The Esalen Institute, Sacred Mushrooms, and the Game of Golf
AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL MURPHY
BY ROBERT FORTE
RF: I’ll start by saying what motivated me to compile a Festschrift for Tim. At a meeting in Switzerland commemorating LSD sponsored by the Swiss Academy of Medicine and Sandoz, whenever Tim’s name, or the spirit of the sixties, or humanistic psychology, or transpersonal psychology came up, generally it was dismissed as nonscientific, radical Californian esotericism.
MM: Well, that’s a Swiss perspective.
RF: That kind of sets the context for the book.
MM: It puts you in a warlike mode.
RF: A little bit, I suppose, yeah.
MM: I guess that haunts Tim Leary, the iconoclast, the rebel. It doesn’t have to be in that mode.
MM: Well, you know, you can be visionary without being revolutionary, although they often go together. But anyway, you’re setting the dials.
RF: Right, I guess I am. Though I felt they set it up that way.
MM: But to do a Festschrift you don’t have to do it that way. In other words, you’re choosing to do this.
RF: Yes.
MM: OK. All right. I mean I’m not objecting, I’m just pointing it out.
RF: Right. That was my inclination: Tim busted loose and he’s blamed for having set the field of drug research back twenty years. Lots of folks think he set the field forward twenty years.
MM: What about the Beatles? What about our great other musicians of the era? What about the Grateful Dead? What about—you know, Allen Ginsberg and company? What about Stan Grof? In other words, Tim’s not alone.
RF: No, Tim’s not alone.
MM: But there were mighty forces opening up consciousness. Much of it went far too far. But the culture assimilates, you know, digests this stuff, and we go up the spiral hopefully. So anyway, go ahead.
RF: What is it about that Irish spirit—his and yours—that caused such a ruckus thirty-five years ago?
MM: We both set out pursuing a vision of greater life, of greater human possibilities, and like all such visions of going beyond, of renewing, you run into the constraints of the given culture, the homeostasis of the social order, and there’s resulting Sturm und Drang. It’s a law of life. When you bear witness to greater possibilities and when you bring an energy forward that’s going to change people’s practices and ultimately, therefore, their ways of perceiving, and their feelings and their bodies, there’s going to be the tendency to try to hold fast, to keep things as they are. It’s normal. The Irish have been doing that now for about 1500 years. It seems to be genetic. I believe that it is. The English have still not figured out that when the Irish are deadpan, they’re joking, and when they’re smiling, they’re deadly earnest. They still haven’t figured that out.
RF: Somewhere I heard that one of the original visions of Esalen was for it to be a psychedelic initiation center.
MM: No, that’s not right. I took an early stand. You know, temperamentally, Robert, I did not find drugs to be my allies. I had eight trips between ’62 and ’66 and I had the best folks with me on them. My first trip was alone with peyote. It was marvelous. Then Aldous Huxley gave me some Sandoz LSD and Laura, his wife, was my sitter down in Mexico. Those first two trips in ’62 were just as we were starting Esalen’s programs. Then Dick Alpert and Tim came to Esalen, and they gave me a trip—that was ’64. It was mainly Dick—although Tim was there that night—with me and Dick Price. That was great. Then I had a wonderful trip over there at Myron Stoloroff and Willis Harman’s place, the Institute for Advanced Studies. And that was wonderful. So I had wonderful sitters, but each trip got worse, more painful. The whole message was, “this is not good for you.” So my last trip was in ’66, and I just had those eight trips in there from ’62 to ’66.
RF: So you followed Alan Watts’s advice: “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” This raises the question of using psychedelics as a path in and of themselves, or whether they work best in the context of initiation. Even Jerry Garcia said his most intense and magical time with psychedelics lasted only about a year.
Could you say something about the effect of psychedelics on Esalen? Do you think they have been more, or less, consequential there than the hot springs, the mountains, or the ocean?
MM: Well, I think much of the influence of psychedelics at Esalen has been unfortunate. The place exploded in ’62. I mean we had to keep scheduling extra programs. But psychedelics were not there in ’62, ’63, ’64. There was talk about them, and there were these occasional trips like the one I had with Laura Huxley, but I felt constrained to go to Mexico to have that one. You know what I mean? It started going public I would say, on the grounds, big time, ’65 maybe, but certainly ’66, and by ’67, the Summer of Love, our canyons were full—I mean it exploded, and to some extent we lost control of the place. I would say—’66 through ’70—that was the most tumultuous, out-of-control time. It’s a miracle that Esalen survived that period.
RF: There was an energy that was out of control and really dangerous, not the sort of positive disintegration of Dionysian madness.
MM: Out of control in terms of . . . I mean Charles Manson was developing his cult down at Lime Kiln Canyon. He would recruit his folks down there. That’s a symptom of the age. The Hell’s Angels would come through. We had a big confrontation with them. They came down in a very threatening way and we didn’t have any police support. About 30 of them, one of their squadrons, black jackets, all stoned. They threatened to take the place over. These would be symptoms. We had at least three suicides I know of in the larger Esalen orbit when people were stoned and it just fed their depression. Those happened in and around Esalen in those years. The reason the institution survived was we had enough going for us to hold it all together. We were all in our thirties, unmarried, no kids, full of energy. It was a wild time. The seminars were always full, people were having great experiences. It was very exciting. But at the same time, as you know, many of those experiments in that period fell apart. In fact, most of the communes were falling apart by the late ’70s. That’s what led me to see that you needed life-long transformative practices.
Along the way, we were under surveillance by a number of agencies, the Food and Drug Administration and others. I met twice with the head of the Northern California FDA. to clarify what was going on, what our obligations were. Under the Bill of Rights, you cannot go in and search people’s rooms if you’re an innkeeper. So we were clear with everybody, our lawyers, everyone, that we were not obliged to go Gestapo-like into the seminarian rooms. But the great reason that our institute never went under—because there was a huge amount of drug use on the grounds—was, we prohibited any sale of drugs there or the use of any in workshops. We said that if we caught anybody in the act of taking drugs, they would be kicked off the property. And in fact we were kicking people out of there. You know, we had some criminals—I mean we had real drug dealing. We told them they couldn’t come back. So we took that public stand, and it was in resonance with my own strong negative take toward psychedelics as a way forward into greater consciousness. I’d been meditating since 1950 and been to India, so that was, and that remains, my path; the non-drug route.
We never conceived of the place as a psychedelic research center. But we had seminars about psychedelics. And people were taking drugs down there, there’s no doubt about it. But we kept announcing you cannot sell. You can look someone in the eye and know perfectly well that person’s stoned, but you can’t go and force him to have a blood test and then kick him out because of that.
At the same time Dick Price used psychedelics some in his own personal voyaging, but was with me in wanting to preserve the public viability of Esalen. In other words, we had to be law-abiding. He was completely with me on that. Psychedelic drugs were more of an ally for him, but they weren’t for me.
RF: I was surprised that you were happy to contribute to this tribute to Leary, knowing that your attitude toward psychedelics was conservative. When I mentioned the idea back in July, I noticed a genuine enthusiasm in you.
MM: I just was expressing my love and admiration for Tim, that’s what I thought. It’s not psychedelics, it’s Tim. I don’t see any contradiction whatsoever. I’m saying that what we learned at Esalen is that psychedelics don’t provide by themselves a path to these permanent graduations of human nature which I really want to work for—which I see as my life’s work.
I have to say also that through psychedelics many people have had real openings into these great things. I mean all through history. I’m just telling about what happened in Big Sur and I’m telling about my own past, but I’m not talking about the intrinsic worth of psychedelics—if they’re done right, in a ceremonial fashion with conscious, creative, and experienced folks.
Tim is a real pioneer and hero. That’s all.
In principle I am for the idea of free exploration, and I always was attracted to Tim. I love his visionary spirit and that great Irish charm, and what he basically stood for. The same you could say about Fritz Perls. I mean I hated a lot of the things Fritz Perls did, but I so appreciated what I still believe is his true genius, as both a clinician and a theoretician, although he could be a mean son-of-abitch a lot of the time.
RF: Do you think psychedelics were the prime cause for the importation of Eastern meditational systems and philosophies in the early 1960s?
MM: No, I disagree. I became interested in all this at Stanford in 1950 studying with Frederic Spiegelberg. I watched this underground fire at Stanford during the ’50s and it was not drugs at all. It was a readiness in the culture to go beyond the very tight upbringings all of us had had in our churches and synagogues. We were ready. I mean hundreds of thousands of Americans were ready to break out. I remember Spiegelberg’s lectures, I mean, my God, he would fill every auditorium, speaking about the Vedas, the Upanishads, the great Buddhist scriptures, Ramana Maharishi, and Sri Aurobindo. You cannot credit it first and foremost to psychedelics. Psychedelics certainly fed into it. But I would say it was one of the prime causes.
RF: More synchronistic than causal?
MM: Well, it was one of the prime causes. I think you would have to name five or six primary reasons why the whole thing opened up the way it did in the ’60s and psychedelics would be one of those five or six.
RF: OK, you’ve named two: the constrained upbringings in the ’50s and psychedelics. What are some of the others?
MM: The exposure to Eastern thought and practice, to shamanism, to esoteric Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All those started to pour in, Neoplatonism and the rest of it. Then the tremendous impact of—it was a package that would consist of—existential therapies, humanistic and transpersonal psychologies . . . Maslow, Rogers . . . It was going to erupt. Put yourself back in the fifties with psychoanalysis and behaviorism in the saddle. There was bound to be an eruption, and it became a very popular movement. Then you had all these dozens of major somatic disciplines appearing—you know, from Rolfing to Feldenkrais, to Charlotte Selver; they just exploded on the scene. All of these events happening at once. You had the real disillusionment about government that came from the Vietnam war. Then this explosion of music. There was so much. The Beatles invented so much new music. The biggest explosion of new invention in music since the invention of jazz. You could go on. There were maybe eight or nine major events. But it certainly did not depend upon psychedelics. That fed into it. The time was right for the culture to open up. All of those things contributed.
RF: Wasson was the first to suggest that religion may have originated out of early humans eating psychedelic mushrooms. Terence McKenna has recently jazzed up Wasson’s theory on the origin of religion, suggesting that mushrooms are the missing link in evolution that accounts for this exponential rise in brain size and culture and religion and so on. So do you think we saw a recapitulation of this in the ’60s?
MM: First of all, I don’t even believe those theories. It gives much too short shrift to all our other activities. I mean, look, Robert, for twenty-five years I have been getting reports of mystical experiences on golf courses because of Golf in the Kingdom. I call golf “a mystery school for Republicans.” If you can have such experiences playing golf, think of all the other activities . . . Take the initiations in the great caves of Lascaux and elsewhere, you know, to come into rapport with the hunt, and all the shamanic rituals, I mean, God, swimming in the cold sea, and going on those long runs, going to the mountain tops, and all of the others. No, I simply don’t buy those theories.
RF: Confrontation with birth and death and sex and other forces.
MM: All of that, in our day, produces these incredible openings to the astonishment of being and all of these powers. There’s is a reductionist theory. There are higher reductionisms, and I would say Wasson’s and McKenna’s is a higher reductionism. I just don’t believe it. Psychedelics certainly had a role, no doubt. And sometimes a ritualized role. But as the only? Give me a break.
I would say it’s in the nature of this universe to keep graduating. We’re in the graduation business. We graduate to new levels of complexity and awareness. It’s been going on for fifteen billion years or more in this universe. Since the first life appeared it’s been going for 3–4 billion years on Earth. In the human race it’s been going on from the beginning. To say it’s all one mechanism—I say in The Future of the Body to watch for the fallacy of single mediation. It’s the fact of our forward march, this opening up, of this stupendous event of the universe opening to higher and higher levels of functioning, more complex orders, ecstasies—reclaiming the world’s latent divinity. To say it all depends on drugs is just ridiculous on the face of it. Forgive me for getting so heated up here.
RF: Your book The Future of the Body is the most complete assemblage of scientifically confirmed mystical or metanormal experience there is. Charlie Tart calls it “the most important work on the relationship between mind and body ever written.” I’ve not read all 785 pages, but so far there’s not one mention of psychedelic experience. That’s incredible.
MM: No, I’ve never dealt with it. Probably in a new edition I would. After seven and a half years it was time, finally, to put the book to bed. So in that respect it does show my predilections, there’s no doubt about it. I had it vetted by various critics; I did that with each chapter and then the book as a whole. We had two conferences on the book before it was published to get criticism of it, to make it as solid as I could.
RF: And in these conferences this omission of psychedelics didn’t come up? Did you deliberately leave that out?
MM: Well, it was just finally, you know, at the end of the day I’m not that interested. I didn’t have any big sections on tantric sex either, and that I could have expanded. The psychedelics I certainly could have put in. It was partly just my bias; I have to admit it. But it was not a kind of policy decision or anything like that. I had worked on that thing seven and a half years and it was time to get it published. Also its size. We had cut it in half. So, all of that contributed, but it was not a policy decision to leave psychedelics out. I would say it’s just a shortcoming of the book.
RF: I’ll say. The Future of the Body with no sex and no drugs either? Will there be a second volume?
MM: I doubt it. I’m writing a sequel to Golf in the Kingdom, in which I mention mushrooms at Muirfield.
RF: You do?
MM: Yes.
RF: I should send you my chapter on it.
MM: Well send it to me. I mention it once in a manuscript by one Mortimer Crail, who was a professor of Classics at Edinburgh in a book written in 1893 entitled Golf: Its Roots in God and Nature, telling about a case of apparent demonic possession during a tournament for pairs at Muirfield. It was attributed variously to demonic possession, a hemorrhage of the psyche that produces a phantom, or the mushrooms served at lunch at the Muirfield Clubhouse. I have you to thank for that reference.
RF: I have a whole section on the origin of golf, that golf was originally a cover for mushroom hunting.
MM: Where? In Scotland?
RF: In Scotland, yes.
MM: This is an incredible revelation.
RF: A man at Muirfield told me “golf” is really an acronym. It means to GO Look For—mushrooms of course, which were prohibited by the orthodoxy. The game was invented to disguise their searches in the meadows and links land. He showed me an old manuscript he kept carefully hidden.
MM: I could refer to your text, whether it’s published or not. Listen, I would love it. I would just mention it in passing. GO Look For.
RF: Yes, to GO Look For. You see, I found the mushrooms at Muirfield. They grow there naturally. Psychedelic mushrooms I mean.
MM: Well you told me this.
RF: And played two under par from that point on.
MM: This is what inspired that reference.
RF: It finally got to be too much. Fortunately the fellow who gave me the mushrooms found me near the 17th green, on the ground, in ecstasy. He took me back to his home where I would be safe and warm. He cared for me till I came down and told me the story of the origin of golf.
MM: Oh God, Robert, you’ve got to publish this. Listen, can I . . . What’s the title of your book?
RF: Whole in One.
MM: I might refer to this.
RF: Tim should have known. If he wanted to transform society, he shouldn’t have insulted and antagonized the war mongers the way he did. He could have simply and quietly proved that higher consciousness makes life more meaningful in terms Republicans could relate to and aren’t threatened by. I suppose he tried that in the famed “She Comes in Colors” Playboy interview, but golf is more important than sex to Republicans. If word got out that small doses of LSD or psilocybin improved concentration, visual acuity, reaction time, and therefore improved golf scores, there could be another epidemic.
Your current madness, Michael, as you put it, is bodily transformation.
MM: But not cryogenics or something like that, no. I mean the graduation of the flesh into more luminous forms of embodiment. I like to talk of it as the human flesh mutating in accompaniment with mutation or the graduation of consciousness. Now I was oriented to that, Robert, as you know, by Sri Aurobindo, but the more I look into it, the more fertile it seems. That’s what my current book is about, by the way.
RF: Your sequel to Golf in the Kingdom?
MM: Yes. The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, meaning this metanormal embodiment, where Shivas seems to have transcended both life and death as we know them now. In other words, death will become a new deal and life too if we could live in this new flesh or if you want to call it “new spirit bodies.” I actually believe that.
RF: What happens to the physical body?
MM: I think just as consciousness by slow degress and sometimes large degrees can develop, you know, can expand, can graduate, however you want to describe it, can be suffused more completely in the light of God—so can the body. But the body then begins to change. Oh God, don’t get me started on this. That’s what The Future of the Body is pointed to. I’m going to write a follow-up volume to that. Not Volume II in encyclopedic form, but a more speculative book. For the rest of my life I’ll be working on that.