Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy was born in 1930 in Salinas, California. He earned a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University in 1952. After military service, he returned to Stanford for a short time for postgraduate studies, then left in 1956 to spend 18 months in India at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, which shaped his ideas about humanity and the direction of his future work in the field of transformational energy. Back in San Francisco, he lived at the Aurobindo Fellowship, where he met Dick Price. Together, they founded Esalen Institute in 1962 on the Murphy family’s land in Big Sur. Murphy ran Esalen as an educational center until 1972, when he retired to write. In the 1980s, he organized the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program in citizen diplomacy. His book Golf in the Kingdom, a fable about a golf game with a wizard, was published in 1971 and made into a movie in 2010.