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 Francisco"" Chronicle"
"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 completenarrative."--"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"

For too long, critiques of religious thought have been delivered exclusively in clinical scientific terms, intentionally stripped of emotion by the nature of analysis. The trouble with the approach is that to argue only by science or reason is to implicitly concede to religions that their positions hold superior poetry or emotion, which is untrue. Having provided a comprehensive intellectual treatment of religious thought and its ample failures in his first book on the subject (What Are You Without God?), Christopher Krzeminski offers this collection of prose poetry to give sound intellectual critiques of religious systems while simultaneously mimicking the emotional withdrawal process of an emerging atheist through the arrangement of the selections. Leaving religious thought is a transforming maturation exercise for both one's intellect and emotions, and I Am demonstrates that there is great music and poetry to be found in that struggle.