MICHAEL MURPHY is co-founder and chairman of the board of the Esalen Institute. Murphy was born in Salinas, California, graduated from Stanford University, and lived for a year at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India. In 1980 he helped initiate Esalen’s Soviet-American Exchange Program, which was a premiere diplomacy vehicle for citizen-to-citizen relations, and which played a significant role in breaking down the barriers between the Russian and American peoples. During his forty-two-year involvement in the human potential movement, Murphy and his work have been profiled in The New Yorker and featured in many magazines and journals worldwide. Esalen, the world’s most famous growth center, is also a groundbreaking research site. Preparatory work for his book The Future of the Body began in 1977 with the building of an archive of more than ten thousand studies of exceptional human functioning. The archive has been donated to the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Michael Murphy in The Translucent Revolution:

“Meditation and prayer both are primal acts, like sex or defecation. We know instantly how to do them. Surrendering to the will of God or the life force,  is all stretching, going beyond your limits. I feel so good when I go past the limits."

Esalen Website