The Sixties
The general public was losing interest in reading about the Beats, but the bohemian counterculture itself was still alive and growing.
By 1962, the counterculture in New York had outgrown Greenwich Village and so many young bohemian-types were living in the Lower East Side that it was being called the East Village. The same thing happened in San Francisco: as the population of the counterculture outgrew the space available in the old bohemian area of North Beach, it spread to a residential neighborhood called the Haight-Ashbury.
They were turning on to the "weed and wine" popularized in the Beat literature, because LSD had not yet become widely available; they were tuning in to the Zen-influenced philosophy of Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others; and they were dropping out and trying to join a movement they really didn't fit into very well.
Most of them were well above average in both intelligence and education, and had a serious interest in at least one creative activity: art, literature, music, drama, social or political reform, etc. As an occultist and political radical, I felt comfortable in the Beat movement; but many of the recent dropouts didn't.
And yes, when I started asking people, they said they had first started using marijuana or LSD because they'd had dreams, visions, or simply "hunches" that they ought to, and that these "feelings" predated any intellectual knowledge about psychedelics.
However, when these young people read the accounts, they felt very strong desires to use psychedelics. In many cases, the principal reason they'd joined the counterculture was to meet people who could get them peyote, mescaline, or LSD.
The emotional tone of many of these telepathic messages was extremely militant, often bordering on what most people would call paranoia and delusions of grandeur, as if someone were trying to turn people into fanatics. My impression of this was that someone was literally trying to start a social revolution on a very deep level, one that would completely transform Western civilization if it succeeded.
Some of these telepathic messages even suggested that we call ourselves "Spiritual Revolutionaries."
Other rumors attributed the messages to the Bavarian Illuminati, space people, or a wide variety of deities. When I tried sending telepathic questions asking the identity of whoever was sending the messages, I found out the source of all these apparently conflicting rumors was that mysterious "Invisible College" I'd been speculating about for a long time.
Then I'd ask them,
I sent these questions many different times and always received versions of the same answers.
The replies were always short and cryptic, and they really left me no wiser than before. Now that I've made the breakthrough, they make perfect sense; but they meant little to me in the Sixties and early Seventies.
The next eight years are full of chaotic memories of guiding LSD trips, leading various rituals, teaching sex magic and mediumship, and writing all sorts of things for the underground press.
I still wasn't sure what was going on, but it was obvious what needed doing from one day to the next.
However, very few of these people were actually providing leadership as it is usually defined. They issued very few direct orders, and when they did, not many members of the counterculture obeyed them.
Timothy Leary was acknowledged as the leader of this movement by both the general public and the acidheads themselves, but he was just a figurehead.
Leary lectured and held quasi-religious rituals as the "High Priest of LSD," but the people in the psychedelics movement treated him more like a statue of a god in a temple than like an actual priest. A priest preaches, and members of his religious congregation are expected to put his teachings into practice; but this simply didn't happen in the Sixties psychedelic movement.
Nor did they practice the much simpler instructions of the "How To Be Your Own Trip Guide" type that people like me wrote for the underground press. They were simply buying acid on the black market and stuffing it down their throats, with very little regard for the consequences. Once they'd survived a few acid trips, they figured their personal experience qualified them as trip guides, and they started giving LSD to all their friends.
The general attitude was:
At first, I was quite hostile to this attitude.
I'd learned the use of psychedelics by studying Western occultism and Amerindian shamanism, which teach that the drugs should be taken under very structured conditions involving elaborate ritual. However, when I was persuaded to try the less controlled approach that everyone around me was using, I found it both safe and effective.
By this time, I had enough conscious control over my psychic powers to perceive directly that an outside agency was telepathically communicating with people who took LSD and was reprogramming their minds.
The content of the telepathic messages was the usual ideology of the Sixties movement as reported in the underground press:
There were also hundreds of phrases from popular song lyrics by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Donovan, Tim Buckley, Simon and Garfunkel, and many more.
Often, I'd receive a phrase telepathically months before I heard it in a song, and speculate that the songwriter had gotten it by the same means and from the same source.
I was reasonably certain they received the same tantalizing fragments of telepathic information I received, and had no more understanding of them than I did. Numerous passages in the song lyrics themselves could be interpreted as saying this.
They urged people not to follow leaders at all, but to learn everything by personal experimentation and become masters of their own fate. Even though I've always lived my own life by this philosophy, I felt uneasy receiving these messages, because there were so many immature and irresponsible people in the Sixties movement.
I was afraid that the policy of "Do your own thing" and "Don't follow leaders, become a leader yourself" would keep the movement from developing enough political organization to make significant reforms in society.
Besides, by the time this message was sent, the movement was dying out anyway, and few people were expecting immediate revolution, political or spiritual, any more.
And I was looking further into the future, believing that both the "alternative lifestyles" of the Sixties and the "spiritual alternatives" of the Seventies were just precursors of the real beginning of a "New Age," which was still to come.
By the early Eighties, just before I made my personal breakthrough, I was able to look back on the Sixties Movement and realize just how successful it had been in preparing American society for the overt Spiritual Revolution of the Eighties and Nineties.
At the same time, most of us within the movement itself who hadn't become complete fanatics expecting an instant Utopia kept saying,
Because of this, I believed all through the Sixties that the Establishment would eventually suppress the counterculture by force.
All the "superstar" leaders would go into jail or exile, most of the
rank-and-file members of the movement would be scared away from it,
and the rest of us - those deeply committed but not conspicuous
enough to be identified and persecuted - would carry on our
activities underground until the heat died down and we could surface
again. That's what my knowledge of history told me was most likely, but it didn't happen. The Sixties movement neither challenged the Establishment nor was challenged by it, but simply kept getting larger and more diffuse until it faded away into the background. By the late Seventies, I realized that this had been the plan of the unseen forces behind the movement all along, and that it had proven extremely successful.
Many of the beliefs and opinions of the "Silent Majority" changed without the people involved being consciously aware of it. Most Americans continued to say they disliked hippies and the hippy philosophy, while at the same time their personal opinions on many important issues were moving closer and closer to those the counterculture had actually lived by.
The overt phase of the movement withered away without making too many political changes. Psychedelics remained illegal. The nuclear arms race and American imperialism still existed even though we did finally pull out of Vietnam.
Every President from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan has been either conservative or moderate, and the very term "liberal" remained in bad repute.
Above all, the extreme optimism about the future that was one of the hallmarks of the Sixties movement gave way to alternate waves of militant pessimism (such as predictions of imminent ecological catastrophe or economic collapse) and self-indulgent indifference (the philosophy of the "yuppies" and many New Age groups).
Millions of blacks have now achieved effective equality with whites: in education, in housing, in small-business ownership, in professional and executive-level employment, and to an increasing extent in labor unions and well-paid blue-collar jobs. Although the civil rights movement is correct when it says there is still a need for even more reforms before our society achieves complete racial equality, there is absolutely no doubt that enormous strides have already been made.
When I first started supporting the concept of equal rights for minorities, I never thought I'd live to see this much real progress.
Again, there's still a long way to go and an ongoing movement fighting for further progress, but there's no doubt a young girl today will live in a better world than her mother did when it comes to opportunities for women.
And the progress is not just in having women in high political office or positions of business leadership; changes for the better in male-female relations within the family itself can be observed all around us.
For example, it took more than a century after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights for the majority of Americans to realize that it is impossible to have government by, for, and of the people without political equality for women and racial minorities.
he American Revolution was the work of a small political elite who forced modern democracy on a population who really hadn't asked for it and weren't prepared to make full use of it, and many of the social changes since the Sixties have been caused by a series of spontaneous, grass-roots movements without strong leadership that forced reforms on the Establishment.
It discusses the role that
organized religion is playing in all these events. |