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 sayi
ng 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 preconc
eived 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.”
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 20