Jeffrey Kripal's latest work

[Guest guest]

Sex, drugs and rich white folk

Mick Brown of the Telegraph (UK) reviews

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion

by Jeffrey . Kripal

02/08/2007

 

[Note: We've discussed Jeffrey Kripal here before; he's

the author of the controversial work _Kali's Child_.

Since then he appears to have shifted the focus of his

research to domestic (U.S.) religious movements.

Interestingly, his work is still more-or-less on topic

here; see the reference to " American Tantra " --i.e. the

Esalen Institute has played a role in the western

understanding of Tantra.]

 

[....]

A mixture of residential community, seat of academe

and mystical hothouse, Esalen was the crucible of what

became known as " the human potential " movement - a

curious hybrid of radical psychiatry, Eastern philosophy

and mind-expanding drugs that flourished in the 1960s

and constitutes the higher end of what we now know as

the New Age movement.

 

Both Price and Michael Murphy, the co-architect of

Esalen, were students of the philosopher Frederic

Spiegelberg, a refugee from Nazi Germany who taught

comparative religion at Stanford University in California

in the 1950s. [....]

 

It was through Spiegelberg that Murphy was introduced

to the teachings of the Indian nationalist turned mystical

philosopher Sri Aurobindo, who devised his own form

of " integral yoga " . Price was more inspired by Zen

Buddhism, Taoism and his own experience of what

Kripal calls " manic enlightenment " , which led Price, in

his early twenties, to be institutionalised by his own

parents.

 

In 1960, Price and Murphy took over a property in Big

Sur [California, USA], built on the site of a natural

hotspring, and opened the Esalen Institute. [....] [T]he

first seminars were advertised as " exploring recent

developments in psychology, psychical research and

work with the 'mind-opening' drugs " . [....]

 

Kripal locates Esalen as the centre of what he calls

" American Tantra " : an " enlightenment of the body " that

embraces sexuality and drugs. He uses such phrases as

" secular mysticism " and the " democracy of the soul " to

describe the work of the Institute. Yet the clientele has

always been overwhelmingly white, upper-middle-class

and well-off. Esalen is a symptom of how modern

capitalism transforms religious beliefs and practices,

originally based in tight-knit communities, into " free-

floating products available for purchase and

consumption by individual consumers " . [....]

 

This is a fascinating but in many ways frustrating book.

[....] Kripal's attempts to elucidate a new approach to

religious experience can also result in some confusing

language.

 

His [Kripal's] biggest fear in writing the book, he states,

is that readers might " mistake the ways that the

probability function collapsed in my particular

hermeneutical experiment for the full wave function of

Esalen's total history " . I [Mick Brown, reviewer] for

one have no idea what that means.

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?

xml=/arts/2007/08/02/bokri128.xml

or

http://tinyurl.com/2pb22s

More on Kripal's book:

http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2007/07/02/review_kripal_esalen_1.html