Esalen Institute

Institutes

Esalen—the word itself summons up tantalizing visions of adventure, of unexplored frontiers, of human possibilities yet to be realized. There is the wonder of the place itself, 120 acres of fertile land carved out between mountain and ocean, blessed by a cascading canyon stream and hot mineral springs gushing out of a seaside cliff. There is the delicate and subtle Big Sur air of a late afternoon in May, the midnight mist of July, the drenching February rain. There are October nights so clear the Milky Way can light your walk along the darkened garden path. And always there is the sound of the sea.

And then there are the people—the people who live there and love the land, and the 300,000 more who have come from all over the world to participate in Esalen's forty-year-long Olympics of the body, mind, and spirit, committing themselves not so much to "stronger, faster, higher" as to deeper, richer, more enduring.

They come for the intellectual freedom to consider systems of thought and feeling that lie beyond the current constraints of mainstream academia. They come to discover ancient wisdom in the motion of the body, poetry in the pulsing of the blood. They come to rediscover the miracle of self-aware consciousness. At best, they come away inspired by the precision of a desire to learn and keep on learning through all of life, and beyond.

Esalen is a place with a global reach. It is a place, as Thomas Wolfe said about America, where miracles not only happen but where they happen all the time.

Welcome to Esalen!!
Big Sur, California

North America

Institutes

Green Century Institute: Green Community Network

This relatively simple Green Community Network Map is a concept demonstration for a next generation mapping interface that is being developed under the auspices of the Green Century Institute. GCI has already initiated a full software development spec of this leading edge green 'metamap' and will soon be putting it out for development to the green open source community.

The current map gives a geographical access point for navigating across the internet to the websites for various green communties around the world—with an emphasis on communities in the Green Century Institute's local bioregion, the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California. If you have information on a green community you would like to see added to the Green Community Network Map or any other ecological development projects that fits neatly within the map's current categories, please contact GCI through this site, providing project/community description and links in the body of the email.