Voices Of Esalen

For the past several years, I’ve been lucky enough to work closely with the famed and slightly disorganized Esalen archives, diving deep into the history of this extraordinary place. I’ve fashioned several multimedia talks out of the material that I’ve uncovered, one on the history of altered states at Esalen, another on the 1970s and 80s. And recently, I had one of those rare, thrilling moments that every archive enthusiast—every crate digger, like me—dreams of. A while back, I made a trip out to a storage facility near the Monterey Airport, with the producer of this podcast, Shira Levine, and we found boxes upon boxes of historical materials—photographs, slides, notes, VHS tapes, catalogs. As I sifted through them, I stumbled upon something incredible: a box filled with 5” reel-to-reel tapes, very likely recorded in the 1960s and ’70s by a man named Paul Herbert. This was the kind of find that makes you stop in your tracks. Material that had been thought lost—or at the very least, forgotten—suddenly resurfa