendency of mystical practice, or any kind of religious aspiration constellate a group of companions who solidify and it’s kind of like a supersaturated solution, you know, you tap it in the jar in high school chemistry, and then it crystallizes the crystallization, of attitude of ethic of and then you could tell how people stand. There’s a way to stand. I love these anthropologists who study you know, Pierre Bourdieu, you know how French working-class men will not eat fish, because its defeat to put it on your lips and chew like that. A man eats beef, and not a fish. And okay, so we pick up 1000 habits. In religious cults this happens. That shapes consciousness. Bodies mirror each other all the time. Dick had his own vaccination against cults. So, when we started that, little did I know that how relentless some of the teachers that we had, would try to enforce their whole system, Fritz Perls, who invented gestalt therapy, he really wanted, as he said I’ve always had this dream of having a big Jewish kibbutz, a gestalt kibbutz. He had been to Israel, and all right. And he was very intent of weaning me away from what he called the mystical neo cult.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, interesting.

Mike Murphy:

And he would send his minions around and etc. So, Dick and I had to work at it, it’s not enough to say, we want an open system. You have to watch this. The Rajneeshees for example, started to come to Esalen pretty soon it was a real attempt. So, anyway, we have succeeded, you know, but you have to be vigilant. So anyway, that’s the idea. And just finishing back to psychedelics, you asked me about that. But in those years between that class at Stanford, I was 20. And starting Esalen I was 30, and in those 10 years I had really based my daily practice in meditation. Meditation can come in different in different varieties and so forth. So, I’d say speaking, broadly, I had, I was into it, and it lit me up. And it came to me naturally, it just, it did. I had been a religious kid in high school, you know, an altar boy for the Episcopal Church, and now it was meditation, et cetera. Now came psychedelics and in the first year of our programs, I had had one session with peyote buttons alone, which hit me sideways, and, whoa, experiences I had never had with meditation. But then the second one was with Aldous Huxley and Laura Huxley. So, they sat with me for six, seven hours. And Aldous at this point, this is 1962, got his psychedelics right from Sandoz. And he had written The Doors of Perception. He had influenced the language I used in the early brochures because if I had quoted Aurobindo too much, or Hegel or Fichte, nobody would have come. I mean, for that beautiful English that he wrote. And so, he had been an influence. And that trip was interesting. Okay, and then I had six more. I had eight trips between then and ‘66. I have to say, Elizabeth, really, each one was worse than the preceding. It got worse, and I could tell it’s not my ally, this is not my ally. And so, I quit. So, as it was cresting at Esalen, I was shrinking from it. We were going in opposite directions. So finally, at Esalen, along with the culture, generally, it regurgitated this. We overdosed. It was a drunken mysticism.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, we’re very capable of getting drunk on almost anything. Right?

Mike Murphy;

Amen. And that’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. You know, William Blake. Esalen has gone through different stages. And it still is. And the demographic, Esalen’s demographic, which , worldwide has not yet I believe, been adequately described by any sociologists, cultural anthropologist is historian. It’s a river. It’s like an atmospheric river, flowing in the sky. This is a cultural river, flowing through the world. Towards this secret into this greater life that’s pressing to be born in us.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Everything that you’re touching upon follows kind of the trajectory of what I want to ask you about, like, starting from the physical body into, like, the greater consciousness, you know, everything in between, and to a certain extent, and, you know. I think it’s all there. And what I mean by that is just starting with, you know, people probably, some people probably do not know that you wrote the definitive book on golf, in 1971. You know, like, like, people that play golf know this book. And it seems kind of when I first heard about, I was like, wait, what? And then I read, it’s like, you talk about how the soul, the actual soul is reflected in the golf swing. And I was like, that’s fascinating. That’s like yoga. And then it goes into the whole subtle body aspect with like, the theosophists doing like these exercises to activate consciousness in the soul. And anyway, I see you got to start there. Right?

Mike Murphy:

Elizabeth, thank you for bringing it up. I mean, yeah, that’s the first book I ever wrote. And I, it’s the luckiest thing I’ve ever done. I had no idea that it would trigger what it has. It’s been 52 years. It’s in nine languages. If I if I go out to a golf course and the word gets out and I’m there, someone’s going to come in and confess their latest mystical experience on a golf course.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You got you got to tell us one of them give us a good golf mystical experience.

Mike Murphy:

The experiences range widely. And now, lately, more and more. First of all, there’s a range of experience that is very gentle, and unobtrusive. That is not as dramatic as some of these experiences people will tell me that is right out of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. But this is a more subtle thing that happens. It’s come up for me big time now in our study of subtle bodies. And that is a kind of natural high that golfers experience. Now, even though they get into these great lamentations that they miss this golf shot, and it’s a fiendishly clever game, and it’s profoundly absurd: whacking a little ball into a little hole, a quarter a mile away, and then doing this 18 times. It takes four hours, let’s say, for an average round, all right. But they come away, lamenting their bad shot or bragging about this bragging about this miracle shot or whatever. But with it all, a pervasive sense of well-being. I mean, people have it. Now, I equate it, if somebody wants to correlate it with psychedelics, to a very gentle, very light dose of psilocybin, where you’re not having visions, you’re not having ecstasies. But you’re kind of in a glow. An easy glow. Now, my friend, Richard Baker, the who’s truly a creative Zen teacher, he says a lot of this elementary meditation is happening all the time, to countless people lying on beaches in the sun, and just letting go to feeling good sunbathing, and what might start to happen in a meditation retreat or golf. And so, this, anyway, it sets the stage for deeper and more dramatic disclosures. When you play golf, you necessarily have a certain amount of sensory deprivation by this continual refocusing on this absurd act and complex swing. I mean, we in the Paleolithic, our Paleolithic ancestors in the hunt, did not do a golf swing. If they’re charged by a bear, I mean, you don’t have time to tee up a ball and hit it. And so, it’s an acquired athletic capability. And it’s actually challenging. I must say, this is why when you see Tiger Woods hit a ball and you see it fly for 300 yards. It’s just, it’s unbelievable. It’s if you’re near it, it’s awesome. Wonderstruck!

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that’s great.

Mike Murphy:

I think it’s a speciation difference. When you’re around these pro athletes and do things that the rest of us can’t do. It’s awesome. It’s awesome. Okay, so back to these, what people are telling me. So, I’m taking along with it, these experiences. And so anyway, anybody who’s done any kind of sensory deprivation stuff, saying that floatation tank or whatever, you know, it allows your unconscious material to come up. So, it’s not unlike, it’s the same. It’s affiliated to, let’s say, a psychoanalysis on the couch, a Freudian psychoanalysis, and free association and then a natural catharsis and whatever. Psychology generally has learned this, and we’ve dramatically explored it or since Freud, and so forth. But, again, you’re focusing in on some setup that focuses you in a way to allow this disclosure to occur in you. All right, but there are different layers of human nature. So not only do people see wee people, and not only get this preliminary glow, but will have, will be taken out beyond themselves. A woman told me once, that on a summer afternoon, as the sun was setting, and she was playing the 18th hole of her country club, she suddenly was caught in a state in which she could see the sun rising through the ground. And now that this is her language, the sun was rising through the ground. And I realized the sun was setting and this is one of these gorgeous, California magnificent golf courses on you can see the sun setting, but it was rising through the ground. And then she went into the clubhouse. And it was shining through the walls. And it shone through the walls of her car as she drove home. And she woke up the next morning, and it was shining into her bedroom. And she experienced something she had never experienced in her entire life. And it changed her life. So, when I published the 50-year anniversary of the book, so they wanted, the publisher wanted to have a new foreword or something. So, I then told him I told I, I described this story in that foreword to the latest rendition of Golf in the Kingdom. Because at what one point when I saw her again, she asked me, is this what they mean? Is what Mark Zuckerberg means by the Metaverse? And I thought, and she said them, What do you think? What would Shivas Irons say? The protagonist.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Right, in your book

Mike Murphy:

So I imagined this, and it was this publisher lovely guy. He said this, you nailed that one because it’s up for people. What’s the role of technology and the Metaverse and the Internet and now AI and et cetera? So um, anyway, I just cry, what he would say, yeah, it’s an absurdity. And of course, this is a lady who had never studied William James or Plotinus or Meister Eckhart, or the great mystics of antiquity, but her description was that of the highest order realization. There are a lot of words in Sanskrit for this. Spiegelberg conveyed hints of this when he stood up on that when I was a kid. He said Brahman, which is Atman, our deepest subjectivity, we are secretly that. Yeah. Okay. So, she was untutored metaphysically. So, all these golfers, totally untutored, they’ve never been in a comparatives study or religions course. It’s the mysticism of everyday life, which is abroad in the culture. It’s everywhere and, but it’s not named. We live, we fly under strange flags. So, it has converged with, you know, all the Esalen aspiration, and to say that this is abroad, this is us, we are wired for this.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It makes me think of how many people because that book is such a success and a best seller, how many people that book on golf has reached, that would not be reading William James, or Plotinus, or any of these kinds of mystical things. Like you said, with this woman who saw this glow, this incredibly life changing experience? Yes. So, what a gift to her and to others that have a book on golf. That’s like anchoring it into something that we don’t talk about.

Mike Murphy:

Elizabeth, that’s well said. I appreciate that a lot. I mean, exactly. I mean, did you ever read John Carse? I mean, anyway, he. He has, oh, God, he was wonderful. He was into this, and a book called Breakfast at the Victory. The Victory was the name of a little stand is somewhere in Manhattan, maybe Brooklyn. It’s the mysticism of everyday life. It breaks out in ways that, well, anyway, that’s a lot of people have don’t really get from their religious, from Sunday school. And that’s where why people at Esalen, a lot of them. It’s kind of like, part of a cosmic jailbreak. I mean, breaking out of the strictures to come to this. In a way, we’re all having to be brought out of the closet. Our mystic closet.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You know, this makes me think of our common friend, Simon Cox, who he was telling me a story that you had shared with him about the weirdness bell curve, you know, and it’s like, this idea that, you know, as you were saying, right, this is a human capacity. We are we are ourselves, and we are beyond ourselves, and how most of the time we don’t know it because you don’t get it in Sunday school. And that people have this capacity to get it, you know, on a certain level, we get it, we get it, we get it, then we hit here, and it gets way too weird. And it’s like, okay, shutting the door on the closet, no more. But that’s why, like what you’ve done with Esalen is opening this door and the book on golf and The Future of the Body and the study of the subtle body. It’s fantastic. Mike, what do you think like this opening of the door, you know goes back to Doors of Perception but opening the door to this can do for us as humanity, as a globe, as a world civilization as with all the divisiveness and everything else. How do you see the future aided by this?

Mike Murphy:

All right, you got the right question. How? Fritz Perls. God bless him, I mean, you know, he, he did he could be a bully, but he did have, he had a critical genius. I mean, to look at people, and he wasn’t always nice on how he informed those people about such and such. They were doing and they weren’t ready for it. But anyway, he agreed with the Buddha, who would not do metaphysics. And all the Buddha was interested in is how. How do we achieve this nirvana? Or, however you want to frame it? We have to find ways to work our way out of these political jams, et cetera, et cetera. This is the game of all games. It’s the cosmic game. How to grow into this greater life that’s within us. We glimpse. And some people pursue. They come Esalen. They’re pursuing it and how. So, we don’t have much time left here today. But there are lots of different hows. That’s been a great change. And this is part of this change in the demographic which I don’t think has been fully embraced yet by mainstream sociology and cultural anthropology. The invention rate has gone way up for the ways and means of practice. The Gallup poll and other polls have been right to say that more and more people will say that they’re spiritual, but not religious. So that’s something. It gives a headline. There are many studies that I would say have made a preliminary advance into seeing it in the culture. But, okay, so you know, believe me, no football teams that I ever heard of won a National Championship with their quarterback, particularly Michigan, which is won more games than any other college. It’s interesting. And I didn’t I hadn’t known that that was all broadcast because of their National Championship but the, to have the quarterback, you know, kind of when I went to high school, boy, the girls flocked to the quarterback first. They tend to be good looking and tall and glamorous in high schools across America. And then they get to college. Oh my god, the quarterback. And you know, doing the becoming a yogi, to be a yogi, I was a kind of a star in school, you know, for and so like,

Elizabeth Rovere:

Were you a quarterback?

Mike Murphy:

No, I’m not a football star. I was a good athlete. But the way Wait, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have been big enough. And, and also the, the quarterbacks just were bigger, better looking, and the girls just trailing after them. And, um, you know, I’m embellishing this a little. But for that guy, to be demonstrating this yoga position on the edge of the field before the game with his shoes off. I mean, he’s trying to tell us something—he’s standing for this. Well, all I’m saying is this stuff spreading in these strange ways. And I predict, some great books are going to appear to that dramatize this emergent something.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I really did want to ask you, I know that Esalen had this, you know, that you’ve got The Future of the Body book, in which when I was reading it, you talk about the study extraordinary experiences, you know, kind of near-death experiences, and astral body and astral travel and all these things. And you said in your book, you ask yourself, like, what does this mean? Does this does this change my belief in God or something beyond? And you said in 1992, you were agnostic. So wanted to know, since then, and since you had the like the Sursems at Esalen. What’s changed for you? If it has, are you still agnostic?

Mike Murphy:

Now, when I said agnostic, that I was agnostic about what’s going on, first with reincarnation, and with survival. I am not agnostic about Brahman and Atman and Brahman.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Okay, thank you for clarifying. That helps. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Mike Murphy:

So, I feel that’s I wanted Esalen to be part of the embrace of this implicit divinity on the one hand, but not locked into the dogmas that have associated the religious, the religions. I don’t want to re-litigate that which we know. We know that this greater consciousness is available, and why we’re litigate it again, and again and again. And for me, you don’t need to re litigate telepathy, clairvoyance, now a lot of these psychic powers to me are facts. So, I want to help midwife the cutting edge of as yet not fully understood demographic. There are a lot of people around like you and me who, enough already. Oh, God, if we have to do one more experiment with telepathy, I want to puke. I mean, we’ve done 10,000 already. I mean, it’s a fact. It’s not repeatable, like this or that. But how much that all of us who are just common sense, sensible people know, that’s unrepeatable. But we know it’s a fact.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I feel like people would be very interested in what your daily practices because I mean, you know if I can, am I allowed to tell people what your age is? Or do you want to tell people? Can I say what your age is—how old you are.

Mike Murphy:

93

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, so the question is, why do you look 39 instead of 93? Or you still look like the high school quarterback? I mean, like, what are you doing? What was going on over there?

Mike Murphy:

Was and you’ve made my day with that 39 number, see if I I’ll take whatever number I can get. I’ve never gotten a 39 before but well, I don’t know. I mean, in terms of a lot of it. Seriously, as of it is, is genes. You know, I have a lot of long-lived folks, and I say I have enough good habits. Many. Gotta be careful, not too many, because I do have friends who are going to have shortened their life. And but it’s alright. There’s been a lot of experimentation, you know, with everything. But, you know, for example, no matter what you asked me, I mean, what I eat. I do have, I have found my way to what works for me.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Your routine? Like? I mean, do you wake up and meditate? Do you take long walks? Broccoli?

Mike Murphy:

Ok, in my 20s and I was a certified nutcase. I mean, I was I was sitting six to eight hours a day. Yeah. And I did I did that and even in the Army, you know, in the Army. Well, I maybe I worked half an hour a day. If you ever wrote, did you know that great book. What’s Oh God about the Army in World War Two, Heller’s book, anyway. So anyway, what did I do? I was meditating and reading, and I would get up before reveille, and reveille would blow at six, but I would get up about five and go meditate in the chapel. So alright, so that and then the ashram and everything. But once Esalen started, and I had been a virgin. I was a virgin. So, I was 32 years old. All right. So, with Esalen, you could say on that front, I melted down. And it was a delayed adolescence. Certainly, it was. Whatever. So, I had to make a simple way to say it from being a Jnana yogi, which in India is the way of meditation and with the broad family of meditation practices. Not only emptying the mind but opening to that light that the lady saw playing golf. There’s several basic primal movements of transformative yoga, transforming your practice. I was full-time until Esalen started, then it shifted and what I told myself that I was becoming a Karma yogi, through works. And so, I have looked for ways, let’s say when I wrote Golf in the Kingdom, it was truly channeled in many ways. It’s amazing. When I look back, my family favored writing; my grandmother, oh my god, she were rewarded the writers, my brother had a great success with a novel and my grandfather delivered John Steinbeck and so Steinbeck and my father were buddies growing up together. East of Eden, you know, there’s a Dr. Murphy. So okay. Okay, so my brother had the same agent, same. So okay, so that was in the air. All right, I was 39. When I sat down to write. My brother had already written a best-selling novel and he’s 23. Okay, so how to turn an activity that becomes your primary focus into a kind of channeling? Yeah, basically, I had made that move as I started Esalen. And I and I started to keep a journal of coincidences or synchronicities. Jung had quite an idea there that synchronicity, there’s something to it. So that became, more and more, my yoga. Now I continued to meditate. I do not meditate now in that way I did then where I sit down and focus for an hour at a time, I don’t do that anymore. But I recollect I would say, every single hour of the day, but that when it has morphed into a kind of recollection, I can do it right now. And so, it’s become second nature, select. Somebody who was actually good at this was a Gurdjieff and Ouspensky The older I get, the more I appreciate those guys. At first, I thought that that’s true, because there’s all these Gurdjieff groups that some of them are real cults, but nevertheless, it was the mysticism of everyday life that Gurdjieff and okay, that recollection, that natural morphing of formal meditation into mindfulness now that has gone abroad in the culture. It’s now often misused. It’s been made so extraordinarily vanilla, that it’s almost washed out all its meaning. But it’s, but it’s right, too. The morphability of these profound practices. I mean, you could, right now, it’s become a conversation item with my friends, explaining who and what is Taylor Swift? What is this phenomenon? I’ve actually never heard of her, So I’d never I had no idea that she’d been known for 14 years. And since she was 16, or whatever. And so anyway, it’s become a, it’s very much like my apprehension of the golf world: what goes on? And then the morphing of let’s say, what happens when she fills the stadiums? It’s interesting, and then how it takes projections. The New York Times last Sunday. had a big thing that she is, she is queer-coded. She’s telling the world she’s queer. This is, again, a one way it’s an outrageous critique. But it raises the issue, how come and you know, in the early days, the Eras Tour, these are the eras of her life. Swifties have come along with her. For me, it’s another example of how humans channel this greater life. And anyway, Dave Morin, who, I call him Gandalf. He’s the chairman of our board of Esalen. He’s 43, had this huge success in the Valley, and still does. And he and his wife, she also is very successful and extraordinary lady, they love Taylor Swift. But he sees in her something a lot different and how people project into her. And so, the author, more or less confessed, at the end, it’s a big spread in the in The New York Times Opinion section on Sunday, at one level, absolutely outrageous, because, you know, seeing yourself in someone and saying that what she’s really doing is trying to tell the world it’s that she’s queer. Well, I just I find it extremely hard to believe. I just do. But what’s more interesting is how she is living a life out ahead of her game plan. Because she’s obviously guided probably by her father, who’s a Merrill Lynch broker. She’s good in business. She seems to be good at everything. She’s 34 now. She writes these songs, and you watch her. Okay, now I have to say I’ve developed an eye for somebody who, let’s, for lack of a better word channeling, being possessed by whatever it is that’s working and you can give the Indian names like, you know, you’re owning an archetype or you can there are many ways contemporary people are trying to name this emergence of this greater life. What goes on in these gatherings and that where they have the bracelets, who had this idea, and they are signaling one another so you have 70,000 people, recently here and down near us here on the peninsula. It’s, in our poor, impoverished public culture of America with all its divisions and all its craziness and all this wrong, finds ways to live into what these great moments in history. I can imagine, let’s say in the Greek, so Sophocles, what Aristotle’s catharsis, I mean, what was going on there? Okay. We’re out ahead of our understanding. Like why the people on the golf course they want to tell me these stories? They’ve never read William James. They’ve never ever studied yoga, they’ve never nothing—and they’re having these authentic experiences. So, with her, so okay. Now see it digressed here.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I was thinking it’s about you. To me, you’re talking about how you end up channeling it and embodying it yourself.

Mike Murphy:

Alright, we’ll see. That’s it. That’s, I would say at the heart of what I’m doing now is asking how best to serve now in relation to Esalen. And then, okay, so this yoga for me now. I have to say it, and I say this around down there: who’s writing the script for this place? This demographic is out of hand, because we do a lot of, well, the staff, they’re thinking a lot about how to program, who to invite, who not to invite. And so, the group and this is under a new regime over the last couple of years with a new CEO who is doing extremely well. I want to stand back and then channel it through them. So, this is me, going from a meditator. Although, I meditate. I still do. And this recollection is a constant in my mind is as common to me as breathing. So, it’s alive. And I’ve tried all sorts of sports stuff and everything. And so now it’s very simplified. And so, here’s the now this is getting real confessional here. But, alright, so this group, we started, Integral Transformative Practice. It’s George Leonard was really the primary architect, and he invented a kata, you know, that’s a series of exercises in the martial arts or, you know, Chinese yoga, a series of and you’ve seen them practicing these different movements, kata. I don’t do the kata but making my bed I make into a kata. So, all these different movements if you do it thoughtfully, and enjoy it. It only takes four minutes. But all right if you do it mindfully with your attention. But in the pleasure of it, letting it morph from work to pleasure. Now how many people in the kitchen, how many women who are who are having to do most of the cooking, get into this, and I use my mother, her side of the family which are Basque, French Basque, from the Pyrenees. They cooked lights out, just unbelievable. And how did she do all of this? That was, for her, a yoga. Yeah, and little town where we lived, Salinas, the other women would love to get her recipes, that then they’d try, and they couldn’t bring out the effects she could bring up. And that’s when I learned about a craft transcends recipes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes, yes, very much. It’s seems like you’re saying you’re channeling it in a way that it just becomes alive within you that it just becomes your it’s your life. It’s not a practice that separate. You are it.

Mike Murphy:

Right, exactly. And, so, if you map me through the day, I’m not a formal-looking yogi like I was in my 20s. Wow, I’d have to say I get wonderstruck to different degrees, you know, little ones, I would say? Well, recently, I mean, I can go back and well, if you give me whenever I that I can think of all sorts of moments where

Elizabeth Rovere:

Whenever, yeah.

Mike Murphy:

Okay, a dramatic one. Where it overcame me physically, was I was sitting at the back of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. And I walked in, not knowing that they were going to have an extremely high mass, led by a Cardinal of the church. So, I some I got my way in there. And behind me was the big organ at the back. And then there’s the organ up front so they could play these, I’m dying to get to the new, they’ve redone the cathedral there at Notre Dame. And so, I sat down and out of the darkness, 100 and some feet up from the darkness, slowly was coming down the red hat of a Cardinal on some sort of little cable being lowered while the cathedral fell into silence. And then the organs hit it big. And I started to shake where I couldn’t control it. I mean, my knees and everything. And then this procession. I think there were 10 bishops, and about 20 ministers, and then it came through, but it was below me. So, I was looking down and the front and for an hour, I couldn’t stop shaking. My knees were shaking. I mean, it was just that was an assault that was cellular all the way down. But, you know, as a meditator, I could hold it. And in those moments, I’ve had to learn that you have to grow in capacity to hold these very powerful disclosures. The reason I think a lot of these golfers do it is they work into it so gently, and they’re surrounded in the world’s largest gardens sees 200-acre, gorgeous golf courses, the beautiful ones. Well, there, in that cathedral, so that would be to close my eyes, I could get into the realm of my very deepest knowing. This is not believing. This is knowing and seeing and being in some of the higher reaches of the divine nature that are in us all.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s a great last line. I like that.

Mike Murphy:

Well, listen, it’s wonderful to be with you, really.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, thank you.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That was Mike Murphy. Thank you so much, Mike.

To learn more about Mike’s work, check out www dot Esalen dot org.

Please come back next time on Wonderstruck.

I’ll be talking with Nicole Baden, Tatsudo Roshi about her life in Zen.

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