One Nation, Under Gods

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by Manseau, Peter


  From that night on, the Cookes became fixtures at 1001 Nights. They were “the stars of my late show,” Gysin said. Though like the rest of the clientele they came mainly for the exotic entertainments for which the café was known—dancing boys and the trance-inducing Sufi musicians of the Jilala and the Gnawa Islamic mystical traditions—it often seemed as if John and Mary were truly the ones on stage. John especially, with his “big Buddha ears sticking out on both sides of a wide guru grin” and “big bugged-out green eyes laughing like crazy,” was a subject of fascination to all. When the Sufi musicians played, he was known to leap onto tabletops in an ecstatic dervish dance, performed barefoot to display the jeweled rings on his toes. He delighted audiences with fantastical tales of his childhood in the “far out islands” and the mind-transforming practices he had discussed with Hubbard.

  The Cookes so liked the venue in which they were the center of attention that they soon bought the place. Just as he had acquired a mountain retreat for Meher Baba’s California devotees, Cooke now set about creating a bastion of exotic spiritual experience for the visiting bohemians of Tangier.

  Though he became personally devoted to the Cookes, not least of all because buying 1001 Nights had kept it in business, Gysin was skeptical of the new religion they preached. John’s tales of Scientology and its leaders were, the artist said, “enough to make me laugh myself sick, but who was I to have an opinion when my restaurant was coming apart under me like an old rotten undervest or a leaky boat in heavy weather?” Kept to himself at the time, his feelings about it remained sufficiently strong that he later wrote a scathing satirical novel about the Cookes and their “billion buck scam.” In allusion to Scientology’s auditing obsession, Gysin called his novel The Process, and used it to recount the way a couple he renamed “Thay and Mya Himmer” had deployed a spiritual practice called “Grammatology” to bilk Mya’s first husband, “Peter Paul Strangeblood, the richest little boy in the world,” out of a cardboard box full of cash they had arranged to have parachuted into the desert. “I’d been giving Strangeblood various occult exercises for his havingness,” Gysin wrote in the voice of John/Thay, “and one exercise we had almost forgotten was making him send to his bank for one million dollars U.S. in cash.” Driving home the fact that “Thay” was in fact a stand-in for his friend and financier John, Gysin described him as both a “Doctor of Grammatology” and, in reference to the Cooke missionary lineage, a “Hereditary Bishop of the Far Out Islands.”

  “Poor PP,” John/Thay says of the character based on Mary’s first husband, the Rockefeller heir, “there really wasn’t much anyone could really do for him except take all that money away from him and he knew this. It made him nasty as hell.”

  Gysin saw it as a swindle from the start, but others in the orbit of 1001 Nights proved more susceptible to Scientology’s pull. Burroughs especially was intrigued. Years after his first meeting with the Cookes, his writing continued to reference Hubbard by name and often concerned themes explicitly drawn from Dianetics, such as the erasure of traumas stored in the unconscious, discussions of which appear in his celebrated works of the 1960s. Godfather of the Beat Generation, he even attempted to bring his literary friends into the fold. He credited his experiences with auditing for inspiring new creative techniques and wrote to Ginsberg about it more than once. “The method of directed recall is the method of Scientology,” he wrote the younger poet. “You will recall I wrote urging you to contact your local chapter and find an auditor. They do the job without hypnosis or drugs, simply run the tape back and forth until the trauma is wiped off. It works.”

  Despite this emphasis on the drug-free nature of Scientology, the apparently addictive nature of auditing, which promised to bring the one being audited (or “pre-clear”) ever closer to the elusive experience of becoming “clear,” was precisely what appealed to the morphine- and heroin-dependent Burroughs. Hubbard’s teachings provided a new field for the writer’s explorations of consciousness-expanding challenges to conventional perceptions of reality. Through his experiments with engrams and e-meters, Burroughs found fresh literary possibility in the Scientologist understanding (alluded to in his letter to Ginsberg) that memory and consciousness were like the magnetic tape of early computers. The basis for Hubbard’s entire system was the notion that the mind was essentially mechanical and thus could be manipulated. Burroughs took this as an inspiration for the development of the “cut-up” technique of writing, which involved excising passages from a variety of texts and using them to build another. The purpose of this, he said, was “to make explicit a psycho-sensory process that is going all the time anyway.”

  “Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time,” he explained. “But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut-up.”

  The cut-up method was Burroughs’s way of dramatizing on paper the human mind’s attempts to control the various stimuli it encounters through the creation of a narrative. For Hubbard, however, the idea of controlling reality in this way was not merely a literary device. While Dianetics as an approach to psychology proposed that an individual psyche could be repaired through the removal of engrams, Scientology as religion maintained that reality itself could be similarly manipulated by the “clear” mind. The physical world—which Hubbard referred to as “matter, energy, space, and time” or MEST—existed apart from the self, or the thetan, which, despite appearances, was truly in control.

  The nature of this control was held to be of cosmic significance, but Hubbard often expressed it in terms that made it seem little more than the showmanship of a spoon-bending magician. In 1955, for example, he spoke with great excitement about one of his students levitating an ashtray “about three feet off of a desk.” The student did so, he said, “simply by making all the particles of the ashtray receive the communication of gravity and mak[ing] earth receive the communication from all the particles of the ashtray, and gravity disappears.”

  Lest this be dismissed as a parlor trick, however, Hubbard was quick to point out that the power available to those who became “clear” was a matter not merely of manipulating the physical world but of controlling all aspects of existence. In the same lecture in which he rhapsodized about levitating ashtrays, Hubbard explained how his teachings had developed from mere psychology to a form of modern necromancy that allowed practitioners to master their own mortality, albeit not without risk.

  “Scientology has moved up into a bracket of where one of its processes can process in reverse, right down to death or insanity just as fast as it can go the other way,” he said. “This is not a frightening fact, but it happens to be a true one. A Scientologist can handle life. Well, if he can handle life he can certainly handle death.”

  During his fourth year in the International Zone, Cooke was stricken with a mysterious ailment. He had been spending more and more time with the Sufi trance musicians, who had begun, he later claimed, to regard him as something of a holy man or a mejdoub, a mystical healer. Despite this reputation, he was powerless to heal himself. At first he wondered if he had been cursed with black magic: Had the long-ago fears inspired by his first tarot deck finally been realized? He also might have blamed the particularly potent narcotic popular among denizens of 1001 Nights. Gwama musicians in particular were known for inhaling or otherwise ingesting enormous quantities of kief—the highly hallucinogenic pollen of the cannabis plant, commonly prepared as hashish, which left what Gysin would later remember as “blue veils of smoke” hanging over the region.

  In fact, though Cooke had begun to experiment with a variety of drugs, he had been stricken by polio. In the 1950s, the incidence of polio was twenty times higher in the European and American populations of Tangier than among its native inhabitants. By the time the illness had run its course, the mejdoub healer had lost the use of his legs.

  When news of the diagnosis—paral
ytic poliomyelitis—reached London, L. Ron Hubbard likely supposed that an engram must have been the true cause of Cooke’s affliction. As Scientology literature from this period explains, “We don’t believe in sickness, we do not address illness, we do not diagnose, we believe that freeing the human spirit also incidentally prevents sickness.” The Cookes hoped the top Scientologist himself would materialize in Tangier to tend to his friend, but Hubbard instead dispatched one of his high-ranking auditors to see what “the process” could do for one of its earliest adherents.

  A gaunt Australian by the name of James “Lucky Jim” Skelton soon arrived with specific instructions on how to overcome the “suppression” that had crippled the usually spry Hawaiian dervish. In a shuffling of roles that might have made the former Shakespearean ensemble actor nostalgic for a time when such things happened only on stage, now it was John who was the afflicted one, and the younger man claiming magical skills who had come to heal him. Given the way the Cookes’ earlier and similar drama unfolded, it perhaps came as a surprise to no one that Lucky Jim eventually ended up not only with Mary but with custody of Mary and John’s newborn son, who would grow up in the Scientologist fold. The boy, Chamba—great-great-great-grandson of the missionary Amos Starr Cooke—would later recall hearing L. Ron Hubbard recounting fantastic tales of his past life as a pirate, while his mother and stepfather listened with childlike credulity.

  Unhealed by Skelton’s auditing attentions, and troubled that Hubbard had not made a greater personal effort on his behalf, John Cooke left Scientology and his young family behind. He returned to California, still unable to walk, still believing he had been cursed, but eager to resume his old mission of putting his money to spiritual use. He settled in the Carmel Highlands, 120 miles south of San Francisco, and soon brought the Indonesian holy man Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo to California, allowing practitioners of the once-popular but now mostly forgotten Subud movement to make his home their American headquarters. Having been declared “clear” by Hubbard in the early 1950s, he was “opened” through a similar process by Pak Subuh in 1958, with no apparent relief to his spiritual searching or physical ills. Cooke and a small community of his own followers also engaged in practices ranging from Huna (traditional Hawaiian beliefs made over to fit in with the New Age), Bahai, astrology, transcendental meditation, mandalas, ESP—really every spiritual fad then active in California, with one notable exception: Despite having once been a recipient of Cooke’s largesse, Meher Baba told his followers to have nothing further to do with him. “God in human form” believed something had happened to Cooke that “had affected his mind.”

  It may have been the drugs. Along with this eclectic mingling of various esoteric disciplines, Cooke’s return to California also led him back to the basic tools with which his career as a would-be guru had begun. He began channeling the voice of a being he called “One” through the medium of a homemade Ouija board and soon had a series of visions that inspired him to reimagine the cards of the tarot, which had set him on this path four decades before. Now, however, he performed his Ouija divinations and tarot readings while dosed on enough LSD to make his Carmel retreat the West Coast answer to Timothy Leary’s Millbrook.

  Though far removed from the jewel-toed dervish who delighted crowds at 1001 Nights, the man often stoned and slumped in his wheelchair in some ways had not changed at all. In letters written to Brion Gysin around this time, William Burroughs noted that in his recent interactions with Cooke, it was as if he had seen Thay Himmer, Gysin’s fictional version of the man, “stepping right out of your pages.” By writing a novel about his old friend, Gysin had captured another truth about Cooke as well, though this one he left out of the version published in 1969. Before he settled on calling his book The Process, Gysin had considered other titles. One possibility captured succinctly the industry in which the peddlers of both Scientology and acid trips were all involved to one degree or another: The Immortality Racket.

  As the conflict in Vietnam helped transform the Beat Generation into the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury, Cooke’s homes in Carmel and then in Cuernavaca became virtual pilgrimage sites for the discontented and the seeking. Many of his followers moved to Mexico for the purpose, they said, of preparing for their action in the world. Among the first was a young artist named Michael Bowen, who had sought out Cooke when a friend told him there was “a wizard that lives down the coast in Carmel Highlands.” The artist was immediately taken with his new teacher, and in Mexico joined Cooke’s hallucinogenic order through an “initiation” that involved eating so many narcotic tolguacha flowers that he was left comatose and hospitalized for a month. Bowen’s wife, Isabella Paoli, would later describe the imagined purpose of Cooke’s “brotherhood”: “Like the Knights Templars of the 10th century, this militarily organized group practiced their mind control skills as a matter of duty to their order and their survival.”

  After Bowen’s recovery, Cooke used his still substantial resources to send his protégé as a missionary of sorts in search of fellow travelers in New York (where he tripped with Leary), England (where, his wife later recalled, “he met with L. Ron Hubbard and others of the Brotherhood”), and finally back to San Francisco. There, he opened his painting studio to the hippie scene on Haight Street, making it a community hub in the mold of Gysin’s 1001 Nights, a place from which they might draw in the rest of the world. When their dream seemed to become a reality with the Human Be-In, Bowen and Cooke considered the twenty thousand who had crowded the Polo Fields “initiates” and “apostles” in a cultural revolution.

  In the words of political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg, who happened to be in attendance in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967, the San Francisco Human Be-In was “as good a marker as any for the arrival of the counter culture as a mass movement.” It had been born out of John Cooke’s desire to spread, far and wide, the high he had found in the wake of personal catastrophe, but its influence grew well beyond his original intentions. According to the people involved, it played an essential part in the birth of a new kind of protest movement.

  When the East Coast had its own Be-In three months later, on March 26, 1967, it was modeled specifically on the original. Organizers of the Easter Sunday happening in the Sheep Meadow section of New York’s Central Park attempted to emulate the success of the “gathering of the tribes” yet hoped also to avoid its failures. Jerry Rubin, the one overtly political voice at the first Human Be-In, had actually been booed when he spoke out against the Vietnam War. Because the Haight-Ashbury crowd considered politics in general to be just one more source of tension they could do without, Ginsberg found Rubin’s remarks “too histrionic,” and unlikely to inspire the kind of change they were looking for. After the event, Rubin decided the poet was right. “It was the first time I did see a new society,” he said of the San Francisco Be-In. “I saw there was no need for a political statement. I didn’t understand that until then, either.”

  The planners of the Central Park Be-In understood that from the start. “We wanted to be a celebration of being alive, of having that experience in the park,” one of the main organizers, an actor named Jim Fouratt said. “People in New York don’t look at each other, don’t see each other, don’t talk to each other. This is the one time they can do that without being uptight or afraid of it. It’s an affirmation of not being afraid, an affirmation of love and happiness.”

  Despite such apolitical rhetoric, both events included a common element that was definitely political, if not obviously so. “Acid actually played a very important role in the alteration of the American psyche,” Allen Ginsberg said, “in catalyzing a lot of the anti-war movement in the sense of altering the basic social conditioning and the semiotics and the terminology and the take. Acid was one of the main catalysts of the anti-war movement, to the activation of it on a grand scale.… It was the deconditioning agent that got people into another world, into the flower power, the psychedelic thing that was connected with the anti-war movement.”


  Yet in the aftermath of the Be-Ins, their organizers came to believe that acid alone wasn’t the answer. Many of the politically minded radicals in the growing anti-war movement mocked Leary for his desire to simply disconnect from a troubled world, adding two words to his mantra to capture their disdain: “tune-in, turn-on, drop-out, jerk-off.” Psychedelics for their own sake would not bring the revolution they longed for. The answer instead was acid plus action. But as Rubin had discovered at the Polo Fields, action could be a tough sell to the Love Generation. What kind of action would they buy?

  The answer came, indirectly, from John Starr Cooke.

  After the Be-In, Bowen had returned to Mexico to reunite with his teacher, and the two there deepened their studies, now covering ever more esoteric terrain. They worked on extrasensory perception, ancient Mayan shamanic rituals, more of the metaphysical symbology that had long informed the artist’s paintings, and the possibilities of manipulating matter, energy, space, and time, which Cooke had discussed with the founder of Scientology a decade before. When the guru dispatched his student back to the United States, he sent with him an outlandish idea that soon found a surprisingly receptive audience.

  One of the volunteers working with Jim Fouratt on the East Coast Be-In, Abbie Hoffman, was at the time looking for ways to harness the energy that had been successfully expended on gatherings without particular purpose to explicitly political ends. A veteran of the Civil Rights Movement through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he found one way when he became involved with the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an affiliated group of organizations also known as “the Mobe.” In the latter half of 1967, the Mobe had begun planning the largest protest yet against the war: a two-day demonstration in Washington that organizers hoped would draw 100,000 people.

  The Mobe had recently hired Jerry Rubin as the Washington demonstration’s project director, and the first thing the Berkeley radical did was inject a little West Coast logic into the East Coast radicals’ plans. The initial conception of the protest had been to occupy the Capitol, but that, Rubin suggested, might send the wrong signal to the public at large, suggesting that the marchers wanted to shut down the democratic process and thus were offering only more of the kind of political negativity that had earned him boos from the hippies in Golden Gate Park. His friends behind the Be-In, he told his Mobe colleagues, had an idea for a different stage on which to perform their dissent: the Pentagon.

 

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