George Leonard is the former senior editor of Look magazine. Considered by some to be the "grandfather" of the human potential movement, Leonard is author of "Mastery", "The Silent Pulse," The Transformation," and along with Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy, "The Life We've Been Given." An aikido master, he has taught Leonard Energy Training, (L.E.T.) to thousands of individuals around the world.
DiCarlo: Please describe the origins of the human potential movement... What was your involvement and what sparked your interest in the exploration of human potential?
Leonard: In the mid-60s, I was a senior editor at Look Magazine, one of the most prestigious and award-winning magazines of its day. I was also west coast editorial manager and I had done lots of award-winning feature articles on education, starting in 1956 with "What is A Teacher?" I did a piece in 1964 called "Revolution in Education". In the last paragraph I said something about "human potential". As a result, we must have received at least one hundred letters from readers, which essentially said, "That's what we really need to do, focus upon the human potential." It occurred to me put in a request to do an article on the human potential and my request was granted.
Those were the golden days of journalism. Look writers had total authority to do anything they wanted to do. So I began criss-crossing the country. When I was finished I had interviewed 37 experts on the subject of the human potential. Psychiatrists, psychologists, brain researchers-even theologians and philosophers. Not one of them said we were using more than 10% of our capacity. In later years, I came to realize that was a very conservative estimate-we're using about 1% I would guess. Maybe less.
During the 7 months in which I was criss-crossing the country, I had heard something about Michael Murphy and this little institute called Esalen in Big Sur, California, the programs of which ran under the banner, "Human Potentialities." When I finally had the opportunity to meet Michael, we hit it off immediately. We went to the house of a woman we both knew to have dinner. After we had left, we kept on talking, till three in the morning. We've been talking ever since. I met Mike February 2, 1965 and it changed my life.
He was really into the subject of human potential and we had what you might call a dovetailing of interests. I knew quite a bit about various social movements, such as the civil rights movement, I covered that story from Little Rock, right on through Selma and Ole Mist-the whole thing. I also knew a lot about brain research and behavioral psychology from the work I had been doing on this human potential article. Mike was very well versed on Eastern philosophy and religion, humanistic psychology and some of the more frontier developments of the day, such as biofeedback. So when we started exchanging stories, everything seemed to go together. It made a complete picture. So we just immediately started brainstorming, saying what could we both do and what should be done. A number of the events of that time indicated to us that some sort of transformation really wanted to happen. Of course these were the 60s when such things seemed imminent. So we would just toss out ideas, which I would scrawl down on a piece of paper and throw onto the floor. The accumulated paper looked like a snowstorm, we were throwing so many things. At one point I said, "How about this....we've got a civil rights movement and we've got a free speech movement...how about a human potential movement?" So I just wrote it down and threw it on the floor. I guess that was the beginning of it.