PRAISE FOR A NATION OF MYSTICS
“In her exciting novel, Pamela Johnson has crafted a work of literature that conveys big picture ideas through the most intimate of characters. A Nation of Mystics sings with the sense of wonder and awe that inspired a generation to change the world—one atom and synapse at a time.”
—Nicolas Schou, author, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World
“The deeply insightful and knowledgeable presentations of spiritual practices in both Eastern and Western traditions and the grueling rigors of cleansing and renewal to attain the blessings of sacred plants, are dramatically documented. These quests are captivating. I would rank Pamela Johnson among the best of modern storytellers. She has the rare ability to combine valuable history lessons with highly entertaining portraits.”
—Jim Ketchem, MD, author of Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten: A Personal Story of Medical Testing of Army Volunteers
“I was particularly moved by the story because Pamela captured the feel of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The book explores many of the facets of the scene, including LSD manufacturing and hash smuggling, from 1965–1970, both the sweet and the bitter, in a way that is very hard to accomplish in nonfiction.”
—Timothy Scully, underground chemist, Orange Sunshine
Also by Pamela Johnson
Heart of a Pirate / A Novel of Anne Bonny
A Nation of Mystics series
Book I: Intentions
Book II: The Tribe
Book III: Journeys
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Stone Harbour Press
PO Box 206
Oregon House, CA
http://www.stoneharbourpress.com
Copyright ©2015 Stone Harbour Press
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.
Distributed by River Grove Books
For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Stone Harbor Press at PO Box 206, Oregon House, CA 95962.
Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group
Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group
Cover images: Group of hippies friends walk©iStockphoto.com/Paolo Cipriani; mandela©iStockphoto.com/Real-illusion
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication
Johnson, Pamela, 1947–
A Nation of Mystics, Book I: Intentions / Pamela Johnson.–1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Counterculture–United States–History–1961–1969–Fiction. 2. Hippies–California–Fiction. 3. Social justice–United States–History–1961–1969–Fiction. 4. Nineteen sixties–Fiction. 5. Bildungsromans.
I. Title.
PS310.O369N38 2010813’.6
QBI10-600059
Print ISBN: 978-0-9968539-0-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9968539-1-0
First Edition
For those who made the journey, that we may remember
For the children—particularly for Erin, Owen, Adam, and Rachel—that they may understand
And especially for Michael John Murphy, who began this story
“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
—William James, American philosopher and psychologist, 1842–1930
“Throughout human history the shadowy figure of the alchemist, the shaman, the herbalist, the smiling wise man who has the key to turn you on and make you feel good, has always been the center of the religious, aesthetic, revolutionary impulse. I think that this is the noblest of all human professions …”
Timothy Leary, “The Dealer Is the New Robin Hood.” Los Angeles Free Press (8–21 May 1970).
A list of characters and a glossary can be found in the appendices at the back of the book.
PREFACE
This tale was a long time in the making. Shortly after I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980, I began to reflect on stories and incidents from the sixties that eventually became this book. Many of those remembrances concerned the motivations of the youth movement. As I looked around, I saw that those fragile and hard-fought ideas of the counterculture were beginning to bear fruit—environmental organizations, the peace movement, women’s rights in the workplace, the ongoing public awareness of racism, emerging gay pride, populist political groups, and the proliferation of health food stores, organic food, and yoga classes.
I also knew that the catalyst for those ideas had been a mass leap in consciousness brought about by the use of psychoactive substances, by the ripping apart of “the filmiest of screens” as William James, the great American philosopher, declared after his initial experiments with nitrous oxide in 1882. At the apex of the sixties, over half a million people gathered at Woodstock in 1969, a single moment in time when those present became one person in mind, in large part because of shared psychedelic experience. From Woodstock, the tribes moved across the nation and the world, bringing with them a shift in personal values, from competition for money and transitory objects to a worldview that regarded humans as a single community and the planet as a living organism shared by all life.
What I was also seeing in the eighties was a declared war on drugs, a lumping of all drugs into one notorious category and a deliberate stigmatization of those who altered their consciousness. Tens of thousands of families were being affected by the incarceration of a loved one for nonviolent offenses against laws that were becoming more draconian and that often denied the spiritual conscience of an individual.
In between raising three boys, volunteering in schools, and working in the community, I researched and wrote at a time before computers, searching through the stacks of UC Berkeley’s libraries, the Berkeley Public Library, and reading through numerous volumes on the sixties found in bookstores. Not having a computer myself, I wrote by hand. About 1988, almost eight years after my first line, I purchased my first computer and typed the work, saving it on large floppy disks. By the end of that year, I had a printed work of enormous size.
In 1989, I decided to return to school for a teaching credential. Having spent so much time volunteering in schools, I thought it might be a good idea to get paid for my work. Little did I realize that a teacher’s life was a twelve-hour-a-day job, weekends included. The floppy disks and the ungainly manuscript sat on a shelf, forgotten, for almost twenty years.
Then, in 2007, on a whim, I took down the box with the old manuscript, dusted it off, and decided to read the first chapter, then the next, and found that I could not put the story down, having forgotten what I had written years ago. The pages were yellowed, the text was definitely a first draft—many revisions were necessary—but what I had was the kernel of a good novel, a remembrance for the children of the sixties who were now older. For many months, I searched for ways to convert the old floppy disks to a contemporary Word document, praying I would not have to retype the entire manuscript. Some of the disks were converted, some of the work was retyped, and much of what had been recovered was feisty on the page, refusing to be altered by margins and having a mind of its own. Through a great deal of finessing, I eventually came up with a document with which I could work and began the editing process.
No one person shapes the characters of these pages. They are an amalg
am of the stories told to me in hours of interviews, scholarly and scientific texts, spiritual works, autobiographical and biographical readings, writings on the history of music, and days in libraries searching through old newspaper records for day-to-day events.
This story is for all of you who have dared to dream and imagine and who have worked for a better world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Words cannot begin to express my deepest and sincerest thanks to many people who made this work possible: Michael Murphy, whose handwritten notes became the catalyst for the story; Dolores Muldoon and Kathleen Caswell who spent many hours helping to type the original handwritten manuscript; my forever readers and friends for their encouragement and advice—Katherine Czesak, Anne Einhorn, John Hornung, Cynthia Josayma, Clifton Buck-Kauffman, Kelsey Magness, Leonard Post, Annie Reid, Patrice Robson, Tim Scully, Carol Whitnah, and all you others who have taken time to read parts of the story; Julia Cooper Smith for helping me to understand how to cut a story to make it more powerful; Donald Ellis for his friendship, eternal support, and amazing knowledge of the publishing industry; Greenleaf Book Group, especially Hobbs Allison, for the time, concern, and orchestration of the editorial comments that led to the trilogy, Nathan True for his remarkable copyediting, and Elizabeth Chenette for the hours of proofreading, both teaching me to see the world in new ways; to Neil Gonzalez, for his artistry and patience in working with me on the cover designs. My special thanks to Susan Hauptman for sharing both her time and extraordinary artistic eye in helping to choose the cover art. To Nancy Wiegman for her insights into India and meditation in the final proofreading. To the dozens of you kind enough to take the time to give interviews, again, my sincerest thanks. To Jim Ketchem, Jean Millay, Nicolas Schou, Tim Scully, and Joel Selvin—busy people all—for your generous endorsements. As always, thanks to my family, to Erin, Owen, and Adam, who grew up watching mom write whenever there was a spare minute; to the women who love them, that they may know the waters from which these men spring—Sophie, Danielle, and Clarice; to Nicolas, Liam, Emery, Cayden, Nora, and Dyllan, for inspiring the fortitude to leave you a greater awareness of the world.
And finally, to Erik—always my inspiration.
CHRISTIAN BROOKS
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
OCTOBER 1965
With his scream still receding into the shadows of the room, Christian Brooks struggled to awaken among a tangle of sheets. Still gripped by nightmare images of burning buildings and the grasp of dark hands, he blinked and looked around the room. No longer were there angry shouts, the sound of explosions, the roar of fire. The only sound was the harsh rasp of his breathing.
Safe, he slowly realized, I’m no longer in danger, but safe here in the Berkeley apartment.
Rising in the dim light of dawn, he stumbled through hazy shadow and leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the windowpane. The pale, pink, October sky was growing brighter, colors changing by the second. Still breathing heavily, Christian ran his hands across his face and eyes and looked to the street below, to movement, color, someone walking in early morning—anything to distract his fast-beating heart. Behind him, the bedroom door opened slowly.
“Hey, man,” Matt’s sleepy voice mumbled. “Everything okay?”
“Just … just a bad dream,” he murmured, embarrassed he was unable to control the trembling in his voice.
“You want to talk about it? It’s not the first time.”
He stood naked at the window, his back turned to Matt, but Christian still saw the dream in bits and pieces, a night of riot in the Punjabi city of Amritsar, narrow streets filled with madness and terror. In the confusion of the dream, he was forever running after Nareesh … so close, Nareesh was so close … but no matter how fast he ran, Christian was never able to reach him, was only able to chase his friend’s vanishing form, muted on one side by shadow and illuminated on the other by the glare of fire.
Instinctively, he rubbed the thin, raised scar near his left temple, a small but terrible reminder of what had happened in India only months ago. In this moment of absolute truth, in this place where he could not hide from himself, he finally asked the question he had tried to avoid: Was it all my fault?
What if he had stuck to the plan that had been expected of him all his life—gone to divinity school and returned to take over his father’s mission?
In both despair and frustration, he raised his clenched fist and pounded the wood of the windowsill once, twice, three times. The reality was that he had chosen differently, and the dead could not be brought back.
“Christian?” Matt asked again. “Anything I can do? We’ve got classes in a few hours, and I’ve got to start getting ready for work soon. But we could have some coffee. Maybe talk for a while?”
Christian knew Matt meant well, but how could he speak of the recurring nightmare, or the importance of Nareesh in his life, that he and Nareesh had shared almost every thought from the time he was five years old? How could he explain to this unworldly, nineteen-year-old student from San Diego the poverty of India, the complicated politics of a world where religion still mattered a great deal? Matt had grown up with the Beach Boys, a surfboard, and high school dances. He had no religion, or if he did, he never spoke of it. Did he really care that in another part of the world, praying five times a day was unbroken law, that a cow was considered sacred, revered? Could Matt understand that an invasion of Tibet had created untold misery, moving a culture abruptly from a medieval existence into an unknown world, or the Tibetan belief that the knowledge of centuries had to be preserved in the lamas making their secret way over the Himalayas?
“Thank you,” Christian answered quietly. “But … there’s nothing to be done.”
No. He could not begin to explain the dream to Matt. To do so would mean he’d have to explain things about himself he wasn’t ready to share, things even he did not understand. To speak of the riot and all its consequences would be to relive it again, to make it real. The relationship with his father, the Reverend Charles Brooks, was complicated, more than his simply quitting school at a theological seminary and going off on his own. His anger toward the man who had given him life and care bewildered him, but it was still there.
On the morning after the riot, still recovering from wounds of body and spirit, and against his fierce objections, Christian had been packed off by his father to an aunt in Oberlin, Ohio. Seventeen at the time, the trip had been long, by small plane from Amritsar, in northwestern India, to New Delhi; by jet to Bangkok, then Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, and finally to Oberlin. He had flown alone, silent, and in the darkness, facing the plane’s small window, had stifled his sobs while the man next to him slept.
By the time he’d disembarked in Oberlin, his eyes were dry. All that remained was the anxious longing to see Nareesh, to be able to talk through the entire complicated mess that had put them both in the center of a ferocious religious upheaval. But Nareesh was not due until divinity school began in August. So, holding on to his anxiety, he waited. His aunt had tried to help, to speak to the desolate sadness in his eyes, his stunned bewilderment. But he needed Nareesh and all the shared history between them.
July came, and with it, his eighteenth birthday.
August. With a great deal of anticipation, he’d packed his few belongings and settled into the dorm, waiting for Nareesh to walk through the door and take up residence as his roommate. Classes began, but Nareesh never appeared. Not a word to the school or to Christian. As the first days of the semester passed, Christian was filled with a growing sickness. Had something happened to Nareesh on the night of the riot? Had his father kept something from him?
Then the dream began.
By mid-October, the questions and longing had receded, hidden in the nightmare. In the day to day of his new life, he’d joined a group that planned to work in the South the following summer, registering Negro voters. A girl had briefly held his interest, but an all-boys boarding school in India had made him di
fferent, somewhat shy. He began to follow the news about happenings in Berkeley, California: a political movement to ensure free speech on campus.
When December finally arrived and with it, the end of the first semester, he had known he wasn’t ready to make a commitment to the ministry. He had resigned from the divinity school, knowing that doing so would break his father’s heart. At the time, the thought had crossed his mind that hurting his father was perhaps half his motivation.
At the beginning of the year, with the news stories about the Free Speech Movement still fresh, he had set off for California without money, a place to stay, or acquaintances. Once there, he’d been granted one of the few remaining places for winter quarter and had enrolled full time at the university. On that day when he’d sat outside the Admissions Building with acceptance papers in hand, suitcase with all he owned at his feet, and wondering where he would go, Matt had casually approached.
What had drawn Matt to that bench, Christian had always considered karma. But there Matt was, carefree, teasing Christian about his forlorn face. And when Christian had explained his situation, how he’d left the Ohio college without his father’s permission, Matt had playfully punched his arm and waved his hand in casual dismissal of parents everywhere. Then, understanding Christian’s empty pockets and what the suitcase represented, Matt had given him a place to stay and helped him to find a job.
Over the summer, they had rented a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of an old three-story building on the south side of the Berkeley campus, near Telegraph Avenue. Housing was tough to come by, and it was a small miracle that a graduate student had sublet the apartment for a year. An ordinary student lodging, some would have called it—a small kitchen, where not much was cooked, the countertops scratched by countless knives; a living room with a worn green couch and a matching chair; a laminate table, and four chairs with upholstery escaping from the sharp corners of their plastic seat covers. Each bedroom provided a single bed, a brown-stained dresser, and a small desk. The only considered piece of art was a poster tacked to the wall above the dining room table, of Mario Savio carefully removing his shoes before standing on the roof of a police car to speak to the crowds. From his bedroom window, Christian could just see a corner of Sproul Plaza, the center of the Free Speech Movement protests of last year and, beyond it, the Sather Gate entrance to the university.
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