ESALEN SEMINARS ON THE NATURE OF REALITY
Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA
is the flagship of the Human Potential
Movement, the first of many "growth centers" dedicated to
enhancing people's lives rather than merely curing their ills. In 1976,
Esalen co-founder Mike Murphy decided "to put some spine into Esalen"
and opened the grounds for a month to a group of physicists under the auspices
of Jack Sarfatti's San Francisco-based Consciousness/Theory Group. One
of the outcomes of the P/CRG era at Esalen was Gary Zukav's successful
physics popularization "The Dancing
Wu-Li Masters". The Esalen Seminars on the Nature of Reality led
by Nick Herbert & Saul-Paul Sirag succeeded P/CRG at Esalen and for
eight years continued to invite distinguished scientists to stroll along
the Pacific cliffs, sit in the hot sulphur baths and air their views on
reality in the same rooms where Aldous Huxley, Fritz Perls, George Leonard,
Gregory Bateson and numerous other exotic mind- and body-workers had worked
their magic.
The Esalen Reality Seminars focused mainly on problems at the foundations
of quantum theory, most especially the notorious "measurement problem"
(Altho "measurement" is central to both theory and experiment
in physics, no physicist is able to tell you exactly what happens during
a measurement) "Measurement" is problematic in Quantum physics
in a way it was not in Newtonian or Relativity physics.
Coincidentally with the physicists' exploration of their measurement problem--how
mind contacts matter in a physics experiment--the gestalt therapists at
Esalen (Fritz Perls, Dick Price
and others) were exploring the question of how mind contacts matter in
ordinary life.
Much of our work in Big Sur concerned the meaning of Bell's
Theorem--a recent proof that the world deep down is "non-local"--criss-crossed
everywhere with underground superluminal connections. In 1980, under the
auspices of the Reality Foundation, ESNR awarded the First "Reality
Prize" to John Clauser & John Bell for their pioneer work in uncovering
nature's necessary deep non-locality. Bell proved that if the EPR experiment
actually produced the results predicted by quantum theory, then no local
model of Reality could explain these results. At that time, no one had
done the experiment, but John Clauser, convinced that the world was local
and that quantum theory was wrong--at least in this instance--performed
an elegant optical experiment at Berkeley which, much to Clauser's surprise,
confirmed quantum theory and established deep non-locality as a necessary
feature of the physical world.
Participants at ESNR included Henry
Stapp, Bernard d'Espagnat, David Finkelstein, Ariadna Chernovska, Rudi
Rucker, Beverly
Rubik, Dieter Zeh, Ralph
Abraham, John Clauser, Philippe Eberhard, Beverly Kane, John Cramer,
Elizabeth Rauscher, Larry Bartell, Geoffrey Bubb, Mort Weiss, Ann Manly,
Tom Etter, Phil Keukes, Jerry White, John Holmdahl, Nick Damaris, Helga
Wild and many others. Our seminars were immeasurably enhanced by the presence
of the Esalen community most notably Michael & Dulce Murphy, Gregory
Bateson, Al Huang and Richard Baker Roshi who were all somewhat amused
at the presence of so many wordy scientists on the grounds of the world's
foremost "institute for the non-verbal humanities".
The information, insight and inspiration gained in these Esalen seminars
greatly enriched Nick's books on quantum
reality, superluminal signalling
and mind science and continue to
inspire his explorations into quantum
tantra.
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