CHAPTER 7

being there then

Postsixties pop culture has been quite dismissive about the hippies’ interest in Eastern religion. Mike Myers caricatured yogis in The Love Guru. In the TV show The Sopranos, Tony’s homicidal sister Janice and suicidal girlfriend Gloria Trillo are both self-professed Buddhists. In This Is Spinal Tap, David St. Hubbins’s girlfriend Jeanine foolishly makes up itineraries with the astrological symbol of each band member on the tour book. Edina, the burned-out protagonist of the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, chants “Om” while inebriated. The film Bull Durham opens with this voice-over from Susan Sarandon’s character: “I’ve tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan.”

Putting aside the fact that Buddhists don’t worship Buddha, the ridicule reflects the shallowness of people who adopted superficial symbols of yoga and meditation while maintaining selfish, egotistical behavior. Like every other belief system, the Eastern religions that grew more popular in America in the sixties could be used as masquerades by bullshit artists and self-deceivers, but the existence of loudmouthed fakes didn’t erase the authenticity of sincere seekers.

In 1967, the growing presence of non-Western spiritual and esoteric traditions was part of the air that animated the hippie idea. On the mass media screen, no one was bigger than the Beatles, and George Harrison’s fascination with Eastern spirituality was as much a part of the band’s image in their last few years together as their haircuts had been when they’d first burst onto the scene. I became a vegetarian at the end of the sixties, and when people ask me why, I still sheepishly say that it’s because I read that Harrison was one.

The internationally known master of the sitar, Ravi Shankar, was a key catalyst in George Harrison’s interest in Hindu paths. Harrison, who took sitar lessons from Shankar, had first played the ancient instrument on “Norwegian Wood.” “Ravi was one person who impressed me,” wrote Harrison in the introduction to Shankar’s autobiography. “I mean . . . Elvis impressed me . . . but you couldn’t later on go round to him and say, Elvis, what was happening in the universe?” Harrison also found that several books about Hindu practices, including Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi and Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga, were consistent with his LSD experiences. In 1966, George and Pattie Harrison spent six weeks in India.

Harrison was only allowed one song as a writer and singer on most Beatles albums, and on Sgt. Pepper’s, the Harrison track was “Within You Without You.” It is the second longest on the album and the only recording that didn’t include other Beatles. “Within You Without You” has three time changes, a tambura drone, tablas, a weird (to Western ears) melody that Shankar had taught him, and the trippiest lyrics on the Beatles’ trippiest album. It fades out with the sound of the band members laughing as an antidote to the solemnity of the song.

 

The Maharishi

Sometime in the summer of 1967, George Harrison’s wife Pattie attended a lecture by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She was sufficiently impressed that three of the four Beatles (Ringo’s son Jason was a newborn) attended a talk he gave on August 24 at the London Hilton on Park Lane. The Maharishi was forty-nine years old, and had announced his intention to return to India at the end of this world tour, so this was supposedly his last public appearance in the West.

He was born Mahesh Prasad Varma, and had studied with several renowned spiritual teachers in his native India. The Maharishi had introduced the concept of Transcendental Meditation (TM) in 1955. By the midsixties, he had been on British TV several times and, because of his tendency to laugh, was sometimes called “the giggling guru.”

The Beatles were given front-row seats and were invited to meet the Maharishi in his hotel suite after the lecture. He had a long gray beard and wore a garland of marigolds around his neck. Harrison noticed a faint scent of sandalwood.

The Maharishi gave a mantra to all students with the instruction to repeat it in sittings twice a day. The mantra for all four Beatles was “just a sound to help follow the thoughts which pass before you like a movie.” The master told them that if even 1 percent of humanity meditated, it would dissipate dark clouds of war for thousands of years. (I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true, but it’s definitely the kind of grandiose claim that reinforces skepticism in the minds of rationalists.) McCartney’s song “The Fool on the Hill” on the Magical Mystery Tour album, released later that year, was inspired by the Maharishi.

He invited the band to be his guests at a training retreat in Wales, and the next day all four Beatles, their wives (minus Cynthia Lennon, who missed the train), Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Donovan took the train from London’s Euston Station to Bangor, Wales. Mobs of fans and press photographers were waiting at both stations. This one moment literally transformed “meditation” from a term previously limited to small zendos and yoga centers into a household word overnight.

The Beatles had to leave after only a single day of the planned ten-day course because of the shocking news that their manager Brian Epstein had died at the age of thirty-two from an overdose of sedatives mixed with alcohol. This tragedy triggered another wave of enormous media attention.

George Harrison and John Lennon appeared twice on David Frost’s TV show in the fall of 1967 to talk about their involvement with TM. On one of the shows, John stated that, thanks to his meditation, “I’m a better person, and I wasn’t bad before.”

They made arrangements to spend more time with the Maharishi at his teaching center located near Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas. They, along with their wives, girlfriends, assistants, and numerous reporters, arrived in February 1968 to join a group of people training to be TM instructors, including Donovan, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and actress Mia Farrow.

While in India, the Beatles wrote most of the songs that would be recorded on The White Album, including Lennon’s “Dear Prudence,” for Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence.

“The Maharishi provided us with a device to look at our own thoughts,” said Donovan, whose antidrug liner notes were a direct result of the teaching.

Ringo and his wife left after a ten-day stay; McCartney left after one month, and Lennon and Harrison stayed about six weeks, and then left abruptly following rumors of inappropriate behavior toward a few young women by the Maharishi. John was outraged. In Lennon Remembers, John said that when the Maharishi asked why they were leaving, he replied, “Well, if you’re so cosmic you’ll know why.”

In an interview on The Tonight Show, Lennon said that it had been a mistake to believe in the Maharishi. “There is no guru. You have to believe in yourself. You’ve got to get down to your own god in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.”

Other musicians had mixed feelings about the Maharishi as well. Joe Boyd says in his memoir White Bicycles that Incredible String Band members Robin Williamson and Mike Heron met the Maharishi before the Beatles did in 1967. They were eager to discuss spirituality, but according to Boyd, the Maharishi said that meditation “was only of value when the mantra had been given personally by him or one of his cohorts, and that meant joining the organization and paying the fees,” which turned them off.

The Maharishi met the Grateful Dead in Hollywood in November 1967 while they were recording their second album, Anthem of the Sun. He personally gave a mantra to members of the band, but the others in the Dead’s entourage got them from assistants. (This distinction did not go down well in the egalitarian hippie subculture of the Dead.)

Harrison later apologized for the way he and Lennon had turned on the Maharishi, and in 1992 he gave a benefit concert for the Maharishi-associated Natural Law Party. In 2009, McCartney and Starr performed at a benefit concert for the David Lynch Foundation, which raises funds for the teaching of TM to at-risk students.

 

Hare Krishna

The so-called Hare Krishna movement was the other spiritual path that George Harrison would publicly associate with.

A.C. Bhaktivedanta, a sixty-nine-year-old native of Calcutta, arrived virtually penniless in New York in 1965. He believed that his destiny was to bring awareness of Krishna, an incarnation of God, to the West. Within the Hindu tradition his approach is generally referred to as “Bhakti,” which means the path of love and devotion. The Maharishi’s TM revolved around the use of a mantra to detach the mind from random thoughts and emotions, a practice which is also at the core of many Buddhist paths, using the mind to conquer the mind. Bhakti yoga centers on the heart. The two practices do not inherently contradict each other, but they are quite different despite both having roots in Hindu traditions.

Bhaktivedanta believed in the cosmic power of what he called the “maha-mantra” (“maha” meaning “great”): “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna / Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare. / Hare Rama, Hare Rama / Rama Rama, Hare Hare.” Krishna is the supreme God, and Rama is an aspect or incarnation of Krishna, according to Hindus. “Hare” is a call to the female energy of the universe.

Bhaktivedanta conveyed faith in the repetition of these holy names. Within a few months, and with the help of some Indian acquaintances, he was able to rent a small storefront on Second Avenue between 1st and 2nd streets. He retained the awning that read, Matchless Gifts, put up by the previous tenants.

Howard Smith of the Village Voice was the first to write about Bhaktivedanta. He initially attracted a couple dozen students to whom he gave classes on the Bhagavad-Gītā, the ancient Hindu text that tells the story of Krishna and his disciple Arjuna. Bhaktivedanta also led the group in chanting at Tompkins Square Park. Avant-garde jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders soon joined in, as did Allen Ginsberg, whose embrace of Bhaktivedanta got the attention of the New York Times. The newspaper quoted the beatnik poet as saying that the Hare Krishna chant “brings a state of ecstasy.”

Bhaktivedanta’s devotees took to calling him Prabhupada, which means “Master.” A picture of him leading chants in the park graced the cover of EVO in November 1966 with the headline, “Save Earth Now!!” and the maha-mantra printed at the bottom. The article inside reported, “This new brand of holy man, with all due deference to Dr. Leary, has come forth with a brand of ‘Consciousness Expansion’ that’s sweeter than acid, cheaper than pot, and non-bustable by fuzz.” Bhaktivedanta was later quoted as saying, “We are not hippies, we are happies.”

Not long afterward, Ginsberg sang the Hare Krishna chant when he was a guest on William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line. The musical Hair included the chant in the finale of its first act. A small indie label recorded the master and devotees chanting, and the record was advertised in various underground papers using Ginsberg’s ecstasy quote.

To further expand his work, Bhaktivedanta created the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), which opened a temple in Haight-Ashbury in January 1967. Ginsberg greeted Bhaktivedanta at the San Francisco airport and served as master of ceremonies at a benefit for ISKCON at the Avalon Ballroom. Big Brother and the Holding Company, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead performed at the event. The Krishna people got along well with others in the Haight community, even the Diggers, who were impressed by the free vegetarian meals ISKCON offered to visitors.

Bhaktivedanta had strict rules for formal devotees, but was tolerant of less austere supporters. ISKCON forbade meat, extramarital sex, alcohol, marijuana, psychedelics, tobacco, coffee, and tea. At the Avalon benefit, Ginsberg told the crowd that the Hare Krishna mantra was a very good way to come down from a bad acid trip. He admitted that he was sticking with cigarettes but “if it would help matters, I’ll chant Hare Krishna before going to bed for the rest of my life.” As Bhaktivedanta walked out of the Avalon, past undulating, braless hippie women, he quipped to a devotee, “This is no place for a brahmacharya” (a Hindu term for celibate).

In the summer of 1967, the Beatles went to Greece to decompress after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s. George brought along a recording of the Hare Krishna. One day, George and John went out on a boat and played ukuleles and banjos and chanted for six hours. “We felt exalted. It was a very happy time for us,” George later recalled.

By 1969, Harrison had met Bhaktivedanta and invited several devotees to live in his home. They rerecorded the Hare Krishna chant, and the combination of modern recording and the magic of the Beatles made it an actual hit in Europe. Harrison made plans to produce some new chants for the Beatles’ label, Apple Records, with a chorus of devotees that included another one of my Fieldston classmates, Joshua Greene.

Greene had attended the University of Wisconsin, where he quickly joined the staff of the campus newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, at a time when antiwar protests on campus were growing in intensity. Although he was against the war, he told me he was turned off by the protest leaders and transferred to New York University’s junior-year-abroad program at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Greene had an interest in yoga and was captivated when he heard the new version of the Hare Krishna chant in a disco. The deejay who played it invited him to meet Bhaktivedanta in London just as the new Harrison-produced sessions were scheduled to begin. He had played organ for a college band and thus was invited to the session where The Radha Krsna Temple album was recorded. Although it was an album of devotional chants, it got attention from young rock fans like me because it was released on Apple Records. Greene sang and played on “Govinda,” and shortly thereafter dropped out of college and went to live with the devotees in a building off Oxford Street rented by Harrison for their use as London’s first Krishna temple. John Lennon was impressed enough by Bhaktivedanta that he invited the teacher to stay with him and Yoko for several months.

In his book Here Comes the Sun, Greene described a conversation in which John and George confronted Bhaktivedanta to try to figure out how broad-minded he was. Was he saying that his translation of the Bhagavad-Gītā was the only one that was right? And why did he exclusively focus on the name and form of Krishna? What about Shiva? Ganesha? Jesus? Bhaktivedanta acknowledged the divinity of other beings but said that he believed Krishna was unique. George diffused the tension: “I believe there was a misunderstanding. We thought you were saying your translation was the authority and that others were not. But we didn’t have any misunderstanding about the identity of Krishna.”

Greene explained, “This was a gesture of accommodation of all concerned. The alternative was, for George, unconscionable. Throughout history, how much suffering had fanatics caused by believing they had an exclusive handle on truth? Not that he saw [Bhaktivedanta] in such terms. But claiming only one way to God could never be George’s way.”

Lennon would become increasingly skeptical of all spiritual organizations, but a spiritual worldview remained a part of the way he experienced reality. When asked in 1971 whether songs like “Give Peace a Chance” and “Power to the People” were propaganda songs, he replied: “Sure. So was ‘All You Need Is Love.’”

 

Is God Dead?

Meanwhile, a large section of mainstream American culture had been going through its own spiritual angst in the context of prosperity, modernity, and the echoes of World War II. On April 8, 1966, the cover of Time consisted of red letters against a black background that asked the question, “Is God Dead?” The accompanying article said that recent polls had indicated that more than eighty million Americans were agnostic, atheist, or members of religions or belief systems other than Judaism or Christianity. Of those who did identify with mainstream religions, less than half attended church or synagogue every week.

Lutheran scholar Martin Marty lamented the prevalence of “weekend Christians” who acted during the week as if God didn’t exist. William Alfred, the author of the prize-winning play Hogan’s Goat, gave the religious elitist view. He compared people who don’t believe in God to a “six-year-old kid who doesn’t believe in passionate love. They just haven’t experienced it.” Billy Graham, then forty-eight years old and at the peak of his celebrity, affirmed his unwavering belief in the Gospel. This was before the era when evangelicals were playing a role in politics, although in the next few years, Graham would appear regularly in photos with Richard Nixon and did nothing to discourage the notion that he supported the war in Vietnam.

Time’s un-bylined piece smugly asserted, “In search of meaning, some believers have desperately turned toward psychiatry, Zen or drugs.” Martin Luther King Jr., the man who many Americans saw as the country’s most prominent Christian, was not even mentioned, nor was Islam, Buddhism (except for the snarky Zen reference), or Hinduism. With the exception of a few lines that quoted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the question of the existence of God apparently took place exclusively among white Christians, as far as Time was concerned.

But Time did offer respectability to doubters, which is what motivated many of the 3,500 people who sent in letters in response to the article (the most in the magazine’s history). Most complained of sacrilege because of skeptical passages like, “At its worst, the image that the church gave of God was that of a wonder worker who explained the world’s mysteries and seemed to have somewhat more interest in punishing men than rewarding them.”

Notwithstanding its narrow cultural perch, Time offered a Christian lifeline to counterculture mystics who valued direct experience and rejected dogma. The magazine quoted Switzerland’s Karl Barth, who they described as “the century’s greatest Protestant theologian,” and went on to say that Barth “has consistently warned his fellow churchmen that God is a ‘wholly other’ being, whom man can only know by God’s self-revelation in the person of Christ, as witnessed by Scripture. Any search for God that starts with human experience, Barth warns, is a vain quest that will discover only an idol, not the true God at all.”

 

Rolling Thunder

As evidenced by Gary Snyder’s musings at the meeting on Alan Watts’s houseboat, widespread hippie interest in nature, combined with an antipathy to racist elements in America’s cultural legacy, led naturally to a fascination with Native Americans who in the sixties still referred to themselves as Indians. Of course, the fact that some tribes used peyote as a sacrament didn’t hurt. The Oracle ran an entire issue dedicated to the American Indian.

A medicine man known as Rolling Thunder was part of the Haight-Ashbury scene and became close to the Grateful Dead. He was born John Pope in 1916 in Oklahoma. Other details of his background are unclear. At different times he identified with both the Cherokee and Shoshone tribes.

Rolling Thunder lived at Peter Coyote’s house in the Bay Area during the late sixties. The former Digger says, “He was half carny, half shaman. He had real juice, but he was also a self-promoting opportunist. He was unevenly developed. He came to Haight and met the Diggers. He said he had a vision that we and others in the Haight were reincarnated souls of Indians who had been killed at Little Big Horn. I thought it was bullshit, but good bullshit. We understood that he represented an encyclopedia of how to live on this continent. The woods had been his drugstore, his food store, etc. We wanted to learn from him.”

By this time, Coyote had begun shooting heroin and had contracted hepatitis. “Rolling Thunder cured me when no American doctor had been able to help. He walked into my room when I was bedridden and said, There is a rattlesnake in here. He started opening closet doors. My black hat had a band made from the skin of a rattlesnake that I’d killed and eaten. He grabbed my arm and looked at the needle tracks and said, That’s where the snake bit you. I burned the hat with prayers. He gave me bitter root tea and in a few weeks I was cured.”

Coyote says that in those days, Rolling Thunder would often complain about the Grateful Dead. “These guys have no culture. They don’t know that when you call a medicine man, you’re supposed to pay him.” Nevertheless, he stayed close to the Dead.

I met Rolling Thunder on a visit to New York City in 1979 when he and his wife, Spotted Fawn, stayed at my apartment for a few days. One night they invited me to a Dead concert at Madison Square Garden. He was greeted at the backstage door with great deference by the crew and we were immediately taken to the dressing room to see Jerry Garcia. They spoke affably for around half an hour before the band started their show. We actually left the arena before the music even got started, as Rolling Thunder had no interest in hearing it himself, but apparently had wanted to give Garcia some energy before he went onstage.

 

The I Ching

The I Ching (Book of Changes) went from selling one thousand copies a year to fifty thousand when a new edition was published in 1961. The hardback edition that I bought had a gray cover and it immediately became a treasured possession, which I frequently consulted. (Richard Wilhelm had translated it from Chinese to German in the nineteenth century and his version was translated into English by Cary F. Baynes in the 1930s.) One would throw three coins six times. This process would designate one of sixty-four hexagrams with spiritual guidance and several hundred varieties of emphasis within those hexagrams. The idea is that the process could tune in to seemingly random forces of the universe.

Carl Jung had written a long introduction to the Wilhelm translation, and this endorsement by one of the fathers of psychoanalysis contextualized The I Ching as a significant sacred text for me rather than a fortune-telling gimmick. Jung acknowledged his own initial skepticism, but he was impressed that The I Ching was highly respected by both Lao-Tzu and Confucius, who, he felt, were beyond intellectual reproach.

Jung explained that ancient Chinese thought focused more on the concept of “chance” as distinguished from the modernist Western belief in “cause.” It seemed to me that “chance” was in the same metaphysical ballpark as “grace” and many other words that support the notion that there are forces in the universe that are not decipherable by the intellect. Or as Jung put it, “The heavy-handed pedagogic approach that attempts to fit irrational phenomena into a preconceived rational pattern is anathema to me.”

The I Ching was a subject of fascination for many of my high school friends as well, but I cannot identify the moment when it became cool. All of a sudden it just was. The Oracle frequently referred to it, and in Anita Hoffman’s Trashing she recalls she and Abbie using it at their wedding.

In the first issue of Rolling Stone, an ad for radio station KRLA in Los Angeles read in its entirety, “‘The beginning of all things lies still in the beyond, in the form of ideas that have yet to become real’—I Ching: the Creative.” In the song “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine,” Country Joe sings sarcastically of its use as manipulative hippie shtick: “Now she’s the one who gives us all those magical things / And reads us stories out of The I Ching.” According to the Grateful Dead’s former manager Rock Scully, the band threw The I Ching in April 1966 after recording in Los Angeles and got the hexagram Crossing the Great Water, which encouraged them to move back to San Francisco and into the house at 710 Ashbury. The following year, on the Band’s debut album Music from Big Pink, the song “Caledonia Mission” included the line, “You know I do believe in your hexagram / but can you tell me how they all knew the plan?”

One of the obvious appeals of The I Ching in the hippie world was that there was no organization or hierarchy attached to it. Everyone who consulted it served as his or her own priest. Thus, even the anarchistic Diggers felt comfortable enough with The I Ching that their newsletters typically ended with a hexagram as guidance for the coming days.

 

Gurus and Rugus

When Swami Bhaktivedanta announced the opening of the Krishna temple in Haight-Ashbury, he said, “I think what you are calling ‘hippies’ are our best potential. Although they are young, they are already dissatisfied with material life. Frustrated. And not knowing what to do, they turn to drugs. So let them come, and we will show them spiritual activities.”

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 Lower 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.