The Esalen Archives of Extraordinary Human Functioning

Below is a brief description of this project.  Click here to go directly to the search options.

These archives are designed to support inquiry of the kind pioneered by William James, Frederic Myers, Marghanita Laski, Herbert Thurston, Abraham Maslow and others into extraordinary human functioning. Beginning in 1976, Michael Murphy, James Hickman, Margaret Livingston, Steven Donovan, Dulce Murphy, and others began to collect materials related to such inquiry from scientific and scholarly journals, dissertations, and other sources. The materials contained in this collection were drawn from experimental, anthropological, and scholarly research studies, as well as from the lore of contemplative, martial arts, athletic, and other practices.

Since its inception, work on these archives has had two aims: first, to document the effects of transformative practices and second, to develop what might be thought of as a "natural history of extraordinary functioning." The latter discipline is analogous to natural history in the life sciences in that it systematically and critically compares items of supernormal human attributes (rather than plant or animal specimens) in a broadly empirical manner, collecting data from all relevant fields. This endeavor is based upon the assumption that seemingly disparate phenomena, ranging from mystical illuminations to self-surpassing feats in moments of crisis to dramatic bodily changes produced by athletics, can be examined with critical detachment and verified by people expertly acquainted with the data at hand. Such research and the theoretical work that accompanies it is synoptically scientific, viewing data from different fields as a whole in order to find patterns that connect them and possibilities they reveal for further human advance.

Esalen supports work of this kind while recognizing that it has not coalesced into a generally acknowledged lineage of inquiry comparable to the mainstream sciences. By making these archives available via the internet, Esalen’s CTR aims to promote the recognition and development of such a lineage.