Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco

5. The New Age Persona: Sex, Spirituality, and Escaping to the Now

Chapter Five The New Age Persona Sex, Spirituality, and Escaping to the Now Out of their kaleidoscopic creations, it was to be hoped, might emerge “a shared symbolic order of the kind that a religion provides”—the ultimate agenda of postmodernism. —Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity In February 1967, soon after the Human Be-In—where acid guru Timothy Leary uttered his “Tune in, turn on, drop out” phrase—Leary and poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, along with comparative religion philosopher Alan Watts, met for an event called the “Houseboat Summit.” Advertised as a dialogue between four men widely considered to be spokespersons for the countercultural lifestyle, the summit took place on Watts’s own ferryboat, which was moored in Sausalito, a town north of San Francisco on the San Francisco Bay. As a recognized mouthpiece for the counterculture, the underground newspaper San Francisco Oracle sponsored the summit and published a transcript of it in the March–April issue.1 The general focus of the event was on the philosophy of and possibilities for the emerging subculture. The men generally agreed that this subculture was forming in isolated urban pockets around the country, from the Haight-Ashbury district to the Lower East Side in Manhattan to coffeehouse enclaves in Seattle , but that it would soon leave the cities to make its existence closer to nature. 124 Discussion quickly turned to the notion of “dropping out”—could everyone do it, how could they do it, what were they dropping out of, were they dropping into somewhere else, what did dropping out mean, and what were the implications of it for the future of humankind. The four men at the Houseboat Summit were not the only ones asking such questions . On the contrary. Even in the competitive halls of America ’s top advertising agencies, designers and marketers were crafting what Thomas Frank calls a “hip consumerism” that re›ected a growing distaste for conformity and growing desire for individualism. Frank’s explanation of the path that advertisers would take in their “creative revolution” is remarkably similar to the assessments formulated at the summit.2 Watts argued that as creative and freethinking individuals isolated themselves, experienced their loneliness, and developed their vision, they would come to see that the rules of mainstream society were illusory and that they could transform their own visions into their own reality. Though Watts’s formulation left plenty of room for interpretation and agreement, Leary was not satis‹ed. Unwilling to let go of the fundamental principles of individualism and unlimited variety while also refusing to relinquish his all-or-nothing “drop out” philosophy of complete escape from society and its organized structures of laws and leaders, Leary dug himself into a hole. He insisted that “drop outs” had already liberated themselves but that, at the same time, the issue for now, and for the future of this subculture of individuals with their own visions, was that they didn’t “know where to go.” Leary was compelled to answer a range of implied questions raised by his own response: Where should they go, then? Will they have leaders? Will they go toward something? Leary responded: They don’t need leadership, but they need, I think, a variety of suggestions from people who have thought about this, giving them the options to move in any direction.3 The New Age Persona 125 In Leary’s construction, a world where veteran thinkers advised new initiates in a subculture (on what to do upon “dropping out”) apparently was different from a world where leaders laid out guidelines for activity and rules for cultural inclusion. Advice and suggestions, rather than laws, meant that all options and all directions were still on the table. Leary’s hole kept on getting bigger. He suggested that meeting places, or “meditation rooms,” in each isolated urban space should be set up so that dropouts could explore their in‹nite options and decide where to go from there. The different meditation rooms can have different styles. One can be Zen, one can be macrobiotic, one can be bhahte chanting, one can be rock and roll psychedelic, one can be lights. If we learn anything from our cells, we learn that God delights in variety . . . people would meet in these places, and AUTOMATICALLY tribal groups would develop and new matings would occur, and the city would be seen for many as transitional . . . and they...