In the morning, a morning which I was surprised and grateful to see, I found that I had made the decision to develop/work on long range plans which had the possibility, given sufficient time, to lead to the desired changes, even if we thought that there would not be enough time. I had decided that I would rather work on plans that had the hope of coming to fruition, rather than continue short term responses, that had no real hope of being effective, to one crisis after another.
I had come to understand that governments manifest the consciousness of the people, or, stated another way, that the consciousness of the people establishes the parameters within which the shape and direction of government manifests. Therefore, if one wished to bring about substantive social change, the question became, “how to change the consciousness of enough people to make a difference?” In a sense, I have been working at responding to that question ever since. This understanding has profoundly influenced my life and my work.
When I moved to San Francisco in 1964, the WRL asked me to be their representative on the West Coast. I organized the first demonstration against the war in Vietnam on the West Coast, and then went on to found the War Resister’s League-west (WRL). The WRL(west grew, and I became its Executive Secretary, which was the same position (except local rather than international) that Bayard Rustin had with the national WRL- an important point to me, as I wanted to be like him. The Vietnam War was profoundly painful to me. The monks who burned themselves alive in protest of, what I always called, “the war on Vietnam,” had a very profound effect on me. I felt that they were the ones who really understood what was happening. I was able to see the whole horrible thing unfold before my eyes so early on. I could feel what we were doing to the Vietnamese people and knew that it would become worse and worse. I felt the changes that it would have on our country’s collective consciousness, and I saw the war in relationship to our previous idiotic interventions. I will over-simplify here for the sake of brevity: First, we decided to intervene, right at the end of World War I, in the Bolshevik revolution, with ridiculously inadequate forces, on the side of the White Russians. This was at time when most Russian revolutionaries looked to the United States as the one country (which had fought and won a revolutionary war) that would understand and sympathize with them. Instead we became the enemy, and lost any chance of playing a role in moderating the excesses of Bolshevism. Then there was the Chinese revolution, where we repeated the mistakes of the Russian revolution almost exactly: Intervening with completely inadequate forces, alienating those Chinese who were looking to us as allies, etc. This was followed by Korea, and then Vietnam.
I felt the urgency to communicate what I felt and saw at the beginning of the War on Vietnam, so intensely that it was almost unbearable. I wanted to run through the streets shouting, “stop! stop!” And would have, except that I believed it would do no good. I organized many events and demonstrations, spoke at many colleges, developed a very large staff of sixty volunteers, and seemed to make no difference at all. Some people think that the Peace Movement made a big difference in stopping the war, perhaps it did. But it certainly did not do so in a timely fashion.
I spent my first year of organizing activity trying to persuade people that there was a war going on. The war (the invasion of Vietnam) was reported in the Christian Science Monitor (one of the best newspapers I know of) long before any other newspapers seemed to be aware of it. I would bring copies of their articles to journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle, some of whom I wound up being friends with for many years, asking them to report on what was then called a “police action.
I became deeply involved with the Experimental College (the first of its kind) at San Francisco State College (SFSC). In 1996, Michael Rossman (from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement) came to one of our sessions, and said that psychedelics were going to change the consciousness of the world. That got my attention. A tool to “change the consciousness of the world” was quite interesting to me.
I attended the famous “Be-In” with the whole WRL volunteer staff (January 14, 1967). If you have ever seen any pictures of the event, with people carrying the peace symbol on the top of a staff, those were all from the WRL. I had my first psychedelic experience not very long after the “Be-In”, and, shortly thereafter, stumbled upon a meeting of the “Haight-Ashbury Elders” in the meeting room, below the WRL office. I was walking past the meeting room, and heard this quote: “Artaud said that the creation of the stage was the destruction of the theater.” What an interesting statement, I thought, and stepped into the room to learn more. I was strongly drawn to this group of powerful characters. This group went on to be known as “the Diggers,” (http://www.diggers.org/top_entry.htm). I was invited to speak at a gathering in the Haight-Ashbury. I spoke about peace, love, and consciousness, and felt heard, appreciated and understood; I thought, “These are my people.”
I remember telling my closest associates in the WRL that I was resigning to become a “hippy.” They laughed at first, as I seemed much too old (I was not yet thirty), and a rather a stuffy person to be doing such a thing. I thought I was following the most efficient path to changing our collective consciousness. It was good to break out of my ponderous seriousness and ongoing pain from not being able to do anything to stop the war, and other inner stuff.
The third time I took LSD was at a concert at the Polo Fields, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco early in 1967. The “longhair” community, as Rolling Thunder later dubbed us, was still pretty small back then. There were seven different bands playing at the same time, each from their own flatbed truck around the field. Amongst the bands were: the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, Anonymous Artists of America, etc. Each perhaps with 100 to 350 people listening to them perform.
I was standing with my friend, Ron Thelin (founder of the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street), watching the Anonymous Artists of America (AAA) play a Mothers of Invention song. The main chorus was: “I’m dying. I’m going out of my mind.” This was accompanied by one of the first synthesizers, called a “Buchla Machine,” which wailed and shrieked with a cacophony of horrible sounds. This was not the best possible accompaniment to coming onto one’s second LSD experience.
In my mind, I was dying and going out of my mind. I crawled away. I do not know whether I literally crawled or figuratively crawled, as the distinction was a bit fuzzy. Anyway, down the field I went. After a while, I began to feel somewhat better, then pretty good, very good, and, finally, extremely excellent. I stood up. There was Danny Rifkin, one of the first managers of the Grateful Dead, leading a long snake dance of several hundred people, in front of the Grateful Dead. The music, and the moment, was overwhelming. It was my first experience of awe. Not as in the expression, “that was awesome,” but in its literal meaning. I was awed. Moved profoundly. It seemed to me that all magic that was flowing around us in the Haight-Ashbury emanated from the Grateful Dead, and most particularly, flowed out of Jerry’s guitar. I thought to myself, “imagine being a manager of that band, being around that music all the time.”
Not very much later, I was a manager of the Grateful Dead. How that came to be, and where that went, is a very interesting story about those times. I began organizing, or helping to organize, most of the famous “Summer of Love” concerts in Golden Gate Park, first as a helper, and later as the primary organizer. This led to a close relationship with the Grateful Dead, and ultimately to my becoming a manager, and developing a very close relationship with Jerry Garcia. There was that brief period of time when we were filled with hope; it really was the “Summer of Love,” a beautiful evanescent bubble. It burst in 1968 with the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. By the end of 1969, psychedelics no longer seemed, to me, like a road leading to higher consciousness, but an end in itself.
In 1970, I made the decision to find a teacher, and enter into a spiritual practice. I felt that if I were going to play a role in helping people to shift to a better state of planetary consciousness, I had better develop a higher state of consciousness myself. I had come to the firm conclusion that I had nothing more to learn from psychedelics; that I had to learn to impact my consciousness from within, rather than from externally applied substances.
I attended an event in May of 1970, called “the Holy Man Jam at the Family Dog on the Great Highway.” A transitional event at the close of the Hippie era, with many spiritual leaders including Yogi Bhajan, Swami Satchidananda, Pir Vilayat, Schlomo Carlebach, Stephen Gaskin, and others. Just prior to attending the event, I had concluded that in order to do the work before me, I needed to find a way in which to allow a great deal of energy to flow though me without the energy being wrongly directed by flaws in my ego or personality; to have power flow though me in service of humanity, but not to crave or seek power. When Yogi Bhajan spoke, I felt the immensity of the energy flowing through him, and how easily it flowed through him without seeming to be distorted by his ego. I found that I was greatly attracted to him, and shortly thereafter (at Summer Solstice 1970) became his student. I entered into spiritual practice in order to become a better social change agent.
