Michael Murphy (edit name/settings)

Michael Murphy is the co-founder and chairman of Esalen Institute and the author of both fiction and non-fiction books that explore evidence for extraordinary human capacities. During his forty-year involvement in the human potential movement, he and his work have been profiled in the New Yorker and featured in many magazines and journals worldwide. After graduating from Stanford University, he did graduate work there in philosophy, practiced meditation at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in South India in 1956 and 1957, and co-founded Esalen in 1962. In the 1980s, he helped organize Esalen’s pioneering Soviet-American Exchange Program, which became a premiere vehicle for citizen-to-citizen relations between Russians and Americans. In 1989, Boris Yeltsin's first visit to America was initiated by Esalen. Murphy is author of The Future of the Body, The Life We Are Given (with George Leonard), In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports (with Rhea White), The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation (with Steven Donovan), God and The Evolving Universe (with James Redfield and Sylvia Timbers), and four novels Golf in the Kingdom, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, Jacob Atabet, and An End to Ordinary History