This is a work of historical speculation about the life of Dick Price in Big Sur.

This is a biography of Dick Price, the co-founder of Esalen Institute and the creator of Gestalt Practice.

Dick Price did not publish anything about his groundbreaking work during his regrettably short lifetime. However, he had many committed students who remember his teachings. This text is a reconstruction of Dick's most important ideas. It can be used as an introduction to Gestalt Practice as well as the other books published by The Gestalt Legacy Project.

Jeffers' Country -- Nature's highway -- Big Sur: utopia, U.S.A.? -- Open-space at continent's end -- The influence of the counter-culture, community, and State -- The "battle" for Big Sur, or debating the national environmental ethic -- Defining the value of California's coastline -- Epilogue: millionaires and beaches: the socio-political economics of California coastal preservation in the twenty-first century

An exploration of high intensity mental states as found in the psychiatric emergency room, in everyday life, in psychotherapy and in spiritual practice. There are certain unusual mental states that have such an extraordinary intensity, that they are numinous; they involve the presence of an archetype. These states can be beautiful or utterly terrifying, they can predispose to illness but if carefully negotiated they carry enormous potential for accelerated development. How can we understand this archetypal layer of psyche and how can we work with its power to promote psycho-spiritual growth? The author weaves the archetypal perspective into the psychoanalytic and medical models of mind to show us how the different layers of the individual and collective psyche intertwine to give us our rich experience of being human. Using everyday language and using case studies from clinical work in psychiatry and psychotherapy, the author takes the reader on a journey from: * Breakdown to breakthrough * Plato's cave to Jung's archetypal crisis * Genetics to transpersonal psychology * Hearing voices to post traumatic stress disorder * Psychoanalysis to psychedelics * The mid life crisis to the encounter with death * Quantum physics to synchronicity * Shakespeare to shamanism * Transcendent nature to mindfulness

Jeffrey Kripal here recounts the spectacular history of Esalen, the institute that has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education and stands today at the center of the human potential movement. Forged in the literary and mythical leanings of the Beat Generation, inspired in the lecture halls of Stanford by radical scholars of comparative religion, the institute was the remarkable brainchild of Michael Murphy and Richard Price. Set against the heady backdrop of California during the revolutionary 1960s, Esalen recounts in fascinating detail how these two maverick thinkers sought to fuse the spiritual revelations of the East with the scientific revolutions of the West, or to combine the very best elements of Zen Buddhism, Western psychology, and Indian yoga into a decidedly utopian vision that rejected the dogmas of conventional religion. In their religion of no religion, the natural world was just as crucial as the spiritual one, science and faith not only commingled but became staunch allies, and the enlightenment of the body could lead to the full realization of our development as human beings. “An impressive new book. . . . [Kripal] has written the definitive intellectual history of the ideas behind the institute.”—San FranciscoChronicle “Kripal examines Esalen’s extraordinary history and evocatively describes the breech birth of Murphy and Price’s brainchild. His real achievement, though, is effortlessly synthesizing a dizzying array of dissonant phenomena (Cold War espionage, ecstatic religiosity), incongruous pairings (Darwinism, Tantric sex), and otherwise schizy ephemera (psychedelic drugs, spaceflight) into a cogent, satisfyingly complete narrative.”—Atlantic Monthly “Kripal has produced the first all-encompassing history of Esalen: its intellectual, social, personal, literary and spiritual passages. Kripal brings us up-to-date and takes us deep beneath historical surfaces in this definitive, elegantly written book.”—Playboy

What have the hippies ever done for us? Matthew Ingram explores the relationship between the summer of love and wellness, medicine, and health. The counterculture of the Sixties and the Seventies is remembered chiefly for music, fashion, art, feminism, computing, black power, cultural revolt and the New Left. But an until-now unexplored, yet no less important aspect -- both in its core identity and in terms of its ongoing significance and impact -- is its relationship with health. In this popular and illuminating cultural history of the relationship between health and the counterculture, Matthew Ingram connects the dots between the beats, yoga, meditation, psychedelics, psychoanalysis, Eastern philosophy, sex, and veganism, showing how the hippies still have a lot to teach us about our wellbeing.

Yoga. Humanistic Psychology. Meditation. Holistic Healing. These practices are commonplace today. Yet before the early 1960s they were atypical options for most people outside of the upper class or small groups of educated spiritual seekers. Esalen Institute, a retreat for spiritual and personal growth in Big Sur, California, played a pioneering role in popularizing quests for self-transformation and personalized spirituality. This “soul rush” spread quickly throughout the United States as the Institute made ordinary people aware of hundreds of ways to select, combine, and revise their beliefs about the sacred and to explore diverse mystical experiences. Millions of Americans now identify themselves as spiritual, not religious, because Esalen paved the way for them to explore spirituality without affiliating with established denominations The American Soul Rush explores the concept of spiritual privilege and Esalen’s foundational influence on the growth and spread of diverse spiritual practices that affirm individuals’ self-worth and possibilities for positive personal change. The book also describes the people, narratives, and relationships at the Institute that produced persistent, almost accidental inequalities in order to illuminate the ways that gender is central to religion and spirituality in most contexts.

This is the revised edition of the manual of Gestalt Practice in the tradition of Dick Price, compiled by The Gestalt Legacy Project.

A failed West Point cadet would coin the phrase "turn on, tune in, and drop out." A confused seventeen-year-old from Newark planned to be an attorney but instead let loose with a poem called "Howl." An Olympic-caliber wrestler authored One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and spent the next twenty-eight years leading a band of merry pranksters on a cross-country, electric Kool-Aid odyssey... These were a few of the men whose radical ideas were forged in the black-and-white '50s. Before the 1960s turned into a frenzy of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, before Kent State, before a battered America fled from Vietnam, a seismic Technicolor shift was underway-led by a group of visionaries who collaborated, competed, went to jail, and fought against an Establishment that fought back just as furiously. From the last days of the Beat Generation to the strange history of LSD in America, from the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the fantastic, teeming celebration at Woodstock, from the civil right movement to the anti-war protests brewing at college campuses across the country, this phenomenal book will let those who were there rediscover the magic and those who weren't discover why the '60s was the decade to beat all others.... Book jacket.