by Marco Vassi
It is odd that the single most radical force on the campus should have been run dictatorially, and that period of my life once and for all dispelled the idea in my mind that there is something inherently better about democracy as a social form. I suspect that the health of a state depends on the quality of the people, and it doesn’t matter what particular form they choose to express their sanity or their madness.
By registration day, I had written up a blurb for a workshop in “Relaxation, Awareness, and Breathing.” At the time, I was floating in a more or less continual euphoria. The sheer joy of San Francisco, the golden rich September days, the freedom from all the habits of my New York life, came together to keep me permanently high. The campus was such a continual feast day that soon I had shed all the gray eastern film, and had begun going barefoot, wearing a leopard-skin cloak, carrying a wooden staff, and playing a harmonica instead of talking. It was a perfect time. I could do nothing wrong. If I danced in the street, I would have an appreciative audience. If I wanted a particular girl, I had only to smile at her.
I was getting very deeply into the power of dance and mime, learning that in any given communication, if one responds to breathing patterns, muscle tensions, and eye contact, and if one is sensitive to the nonverbal vibrations in any given group, then one is like the man with one eye in the land of the blind. I found that charisma was nothing more than letting this multileveled awareness, and its concomitant energy, glow. In short, I was becoming a strangely influential force, and the fear of the EC rulers had a basis in fact.
All around the Gallery Lounge we stood and sat. All the current legends were there, and as the morning progressed, and the crowds grew, and music swelled, and the grass circulated, the entire place began to lift off the ground. The vibes were so high that just to walk through the door was like smoking a joint of good-grade dope.
Michael Parker had the booth next to mine, and just to be in Michael’s presence is the equivalent of a lick of acid, so by mid-afternoon I was infatuated with enlightenment. The energy poured out of me like sweat. When I went to the John, my eyes in the mirror were like strobe kaleidoscopes. The Spirit was in me, and the people saw. I started dancing, and soon, scores of students were flocking to the booth, wanting to sign up, not even knowing what it was I was teaching, not caring. It was the classic guru scene; one judges the master not by what he says, but by the force of life which flows through him.
By day’s end, I had over two hundred people signed up for a workshop which was designed for no more than twelve. The other high tally was for Michael’s Monday Night Class, and he drew almost three hundred. Michael continued his class even after the EC closed down, and eventually went on to become perhaps the foremost American-born spiritual teacher, with over fifteen hundred people coming every Monday night to hear his rap, and share in the circle of beauty and truth he and his family have created.
My first class was for a Wednesday night, and all that week, I prepared. I drew up a list of graduated exercises, beginning with deep physical relaxation, and going into mutual support workouts, and ending with group movement and chanting. The point was to get everyone into the same psychic space by relaxing the normal tensions of uptight daily life. There was a danger of creating a cheap instant-intimacy, such as the kind that Esalen thrives on, but I was guarding against that. It was possible to keep critical intelligence even in the midst of the most turgid touchie-feelies.
That Wednesday I held silence until evening, eating lightly, spending a good deal of time sitting quietly. I hitched to the campus, finding that a freer way of travel than driving, and loosened up with a light rap with the cats who were driving. On campus, I went to the Lounge, and spent an hour moving chairs and picking trash up off the floor. This was the necessary self-humbling that the religious cookbooks recommend for any holy venture.
I went out onto the grounds and sat under a tree, smoking three joints, and watching the evening star emerge from the growing dusk. I made peace with the universe, switched my consciousness onto No-Mind, and prepared to begin an adventure the parameters of which were totally unknown to me. At least, consciously. As always, the twin threads of sexuality and mysticism wove their fantastic pattern through all my actions, but the final result of that mix wasn’t to be seen until four weeks later.
A hundred and ten people showed up. All young, all beautiful, all stoned. When the class began, I sat crosslegged on the floor, and watched all those eyes looking at me, waiting, expecting. All of my preparation steadied me, and I gazed slowly over the crowd which I had to transform into a single organism before three hours. Countless thoughts tumbled through my mind, so quickly and profusely that I couldn’t even check them as they passed. I merely watched and let them register.
“What do they want?” I wondered. “Here are a bunch of kids who are healthy, pretty, and living in the most beautiful city of the richest nation on earth. They have access to some of the earth’s most wondrous offerings. Their government is becoming militarily fascistic and their heads are being wooed by psychedelics. Their parents and teachers are wooden automatons for the most part. Why aren’t they somewhere else, fucking or turning on or blowing up banks? What do they hope to get here, in this public place, from this stranger from New York?”
I checked my catalogue of basics: food, shelter, clothing, recognition, meditation, orgasms, truth, and love. The first three were out of my domain. So I went to the other five. Each of these people was starved for recognition; not the surface hello we give to one another. But every one of them wanted that deep inner part, that part that is most central, to be seen and known as valuable and beautiful. As far as meditation, it was clear that not a one of them had any notion what that meant. Those who were even at all familiar with the word had probably been introduced through one of the Maharishi-type charlatans who infest the nation with their lotus poses and self-induced visions. Orgasm was always a problem; men could ejaculate and women could clitorally twitch, but few could sail into that totally convulsive realm of pure vegetative release. Truth, of course, being practically nonexistent among the human race, was to be another necessary element, but the transmission of truth can never be articulated in any symbology whatsoever. And as for love, I put that on the shelf of hopefulness. The best thing to do was prime the subconscious with an awareness of the elements and then not consider them again.
The workshop was successful but unspectacular. I ran through several of the standard routines, including facial relaxation and eye contact, mutual massage and suggestion of imagery. That night I ended with an exercise I had originated, called “the Puppet.” After having everyone go into very deep physical relaxation lying in the corpse pose, I had them imagine a guillotine above them, with the blade dropping down at intervals to chop off, one by one, each of the limbs and head. The sense of imagining one’s body being cut to pieces allows a muscular relaxation not otherwise attained. At least, in most cases. Several of the people that night, when I said, “Now let the blade drop down and slice off your head,” sat bolt upright, blinking in sheer terror. But, to paraphrase Lenin, “You can’t make a revolution without blowing a few minds.”
Afterward, I put on a recording of Ravi Shankar’s, and led the group in a period of spontaneous movement, telling them to imagine that they were puppets, and that each of their severed parts was attached by strings to the fingers of a great puppet master. Using this artifice allowed them to let their bodies move without the usual tension cliches, and the total effect of over a hundred people moving easily and sensually was glorious. We ended by chanting Om, and when the class was over, the strangers had shared a moment of pleasant ease. I left very quickly, before anyone could talk to me; the night had exhausted me and I just needed to crash. What I didn’t know was that my honest performance and sudden departure planted the seeds of a myth. The people began to whisper that a true holy man had come among them.
Meanwhile, the guru was having his problems. I had just
begun a ménage with Rita and Leah. It was a blind attempt at union which swung between ecstasy and despair, during the course of which I learned how two women can make love, and have since been forever humbled in my own sexuality. We were swept up in the beauty of what happens when three people can, even for a brief time, become one organism on at least two levels of consciousness. But we also suffered the pain and paranoia which follows the tearing of the fabric, when all the delicacy of give-to-get builds higher and finer until the slim foundation of time-shared can’t sustain the great elaborations of the erotic superstructure. We were at a point where I was finding out the difference between male chauvinism and manhood, and the women were struggling between the desire for wider communion and the biological instinct of possessiveness of the mate.
That week, my preparation for the class navigated the tricky rhythms of our troika. By the time Wednesday came, my subconscious was totally enmeshed in questions of human sexual relationship. I arrived only two hours early this time, cleaned up the Lounge in a hurry, and on my way back from smoking a joint sent up a prayer to Venus, which had just begun to glow. It was getting darker earlier as the year dipped toward winter.
Once again I put the crew through their paces. This time there were almost a hundred and fifty of them. When I started my opening rap, I found myself talking about sensuality. I spun an elaborate schema of the way in which sexuality tends to bum out the more delicate needs of touch and glance and breath, and ended by noting that many people wind up fucking someone just because they need to be held. The admiration from the psychically pubescent women in the class was palpable.
But I was feeling expansive and depleted from my efforts of the week. It suddenly came upon me that tonight I should teach the men how to make love to the women, how to be gentle and responsive. So, after the softening-up relaxation period, I broke the class down into groups of four, and led them into a mutual feeling session, in which three people massage the fourth, until all have been both active and passive. I took great pains to outline what to look for, what kinaesthetic clues lurked inside the body, and what could be learned from observing another’s breathing and skin tone and subtle motions. Halfway through the exercise, the air started getting steamy. Everywhere I looked half-erect cocks bulged through jeans, female crotches yawned over the entire floor, and succulent buttocks contracted and expanded as unimaginable eddies of exquisite sensation ran through dozens of nearly virginal thighs.
By the end of that round, I was slightly out of control. I took an unexpected turn, and had them all lie down again, and once again took them on an inner voyage, feeling their bodies with their bodies, or letting the bodies be aware of themselves. But this time I lingered over the genitals, spinning out fantasies about what the inside of a cunt feels like, of what happens inside a penis when it expands. Aroused, half-hypnotized, willing, they let themselves be swayed, and soon sighs of rapture and moans of pleasure began to erupt. They were beginning to let it all hang out.
The music I used that night was from the Stones, which perfectly took the amorphous sexual flow and coagulated it into a driving hard rhythm. At the end of the first side of the album, everyone had blood in their eyes. I took the vibes down again, and ended with a large circle, with everyone’s arms around everyone else’s shoulders. Of course, with all that kundalini running free, the circle became electric, and soon, eyes closed, they were swaying in the single most beautiful jellyfish I had ever seen. I asked them to let sounds out, and within a minute the room was filled with all those different voices, each in a different pitch, with the whole blending into a giant sound of praise. My eyes began tearing, and I couldn’t absorb any more, so before they finished, I quietly left.
I learned later that they stayed for a half hour after the class, not wanting to leave one another’s physical presence, and talking about the mysterious man who comes to perform miracles and then leaves before anyone can speak to him.
During the next week, the thing with Leah and Rita fell totally apart. We reached the point where we were criticizing one another’s method of washing dishes. The viciousness was barely ameliorated by its pettiness. We were all heartbroken, because we all loved the hurting moments when we sat at the kitchen table, holding hands before dinner, listening to the silence of the house. But the scene was beyond our ability to manage, and we knew it, and now had to do the deadly business of getting to hate one another before we could garner the energy to split.
I took refuge, as I often did in those days, in The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. Between the heavy blows dealt my mind by that book, and the emotional upheaval I was experiencing, and the growing unreality of my scene at the college, I freaked. It suddenly occurred to me that I was gathering hubris at a rapid rate. The underbelly of megalomania showed its greenish light, and all of a sudden I saw myself as a charlatan, a breaker of hearts, and agreed with Evan that I was a black magician.
My mind turned around. I remembered that I had forgotten God, and had fallen into the modem heresy of thinking that man was the supreme entity in the universe, that I had forgotten my own limitations. I decided that I was leading the people astray, and during the next class, would call for a spiritual regeneration. That this fell in with the image they were forming of me as a spiritual leader was the type of coincidence that would have delighted Jung.
I got to the campus very early the next morning. To my surprise, strangers kept approaching me, asking me if they might join the class. One girl came up to me, and after some preliminary small talk, suddenly grabbed my hand and said urgently, “I can’t come. Please help me. I know you can.” I gave her my phone number and told her to call me in a few days. The scene was too much out of Feiffer to be erotic. Members of my class, as they recognized me sitting on the grass, would come up and sit silently in front of me for long periods of time and then, reverentially, get up and leave without saying a word. Without doing a single thing but following the inner logic of my madness to its most baroque extension, I was becoming a guru to an entire generation.
The third week’s class was a masterpiece of metatheater. I very humbly cleaned up the Lounge this time, picking up every cigarette butt by hand. I found that four or five women were helping me, and I realized that my first group of inner disciples was forming. Then I sat on a piano bench in full lotus, and waited for the throngs to arrive. They came slowly and made a giant crowd at my feet. One thin blond girl came up and laid a bouquet of flowers before me. Here and there, joss sticks were lit.
And, in a phosphorescent flash before my third eye, the solution hit. To blend the erotic and the godly, the path was through Tantra.
My talk that night was all about that superhedonistic yoga of quintessential fucking, that marvelous ritual whereby color and scent and fabric and food and long, careful preparation go into making that consummate human action. I spoke of the way in which the male sits rigid and knowing, moving the kundalini up from the base of his spine to the thousand-petaled lotus above his head, while the female works in the ecstatic movements of Sirasvati until, at one grand moment, the male explodes in cosmic consciousness and full physical orgasm, and the female rides the tumultuous waves of universal orgasm, that of the Great Mother giving birth to existence itself.
Everyone got stoned on the image.
The class that night was all breathing, very slow movement, and exercises in penetrating perception. I did a very long facial relaxation, and then had everyone let themselves be seen in their full inner nakedness, while they gazed on all the others in that state. At the very end, I allowed the gentlest of touching to take place. It all went so beautifully that I forgot to check my meters, to see what kinds and levels of energy were building beneath the surface of appearances.
I asked them all to form a large circle, and begin closing in on the center, my idea being to bring together on the physical plane the communion that was taking place spiritually. But no sooner did that troupe of bodies pass a certain criti
cal mass than the tension snapped, and in a flash the Gallery Lounge was a pile of writhing, meshing, groping bodies. I was horrified, much as the old Tibetan monk leading a group of novices in Tantric practices, and leaving the room for a minute to come back to find his charges fucking merrily on the floor.
It grew orgiastic. Hands grabbed cunts, mouths went to nipples, asses flashed and rolled. I stepped to the edge. “Stop,” I cried. “Stop.” As an answer, three pairs of arms reached up and grabbed me, and before I could react, I was pulled into the sea of flesh.
It was a most peculiar experience, for on the one hand I was sinking under the sheer sensuality of the scene, and at the same time I was trying to maintain my spiritual stance. It took me minutes to crawl out, and I fled from the scene, shaken. They went on like that for almost an hour, and many of them went off by twos and threes and fours to the beach and various apartments.
During the following week, I struggled for the proper way to continue the class, but during that time, I was converted to Christianity.
It happened one night when I dropped by to visit Paul and Cheryl. When I had first met them, Paul was one of the single most generous and warm-hearted people I had ever known. He was forever giving people presents of sculpture he had made, and was always willing to help someone in difficulty or to extend hospitality, but Cheryl continually talked about leaving him when he wasn’t around to hear her. “Paul is so sweet,” she would say, “but he doesn’t, you know, understand.” In her frustration, she rushed them through the several thousand dollars they had received in wedding presents, and ended by leaving the keys in their new MG one afternoon, and having it stolen.