The Upstart Spring
Toolan, David
Erosion contains thirty three poems of this extraordinary quality. I reread them as slowly as they could bear it to find the rhythm of the voice that generated them: it is a slow, steady...
...They've run a gamut of disillusionments: the distortions of encounter, Baghwan Rajneesh, scientology, Oscar Ichazo's Arica, and that Dale Carnegie parody of Esalen's personal responsibility ethic, Werner Erhard's est training, to mention a few...
...The place is staggeringly beautiful, and about the only metaphysical thing Esalen initiates are likely to agree on is that Selig Morgenrath, its now deceased gardener, was an authentic wise man...
...The sociological base was also weak...
...A LAND OF TWO PEOPLES Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs Edited with Commentary by PAUL R. MENDES-FLOHR "Buber's politics...set forth in Mendes-Flohr's brilliant anthology...[are] never simply visionary.., but [are] tactically sound, precisely because [they are] morally just and compassionate...
...This plan has the support of the Irish government which Britain up to this time has ignored...
...Over 25...
...THOMAS De PIETRO has published in the Nation, In These Times and other journals...
...Esalen was always democratically generous...
...Correspondence II (Continued from page 130) tion, with autonomy of local government for each part...
...Is there any hope for the Middle East...
...1.50 apiece, $9.95 for 10...
...Write Fr...
...Box 5719, Baltimore, MD 21208...
...And today many Esalen enthusiasts see that "it would have been more successful if it had had a healthier respect for the vastness and difficulty of its task...
...Focus, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA 99258...
...Community experience with 50, worldwide...
...Murphy and his friends decided to change the world...
...Classes, workshops, scripture, theology, spirituality, human development - - 30 day retreat...
...Though light plays on her face, "changing her," "she has no care" for that: "she is at/her work...
...Mendes-Flohr did not intend his constellation of Buber's view.., to serve political ends, but inescapably a document that bespeaks such personal urgency and moral leadership cannot help but be political in the finest sense...
...FATHER JOHN A. COLEMAN, SJ., is the author of An American Strategic Theology (PaulisO...
...July 16-19...
...For arguably Esalen has been more successful as a cultural force than those earlier utopian communities because, like the awakening circuit riders, it gave itself away, seeded the U.S...
...Through all the residential programs there had been a frequently expessed sense of incompleteness, a general belief among the residents that they were getting too much of something and not enough of something else...
...But it was just this entry of tragedy, the sense of incompleteness, and the need for greater connections than a humanistic psychology could supply that triggered the shift to transpersonal psychology in the seventies...
...the noble savages who visited and inhabited the place promptly replicated the Fall...
...The surviving original Esalen cohort, Anderson suggests, is today somewhat uncertain of its success...
...1964 brought Charlotte Selver's "sensory awareness" exercises, the first of a long line of body therapies that would become an Esalen trademark...
...Since pioneer days, California has served as the test range for America's mythic boundaries...
...David Toolan C ALIFORNIA: a place where the American expansionist ethos once reached its outer limit...
...509) 3284220...
...Greeting Cards Born Againl Re-birthday cards...
...American Christians for the the Abolition of Torture, 300 W. Apsley, Philadelphia 19144...
...It has no doubt also teased its inhabitants to dream they ought to look and feel as good as the state's scenery and weather...
...Later, in 1967, Willliam Schutz, with his smorgasbord of group therapies under the title of "open encounter," came to stay...
...66r three times...
...Though like as not, if such foresight had been there at the start, nothing would have happened...
...Yes, said Martin Buber, but only a sound and just settlement between Jewish and Arab interests will bring lasting peace...
...A United States Envoy to Northern Ireland, such as Assemblyman John Dearie has proposed, and Senators Moynihan, Kennedy, Dodd, Metzenbaurtl, and Cranston have sponsored, is essential if all parties to the issue, the Irish government, Britain, and representatives of Northern Ireland are to be brought together for discussions to end the killing and attempt to bring peace to the area...
...Perhaps Esalen, its mothering, generative purpose served, is going the way of its American antecedents, New Harmony, Oneida, or Brook Farm...
...Esalen's Law," Richard Price observes, "is that you always teach others what you most need to learn yourself...
...Murphy had spent time at Shri Aurobindo's ashram in India, where he took to meditation but not to the authoritarianism of the great man's successor...
...Join us and become part of an ongoing group which is ecumenical in every dimension...
...Conversations between all parties would be a positive gain...
...Completed B.A...
...Anderson falls to make much of this shift -- a theologically significant one, I believe...
...Therapeutic and spiritual tyranny would become Esalen conference topics in the early seventies...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...Britain will not of itself come to the conference table without American instigation and world pressure...
...Priest Workshop On preaching Penance and hearing confessions...
...FATHER DAVID TOOLAN.S.J., is assistant editor of Commonweal...
...P r i e s t h o o d Desire Priesthood...
...A rash of suicides in the early seventies sobered enthusiasms...
...Over 25...
...Just at the time when left critics, in particular, were shelling the place for being intellectually lightweight, nonpolitical, ahistorical, and narcissistic, it was beginning to recover some of the intellectual tone it had had at the start, when people like Arnold Toynbee, S.I...
...To many the obstacles seem insurmountable, but Martin Buber proved time and time again during his fifty years of political activism that practical political solutions could be found which satisfied the needs of both peoples...
...The Esalen staples were in place...
...r a m - - Send check or money order to: Quantity _ _ Buber/Mendes-Fiohr: A LAND OF TWO PEOPLES OXFORD #503426-0 paper $7.95 UNIVERSITY r~s rR,NT: PRESS Name 2De00~Mrtment EC, Address adison Ave...
...Religious Community Considering Religious Life...
...30-32 Mortimer Street Dept...
...Biblical Institute 19th Biblical Institute, Trinity College, Burlington, VT 05401, June 17-22...
...I don't know if the extinct Esalen Indians were into potlatches or not...
...I do know their successors were, and I am grateful...
...But there are no gaps, no unearned garden, no garment put on that the poem hasn't materialized, patterned, cut, and sewn: "Bruna is teaching me/to cut a pattern./Saturdays we buy the cloth./ She takes it in her hands/ like a good idea, feeling/ for texture, grain, the built-in limits./ It's only as an afterthought she asks/ and do you think it's beautiful...
...The two men, both then thirty, had been introduced to oriental wisdom as Stanford undergraduates by Frederic Spiegelberg...
...Even the concept of an "Irish Dimension," i.e., that the Irish Government has an interest in Northern Ireland, has been rejected by Britain...
...Continuing Education Leadership training and renewal for Religious, Laity and Clergy in spiritual direction, pastoral ministry, prayer, formation, directed retreats...
...COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., NYC 10016...
...Commonweal: 158 terbalance the excesses of the sixties with important other Esalen contributions -for instance to "confluent education" (cognitive and affective), to humanistic medicine, publishing, sports as spiritual discipline, and participatory "theory Y" management...
...Saviour monastery Elmira, N.Y...
...LSD, primal screams, and the tyranny of "hold nothing back" were in -- along with the hereditary American Adam...
...He would also settle down to manage the Big Sur operaUniversity Microfilms International 300 North Zeeb Road Dept...
...To others again, Esalen was and is a fast-food American monastery, a secular counterpart to the mountaintop Camaldolese monastery down the road a piece...
...Founded to ransom slaves, our small community of men have grounded our lives and our work of liberation in fraternity, prayer, and the Bible for over 800 years...
...Anderson details the ugly (and often hilarious) rivalries that ensued...
...ROSEMARY DEEN, a Commonweal poetry editor, is co-author, with Marie Pomot, of Beat Not the Poor Desk (8oynton/Cook...
...To some, Esalen is Babylon West...
...But Anderson may be right in not referring to such precedents, and instead, locating Esalen historically in the less sectarian mobility of Great American Awakenings...
...14905...
...she gave away her curative secrets to all comers...
...RCS, 109 Roselawn, Modesto, CA 95351...
...JOHN BRANIGAN Classified RATES: 70r a word, one time...
...Walter Anderson's Upstart Spring tells Esalen's riveting, unfinished story - - even-handedly, entertainingly, with sympathy, and yet holding little back...
...As to the rest, there are more questions than answers...
...landscape with a host of body, mind~ and soul arts that other networks and institutions, with firmer sociological roots and longer historical memories, are beginning to harvest...
...They did not mix well ("joy boys," Perls contemptuously labeled Schutz and his followers...
...That is the central theme of this anthology of Buber's essays, speeches, letters, and unpublished writings on the subject of Arab-Jewish relations...
...Conducted by Redemptorist theologians and preachers at oceanfront retreat house...
...In search of it, they tried yoga and meditation . . . . (T)hey worked on the buildings, and in the garden . . . clearing weeds, planting trees, literally digging into the ground in search of that missing something outside themselves...
...Sidney Callahan will speak on Self-Awareness, Empowerment For Political Action...
...Human Rights Good Friday liturgies, other action/ reflection resources on international human rights...
...This was Great Mother country, permissive, sensual, and nurturing...
...And these figures were the titans of the late sixties...
...In general though, the author is weak in assessing distinctive developments in the late seventies, for instance the new dialogue going on at Esalen between the hard sciences and traditional religious philosophies, or the more intense religiosity of the place, which frequently degenerates into freaky spiritualism but could -- and I don't know if it will -- contribute to a nonsectarian American lay spirituality of real substance...
...Errand into the wilderness THE UPSTART SPRING ESALEN ANB THE AMERICAN AWAKENING Walter Truett Anderson Addison-Wesley, $11.95 paper, 320 pp...
...Write: Sr...
...Ann Arbor, Mi...
...Bill Axe, The Trinitarian Friars, P.O...
...or call Collect (301) 484-2250...
...Miriam Ward...
...Yet the place was such a variety store, its ambitions so outsize - - nothing less than to put East-West, science and religion, the whole Humpty Dumpty together again - - criticisms could always be assured of hitting their mark somewhere, and did...
...Rollo May and Maslow begged for "more reading, more research, a stronger philosophic base," but until Perls and Schutz were out of the picture, that advice was hard to pursue...
...The more conventional things that people used as foundations for their personal lives '-- families, jobs, communities, organized religion -- were often the very things the residents had abandoned when they set out for Esalen along the path of self-development...
...Esalen was a moving target, rather like a snake shedding skins...
...but it had spawned the anarchic human potential movement, a big, messy target like a church...
...The tamed place Anderson describes at the present time (finally hospitable to children) has the slightly musky smell of ripe fruit -- or delayed dreams...
...They talked of the need for "grounding...
...The next time I returned, in 1977, information theory wizard Hans von Foerster and dolphin researcher John Lilly were bringing cybernetics to lotus land, a harbinger of science conferences to come, and people like Daniel Ellsberg, Andrew Young, and California assemblyman John Vasconcellos were passing through regularly...
...07740 (201) 222-2731...
...Murphy, on the other hand, would serve as promoter and idea man, in 1967 moving north to establish the San Francisco Esalen, which closed its doors in 1977 when it could no longer compete with all the Esalen imitators...
...paper $7.95 At better bookstores or use this coupon to order direct...
...And that same year, the cantankerous Fritz Perls, founder of gestalt therapy, would move in to stay...
...To others, like the Kali temple I once visited in Calcutta, it's a three-ring therapeutic circus, all-forgiving, a place of refuge and healing...
...I reread them as slowly as they could bear it to find the rhythm of the voice that generated them: it is a slow, steady stepping forward...
...These poems are at their work, leaving their long afterthought to their readers...
...Selig, Morgenrath created a garden of Eden...
...Amen...
...Faculty: Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, Paul Achtemeier, Philip J. King, Elizabeth Achtemeier...
...Hayakawa, Gardner Murphy, and Paul Tillich ran seminars there...
...Practical...
...Providence, or in California argot "synchronicity," seemed, at first, to smile on the project...
...But I had to catch my breath by the end of poems because images seem to take a quantum leap--from seed to Eden in a step...
...Price was not long out of a harrowing hospital treatment of electric shock and insulin, and would later put Esalen in the forefront of the fight for patients' rights...
...48106 U.S.A...
...Cost $125, deposit $25...
...He is more concerned to courtREVIEWERS FRANCIS J. FLAHERTY, a reporter .for the National Law Journal, is a frequem contributor...
...The heart of this new frontier, its laboratory center, was the hanging garden on the big Sur coast named after an extinct Indian tribe, the Esalen Institute...
...in the sixties and seventies it became a state of mind, a mythic medium for charting inner spaces and untried human potentials...
...Classified payable with order...
...Icarus plunged...
...Snaky Esalen shed its skin again...
...Kirkridge Gathering The Company at Kirkridge, a supportive network for contemporary Christians, will meet March 23, 24, 25, 1984 at Mt...
...London WIN 7RA England tion and become a masterful practitioner of his own (very gentle) style of gestalt therapy...
...In 1964, Esalen's orientation shifted from philosophizing to the participatory workshop, and to activism...
...Arthur A. Cohen, Commonweal 336 pp...
...With that, the human potential movement became the "consciousness revolution...
...New York, NY 10016 City State Z i p . _ _ 9 March 1984:157 When Michael Murphy and Richard Price arrived in the summer of 1961 to take over the Murphy family property from the charismatic Church of the God of Prophecy (and the guardianship of Hunter Thompson), they had been encouraged by Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Gerald Heard to believe that an amorphous "great evolutionary leap forward" was brewing in the Western psyche, and it needed a launching pad...
...After the "peaks" came the bottomless let-downs...
...An old woman in one poem is "sorting chick peas from pebbles...
...1-800-633-2252, Father Nigro, Gonzaga University, Spokane 99258...
...For more information write Anthony Ciccadello, 520 W. Gray St., Elmira, N.Y...
...beautiful, inspiriational...
...For a while there, such dream space took flesh on Esalen's cliffside soil...
...July 23-26...
...Lately, Murphy's energies are devoted to transformation sports and dialogue with the nascent human potential movement in Russia...
...San Alfonso, 755 Ocean Ave., West End, N.J...
...By that time, Will Schutz's sometimes brutal "encounters" - - lampooned in the film Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice - - were already on the wane...
...9 March 1984:159...
...The most meaningful card you'll ever send...
...his judgment o f Maslow's "being motivation" is unprintable...
...63r six times...
...Quite fortuitously, Abraham Maslow, champion of "third force" humanistic psychology, drove by Esalen one day in 1962, dropped in, heard what was going on, and soon became a staunch supporter...
...Let's fire a shot heard round the world," exclaimed Murphy to Look editor George Leonard in that year...
...Nine months, cerfiticate...
...In the early seventies, straight from civil disobedience "action," I made my first pilgrimage there for a meditation workshop that was first-rate...
...For what was actually a brief period, bookworming was out...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
