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The Esalen Soviet Exchange Program



A while back I found an interesting claim about California’s New Age-y Esalen Institute and the role that it played in the Cold War. The speaker seems to be Jack Sarfatti, and he explains:

[We received money from] Werner Erhard and by Laurence Rockefeller’s close friend Jean Lanier who was the widow of the Chairman Of Stone Webster. We also got money from US Air Force Training command via the late spook George Koopman - as well as from CIA sources indirectly via the late Hal Chipman. We were part of the covert psy war op which got high level Soviet officials to Esalen hot tubs where their minds were altered by psychedelics and our boys turned them - hence the fall of the Soviet Empire. Note that Boris Yeltsin came to America with Esalen money before he became President of Russia and that the head of Gorbachev Foundation USA is a former Esalen official.”

Sarfatti, of course, is an interesting source as he claimed to have been contacted by a computer from the future as a child which told him to study science. Here’s an article detailing some of Sarfatti’s other alleged exploits written by him: In the Thick of It! (In that article, Sarfatti claims also that his research group was the inspiration for Ghost Busters)

In any event, it’s starting to seem like there’s a pattern with the Rockefellers and the CIA funding the “counter-culture” in the name of promoting freedom and defeating communism. Also interesting that Werner Erhard comes up again in this context (as does Aldous Huxley).

In Sarfatti’s quote above, he’s referencing the 1970’s, and I can’t find any supporting evidence of his claims about turning Soviet officials. But it’s a known fact that from 1981-1987, the Esalen Institute ran the Esalen-Soviet Exchange Program. It held a series of conferences on “Citizen Diplomacy”, funding direct satellite-based conversations between American and Soviet citizens, and helping noteworthy Soviets to tour the US. For other info on Esalen’s public programs, check out this page on their site. Knowing this, it’s only a very small leap that gets me to believe Sarfatti when he says they were doing this in a much more subversive way in the decade(s) prior.







2 Reader Responses

  1. Segovius Says:
    July 11th, 2005 at 7:46 am

    It might be interesting to consider the possibility that the Esalen/Erhard/Cia links are a double-bluff and a blind alley.

    Certainly the powers that be would have wanted (needed ?) to neutralise the nascent new-age movement at an early stage and turn it from a ‘proactive’ potential threat to a ‘passive’ and acquiescent pool of people who are disposed not to challenge the status quo - and lo, so it turned out to be.

    The USSR meme is a dead give away btw - the programme couldn’t give a fig about another state’s problems, this one was purely aimed at the folks down home.

    The real results are obvious enough to see and the chief dancing bear is still operative in the public eye - still preaching to his constituency (which through bestselling books and public appearances is massive) the virtues of acceptance and tolerance of anything that happens to them whilst hobnobbing with the world leaders who make sure that something DOES happen to them.

  2. Occult Investigator Says:
    July 11th, 2005 at 1:40 pm

    It might be interesting to consider the possibility that the Esalen/Erhard/Cia links are a double-bluff and a blind alley.

    Agreed, I’m trying to fully explore it from a the perspective of it being real though - mainly because I’ve not seen anybody else really pick this up and run with it in this direction. It may very well lead me to another conclusion entirely. Like somebody said in another post: its likely communism was as manufactured as the rest of this. Then what are we left with?



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