Youth turns to spiritualism as hippies, radicals fade
This article, "A large, exotic shift - Youth turns to spiritualism as hippies, radicals fade" was published in The Idaho Free Press, August 8, 1973, in Nampa, Idaho.
By Robert Strand
SAN FRANCISCO (UPI) - With hippies nearly extinct and radicals fading on the campus, vast numbers of middle class youth are turning their search for a changed word to a new spiritualism.
In a shift as large as it is austere and exotic, the talk of the day concerns yoga, meditation and the contemplative life. Drugs and easy sex are out, mysticism is in.
Mantra prayers begin at 4 a.m. A ritual master teaches walking on hot coals. Devotees spend hours in Asana postures.
Bald, chanting dancers jump up and down in a trance lofting rose petals over idols of Hindu Deities.
Christians adopt the lift of St. Paul, and Jews return to the mysticism of the Sterm and Pious Hasidim.
Astonishing though the switch to spiritualism may seem, serious scholars see the impact on national life to be as potentially substantial as that of the Haight-Ashbury and the Students for a Democratic Society.
Just as most people knew somebody's son who turned bubble blowing flower child or shouting activist, so soon many may shake their heads over an acquaintance with a shaved skull, new turban or pajama pants.
The eastern mystical discovery by the young perhaps started with the trips of the Beatles and Mia Farrow to India and Maharishi Mahesh Yoga, mentor of the transcendental meditation technique.
Now TM, as it is called, is practiced by army generals, Wall Street brokers and California legislators. Its teaching has been proposed for the San Francisco school system.
Gradually since the Haight Ashbury turned from love to terror in 1967, Gurus, Dervishes, Roshis and Swamis came to lecture American youth. Lamas, driven out of Tibet by the Red Chinese, brought a Buddhist discipline new to the United States.
One rock star after another cried out messages of an Aquarian age to come, messages incomprehensible to youngsters' parents.
The list of all-out new spiritualists includes Alice Coltrain, Carol King, Clint Walker, Kate Taylor, John Fahey and Mahavishmu John McLaughlin.
In Berkeley, a recent dope-smoking audience was stunned when acid rock king Carlos Santana, known for hair to his waist, emerged on stage in a pow cut and an Indian shirt. He set up an altar with a photo of his guru, SRI Chinmoy, and gave a spiritual concert.
Jerry Rubin, one of the Chicago Seven activists, and Yippie co-founder, is very mellow these days experimenting with EST seminars, a synthesis of eastern techniques.
Another of the Chicago Seven, Rennie Davis, gave a Berkeley speech last April that shook the new left from coast to coast. He announced his adoration of a 15-year-old boy, the Guru Maharaj Ji whose devotees are expected to fill the Houston astrodome in November.
"If I didn't believe with my entire soul that Guru Maharaj Ji is going to save the planet, then I wouldn't be placing myself so far out in a limb." Davis said.
For three hours the SDS co-founder spoke softly and sweetly in the face of shouted obscenities from a furious audience of 1,000, mostly radicals.
When Davis allowed that President Nixon has good in him, too, a flurry of tomatoes flew, screaming youths rushed the stage, and Davis responded, "I love all of you very much."
Hippies and activists long were divided over whether the world can best be saved by changing the social system - or by changing one's self. Davis spent years storming the system, then switched.
The numbers involved in the Eastern and Christian varieties of the new spiritualism are impossible to pin down.
The Mandala, a Berkeley store dealing exclusively in the metaphysical and mystical, sells 75,000 books annually.
"Be here now," a book by Dr. Richard Alpert now known as Baba Ram Dass, has sold 300,000.
Alpert, a former Harvard professor who with Timothy Leary was a pied piper of LSD, returned from India as a spiritual teacher. He dismissed drugs as unnecessary.
"Spiritual Community Guide," an underground paperback, lists 371 Ashrams and related activities in California alone.
One scholar guesses the nation now has 500,000 practicing members of various Eastern religious groups, not counting TM enthusiasts and persons simply using yoga to limber up.
To that number may be added youthful thousands of the Jesus Movement with similar mystical impulses, and perhaps an estimated 300,000 neo-Pentaoostalists active in mainstream Catholic and Protestant churches.
Neo-pentacostals, born in the United States roughly at the same time as the flowering of Eastern groups, involves the entire age bracket in Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Pentacostalists seek personal experience of God.
In the new spiritualism of youth, almost everyone is under 30, comes from middle and upper class families and is college educated. Eastern groups attract youths of all religious backgrounds, but Catholics and especially Jews appear in disproportionately high numbers.
Most have been heavy drug users, and all proclaim drugs are not needed to get high. They say righteous life can keep you high all the time.
Given their background, the significance may not simply be the new spiritualists' happening - as much as what they dramatize about doubts and hopes among young millions who never will go so far as to carry a dhoti or paint their foreheads with a tilak.
All respect Yoga and meditation, and practicing Christians and Jews still find appeal in the central thrust of the various oriental faiths, the changing or elimination of desire.
All seek joy and ecstasy in daily religious experience, and, with some exceptions, all think each major religion offers a true path to the same reality. Some paths, however, are held to be straighter.
All find American society degrading and corrupt from top to bottom, and all believe man - and his world - can be vastly improved, quickly.
New spiritualists firmly believe humanity verges on a quantum jump forward. It is called the NEW AGE, THE AQUARIAN AGE, the dawning of a new consciousness, or the coming of the Messiah.
Ivan Finmay, 21, former atheist and son of a Newark, N.J. liquor salesman, explains:
"Our parents worked hard to be middle class, and God was excluded from our life. He was cut out of the deal."
"Our generation seeks to experience the oneness of the world, to improve the planet, God promised to send us a Messiah, to show us how to improve ourselves and the world. We all feel he is coming in our lifetimes."
Having gone to the mystical roots of his own cultural background, Finmay lives in San Francisco at the House of Love and Prayer with the Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. The rabbi is widely admired in guru circles.
Finmay is a Hassidic Jew, but wears jeans instead of a long black coat and Williamsburg hat. He calls himself orthodox, but with his friends he rejects Hassidic sexual strictures and old world ways.
At the Healthy Happy Holy Organization (3HO) Ashram in San Rafael, Baba Bert, 33, onetime manager of the Grateful Dead Rock group, says, "There are only two directions to go. Either we are going to radically change the world, or we are going to blow it up."
Bert's Ashram, a 25-room mansion in an exclusive section, is one of 100 claimed operated in the U.S. under the teaching of Yogi Bhajan.
His followers, considering themselves sikhs, wear white caftans and turbans, and do not cut their hair.
Several hours daily are spent in meditation and kundalini yoga, but devotees work hard to live, as taught, "By the sewat of the brow."
In San Francisco, Norah Whiten, 24, education at the University of California and the Sorbonne, practices chastity at the Integral Yoga Institute which operates a dozen ashrams dedicated to Swami Satchidananda.
As usual, the building is sparcely furnished and immaculate - in sharp contrast with communes of hippies and activists. Potted plants and guru pictures are everwhere, even on the floor where devotees sit cross-legged for their vegetarian meals.
"May the entire world be filled with peace and joy," goes the Mantra they chant over and over awaiting everyone's presence before eating.
Miss Whiten, a San Jose businessman's daughter once arrested for her activist activity, has given up "the hate trip" of radical politics.
"When you spend all your time thinking of 'us' and 'them,' you get very paranoid," she says. "You spend so much time thinking of 'them,' you come to resemble 'them.'"
A pretty 18-year-old girl from Seattle, Carol Bollinger, daughter of a YMCA director, explains she has close-cropped her hair in the hope of becoming one of the swami's nuns.
"It always meant a lot to be to be popular with boys," she says. "But now I want to be able to love everybody."
The U.S. operation of Maharaj Ji, the boy god, is the Divine Light Mission whose 150 centers are linked by telegraph and telephone lines. Its new quality color magazine, "And It Is Divine," has a press run of 130,000.
In the Divine Light's two-tone Victorian house in San Francisco, Lynn Domenico, 24, former Golden, Colo., Catholic, hippie and activist, says, "Man, the Guru Maharaj Ji is the hottest guru on the guru circuit."
Her Ashram sends $5,000 a month in earnings to the Divine Light headquarters in Denver, and gets back $150 a week for food and other expenses of 18 residents. The $5,000 goes to financing the Astrodome event, a new city to be built in California, and evangelistic activities in the seven-story headquarters building.
In the past the young guru's devotees around the world have bought him a Rolls Royce, a Mercedes Benz and two private airplanes.
"My father says anytime I want a psychiatrist, he will pay for it," laughs Ryan Reisman, son of a Los Angeles corporation lawyer. But young Reisman says he has found peace, and "the only way to have peace is to have God rushing through your veins."
Faith in Maharaj Ji is absolute. Miss Domenico believes the guru will convert Mao Tse-Tung by 1975, and "in the next five years our organization will be feeding and clothing the entire world."
Divine Light followers, seeing their guru as "the perfect master," and are prone to argue that their's is the only true path.
Like the Hare Krishnas, they keep apart from the meeting of the ways, a local group bringing Eastern, Christian and Jewish mystical organizations together.
The Hare Krishnas, whose devotees renounce sex except for procreation, now have saffron-robed chanters on the streets of 65 cities. These followers of Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta predict the spread of their chant "to every town and village on the planet."
Among other mystic groups are the Sufi order, in the Islamic tradition, and Tibetan Buddhists, both gaining attention in intellectual circles, and Arica, a synthesis of oriental methods.
In San Francisco, American-born master Subramuniya offers disciples a 2,000-word language received in a vision, and Dr. Neville Warwick of the Kailas Shugendo sect teaches fire yoga.
The movements join the Zen Buddhists whose influence in the U.S. grew large in the 1950s, and Vedanta and Theosophical socieites, both of which have operated here for generations.
Among those involved in Eastern groups and practice are students of the Jesuit Theological Seminary, Berkeley. To concerned parents, the Rev. Michael J. Buckley, the rector, would say:
"If a person becomes more loving, more gentle and more peaceful by standing on his head, you should be delighted."
Father Buckley cites historian Arnold Toynbee's belief that the most important 20th century development will be, rather than technology, the confrontation of Christianity with Eastern religion.
Christianity, he says, is turning East where it will absorb new religious ideas and techniques - just as the early Christians assimulated Greek philosophy in the Mediterranean world.
Edward Espe Brown, a Zen Buddhist priest, comments: "The way Americans live hasn't satisfied young people. The standard way of relieving suffering - a well-paid job, a family in suburbia - hasn't worked."
"People seek something to improve their life - not the philosophy of Sunday go-to-meeting religion - but something that works," says the Rev. Earl W. Blighton. "There is a handbook for what works, the New Testament."
Blighton, who also sees the coming of a new age, is director of the Holy Order of Mans, a mystical group which has grown in a decade to operate 81 "stations" manned by 1,000 black garbed persons under life vows, mostly youths.
Jacob Needleman, author of the "The New Religions." says the notion that the intellect, through science and psychiatry, will solve all problems has soured.
"We have all we wanted - cars, TV, money, a sexual revolution, women's liberation - and it doesn't make people happy. The quality of life has not changed."
"Real religion is based on hard hitting psychology, telling us what is wrong with us, how we sell ourselves short. Ancient religion had this, and saw everything Freud saw, and more."
"Real religion has a practical method for changing the psychological structure of man. That, to me, is the religious core the west has lost."
Needleman and Father Buckley suspect the spread of Eastern practice in the U.S. will force a new Christian understanding of its own mystical traditions.
Among the young, hopes run far higher. They will ask Mayor Joseph L. Alioto to proclaim San Francisco a world spiritual center on the occasion of the autumn equinox.
Sam Bercholz, 25, Berkeley publisher, predicts that America will become "a beacon for the rest of the world" because "spiritual experience comes in desperation, and people are very, very hungry."
The forecast from the old red factory housing San Francisco's Sino-American Buddhist monastery - founded by young Americans who spend their time studying Sanskrit and Chinese texts - is more guarded.
Bhiksu Heng Ching, 29, formerly Steven Klarer and son of an air force colonel, leads a life so austere he sleeps sitting up, and has not lain down in four years. He says:
"A lot of it is faddism. But the time certainly is ripe for the real McCoy."