http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Esalen The Esalen Institute is a Human Potential Movement think-tank and center in Big Sur, California, founded in 1962. They were central to the development of the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and are sometimes cited as a direct forerunner of the New Age movement. Esalen holds a number of courses, retreats, seminars, encounter groups, and lectures.
Esalen sometimes turns up in conspiracy theories about the New Age movement claiming some nebulous ties existed between Esalen and the CIA or Department of Defense, hence leading to claims the New Age movement is a vast CIA experiment, such as in the conspiracy theories of Texe Marrs and Lyndon LaRouche. For the skeptical movement, such ridiculous conspiracy theories are a distraction and detrimental to serious analysis of Esalen's teachings and the extent to which they incorporate pseudoscience and woo.
A rather wide range of people associated with later human consciousness movements are Esalen alumni. They include psychologist
B.F. Skinner and Carl Rogers,
Werner Erhard, LSD gurus
Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, liberal Protestant theologan Paul Tillich, Zen teacher Alan Watts, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey, counterculture figures Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner, and Buckminster Fuller.
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