Michael Murphy

Really, I was way back, 1973.

I was in graduate school at University of the Pacific, and my master's teacher, uh, knew a, a guy that he had met, guy named Michael Murphy, a guy that was one of the founders of, of Esalen back in the day, a Stanford grad and all that.

Um, and he had heard about this guy named Tim Gallwey, and he eventually got to go visit him in San Francisco.

The whole class went as kind of a field trip.

I would call it an inclination.

As I recall, the founder of the Esalen Institute, Michael Murphy, became a student of Aurobindo's tradition in India.

I believe he must have had some mystical experiences, but then he came back and founded the Institute as a way of sort of concretizing the insights that he had.

yeah and aurobindo himself had studied in the west so so where did you know where did aurobindo's uh worldview come from well it didn't completely come from india it actually um so you have this kind of back and forth right it's a cultural cross-pollination It is it is from the West to India, from India to the West, from, you know, Tibet back this back and forth.

to The New School, Commonweal's learning community and podcast.

Join us now for a conversation with cultural historian and astrologer Richard Tarnas and host Michael Lerner.

Rick Tarnas, welcome back to The New School at Commonweal.

Thank you, Michael.

It's always a pleasure to see you and talk with you.

Wonderful.

And within like, two, three days of doing a little bit of that research, Stan and I, whoa, there's something here that shouldn't be there unless there's some validity to it.

So that's perhaps a little too long of a response to a couple of things that you brought up.

it doesn't seem that way before you pick up a club.

Yeah, I think Michael Murphy, who wrote Golf in the Kingdom, was talking about...

He had written something about, you know, uh, golf and spirituality, and he described golf as mystery school for Republicans.

Yeah.

Well, there was an, uh, yeah, there was a great, uh...

The thing I always think of is Michael Murphy in Golf in the Kingdom.

Yeah.

When, when Shiva Siren says to him, he says, "Your problem is you try too hard and you think too much."