Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Michael Murphy, Co-Founder of the Esalen Institute

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

This week’s conversation is with Michael Murphy, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the board of the world famous Esalen Institute, tucked away on the coast of Big Sur, in California.Michael and Esalen have been ground zero for the human potential movement: exploring everything from consciousness, Eastern philosophies meeting Western frameworks, the birth place of Gestalt therapy, to generating scores of mind body interventions.In 1950, Michael was a premed student at Stanford and wandered into a class discussing Eastern and Western philosophies and religions.The miscue changed his life.Soon he was meditating and, after earning a bachelor of arts in psychology and serving in the U.S. Army, he lived on an ashram in India for 18 months.Upon returning to the United States, he and the late Richard Price started Esalen on property the Murphy family owned. Over its 50-plus years of existence, it has been described as a “personal growth think tank.”The organization is focused on personal growth, meditation, massage, ecology, yoga, psychology, spirituality — there was nothing quite like it at the time.Michael is also an author.His work includes: ·     The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature, Golf in the Kingdom·     The Life We Are Given: A Long-Term Program for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul·     In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports·      An End to Ordinary HistoryIt's a gift to laugh with him and learn from Michael, and I'm honored to share our conversation._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Finding Mastery is brought to you by Remarkable. In a world that's full of distractions, focused thinking is becoming a rare skill and a massive competitive advantage. That's why I've been using the Remarkable Paper Pro, a digital notebook designed to help you think clearly and work deliberately. It's not another device filled with notifications or apps.

It's intentionally built for deep work. So there's no social media, no email, no noise. The writing experience, it feels just like pen on paper. I love it. And it has the intelligence of digital tools like converting your handwriting to text, organizing your notes, tagging files, and using productivity templates

to help you be more effective. It is sleek, minimal. It's incredibly lightweight. It feels really good. I take it with me anywhere from meetings to travel without missing a beat. What I love most is that it doesn't try to do everything. It just helps me do one very important thing really well,

stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. We have to respect the need in all of us at times for a timeout, whether it's for on weekends or it's for sabbaticals. We have to learn to be skillful in living in the two worlds, the world of being and the world of becoming. All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais. And by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist and the co-founder of Compete to Create. And the whole idea behind these conversations, behind this podcast,

is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery, to better understand what they're searching for, the deep stuff, the true stuff, their authentic path. We want to understand their psychological framework, which is how they make sense of themselves in the world and explain events. And then we also want to dig to understand the mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true.

Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people. It takes the right tools, the right information at the right time. And that's where LinkedIn Sales Navigator can come in. It's a tool designed specifically for thoughtful sales professionals, helping you find the right people that are ready to engage, track key account changes, and connect with key decision makers more effectively. It surfaces real-time signals, like when someone changes jobs or when an account

becomes high priority, so that you can reach out at exactly the right moment with context and thoroughness that builds trust. It also helps tap into your own network more strategically, showing you who you already know that can help you open doors or make a warm introduction. In other words, it's not about more outreach. It's about smarter, more human outreach. And that's something here at Finding Mastery that our team lives and breathes by. If you're ready to start building stronger relationships that actually convert, try LinkedIn Sales Navigator for free for 60 days at linkedin.com slash deal. That's linkedin.com slash deal for two full months for free terms and conditions apply. Finding Mastery is brought

to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals on a demanding day, certainly, I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David Protein Bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put them on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening.

I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so much. I just want to kind of quickly put them on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them. One a day, one a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell. Okay. All right. Look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits. My favorite flavor right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know, Stuart, you're still listening here.

So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life. When you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David D A V I D proteinT-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Okay. This week's conversation is with Michael Murphy, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the

board of the world famous Esalen Institute. If you're not familiar with them, I encourage you to go check them out. E-S-A-L-E-N.org. That's www.esalen.org. And it's a center that's tucked away on the coast of Big Sur in California. And Michael Murphy and Esalon have been ground zero for the human potential movement, including exploring consciousness and the Eastern philosophies meeting Western frameworks. And it's known as the birthplace for gestalt therapy, including generating scores of mind-body interventions. In the 50s, Michael was a pre-med student at Stanford, and he wandered into a class discussing East-West philosophies and religions. And that miscue, it changed his life. Soon he was meditating, understanding and exploring mindfulness and the inner domain. And after earning a bachelor's degree in arts and psychology and serving in the US Army,

he lived on an ashram in India for 18 months to really become immersed in what he was fascinated by. Upon returning back to the States, he and the late Richard Price started Esalen on the property that Murphy's family owned. And over its 50 plus years of existence, it's been described as a personal growth think tank. Like this really rich ideas have come and sprung from the origins and the grounds of the Esalen Institute. And the organization is focused on personal growth and meditation and massage and ecology and yoga and psychology and spirituality. And there's really nothing quite like it at the time in the 50s and 60s. And it still holds that position now in modern times. And so just as a quick glimpse of the spirit of the Esalen Institute, this is what it reads on their website. The people, more than 750,000 people who have come from all over the world to participate in Esalen's 50-year-long Olympics of the mind, heart, body, spirit, and community, committing themselves not so much to stronger, faster, and higher,

as to deeper, richer, more enduring in the fellowship of other seekers. Michael's also an author, and the first book that grabbed my attention that he wrote was called The Future of the Body, Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. And it's good. It's really good. He also wrote Golf in the Kingdom. He wrote The Life We Are Given, a long-term program for realizing the potential of the body, mind, heart, and soul. He wrote In the Zone, Transcended Experiences in Sports. He also wrote An End to the Ordinary History. And those are just a few of the books that he's written. Now, how do you capture Michael? He's wise.

And I can just leave it at that. His contributions have created a ripple of significance and his spirit is infectious and his presence is felt. And it's just a gift to laugh with him and to learn from him. And I'm honored to share our conversation with you. So with that, let's jump right into this conversation with Michael Murphy. Mike, how you doing? Doing real good. Here's how I understand you. Of course, correct me if I'm off on this. The way that I've understood what you've done and the man that you are, that you have pushed boundaries, you've gone into the recesses and the corners and the places of the human experience to explore and understand the depth and the boundaries of the human experience.

And I've loved knowing what you've done and the times that we've met. I've really appreciated it. So I'm honored to have this time with you. And I'm nervous because I know we're going to go places and I love it. And I love it. So thank you in advance for this conversation. You know, Fritz Perls, the famous gestalt therapist, he always said the best kind of anxiety is suppressed excitement. That's right. Suppressed excitement. Okay. So I'm barely going to be able to suppress it because I want to lead off with, you know, people know you from your books that you've written and the Esalen Institute. So can you just talk just to start a little bit about the Institute

and then we'll go to some books and then we'll rewind and get into what it was like growing up, what the forming experiences were for you to be a world leader in your space. Okay. But you don't want to go straight to the subject we've been talking about, a supernormal experience no i yeah just before the mics turned on that's the thing that i know you have a real keen point of view about but let's start with the the institute well i started uh esalen in 1961 uh this the story of its founding is very very dramatic i think we should decide later if we're going to circle back to it it's been it's been much told there's a big book called Esalen yeah by Jeff

Kripal who's now our chairman he's a very prominent professor of religious studies and he's really a religious historian and that story is we had what you might call a breech birth. It was wild. I had had the dream to do this center a couple of years earlier and had approached my grandmother. Grandparents owned this beautiful property that's a couple of miles of Big Sur Coast. My grandfather had bought it in 1910, had wanted to create a spa. He was a doctor and he'd built some hospitals. He had died in 1948 and there was the beginnings of the buildings that are down there now. But she told my father, who was getting to be the executor of her estate, she had made a lot of money.

No, we can't give it to michael because he will give it to the hindus and uh how old were you i was well i was at this point i was 30 i i hadn't gone to work yet they were you know they were amazing the room they uh gave me to go on my way when i was at stanford and when i gotten inspired by, well, primarily through a professor of comparative religions, Frederick Spiegelberg. And I was actually a sophomore when I, by mistake, went into his class and heard him say that Atman is Brahman. Anyway, it changed my life. I was 19. I came back to, and anyway, to make a long story short. Oh, no, no, no, no.

Keep going. Keep going. Because I want to share something that happened to me when I was the same age. So keep going on this story. Okay. Yeah. Well, okay. So I, it led in short order to me dropping my pre-med. I was, you know, I was kind of, the family had kind of wanted me to be a doctor,

and then I thought, well, I'll be a psychiatrist, et cetera. Anyway, I dropped out of pre-med. I dropped out of my fraternity, and it was a shock to my family. It was to hear their son, the yogi, now 20. I'd been a, you know, in high school, the student body president. I had a scholarship to Harvard. Instead I went to Stanford. I get to Stanford immediately. My fraternity brothers wanted to run me for office and pretty soon I was now going to run for student body president at Stanford. And suddenly

he's a yogi, the son. It was a shock to the system. But I, in any case. It was a shock to the system. But I, in any case... Was it a shock to you or was it a natural garage? An inspiration. It was an overwhelming inspiration to me. The moment where you met the professor. Well, the trigger was in this first lecture, when I heard him lecture. I walked back to the fraternity after having heard that lecture and said my life will never be the same. So, and it was, I had gotten in there by mistake because they had switched classes.

So to make a long story short, I stayed in the class. And over the course of the spring quarter of my sophomore year, he introduced us to the Vedic hymns, the Upanishads, different religions, and the mystical core. He was a stupendously gifted, educated in Germany, and got out, you know, before Hitler could get him in 1938. But he ended the course with the work of the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, that became my primary conceptual framework for my inspiration. Aurobindo had a vision of the cosmic advance giving birth to a supernature that's latent in us. To quote Henri Bergson, that the universe is a machine for the creation of gods. This was the basic philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, but he was not only a philosopher, he had been an Indian independence leader. The first one to call for

complete independence had been before Gandhi. So he was a man of this. So he spoke out of realization. So this was a stupendous revelation to me and it really set me on a course so that by the next year, my junior year, on one night by the Lake Lagunitas, I took vows. This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. Okay. Stop here. Stop here. Brilliant. I can't wait to get to the vows. I want to go back to the moment when you first met the professor or there was a thought that you fell in love with.

Do you remember that thought? Well, I'm writing my memoir right now. It's a work. It's not a kiss and tell book. It's not about all the boring side. But I'm trying to write about the through line of my life. And I'm calling it Memories and premonitions because when i got anchored in this vision when i was 20 and then later when i went to live in india when i was 25 i realized more and more that i'd had premonitions of this starting really in my mid-teens so that it had been dawning on me this basic vision is that something's trying to be born in us that is beyond what our everyday world is telling us so and then i had a little inventory of the

ways and means that i had gotten i'm now 14 15 and i uh and you know i had my list of practices. I was a very religious kid. I was the only churchgoer in my family. So I was an older boy, starting when I was 11. And sometimes during the Holy Communion, Episcopalian. But I would have these moments. I can only say they're very religious, deep religious moments. So this was one way in for me, but also through music and through friendship.

This was one of my ways. This is a 14, 15-year-old constructing a philosophy. And sport, interestingly, very early on, because we had, I had the most fortunate life in the world of sport. That's another story. But so when I got to Stanford, the, let's call it the unwarranted part, the superstitions, I never could believe most of the teachings of this Episcopal Church. I couldn't. It was the inner core.

It was the spiritual experience that I had. So the spiritual but not religious thing was upon me. But so in the first year at Stanford, I just, I more or less threw away my Christian beliefs, you know, the virgin birth. As for whatever reasons, I was never attracted by Jesus. It was always God, the transcendent God. I can never remember praying to Jesus and angels and so forth and so on. All of that went completely out the window when I got to Stanford, learned about evolution and all of this. But the wake of this in these first two years along with the rejection of mainstream religious beliefs came this revelation of this mystical experience

that is at the heart of all the religions but embedded through our bindo in an evolutionary worldview that says that the divine is transcendent and imminent. It is beyond this world, but it is within this world. And the super magic that happens all the way along is when these two connect. The Star of David, you know, people think, well, that's simply a Jewish symbol. It's not. It's even more ancient. Judaism is a very old religion, but you find it in a lot of Neolithic cults. And what is it? These two triangles intersecting. The bottom triangle pointing up, this is matter aspiring to spirit. You can read it this way. The top one is the spirit of the transcendent answering the call from below. And when I see athletes who come up with this kind of language, it's interesting.

The most recent dramatic one is with Paul Richardson. He had uh drafted high and then he got injured and so finally this past season he started making unbelievable catches and he told the papers that he said i want to make i want to do things there in which god reveals himself to the world and i thought here's this i don't know him but uh it's this kind of tell that comes out of the very heart of the athletic world. I'm sure he doesn't know about the Upanishads. He doesn't know about panentheism. He doesn't, but for him to want to say that and then to watch him do what he does, which a lot of it was not fully appreciated. I mean, he really did things that look physically impossible. We could talk about it. This sort of event I have been recording now for half a century. And that is the

bottom triangle again of that, that in us, which is embedded in our flesh, which is subjective, I want to argue, even in inorganic matter. It's certainly in the living flesh. It's latent. It presses in various ways to find expression, and then there's an answering grace that is given, the language of grace that these moments are given. Now, even in Buddhism, where there is no God, in those schools of Buddhism where there's no personal God, so they don't have a language of God given, but it's non-attainment, the language of non-attainment, of sudden, surprising, out-of-the-box disclosures, total surprise. It's one of the hallmarks of these moments of surprising yourself even we all do this all the time i mean to say a sentence i have no idea what this next sentence is going to be but i know damn good and

well that i'm going to be able to finish it with a nice period at the end now you see i did it okay i didn't rehearse that it just happened happened there. Okay. We do this all the time. We're always surprising ourselves. But I just, now to come back again, that's a lengthy way around. No, it's brilliant. All I want to say is that that first moment with Friedrich Spiegelberg was something new, and yet it revealed something that I never had the words for. There is nothing in Christianity, or even in English,

that is the exact equivalent of Atman. Which is, now we can talk about that as just a word. We need better language for this. Atman, the deepest self, it's been translated that, our deepest identity, ultimate subjectivity, boundless. Now you get these descriptors they have in the Upanishads. It is without boundary, and it's always there, it always had been, it's eternity.

You can go right to it, but it's the seed of all power. And the minute you can get to it, you know that Atman is Brahman. Brahman is a word for everything. You call it everything. Everything above and below, it's the entire world. Atman is Brahman. Now that's a realization that comes with that. But anyway, so he lectured on that, my professor, in that first lecture for an hour at Stanford because the classes had been switched. I didn't even know I was going to be in there. Do you remember the title of the book that you worked from in that course?

Well, he had a variety of books. He himself had compiled a book called The Bible of the World. You know what? What? I read his book. And this is like a similar story between you and I. That's not a big deal that I read his book, but it was one. So I want to share this quick story with you is that I got into a junior college. I was a knucklehead in high school, couldn't quite figure it out. My parents said, either get out or go to junior college. I said, well, if I go to junior college, I can still surf. And so I went to junior college and then it happened. A psychologist, a philosopher, and a theologian, Dr. Cusio, Perkins, and Zanka, they were great friends.

They wrapped their arm around me. I fell in love with the invisible. So it was the contemporary, it was the theologian that taught the class on contemporary world religions. So a comparative world religion course. Guess whose book it was? Spiegelberg? Yeah. Bible of the World. Yeah. That's far out. That's, yeah, I know. Seriously. Really? Yeah. I'm going to go double check this, but I think it's a purple. It had like a purple cover on it. Well, it did. It had a big, well, it was a bluish, I wouldn't call it all the way to purple, but it was thick. Really thick. Yeah. And it had selections from all the way through the different religions.

Yeah. That was the text. That is far out. So, okay. So I want to, What is the language that you're just speaking? What are those words? Well, those are from Sanskrit. Atman, Brahman. How do you spell them? Well, Atman, A-T-M-A-N Brahman, B-R-A-H-M-A-N B-R-A-H-M-A-N

Atman, Brahman. Now, they're translated in different ways, but I was lucky through Spiegelberg to get the most sophisticated translation. But you can think of Atman as, it's a reflexive pronoun in some usages, so it simply means itself. But it's translated often as the deep, the deepest self. It's the deepest core of who you are. Okay, so when we talk about finding, exploring, being in touch with your authentic self, is that, are we talking about the same thing? Okay, you're going to immediately to the very basic and very deep complexities.

I think it's fair to, yes, you could say yes. The straight, immediate, clear answer is yes. It's our deepest authenticity. A lot of people experience this kind of thing, I'm home again. I'm home. I've gotten home. And the practice to which it arises from contemplative practice, the deep sense of Atman. And we can talk about the range of practices, but one of the most basic is the principal thing of not only of observing your mind and your feelings, but of learning how to drop any feeling or any thought, standing back from, entering the witness self. So now some people want to translate Atman as witness self, but that's a step.

I would say that's a step towards Atman. But pretty soon you, there's a space in which you're, you find yourself in which you say all the contents of your mind, your thoughts, your feelings, your actions. Now there are words for that. Okay. I can give you some, all of that is one thing. And that in which it arises is Atman. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not

your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for life. And to do that, they developed what they call the Momentus standard. Every product is formulated with top experts and every batch is third-party tested. NSF certified for sport or informed sport. So you know exactly what you're getting. Personally, I'm anchored by what they call the Momentus 3. Protein, creatine, and omega-3. And together, these foundational nutrients support muscle recovery, brain function, and long-term energy.

They're part of my daily routine. And if you're ready to fuel your brain and body with the best, Momentous has a great new offer just for our community right here. Use the code FINDINGMASTERY for 35% off your first subscription order at livemomentous.com. Again, that's L-I-V-E, momentous, M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S, livemomentous.com, and use the code FindingMastery for 35% off your first subscription order. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Felix Gray. I spend a lot of time thinking about

how we can create the conditions for high performance. How do we protect our ability to focus, to recover, to be present? And one of the biggest challenges we face today is our sheer amount of screen time. It messes with our sleep, our clarity, even our mood. And that's why I've been using Felix Grey glasses. What I appreciate most about Felix Grey is that they're just not another wellness product. They're rooted in real science developed alongside leading researchers and ophthalmologists. They've demonstrated these

types of glasses boost melatonin, help you fall asleep faster and hit deeper stages of rest. When I'm on the road and bouncing around between time zones, slipping on my Felix Grays in the evening, it's a simple way to cue my body just to wind down. And when I'm locked into deep work, they also help me stay focused for longer without digital fatigue creeping in. Plus, they look great. Clean, clear, no funky color distortion. Just good design, great science. And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray.

You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. Okay, so the place that information comes from, is that the same as the authentic self? Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes, the answer ultimately is yes. You are stepping into that which has given rise to the world itself. But you can get a first opening into this, and you get it.

But to access all this material is not automatic. That depends on your life and on your practice. And the contemplative practice that you're talking about, it literally is observing without judgment yes thoughts and or emotions or feelings sensations and or a spot on the wall or something that is right you're working deeply to engage in yes so what this is this is the the... There are a lot of varieties of this. Okay, Zen training. Right. Zazen.

You're sitting here. You're simply observing your breaths. Okay. In Vipassana, Buddhist practice, that's a different school of Buddhism. You're simply observing your thoughts, and then you can start practicing letting them go. Or you can, in Dzogchen, this is a practice out of Tibetan Buddhism, where you literally nip your thoughts in the bud. It's arising, drop it.

It's arising, drop it. And, of course, new thoughts will arise. What happens in all these things is Atman emerges around the practice. Not from within or underneath, if you will? Well, these are all metaphors. Okay. Within, above. Okay.

You can't locate it in space. It's beyond space. You're getting beyond space and time. You start on that. So you can say within is one way to talk about it, but you are in a way letting your ordinary self imitate the ground of your being. Well, that's really good. You're allowing your ordinary self to imitate the ground of your being. So in other words, the ground of your being is the beginning. Yes, it's the beginning.

It's always beginning. It's the eternal beginning. That's right. It's always fresh. There's a Sanskrit word, anuragha, always brand new. When you get into this, everything's a surprise because everything's brand new. Each moment is brand new. I just had this conversation with a brilliant mind about novelty. And we're talking about confidence and like as a skill to develop. And so we're going back and forth respectfully about the conversation about, no, no, no, hold on now. Every moment is brand new. So how can you gain this thing of confidence from your past?

I think we need to flip the model on its head and say, no, embrace the completely new 1,000 is by definition, anxiety for so many people that we end up embracing the, the, it feels to me like a, uh, a raindrop that is, uh, like a daily raindrop, right? And so you wake up in the morning, like the rain is dropping and my work, my job is to get into the center of that raindrop and ride it. And so that's the way I feel like when I'm fully attuned and fully present, I'm riding that raindrop. And some people are going to listen to that and go, Mike, what have you been doing? Like that, what are you talking about? But that's me trying to get to the center of now.

Well, that, okay, that visualization of yours has its own power. We can come back to this. We could, if you want, come back and talk about how visualization, which is a different practice than this self-observation, this dropping thoughts. And then nipping. Yeah. Do you use that progressively? But I would like to say one, what did you say? I'm sorry. Yeah. Do you use those in progression or do you see them as parallel tracks? Well, there are just different ways to start meditating. I like to say this.

When you make a fundamental move towards your deepest self, you know, then you start being meditated. You're not meditating. You're being meditated you're not meditating you're being meditated now uh we uh some of us i and a couple of colleagues compiled at that time it was the largest bibliography of meditation research you can access it now because through the institute of noetic sciences it's online you can go and it's they keep uh developing it they're about seven eight thousand good solid studies of meditation now and what it shows is that when you start a practice like this all sorts of changes start to happen in you it's a rich literature for example your brainwave patterns start to change

your hormonal profile uh your mastery of your own interior states definitely improves and um now there's beginning to see evidence this is solid change in the the tissue of your brain gray matter yes it's amazing yes and that's where this 10 000 hours of practice comes in uh that the expert performance people, you know, Anders Ericsson and all, talk about. They don't come at it from this angle. But meditation research shows that there are some several scores or dozens, several dozen changes that come for free from meditation. For example, your saliva changes. And some group of dentists up in Seattle got onto this a long time ago. So, you know, they started to study this. They put them on meditation and pretty

soon, less cavities and less impurities in the saliva. Now, I have never met in my life a single person who practiced meditation to improve his saliva. I've never met anyone. At Esalen, there have been thousands of people, but no one comes there to improve their saliva. But it just happens. When people are stressed, you can smell it. Yes. It's pouring out of them.

And there's something about what happens in the salivary glands and the cortisol that's released. And so it's probably something toxic that's taking place. I don't know what that neurochemistry is, but I can nod my head to it. And then so. So these are given. And so in this practice, you blossom around the stem of your practice. So this is why the consistency of practice, it's like to think of that practice like a stem, and then it blossoms. All of these things happen. But meanwhile, this first primal act of your meditation, let's say it is dropping. Oh, I love that.

Wait, say that again. Your primal act. The primal act of your meditation, or however you do it, if it's aimed right, it's going to grow and give birth to an amazing array of stuff. But you have to keep doing it. And you have to. Now, there is a craft to this. And there are all sorts of upaya in Japanese, skillful means.

There's a craft to how to nurture this practice. And furthermore, it's a fact that meditation in a communal setting can help virtually most of us get a lot of support because part of what comes out of all this is something that becomes contagious to others. And this is the secret of great team play and great jazz bands and symphonies. I could go on and on and tell you what i found out about this the contagion of right practice okay let's get into this okay well actually god bless it i knew this was going to happen there's like 15 things i want to ask you no no i love it okay so contagion of right practice yeah okay i want to hit that and I want to come back to I really want to understand how you've been able to say no to things that societal pressures told you you should be doing.

And so I'm going way back to your first sentence. And then I want to ask you about glimpses of potential. Will you remember to come back to that? Because I know you've got some stories about how you've been able to say no. You said no to medical school. You said no to Christianity. You've said no to a lot of things that I'm sure you had opportunities to. When I took the vows that night at Stanford, and I had been in Spiegelberg's class starting nine months prior.

I was a sophomore. Anyway, so now I came back. I stayed into his course, and it was just on fire. I was really on fire. And that night, it just came with overwhelming force that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And what was this? To embody this vision, this worldview. Of Atman? Well, that Atman is Brahman is part of it. But the main door opener on my worldview was Aurobindo, who has this vision of the cosmic advance giving birth to ever higher disclosures of its latent divinity. Now, I've written about this subsequently, and I argue that this worldview has been trying to be born in its crystalline form since about the 1790s.

So, you know, it's through the German idealists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Okay, Schelling, the German idealist. No, they didn't know about the big bang then they didn't even know about evolution but they knew about the world advancing they could see that by the late 18th century all across europe and america the developed countries were catching on first of all the world is much older than they thought and it's going somewhere and some of them wanted to say it's all the way back into the animal kingdom they can see these animals getting more complex and can do more things than the arrival of consciousness in humans. So that vision has been born all along the way.

But Schelling's famous phrase is the deus implicitus, the divine implicit in matter, in organic matter. Now we would say at the big moment of the big bang the deus implicitus in the course of time is giving rise to the deus explicitus we are manifesting the divine so it's interesting when a um a wide receiver is telling the world the sports reporters that he wants to create a situation in which God can reveal himself through the things he, Paul Richardson, is doing. I thought, isn't that beautiful? It's just so beautiful that here's a guy who doesn't know about any of this stuff, and he's doing it, and he's got a language for it, and he's somebody I wanted to talk to about that. How did he come up with such a phrase?

I have a lot of these examples. I've written books about them. But the deus implicitus. So I had all of this cooking in me on the night I made my vows. I could have told you the same things then. I was 20. And that vision, in its primal acorn form, let's say like an acorn, I said, I want to grow this into a mighty something.

And it's interesting that that most dominant phrase that came to me that night, I want to help the divine enter the earth plane, come to the world. And it's just another way of saying this, to embody this latent possibility that is pressing everywhere in the universe to disclose itself. It's our human possibility to facilitate it. So that sort of thinking was in me, and I wanted to give my life to it. And took those vows and I would say Mike that that

has been a through line all the way through my life I've meandered plenty because evolution meanders as much as it progresses I mean we are meandering we're exploring creatures and then we fall off our vows I've fallen off my vows but I've been relentless in staying on it and building Esalen and writing my books and establishing my little practice community, Integral Transformity Practice and so forth. Okay. What does this phrase mean to you? The animation of the Holy Spirit. The animation. The animation of the Spirit. Some might say Holy Spirit,

but the animation. Is that your phrase? No, it was first introduced to me by Thich Nhat Hanh. The animation. The teaching of his. Yeah. So the animation of the Holy Spirit, I'll describe what I think it is for a moment. It's those moments of time where the full aliveness is in my full aliveness or somebody else that I'm witnessing. There's complete alignment between thoughts, between words and actions or, or thoughts and actions. And that harmony and alignment is like tapping into the center of, or, or the, what did you phrase? You talked about like, um, words, and actions. And it's noticeable. You can't help but feel it. And others, if they're around it, now stitching it back to the contagion effect, it's like, wow. And so that for me is this really powerful transcendental experience for...

Yes. We're talking about the same basic thing. So when you made a vow, did you make the vow to yourself, to somebody else, to God? What was that vow? Yeah, that's a very good question. It was a primal vow. It's both to myself and to the divine.

Let's say you think of the Star of David. The bottom triangle is spiring up, the one responding from above. And our Bindos in the middle, it was a symbol he adopted. In the middle was a lotus, which his name in Sanskrit derives from a certain kind of lotus. So he used that as a personal symbol. But it also stood for that seed in us, which is, you know, in many systems is located in the heart. And it's the seed of the divine that's there waiting always to blossom.

So you could talk this way, that your vow, my experience that night was it was not a vow to, in any conventional religious way, it was not a vow to Jesus or anyone else, but it was a vow. And I've come to feel that vowing is another aspect of the, another primal move in transformative practice affirmations and vows in other words you you can say that there are certain primal acts that bring us into alignment and help us get into this divine disclosure and vowing is one of them and that has a different tone to the word commitment like commitment has a very western business like there's something about the word commitment. Like commitment has a very Western business. Like there's something about the word commitment and vow feels more, more like there's a sanctity to it. Do you see a difference in those? All right. Now this is, these, that's, this is a very, that's a very

interesting distinction. I, um, vow taking or affirmations, we do this in our practice community, Integral Transformative Practice that I started with George Leonard. You did? Yeah, the two of us started this, 92, and it's now gone forward. There are groups around, and we're working on these things. So affirmations are very important. But so vows. In Buddhism, one formulation is there are three kinds of vows. There's life vows. And this would be also be in the Western, you know,

if you're a Roman Catholic, a life vow. There's the daily vows. And then there's long-term vows around particular acts. But you're going to be a better person in all the different ways. So you're going to vow to improve with your integrity or with your chastity. If you've had vows, that's when it has to be revowed a lot. But if you're in the contemplative ascetic mode, people tend to fall off that vow fairly fast. So you have to get back to chastity. But let's say in our group. Chastity means purity? No sexual intercourse.

Let's say if you're a monk or if you're an ascetic. I took a vow of celibacy. So I was a virgin until I was 32. Come on. Yeah. Wow. Right. Because in high school, back then, you know, we kissed the girls in our class.

Nobody slept with anybody. There were other groups at Salinas High School that people were starting to have, you know, sleeping with one another. Our group was not. I got to Stanford, and I got hit by this thing as a sophomore but in any case i it was not really that hard for me it came it naturally to me and enabled me to duck a lot of bullets i mean who did you meet at 32 well well now this open this now we go down a long this would be a long chapter of my relation to sexuality. And this has been very big at Esalen and so forth. Because now, and this leads me around to another set of things.

Are you going to avoid this part of the questions? Well, if we start on this, this will take up an hour. So it's a complicated thing. I got to know about her. I mean, that's phenomenal that you waited 32 years. Yeah, 32 years. So this is the whole idea of the integral that is important too. That Atman is Brahman by itself is not enough. Can you describe that? I know I'm remedial, but can you describe Atman is Brahman one more time for me? Atman, our most basic subjectivity, the deepest subjectivity we have is Brahman, one with the world. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep.

It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I tend to run warm at night and these sheets have helped me sleep cooler and more consistently, which has made a meaningful difference in how I show up the next day for myself, my family, and our team here at Finding Mastery. It's become part of my nightly routine.

Throw on their lounge pants or pajamas, crawl into bed under their sheets, and my nervous system starts to settle. They also offer a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty on all of their bedding, which tells me, tells you, that they believe in the long-term value of what they're creating. If you're ready to upgrade your rest and turn your bed into a better recovery zone, use the code FINDINGMASTERY for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. That's a great discount for our community. Again, the code is FINDINGMASTERY for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Caldera Lab. I believe that the way we do small things in life is how we do all things. And for me, that includes how I take care of my body.

I've been using Caldera Lab for years now. And what keeps me coming back, it's really simple. Their products are simple. And they reflect the kind of intentional living that I want to build into every part of my day. And they make my morning routine really easy. They've got some great new products I think you'll be interested in. A shampoo, conditioner, and a hair serum. With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding

more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. So when we're connected to our most authentic, our deepest, our truest self, we are connected to everything that is true. I would say to everything, everything, even everything. So it's not like just the true is connected to the true. It's it. Okay. Now, yes. Now to make this real, let me give some examples that when people hit these deep moments and their mind isn't prepared, nobody's told them about this, they, you know, in these games, Bill Walsh, the great 49er coach, would say that one of the secrets is you sacrifice yourself.

You give yourself up and sacrifice the roots. Sucker, sacred, feis from fischio. You make sacred. Sacrifice. Where does feis come from? Well, it's ficcio. It's Latin. It's the root of fuck. It traces back through these languages. It's to make something. To make something. Yeah.

You make love. Okay. You make sacred. Sacrifice. so what happens is these guys give themselves up they're all out and they often go into these altered states but then immediately collapse back and they've learned growing up and starting in high school these athletes to you know control it it happens so anyway this one guy comes into the locker room and this is a good story. He looks at his buddy and he says, you know, you and I are one. So the buddy looks at him and says, we're buddies, all right. And he says, no, no, you don't get it. You and i are one and uh so the friend as i was told the story said well we're pals and turns and away to get dressed in his locker wherever he is this guy says no you don't get it

you know and finally they say it's time for you to go take a shower and they shove him into the shower he's having this disclosure you and i one. He was transported into this moment. And very often these moments happen and no one around the person having it can understand what they're going through, seriously. And this is a problem in athletics. I have taken confession from more practicing athletes along these lines, maybe than anybody on the planet after I wrote Golf in the Kingdom, which was published in 72. So people want to, if they see me at a golf course, they're

going to come up, there's going to be somebody who says, like Father Murphy, they want to tell me about their latest mystical experience on the goddamn golf course. And so I hear this stuff all the time. But nobody told me. They read this book and said, now I understand. Now I understand. You know, you need one friend. And sometimes you find that friend in a book. Yeah. You know, that's a really cool thought because I don't know where I was introduced to the idea. It wasn't long ago, but it was a catchy little phrase about the importance of your five most important people or your closest people in your life. Like you become the average, the saying was you become the average of the five people in your life, spiritually, financially, economically,

whatever. Okay. And I love the idea that you're just bringing up though, the importance to be connected to people that are working towards something that is rich and deep and pure and true. Because if you're not around them, we're in trouble. Well, that's part of the secret of, a large part of the secret of Pete and the Seahawks. He had that going at USC. He's, you know, he's into this. And if you're around a team and all these great teams, you know, Phil Jackson was, it was, you know, read the golf in the kingdom when he played for the Knicks. And Bill Bradley, Bill Bradley told me they both had it, you know, as their book when they were playing for the Knicks.

And then Phil went on to 11 NBA titles. He gave Michael Jordan, uh, uh, golf in the kingdom. He also, the future of the body game, there was an article in the Chicago Tribune, uh, Michael Jordan and the future of the body. And it was an amusing article, you're still Jackson giving in this. He gave him future of the body. Yeah. Both the future of the body and go for the kingdom. Well,

for the kingdom, when I read golf for the kingdom, I was like, wow. Okay. Like I I'll tell you my story when I was 19 in a, in a minute, but further than that,

but I felt like I was a different kid than most of the other kids, my age. So I had to hold back. Like I would, I remember I was really young and my parents asking, so what'd you think of star Wars? And I just went, I was like six and I said, well, it's the traditional battle between good and evil. And you know, that struggle is inside of all of us. And my dad looked at me and he's like, son, what movie did you just watch? So I've always felt like I had this, I had to hold in and hold back and not be the kook. That's a surf word, right? Like not be the one that is. And then I start getting around people that are completely switched on and animated and there's a freedom that comes with it. And so coach Carol, same way, like he'll go as far into the recesses and these, the conversations that he and I have, I hold them in, in, in high regard and they're wonderful and they're complicated and, you know, and you've had those, those conversations with them over the last 30 some years. Yeah. So anyways, uh, really, really,

yeah, well, we need, we need friends on the way. And now the world needs more language, more understanding. And that's why I started Esalen, is to create a place. Well, the idea was to have a place where no one captures the flag. We didn't want to have a cult. I had been vaccinated by that time twice against cult. It's a metaphor. No, I love it.

Yeah, I'd been in, first as an undergraduate, while I was having this great awakening. Because you know what? You could slip people into being cultish around you. For sure you can. Oh, yeah. And I've got aversion to that experience. Not that I've ever been in one or that close to one, but it doesn't feel right. Well, this is one of the great challenges of our age because we're individuating. Now, this is where to know Atman is Brahman and all that, you can be in that state

and still be captured by a cult. And you get a guru. And this happened all across America, starting in the 60s we we had a big window into this at esalen i mean it was a pilgrimage point it still is for people and so the but and they're always available gurus to to kind of gather folks and that there is a lot in us that wants to find big daddy uh and at some level be taken care of. Which, okay, it's a divine impulse to be with others who share this vision and who support you. And that's healthy. The Buddha said, seek out the Sangha.

But when you get into one of these cults that gets sick and starts, the guru not only is teaching you about Atman and Brahman, but is also saying that he can do your income taxes and you should donate to him immediately and et cetera, and all the ways these cults go wrong and hundreds of ways. So we wanted a place that no one captured the flag. That was our motto. But start a world impactful conversation and exploration of this latent potential. And we flew under the flag of human potentialities, which is a very open and very cool term. You know, everybody's for the human potential. But we also had a focus and we continue to have it to this day. a part of it is we can talk a lot about this is finding a common language and we have to make an ever richer language to talk about

this like the guy in the locker room he couldn't he didn't know ever heard of atman is brahman or he didn't hear about any of this but but he had the insight. He had the experience. Is it for you, you've been down this path in a rich level, at the highest level, you know, for a long time. Do your words, they do for me, do your words just not quite do justice to the thing that you're working to understand? Or have you mastered or really come to a deep understanding of the words that best capture what you found to be true or authentic? Well, Gulf of the Kingdom has lived on now for 45 years. So obviously those words have created magic for a lot of people. And it's been translated into various languages it's hard though to translate some of this stuff so um i would say i have in some of my books and some of the things i've said

uh been able to create language that's been very helpful but i like i think all of us are want to enrich our language and uh and make it ever better. And that involves taking words from other cultures, like Atman Brahman. We don't have that in English. That's right. So, and all language today in the global village is filled with loan words. They call words you take,

like English is filled with French, you know. Think of all the words we use, we don't even know, you know, the boulevard, that's French, you know. We can go on a déjà vu, that's French. You know, we can go on a déjà vu. That's a French term. So we use these phrases. Now the same with Yiddish.

There's, you know, mensch. It's a Yiddish word. Chutzpah. But we take it for granted. And English is probably, well, it's the most common language today in the developing world. It's the language that is most used, and it's also probably the most elastic. It takes these words. So now, in the New Age language, so New Age language is sometimes referred to by the snobs and opinion elites as newage as like sewage so i say esalen we're

into environmental issues and we're into composting so we're composting uh newage we're composting the language so we take these words you call it sewage we call it, you know, we like newage, and we're composting it. So, and I can give you examples of this. You have to value crude approximations, because we humans are crude approximations to what the human race can become. So we're trying to get these approximations closer and closer to what we deeply and most potently are. And we have to be, in that sense, like kids. The reason they learn and children learn so fast, they're not afraid to be foolish. And we watch them playing. You know, I'm at a grandfather age, and I just adore these two to six-year-olds, the way they run around, and they're just playing. They're not worried about their being silly or anything. They're supposed to be silly.

But we get old, and then we have to be adults. And a lot of friends I have are premature adults. They committed to their image of maturity real young so they become they became old young they you know they're instead of a young spirit you know it's one thing one way to admire pete carroll he apparently didn't buy into that much i mean the way he runs around on the sideline and chewing that gum. I mean, he's not afraid to be a 17-year-old forever. I mean, and everybody watches.

And by the way, the cameras can't. Ever since he started coaching, that camera goes to him very soon. For some reason, it's not fully understood. And they love watching him. He is animated. He's very animated he is animated he's very animated yeah yes he's very animated okay so how you've been down the path of consciousness of the human experience looking for authenticity and truth how can you help us mere mortals how can you help what what would be one two three ways that you could help me be a better man well i okay i you know i i'm not doing the vow of celibacy okay you're not

doing that one i'm joking yeah well no i mean if i could if you want to do that i can i can help you i'm not recommending it yeah but uh but i could. But anyway, well, God, there's so many things to say. I mean, there's so many things to say. So start me off. Pretend like, you know, whatever, like what out and i try to be helpful i'm not primarily a guru uh but i do have these various situations and now this itp of course where i'm trying to be helpful and so sharing what i know so i um we wrote that book the life we are given george leonard and i about a two-year experiment we did based on my big book, The Future of the Body, largely, and his book, Mastery. And these, the marriage of those, and then we cooked this thing up. And then two years, then we wrote a

book about it. Now, it's filled with the ways and means. So anybody can take and read that book. So I could start with anyone, as we do in the book. The greatest traditions, as well as the greatest crafts, typically begin with some sort of statement of right attitude. Right attitude. That's in Buddhism. right attitude. But today, right attitude for me, I think, must be governed by this vision of heaven and earth. This, what I'm choosing to call evolutionary panentheism, which is panentheism is the doctrine that the divine is both transcendent and imminent. Within? The whole cosmos. Outside and within. Yeah. Pantheism is the divine is just everything is God down here. Theism is God is everything up there. That's right. Panentheism says both. And evolutionary simply reminds us

that the cosmos is evolving and we are always evolving. All right. So however that is framed, the first thing is I just say to people, let's say we're working with sports folks that write attitude. So let's talk about, if you're here, talk about your experiences in the light of this vision. So for example, that's where I hear things like this guy in the locker room trying to say to him, you and I are one, and pretty soon they get him in the shower. They thought he was losing it. So the right attitude and language.

And then in terms of practices, to find a way forward for yourself in mindfulness practice. Now, if you can meditate, that is great. It is such, so much work gets done so simply. Huge return on investment. You know, talking to business folks, you want to return on investment so here you in this simple act if you're faithful you're going to get dozens and dozens of both physiological and psychological changes and this is well mapped now now some people have very hard time uh in sitting meditation well some people do it through some activity. They get to it naturally, fishing or even bowling. It's the only way I can understand bowling, that it's just knocking those

pins over. You know, I don't, I have a hard time with that. But once you understand the rhythms they get into and the infatuation, I revisioned bowling. So finally I understood it. It's a form of meditation. And you find that people find their way to something like a mindfulness practice. So you can build on that. But anyway, to find it in yourself, I believe it's important to some degree to take vows or affirmations it helps so you know our parents for a lot of us tried to teach us this sort of thing uh but to put it on a deeper more a richer more rewarding basis so to take them this is big for our practice community, Integral Transformative Practice. You want to take vows along what your soul really wants, the soul's code.

Now, this is where the phrase, Atman is Brahman, is necessary but not sufficient. This is where we need a deeper understanding of what that deep, evolving soul in you is. And it's sending signals up to consciousness all the time. So we have to learn to read our own soul's code. We have to learn to decipher it. And, you know, that's a lot of what adolescence is all about. Yeah.

But the problem is that... It's a life journey. It's a life journey. And the problem with a lot of us we've been helped by let's say uh i was by being uh an older boy i was not helped in my life by the boy scouts i was in the boy scouts but my boy scout troop was so crazy i i i i didn't learn much from my fraternity i i got out as soon as I took my vows. So there are way stations in life that are supposed to be guides.

College used to be that. You know, you went there for the development of the whole person. But it obviously ain't anymore. It's for certain cognitive skills, certain vocational skills, certain networking. You go to Harvard and you meet everybody. almost automatically get rich. Then there's Stanford. Oh my God, you're going to invent some algorithm and just go to Stanford. But anyway, so they give you a lot, but not as good as this world needs now. We need a deeper, more sustaining wisdom and ultimately expertise in how to guide one another into our higher and greater life that's waiting for us so these are well i mean i could go on

how to build a practice there are certain elements you have to have you have to build a practice. There are certain elements you have to have. You have to have a worldview that matches who you really are. It has to match. It's like putting on a suit of clothes. I mean, it's okay to go buy a thing off the rack, but it's really neat. You know, it used to be my family, you had your suits tailor-made to you. But now there's so much diversity out there.

You dress to fit you. Now you may be a fashion plate and it might be good to be, you know, you don't want to be too kooky out there. But so the same with a practice. A practice is like in a suit of clothes that you've got to build it around who you really are. How do you figure out, what is your practice to be able to figure out who you really are? And I'll share my practice first and then, you know, you might, hopefully you can build on it or say, no, what have you been thinking is who you really are. One, you've got to listen and then you've got to put some words to it. So it's not complicated, right? So it's connection to get to clarity. And then once you have that, you can get to some conviction. Okay. So there's this kind of three steps that I've got, but it's the connection

first. And so how do you connect? You got to listen. You got to get quiet. You got to pay attention without judgment and critique and all that good stuff. And just listen to what it feels like. And then what that, those feelings put to words. And then those words, if you can string them together in something that feels or works to capture what is most authentically you, we call it a philosophy. And so that's the only way I know how to do it. Well, that sounds good. Does that sound about right to you? Well, that's beautiful. That's beautiful.

I mean, you have to buy that. Okay. Then here's what's happened for me. The first time, it was like 25 years ago, one of my mentors said, write some stuff down now. Who are you? I was like, okay. And when I said it out loud, I knew it as soon as I said it. This is what my dad wanted me to be.

It wasn't who I wanted to be. It wasn't my true filter. And the way I think about a philosophy is that it's the filter for which you make, um, you choose words and actions, right? It's the filter decision-making filter. And it was, it was everything like, and then my next pass was not for my dad. It was for my religion. And I was like, that's not quite it either. And then I got scared. How old were you at this point? This was like 18 or 19. And what was your religion? It was Christianity.

Still is. Which branch? I'm having a hard time with the branches and the religious aspects. You were Protestant? Catholic. You were Catholic? Yeah. Did you go to confession? Yes. Really? Yes. Really? Well, Catholicism is so rich. So, okay. So you, yeah. So the religious part is troubling and the practices and the evil, you know, doings that take place inside of what I considered an amazing tradition. And it's the Trinity that has me just gripped. The idea of flesh, divine, and spirit. That's the part that I love. And so, I don't know

how I got onto this part of the conversation, but the intersection between those three, I think like, okay, that makes sense to me. Now, did Jesus give, take three loaves or seven loaves or whatever the number is I'm blanking on now and makes, you know, 2,000 feet, 2,000 people. I, you know, I don't know. I don't even know what to do with that. And so, but the concept makes sense. It's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that is beautiful. See, oh boy. You know, when I wrote

The Future of the Body, a number of viewers say, evidently, Murphy is a crypto-Catholic. Because it refers, there's a lot of reference. I have a whole, this could be a whole other interview, Mike, I mean, seriously, on how uh what's right when we have a project going on in the vatican now eslen does looking at the lives of the saints in the canonization proceedings saint joseph of cooper c tino were making a interdisciplinary study of his so-called levitations he was the all-time champion levitator. And now, it's the only religion that puts their saints on trial. After they're dead, I mean, they're possible saints.

And people take depositions under oath. It's a mortal sin to lie to the promotor fide, the promoter of the faith. And then they gather evidence. And so they're like anthropologists too. They're collected. And in the Vatican, it's the biggest pile of amazing revelations about the lives of these saints. And much of it is weird.

It's really weird. And what makes it interesting is that some of these phenomena are conducive neither to virtue nor sanctity. But they recorded this. Now, take levitation. Now, you know, most people, 99% of scientists will say it's impossible. This is a projection. People, you know, in the old days, they would project things onto people because we don't

have any levitators now that's except if you look in sports see this is what i i've been doing my own vatican study in the in the world of sport but we're also now doing this thing in the vatican uh why because now starting with his first saint, St. Joseph of Cupertino, he was 17th century. It's astonishing. And what was going on, and it's not just his levitation. When you get around one of these,

you find he's got six, eight, ten charisms in the Catholic Church. These are called charisms. In the Hindu-Bdhist world they're siddhis that's a word for a supernormal power that emerges in the practice of yoga even when you don't seek it you scratch anybody who's tapped into this stuff there's not one there's three there's five there's a lot going on in that person. But the person has these experiences in the context of wanting to do something.

In this case, let's say, hit a golf ball into this hole. I mean, this is something where I've collected these hundreds of things on golf courses. But the focus that people who are otherwise not doing this for five hours induces a kind of limited sensory deprivation where they go into a tunnel. This is another subject. It happens in all sports. You go into this tunnel. These are the first things. I don't know if Pete remembers our conversations about this with Bill Walsh. Anyway, this tunnel phenomenon and what

it does is it shuts down uh distractions and the clarity allows you to go into a new uh psychophysical space so typically there are a number of these powers or capacities break out all at once they're never alone these powers but the catholic church the Catholic Church, it's the greatest collection of weird shit in the history of humankind. It's in Latin. But it's in Latin or Old French. So the weirdness of it all is cloaked in this ancient Latin. And the Church is not producing any more of these saints. The whole world works against it now because they were mostly monastic.

Mother Teresa barely snuck in. Now, she's a saint of service. I'm talking about saints of contemplative ecstasy and supernormal powers. She may have had some of this, but there's no record of it. There are different kinds of saints. But these are these contemplative saints. And, you know, from early Christianity on, it was built largely around monasteries. kinds of saints but these are these contemplative saints and you know from early christianity on it was built largely around monasteries and they're in there they're like yogis see the protestants never had monasteries that interesting but they broke away martin luther said hey listen guys you're you're robbing us this isn't right what what what am i going to confess my sins to you

in a language right i don't even understand what are we doing so there's a power structure there that right thank goodness because thank goodness yeah he broke it open oh no it was good i know we had to have it for the evolutionary advance to become bigger people but every time you you develop i mean these cultural meanders you get something new but you lose things typically so we've lost witness to these great, great charisms. So why are we talking about that? And how did we get over here? That I got scared. When I realized that the philosophy that I was writing, my decision-making framework was not for my dad. It wasn't for my religion doctrine. You know, I was pushing against those. And then I felt like I was out on my own. What the hell am I going to do with that as a young kid?

Like, no, no, no. Let me go back to dad. Let me go back to religion. And that internal civil war is what it felt like was eventually became very freeing. And it was a parallel track to – And you were 18 or 19. 18, 19, somewhere in that range. It was a parallel track to figuring out how to love people and stop giving a shit what they thought about.

And holding those two things together for me was the most transformational experience I've ever had. And I have to work at it. But to love you and to not give a shit what you think of me. The freedom in that. Mike, I can't tell you how central that was for me, too. Seriously. Because, okay, this is particularly when I'm 19.

After I took those vows. And, you know, I had been always popular and very self-assured, basically. But now, that was a real oddball. I mean, 51. So there was a certain amount of taunting and teasing. And then I had professors looking at me saying, you're going crazy. And that was overwhelmingly frightening in moments. And I had to get back to this atman, this witness self, and get back into this bliss

and realize I'm okay. But I would have to learn, and I was supported then by the literature that was coming out that's of cultural criticism and the new psychology, Eric Fromm, Man for Himself. When did Fromm die? I don't know. Did you know Dr. Fromm? No. He would have been perfect for Esalen, but Esalen came a little after he was losing his fastball. So Abe Maslow was rising up. He could throw the high hard one then. And so Abe was emerging. Did you connect with Dr. Maslow? Oh, I mean, he told his daughters I was the son he

never had. And he drove into Esalen by mistake. I had just, before any of our seminars, we had taken this place over in this wild birth, you know, with guns and there's a whole story. You'd have, this would take up half an hour for me to tell you. We had to take it over by brute force. I thought this was your grandparents' land. Yeah, but it was infested with people who didn't believe in private property.

And these were the big Sur Mountain heavies, many of them neo-Marxists. Wait, wait, wait. We're talking this. It all happened after my grandfather died in 1948 and during the 50s. Okay. So this place became a great bohemian hangout. And then my grandmother had this master stroke, and she hired Hunter Thompson as the caretaker. He was 21 with an arsenal.

You know, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That's right. Johnny Depp. I mean, so here he's 21 and one of the streams flowing into Esalen were very well built gay guys. And this was the days of the bathhouse scene. So this gang had been located primarily down in Venice but they started to attract people from Paris, gay guys. Everything was suppressed

and it was outlawed, and everything, but on the baths, in these hot baths down there, then you had this bohemian crowd, wildly hetero, and then you had, my grandfather had hired a lady of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal church sect, holy rollers,, so they would have speaking in tongues going on in the lodge. You had these Bohemians there. Joan Baez lived there. She was 19. She wasn't famous.

On that property. On the property, yeah. And Dick Price and I, both 30 years old, both of us into all this stuff we're talking about, go down there for our own personal retreat and I'd been going there all my life at the weekend place and I'm challenged immediately by Hunter Thompson

who are you? and I said well you work for us and blah blah blah and then we run and discover this chaos and one night the gay guys tried to kill Hunter Thompson and throw him over the cliff. I'm serious.

And so at that point, there was gunshot, a lot of gun shooting. He was armed. So I said, it's time for me to go tell Bunny. That's what we call my grandmother, Bunny, what's going on here. And I had tried to create this center a few years earlier, and she had told my father, we can never give it to Michael. He will immediately give it to the Hindus. And so now my father went to her and said, you know, Vinny, that was her name, we have to give it to Michael now.

Otherwise, we're all going to be in jail together. The place was totally, it was totally, It was truly out of control. So I was just at a meeting with a colleague or professor down at Stanford. And he says, where are you heading off to? I said, oh, I'm going to go spend some time with Michael Murphy. And his eyes lit up and he got excited. And he said, are you going to get in a bathhouse and take off your towel with him? And I said, what are you talking about? I looked at him. He goes, are you going to get in a bathhouse and take off your towel with him? And I said, what are you talking about?

I looked at him. He goes, are you going to the Esalen Institute? I said, no, I'm going up to his house. And he said, oh, man, the Esalen Institute is something else. Who is this guy? I'll tell you later. But he was so excited about all of the legendary things that have taken place at the Esalen's. Oh, no.

I mean, well, this big book is, you know, Jeff Kripal, it's a big book. It's the best thing by far. There have been other books, but that's... Which book are we talking about? Well, it's simply called Esalen. Oh, the Esalen. Okay. Yeah.

He's a historian of religion. He's a cultural historian and an authority, really, on. Yeah. He's a historian of religion. He's a cultural historian and an authority really on Indian philosophy. And we had an interesting way. We, the two of us, met. That's an interesting story. But speaking of books, how in the world did you write Future of the Body? I brought that book home. And it's, what was it, four inches big?

Something like that. Yeah, you could use it as a doorstop. So I brought the book home. And my wife looked at me like, what are you going to do with that? Don't read it in bed at night. One guy fell asleep and it fell on him. And after he gave him a bloody nose and he said he was going to sue me. You were so switched on when you wrote that book.

Like where did that come from? Well, okay. First, it took seven years and it was built on a project started at Esalen. And there was a gang I had of comrades. We were all working out together, meditating together. When the running boom hit, you know, and at 43, I started running. I got good at it and came in third in the national championships in the mile for 50-year-olds. So, I mean, just to Esalen with me, was killed

in 1985, you know, 30-some years ago. So Steve had this archive in his apartment. Pretty soon it morphed into 10,000 studies. And we were collecting this, and out of it came two of my novels, and then The Future of the Body. So I wrote my way in, and came up, I feel it, I did some things there that are new. There are a couple of the big moves. I mean, for example, what I do is pile on all this evidence that every human attribute which we've inherited from our animal ancestors

gives rise to a variety of supernormal expressions. And no matter how you look, your perceptual abilities, your kinesthetic abilities, your cognitive abilities, your vitality, your sense of self, all of this can be seen in an evolutionary unfoldment and i just

think because i'm not a professor and don't have graduate students that you know i um i've had to find you know support for this elsewhere and the book is still selling and out of it came this integral transformative practice but um i feel one it's still out ahead of the curve, that book. Yeah, it's rich. And okay, let's switch gears and let's talk about competing. And can you talk to us about your insights around that word, competing? Because part of our conversation has been about spiritual center and about authenticity and being. And now let's talk about becoming. So can you talk to us about competing? Becoming and then competing. Think Charles Darwin. Yeah. That the evolution of species on this planet for three billion years plus has involved a relentless

competition in the sense that those organisms which are best adapted to a certain niche went out. The biggest families win. Now that's at the animal level. But in the cultural level, where we are, it's not the biggest families win. In other words, the most offspring you have, but your ideas and your influence. So, but the competition is going on all the time with ideas. Let's take- Wow, what a cool insight, because the age of information, if you will. So you're saying the leverage. But way back, the birth of Christianity. Christianity was born out of a Jewish cult who followed Jesus of Nazareth, but mainly propagated, or largely, by St. Paul, Jewish also, but never met Jesus.

All right, this little group formed in the early Roman Empire. It had its followers, but there's also other cults, including the cult of Mithras, another teacher out of the Midwest, none of us, the Middle East, and none of us think about Mithras now, but these two competing... I have no idea what Mithras is. Well, it was another teacher who had another worldview, not unlike Jesus's.

During the same time as... Yes, in parallel. Okay. So now the Emperor Constantine, we're now talking the year 333, when he, the forces um of um the um persians who were following the cult of mithras and he he won uh anyway he and christianity this persecuted cult became the dominant religion and that gave birth to what has become the new Rome. That's where the Vatican is. So instead of Julius Caesar, you have the Pope. Okay, then you have the Eastern Church. So, okay, there's a Darwinian

struggle of ideas. Now we come forward another 1300 years, 12-1300 years, you have the Italian Renaissance, now the birth of science and it had to compete against the church okay so that kind of now today where you and i are talking about things we have to compete against reductive materialism physicalism which dominates our scientists and our academics and um it's uh the opinion elites of the that operate uh in america and new york or wherever this dominant paradigm that says a lot of the stuff you are i are into uh never happens in my case, you know, telepathy, there is no telepathy. These paranormal powers, they don't exist. It's in our mind. We imagine this stuff.

But meanwhile, you have all this meditation on research going on and sneaking in, into this physicalism, this materialistic environment, comes like a Trojan horse, this new insight into mind over matter, let's say it, and how meditation can change your brain. So, again, competition. As individuals, you and me, and everybody listening to this thing, to the extent that they are really into a calling or into a work they value or something they want to bring forward into life, will always be up against certain resistances. So, willy-nilly, whether you want to to or not you're going to be competing i i i love this thought because for a long time i've been trying to sort out this connection between authenticity and becoming right the being versus becoming and the competing sense the way that i've been

thinking about this i'd love your gut check on this or chin check, if you will, is that what we need to work on relentlessly, uncommonly so, is the way that we train our mind to be able to manage rugged and hostile or adversarial conditions, sometimes self-imposed, but sometimes real, where there's a hostility towards our thoughts that challenge our authenticity, our authentic self. So we have to buffer, we have to front load and train our mind on the mechanics, mechanics, literally mechanics of confidence, the mechanics of finding calm, the mechanics of being focused on the present moment. And that's just work so that we can explore and take the ideas that we have to be true and the craft that we've worked on to express to go into the real world, not just the sanctity of our friendship amongst peers or whatever, but go into the real world and get tested. So it sounds – so I'd love for you to chin check that and say no that's too small or that sounds

right like that sounds right okay i that was quite beautiful and eloquent which you just said okay it's exactly right and i would this is a constant thing with me the oscillation between that in me which is a natural yogi i Meditation came easily to me. I was blissing out all the time. In my 20s there, nobody knew what this was all about. Believe me, the 50s, you know, everything they say about conformity is true. I mean, you know, to be a man, you'd be like John Wayne, you know. If you're like a woman, you're like one of these Barbie doll creatures that feminism has revolted against, you know. So I was an oddball. So I went underground in this sense that I didn't talk about it, but people would ask me out for dinner.

This would happen again and again. And the next day they'd say, gee, Mike, there's something about we can't figure it out we get high when you're around but it was they were getting addiction you know this is a contagious effect i was always so not only cheerful but um high on meditation yeah and it it is infectious and it is now I believe it is a natural it's a telepathic rapport groups it's not that you you do imitate the behavior of your friends yes

but more basically it's a primal energy that transmits back and forth between humans that make for these higher or lower qualities so anyway that was happening in me, but I was in secret. And it's, okay, now I start Esalen, where you really had to get down and dirty.

We had this breech berth. We had guns and Hunter Thompson and et cetera. And so I've had to negotiate between, let's say, the one in me that wants to go into this bliss state and the one that acts. But you can act with mindfulness in such a way that I think the way Thich Nhat Hanh was saying to you, that where this energy flows through you and it works. There's no doubt you can do it. But I do think we have to respect the need in all of us at times for a time out. Whether it's during the day or it's for on weekends or for sabbaticals, We have to learn to be skillful in living in the two worlds, the world of being and the world of becoming. And there's a great symbol in India, the Paramahansa. Now, this is another Sanskrit word. The Paramahansa is this bird that flies. It's the flying, the swan, whatever it was, a mythical bird, that flies with one

foot in the water. And that means it's permanently rooted in Brahmand, but it's always in the water at the same time. Now that would be an ideal to shoot for. And there are times when some of us can do that, where we're in both at the same time but very often you get that foot in the water um plunk down you go like a pelican down after the fish except you may or may not get back out and um you you got to learn how to you know not get swallowed, Plotinus, the great mystic, said the source of all suffering, all suffering, is that the soul gets lost in its works. It came down from the high heaven, this is the Neoplatonist, and into this world, and lost the ecstasy, and forgot. And so Plato talked anamnesis, remembering the divine.

Okay, you remember, you come back to it. Now you come back to it. Then what do you do? And one temptation is just stay up there in this bliss. And that's one whole approach in the early 60s at Essen. There were a lot of people preaching that. Don't get down here in this dirty world. But I had chosen to try to be in both,

like the Paramahansa. And that's the challenge, I think, for those of us who want to be both in this high being and keep growing in it and yet be down and serve in the world. That's a challenge. How do you spell that? Para? Para Mahansa. P-A-R-A always means kind of beyond. And the Hamsa is this bird, the bird that's out but in. Para Hamsa. Hamsa. Hamsa. H-A-M-S-A.

Para P-A-R-A. Yeah. Okay. Hamsa. New words. And what a great story. Yeah, what a great story. Yeah, story the birds at one foot in the water so you can do both at the same time and so uh so every year i think you're going to appreciate

this every year i don't do resolutions or any of that right like but every year i reconnect to what is my purpose for this year and for the last five years years, it's been the same, which I don't know what to say about it, but it just keeps being true. Roots and reach. Roots and reach. Roots and reach. I think that's the same thing. I got to look up this bird. Roots and reach. Roots and reach. Yeah. But you stay now, what do you mean by staying in your roots? So roots is being grounded, being connected to the source, being connected to the source being connected to earth being connected to myself like like having roots as a man and then reach is how can i explore the reaches and the edges of of um the human experience i love it yeah and so all of that for me sounds

like a it's a very much of a spiritual practice and so roots and reach and i need both right and that tension between the two and the opposites and uh well now you need a particular worldview to embrace that because there are a lot of people who say hey when you know your roots that's it go sit in a cave and have ecstasy now i've imagined how i might have done that if I hadn't been born to this property, to this family with this property. And I've often had this fantasy, what would I have done? Because I got stoned so easily. And people loved it. So I could have become a meditation teacher and a writer.

I obviously could have. How many books have you written? Well, that I have my name on that you would call books are nine. Okay. Well, that I have my name on that you would call books are nine. But, you know, four of them were with other people, a cooperative venture. My four novels and The Future of the Body were just me. The biggest, my largest reach are the ones where I was alone on The Future of the Body and The Golf of the Kingdom. Those are the two that had the most reach. How do you prepare yourself to express?

Well, in writing, which is, I would say, writing is the activity where I've most reached out. But you could say that building Esalen, I've touched. You could argue I've touched more people through starting Esalen and nurturing Esalen than I have through my books. But anyway, if we chose writing for me, I do love that phrase of Saul Bellow, the great writer, Nobel laureate, that writers need a dreamy space. For me, my best writing is I always get in an altered state. When I'm deeply in, I'll wake up.

I've been at it for three hours. What day is this? I mean, it's like falling asleep. It's a different state of consciousness in which you move across a threshold that puts the blinds down. It's like a Venetian blinds. It pulls the blinds down on where you were. In this case, I'm sitting over there. So it's that deep. So my problem right now is writing this, call it a memoir, reflections, whatever, massive interruptions because of all the karma I've generated, all my other activities so i'm competing my sub personalities are competing against one another the more you develop the more you have

these sub personalities and they start competing you know uh there's certain members you know like they play golf they're a foursome all by themselves yeah and so these you know the different selves so and you are you become a different self. You know, you have friends, they're different in different states. There's a spectrum of dissociation, let's say among athletes. They're one thing out on the field, but they're a different thing in private. Okay. Sorry. Okay. Let me interrupt really quickly. Sorry for that, but can you walk us through how you see sport? Well, yeah, this is back to where we were, that it's an experiment of nature. This is a technical term a lot of people, or some people, use in looking at, well, actually both in the biological kingdom of animals, but also in cultural, that life meanders, you know.

Evolution is not progress, technically speaking. Evolution merely means a pattern change in a particular direction. But evolution can be regressive. Let's say a saber-toothed tiger who keeps growing a tooth that's curved and pretty soon it's dysfunctional and it puts itself out of business. Okay. And the same with cultures. There are certain cultures that get going in a certain way

that they put themselves out of business. 99% of all species that have ever lived on the planet are now gone. All the ancient cultures are gone so okay but progress can there can be deemed to have occurred on an evolutionary sequence but you have to define what progress means what are the criteria by which you say something has progressed so it doesn't matter what aspect of human nature you look at. What does it mean, progress? So, okay.

So however we do that, we have to look at the whole spread of life and say that it has an experimental look to it, kind of reaching upwards, always kind of flowing towards something. And the great debate in philosophy today and in anything you might call metaphysics, and actually in many domains of scientific thinking and exploration, there are great discussions about this so what do you deem to be progressive but everywhere you look these meanderings and so you say they're big experiments it looks like an

experiment so sport what okay if you look at sport why is it so fundamental to human nature is it adaptive in a biological sense? Well, you know, the English say, well, on the fields of Eton, we developed characters. So we better servants of the British Empire, better soldiers. So you make up stories for this. But a lot of thinkers about this feel, it's just we do it because we love it. It's play. And now I believe at the bottom line of this cosmic adventure is play. In the Hindu term, lila, the divine play. So the instinct for play is obviously

what drives sport, but also it's the impulse for adventure and for going beyond. We see it in extreme sports. Whatever they do, you want to do it better. Spelunking. How small a hole can you get through? You know, this fascinates me. I mean, you know, now there are guys so flexible. They can get through a hole. If they can get their head through it, they can get the rest of their body through it.

It's crazy. You or I can't do that. But there are people. There are people who climb up straight walls you know some of these rock climbers they do amazing things always going beyond in every sport where there's a measurement it's going beyond now so sport does this now secondly though it captures the world's imagination. The biggest audiences on television right now, the Super Bowl is the biggest, but the Olympics, it, so I read that. It's an experiment of nature that's very close to the primal intention of the universe,

which from my philosophy is to disclose the divine. And I would argue that the ancient Greeks, that's why they did the Olympic Games the way they did it. The men all competed in the nude. They were celebrating the beauty of the physical body. And I believe the historians who say they would take timeouts from their wars. They would stop the wars during the Olympic Games. They saw in ancient Greece this marvelous breakout period in human history, celebrating the highest goods that humans have. And at the heart of it was play. So we have a through line in the history of sports that is kissing cousins to the great contemplative traditions. This is how I see it. But it's transformation not just of the mind but of the flesh itself to build a body that can do whatever this sport entails.

So it's an experiment of nature that's really in close, and I feel very, very lucky to have stumbled into this. And it was from being a kid and marrying, I would say, my contemplative side that aims towards being, and the athletic side, which is a demonstration of becoming in the flesh. And I've been able to harvest this for insight after insight. And that's what all my books have dealt right with this, both my novels and my nonfiction. And it's certainly a field for further research. I mean, there are a thousand PhDs to be had studying the further reaches of human nature and sport.

Some professors, when they get going on this, just to say, and then what you're doing, Mike, with Pete, Carol, and what you're doing with the Seahawks is first-rate field investigation. I mean, okay, you're a psychologist there to help them do better, but you're also, in a way, willy-nilly an anthropologist. You're discovering stuff. Someday you will inevitably be sharing your notes with others. That's what you're doing now. You will learn things. You're learning what doesn't work, what does work. You are up close to these extraordinary specimens.

I mean, you've got a million kids playing football. How many get to be on an NFL team? And then how many get to be on a winning NFL team? You're on a team that actually won a Super Bowl. So you're an anthropologist. So you're a psychologist. You're an anthropologist. But it forces you inevitably to be a philosopher.

You have to be thinking. You are thinking. And the coach is thinking. So sport itself, football, is driving an enterprise. But unless there are a few of us who can see what's happening and harvest it and make use of it, otherwise you're like these owners. They're in it to make money and have fun and um are like these poor players who many of whom go to hell you know you know they don't do well the league is trying to teach them how to take care of their money some of them don't grow some of them flower it's very

hit and miss but like all these great enterprises, humans are basically sleepwalking toward their glory. And most of us are tripping over beds and falling into the toilet and other things. If we're sleepwalking, we've got to learn to wake up while we're sleepwalking and own this divine gift, this great experiment of nature that's headed somewhere pretty close to the target. I mean, it's, you see what I mean? And we have to wake up to what's going on here.

And I would say that most teams don't. Now, there is a big movement on the inner game, and we've watched that happen. Pete's been in the middle of it. I've been in the middle of it now since the 60s, well, since the 70s, certainly. So there is a waking up, but it's still only a portion of the sporting world. But it's a significant portion. Waking up. Waking up. waking up waking up and yeah if we're not careful we're going to repeat the same

lessons that plato described from the allegory of the cave we're just going to be watching the shadows on the walls because the pain of being unchained and walking into the light uh the sunlight if you will is so painful why would i do that let me go back to look at the shadows on the wall right so that's it yeah i mean this has been something that's circular in nature and it's a classic, it feels like a classic repeat of many of the early conversations about what the hell are we doing here? Yeah. Like what do we do? Sport, politics, whatever, whatever. What the hell are we doing? So how would you answer this question? It all comes down to, that's not a question, it's a statement. It all comes down to...

Well, for guys like you and me, it comes down to staying on the path of discovery. And discovery in, okay, if we're not the Paramahansa who's going to stay in the bliss realm if we're not going to be these with yogis who are blissing out and it's a word hey i wish there were more like that yeah we we we need a few more of these blissed out yogis who are just in a pure being yeah but nevertheless uh guys like you and me who are down in the world trying to do being and becoming at the same time keep going that's what i always say keep going make sure you get enough time outs make sure you balance yourself and the integral make sure you are what are you what might you be neglecting that's where we we grow. What are we neglecting?

What corner of our property are we letting the weeds take over? Okay, how about this question on that line of thinking? Pressure comes from? Well, many sources. I love your answers. Keep going. Many sources. I mean, the pressure is from within. Speaking for myself, and I think this would apply to you and the creative people I know, it's a restlessness for the more. We're terribly aware of something that's not quite right.

And, okay, so there's a pressure to address something within us. And those now are all sorts of needs and possibilities. Okay, there's pressure from outside. Now, I can only imagine, I mean, you and the Seahawks, since we've come back to this, the pressure to win. Okay, that's part of what the whole enterprise is based on, winning. So that's if you're going to play in that world, you're going to live with that pressure. All right, but you have to learn then how to lose. If you can't learn how to lose, you might as well get off right now because you will lose. And in sport, one loses as well as wins. You have to learn how to win.

You have to learn how to lose. So that's a pressure. Building Esalen, Dick Price, who started with me, he was the best guy to lose with. He just, he seemed to enjoy losing in the best sense of resilience, you know. It's actually the only way that we can build resilience is by going through, doing difficult things. And so it's a prerequisite to build poise, if you will, a resiliency to stick with something, to do difficult things. And that difficultness often involves some sort of pain. And so it's the rite of passage into wisdom, and the rite of passage to perspective, and the rite of passage to be eloquent is to do difficult things.

Amen. Now, one of the great learnings from me, from the Indian tradition, from my Aurobindo, these supernormal powers, siddhis. These are powers that arise in the practice of yoga. One is something called rudra ananda. It's turning pain into pleasure. And it's a regular practice, so it's kind of caricatured by the yogi laying down on a bed of nails.

But in practice, you can do it all the time. Aldous Huxley said, most pain is an opinion. Did you say Aldous? Aldous Huxley. Yeah, I haven't heard his name for so long. Aldous Huxley. Yeah, I mean, legend. He was very important to us in the early days of Islam.

Yeah, for sure. But turning pain is an opinion. And, of course, hypnosis teaches us this. You know, I studied hypnosis a lot and got to be a pretty good hypnotist. And I've been a pretty good hypnotic subject. You know, so I've been skewered. You know, you get yourself into a trance and then you put a big spike through your hands. They do this. you can stick it under

the blood vessels and hold it there and uh but you're in this state and so the first time i did that and no pain uh just this thing of kind of odd pleasure and then he says now i'm going to pull this thing out of your hand and then you're not going to bleed and then I'm going to start counting and at the count number three you will bleed so anyway pulled the prong out and didn't bleed fantastic one two three and then I started to bleed so anyway but it's controlling these things and pain and pleasure now yeah easier said than, when we're hit with a big emotional shock, when we lose a friend or something like that, one of the big ones. But again, this has been a huge item at Esalen, how to handle grief

and how to go deep with grief and then come out the other side renewed. It's abroad in the human race, how to deal with suffering. It's going on all the time. But to learn that you can transform, say, small insults to the body or to the mind or your feelings into something else, into equanimity at least, or even the thrill of, there is a thrill of, I watch it in Trump, for example, in his press conference, he gets off on being assaulted. He's an unconscious yogi. He's always flirting. He's a troublemaker. He's a born troublemaker. And God knows where this is all going to go. But he gets off on it. He's not suffering.

He invites. He picks fights, what the media say. Well, I have friends like this. They love the challenge. And I've been very aware of it when I've been close in some sporting contests. I was amazed when I first encountered it. God, I was only 16. The 49ers, it was their first season. And they had a quarterback, Frankie Albert, who I had met. My father had introduced me to him when Frankie Albert was a junior at Stanford.

I was 10. Frankie Albert was 20. And they won, they introduced the T formation. They invented it that year. It's where it got invented, modern offense. So anyway, so now we're up at this football game and we had this seat right behind the bench. And these guys would take their teeth out they'd have

a six or seven teeth they put it on a bridge and put it in a bucket that was their manliness that a lot of them had their teeth knocked out so it was like that it's different than now so anyway he's up there calling signals and he um these bears were the nastiest, biggest, ugliest looking things I'd ever seen as a kid. You know, at this point I was 15. And you can see these guys. So he stands up under the, and he says, he was calling the numbers. One, 15, fuck you bears. Hep!

I thought, oh my God. These guys are 200, these guys are 300 pounds against him, my God. These guys are 200. These guys are 300 pounds against him, 180 pounds. And he loved it. And he would run and escape from them. So it was like, you know, kids playing with pillow fights or something. And he was doing that. And so I've been very aware of that in certain combative sports getting high on combat now if you can do that

and and of course if you can then preserve the gentlemanly of art of after the game is over it's over that's one of the great i think goods that can come out of sport, inviting challenge, inviting hurt, and then transcending it or transforming it. There's something in a lot of us that does that. We're looking for it. It's, you know, one of the, I don't know, premier MMA fighters in our time. We're having a conversation and he says, and I said, why are you fighting? Because he's a, he's a thinker. He's a, he's a spirit, spiritual being. And I said, why are you fighting? And he's one of the best there is. And he says, you know, I don't know, but my sense is that most people are going to find themselves when they're on their path into being tested. And the way that I get tested

about who I am is when I'm in difficult situations. And this is the most difficult I can imagine, being in a cage with another skilled man that can do real damage to me. And that's when I know if I'm being authentic. Wow. Because it's really easy to lose your mind. And I mean, I love him for that. Like, that's right. You know, we have to, you know, in celebrating that, I think, we have to always look at how easily it can be pathologized and go over to the dark side. It really can but quickly in that form it is something to see the divine disclosure the beauty in this and you know this is now unfortunately this is why

a lot of these extraordinary characters join the navy seals yeah i mean these guys are the bravest and risk most risk-taking, but they're defending us. The most noble. Right. And some of them are out for blood in MMA or special operators or military. But many of them come from like a noble place. And so when I asked him, there's two mindsets you can have. I did a bunch of work in heavyweight boxing.

There's two mindsets you can have. Intent to harm or deliver a technically proficient strike. And it's totally different. If your intent to harm your psychology is to inflict pain on somebody, it's completely different than being able to – Oh, God, that is so great. Yeah. And this is where football can be great because there are guys out there who are just mean and there are other guys who you know it's interesting how um bill walsh you know i had the privilege of knowing him and talking to him uh some people

seemingly hardly ever get injured and there are a few around who and that the art of escaping injury is an interesting thing and a lot of them are very tough guys, running backs, defensive ends. So that's interesting. Isn't it? Yeah. That's interesting because, again, I think it relates to this meanness. You know, time heals all wounds, but time also wounds all heals. You know, bad guys, you know, they have to pay for it eventually. Okay, two more questions one is is there a word or phrase

that cuts to the center of what you understand most and then i'm going to follow up with a second part of that like if you could share your philosophy but the first part is there a word or phrase that that cuts to the center of what you understand most? All life is yoga. That's straight from Sri Aurobindo, by the way, but it's an ancient thing. But it's, in other words, but, you know, just to write a footnote to that is that most of that yoga is mainly unconscious. So as long as you're doing yoga, you might as well get with the program. Okay, good. And then how would you're doing yoga, you might as well get with the program. Okay, good. And then how would you finish this phrase or say, my philosophy is?

In its most basic form, it's very simple. The cosmos is the adventure of divine disclosure. And that we are here. That's one thing you can't escape from. We are here. And we are part of this great adventure. Whether we admit it or not. Whether right now, this moment, we like it or not. So again, get with the program. Okay, last question is, how do you articulate,

define, or think about the concept of mastery? You know, Mike, I got to say, I thought you were going to ask that right at the beginning. So this, I have been thinking about that the last few days and I don't, you know, mastery is for me, not a ruling concept. It's not, um, you know, it's so, but it's certainly a fact of life and it stands for something so um you know i for me i don't i don't want to um make it uh too simple because okay first of all mastery becomes more um luminous as a concept for me. In the context, this sounds fancy, of development. The problem for some people when they talk about mastery is it puts a lid on. We are developing.

So there are stages of mastery. Now, some levels of mastery are second nature to us. I mean, you and I know how to speak. Okay, there was a time when we were two or three years old where we were still learning, riding a bicycle. Once you got it, you got it. You know, you don't have to go practice anymore. You can be a better bicycle rider. So our hierarchy of being, each of us is a hierarchy of systems, both physical and psychological. And a lot of them are just there, established. But as we grow, we're developing new masteries.

So they build on each other. We're each of us these layer cakes you know they have so sometimes then you have to go back and re-establish mastery or establish it because you never have at a much lower level of your being you're very very you're so good at so many things that you just never had to deal with this and oh boy there comes a moment when you better deal with it. So mastery is a something that is always morphing into something else. But it has levels in it that are relatively established in us. I mean, just to live and breathe.

I mean, if you and I sit around here thinking that we're going to breathe, now people come to Esalen, how to relearn how to breathe. Seriously, whole workshops on breathing. And by God, they're useful as hell for a lot of people. But if you and I had to spend all day walking around, are you breathing all right? There are a few people we know who should be doing that. But nevertheless, you know, you don't have a life. And we have thousands of things we've established. I would call it working mastery. But mastery in a developmental scheme of human nature makes it a more relative term. It's the description of a marvelous something that's been laid down at a certain level

and something that can help you go further. And we could talk about thousands of examples. So those are some of my thoughts about mastery. Thank you. Okay, so where can we find out more? Where can we follow you? Where's the best place to get your books? What is the right way to be connected to your work and your thoughts and your ideas?

Well, of course, front and center, you could buy my books. You can go to Amazon. Everything I've written is either in hard copy or on e-books, everything. And you could track me down through google or through amazon esalen institute has a esalen.org you can go to you can go there and you can um uh find your way through you got to learn how to navigate in and there's something called the center for theory and research and then you can navigate in there okay uh there are archives this archive that i developed 10 000 studies of supernormal functioning you can actually get access to it

the hard copy is held at the university of california santa barbara but there are about 200 keywords and let's say stigmata you know yeah well there's muslim stigmata you know they don't have the cross of the five wounds of Jesus, but they have the battle wounds of Muhammad, but et cetera. So you can do that. And then finally, with me, I mean, you could go to this Integral Transformative Practice website, and it is a something that there are groups around the country, and it is an experiment in actualizing the principles that I've explored and that we're talking about right now of transformative practice. Michael, thank you. Great fun. I mean, you're on a great course, Mike. I mean, you really are. You got to keep going, man. You know, it feels fun and it feels scary.

And at the same time, it's like I'm starting to really feel overwhelmed by all of the gifts of insight and wisdom that people are passing. And the last two hours that we've spent, like it's game changing. So thank you for sharing. And then from coming from a real place and what you've contributed, like it's beautiful. So, you know, I want to encourage folks that are listening to go get some of your books and yeah, I just want to encourage that and to dig deeper into who you are as a man and to support the development of one's own self, to be authentically true, to create and express the craft and the essence of who a person is on a regular basis.

And what I'm working to try to understand is how to create a living masterpiece day in and day out. And this conversation has been meaningful towards that. So thank you. Great. Yeah. Okay. So thank you everyone for. Yeah. Okay. So thank you

everyone for paying attention, for listening. You can find me at Michael Gervais on Twitter at Finding Mastery on Instagram. And then if you want to be part of our tribe, it's findingmastery.net forward slash tribe. Thank you. To be continued. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for

the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously. And the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com slash sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only.

If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.