Supernature: Esalen and the Human Potential

SUPERNATURE: ESALEN AND THE HUMAN POTENTIAL is a documentary film about the influential Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and the Human Potential Movement it spawned. Esalen was founded in the early 1960s by Stanford grads Richard Price and Michael Murphy as a place to explore and nurture what Aldous Huxley had named the “human potentialities,” his expression for the fantastic reaches of mind and body hinted at in the altered states of mystical literature and psychedelic experience.

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A Supernature Short Synopsis

The story of American religion is often told as a rather dreary march of churches, denominations, and revivals, as if the story can really be told by counting how many people are sitting in which pews or by tracking this or that outmoded belief. The real demographic facts, however, tell a radically different story, with upwards of 70% of people under the age of thirty now self-identifying as being “spiritual, but not religious,” and with around 75% of the total population professing the reality of this or that paranormal manifestation (psychical powers, UFOs, ghosts, etc.).

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A Supernature Super-Short Synopsis

Supernature: The Story of Esalen is the American story of the Human Potential Movement and its half-century of celebrated adventures in bringing together East and West, science and religion, body and soul, spirit and sex.  A grand tale of saints, sinners, scholars, scientists, and seekers, the story takes us from an ashram in India and a psychiatric hospital in the States, through the California counterculture, Cold War psychic espionage, and the physics of consciousness, to the greening of the spirit and the further reaches of human nature in “the future of the body".

Jones Cinema Arts options Jeffrey J. Kripal's ESALEN

We are delighted to announce Jones Cinema Arts has acquired an option to make a documentary based on Jeffrey J. Kripal's ESALEN: AMERICA AND THE RELIGION OF NO RELIGION. Kripal's book is the definitive intellectual history of the influential Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

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