Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [71]
—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1996
Many millennia ago, the Esselen Indians of the California coast frequented natural hot springs just south of what later Spanish explorers would name Monterey Bay. The near-boiling waters of the hot springs cascaded out of the cliffs and into the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean below. The Esselen found the sulfur-rich waters relaxing, the morning mist and afternoon sun rejuvenating, and the spectacular views of mountains and beaches breathtaking. It was a spiritual center, a place to go to renew one’s soul.
In 1910, with the Esselen Indians long ago extirpated by European guns, germs, and steel, Dr. Henry Murphy purchased the land and constructed tubs to capture the hot springs for the restoration of his patients’ health. In 1962, Dr. Murphy’s grandson, Michael Murphy, and an associate named Richard Price transformed the site into a center for the nascent human potential movement, calling it the Esalen Institute in honor of the original residents. Today, Esalen is a cluster of meeting rooms, lodging facilities, and architecturally elegant hot baths all nestled into a stunning craggy outcrop along the Pacific Coast Highway.
Over the decades Esalen has hosted a veritable Who’s Who of savants and gurus, including Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Paul Tillich, Arnold Toynbee, B. F. Skinner, Stanislav Grof, Ida Rolf, Carl Rogers, Linus Pauling, Buckminster Fuller, Rollo May, Joseph Campbell, Susan Sontag, Ken Kesey, Gregory Bateson, John C. Lilly, Carlos Castaneda, Fritjof Capra, Ansel Adams, John Cage, Joan Baez, Robert Anton Wilson, Andrew Weil, Deepak Chopra, and even counterculture icon Bob Dylan. I had long wanted to visit Esalen, ever since I read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, in which the Nobel laureate Caltech physicist Richard Feynman recounted his experiences in the natural hot spring baths there. In one particularly amusing tale, a woman was getting a massage from a man she just met: “He starts to rub her big toe. ‘I think I feel it,’ he says. ‘I feel a kind of dent—is that the pituitary?’ I blurt out, ‘You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!’ They looked at me horrified and said, ‘It’s reflexology!’ I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.”1
With this background to the mecca of the New Age movement, I was delighted to receive an invitation to speak at a conference there on evolutionary theory that featured an eclectic mix of participants: an anthropologist, a philosopher of religion, a Buddhist monk, a biophysicist, a philosopher of mind, an evolutionary biologist, a psychologist, a complexity theorist, a business entrepreneur, and a skeptic. The lectures and discussions were wide-ranging and diverse, but focused on the philosophical, religious, social, and spiritual implications and applications of evolution. My talk on the evolutionary origins of morality led to an invitation to teach a weekend seminar on science and spirituality at Esalen the following summer. Given my propensity for skepticism when it comes to most of the paranormal piffle proffered by the prajna peddlers meditating and soaking their way to nirvana at Esalen, I was surprised that the hall was full. Perhaps skeptical consciousness is rising!
The workshop was enriching for all of us, but it was in the extracurricular conversations—during healthful homegrown meals served cafeteria style with informal group seating, and while soaking in the hot tubs—that I gleaned a sense of what people believe and why. Once it became known that Mr. Skeptic was there, for example, I heard one after another “how do you explain this?” story, mostly involving angels, aliens, and the usual paranormal fare. But this being Esalen—ground zero for all that is weird and wonderful in the human potential movement—there were some singularly unusual accounts.
One woman