The San Francisco Oracle
2548 Myra Dell, Walnut Creek, Ca. 94596
tel. 510-935-6492
A New Look at the Summer of Love
by Allen Cohen
Yes, it is 28 years ago since San Francisco's biggest concern was how
many of America's youth, now known as baby boomers, would descend upon the
Haight Ashbury in search of the holy grail of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
In the spring of '67 one of the members of the Board of Supervisors considering
whether to allow the expected hoards to sleep in Golden Gate Park said,
"Would you let thousands of whores waiting on the other side of the
Bay Bridge into San Francisco."
Of course, in the Haight Ashbury we referred to this holy grail as free
love, expanded consciousness and the ecstatic experience. We looked upon
that summer as the beginning of a children's crusade that would save America
and the world from the ravages of war, and the inner anger that brings it
forth, and materialism. We had already identified our lives with the world
as a political and social entity, and the planet as a unified environment,
an earth household. Love, we believed, would replace fear and small communal
groups would replace the patriarchal family and mass alienation.
There was two aspects to the experience of the 60s: the resistance to
the war, and the "psychedelic experience", personified as political
activists and hippies. For the most part these two vectors overlapped
in the same individuals, so that many of those who actively resisted the
Vietnam war had used LSD and smoked marijuana. As a society we have tried
to understand the sixties mostly as political resistance to the war, but
have mostly ignored and denied the changes in values and culture brought
about by "psychedelic experiences".
It is difficult to estimate how many people used LSD between 1965 and
1975 when the war finally ended. One chemist, who wasn't as productive as
some, told me he produced and sold seven million doses. My off the cuff
estimate would be that from 10 to 30 million people took LSD on the average
of six times.
"Tripping" was common in every area of society from the wealthy
and politically powerful to the arts, and sciences and the media. LSD was
trendy, exotic, ecstatic, messianic and dangerous. It promised psychological
healing and spiritual transcendence and often delivered. It should be
acknowledged that it could also cause pain ("bad trips") and psychotic
breaks, and even suicides, and in the case of the Manson Family, it was
an accomplice to murder. There was an aura of living dangerously on a psychological
frontier that was part of its mystique. But given the amount of its use,
I would say it was the one of our least destructive national obsessions.
Why did so many people take this dangerous voyage? What have been its
effects? To understand this we have to reconsider the Haight Ashbury, the
Hippies and the Summer of Love. The predominant feeling among the Hippies
from about 1965 through the summer of '67 was that they were agents and
witnesses of a dawning of a new age. An age in which the warrior spirit,
that had vaulted western man to the domination and potential destruction
of creation, would be dissolved in the spiritual transcendence of the saint.
Ghandi and Martin Luther King were our heroes and we had turned to the rich
heritage of Asian mysticism and metaphysics for our inspiration and our
practice. We leaped across oceans and through time to pre-Christian mythologies
like the American Indian, the Egyptian and the occult and pagan philosophies
of Europe. We studied with Buddhists and Indian gurus, native shamans, witches
and yogis. We turned from Aristotelian and Christian dualism to the four
pronged logic of Vedanta philosophy. We studied the Upanishads, the Tao
Te Ching, Alan Watt's books on Zen Buddhism, and Hermann Hesse's novels,
especially Siddhartha. We wouldn't leave the house without consulting the
I Ching, or our Tarot cards or our astrological charts.
Were we being naive or superstitious? No, I think this was the most important
and long lasting aspect of the 60s despite the backlash of the 80s. It was
the beginning of a renaissance in thought and culture similar to the Renaissance
that brought Greek and Roman images and ideas back to Europe in the middle
ages. Ideas that eventually led to the end of the domination of the Catholic
Church, the rise of the nation state, the rebirth of democracy and the development
of science.
We were becoming world citizens. Peace and love weren't just slogans
but states of mind and experiences that we were living and bearing witness
to. Living in harmony with the earth was an ideal that we felt and perceived
as real experience. We were bringing forth a second Renaissance that would
change human culture.
In the face of the Cold War and nuclear weapons these changes in philosophical
and spiritual orientation would slowly displace the Warrior Spirit and bring
us to a new stage of evolution. The transformation of the inner warrior
has had its outer effect in the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev said to an
American reporter, "I'm going to do a terrible thing to you. I'm going
to take your enemy from you."
The Summer of Love was the peak of the Haight Ashbury experience. Over
100,000 youth came to the Haight. Hoards of reporters, movie makers, FBI
agents, undercover police, drug addicts, provocateurs, Mafioso and about
100,000 more tourists to watch them all followed in their wake. It was chaotic
and wonderful and "heavy" as we used to say and the experience
was shared and spread throughout the world. The police and Tac Squad raided
the street every weekend gradually driving most of the originators to all
parts of the world to plant the seeds of change.
The process of cultural liberation began in the seventies with the conscious
drive for Women's' Liberation and Gay Liberation and the Black Liberation
movement, so brutally feared and attacked by the CIA and FBI. Yes, political
reaction set in, but that didn't stop the new ideas from spreading. We have
seen the rise of psychological insight and spiritual values and practices
in the New Age Movement, the tremendous interest in ecology and whole planet
thinking and through the liberating effect of rock and roll in all its permutations
the continuing call to the young to rebellion and awakening.
In the eighties the new ideas and values spread to Eastern Europe, the
Soviet Union and even China. The deeper meanings of Peace, Love and Community
spread through the universality of the music, and the ideas of the pilgrims
that had experienced or been influenced by the cauldron of the Sixties.
In Prague, Chekoslovakia during the peaceful revolution there John Lennon's
"Imagine" was sung by 200,000 people as they sung the Communist
dictatorship down. Esalen Institute had been doing exchanges and training
in the former Soviet Union for over ten years. In Tianamen Square the Chinese
students played Beatles' and Rolling Stones' music over loud speakers.
As we approach the millennium, the wave of peace, this eternal yearning
of the soul, continues to sweep over the world. Age old rivalries and hatreds
and injustices are dissolving. Sometimes the pain heightens before the medicine
of mediation and peace can be applied. But things definitely are a-changin'
between the Palestinians and Jews, the Muslims and Croats (hopefully the
Serbs will wake up soon) and the many colored people of South Africa, and
even the British and Irish.
As we had predicted, the Sixties generation has entered the White House.
Despite the rottenness and corruption of the system and its control by corporate
interests, there is definitely a new hope and a new sanity in American politics.
Hopefully, the Whitewater assassination conspiracy will blow over and some
positive changes will begin to reconstruct American life.
A new generation of youth are trance dancing in floating laser illuminated
warehouse dances called Raves in San Francisco and Acid House and Acid Jazz
in England. There is a mood of change that again threatens to overturn the
reactionary and puritanical grip on American culture perpetrated by corporate
power and religious fundamentalism. The Era of Compassion born in the Sixties
and repressed in the Eighties may be ready to spring into the forefront
of American culture.
Afterword
In the November 1994 election American Society took a sharp turn to the
right,. due to the failure of the Clinton Presidency to fulfill a successful
progressive agenda and a unprecedented right-wing and fundamentalist Christian
media attack on the president and progressive politics in general. The political
pendulum continues to swing -Instead of an evolution toward a just, peaceful
world as we approach the 21st century, we are experiencing religious moralism,
millennial fear and racial and ethnic intolerance. Despite a feeling of
hopelessness, history is opening toward an opportunity for a new emergence
of consciousness exploration and social change. Open the door the future
is coming through!
The Human Be-In - January 14, 1967
by Allen Cohen
Hippies and The Anti-War Movement Unite
The Human Be-In developed out of the success of the Love Pageant Rally,
the first San Francisco outdoor rock and roll celebration that Allen Cohen
and Michael Bowen produced on October 6, 1966, the day LSD became illegal
in California. We had realized that the change in consciousness and culture
we were experiencing had to be communicated throughout the world. We felt
that the ideals of Peace, Love and Community based on the transcendental
vision could transform the world and end the war in Vietnam. In short, we
wanted to turn the world on and to do it we would need to attract the spotlight
from center stage Washington and Vietnam to center stage Haight-Ashbury.
Michael Bowen centered much of the organizing energy for the Be-In from
his pad at Haight and Masonic. In addition to his expressionist painting
and drawing, he was friends with the Beat poets from the North Beach era,
and had spent time with Tim Leary at Millbrook. He was a mystic hustler
who Allen Ginsberg had called the most convincing man he had ever known.
He could charm the press and turn on a square. And he did. He invited Leary
and the Beat poets to the Human Be-In, and arranged for it to be a worldwide
media event.
Bowen and I had become concerned about the philosophical split that was
developing in the youth movement. The anti-war and free speech movement
in Berkeley thought the Hippies were too disengaged and spaced out. Their
influence might draw the young away from resistance to the war. The Hippies
thought the anti-war movement was doomed to endless confrontations with
the establishment which would recoil with violence and fascism. We decided
that to strengthen the youth culture, we had to bring the two poles together.
In order to have a Human Be-In we would have to have a powwow.
We met with Jerry Rubin, Max Scheer and other Berkeley activists, and shared
our ideas about directing magical and conscious energy towards the Pentagon
in order to overcome its impregnability as both the symbol and seat of evil.
We had developed this magical concept to exorcise the Pentagon from the
writings of Lewis Mumford and the visions of Charlie Brown, the peyote shaman.
The idea to exorcise the Pentagon would be realized in the March on Washington
in October. Rubin and Jack Weinberg were invited to speak at the Be-In,
and Max Scheer agreed to announce and support the Be-In in the Berkeley
Barb.
The Gathering of the Tribes in a "union of love and activism"
was an overwhelming success. Over twenty thousand people came to the Polo
Fields in Golden Gate Park. The psychedelic bands played: Jefferson Airplane,
The Grateful Dead, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Poets Allen Ginsberg,
Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lew Welch, and Lenore
Kandel read, chanted and sang. Tim Leary told everyone to Turn on, Tune
in and Dropout; the Diggers gave out free food; the Hell's Angels guarded
the generator cables that someone had cut; Owsley Stanley gave out free
acid; a parachutist dropped like an angel from the sky and the whole world
watched on the evening news. Soon there would be Be-Ins and Love-Ins from
Texas to Paris, and the psychedelic and political aspects of the youth culture
would continue to grow hand in hand everywhere.
The San Francisco Oracle
2548 Myra Dell, Walnut Creek, Ca. 94596
tel. 510-935-6492
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