Esalen

The word itself summons up tantalizing visions of adventure, of unexplored frontiers, of human possibilities yet to be realized.

There is the wonder of the place itself,
120 acres of fertile land carved out between mountain and ocean, blessed by a cascading canyon stream and hot mineral springs gushing out of a seaside cliff. There is the delicate and subtle Big Sur air of a late afternoon in May, the midnight mist of July, the drenching February rain. There are October nights so clear the Milky Way can light your walk along the darkened garden path. And always there is the sound of the sea.

And then there are the people - the people who live there and love the land, and the 300.000 more who have come from all over the world to

participate in Esalen's forty-year-long Olympics of the body, mind, and spirit, committing themselves not so much to "stronger, faster, higher" as to "deeper, richer, more enduring."

They come for the intellectual freedom to consider systems of thought and feeling that lie beyond the current constraints of mainstream

academia. They come to discover ancient wisdom in the motion of the body, poetry in the pulsating of the blood. They come to rediscover the miracle of self-aware consciousness. At best, they come away inspired by the precision of a desire to learn and keep on learning through all of life.

Esalen is a place with a global reach. It is a place, as Thomas Wolfe said about America, where miracles not only happen but where they happen all the time.

From: The Esalen Catalog, September 2003 - February 2004