Skeptic: Mr. Skeptic Goes to Esalen; December 2005; Scientific American Magazine; by Michael Shermer; 1 Page(s)

The Esalen Institute is a cluster of meeting rooms, lodging facilities and hot tubs all nestled into a stunning craggy outcrop of the Pacifi c coast in Big Sur, Calif. In his 1985 book, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman recounts his experience in the natural hot spring baths there, in which a woman is being massaged by a man she just met. "He starts to rub her big toe. 'I think I feel it,' he says. 'I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?' I blurt out, 'You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!' They looked at me, horrified...and said, 'It's reflexology!' I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating."

With that as my introduction to the Mecca of the New Age movement, I accepted an invitation to host a weekend workshop there on science and spirituality. Given my propensity for skepticism when it comes to most of the paranormal piffle proffered by the prajna peddlers meditating and soaking their way to nirvana here, I was surprised the hall was full. Perhaps skeptical consciousness is rising!