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Hippie Tales: From Levis to Double-knit
Beginnings
When it pleased God, who separated me from my
mother’s womb … Gal 1:15 KJV
In the dark winter of February
1972, I was living with Janis and a whole lot of other people in a big
hippie house in Atlanta. My drug supplier and friend, Colin, decided he
wanted to take a trip with me to my former college where I still had many
friends, where we both thought he would find a large customer base. We
thought it would be a goldmine, but it turned out none of my friends had any
money. They were down to scavenging used cigarette butts tossed in the dorm
halls. But lack of money never hindered the party, so they were glad to eat
and smoke Colin’s dope all night long, and with a big scowl on his face, he
kept reluctantly doling out all night anyway.
But one wonderful thing
happened. We were sitting in my friend Jim’s room, high on Colin’s stash,
and we started really talking. It turned out to be one of the most memorable
conversations of my life. For a brief moment we became honest and began to
share our true feelings about how our lives were going thus far. I clearly
remember saying how I was beginning to despair of life because it seemed to
me that the sum total of the whole thing was that you grew up, if lucky got
a good job, maybe had a family and a nice house, and then you died. That was
about it as far as I could tell.
There didn’t seem to be much
meaning in that to me. And that prospect seemed to offer little hope for
anything better. I saw no value in it. There had to be something more, some
answer, which made it all make sense.
Almost as if driven by
something else, a drive to find “my” meaning, to find out who I was and what
my life was all about began to grow in me. My focus changed from what was
wrong with everything “out there,” and more than ever I began to see the
futility and inadequacy in my own self, “in here.” I knew a life of numbness
and a perpetual party couldn’t be the final answer.
So I began an earnest search.
I realized that the main despair I felt - the lack, the need, the
uncertainty - was in the depths of my own being. Somewhere there had to be a
KEY to fixing ME. “I”, “ME”, I saw as the problem. Nobody had to tell me
that no matter the appearances to the contrary, inside I was a real mess.
The natural way for me to turn
was toward eastern mystical thought. Among the hip culture of the day,
pretty much anything was OK, religiously, except of course believing in
Jesus, which was thoroughly uncool. (For instance, one could say, “Hey man,
I’ve just read a book that says you can experience total enlightenment if
you eat wombat feces while upside down in lotus-position. This guy said he
tried it and it worked for him. Now he can see auras and he says his sense
of smell has really improved.” Then his friends might reply, “Wow, man, far
out! I’d dig catching some auras. Where can we get wombat feces?” If, on the
other hand, someone had said, “I have found Jesus Christ as my personal
Savior, and He turned my life around,” everybody would look at that person
funny and would hope he would walk away, or at least not say anything else.
That one’s a real conversation stopper.)
So a whole smorgasbord of alternative spiritual options was
available, everything from Satanism and witchcraft on one side of the
spectrum, to Buddhism, Yoga or Hinduism on the other, with all sorts of
things in-between.
There was a common belief
among the freaks (what hippies called themselves) that there were two kinds
of witchcraft, white magic and black magic. White magic was supposedly
“good,” and black magic, obviously evil. My first action in this new
direction was to line up an appointment with a witch to seek her counsel
about how I might learn white magic. Going through my mind was the notion
that if I could help people with white magic, it would wipe out any bad
karma I had accumulated in current and past lives. That was my thinking for
the time.
So I showed up for my life’s
first “spiritual” appointment at this lady’s house near the Strip, close to
downtown Atlanta. She was a bit older than I was, probably late-twenties,
and quite normal looking in a hip way. I don’t know what I was expecting –
giant cauldrons and a humped-back old lady with a hooked nose and a big wart
on the end? But she looked normal and her house looked like most any other
hip person’s house at the time: brown rice in jars, whole wheat bread on the
counter and a black-light peace poster on the wall.
She asked me what I had come
for. I told her my plan to learn white magic to “help people,” etc., and
asked her how I could get started. Then she told me something astounding.
She said, “I’ll tell you a
secret.”
“I’m ready,” I replied,
thinking she was about to initiate me into some deep esoteric mystery.
“There really is no such thing
as white magic. White magic and black magic have only one source. They come
from the same thing, which isn’t “Good!” And it’s not for you. You have
shiny bright eyes and this isn’t your path. I can’t help you.”
Well, was I taken aback, or
what?! How many people get turned away from witchcraft lessons? But I felt I
had no choice but to take her at her word, and that ended any career in
witchcraft.
Janis and I subsequently
decided in the spring of 1972 to move out of the hassle and chaos of the
Atlanta hip scene, back to Rome, Georgia, and to what we were hoping would
be the peace and quiet of the country. We moved into a stone house out in
the country where our friends Jim, Tom and Mary, and Robert were already
living. What a marvelous place it was! And it was the most glorious
sun-shiny spring ever.
The house itself wasn’t much
of anything. It was tiny, built of field stone with only one real bedroom
and one inside toilet and bathroom. There was a living room with a fireplace
where we cooked for a while, along with a kitchen and a catch-all room.
Since the house was already filled to capacity, I took the shed out back
past the outhouse for my quarters and Janis stayed most of the time with her
parents.
But oh, the outdoors! There
were fields all around and forest beyond the fields. Our house was in the
middle of a big meadow on three sides with a dirt road in front. That first
spring wild strawberries grew in such overwhelming abundance right outside
our house, that we bought box after box of cornflakes and cartons of milk
which we ate all day every day until all the strawberries were gone.
That was where I began to read
everything I could find on the spiritual life. A copy of Autobiography of
a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda, fell into my hands. I had never read a
book like that. The Christianity I had known up to that point had never
talked about God as though He was someone personally involved with us. I
didn’t know anyone living who talked so wonderfully of God as if he knew Him
and was his friend, and whose exploits with God seemed like some of the
Bible stories I had read as a kid. This man seemed to talk of living with
and in God in a real way and I hadn’t come across that before. I’m sure it
was out there, but I had not come across it. So I wanted what he seemed to
have.
Then another book, Be Here
Now, by Baba Ram Dass, found its way into our house and with that I was
off and running. Almost overnight we became vegetarians and began practicing
yoga exercises and meditation. I turned my little shed out back into a
rustic ashram. My hippie-mattress-on-the-floor got a new brown Indian-print
spread. I put up pictures and little statues and burned incense. It sounds
like something in some B-movie but it was my life. It wasn’t put-on. I
wanted to know, to get there, to find out! I told one of my friends that
whatever it took, I wanted to escape coming back to this life again for
another do-over. I wanted OUT! Nirvana or bust! So I began to give it all I
had.
One night I walked alone into
the field in the back of the house. I was tripping, which was very rare
because I had all but quit using ‘recreational pharmaceuticals.’ But what
happened that night had never happened before. It was an intensely clear
summer night with little humidity to steam things up. I sat still for a long
time looking up, while falling into the immenseness of the universe and the
infinity of the stars. On and on and on it seemed to go. As my mind started
to break over what I was seeing and feeling, suddenly, the whole panorama of
everything surrounding me – the stars, the light-filled blackness, and most
of all the thing that was breaking me - the infinity - came crashing down
in one giant tornadic rush into the center of my being, so that my being
seemed to contain all of that infinity. It was as if all THAT was ME, and I
was ALL THAT. “I” became lost in it, and everything, for just a little bit
of no-time seemed to be ONE.
When I came ‘back to myself’ I
was changed forever. Somehow some opening into something else had happened,
just for a moment, but it was real enough and true enough and total enough
that I KNEW I HAD TO find out what that was. Now I KNEW there was something
more than what we can see, feel and prove, and the desire to find it came up
in me in the most serious earnestness toward anything I’ve ever had, before
or since.
At first light I woke Janis
and we went to Atlanta that day to see Cary, the only person I knew who I
thought was seriously and sincerely looking into spiritual things. I was
scheduled to work at the yarn-dyeing plant that day, but I went into work
and told my boss, O.L., that I couldn’t work that day because I had to “go
find God,” in just those words. O.L. didn’t know what to make of me, but he
was a nice guy and a bit of a rebel himself. He laughed and joked something
about “finding God,” and gave me the day off with his blessing.
Cary was living hermitlike in
a little one room house behind the big Victorian hippie house where we’d all
lived together earlier that year. What had started as silly fun had turned
into great unpleasantness in the months we had lived there. It was a huge
house and we started out with six people and plenty of room. Cary came with
the house. It had been an ashram for a yoga society, the Ananda Marga (path
of bliss), but because of zoning laws they had to move. The neighbors had
pressed for it, since the house was in one of the nicest middle-class
neighborhoods in northwest Atlanta and ashrams weren’t welcome.
So the yogi boys, as we called
them back then, had to go - all except Cary. He was tired of being one of
the yogi boys and wanted to get back into “real life.” And boy, did he get
it when our crew moved in.
We thought it was a great
stroke of good luck that our bunch had gotten the house, but we were unaware
of the fact that we were in fact part of a plot by our landlord to get the
neighbors to allow him to bulldoze the house and its grounds in order to
build condominiums. The neighbors fought it and persuaded the authorities to
deny him permission to build the condos. His first counter step was to rent
to the yogi boys. That really stirred the local folk and they again took to
the authorities to have it shut down, since it was not zoned for a “church.”
Score another for the neighbors.
“Never say die,” must have
been our landlord’s motto, so he thickened the plot by renting to us, who
were far, far less acceptable than the yogi boys. At least they weren’t
coming and going at all hours of the night with the stereos blasting at full
volume and other various and sundry things. At times our place looked like
Woodstock on steroids. One of our roommates, Wade, even took his forty foot
red, white and blue school bus and parked it in the front of the yard,
parallel to ritzy Howell Mill Road, as arguably the greatest eyesore for
miles around, to be his gesture of good will toward our poor horrified
neighbors (sort of a big, red white and blue middle finger!).
And more people started moving
in. Things got more serious. People were hurt. People lied. Violence began
to loom on our horizon.
And that made the peace die.
So Janis and I went away to try to find it again.
That day we came back “to find
God,” when I told Cary what I wanted, he didn’t act surprised. The first
thing he told me was, “You have to be serious.” Then he went on, “Everybody
is stuck in the mud and most people are playing in it, but only a few really
want to get out of it.
“Are you serious about getting
out of the mud?” he asked me.
I was, so I said, “Yes!” And
at that moment Cary, in essence, became my “teacher.” He started me on a
regimen of strict diet, meditation and reading. His thought had gravitated
toward Zen and he began to teach me what he knew.
I went home and did all Cary
told me to do. I still practiced yoga, restricted my diet, read the books he
recommended and began a regular practice of “zazen,” which is the Zen form
of meditation. No one was more dedicated, more disciplined or hungry to
attain than I was. I was relentless. I loved it. I felt calm and peaceful. I
gave up all drugs, but had more spiritual experiences because I knew it
wasn’t the drug. What I had seen had been something real and I had no need
for a drug to know the Real. I knew there was something out there. And for a
while everything was magical.
As the end of the summer
approached two major things were happening. One, I had asked Janis to marry
me, and we decided to have a double-wedding ceremony with Tom and Mary. The
other was that Cary had invited me to go on a trip with him, either to
England to hear a spiritual teacher named J. Krishnamurti, a Hindu man from
India, or to California and the San Francisco Zen Center. I left it up to
Cary and he decided on California.
Janis and I had our wedding
(another story), and less than a week later I was in Cary’s 1959 baby-blue
VW bus headed out Shorter Avenue towards Huntsville, Alabama, and all points
west, leaving my dear sweet trusting new wife behind, while I went on my
spiritual journey to seek enlightenment.
It was a wonderful journey for
a young man to take -- to be a “seeker” of truth, as I considered myself to
be. We would drive for hours and hours and then stop and read our books and
meditate in Cary’s bus. We lived on a giant bag of huge dried figs he had
brought, along with tahini, natural peanut butter and bananas. Cary was a
hard taskmaster at the time, but I didn’t mind. He insisted on obsessive
tooth-brushing. Every time we stopped we had to brush our teeth. And he
didn’t like the way I walked, in that I walked (still do) slew-footed (feet
pointed outward). He tried to train me to walk with my feet inward,
pigeon-toed. I didn’t see what that had to do with being spiritual, but I
gladly went along and practiced doing it.
Eventually we arrived in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, after being on the road a few days. I was really
keyed up about getting to Albuquerque, because Cary was going to see HIS
spiritual teacher, an American fellow who had been given a Sanskrit
spiritual name that I can’t remember any more. Cary thought he lived in the
same ashram where he had known him a few years before, where Cary had also
lived. Since I respected Cary so much, I couldn’t imagine how spiritual this
man would be and I was a more than a little intimidated at the prospect of
meeting him.
We arrived in Albuquerque
about sunup. We had driven through the desert and mountains all night,
taking turns sleeping and driving. Stars were still swirling around in my
head as we putted through the still sleepy streets. Cary drove us straight
to the ashram. We found out our guy didn’t live there anymore and that he
now lived at such and such address. We trekked over to the new place, a
brown adobe in the midst of numerous other brown adobes, knocked on the door
and someone yelled, “Come in.”
In we walked. There sat Cary’s
“teacher” at the kitchen table, eating his breakfast, and EATING BACON!!!!
BACON???? We were shocked and horrified!!!! .... Devastated!!!! ....
Destroyed!!!! …. BACON!!!! How could he??? We didn’t drive 1500 miles to
meet with somebody eating BACON!!!!
He rose up from the table to
embrace Cary. They caught up a bit as he told us he had gone back to his
original name, something along the lines of Jeff Goldstein. Then Cary asked
Jeff why he didn’t live at the ashram anymore. He told us a story that
really blew our socks off and upset the total equilibrium of our trip, as
well as the rest of our lives.
This is Jeff’s story (as
remembered thirty-four years later).
“After you left, Cary, I got
into the further depths of Ananda Marga, and was eventually made a teacher
at the national center in Palo Alto, which is where my parents live. I got
high up into the organization and became a knowledgeable teacher. Everybody
thought I knew everything and had all the answers.
One night I was walking home
from the center, going to my parents’ house, and I started talking to God. I
was saying to God that I thought I knew all this stuff, this deep yoga
stuff, all these spiritual philosophies and had knowledge about oneness and
all that, but that I didn’t know HIM. I felt false inside. And then this
incredible thing happened. A VOICE spoke to me and it was so powerful that
it knocked me down onto the sidewalk. The VOICE said ‘ACCEPT MY SON!’
“I had never, ever, given that
a thought because I was Jewish. But I ran home to my parents’ house and came
into the foyer where the Bible was sitting on the table. My family was not
religious and the book was just there for show, but for some reason it was
sitting open to this passage in Isaiah 53:
He is despised and rejected of men; a
man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces
from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our
griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of
God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was
bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and
with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have
turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity
of us all.
“I KNEW that was talking about
Jesus. At that moment I fell down on my knees and asked Him to come into my
life, and that I would follow Him. The only thing I can tell you is that I
was born again. I can’t explain it, but He came into me and changed my life
and I began, for the first time, to know GOD, instead of just about Him.”
He said lots more, but his
story was NOT what Cary and I wanted to hear, not what we were in
Albuquerque for, not what we were on a journey for -- or so we thought. One
thing Jeff said that caused me terrible trouble, was that “Salvation is a
free gift.”
This had been my problem with
Christians all along. It was “too easy.” You didn’t have to do anything. To
me it was a religion for middle-class Americans who weren’t very deep or
thoughtful, or for uneducated, simple or narrow-minded people. Obviously, I
thought, you had to DO SOMETHING to find God, or find “truth,” or experience
“enlightenment.” For me it was obvious that you at least had to eat
correctly – and to especially eat no meat, because of the violence
associated with it. Then, I was convinced, one had to meditate; you had to
do this; you had to do that, but you certainly didn’t have to “DO NOTHING”
except “believe.” That was, to me, absolutely ludicrous!
But Jeff’s story was so
sincere and told so matter-of factly, without argument or condemning us for
where we were, that we were completely bumfuzzled. Later, after we ground
our own wheat and made ourselves a fresh loaf of bread, we drove up into the
mountains above Albuquerque that night to camp. There Cary started reading
aloud from the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God…
We went back the next day and
spent more time with Jeff and then we left, neither of us saying much at
first, heading due west into the setting sun on I-40 to continue on our
journey. Cary began irritating me because he took more to Jeff’s story than
I did and I became angry with him. We would stop and camp and he would read
more from John. Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born
again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
The next to last day of our
journey to San Francisco, we went up the east side of the Sierras into
Yosemite Park. At times the angle of ascent seems almost straight up. And
the poor bus could only make 10 mph in first gear most of the way up, so
when we finally rolled through the park gates we were followed by a long
line of angry tourists who could’ve walked up faster than we drove. It was
the last night of our journey. Bears rummaged through the camp here and
there and Cary and I sat around the fire. He was reading John to the crackle
of the fire and the flicker of its light. I am the bread of life: he
that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall
never thirst.
It was beginning to be obvious
that something was passing away, and something new was coming. I could feel
it in the air as we descended the west side of the Sierras the next day.
Finally we arrived in San
Francisco in time for rush hour (such as this Georgia boy had never seen),
but we made it to the Zen Center in time for the afternoon zazen session, a
forty minute period of meditation in lotus position. That was followed by a
meditative vegetarian supper served to each of us individually in our little
zazen cubicles. The session culminated by marching in silence upstairs to
the temple for a service of Sanskrit chanting and a teaching by one of the
monks. The service consisted of marching around the room for a while,
chanting Sanskrit words that they gave us on a piece of paper, and then
bowing down nine times towards the giant statue of Buddha in the front of
the room. After that we all sat on the floor while the monk delivered his
lecture.
I don’t remember one word of
the lecture because it was then that I heard a voice, too, not an audible
voice like Jeff said he heard, but still clear in my inner being to this
day, that said, “Thou shalt have no other gods before ME.” I didn’t know
what to make of that, and began to be really disturbed by the whole thing.
After the service was over
Cary and I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge and camped near the ocean in
Marin County. No place on earth could offer more beauty! But all my thoughts
through the night were on my search. Finally, by morning light, I knew what
I had to do. So when Cary awaked, I told him I couldn’t stay any longer and
for him to take me to the airport. I was going back home.
I got a flight out that night
so that gave us a great day sightseeing in San Francisco. There was a
mourning and sadness between us, because we were about to go our separate
ways, so we thought, and finally I boarded a flight at 10
PM headed for Atlanta. Arriving in
Atlanta at 5 AM, I caught a shuttle from the airport to the Greyhound
station, from there caught a bus to Rome, got a taxi and arrived at the
stone house in the country before 8 AM,
where I woke Janis up and SURPRISED the ever-living daylights out of her,
because she didn’t expect me for months!
My new “koan” became “Who is
Jesus?” Was He simply another “Great Teacher” among the pantheon of many
other “great teachers” who had come to enlighten humanity, or was He somehow
more than that? How could I know? It obsessed me. And it seemed as logically
unanswerable as all the other koans.
I began reading the New
Testament, as well as continuing with my Buddhist books. I started hedging
my bets, I think. I had a picture of Buddha where I sat zazen, but I put up
a picture of Jesus there as well. I made up a regular “ritual” to aid in my
meditation, to which I added a prayer from the Episcopal Prayer Book. Once I
went and knocked on the door of the Catholic priest’s house next to the
church, surprising him because I didn’t have an appointment, and asked him
if I could talk to him and could he answer certain questions I had about
Jesus and Christianity.
But I still couldn’t make the
plunge, because I just couldn’t believe it could be just so easy as “to
believe.” And to top it all off, Cary had been writing me frequently (with
old-fashioned envelopes and stamps – remember them?) and more and more his
Buddhist talk became less and his Jesus talk became more – and I wasn’t
liking it one bit!!
The end of this part of my
story came, finally, on Christmas Day. We decided to attend church at St.
Peter’s Episcopal Church, since it was Jesus’ day, and I thought it was
right to honor His day. More bet hedging. My dad appeared at the service,
which was abnormal, and we were among only about six people attending in a
church that sat hundreds. When the service was over Dad came and said that
Cary had called their house (we didn’t have a phone) and wanted me to call
him when we came over for Christmas dinner.
Everybody chowed down heartily
for Christmas dinner except Janis and me, still keeping to our vegetarian
regimen. We filled up on maybe some rolls and cranberry salad, while
mightily coveting the turkey and dressing. After the meal we put in a call
to Cary in the late afternoon. (A “long distance call” was still a big deal
in 1972.) Janis got on the extension when Cary got on the line.
Cary said, “Well, Fred, I’ve
found the answer we’ve been looking for.”
“What‘s that, Cary?” I asked.
“It’s Jesus!”
“Aw, c’mon Cary, I’m not so
sure about that. I don’t know if I can believe that. I’m not sure I can
handle the Bible being the “Word of God” like they say – and all that stuff
about the devil and hell – I just don’t know!”
Cary replied, “Well, all those
things sort of go along with it.”
“I’m not so sure, Cary.”
Finally he asked, “Will you
pray a prayer with me?”
We said, “OK,” and he led us
in a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into our lives. We said, “Amen,” and
that was that. We could hear people in the background on the phone shouting,
“Hallelujah,” while Cary told us we could rejoice because now we were part
of the kingdom of God and belonged to Christ. He said goodbye and we were
left to ourselves.
It was true. Christ had come.
He had knocked. And now somehow we had opened the door and let Him in. In a
moment, a twinkling of an eye, everything changed.
That is the end of the
beginning. |