Publisher description

The world-renowned Esalen Institute, located on the cliffs above the ocean in Big Sur, California, is a place of peace and beauty, a place to contemplate, think, and discover. Filled with beautiful photographs, this cookbook features dozens of recipes for delicious dishes that emphasize healthy, fresh, and organic ingredients--food made to satisfy the soul as well as the stomach.

I want anyone who has had the great gift of visiting Esalen to recapture that feeling of love whenever they are in need of nourishment, both for the body and the soul. This became my inspiration to write this cookbook with some of my favorite Esalen kitchen recipes. Even when hundreds or thousands of miles separate you from Big Sur, you can return through the memory of your senses. Each recipe is intended to taste like love because that's what they are made with and it makes all the difference. *** Proceeds for this cookbook will support Buds to Blossoms, a pediatric massage program that supports orphans affected by HIV and AIDS in Vietnam. ***

“May Ram Dass’s intimate and heartfelt account inspire others to find their own path of true love, compassion, and joyful service.” —Thich Nhat Hanh, author of The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching Ram Dass’s long-awaited Be Love Now is the transformational teaching of a forty-year journey to the heart. The author of the two-million-copy classic Be Here Now and its influential sequel Still Here, Dass is joined once more by Rameshwar Das—a collaborator from the Love Serve Remember audio recordings—to offer this intimate and inspiring exploration of the human soul. Like Deepak Chopra’s Book of Secrets, the Dalai Lama’s Art of Happiness, and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Coming to Our Senses, Ram Dass’s Be Love Now will serve as a lodestar for anyone seeking to enhance their spiritual awareness and improve their capacity to serve—and love—the world around them. “Be Love Now, like Be Here Now, is equal parts memoir and manual of meditation. It’s hard to believe the two books are separated by more than thirty years. The writing in Be Love Now is as fresh and charged with insight as the earlier one.” —Los Angeles Times “If the West even approaches enlightenment in the Twenty-first Century, there’s no way to overestimate the role of Ram Dass in making it happen. He planted seeds that turned into a million trees; if and when they blossom, they will exude the fragrance of his teaching forever.” —Marianne Williamson “Be Love Now reveals the true meaning of yoga, the union of the open heart—this is required reading for anyone who follows a path of devotion.” —Daniel Goleman, New York Times–bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence

Jeffrey Kripal here recounts the spectacular history of Esalen, the institute that has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education and stands today at the center of the human potential movement. Forged in the literary and mythical leanings of the Beat Generation, inspired in the lecture halls of Stanford by radical scholars of comparative religion, the institute was the remarkable brainchild of Michael Murphy and Richard Price. Set against the heady backdrop of California during the revolutionary 1960s, Esalen recounts in fascinating detail how these two maverick thinkers sought to fuse the spiritual revelations of the East with the scientific revolutions of the West, or to combine the very best elements of Zen Buddhism, Western psychology, and Indian yoga into a decidedly utopian vision that rejected the dogmas of conventional religion. In their religion of no religion, the natural world was just as crucial as the spiritual one, science and faith not only commingled but became staunch allies, and the enlightenment of the body could lead to the full realization of our development as human beings. “An impressive new book. . . . [Kripal] has written the definitive intellectual history of the ideas behind the institute.”—San FranciscoChronicle “Kripal examines Esalen’s extraordinary history and evocatively describes the breech birth of Murphy and Price’s brainchild. His real achievement, though, is effortlessly synthesizing a dizzying array of dissonant phenomena (Cold War espionage, ecstatic religiosity), incongruous pairings (Darwinism, Tantric sex), and otherwise schizy ephemera (psychedelic drugs, spaceflight) into a cogent, satisfyingly complete narrative.”—Atlantic Monthly “Kripal has produced the first all-encompassing history of Esalen: its intellectual, social, personal, literary and spiritual passages. Kripal brings us up-to-date and takes us deep beneath historical surfaces in this definitive, elegantly written book.”—Playboy

An inside look at the history and influence of New Age's spiritual home.