by Michael Murphy (Esalen Co-founder)

His main influence was that catalytic moment when we met, and that pushed me all the way to starting Esalen.

I was living at Haridas Chaudhuri’s Cultural Integration Fellowship in San Francisco in 1960, and Dick Price came to see me. We had been classmates at Stanford but had never met. It was a period that was filled with religious meaning, and at times it was truly ecstatic. I took my vows to live a spiritual life in January 1951 when I was at Stanford, so I had been completely surrendered to this life and on fire with it, meditating and studying, for ten years. I later lived in India at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from 1956 to 1957. But I hadn’t done anything in the world to bring forth this fire and this passion. I had the idea to do it, and Dick and I were really talking about it and thinking about it.