In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  The so-called Hare Krishna people could be seen chanting in public in the late sixties, including at many airports. Many of them had shaved heads with a single braid of hair that remained intact, wore Indian clothing, and jumped around with big smiles on their faces while they sang. I recoiled from proselytizing but many of the Krishna followers had a sweetness to them that was less pushy than people of other faiths. One day in Central Park, a Hare Krishna devotee handed me a photo of Krishna with text on it that said that if an individual spoke the name “Krishna” once with love, he or she was forever blessed. I never made any effort to join their organization but I didn’t regret accepting that photo and saying Krishna’s name.

  Bhaktivedanta was not the only spiritual teacher who noticed this opportunity. There was a dizzying array of forces seeking to take advantage of the hippie disenchantment with both traditional religion and materialistic rationalism.

  In Revolution for the Hell of It, Hoffman quotes an exchange from a Ravi Shankar press conference: “What do you think of all the swamis running around New York?” The sitarist answered, “Well, I hope they’re not all phonies. There are a lot of phony swamis in India.”

  Hilda Charlton, who would become my spiritual teacher in the early seventies, used to remind her students that the word “guru” means the replacement of darkness with light, and cautioned that some teachers were actually “rugus” who accomplished the reverse.

  There is no question that a lot of wolves in sheep’s clothing tried to take advantage of psychologically damaged kids who had been attracted to the hippie culture. Some were simply lame, some were in it for the money, and some were on dangerous power trips. Yet many were sincere. From my point of view, red flags to avoid included:

  1. Any group that believed their way was the one and only way to enlightenment, and lacked respect for other approaches.

  2. Too much focus on money or raising money. (Fine to charge for a yoga class, a book, or ask for modest donations to keep the proverbial lights on, but if it got into hundreds or thousands of dollars, something was weird.)

  3. Any culture that encouraged violation of my ethical norms.

  4. Any sexual pressure.

  Avoiding these four areas eliminated the darkest cults, but left an extremely wide array of approaches to exploring the meaning of life. Much of the interest in mysticism came from people who, like the Beatles, had used psychedelics. Steve Earle says that after his first acid trip, “I never had any doubt that there was a God.” The vast majority of hippies shared the conviction that there were other aspects of reality beyond official externality. As the nonpsychedelic Dr. King preached, “Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”

  To be clear, there was tremendous diversity even among those baby boomers who identified with the counterculture and/or the protest movements of the time. Millions, like Paul Krassner, rejected anything mystical and identified themselves as atheists or agnostics; they viewed astrology, yoga, and meditation as fads bordering on superstitions that were not any more “real” to them than conventional religious dogma.

  There were also millions who remained with the religion they were born into, and others who were drawn to variations on older religions, such as the Nation of Islam; the “Jesus Freaks” inspired by Good News for Modern Man, a 1966 translation of the New Testament written in modern English; and the Jewish Renewal Movement, one of whose leaders, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, had taken LSD in the early sixties. Such openness to psychedelics was rare within the Judeo-Christian world.

  However, Richard Alpert pointed out that most established religious leaders looked at LSD as a threat. “Religions were based on history. Priests don’t have revelatory experiences, they just talked about people who had them long ago.”

  Among the dozens of mystics with foreign-sounding names, only a few penetrated the counterculture. Meher Baba, who was born in India in 1894, traveled extensively and visited Hollywood in 1932. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks held a reception for him at their home, where he met Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, Tallulah Bankhead, Ernst Lubitsch, and Boris Karloff, among others.

  In 1967, Meher Baba’s presence loomed large. Posters of his smiling face with a huge handlebar mustache and the saying, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, were displayed in head shops alongside psychedelic mandalas and photos of Hendrix and Dylan. In the Woodstock film there is a close-up of a poster with a photo of Meher Baba as a young man. Peter Townshend of the Who became enamored of the man and dedicated Tommy to him. Baba passed away in 1969.

  Meher Baba had taken a vow of silence in his early thirties and only communicated in hand gestures. He also publicly rejected the value of LSD as a spiritual tool and strongly discouraged its use in a pamphlet published in 1966 called God in a Pill?

  Richard Alpert sent him a letter asking for advice on this topic. “In the United States there are literally thousands of people who have experienced through psychedelic chemicals something which led them to undertake their spiritual journey with great seriousness,” he explained. Meher Baba wrote back and said it was okay for Alpert to take acid three times and then he should stop. Obviously, this didn’t really answer the larger question.

  Not long after this exchange, there was a psychedelic conference in Berkeley at which some Meher Baba devotees staged a protest. Fifty years later, Alpert, long known as Ram Dass, recalls the conference with a twinkle in his eye: “I had a tab of acid, and in front of the crowd, I put it in my mouth and said, This is the fourth time.”

  * * *

  The most influential Hindu book in the sixties was George Harrison’s favorite, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, which had first been published in 1946. Born in India, Yogananda moved to America in 1920 and settled in Southern California five years later, becoming one of the first to bring yoga and meditation to the United States.

  Yogananda would pass in 1952, but the book has been reprinted dozens of times and has sold millions of copies. For many Westerners, it is the easiest way to absorb Hindu traditions. While unambiguous in his description of his mystical experiences, Yogananda honored Jesus Christ and was in harmony with the modern world. He recounted close friendships with the American botanist Luther Burbank and with Mahatma Gandhi, some of whose ashes are interred at Yogananda’s outdoor Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, California. The entrance to the Lake Shrine displays symbols of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

  The Oracle of Southern California (inspired by but not affiliated with the San Francisco Oracle) included many pieces that referenced the writings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Russian mystic and writer who conceptualized a “fourth way” and a theosophy which posits that hidden knowledge or wisdom from the ancient past can offer a path to enlightenment and salvation.

  The Theosophical Society was formed in New York in 1875 by a Russian mystic known as Madame Helena Blavatsky, and her book The Secret Doctrine could be found in many pads and communes. Theosophy presented a cosmology that acknowledges multiple spiritual traditions as well as asserting the existence of masters, whose higher consciousness can be accessed by students who spiritually connect with them. (The grandmother of Oracle cofounder Michael Bowen was a member of the Theosophical Society in Ojai, California, when he was growing up.)

  Another movement that attracted hippie communities was the macrobiotic diet. This was popularized in America through the writing of Japanese native George Ohsawa, who had recovered from illness after following a macrobiotic diet. Major principles include eating locally grown foods that are in season, and eating in moderation. Macrobiotics also incorporates the concept of traditional Chinese medicine that balances yin and yang elements of food and cookware. (There were many stoned arguments about what was yin and what was yang.)

  In 1965, Ohsawa’s book You Are All Sanpaku was translated into English and became a fixture in many hippie kitchens. Macrobiotic restaurants, like the Cauldron and the Paradox on the Low
er East Side, both a few blocks away from the Fillmore East, were magnets for countercultural types of a spiritual bent.

  Swami Satchidananda was one of the most popular teachers of yoga and meditation in New York in the sixties. He came to the city in 1966 at the invitation of pop artist Peter Max and established the Integral Yoga Institute, one of the first places to offer yoga classes in New York. It also included a store that sold vegetarian food. In 1969, Satchidananda gave the blessing at the outset of the Woodstock Festival.

  In Boston, Mel Lyman established the Fort Hill Community and published the Avatar from 1967 to ’68; like the Oracle, it covered the counterculture through a metaphysical prism. Lyman was a virtuoso harmonica player who had been with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. He had memorably ended the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a mind-expanding harp solo of the spiritual “Rock of Ages.” Lyman was viewed by some of his followers as a divine being and rumors of cultlike obedience gave him a confusing image, although Fort Hill was one of the few communes started in the sixties that flourished for decades.

  Buddhism, which rejected any worship of deities, was also growing. Alan Watts was an influential figure in the Haight community and the early underground press. Jack Kerouac wrote a biography of Buddha, and Gary Snyder was a devoted Buddhist whose austere example would inspire skeptics as diverse as Tom Hayden and Peter Coyote, who would eventually become a Zen Buddhist priest.

  Notwithstanding the ubiquity of oms, ankhs, and Native American symbols in the streets of Haight-Ashbury, the Lower East Side, and thousands of college dorms, there were also millions of rebellious baby boomers who were less concerned with enlightenment than they were with the still-escalating war in Vietnam.

  CHAPTER 8

  you say you want a revolution

  As 1967 unfolded, the tribes grew further and further apart. Hippies often felt that the antiwar “leaders” were boring and/or too angry. Radicals and liberals accused hippies of being self-indulgent. The old left claimed that the new left had no discipline. Young radicals were not all that impressed with what the old left had accomplished. Within each of these broad categories there were numerous sects, which were frequently at odds with each other.

  At the same time, the American government and establishment increasingly harassed the civil rights and antiwar movements. The left pondered numerous conspiracy theories. Was the spread of LSD a plot to undermine left-wing activism? How about the proliferation of other hard drugs? Were there government provocateurs who were manipulating the movement into self-destructive actions? Were any of the deaths of Panthers, rock musicians, and countercultural figures actually murders? As Stephen Stills had written, paranoia strikes deep. Many of these notions were met with skepticism from most hippies and lefties, but there was also a prudent appreciation of the old adage: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

  It is certain that the FBI used wiretaps and informants and other methods, legal and illegal, with an ideological agenda that went far beyond stopping crime. Many details remain shrouded in mystery, but anyone interested in having a sense of the dark pressure that all aspects of the left were under can Google the word “COINTELPRO,” which was the FBI’s code name for the program that aimed to subvert the protest movements.

  At a minimum, the antiwar movement deserves a lot of the credit for the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a strong aversion to another war, which the right wing thought was a disease and we knew would help keep the US out of a war in Central America in the eighties (though it did not, admittedly, keep the US out of the region altogether). This would not be the utopian result of “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” but it was far from meaningless.

  None of this was clear in 1967. For many lefties, the need to feel that their tribe’s strategy was superior to other antiestablishment voices created a toxic myopia that delegitimized those whose antiwar tactics were just as valuable.

  One weird example of counterculture infighting took place at the 1967 SDS Convention in Michigan, when Emmett Grogan and Peter Berg disrupted one of the meetings. SDS was among the many groups that Grogan disdained. Berg had called the Port Huron Statement of five years earlier “pallid and elusive.” The 1967 conference was called “Back to the Drawing Boards,” and Tom Hayden gave the keynote speech.

  Grogan and Berg burst into the convention uninvited, asking for a lawyer to help another Digger who had supposedly been arrested for swimming nude in the nearby Platte River. Berg ridiculed SDS as all talk and no action, in contrast to the Diggers who were helping individual people with free food, crash pads, and medicine. Grogan read Gary Snyder’s poem “A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon,” and they stayed for more than an hour loudly insulting SDS members.

  Todd Gitlin speculated that perhaps the reason SDS permitted the long interruption in their convention was that the Diggers “were our anarchist bad conscience . . . We shared in the antileadership mood.” The pressure to prove just how radical they were led to police being described as “pigs” for the first time in an SDS newsletter in September 1967, and to a resolution condemning Jefferson Airplane for their Levi’s commercials.

  A lot of the focus was put on helping draft evaders. Stanford University student body president David Harris (who would marry Joan Baez the following year) had announced the formation of the group The Resistance in April, and at its encouragement more than five thousand men had turned in or burned their draft cards in 1967.

  SDS passed a resolution to help military deserters. Its author, Jeff Shero, explained,

  First, hide the guy out for a few weeks until his GI haircut grows in. Then give him your draft card and write to the draft board for another copy, telling them that you lost yours. After that, supplied with civilian clothes, he leaves for another city and gets a job . . . I intended it to be an illegal resolution. We should stand for disruption in the armed forces and for soldiers going underground.

  This was fine, but many of us felt there was a dissonance between the intensity of anger that was starting to come from some of the radicals and the lack of a coherent long-term strategy to accomplish their goals. Michael Kazin, who became cochair of the SDS chapter at Harvard in 1969, told me, “It bothered me when John Lennon sang in ‘Revolution,’ ‘You better free your mind instead.’” The implication was that activism was less important than inner work. I reminded Kazin that earlier in the song Lennon sang, “You say you got a real solution / Well, you know / We’d all love to see the plan.” Kazin chuckled ruefully and admitted, “Well, there wasn’t one.”

  During this same time period, religious antiwar communities also became increasingly radical. A delegation of Quakers went to North Vietnam with medical supplies. Radical Catholic Father Philip Berrigan and his brother Father Daniel Berrigan were involved in numerous nonviolent acts of civil disobedience aimed at ending the war. On October 27, Philip Berrigan and three others (the “Baltimore Four”) poured blood on Baltimore Selective Service records. As they waited for the police to arrive and arrest them, the group passed out Bibles. Berrigan told draft board employees, “This sacrificial and constructive act is meant to protest the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood in Indochina.” He was sentenced to six years in prison.

  Jews and Jews

  On June 10, 1967, the Six-Day War ended with Israel’s resounding victory over several Arab invaders and with the Jewish state occupying relatively large pieces of land formerly controlled by their enemies.

  This created some immediate fault lines in the American left. Certain radicals, including some vocal members of the black community, identified with the Palestinians who were now under Israeli military occupation. Many left-wing Jews looked for a formula to balance their radicalism on other issues with an inclination to support the Jewish state that had been created in the shadow of the Holocaust and which had prevailed against surrounding countries aspiring to destroy it.

  The Soviet Union publicly supported the Arab countries during the Six-Day War, as did
several American leftist groups who typically stuck to the party line, including the Communist Party USA, the Progressive Labor Party, and the Socialist Workers Party—all of which had few members but nonetheless represented “the left” in the minds of some American Jews.

  In an interview with the New York Times on August 15, 1967, SNCC leader Ralph Featherstone said, “SNCC is drawn to the Arab cause because it is working toward a third world alliance of oppressed people all over the world—Africa, Asia, Latin America. The Arabs have been oppressed continually by Israelis and by Europeans as well, in such countries as Algeria.” He denied that SNCC was anti-Semitic, and said that they were only interested in indicting “Jewish oppressors,” a category he applied to Israel, and “to those Jews in the little Jew shops in the ghettos.” The vast majority of Jews, even radical Jews, were offended by that language.

  During the first week of September there was a New Politics Convention at Chicago’s Palmer House, which attracted several thousand delegates. I asked Todd Gitlin how one became a delegate and he laughed and said, “That’s a good question.” A committee had been created a year or two earlier, and a sense that there should be a gathering of the left, possibly to nominate a third-party presidential candidate, took hold and drew funding from various labor unions and wealthy individuals, including Harvard instructor Marty Peretz.

  The arcane rules of the convention gave weighted voting to representatives of various groups, and a forceful alliance of black delegates succeeded in pushing through a resolution that gave them 50 percent of the total votes. It is not clear whether the rationale for this was that African Americans represented half of the American left or as recognition of past discrimination, but the most vocal black voices were not, according to Gitlin, activists who he had previously seen at SDS or SNCC meetings or any other left-wing gatherings. To this day, he wonders if some of them were provocateurs directed by the government or reactionary private interests to foment dissension within the left.