Nuggets from Occult Invasion—The Mecca of Human Potential

During the 1960s and 1970s many of the leading lights in the blossoming field of humanistic psychology used to gather to share the theories at Esalen Institute, in the Big Sur area south of San Francisco. In 1962 Abraham Maslow and his wife, Bertha, stumbled upon it almost by chance and thereafter enjoyed a long relationship with Esalen. Many celebrities, including Aldous Huxley, Paul Tillich, Arnold Toynbee, Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, some of the Beatles, B. F. Skinner, Linus Pauling, and Jerry Brown, dropped in for discussions.