Michael Murphy is co-founder of Integral Transformative Practice®, co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Esalen Institute and serves as Director of Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research (CTR). He has authored four novels: Golf in the Kingdom, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, Jacob Atabet and An End to Ordinary History.
His nonfiction works, in addition to The Life We Are Given, include In the Zone, an anthology of extraordinary sports experience, co-authored with Rhea White, and The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. Golf in the Kingdom, still a bestseller 50 years after it was published, has spawned the Shivas Irons Society, a nonprofit organization with members in the U.S. and in 20 countries as well.
Murphy was born in Salinas, California, graduated from Stanford University and lived at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India for one year. In 1980, he helped initiate Esalen’s Soviet-American Exchange Program, which was a premiere diplomacy vehicle for citizen-to-citizen relations.
During his long involvement in the human potential movement, Murphy and his work have been profiled in The New Yorker and featured in many magazines and journals worldwide.
In this talk, given during the 2011 Seekers and Sages Evening Program series, Michael Murphy discusses how various traditions, mystics and writers have pointed to a relationship between our “individual evolving souls” and “the ultimate source of our being” and how we can be alert to clues about our evolving soul’s purpose.
In this talk, given during the 2012 Seekers and Sages Evening Program series, Michael Murphy discusses Frederic Myers’ “Scheme of Human Faculty in its Relation to Time,” and how this model points to practices that can reach into our extraordinary capacities.
In this talk, given during the 2012 Seekers and Sages Evening Program series, Michael Murphy discusses the contributions made by great thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Jung and William James, offering a grounding philosophy in our practice.
Gain insight on evolutionary theory, esoteric anatomies and spiritual practice through this lively dialogue between Michael Murphy, Tim Boyd, president of the Theosophical Society and president of Greenheart International, Emanuel Kuntzelman, originally recorded at the March 2015 Falkirk Lecture Series.
In this talk, originally recorded during the Seekers and Sages Evening Program series in 2010, Michael Murphy discusses various ways in which your philosophy, worldview or religious beliefs can impact your life and practice; and how belief systems can have huge consequences on the culture at large.
In this talk, originally recorded during the Seekers and Sages Evening Program series in 2010, Michael Murphy is joined by Kevin Maher to discuss the intellectual and cultural currents that have worked to push “metanarratives” out of favor in contemporary academic and mainstream dialogue.