Voices of Esalen

In this episode, Sam Stern speaks with Bill Drummond, a clinical consultant psychologist based in Wellington, New Zealand, where he serves as Clinical Leader for Youth Mental Health Services across the region. Bill has spent more than a decade working with young people and families in public mental health settings, supporting adolescents facing trauma, anxiety, depression, family instability, identity confusion, and complex mental health challenges. His work spans acute care, community-based mental health, schools, hospitals, state care systems, private practice, and clinical supervision. Together, Sam and Bill explore -what is happening in the inner lives of young people today — especially in a world where diagnoses, social media, algorithms, and AI can offer instant explanations for pain that may still need time, relationship, and embodied attention to fully understand. -the rise of diagnostic identity - the difference between “I have anxiety” and “I’m feeling anxious" - why he approaches young people with curiosity rather than correction - the appeal of AI and social media as sources of validation, particularly for adolescents who may already be biologically primed toward threat perception, self-consciousness, and emotional intensity. https://www.wholeself.health

Today we revisit a 1971 talk by Dr. John C. Lilly: physician, neuroscientist, tireless psychonaut, and one of the most audacious explorers of consciousness in the twentieth century. John Lilly was a frequent teacher at Esalen and a close friend of Esalen co-founder Dick Price. He begins teaching at Esalen as early as 1968, focusing on what he called the human biocomputer and lecturing in part on “isolation, solitude, and confinement experiments.” Lilly is widely known for three things; first, he invented the first isolation tank — a dark and silent vessel filled with a saline solution that is meant to suspend the body and expose the mind to itself. He made his first one in 1954. Second, Lilly was convinced of the possibility of interspecies communication, notably between dolphins and homo sapiens. And finally, Lilly was an early experimenter with ketamine, from a psychedelic point of view, an interest that ultimately led to an addiction which drove him quite mad. However, during this talk from 1971, he is in great form, speaking about the concept and practice of Satori: the instantaneous awakening, the shock of direct perception.

What if AI was capable of being more than just a new and improved Google search? What if there was ways to harness its predictive powers for growth, self-realization, or even freedom? Today we'll hear from four thinkers: Larissa Conte, a leadership guide and systems healer with a focus on power, on the principle of mutual co-enactment. Then we hear from Cecilia Callas, co-founder of The AI Salon, about convening global conversations that wrestle with the societal stakes of technology. Next is Sadia Bruce, Esalen’s Director of Product, who speaks candidly about using AI as an adjunct to therapy. And then Sam shares his own journey, from glitchy AI songs and translated prayers to the creation of a new weekly circle at Esalen called AI for Social Good. It’s a messy middle full of experiments, missteps, and glimpses of possibility. Larissa Conte & Wayfinding Website: https://www.wayfinding.io/ Weekly Contemplations: https://www.wayfinding.io/community AI Summer Camp: https://www.wayfinding.io/ai-summer-camp LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larissaconte/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lbconte Cecilia Callas: Substack: https://ceciliacallas.substack.com/ RemAIning Human podcast: https://ceciliacallas.substack.com/podcast AI Salon: https://aisalon.xyz/ Sadia Bruce: IG: @breathisalanguage Esalen: https://www.esalen.org/faculty/sadia-bruce https://www.esalen.org/post/the-proust-questionnaire-sadia-bruce-012023

Today I’m super excited to present to you another episode from the Archives From this trove of 1/2 inch reel to reel tapes that we recently found mouldering in a storage facility near the Monterey Airport - a 1966 dialogue between Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy and philosopher Alan Watts and today is PART TWO— notable for being one of the only instances I've encountered of Michael Murphy conducting an interview himself. But hey, when it’s Alan Watts, all bets are off. So, first, who is Alan Watts? He’s born in England, but moved to the United States in 1938 to pursue Zen training in New York. Then he attended a Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, got a master’s degree in theology. became an Episcopal priest in 1945, left the ministry in 1950 and then he moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. It was during the 1950s that he met Dick Price and Michael Murphy - both of whom were kicking around the Bay Area after their stints at Stanford, trying to figure out what the heck they were doing with their lives. It’s widely known that Watts represents this pivotal figure in the transmission of Eastern philosophical traditions to Western intellectual discourse. By the time this conversation rolls around in 66, he had long since established himself as a rather famous interpreter of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Hindu metaphysics for American audiences. He’d had a rise to prominence in the 1950s which coincided with a broader cultural receptivity to Eastern philosophical frameworks. The Beats, early hippies, young people, intellectuals - they were all fascinated by Zen and the I Ching and Buddhism. At Esalen, where Alan Watts taught from the very first days in 1962 up until his death in 1973, he really found an ideal context for exploring the synthesis between Eastern contemplative traditions and this Western psychological inquiry which was coming to the forefront. And then the temporal context for this interview bears mentioning, too. This conversation occurs at a moment of considerable social upheaval: we’ve got an escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, and a pushback at home, we’ve got the emergence of several countercultural movements, including the civil rights movement and a rather new hippie/ pyschedelic culture. There’s a widespread questioning of established institutional authority. So it’s within this milieu that Watts and Murphy examine fundamental questions about human consciousness and the peculiarities of American cultural expression. And of course all delivered in that million dollar voice by Alan Watts. I mean, He could read a Denny’s menu and make it sound profound. To me, this is a treasure of a conversation - even though it’s historically situated, it addresses still-relevant questions about consciousness, about cultural development, and about humanity's place within larger systems. It also provides a lot of insight into the intellectual atmosphere that characterized Esalen's early years, when the boundaries between disciplines were very permeable and fundamental questions about human nature were approached with both rigor and imagination. Here's Alan Watts, interviewed by Michael Murphy, at Esalen Institute in 1966.

Fletcher Tucker - Big Sur artist, Esalen faculty member, independent musician, and wilderness guide - is a kind of spiritual cartographer and wild-hearted philosopher of the sonic and sacred. He has a new album, Kin, which is the focus of this conversation. Kin is a ritual, a spell, a window into the more-than-human world. It is a collection of drone-based, chant-infused compositions built with ancestral instruments like Swedish bagpipes, bowed zithers, and elder flutes. In this conversation, Fletcher walks us through the making of Kin, which emerged over years of wilderness pilgrimage through the Big Sur backcountry; songs that were written while walking, chanted into being beside waterfalls and totemic boulders, assembled later with vintage Mellotrons, and dulcimers that seem to hum with the memory of older worlds. We talk animism, and Fletcher’s embrace of a concentric, non-hierarchical cosmology where stones, rivers, ancestors, and unborn children all participate in the great chorus of being. We talk proximity and kinship and enchantment; “Radical Permeability” as Altered State; the Tassajara Zen Center Influence; Emotional and Aesthetic Complexity; Birth as Ceremony; life-threatening snowstorms; Polyphonic Compositions; clear vinyl and Streaming and Digital Ethics; and Wildtender, the organization Fletcher co-founded with his wife, Noel Vietor. Fletcher Tucker: https://www.fletchertucker.com/ Wildtender: https://wildtender.org/ Kin on Bandcamp: https://gnomelife.bandcamp.com/album/kin

In this episode, we speak with Anne Hamilton, founder of the Survivorship Collective: a survivor-led initiative offering legal, psychedelic-assisted therapy to people living with cancer. Anne is an educator, filmmaker and breast cancer survivor whose own journey through illness (and a life-altering psilocybin experience) led her to ask deeper questions about grief, mortality, and transformation. We talk about the liminal terrain of survivorship, the limitations of conventional medicine, and how a psychedelic journey helped her metabolize the kind of fear no doctor could treat. Today, the Survivorship Collective offers safe, science-informed, and deeply human psychedelic support to people facing the hardest truths life throws at us. Spread the Word: https://survivorshipcollective.com/help-us Retreats: https://survivorshipcollective.com/retreats