SHAWN MACOMBER : Utopia Road
Kripal, Jeffrey J.
W hile the policy proposals in Leave Us Alone are uniformly sound, Norquist’s analysis might occasionally be overly optimistic.Forexample,hedevotesanentirechapter to the growth of the conservative...
...Whether it is GOP politi-cians presenting the federal government as a defender of traditional values rather than an aggressor against them or free-market advocates accepting the largest new entitlement program since the Great Society, it sometimes seems as if we are all big-government conservatives now...
...And surprisingly, His Famous love letter it has taken 16 years for a by Robin Young major book to be published (tHUnder’s MoUtH press, 830 pages, $35) about Ballou...
...W hile the policy proposals in Leave Us Alone are uniformly sound, Norquist’s analysis might occasionally be overly optimistic.Forexample,hedevotesanentirechapter to the growth of the conservative new media...
...all, a particularly potent awakening for Price ended with “three spiritually eventful months” in a mental ward, and Ed Maupin’s altered state experience pro-vided him with heightened awareness of “emotions, thoughts and social anxieties, even the physical pain of a dentist visit...
...For Kripal, that which furthers his thesis of Esalen For Kripal, that which furthers his thesis of Esalen as the vanguard of spiritual humanism is celebrated as serendipitous synchronicity...
...APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 73...
...Unfortunately, Ballou first came to the nation’s attention not due to his beautiful missive but because of the horrible fate of his corpse after the Confed-erates’ victory at Bull Run...
...Should it spark some-thing more in especially enlightened readers, the Esalen Institute continues to hold hundreds of work-shops every year...
...The power is not real...
...The Letter,” which remarkably expressed Ballou’s love of his wife, For love and liberty: two little sons, his country, The Untold Civil War story and his God, moved the of Major sullivan Ballou and nation...
...Citing, for example, among other things, “a catalyzing passion for the occult” and “a kind of eccentric diplomatic genius,” Kripal contends, “Esalen played its own part in the collapse of Soviet communism, the softening of American militarism and the end of the cold war...
...It’s the pseudo-intellectualized philos-ophizing that breeds real mistrust...
...The intensity level jumped significantly when a group of “psychonauts” dubbed The Flying Circus— led by two men known as the Psychedelic Madmen— came on the scene...
...Well, of course...
...A ll of this experimentation, Kripal enthuses, created a “democratic mysticism, a religion of no religion” and fostered an environment where people recognize “the deepest problems of the world” are a result of “the religious game itself...
...Women’s “fears concerning their genitals” were addressed in a work-shop wherein “women would expose their vaginas, the group would look at the Pandora’s box, and then they would process the feelings, fears, and desires together, acting out the myth, as it were, in order to transcend its fundamental misogyny...
...A bit of background: Shortly after a Stanford fac-ulty “not well disposed to…metaphysical interests” deep-sixed his hopes of a doctorate in philosophy in the mid-1950s, young Michael Murphy co-founded the Esalen Institute with Richard Price to jumpstart mankind’s next evolution...
...Then again: no pain, no gain...
...And it remains difficult to determine whether Kripal’s intention is to warn or entice when he writes, “altered states of conscious-ness and energy” are “as common as the leaping whale s and flapping butterflies at Esalen...
...Norquist’s lively manifesto should encourage them not to give up the fight...
...Thus, when a bird’s nest falls onto the head of a friend with a “profound homosexual orientation” while he and Kripal sit on a set of church steps chat-ting about another bird that had “recently shat on” this same friend, the tale easily morphs into a mysti-cal experience...
...During their sessions, if, for example, “a man would confess to feeling ‘held down’ by life,” Kripal explains, the facilitator “might instruct the men of the group to pile on him until he screamed under the pressure and was forced to fight his way out, not just from the dog-pile but from his emotional constriction as well...
...It’s just a minor difference of socio-theological opinion that Rice University Religious Studies Professor Jeffrey J. Kripal attempts to over-come with his exhaustive history/cheerleading endorsement, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion...
...When a boulder crashes down on Price’s head and kills him in 1985, it is not a sign of “homoerotic sublimation...
...Much of Kripal’s other evidence sounds circumstantial at best: Slo-pitch goodwill softball games with George Wendt of Cheers fame, visits with Soviet mystics, and “hot tub diplomacy” designed to “‘warm’ Soviet-American relations and ‘melt’ the cold war’ by inviting Soviets to disarm and undress ‘just like they do at Esalen.’” Consider: Esalen, for a time, was governed with the help of a medium and coven of spirits dubbed the Nine, one of whom “happened to be the star Sirius...
...Kripal meditates further: “I take that car accident as a powerful and potentially deadly struggle between the traditional and the new, between the way of male homoerotic sublimation and the way of heterosexual expres-sion...
...The area, with its natural hot spring baths and outlaw attitude, was already well known in counterculture circles...
...But for an enlightened few at a small New Age mecca situated on the coastal cliffs of Big Sur, California, it is hallucinogen-induced conver-sations with elf-like (perhaps insectoid) presences, mini pseudo-race riots, gaggles of men sitting atop other men to simulate “emotional constriction,” altered-state visions, and life cues discerned from bird droppings...
...It is “a freak hiking accident...
...When it comes to the permanent damage done to the man’s brain by electroshock treatments administered during the same stay, however, Kripal doesn’t grapple with what the failure of Price’s protective energy field might signify...
...That is why conservatives should rush to revive the Leave Us Alone Coalition, not bury it...
...Later Kripal writes of an “energy field” that supposedly enveloped and protected Price during his institu-tionalization as he thrashed around his padded room 72 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 “to release the incredible rage he felt burning inside him...
...But these advantages were not enough to prevent Republican losses in 2006 or halt the recent rise in Democratic Party identification...
...The for-mer was convinced, Kripal tells us, that all human beings “are superheroes, X-Men and X-Women in disguise, our supernormal powers and true identi-ties hidden even from ourselves...
...As with Abraham Lincoln, his last direct descendant died decades ago...
...Actually, Esalen’s history itself is to him “a kind of encoded tantric transmission...
...Neither of us quite saw it then, but the church was indeed ‘sh--ting on him’ from its own imagined heavens,” Kripal writes, adding a few para-graphs later, “Birds don’t just poop, and nests don’t just fall from the sky within this sort of time: they represent, they speak, they connect...
...Admittedly, my case here is more utopian than actual,” Kripal writes, and as in the case of the sailor-philosopher Raphael Nonsenso, who even while enumerating the Esalen: America and the wonders of collectivism religion of No religion in Thomas More’s Utopia by Jeffrey J. Kripal could not help but snipe (University of CHiCago press, at the multitudes off its 594 pages, $30) shoreswho“haveentered into an idiotic conspirReviewed by shawn Macomber acy to call some thingsenjoyable which are naturally nothing of the kind,” the vision of Esalen is no doubt considerably more appealing to the messenger than the masses...
...Many on the right are willing to pronounce the era of limited government over before it really begins...
...It is true that this has greatly benefited the right, which is why the left wants to “hush Rush” by reinstating the Fairness Doctrine...
...Conservative talk radio may not be the best medium through which to reach the independent voters who swung heavily against the GOP in the last election...
...Not germane, apparently...
...With the exception of Ron Paul, Republicans have often lagged in Internet fundrais-ing...
...McKenna was later invited to speak at a gather-ing of the Association for the Responsible Use of Psychedelics at Esalen in 1984...
...What does not is wiped away like so much spiritual bird poop on the metaphysical windshield...
...as the vanguard of spiritual humanism is celebrated as serendipitous synchronicity...
...Utopia Road F or some, utopia is a land with corporate taxes high enough to make the social safety net look more like a hammock...
...What Esalen does to recommend countercul-tural Taoism, altered states of consciousness, cow pie aliens, or the religion of no religion is not at all clear, but, like a neighbor’s psychiatric report, it does make for interesting reading...
...However blithely ridiculous the metaphysics of Esalen may be, though, Kripal’s colorful narrative nonetheless delivers any number of priceless scenes...
...Well, yes, technically…but there are a few other stops along the way that perhaps shouldn’t be com-pletely ignored...
...I’m Popeye the Sailor Man...
...Robin Young’s For Love and Liberty: The Reviewed by Mark Tooley Untold Civil War Story of Major Sullivan Ballou and His Famous Love Letter describes a man who was every bit as magnificent as the writer of such a letter would be expected to be...
...It would take a peyote-fueled vision quest to divine Kripal’s mean-ing when he describes one Esalenian’s transforma-tion from mindset of “sublimated homoerotic orthodoxy to an expressed heteroerotic (and so het-erodox, if not heretical) mysticism” or posits “the shameful fruit of the Garden of Eden can be redeemed by the shared gnosis of unorthodox psychoanalysis and Indian tantra...
...Unlikely...
...Yet just as there is no monolithic Hispanic vote, as the author notes, there is no single Hispanic opinion on immigration policy...
...What does not is wiped away like so much spiritual bird poop on the metaphysical windshield...
...There is also the risk of a conservative echo chamber that can make it harder for Republicans to stay in touch with people outside the base...
...Henry Miller had lived there, commemorating his stay in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch...
...These sessions were spear-headed initially by Fritz Perls, who “first turned to psychoanalysis as a youth because he feared he was ruining his memory through masturbation...
...Still, Esalen hadn’t seen anything quite as far out as what Murphy and Price dreamt up...
...Daily Kos is well ahead of most conservative sites in this regard...
...Price, meanwhile, was entranced by a “unique brand of Beat Zen Buddhism and countercultural Taoism...
...Indeed, late in the book, when Kripal bemoans today’s America, a not-at-all-groovy “globally hated imperial superpower,” a “‘Christian nation’ obsessed with mad and arrogant apocalyptic fantasies abroad and discriminatory ‘family values’ at home” (scare quotes abound) and “a monster consumer of the world’s ever-dwindling resources,” the critical read-er is liable to sarcastically wonder aloud why Esalenians don’t just take this new evil empire down like they did the last one...
...In 1947 Harper’s Magazine published a profile of the place, “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy...
...Even a “religion of no religion” must claim some sublime APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 71 metaphysicalvalidation,however.Tothisend,Kripal incorporates “synchronicity” or “meaningful coinci-dences...
...Murphy breaks a vow of celibacy and the next day is in a car crash en route to introduce a gay New Age author: It is not only synchronicity, but also “Murphy’s sexual car wreck...
...It probably didn’t hurt that lodge waitresses’ uniforms were braless or, as noted in Kripal’s descriptive open-ing, that the “hot baths down by the sea bob day and night with naked flesh...
...The high cost of free love, once again, in stark relief...
...The narrative is over-blown...
...Whatever survived from the fam-ily was dispersed or destroyed...
...More likely President Dennis Kucinich would now be presiding over a global Beat Zen government, commander in chief of the Tie-Dye Army...
...Of course, birds do just poop, but that’s really neither here nor there within the context of Esalen...
...And yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind andbears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield...
...Picture further a band of “five people, including Joan Baez and three Doberman pinschers,” running the same attackers out in what is known in Esalen lore as the Night of the Dobermans or a party where Esalen luminar-ies schmoozed with the likes of Rock Hudson, Shirley MacLaine, and Dennis Hopper, while Perls derided Natalie Wood as “a spoiled little brat” and gave her a public spanking over his knee during an encounter session...
...D espite how silly the “reli-gion of no religion” may hitherto appear, Kripal nonethelessboldlyattributesgran-diose achievements to it...
...But excessive unskilled immigration can also retard Hispanic upward mobility, making these voters ripe for the Takings...
...Only one picture of Mark Tooleydirects the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C...
...This is the real bridge to nowhere...
...70 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 in the waves and sperm floating in his bath...
...Without his altered-state mind travels, would Terence McKenna, a 1980s fixture at Esalen, have otherwise ever deter-mined that (as summarized by Kripal) “the original awakening and early primordial evolution of human consciousness was the result of the brains of our pri-mate ancestors entering a symbiotic relationship with tryptamine-laced alien mushrooms, whose spores had literally floated in from the deep freeze of interstellar space to colonize the planet by taking refuge in the fertile microenvironments of cow pies that ‘followed’ early human communities wherever they went...
...If Esalen actually had a star on its team and the power to bring down the Soviet Union, would the Institute’s adherents still be stuck on an isolated Big Sur beachhead...
...So, you say “tomato,” and at least one influential figure at Esalen says, “Lose your mind and come to your senses...
...Quite a Love Letter M aJor sullivan ballou became a national celebrity three times after he died of his wounds on Bull Run Battlefield in July 1861...
...While the impact of the netroots can be exaggerated, the left has certainly done a good job of raising money and promoting candidates through the web...
...When discussing the mystical massage techniques of Ida Rolf, Kripal adds his own explication, “neurologi-cally speaking, the spine is a serpent-like channel of bioelectrical energy and tiny arcing lightning bolts that connect the genitals to the brain...
...Border hawks become a liability when they descend into blanket anti-Hispanic hostility...
...But only if we are listening and are willing to engage them as such...
...For others, it is rugged individualism with minimal state coercion or intervention...
...Norquist worries that Republicans will lose the Hispanic vote for generations if Tom Tancredo isn’t deported from the party...
...Imagine, for example, a “young, billy club–toting” watchman named Hunter S. Thompson so sullen over a beating he took at the hands of a rowdy gang of gay men down at the baths that he ensconced himself in his room, “where he spent the next day sulking and shooting his gun out a window, which he never bothered to open...
...Frustratingly, few of Ballou’s papers survive...
...Kripal is a gifted and energetic writer, so it may be beautifully overblown, but overblown it is nonetheless...
...Kripal assures us this is “not quite as crazy as it sounds,” even as he prepares to elucidate McKenna’s LSD experiments during which his test subjects encountered “a completely alien Other, an insectoid or elf-like presence that spoke to them within elaborate conversations in an effort to reveal an entire hyperdimensional reality that over-laps or suffuses with our own...
...His most recent celebrity was in 1990, when the opening episode of Ken Burns’s Civil War series closed with Ballou’s poignant goodbye to his wife on the eve of battle: “Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break...
...The Esalen Institute began holding seminars reflecting this dual vision in the early 1960s with titles such as “Shamanism: Supernaturalism and Hallucinogenic Drugs” and “The Value of Psychotic Experience...
...I n the end, it is not even Kripal’s selective syn-chronicities that necessarily bar our conversion to the Esalenian way...
...But as he would have hoped, even this desecration ultimately served the Union cause...
...At age 34, Ballou was a self-made man who had risen from near poverty as a fatherless boy to become a successful lawyer, abolitionist, and ascending star in the new Republican Party...
...To the Institute’s credit Esalen did sponsor Boris Yeltsin’s 1989 trip to the United States...
...Jack Kerouac visited only to be turned off by “a dead otter bobbing shawn Macomber, a recent Phillips Foundation journalism fellow, is a contributing editor to The American Spectator...
...Conservative websites attract a large number of visitors, but liberals have excelled at online political organization...
...Another encounter group at the San Francisco Esalen center in the late ’60s offered a “series of Racial Confron-tations” to “allow for bloodless riots...
...It wasn’t long before Esalen expanded into encounter groups, a kind of epicene version of boot camp utilizing mockery and verbal abuse to break down a participant’s ego...
...Enlightened rage, no doubt...
...An even bigger challenge than diversifying the conservative coalition is keeping Republicans from playing for the other team...
...He was already speaker of the Rhode Island state legislature when he enlisted in the Union Army at the war’s start...
...In other words, exactly the kind of man you would want conducting social experiments...
...The right simply does not dominate the web the way it does talk radio...
...Hence, Price and Murphy had the same com-parative religion professor five years apart: Synchro-nicity...
...After It remains difficult to determine whether Kripal’s intention is to warn or entice when he writes, “altered states of consciousness and energy” are “as common as the leaping whales and flapping butterflies at Esalen...
...He was also fond of saying, “I am who I am, I f--k when I can...
...Why submit to such ridiculous self-torture...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
