The Secret to Transformation

Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy is the co-founder and chairman of Esalen Institute, and co-creator of Integral Transformative Practice. 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.

Esalen was the first major growth center, and the single largest source of transformation, in Michael and Ken's generation—and it's still going strong, particularly with the recent influx of first-rate management and leadership. The techniques used there are still those that are the major sources of consciousness transformation for anyone who is interested in doing so. Michael Murphy, George Leonard, and Ken Wilber are the three people who have done the most work—often together—on integral transformative practices. Mike and George's version they call Integral Transformative Practice (ITP), and Ken's version (developed with his associates at Integral Institute) he calls Integral Life Practice (ILP)—with both sharing the same roots, aims, goals, and many of the same practices.

Integral is the game that Mike, Ken, and George—and a handful of other courageous pioneers—have been creating over the past several decades (which is to say, they have been both mapping and co-creating this brave new world, a world to which each and every sentient being is most certainly invited). Standing in the wreckage of a postmodern deconstructionism that doesn't have the decency or means to build anything in the place of all that it has dismantled, Integral is the logical next step. Integral is how you put the world back together, co-cognizing its wholeness, when flatland irony and unconscious narcissism have lost their appeal.

"Big Mind is not Supermind. Someone can have this Big Mind experience, and go back to being the same ole sociopath—but not vice versa…."

In this second half of their dialogue, Michael and Ken discuss the core modules of any truly integral lifestyle and transformative practice routine. Although Mike explains he's not wedded to any particular formula, if he was forced to chose, he would choose body, mind, heart, soul—and will (or volition). For Ken, and the approach taken at I-I, the core modules are body, mind, spirit, and shadow, to which you can add auxiliary modules such as ethics, sex, work, emotions, and relationships. In both approaches, ITP and ILP, the general idea is the same: the more aspects of one's being-in-the-world that are touched on with some degree of regularity—it can be as simple as ILP's "One Minute Modules”—the more one is likely to grow, transform, and simply be a healthy, vital human being.

Mike and Ken then move on to an equally fascinating topic of conversation: reincarnation. As Mike comments, both he and Ken have more or less remained agnostic on the topic—except that now, there is a growing amount of evidence suggestive of the very real possibility of some kind of trans-migration between lives. Mike, for one, feels a moral obligation—despite some of his more "rational" misgivings (to put it one way)—to begin to tell the world what the data appears to point to, because to ignore it would actually be irrational, so why fight it?

In the discussion, Ken draws upon the wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism. The idea is not to uncritically accept all that this, or any, tradition (religious, secular, or otherwise) presents to us, but to give credit where credit is due—and there is arguably no culture that has explored these realms more thoroughly than the contemplative souls of Tibet. So how does Integral unpack the insights of centuries of Tibetan Buddhist practice, realization, and exploration? Want to know how Big Mind—the state of nondual union—enters the stream of time as an actual structure of consciousness?

Finally, Ken gives an overview—literally—of his two new books, Overview and Superview