Esalen is a preeminent alternative education center charged with helping to transform and evolve world culture through its public workshops and its Center for Theory & Research (CTR) projects.
For over 50 years, Esalen has initiated new areas of research, theory, practice, and action, all of which have fostered social change and the realization of the human potential. For example, they are now working on: political polarization, citizen diplomacy with China and Russia, somatics and ecoactivism, meditation, etc.
Esalen organizes many invitational conferences and helps forming and enriching international networks. For example, they just hold the « Conscious Business Conclave » and the event brought together progressive business leaders with systems thinkers and spiritual teachers to share their personal values and discuss the emergence of new business models that honor employees and the environment. Current or former CEOs and senior executives from companies picked by Fortune magazine as the best 100 to work for were invited to share what they know with the others.
They are also now working on complexity economics. They organize a conference where the old approach looked at the economy through the physicist’s metaphor of a closed system that always finds an even equilibrium between supply and demand, the new, more biological/evolutionary approach sees an open and dynamic system that is often far from equilibrium. By building a fellowship among the leaders in this nascent and very important field, Esalen can do for economics what the famous Solvay conferences did for modern physics: create a new and better paradigm for discovery, understanding, and a more reliable creation of sustainable wealth.
A unique institution, at the center of today’s and tomorrow’s key debates linking all the decision makers in an opened and proactive discussion. A place we should all know about.
http://www.esalen.org/