HOW I BECAME A HIPPIE: A CHILD OF THE SIXTIES … AND OTHER
THINGS
While parked on West Cliff Drive today, I saw what
might be described as “hippies” parked nearby in a beat-up old van with a
sliding door. Two guys and a girl, probably in their early twenties, trying for
the “60s hippie look” though not really hip enough, compared to how it once
was. The guys had big hats and they all wore colorful, mismatching, though not
raggedy clothes, nor were they particularly naked. The girl had a blond streak
in her dark hair and was seriously reading a book. In their midst, sitting
starkly on a bench was a large glass hookah. I had the urge to tell them
stories of “how it was” but didn’t. I would’ve told them that fifty years ago
the whole of West Cliff Drive would’ve been full of parked vans and buses with
friendly hippies, in states of colorful, raggedy undress, and running naked
down on the little and big beaches. There would have been people playing live
music on acoustic instruments and drums, perhaps even a sitar or two, with
dancing everywhere. And I would have told them that I appreciate that they are
trying to emulate something that once expressed “freedom” as well as “youth.” I
would also have asked them to tell me their stories of “how they became hippies.”
I was once an absolute hippie in appearance and in lifestyle (though there were
definitely different hippie lifestyles). Being able “to become a hippie” was a
choice that I made wholeheartedly, though very few of my friends did. This is
my story of “how I became a hippie,” and how I have been there the whole rest
of my life.
It would be fascinating to interview thousands of “old
hippies” and find out just how they got there, to what was called “the
counterculture.” I was such a hippie by the time Woodstock happened, that I was
just “too cool” to go (I lived rather close by in Ithaca) and mingle with “all
the teenyboppers from Long Island.” As a “back-to-the lander” hippie, I
eschewed such popular, “stoned-out spectacles,” preferring to follow my own band,
NRBQ, and read Steward Brand’s Whole
Earth Catalog, along with a little Nietzsche and Hesse, as well as Be Here Now. My hair was down to my
waist and I kept writing materials stashed in my beard. New York State
troopers, profiling “hippie druggies” stopped me several times, but neither my
wife nor I took any drugs, not even marijuana. We lived in the mountains
outside of Ithaca, using oil lamps and hurricane candles, cooked over a fire
outside, even in winter, and heated with a woodstove. We were Montessori
teachers and then I worked for Tompkins County CPS (Child Protective Services).
But
I have rather plunged into the middle of a story that I believe should be told
“from the beginning.” I suppose it would “make more sense” that way. One of the
primary reasons I am writing this is so that my life actually might make some
sense to me. But for me, and I’m sure many others, “becoming a hippie” was a
choice to “not make sense.”
The
great majority of my friends, of whom I actually had two, though I had numerous
high school classmates, did not become hippies, but more or less followed in
the footsteps of their parents in Albany, New York. I was rather different than
the “normal” kids for a number of reasons, as I see it. One reason, that has
very recently dawned on me, is that my parents were “mixed,” somewhat racially
and definitely culturally. My sense of it is that when people marry (or link
up, as it were) with different kind of people, the children may actually
“mutate” and bring out the best qualities of each different “side.” My
“Italian” father (who was descended from Norman, that is, French descendants of
earlier Vikings, Sicilians) was stationed in Paris, Texas early in WWII, where
he met my mother, the youngest of eleven children, descendants of Scots-Irish
and Native American (Cherokee-Choctaw) blood. Not only racially but also quite
different culturally, my mother had an “indigenous,” if you will, perspective
on life, quite different from my father’s traditional Italian way of seeing
things. Her grandfather had also been a Choctaw medicine man, for whatever
that’s worth.
There
is also the fact that I was born six-weeks premature and then kept in
incubation, in the same kind of box with a lightbulb that incubates chicken
eggs, and without bonding human contact for at least six weeks, which seemingly
had the effect of both delaying my development and creating autistic-like
symptoms, which my father read as defiance, which led to his abusive treatment or
avoidance of me, though much of my childhood.
At
age seven we moved into a house in which a man had committed suicide less than
a year prior to our moving in. He had hung himself in what was now my bedroom.
And he initially appeared quite visually in front of me, totally freaking me
out, and then toning his visits down to a ghost-like appearance. We
commiserated rather frequently for more than a year and I was quite aware of
his situation “on the other side.”
These
influences on my early life certainly provided me with a predilection to view
life from quite different perspectives even as a very young child. My father
was an enigma to me: I did know he loved me but he was also quite physically
abusive. I became aware that when he was being abusive, he wasn’t “in this
right mind”; I could literally see his thoughts and that he was on the beach
(Normandy) in the midst of battle or trapped in a house serving as a field
hospital (he was a medic) in a forest (Belgium in the Battle of the Bulge). I
was seeing into his thoughts in his PTSD episode.
And he was a very well-respected pillar of the
community and looked up to by family and friends. Thus, I was quite able to see
through the false social veneer at a very young age. I think those with similar
sight were prime candidates to become a part of the counterculture.
But
by the time I was in late-grade school and then high school, I had become quite
able to socialize; people liked me and I enjoyed socializing. I had learned to
enter into this world well enough. I had good looks and was popular enough to
become Vice-President of my senior class (of which the President always had to
be a “jock,” which I wasn’t). I went to a Catholic high school with Irish,
German, Italian, Polish Catholics and was taught by a Catholic male teaching
order, many of whom preferred corporal punishment as well as boys. I was not
interested in school and was quite mediocre, though I avidly read all sorts of
science fiction. A girl, older than me, from a “high-class” school in a
well-to-do area outside of Albany saw me from her school bus and pursued me. As
my first real girlfriend (since I was finally ready for such a thing), she was
very adventuresome and actually wild. She was absolutely open to sex, telling
me that she was not a virgin because she had stepped out of a rowboat and had been
impaled by an oar, which sounded totally reasonable to me. She was a
parachutist and would also jump upon the railing of a bridge a hundred feet off
the ground and gleefully, nonchalantly walk along from there. She brought me
into an old cemetery and just as nonchalantly walked into an open mausoleum and
pulled open a drawer with a skeleton. She also brought me spelunking into a
deep cave (Haile’s Cave, in the Heldebergs) which was full of bats and often
flooded, turning off the flashlight and sitting in absolute dark silence for
long periods. She ironed her long dark hair so that it would be flat and shiny.
In the early sixties, she was what I saw as “kind of a beatnik,” wearing black
and black mascara (which later was called “Goth”). Her older brother was a
beatnik who did drugs. She invited me to go with her to Bob Dylan’s house over
in Stockbridge (MA) a number of times, but I was such a dumbass, all I could
say was, “I’m not goin’ to no beatnik fag’s house.” I could have stepped
directly into the highest of hippiedom but I was still too much of a "greaser" and had to wait a
few more years. She also brought me to Lake George to hang with the Hell’s
Angels when they rioted and took over the town until the New York State
Troopers invaded in full force. She opened my mind to “the unknown” and made it
an utterly interesting adventure.
About
this same time, perhaps as a result of my science fiction reading, which had
led me to study astrology and the “occult,” I became a member of the AMORC
(Rosicrucian Order) and began “esoteric” experiments like using my “mental
powers” to cause a candle flame to waver, increase, decrease, or even go out. I
did this in my bedroom. Once my mother poked her head in the doorway and
commented that she used to do that same kind of thing with her grandfather when
she was very young. (She also told me the story of how Bonnie and Clyde came to
her house in the country when she was five or six and gave her mother a dollar
to spend the night in their car in the barn; they were done in two weeks later.)
In
my first year in college, when I was in Fenwick, one of the men’s dorms, I
actually performed a “black mass” in my dorm room in order to “conjure up a
demon.” I studied up on such in the BC library that actually had an archive
with original books on spells and such dating from the Puritan era and the
Salem witch trials. I had a work-study job at the library and had access to the
archives. Then I went to a “witch’s bookstore/center” in Boston, called,
interestingly enough, The Coven, where they lent me a “proper black mass
crucifix” (which must have been “desanctified”), a book on conducting such,
with instructions on drawing a pentacle, the proper kind of chalk, and selling
me a gigantic black candle. I went through the process, the room became dark and
smoky, my roommate freaked out, I stepped out of the pentacle, and was punched
in the face by what appeared to be a cat-like human face with red eyes with an
iron fist, seriously bruising my jawbone. My roommate had already fled the
room. After this, I was thrown out of the dorms and had to find another place
to live.
When
I went to The Coven, the older crones there sent a younger woman, Cassandra, to
work with me in my black mass endeavor. We became friends and she invited me to
her house, which was more of a “compound,” in Charlestown, an old part of
Boston. The house was ancient, built in the 1600s. She told me that her direct
descendants were two witches who were hung in Salem in 1692 and that being a
witch with certain powers was “something inherited.” She was literally
bewitching. She introduced me to the I
Ching and showed me how to use it. We talked about the war in Vietnam and I
told her that I was not one who would kill people. I hadn’t thought much about
the draft (to which I would soon be subject) and, using the I Ching, she said that for me to
participate in the war, killing or not, would “destroy my soul,” and that I
would, risking prison, not go.
While
in college I began participating with the SDS on the BC campus and eventually
parading with the anti-war groups in Boston, particularly on Boston Common
where we were attacked by baton-swinging police on horses. We carried North
Vietnamese flags and chanted “Ho Chi Minh.” It was quite exciting and led me to
question “Amerikan” (as we spelled it at the time) society at the time. Many of
the people I paraded with were Marxists and carried Mao’s Little Red Book (of which I still have my copy).
But
I was not yet a hippie. I had longish hair and a big mustache and LSD posters
on my bedroom walls and wore bell-bottoms and flopped, lacy shirts and
Edwardian double-breasted suits to class, but “weed” just made me very spacy
and put me to sleep. Then I had a series of seven dreams on seven nights in a
row. In these dreams I was underneath a heavy wooden door with a small square
grating through which I could see. I was in a pit like a grave and people
dressed in 18th century Irish garb were throwing rocks down on the
door, crushing me. (The one man, Giles Corey, killed in the Salem witch trials
as a “witch/wizard” was “pressed to death” in a similar manner in 1692.) In
each progressive dream, I see a red-haired woman standing on the edge of the
pit and sternly looking down at me with a slight smile, as if it’s all a joke.
In the final dream, I see a small gravestone with a name and the year 1728.
Back in the modern moment, I am leaving my apartment and the person who moved
in below my apartment a week earlier is coming in the front door. I recognize
her as the same red-haired woman who was in my dream! But all I can do is just
gape at her; it’s just too mind-blowing for me to comprehend. And then she
smiles at me and says, “It’s been a long time, Seamus.” Seamus, the name on the
gravestone! She and I become the best of friends, spending at least a year in
almost daily discussion and smoking dope and listening to “acid music” and
working on the Ouija Board, and amazing each other with what we know. In this
time she chewed up so many men but she never chewed me up. We went out dancing
all the time and she was this Twiggy-style model who was most sexy but I
resisted because I absolutely knew her ferocious power. She was too
sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and intelligent to be “hippified,” or labeled in
that way. She was wild in her mind and taught me how to be wild in your mind,
how to be without boundaries in your mind. We still talk every two weeks, over
fifty years later. And she is still a witch.
I am attending a music festival in the
wheat fields of Sussex, England, with a British friend I met on a train. Timothy
is the lead guitarist for Marianne Faithful, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. We
jammed (me playing a pretty decent “harp”) and he invited to his home in St.
John’s Wood in London. At the festival, thousands of young people are pushing
and straining at the gate as it opens. It is a large meadow surrounded by a
high wire fence with uniformed security guards located along the fence and high
towers with spotlights. It is dusk, the gate is now opening and the crowd is
pressing forward. Suddenly the blinding floodlights on the towers shine upon
the crowd, moving over the crowd. When the light hits me, I freeze in terror,
as if I am going to die in that moment. Through the dust cloud enveloping me, I
see people with shaved heads, wearing rags, some with yellow and black stripes
all around me. My stomach is sucked in; I am ravenous with hunger. I am afraid
and confused. Then, just as suddenly, I am back in the crowd of young people at
the festival. This experience happens one more time when the spotlight shines
on me again. This time I realize that I have had a flashback to a past life as
a Jew in a concentration camp. More reveals itself to me in due time.
After this, I lived in Amsterdam in
the Netherlands with a Dutch woman I “saved” from some predatory American boys
at the Van Gogh Museum. Amsterdam in 1969 was the hippie paradise of the world,
full of hippies from everywhere in the world, all smoking dope—except me. I was
entranced by the magical kingdom around me and was beginning to look the part,
but, as always, I was a bit aloof. After being there a while, I abruptly left,
leaving my ersatz lovely girlfriend, Derusha, with only a copy of The Prophet. I really didn’t quite know
“what to do with people,” and found myself identifying too closely with Harry
Haller in Hesse’s novel, Steppenwolf.
I had discovered the “lost” element of being a hippie.
By
now I had been exposed to aspects of “the unknown,” and I found it to be quite
attractive to my nature; I wanted to know more and see more, yet my proclivity
was to be isolated and reclusive. I wanted to be able to “see into myself” and
“know who I am.” And I had a strong aversion to “authority” and considered
myself to be “antiauthority,” though not particularly rebellious or defiant. I
did not want to be involved in fighting in Vietnam. I believed that I had no
right to kill anyone, especially someone in Vietnam. I thought that I might
have willingly fought in WWII, or to defend people I loved, but I had
experienced aspects of “the other side,” and now had had more “experienced
moments” of a “past life,” and had studied and meditated upon the notion of
“the soul being reborn in many lifetimes of many people.” I didn’t know if I
believed it or how to contextualize it for myself, but I did know that I did
not want to be killing others or supporting others in this. I am aware that I
was very naïve, in regards to what happens in the actions of the U.S. in the world,
but I still realized that I had to “do something.” In due time, I began to
participate in the Friends Service Committee and attending weekly “peace
vigils” (in which people threw things at our group, once hitting a girl in the
head and knocking her out). I wrote to President Nixon and the IRS, telling
them I would no longer pay “war taxes.” I marched more seriously against the
war now. I applied for Conscientious Objector status so that, rather than
participating in fighting in Vietnam for two years, I could do “civilian
service.” I had to gather evidence of my beliefs against killing, which was
rather difficult. Mostly I had to “think and articulate” my thoughts. I used my
Catholic education (God forbid) and compiled lots of Bible quotes, which gave
the appearance that I was actually religious. In fact, the last time I had gone
to church which was with my parents and sister at Easter Mass, the Bishop stood
in the pulpit and announced to the congregation that the Catholic Church
supported the war in Vietnam against the “godless Communists” and that Catholic
men (read “boys”) could be soldiers (read “and kill”). My reaction was to stand
up and walk out, apparently saying “fuck this” on my way out, as my chagrined
and embarrassed parents told me. The Albany Draft Board, consisting of seven
men of my father’s age, every single one of whom had been able to avoid the
WWII draft, granted one out of eight applicants who sought Conscientious
Objector status, with the other seven going to prison for two years. I thought,
“Well, if my CO status is not granted, I can go to prison and meditate and read
like Gandhi did in prison.” Until I met a Quaker guy who told me he was raped
every single day for two years when he went to prison.
The
day arrived when I had to present my case for Conscientious Objection to the
Draft Board. My long hair was sprayed and plastered down under my collar of the
white shirt with the tie and suit jacket I wore. I was not prepared to submit or be a paradigm of sweetness to these cowards. They had in fact
invited, illegally, an Army recruiter, Sargent O’Day, to my defense. When they
introduced him, I said, “I refuse to acknowledge your military title and will
address you as Mr. O’Day.” And when they started calling me a “coward” as well
as “unchristian,” I told them that my father had a Bronze Cross for his heroic
efforts in WWII (which he did) and that they should be ashamed of themselves
for “chickening out,” and reread letters from priests saying how “devout” a
Catholic I am (which was total bullshit) and quoted all sorts of non-killing
quotes by Jesus, I think my insane righteousness and utter contempt for them
may have somehow shamed them. Or else the fact that my father would publicly
embarrass them for their cowardliness (which he actually did at the Draft Board
as he stood on a desk and absolutely lambasted them later in the day in front
of all the secretaries and staff that worked in the building, after I told him
what they had said to me.
Taking
the stand as a Conscientious Objector and risking going to jail did change my
life. I had gone against the current. I knew people who had escaped the draft
by moving to Canada (which was pretty close to Albany, New York), and perhaps
that would have been a good choice, but I was proud of myself and how I
successfully stood up against “the man,” making myself into a “man” in my own
eyes, and my father’s too. My mother, being a “Southern girl” could never wrap
her mind around what I did. The guys in my high school had bragged about how
they would “go to Vietnam and shoot some gooks”; a few of them never came back.
I was absolutely antimilitary. When I was “serving” my two years at a
“residential institution for emotionally-disturbed children” (along with my
faithful wife who also ended up working there), the FBI knocked at our door
with drawn weapons and told us we had committed a Federal offense by not paying
our income taxes, and that unless we paid “right now,” they would put us in
handcuffs and haul us off to jail. I was almost interested in taking them up on
their threats but I did not want to inflict such on my wife, who was terrified.
I was still such a punk that I wrote a check to the IRS for $236 (including
penalties and fines) and drew a picture of hand with the middle finger sticking
up right on the back of the check, though it was quite small and they didn’t
notice it.
At
this point I have not “mellowed”; I am more of a “yippie” (see Abby Hoffman)
than a hippie. Hippies are definitely mellower. That is yet to come. There are
still stories to tell that comprise an amazing lead-up.
We
are living near Millbrook, New York. Several years earlier (1967ish), Timothy
Leary, living on the Hitchcock Estate, was raided several times by the New York
State Troopers. The estate was a center for LSD research and also a residence
for 29 adults and 10 children at the last time it was raided and shut down. I
had heard that it had been finally shut down because local teens had become
involved in taking LSD there. When my wife and I snuck into the gatehouse which
consisted of a large room over the arched stone entrance, the whole area had
become very overgrown with jungle-like foliage and was still guarded by State
Troopers, some with rifles, around all the buildings. We first fought through the
vines which now occupied what had been a garden with all kinds of statues. We
uncovered large statues (six feet or so) of Alice in Wonderland, the Rabbit,
the Mad Hatter, as well as unicorns, turtles, and other mythological creatures.
The entrance to the gateway was guarded so we struggled through the bushes and
climbed in a window that opened onto the spiral staircase leading up the room
where Leary lived. It was a beautiful room with many small windows, built-in
bookcases, and even a built-in bed frame. The room was empty and clean except
for one thing: in the center of the room was a size 14 brown leather wing-tip
shoe with the tongue out and no shoe laces.
I am working at an old institution,
established in Victorian times. It had initially been an Episcopalian
orphanage. It had been hit by a cholera or smallpox plague that killed almost
all the adults and children. The atmosphere of the institution, which was
composed of many “cottages” with up to twelve children, was scattered over many
acres in a birch and pine forest. I noticed that when I went outside at night,
I felt oppressed, even assaulted, by the darkness, as if something was
literally grabbing at my clothes and even shoving me. In fact it was
frightening but I didn’t know what it was. My wife actually saw figures in the
dark and avoided going outside at night. For a number of years I had been
studying the occult as well as Hindu philosophy and teachings. I had read that
“ghosts” live on the “astral (or emotional)” level and were attracted to people
whose consciousness was astral in nature. Interestingly, at that same time, I
started meditating with a Theosophical group, and was able to “elevate” myself
to a “mental” level and thus was able to develop a kind of “immunity” to the
ghosts, or so I thought. Then a number of events occurred that were very
disturbing. First, in broad daylight, I noticed approximately twenty people
dressed in black Victorian Episcopalian clothing standing at the edge of a
meadow in the dark shade of the forest. Then, one night our little apartment
became very cold with an inky smoke and my wife and I were visited by some very
malevolent ghosts, who I could not only feel but who materialized right in
front of us. We were terrified and had no idea what to do. Eventually they
left. About this same time, the young boys in my cottage were also being
assaulted by the ghosts, who came to their beds at night and pinched them as
they materialized in front of them. The boys would come to my room crying and
terrified. My meditation had worked but only a bit. I kept lights on for the
kids and we decided that we would “pray to Jesus” to protect us and make the
ghosts go away. I told them to tell the ghosts, “In the name of Jesus Christ,
leave here and move on.” We practiced over and over until they felt that they
could follow through with it, even if they were afraid. They were angry about
what the ghosts were doing as well. They called on Jesus to “stand with them,”
told the ghosts where to go, and it worked. None of us ever saw or felt another
ghost around us again.
One
of my great concerns at the institution was the treatment of the children by
their child care workers/house parents. Some of these people were totally
unqualified to be caring for children and were physically abusive. I was
appalled and wanted to find some way to educate these people in proper child
care. The institution was non-union and I believed that if they were unionized
they could be properly educated through the union. I research training provided
by unions and found that the AFL-CIO would be a good candidate. So I contacted
them in New York City and they assured me that they do and would provide such
training. I went to meet them secretly and found myself, a quite hippie-looking
man with long hair down to his waist and a big bushy reddish beard, sitting at
one end of a long oval table. At the other end was a short Italian man
literally in a tight-fitting sharkskin suit (who had to be Joe Pesci in another
life), with two guys in black suits on either side, wearing white shirts and
stylish ties, packing a gun in a shoulder holster. This was like the Mob. At
this point he told me what I had to do: I had to organize the house parents in secret
and get them to join the union by having them literally sign on the dotted
line. If I didn’t do this, he would “send his associates to further advise me.”
My heart was in my throat and I had to agree. So I went back and made the
rounds among the house parents, a number of whom I discovered were actually
German refugees from post-WWII (ex-Nazis). Two other Conscientious Objectors
joined me.
Now the story gets particularly weird
and then tragic. One of these workers was a follower of Eckankar and claimed to
be experienced in “astral travel,” which is kind of like Harry Potter’s “cloak
of invisibility” or of being like a ghost. He knew from his girlfriend, who was
the private secretary of the CEO of the institution, that the CEO was
embezzling funds from the institution, and decided that he would “astral
travel” to the CEO’s home on the institution grounds to see what he could find.
He asked my wife and to come with him. We had never done this and didn’t think
we could, but he said it was easy and to let him guide us, which we did. We
moved in our “astral bodies,” which was like not being in the physical body
but, rather, being a kind of ghost, in which you are able to “move” and to
“see” as you move. We moved though physical obstacles like walls and doors, and
could see the rooms in the house as if we were looking through clouds;
everything was rather grayish and out of focus. We found nothing in particular
but both my wife and I remembered seeing the exact same things and layout of
the house. I’ve done this a few times over the years but it’s so strange and
dream-like that it’s hard to believe.
The administration of the institution
found out our “secret plan” and the institution policeman, who was an ex-cop
and did wear a pistol and had a rifle in his truck, did his best to follow us
at night. We had to hide fast and then desisted from our attempts to talk to
house parents (which probably informed the administration in the first place).
I received some intimidating calls from the AFL-CIO guy but, in fact, the
campus of the institution was actually guarded, especially at night, by armed
officers, both to keep people out and to keep the residents, some of whom were
older teens and sought to escape, in. And one night, one of the guys I was
working with in the union-organizing was killed in a car accident; it was
discovered that his brake line had been cut.
As a house parent, I worked with a
group of 12 young boys, aged from 4 to 10, in a cottage setting. Most of the
kids were from Harlem and had been removed from their homes for their own
safety, due to drug use and to drug-related crimes, or negligence or
abandonment. There was an on-campus school with young, inexperienced, white
teachers. My kids went to school and were both “uncooperative” and “out of
control.” My own belief was that had they been white, such a “problem” would
not have arisen. So the psychologists and doctors in the administration
prescribed Ritalin for every single kid, which I was to administer to them.
After the first day, they came home like zombies and went to sleep. Then the
weekend came and the next morning we had a meeting in which we made a deal. I
told them that if they cooperated in school and behaved properly that I would
give them treats (like ice cream or hot dogs or no vegetables or pizza) every
day and that they would be able to stay up late on weekends and watch Creature
Features and have banana splits and popcorn and the like. So the deal was
struck: they behaved, the teachers and psychiatrists and doctors were quite
self-congratulating, and I flushed the Ritalin down the toilet every day for
almost two years. After my friend was killed, my time was almost up and one
Thursday morning I told them, right after they had once again congratulated
themselves, that the boys hadn’t taken any Ritalin but had decided to improve
their own behavior. I was immediately threatened with arrest and then reminded
them that they might not want to go this route since I could just notify the
local press about what they had done (and were doing in other cottages with
other children). So they merely fired me (and my wife) and sent us packing.
While at the children’s institution
near Millbrook, I had begun participating in a California-based Theosophical
group that followed the teachings of Alice Bailey, a more or less “renegade”
Theosophist. The group meditated on “the soul level” and studied the teachings
of the “Hierarchy” and Djwal Kuhl as “consciously channeled” by Bailey in the
1920s. I was totally up for it and everything resonated with me. Theosophy,
started by Helena Blavatsky in the 1880s was a mixture of Hinduism and
Buddhism, and what was called “esoteric Christianity”; it had a definite air of
Jungianism. It also spoke of a “World Avatar” who was expected any time (since
its prepared Avatar, Krishnamurti, had left it at the altar). I had a mentor
who led me to believe that I might be that “World Savior”—which was quite
problematic to a young man who had just married a beautiful Welsh woman who
wanted to have children. A part of the Theosophical teaching was celibacy, and
since I was planning on being the World Avatar, I believed it to be expedient
to go that way. We had a little house in the mountains outside of Ithaca and I
slept literally on the mountaintop I owned up in back of our abode. And then I
was “moved” to leave on what turned out to be a six-week “soul searching”
journey alone. This was not a good move. When I returned my wife ended our
relationship and happened to have another man living at my house. I honored her
wishes (still in my pride and self-deception) and I was devastated. No longer
believing I was the Avatar, I still “kept to the path,” though in deep
depression. This “back to the lander” was now alone with the land.
In those days, when a young person
ran up against what I now had to face, there was only one alternative: go to
California. I went to live in a “growth center/commune” in Berkeley, called the
Living Love Center, led by Ken Keyes, author of The Handbook of Higher Consciousness, among others. I learned and
experienced every New Age thing there was to learn or experience. Eight hours a
day I was taught everything there was to know that was occult or yogic or
psychological or magic or artistic. It was far and above Esalen at the time,
attended by the Silicon Valley wizards, the Manson crazies, Buddhist teachers,
Indigenous shamans, yogis, pre-Scientologists, Silva Mind Control, and then
LSD. I went from being a “back to the lander hippie” to being a truly Californian
“trippy hippie.” I watched all my chakras open to the very ends of the universe
and beyond, watched and heard the earth breathe, saw everything turn into pure
atomic energy as it pulsed and throbbed, made the clouds move and the sun
shine, walking Telegraph Ave and the UC-Berkeley campus accompanied by either
Pan or Mephistopheles. Then, after too long a time taking purple microdot, I
stopped eating, lost eighty pounds, started seizuring, and stopped cold turkey.
Then, after stealing Ken’s girlfriend, Nicole, I was ejected from the Living
Love Center, eventually ending up living with a woman artist on Masonic and
Asbury in SF.
Now I was a full-fledged hippie and
was supposed to be enjoying it. There was a difference between “East Coast
hippies” and “California hippies”; the East Coast people were far more
intellectual whereas the California people were more hedonist. In Berkeley I
had begun to “sit,” that is, to practice Buddhist meditation, at Dharmadhatu,
Chogyam Trunga’s group, a strange bunch that smoked and drank, just like him.
And then somebody took me down to the Tassajara Zen Center in Carmel Valley,
behind Big Sur, and I liked that. These people were clean and bald and quiet
and tranquil, or so it seemed in comparison to myself. My “out of this world”
experiences were becoming much rarer. Then along came est and Werner Erhard.
For me, this took the cake. I not only “got enlightened,” the women lined up at
my door, so to speak. I got all cleaned up and discovered that you didn’t need
to be a hippie to have “free love” (though it was much the same in my college
years, to be honest). One just had to be “present” and “forthright” and so I
learned well how to be a “sensitive male” and perhaps even was somewhat. But in
working at the est Center in SF, I discovered the emotional and physical abuse
that was glorified as “honesty” and exited as quickly as I could, moving back
to Berkeley, where I was literally pursued and harassed by est, as if I could
not be allowed to leave the cult. But, matching nastiness with nastiness, they
finally laid off me. However, that said, I had learned how to “be in the world”
and play that game properly, thanks to est. It was Werner who said,
“Understanding is the booby prize.” Such a trickster, Jack Rosenberg, like the
the rabbit in the briar patch. I understand and appreciate hard lessons.
I had changed. I no longer looked
like a hippie. I realized at this point that “being a hippie” was more truly a
state of mind, a worldview. On my “honeymoon” in Colorado and New Mexico with
my new wife, we got into a heated argument in Manitou Springs, and I, as I had
done once before to “gather my wits, took off into what was literally the wild
blue yonder. I ended up becoming a monk at the Bodhi Om Mandala Zen Monastery
in Jemez Springs, New Mexico. They shaved my head and I sat in my black kashaya
robe for four hours at a time in the outside zendo built over the mountain
stream that ran down to the desert below. I learned to cover my bare feet so
that the tarantula-like spiders would no longer creep out from under the floor
to bite my toes. It was a most solitary Zen sangha; the monks were silent and
kept to themselves. I “sat” for eight hours a day all tolled and worked at the
monastery most cleaning. Only once was I sharply and loudly stuck upon my
shoulders by the jiki-jitsu with the long hard keisaku, which had the effect of
altering my state of consciousness, not unlike the effects of peyote, which
heightens the senses and instinct, creating an intense state of awareness of
and connection with the natural world, as if one was a rabbit. One day, during kyogyo,
the walking meditation, in which we walked in single file following the jiki
out on the pavement in front of the monastery, some local yahoos stopped in
their pick-up truck, climbed in the back, and started laughing and throwing
empty beer cans at us. In a split second, the jiki, with fourteen of us
black-robed monks walking as one unit, within inches of each other, turned on a
dime directly facing the locals and began speeding towards them. In a
nanosecond, their eyes bugged out of their heads and they zoomed off, never to
return. Weeks flew by, summer became fall, but no rain so close to the desert.
I had become a bona fide Zen monk. There was a natural hot springs at the monastery.
Every evening, all the monks and nuns met there, stripped naked, and bathed absolutely
silently in the springs, watching the black sparkling dome above us. In time, I
got food poisoning and was extremely sick and weak. After a few days, no one
even noticed or did anything to help me; I left in the middle of the night and
drove back to California where my wife was waiting for me at a Hindu ashram,
Kayavorohana, (where we had been married) outside of St. Helena in the Napa
Valley.
