A version of this article has appeared in An Actual Man: Michael Murphy and the Human Potential Movement, Published by Esalen Institute, Edited by Jay Ogiilvy, 2010, based on an article published in translation in the Korean journal Here and Now, 2006
When the Esalen Institute was founded in 1962, with an explicit agenda of offering a forum to “everything that is excluded from the Academy,” certainly the youthful founders did not have in mind to invent (or reinvent) “experiential education” — much less to revolutionize the fields of adult education, lifelong learning, and a number of related areas in education, in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. The truth is, they did not have a very clear idea at all of how they might go about achieving that ambitious, and rather loosely-defined agenda. What they did have in mind was that they would simply invite the teachers, philosophers, writers and practitioners who interested them, and whose work was outside the mainstream of academic thinking (or outside academic thinking altogether). The result, they imagined, would be not an academic course but some kind of conversation — again what they were missing in their formal university educational programs (but finding, oftentimes, in their exploratory studies of Zen and other meditative forms and trainings, in the coffee houses and informal gatherings in San Francisco and other centers of the “beat” generation of the times, and in some emergent radical approaches to psychotherapy and group process studies).
To their pleasure and (it must be said, surprise), in the words of Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy, “everybody came.” “Everybody” meant the now-iconic names in the West, in the broad fields of consciousness studies, human behavior, psychotherapy and somatics, and philosophy — names such as Aldous Huxley, Fritz Perls, Gregory Bateson, Alan Watts, Fritz Perls, Ida Rolf, R.D. Laing, Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell,
Word spread, and interested and curious students came too. The question quickly became, what to do with these people, how to structure these “conversations” and other encounters. Some people lectured, some just “hung out;” but many — teachers and students alike — began to push for something more active, more experientially exploratory or “hands-on,” more practice-focused. In other words, something more like what so many of them had experienced, in many different ways, in their first encounters and trainings with yoga and meditation, with new forms of psychotherapy — or for that matter (looking more interpretatively, because this was generally not in their own awareness) in the “progressive education” movement that had left a strong mark on early childhood education in the United States and Western Europe before the War, and was now stirring again especially in England and the US. Or, if they had never encountered various kinds of explorations in “holistic” educational forms directly, then they might have read about them in the histories of philosophy and religion, in certain much-mythologized academies and religious communities of the more-distant past.
Looking back now, we can identify clearly all these strains in the new educational forms which began to emerge, at Esalen and elsewhere, in the 1960’s and beyond — all those forms which we now group loosely under the umbrella term “experiential education:”
1) From the yogic and meditative disciplines and practices of “the East” — especially the Vedantic forms introduced and popularized in the US by Swami Vivekananda around the turn of the 20th Century, and the tradition of Japanese Zen brought in the 1950’s by Suzuki Roshi — came the idea that a change in consciousness, a new idea or way of understanding the world at a deep level — was the consequence, not the cause, of a change in sustained praxis. That is, rather than the power of some abstract idea alone to reorganize one’s thinking and behavior (the model of much academic/ intellectual teaching, obviously, in the sciences but also in many other fields), these ways of learning and knowing emphasized something closer to the “conversion experience” — a kind of learning where one had to give oneself over (even if only for a circumscribed time) to a new way of behaving and possibly of being, so as gradually to “inhabit” (rather than to “master”) a new idea.
Psychoanalysis was of course one such “conversion practice”” which was popularly familiar and widely influential in the Euro/North American culture of the time; and certainly it was an “experiential practice” leading intentionally to a different worldview, and a different self. But of course psychoanalysis, which had been part of a radical, progressive fringe a couple of generations before, was now very much associateed with the mainstream establishment and mainstream conformist values by 1960. But the idea of a psychotherapy without coercive authority, and without the assumptions of psychopathology, was strongly motivating to the progressive generation at the time.
Now as the example of psychoanalysis illustrates, in the espoused and felt individualistic culture of the West, and especially of the United States any such “immersion” or “conversion” approach to education came with deeply ambivalent feelings and associations. Particularly in the immediate wake of a World War with the various fascist movements of Europe (and the emperor/deity ideology of Japan), and at the height now of the Cold War ideology, which at least officially pitted Western liberal/individualistic humanism against Communism — particularly in this context, any signing-over of personal authority and responsibility for one’s own life and behavior to a teacher or “guru” had to be regarded with deep misgivings. Indeed, the very separation of the spheres of science and religion, “knowledge” and “experience” (with the former definitely typed as powerful, male, and reliable — while the latter was culturally regarded as “soft,” female, and “only a feeling”) functioned as a solution to this kind of cultural dilemma. That is, that separation of spheres answered the question of how to transmit authoritative teaching (science), while still preserving a realm of personal autonomy (values). That these two were ontologically, irreconcilably separate was a bedrock principle of the post-Enlightenment technological age in the West, with all its achievements and all its then-recent horrors.
But if that whole notion, of separation of “knowledge” and “experience,” functioned as a solution to the authority/autonomy problem in the West, that solution was a very unsatisfying one to a new generation by 1960. Not only had that cultural paradigm been badly discredited by the sobering technological horrors of the War and the nuclear shadow hanging over the world at the time (and by the emergent cultural awareness of relativity and quantum physics), but it seemed to have resulted in the mood of “alienation” or loss of felt meaning which is captured in mid-century Existentialism in the West. Thus however ambivalently, the generation of 1960 was moved and driven to experiment with forms of learning that addressed and placed demands on the “whole person” — behavior as well as thinking, feeling as well as analysis “experience” as well as ideas.
2) From the Progressive Education movement, long championed in the States by pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (and in Europe by a long tradition of early-childhood education dating back at least to Pestalozzi in 17th Century Switzerland, and more recently by such reformers as Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner), came the notion of learning as spontaneous play, driven by natural curiosity, and also that human development followed a natural arc of hands-on experience leading to attitude and theory, not the other way around. Maria Montessori, for instance, was much dedicated to what we in the West sometimes call the Victorian ethic of disciplined self-application, clear resolution of life into tasks through analysis, and thorough accomplishment and completion of those tasks. However, she didn’t sit 4- and 5-year-olds at desks in rows and lecture them to inspire them with these values and capacities: she gave them tasks that were naturally interesting and challenging to them (sweeping is one classic example), and guided them to acquire these skills and internalize these values through their own experience.
Now what was radically new here, in drawing (somewhat unconsciously) on this legacy of progressive education in the 1960’s, was the idea of applying “play learning” and “hands-on learning” not just to children, but to adults of all ages. In retrospect, this step seems one of the most revolutionary leaps the founders of experiential education would take — and one of the most profound, as we look out today on a world in which lifelong development, self-directed learning, and adult education (and midlife career and lifestyle changes) are universal, even normative ideas. Indeed, in our world today of dizzying technological change, with all the ongoing restructurings of work life and thus personal life that result from that continual change at a rapid pace, the idea of lifelong development seems both a given of nature and a sheer necessity of the culture. But things looked very different a half century ago, under the dominance of a classical Freudian model which posited adolescence as the last significant developmental transition of the lifespan (as perhaps it often was, and is today, in the case of lifespans half the length of today’s norms in developed societies).
One model for radical teachers and their students of forty years ago in making this leap was of course the image of the creative artist. In the aftermath of the World Wars, the artist archetype, with its freer access to embodiment, pleasure (including erotic pleasure), non-conformity, and play, gained in appeal and even took on a romanticized glamour. It was not artists, after all, but scientists and “corporation men” who had given us mass civilian bombings, mass death camps, and doomsday weapons. In the culture of the United States, which had glorified business and technology almost to the exclusion of other dimensions of life, the time was ripe for a transvaluation of social archetypes, and social roles.
3) And then there was the appeal, for the religiously or academically inclined, of various iconic intellectual communities of the past, some of them plainly more “holistic” in the sense of including and valuing more dimensions of human experience than university and professional schools of the times were willing to do. These learning communities of the past — or romanticized images of learning communities — ranged as far back as Plato’s Academy, and up through various monastic enclaves of medieval Europe, Ficino’s academy in Renaissance Florence, and alternative religious or other intentional communities of 19th Century North America. And they very much included Western notions (and some experiences) of yogic or meditation communities of Asia as well. Of the two founders of Esalen, for example, Michael Murphy had spent a year in the 1950’s at the ashram of Sri Aurobindo in India, while both Murphy and Richard Price, the other founder, were very much involved in the early activities of the nascent San Francisco Zen Center, founded by Suzuki Roshi, one of the prime figures in bringing Japanese Zen to awareness in North America and Europe.
Thus we can say that there were at least three main streams of cultural sources and influences, that went into the emerging notions of experiential education at the time — or at least into the spontaneous practices that would lead to a more reflective idea of experiential education: the yogic and meditative traditions of the East, with their emphases on learning/practice in community; the American tradition of progressive education, including the powerful notion of play learning, now applied across the lifespan; and the romanticized (and often eroticized) images of philosophical and religious learning communities of the Classic Age, and of times since. To this we can add (as a kind of strong negative example, of pitfalls to be avoided in this area) psychoanalysis, with its authoritarian overtones which inevitably stirred echoes of the fascist (and communist) authoritarianism and conformism of the 20th Century in the West. These influences would be the cultural ground and context out of which a new birth of experiential education, as a lived and also articulated cultural form, would presently emerge.
The (Re)Birth of Experiential Education
And so Esalen Institute was founded, to offer a space, again, to “what was excluded” from formal higher education of the time. Plainly this realm, of things excluded, would now intentionally include the whole arena of consciousness and spiritual explorations and disciplines, which were marginal indeed in American education at the time — and largely cut off from the worlds of politics, physical culture or sport, or psychotherapy as well. That these spiritual explorations very much involved psychedelics and the study of “extreme states of being,” only made them all the more marginalized in a culture which already associated everything “spiritual” with the feminine and the “primitive,” and regarded this whole realm with considerable suspicion and mistrust.
Second only to this emphasis, in the early days of Esalen, were explorations and studies of the body. The idea that mind and body could not be meaningfully separated, as they emphatically had been in the Western rationalist tradition of the past several centuries, was very much a direct consequence of the impact of Asian traditions of consciousness and yoga. At the time in the West, the cultivation of the body was regarded with almost as much mistrust as the cultivation of spiritual experience; the only area excepted was vigorous competitive sport — and even here, sports heroes, like the other battle heroes they were associated to in the popular mind, were notorious for their neglect and abuse of their own bodies. To be sure, great athletes had their own private experiences of the exceptional states of consciousness often associated with those disciplines (and Esalen founder Michael Murphy would make this study, of exceptional consciousness experiences in athletes, a particular focus of his research). But all this was marginalized: there was no cultural discourse of these experiences.
And then of course there was the study of body experience — what came to be called “somatic studies” at Esalen and beyond, — inextricably tied up, then as now, with erotic exploration and sexual liberation. It was this heady mix — the physical, the mystical, the psychedelic, the healing, and the erotic, all with greater or lesser degrees of awareness and integration — which marked the explorations of embodiment at Esalen and other centers of the day. (And of course the countercultural tradition of radical and alternative sexual communities was also a lively influence, even if that tradition had died out or gone further underground in the repressive years between and after the two World Wars).
The next area officially excluded from traditional educational forms of the times was of course the emotional. The realm of “feelings,” like the realm of spiritual experience, was very much gender-typed as “soft” or feminine, and thus seen as disempowering in an aggressively masculine-typed technological world. Feelings simply had no place in intellectual inquiry and learning, which was seen as taking place in a completely separate domain. The emotions, in the mainstream world of the day, were to be “risen above” and “not given into.” If this was not possible, then the problem seen as was one for psychotherapy, a medical intervention to correct a deficiency. And psychotherapy itself, of course, was also very much seen as dependent, “feminine,” and therefore shameful.
Thus the realm of the emotional, and the exploration and expression of the emotions, would very much be part of the alternative educational agenda from the start. This was especially true at Esalen, one of whole founders, Richard Price, felt himself to be (and was) clearly a victim of the sometimes violent and destructive methods of psychological treatment of the times (in particular electroshock therapy and psychotropic medications). Price in particular would be an early leader in breaking down the barriers between what was typed as pathological, and what he and others saw as healthy, even essential personal development and self-exploration.
Explicitly intellectual studies themselves were of course emphatically not meant to be excluded from the new program of study. What was meant to be different was the particular content focused on, in alternative education. Common themes that were felt to have been neglected in the Universities included the history of mysticism and spiritual studies, the scientific study of consciousness and the effects of meditation, the new quantum physics and its implications for philosophy and self-understanding, philosophy itself (particularly the philosophy of consciousness), and certain areas of history (particularly the history of social radicalism and the application of that history to social action today).
And finally there were community, politics, and social action themselves. The old idea of the intellectual/academic activist, the more European tradition of a link between radical politics and intellectual study, had never really taken root in the more anti-intellectual culture of North America. Now, with the repressive political atmosphere of the Cold War, the Universities had generally grown even more conservative and conformist, more focused on turning out the technocrats/engineers who would fill the needed roles of a highly technological, business-oriented, and centralized government and corporate bureaucracy. Meanwhile the old agendas of social and racial justice, women’s rights, and civil liberties, which had been deferred and then buried in the West during the World War and then the Cold War, lay unaddressed, and were coming to a head.
At the same time, the isolation of American families into a nuclear-family, suburban living pattern, and the breakdown of old community structures of religion and small-town secular organizations, had left a powerful hunger for community in the generation of the 1950’s and 60’s. Thus community living, with all the relational/political challenges and learnings that would imply in a highly individualistic culture, would very much be part of the experiential education movement of the times.
But if this was the emerging curriculum at Esalen and other nascent centers — spiritual studies, the body, the emotions, the creative mind, and the realm of relationship/ community/politics, — how were they to go about studying these things? What would be the educational forms and procedures for such a study? To this question, it must be said, most of the early leaders of this counter-cultural “movement” probably had not given much thought.
If there was a clear intention or plan, it was mostly a negative one: avoid the forms and structures of traditional mainstream education. In their place was a more intentionally “ad hoc,” spontaneous notion more like: “make a space, invite the people, get out of the way — and see what happens.” Once the people — teachers and students — got there, then what they would not do would be to sit in chairs or at desks in rows, and listen to an expert lecture. There would be discourse, lecture, and discussion of course; but the mood of the students, once they arrived, was emphatically experiential, emphatically “hands-on.”
If we’re talking about meditation or expansion of consciousness, in other words, then give us an experience of meditation, teach us how and let us experience it — and then let us share those experiences, and learn from each other, as well as from the “expert.” If it’s altered states of consciousness that are the curriculum, then give us the tools for those altered states: psychedelics (mostly not even illegal in America at the time), as well as instructions for practice.
If we’re talking about the body, then let us put our hands on each other, and explore embodied practices. If the emotions, then take us into emotional exercises and self-exploration — right here, not off in the formal and authoritarian privacy of a psychiatrist’s office. If the content is more mental/intellectual, then let us see the “real-life” implications of the ideas on our worldviews and our behavioral repertoire — and let us experience the interplay between and among those new ideas and the realms of spirit, body, emotions, and relational life.
And if we’re talking about relationships, community, politics, then let us explore and experiment with our own relationships, our own community right here and now — and then use those explorations to stimulate our political and social-action projects out in the “outside world.”
Such were the implicit and explicit demands that students and teachers alike brought to Esalen and other emerging centers of those times. And out of these felt needs and demands, in a way that was often more spontaneous than planned, began to emerge a new educational methodology — and with it, a new philosophy of education. The new philosophy would be marked by holism (the idea that each of these areas had implications for the others), optimism (creative growth was possible and natural, for individuals and societies, all through their lifespans), the attitudes of philosophical existentialism (“here and now” focus on present experience), anti-authoritarianism (the felt experience of the individual, in interaction with the group, would “trump” traditional authority), and a deep faith in human creativity (new forms are possible, and our human nature is to seek and find them). The methodology of the philosophy would be pragmatic/experimental: to questions of truth, the answer was often, “try it.” Again, a kind of comparative, empirical, individual subjectivity would be the final authority — as opposed to the authority of tradition, positional prestige, or other forms of official power.
It seems obvious that any such “movement,” founded in anti-authoritarianism, spontaneity, and the primacy of personal experience over official forms, would resist definition or reduction into anything like a “curriculum” in the traditional sense. And yet in retrospect we can see that a clear curriculum of experiential education did emerge, and take on a kind of thematic resolution into “faculties,” or thematic clusters. We may call those faculties and that curriculum the “Human Potential Curriculum.” The faculties of that curriculum will be examined briefly below.
The Emergence of the Human Potential Curriculum
This new social/educational “movement” soon acquired a name, bestowed on it by the popular press out of the themes and slogans of many of these explorations: the “human potential movement.” The term carried in it the radical assumptions of this new educational methodology: optimism, openness to new creative possibility in an unlimited kind of way, holism, and an accent on “the human,” meaning life as lived, here and now.
With its spirit of holism, in opposition to the fragmentation of academic training then and now, and building on experiential, exploratory methods and forms, the core curriculum of the movement had soon organized itself into five coherent basic areas or “faculties,” in the dual sense of that word. One sense is “faculty” meaning a facility, a capacity or dimension of skill or experience; and the other is “faculty” in its sense of meaning a “department of studies,” as in the “faculties” of a university. This duality of usage is relevant here: the whole point of experiential education as a movment was that those two sense of the word had become separated in academic studies, and must be reintegrated with each other, as related aspects of human inquiry and experience.
Those faculties, which may be regarded as natural dimensions or aspects of human experience and the conditions of human conscious life, are the five basic areas listed above, as clusters of inquiry excluded from the academic life of the times. Taken together, they comprise the Human Potential Curriculum. Again, the five faculties of the Curriculum, in the order they are often found :
1) “mind” — the cognitive realm: This is of course the faculty of the Curriculum which most resembles mainstream traditional education. The differences here, as discussed above, have to do first with the particular topics concentrated on, which are generally those currently excluded from traditional academic institutions (particularly consciousness studies, in the early days of the Curriculum). And second are the particular differences of method introduced by the Curriculum: in place of the passive, expert-model learning that still characterizes much traditional education, we find an emphasis on participatory learning, active experiment, and interpersonal enactment.
2) “body” — the somatic system — To us today, with our more sophisticated scientific picture of the brain/body system and the distribution of “intelligence” (in the sense of regulatory nervous system processing) throughout the body, the degree to which “mind” and “body” were treated as separate systems just a generation ago, may seem astonishingly naive. It is worth reminding ourselves that holistic health is still an “edge” topic in our cultures, scientifically recognized and supported today, but still not an integral part of mainstream life.
Along with this recognition of the indivisability of the “mind/body” system has come as well a renewed celebration of embodiment and the life of the body “for its own sake.” Topics such as expressive movement, touch therapies, the “inner world” of sport, and a new valorization of the erotic dimension of life (long marginalized or even demonized in the puritanical cultures of the West) are expressions of this dimension of the Curriculum.
3) “heart”– the life of the emotions: Again, in today’s age of cognitive neuropsychology, PET scans and other tools for brain imaging and “real time” neuropsychological study, we have the empirical evidence to back up the counter-cultural insight of several generations ago that cognition was inseparable from emotion, and indeed importantly governed and steered by emotional factors and reactions. The old idea that feelings and emotional reactions had no place in the learning process is no longer tenable. Memory formation and retrieval, motivation, and the possibilities for individual or societal change, we now understand, are all dependent on affective processes in the “mammalian brain,” and cannot be meaningfully or usefully separated from those processes.
This dimension of the Human Potential Curriculum has been the domain of radical and transformative psychotherapy, and the study of the interactions among emotional dynamics and the other dimensions of the Curriculum, discussed below. In particular this faculty or area of study has been both the inspiration and the result of the collapsing of the old separation between “psychotherapy” and “lifelong personal growth and development.” Again, the transformational insight here has been that human development and transformative, empowering change do not come to a standstill in early adulthood. Rather those deep changes are (or can be) ongoing throughout life. Most importantly for the Curriculum is the insistence that the meaning, quality, and social impact of an individual life are directly related to the ongoing cultivation of this human faculty on a lifelong basis.
4) “spirit” — the transpersonal dimension: In mainstream culture in the West, after the “scientizing” of philosophy and social institutions that characterized the whole industrial era, the dimension of “spirit” was not so much marginalized as insulated in cultural life — officially somewhere at the center of life, but institutionalized into mainstream religious structures, and kept somewhere safely separate from the worlds of science and business — and from the other dimensions of the Curriculum.
It has been a central part of the agenda of the Human Potential to put spiritual exploration and spiritual experience back into the center of human life in a holistic way. Characteristically for the action-oriented flavor of the human potential movement, the answer of the Curriculum to the mid-century malaise of Existentialism in the West was more experiential than theoretical/systematic. That is, to a mood of meaninglessness or existential despair about purpose or place in the cosmos, the Curriculum’s answer tended to be: Wake up, pay attention to your body and your feeling states, engage with your world and those around you, and explore consciousness through meditative prac tices (as well as psychotropics and other means). In other words, rather than trying to answer a dilemma or dead-end in Western philosophy with purely verbal or cognitive/ philosophical tools, the Curriculum insisted that the problems in one domain (in this case, the domain of “mind”) cannot be usefully addressed, without drawing on the other dimensions. Again, the Curriculum is holistic in a real way.
5) “the social” — the domain relationship, community, and political engagement: Here we come to what we might call the “shadow” dimension of the Curriculum — always there in practice, yet slower to come into focus and clear discourse in the extreme individualistic ideology of the mid-Century Western world. The entire spirit of the Western liberalizing bourgeois tradition of the past half-millennium in the West, after all, had been based on the glorification and exploration of the individual, in opposition to the oppressive social and political tyrannies of church, state, and society. Both the articulation of psychological interiority and the advance of human rights in the West were fruits of this individualistic thrust and legacy.
What was sometimes lost in this emphasis — or at best taken for granted — was and is the inherent social relatedness of our human natures. By mid-20th Century in the West, again, that very relatedness could look like our most dangerous enemy, in a Western world that had somehow produced Nazi and Communist tyrannies, both of which glorified the communal over the individual. Thus this faculty of the Curriculum often tended to get left out of the discourse. “Holistic” education itself was often summarized as addressing “mind, body, heart, and spirit” — period. At times the entire world of social relatedness, all the way from deep personal intimacy to community life to macro-politics, was assumed to have been squeezed into the realm of “heart,” or “compassion.” At other times this entire dimension of irreducible, inseparable human experience was simply left out of the discussion altogether.
And yet it was always central to the Curriculum in the enactment. Holistic or experiential education, to state the obvious, has always taken place in groups: the learning community was at the heart of the movement, one of the three main inspirational sources discussed at the outset of this essay. Group dynamics and group process have always been both basic tools and also productive outcomes of the Curriculum. Progressive political activism as well has been a prime characteristic of experiential education. And yet in discussion, the “holistic” picture of human nature that the Curriculum was founded to express and explore, could often seem “monadic,” in the sense of being made up of a universe of utterly separate selves, floating around in a world of separate self-exploration and self-expression.
Today, as we feel more acutely the social and personal costs of the loss of meaningful community in mainstream life, we can see more clearly the social and personal costs of marginalizing this dimension of the Curriculum. We will return to this topic briefly below in the conclusion to this essay.
The Curriculum in Holistic Perspective
Applying the tenets and methods of the Curriculum to our examination of the Curriculum itself, let us step back and look at this the model of experiential education itself in a holistic perspective. One way to do this (in a move very characteristic of the Curriculum) is to “switch brain hemispheres,” from left to right, by making use of an image as a counterpoint to a linear verbal discussion. Consider this diagram, which represents these five dimensions of the Human Potential Curriculum as points on a single star diagram, both contained in a circle and also interrelated with all the other points:
*Organizing them in this way gives us more than a list: it also gives us an opportunity to see something of their interactions, their synergies, and the holistic implications of the Curriculum as a whole. Drawing on both Vedic and Native American traditional terminologies, the five faculties of the Curriculum here are termed “spirit body,” “mental body,” “emotional body,” “relational body,” and “physical body.” Labeling them in this way emphasizes the holistic meaning of the human potential perspective: they are all inseparable components of a single human body or self. When we take up contact and relationship with our world and the others in it, all of these dimensions are implicated. When one or more dimensions are marginalized, denied, or otherwise underdeveloped, the whole person suffers. And his/her effectiveness in the world, and capacity for full human living and personal evolution, suffer as well. This is the meaning of holism, and the meaning and use of the Curriculum itself, and of this model.
The notes on the lines of connection between and among the points on the circle are just that — notes. That is, these are not the only possible labels to put on those lines. We might for example put the label “ethics” on the line from emotional to relational body. Or we might put the term “group dynamics” or even “psychotherapy” on that same line. The point here is not to fix permanent or “correct” labels — but rather to use the diagram to examine the interaction of these various dimensions, and to focus on what would be missing from the whole, if any of the dimensional points were removed or obscured.
Likewise for the spaces or triangles within the pentagram. The largest triangles we might conceive as practices — sustained disciplines of the whole person, aiming primarily at the coordinated development of three points. Thus a practice like sport or dance may often involve both the physical and the relational (in coordination with a partner or a team). If this coordinated discipline is then practiced with a transcendant or transpersonal focus (the spirit body), then that triangle is “lifted out” for focus and consideration. If the same discipline is practiced with focus on the emotional body, then expressive dance or therapeutic sport might be the nature of the practice.
Again, the diagram serves to help us “play” with the ideas and implications (remembering that “play learning,” as one of the central insights and tenets of the progressive education movement and early childhood learning studies, is one of the inherited focal themes of the human potential movement itself, and of this Curriculum.
Conclusions — Alternative Education in Relation to Mainstream Culture
The Human Potential Curriculum is a way of organizing, viewing, and prioritizing the components of experiential education, and the program of an alternative educational program. The five “faculties” of the curriculum — mental, embodied, emotional, relational, and spiritual — are the dimensions of human development and human living. Taken together and looked at in this way, they help us to see the curriculum of experiential education as a whole, and to know where and when we are offering — or not offering — what is needed in the larger culture that surrounds and contextualizes our “alternative” institutions.
Alternative education institutes exist, after all, always in relation to a wider cultural environment and context, which by definition is “not alternative,” or is “mainstream.” This is why we undertake an alternative educational project in the first place: because something is missing in our surrounding cultural setting — and because that something is something essential, for the ongoing progress and development of our societies and our world, and of ourselves as participants in those societies and that world. Thus the content and priorities of the offerings of a particular alternative institution will change over time, as the culture around it changes.
At Esalen Institute, for example, which is now in its fifth decade of life and influence, the focus and priorities have shifted and evolved over the years — but always within the context of this larger, holistic vision. Thus in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when disembodied mental development (and aggressive sport) were dominant influences in Western education and culture, Esalen and many other institutions pioneered the exploration of spiritual studies as part of human development, emotional exploration, somatic experiment and development, and interpersonal dynamics. What still often lay “in the shadow” of this work, relatively less developed and brought out at the time, was the extension of the other dimensions into the world of community and social/political action. (To be sure, Esalen and many other centers were themselves living communities with community dynamics and processes; but a direct focus on the “outside world” was often missing in this period, especially as the dynamic student movements of the late 60’s faded into a period of greater political apathy).
As this political apathy and withdrawal often tended to increase into the 1980’s, one reaction at Esalen was to develop a new political initiative and outreach to the Soviet Union, at the height of the Cold War. After more than a decade of sponsoring conferences and gatherings (at Esalen, in Moscow, and in points between) that included Soviet astronauts, scientists, writers, economists, artists, and eventually highly placed politicians, Esalen had built a network of cooperation, within the context of mainstream division and enmity between the Euroamerican and Soviet blocs. This story — including Esalen’s sponsoring of Boris Yeltsin’s first encounter with the West, his emotional conversion from Communism, and his role soon thereafter, as Mayor of Moscow, in blocking the attempted coup in Russia in 1991 — has all been recounted elsewhere, and certainly serves here to illustrate the disproportionate influence a small countercultural or alternative project may at times have on the larger mainstream environment. What matters for us here, in relation to the Curriculum, is that it illustrates as well what may happen as centers like ours, with a holistic vision of what is needed for full human and social evolution, may themselves evolve and focus on different issues at different times. Always our agenda is what is in “the shadow” — what is being marginalized and neglected in our wider social context.
Today, more than ever, our world culture — and especially perhaps our hyper-individualist Western culture — suffers from a lack of a truly holistic perspective. True, we have shone a light on the neglect of the body, the emotions, and the spirit over the decades of the second half of the 20th Century in the West. But on a cultural and political level, holism today has to mean the whole political world. No more can we focus on the development of “the individual,” without equal focus on the social, cultural, economic, and political surround. Our world today is one global economy, gradually integrating; one global ecosystem, integrating and cross-influencing faster than we even like to admit; one system of biology, health, and epidemics; one system of security and social order; one integrated demand for social justice and the decent conditions of human life that will permit and foster health, development and welfare for all. As the American revolutionary patriot Benjamin Franklin put it over two hundred years ago, at this point we will either find the way to all “hang together,” — or we will surely all hang separately.
Holism, that is, is now not an idea or a perspective, but an urgent political reality. The work of developing the full individual human being through focus on what is neglected in mainstream society, is our shared mission in our shared field of alternative education in the widest sense. By undertaking this work in a consciously holistic way — a way that keeps in mind the full context of the Curriculum for human development, even as we focus on the particular themes and content that appeal to our different institutions and projects at different times — we ensure that the development of the individual is also the transformation of the social whole. This work, of transformative individual and social development, is ultimately a spiritual quest. Its ultimate meaning is transpersonal. This is politics in the highest sense. Let us all dedicate and rededicate ourselves and our institutes together to this perspective, and this great work.
