o wonder California is an unstable place. An enormous fault line, one of the world's longest, runs roughly parallel to the coastline like a giant zipper, the result of two continental plates grinding past each other at the rate of five centimeters a year. Occasionally, the grind goes giddy and lets fly one of the massive earthquakes that have become, even more than wildfires, mud slides, and drought, California's signature natural disaster. Ever since 1906, when San Francisco shook and burned, the threat of the Big One has shadowed the California psyche, feeding a fascination with risk and apocalypse. But the land's vast network of fault lines, cracks, and stresses also makes the region a geothermal wonderland. Like much of the West, California is pockmarked with vents, geysers, and bubbling vats of stinky mud—as well as copious hot springs. These mineral-rich pools of tension-melting bliss, which bring ancient water bubbling up from cavities miles below the surface, have shaped California's culture of healing as much as the land's looming seismic threat has shaped its culture of disaster.
California's original inhabitants treated hot springs as sites of healing and telluric power. Some springs were set aside as neutral ground, where different tribelets could meet without fear of conflict. In the late nineteenth century, when Yankee medicine was awash with homeopathic remedies and naturopathic cures, spas and resorts developed around many springs, helping to deepen the California equation of pleasure and healing. Saratoga Springs and Calistoga, today an entire township of spas, catered to the sanitarium crowd, while more rough-and-tumble sites served miners and lumberjacks across the state. A century later, when the counterculture's spiritual hedonists were grooving to naked flesh and the great outdoors, hot springs transformed into power spots yet again. Hippies and nudists made pilgrimages to undeveloped springs like Sykes or Deep Creek, while other spots bloomed into sustained communities. A riverside spring resort deep in the Ventana Wilderness became the Zen monastery of Tassajara, where the hot waters alleviate the suffering of cramped legs during long winter retreats. Orr Hot Springs, once the site of a rowdy logger bathhouse, became a commune in 1975 and still retains a laid-back, cannabinoid air.
One of California's most celebrated hot spots is Harbin Hot Springs, whose seven springs pump out fifty thousand gallons of pure mineral water a day, supplying the baths and the water needs of an entire community. Fringed by the forests of the Mayacamas Range, just over the mountains from Calistoga, Harbin presents a palimpsest of California healing. The community occupies a steep valley the Lake Miwoks referred to as 'eetawyomi—the hot place. A wall beside the current cold plunge was built just after the Civil War, when the Harbin Hot Springs Health and Pleasure Resort invited folks with dyspepsia, rheumatism, or other ailments to take the waters. In the early 1970s, the area was purchased by Ishvara, a mellow guru of something called Heart Consciousness, although a contemporary visitor to Harbin could be forgiven for feeling that other organs of the body are most on people's minds. Under Ishvara's leadership, Harbin has become a subdued center of New Age culture, with its own healing modality—watsu, a sort of aquatic Shiatsu—and an annual Neopagan gathering called Ancient Ways. A natural builder named SunRay Kelley has recently constructed a graceful hobbit-worthy temple using strawbale and cob. Perhaps the most sacred spot, though, remains the hot pool, which at nearly 115 degrees seems to threaten tissue damage, and is housed inside a hushed, candlelit structure where a prayerful silence reigns.
Ishvara's Heart Consciousness grew out of the human-potential movement, a revolutionary philosophy of healing and human psychology that sprang from yet another California hot springs community. The waters in question bubble out of the cliffs near a low and impossibly gorgeous tuft of land that juts into the Pacific from the coastline of Big Sur, where the Santa Lucia Mountains plunge into the inky depths with a disturbing cant. The area has attracted spiritual hedonists since the writer Henry Miller moved there in the 1940s, riling up locals with his anarchist sentiments. In 1961, when the springs served as a rough-and-ready gay bathhouse, the property came into the hands of two Stanford graduate students named Michael Murphy and Richard Price. A sporty but monkish sort from the Salinas Valley, Murphy had spent sixteen months at Sri Aurobindo's ashram in Pondicherry, India, an experience that left him with a profound love of meditation—which he practiced as much as eight hours a day—but serious reservations about the guru model of spiritual training. Price was a more bohemian character, a denizen of North Beach who practiced Zen and had done time in a U.S. Air Force mental ward undergoing past-life flashbacks and electroshock therapy in equal measure. Together, the two intellectuals were committed to radical psychological development. Inspired by Gerald Heard's Trabuco College experiment, they decided to form an example of what Heard called "gymnasia of the mind." They named it Esalen, after the Esselen Indians, a small and pacific network of tribelets who inhabited Big Sur and are often considered, wrongly, to have been the first of California's native cultures consigned to oblivion.
The Esalen Institute spawned and nurtured the human-potential movement, an eclectic and influential blend of psychological therapies and secularized spiritual practices that transformed the American image of the self. Initially, Esalen was a scholarly place, where folks would gather to hear talks by thinkers and writers like Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley, and especially Abraham Maslow. In Maslow's view, the psychology of the day erred in its fixation on the broken or neurotic individual. Maslow spoke instead of peak experiences, those godlike flashes of joy, insight, and self-empowerment that seem to spring from some deeper source than the mundane personalities that constipate our ordinary days. Maslow's conception of self-actualization was crucial to the idea of human potential, but within a few years, people wanted to do the do rather than talk about it. Soon an enormous number of techniques, new and old, were piled on the Esalen table: Gestalt therapy, meditation, tai chi chuan, psychedelics, Rolphing, primal scream therapy, holotropic breathwork, hatha yoga, biofeedback, Tantra, massage. Esalen participants felt like they were surfing the frothing edge of human evolution, as if a new kind of person were being birthed—or, more properly, rebirthed. Even madness, bouts of which Price continued to experience from time to time, was seen by some as an organic initiation rather than a malady to be squelched. As Esalen's legendary Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls said, "Lose your mind and come to your senses."
Esalen's most dangerous game was the encounter group, a spontaneous collective psychodrama that encouraged catharsis and the sometimes forceful dismantling of what the radical psychologist William Reich called our "personality armor." Murphy was amazed by the explosive dynamics of group therapy, which he considered a better deconditioning agent than LSD. The maestro of the form was William Schutz, who developed a macho "open encounter" style that worked toward joy but could also bubble over into anger and hostility. Encounter was scary, a kind of emotional Outward Bound, and no doubt shook up a freewheeling scene already awash with psychoactive and sexual opportunities. In this environment, Esalen's earlier emphasis on integration took a backseat to the process of letting it all hang out.
By the end of the 1970s, Esalen's practical therapies and holistic ideas had spread around the world, even as the institute became the butt of jokes and the flashpoint for attacks on the Me Generation. Some of the digs were deserved, as were some of the jokes: at one point in the mid-1970s, the list of staff members included "the Nine," a group of disincarnate entities channeled from the star system Sirius. But Esalen's essentially secular engagement with human transformation was, in its way, as revolutionary as anything launched in those epochal days. Esalen's leading thinkers and researchers, especially Murphy and the aikido master George Leonard, mapped and morphed our understanding of the extraordinary capacities latent within the individual—prescient work given the radical augmentation therapies, pharmaceutical drugs, and technologies that are now transforming our definition of the human being. Esalen also explored the social and psychological implications of cybernetics and ecology, developing a more integral approach to mind, body, and nature. Esalen's best facilitators nudged people toward a more embodied and less hypocritical engagement with the tangled realities of the self. And they did this while largely dodging the authoritarian traps that swallowed up so many other avatars of California consciousness.
Today's Esalen is less an institute or a gymnasium of the mind than a genteel New Age resort that keeps the flame of the human potential movement alive by catering to aging baby boomers. Ketamine workouts and scary encounter groups are long gone, replaced with well-rounded weekends featuring organic food, art workshops, and massage. In 2004, six years after storms destroyed the old cliffside hot tubs, a new high-profile bathhouse and massage room opened. Designed by Mickey Muennig, an organic architect who has lived and worked in Big Sur since 1971, the high-dollar compound graces visitors with spare archways, cannily crafted views of the Pacific, and a mosaic fountain with a design drawn from a Hokusai painting. It's a reserved temple of sensation, and though it lacks the funky character of the early spa, bathers are still suspended above the infinite sea. Indeed, Esalen's most abiding California teaching may reside in the land itself. The property's cliffs, gardens, streams, and vantages not only possess an implacable beauty but also seem to incarnate the crux of transformation itself—that precipitous point of exaltation and threat that Robinson Jeffers, the great poet of the region, called "the verge extreme."
