Science and Spirituality

The Search for Meaning in a Secular Age workshop at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, April 18–20, 2025, led by Dr. Michael Shermer and Dr. Ralph Lewis

Over the weekend of April 18-20, 2025, I will be leading a workshop on science and spirituality with my friend and colleague the psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Lewis (author of Finding Purpose in a Godless World), at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California (south of San Francisco, north of Los Angeles), nestled on the cliffs of the Pacific Ocean on Highway 1. The facilities are spectacular and the content, I hope, enriching. You can sign up for the workshop here. This will be my 4th event at Esalen, my experiences of which I wrote about in Scientific American and in my book Why Darwin Matters (recounted below). It is one of the most magical places on the planet that should be on everyone’s bucket-list of venues to visit.

Many millennia ago, the Esselen Indians of the California coast frequented a natural hot springs just south of what later Spanish explorers would name Monterey Bay. The near-boiling waters of the hot springs cascaded out of the cliffs and into the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean. The Esselen found the sulfur rich waters relaxing, the morning mist and afternoon sun rejuvenating, and the spectacular views of mountains and beaches breathtaking. It was a spiritual center, a place to go to renew one’s soul.

In 1910, Dr. Henry Murphy purchased the land and constructed tubs to capture the hot springs for the restoration of his patients’ health. In 1962, Dr. Murphy’s grandson, Michael Murphy (below left), and an associate named Richard Price (below right), transformed the site into a center for the nascent human potential movement, calling it the Esalen Institute, in honor of the original residents.

Michael Murphy and Richard Price circa 1981.

Today, Esalen is a cluster of meeting rooms, lodging facilities, and architecturally elegant hot baths and massage amenities, all nestled into the stunning craggy outcrop along a stretch of Pacific Coast Highway.

Over the decades Esalen has hosted a veritable Who’s Who of savants and gurus, including Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Paul Tillich, Arnold Toynbee, Stanislav Grof, B.F. Skinner, Ida Rolf, Carl Rogers, Linus Pauling, Buckminster Fuller, Rollo May, Joseph Campbell, Susan Sontag, Ken Kesey, Gregory Bateson, John C. Lilly, Carlos Castaneda, Fritjof Capra, Ansel Adams, John Cage, Joan Baez, Robert Anton Wilson, Deepak Chopra, and Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash (pictured below).

I had long wanted to visit Esalen after I read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, in which the Nobel laureate Caltech physicist Richard Feynman recounted his experiences in the natural hot spring baths there. In one particularly amusing tale, a woman was getting a massage from a man she just met:

“He starts to rub her big toe. ‘I think I feel it,’ he says. ‘I feel a kind of dent—is that the pituitary?’ I blurt out, ‘You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!’ They looked at me horrified and said, ‘It’s reflexology!’ I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.”

With this background to the Mecca of the New Age movement, I was delighted to receive an invitation to speak at a conference on evolutionary theory that featured a rather eclectic mix of participants: an anthropologist, a philosopher of religion, a Buddhist monk, a biophysicist, a philosopher of mind, an evolutionary biologist, a psychologist, a complexity theorist, a business entrepreneur, and a skeptic. My talk on the evolutionary origins of morality led to an invitation to teach a weekend seminar on science and spirituality the following summer.

The workshop was enriching for all of us, but it was in the extra-curricular conversations—during healthy home-grown farm-to-table meals served cafeteria style in informal group seatings, and while soaking in the hot tubs—that I gleaned a sense of what people believe and why. One woman explained the theory behind “bodywork”—a combination of massage and “energy work” that involves adjusting the body’s seven energy centers called chakras. I signed up for a massage, which was wonderful, but when the massage therapist told me about how she cured a woman’s migraine headache by directing a light beam through her head, I decided that practice and theory are best kept separate. Another woman warned about the epidemic of Satanic cults throughout Europe and America. “But there’s no evidence of such cults,” I countered. “Of course not,” she explained. “They erase all memories and evidence of their nefarious activities.” Of course.

One gentleman recounted a lengthy tantric sexual encounter with his lover that lasted for many hours, at the culmination of which a lightning bolt shot through her left eye followed by a blue light-being child entering her womb, insuring conception. Nine months later, friends and gurus joined the couple in a hot house, sweating their way through their own “rebirthing” process (to cleanse the pain of one’s own childbirth so that it is not passed on to the child) before the mother gave birth to a baby boy. Right then and there the father told this infant that he would need to become an athlete in order to get into college; two decades later, the father explained to me that this young man became a professional baseball player. “How do you explain that?” he queried. I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

There are many ways to be spiritual, and science is one in its awe-inspiring account about who we are and where we came from, as the late astronomer Carl Sagan waxed poetic in the opening scene of Cosmos, filmed just down coast from Esalen:

“The universe is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.” (Watch the clip by clicking on the image below.)

Referring to the stellar origins of the chemical elements of life, which are cooked in the interiors of stars then released in supernova explosions into interstellar space where they condense into a new solar system with planets, some of which have life that is composed of this star stuff, Sagan continued:

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We’ve begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

That is spiritual gold, and Carl Sagan was one of the most spiritual scientists of our epoch.

How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond ourselves. There are many sources of spirituality, and anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of it. Science does this in spades. I am deeply moved, for example, when I observe through my Meade 10-inch reflecting telescope in my backyard the fuzzy little patch of light that is the Andromeda galaxy. It is not just because it is lovely, but because I also understand that the photons of light landing on my retina left Andromeda 2.5 million years ago, when our ancestors were tiny-brained hominids roaming the planes of Africa.

I am doubly stirred because it was not until 1923 that the astronomer Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch telescope on Mt. Wilson just above the foothills of Pasadena, California, discovered that this “nebula” was actually an extragalactic stellar system of immense size and distance. Hubble subsequently discovered that the light from most galaxies is shifted toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that the universe is expanding away from an explosive creation. It was the first empirical evidence indicating that our universe had a beginning. What could be more awe-inspiring—more numinous, magical, spiritual—than this cosmic visage?

Since I live in Southern California, I have had many occasions to make the climb to Mt. Wilson, a twenty-five-mile trek from the bedroom community of La Canada up a twisting mountain road whose terminus is a cluster of telescopes, interferometers, and communications towers. In the 1990s, I took several scientists there, including Richard Dawkins. As we were standing beneath the dome housing the 100-inch telescope, and reflecting on how marvelous, even miraculous, this scientistic vision of the cosmos and our place in it all seemed, Dawkins turned to me and said, “All of this makes me so proud of our species that I am almost moved to tears.”

As pattern-seeking, storytelling primates, to most of us the pattern of life and the universe indicates design. For countless millennia we have taken these patterns and constructed stories about how life and the cosmos were designed specifically for us from above. For the past few centuries, however, science has presented us with a viable alternative in which the design comes from below through the direction of built-in self-organizing principles of emergence and complexity. Perhaps this natural process, like the other natural forces of which we are all comfortable accepting as non-threatening to religion, was God’s way of creating life. Maybe God is the laws of nature—or even nature itself—but this is a theological supposition, not a scientific one.

What science tells us is that we are but one among hundreds of millions of species that evolved over the course of three and a half billion years on one tiny planet among many orbiting an ordinary star, itself one of possibly billions of solar systems in an ordinary galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars, itself located in a cluster of galaxies not so different from millions of other galaxy clusters, themselves whirling away from one another in an accelerating expanding cosmic bubble universe that very possibly is only one among a near infinite number of bubble universes. Is it really possible that this entire cosmological multiverse was designed and exists for one tiny subgroup of a single species on one planet in a lone galaxy in that solitary bubble universe? It seems unlikely.

Herein lies the spiritual side of science—sciencuality, if you will pardon an awkward neologism but one that echoes the sensuality of discovery. If religion and spirituality are suppose to generate awe and humility in the face of the creator, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists?

Darwin matters because evolution matters; evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.

Come join us on this journey at the Esalen Institute, April 18-20, 2025. Sign up here.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.

Guest faculty Ralph Lewis is a Psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada, and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. In his work, Ralph helps people seek meaning in the face of severe and tragic adversity. In addition to having extensive clinical experience with complex and subtle psychiatric and psychological conditions, Ralph is a regular columnist for Psychology Today and is the author of Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Should Care Even if the Universe Doesn’t.