Golden Thread, Meher Baba

De Simple Silence.

Chapel Hill – 1967

By Barbara Scott

Buy at Sheriar Press

[modifier] The King's Highway

« The very first descent of divinity into the heart awakens love for God. » Meher Baba, Sparks Of The Truth, p. 28.

The day was on the wane, and, as John Gunn remembers, « the sky and air were quite beautiful... I felt like I was in a daze. » Just the week before, a spring storm sent a hailstone to hit John right between the eyes. When later he read the story of Baba’s kiss from Babajan, and the stone which Upasni hurled, both right between the eyes, he came to believe that Baba used the hailstone to knock sense into his brilliant but drug-seduced brain.

One small group, including the Gunns and Scott Simmons, summoned energy to reconvene after the talk for the pre-scheduled meeting of the nascent Neo-American Church. According to Art Lester, «... the members of the (Christ !) Neo-American Church had a meeting in Lorenzo’s house, in the kitchen. Planning a Buddha’s birthday party. »

According to John, the plot was this :

« We would celebrate the Buddha’s birthday (May 20) with a gala party similar to the be-in earlier organized on campus by members of our coterie. This fete would be more private and include an invitation to the national Supreme Boo Hoo of the NAC, Art Kleps, from near Washington, DC. We hoped to convince him to make us lifetime card-carrying members of the sect. Official membership, would, we believed, allow us legal access to psychedelic substances just as members of the Native American Church had won the right to use peyote in their religious rituals. »

Art Lester recalls :

« I don’t remember whether I was boycotting [Rick and Henry’s talk] or simply too f***** up to go, but I remember a flushed group of people arriving at Lorenzo’s... enthusing about it... I said something like ‘He’s no avatar,’ and Barbara, holding a rather slimy Christopher on her lap, looked at me and said in a sort of hard voice, ‘How do you know ?’... I sneered a bit and felt left out. »

The much touted Buddha birthday/drug-fest was never again tabled. Instead talk centered on Meher Baba — who he might be, what it meant for each of us.

Barbara was sure that Baba was Jesus come again, and said so. She had a vivid memory of her childhood singing and thought, « If he were here — but now he is ! » and pictured a « scene by the wayside » which would enable her to view, if only from a distance, the living God Man. Scott Simmons agreed with Barbara, and looking wisely across the picnic/kitchen table, said, « We must talk. »

Scott describes the scene :

« At Lorenzo’s, Art Lester is ranting against Baba as I enter. We’re in the kitchen. Lorenzo is at the sink, standing quiet. The Gunns are sitting at the kitchen table. Art is striding back and forth, disturbed. He is saying nothing Meher Baba says is new, that it’s all been said before. I sit by Barbara. It becomes clear very quickly that I won’t get an opportunity to talk to the Gunns about Rick’s talk on Baba. I lean over to Barbara and say I think Meher Baba is important and hope to talk with her about him sometime, and then I leave. »

John was convinced « 100% that Baba is the Avatar, but (unlike Barbara and Scott, who were both convinced and ready to obey Him) it took me until the following Tuesday to conclude that I’d be able to make the lifestyle adjustment Baba seemed to require of all soon-to-be-ex-hippies that wanted to follow him. » Like some others, John’s higher self wasn’t quite ready to defend the proposition that God wanted him to stop taking drugs to that part of his nature that still longed for drug sensations.

Not surprisingly, the use or not of drugs became a major sticking point for many, and the cause of serious schisms. Intellectually much of what Baba’s words conveyed « made sense, » and all of it had an allure direct to the heart, but the reluctance to give up the sensory titillation of a drug-dimmed consciousness presented a barrier which for many was insuperable. There was an indisposition, not only to give up drugs but to drop the subcultural escutcheon that had been so proudly borne and on which drugs formed the central device. The disagreement with Meher Baba on this subject is typified by the attitude initially adopted by Winnie Barrett : « What does he know, he never dropped acid ! »

It was unpalatable to those with an emotional stake in the drug movement to acknowledge that drugs could and did lead to « madness and death » (Meher Baba’s words). It was denied, but gradually shown to be undeniable, that the drug use that for some of us began in an aura of spirituality, was to infuse and inundate mainstream American life at immense moral cost. Meher Baba’s message about LSD and other chemical poisons could not have come at a more crucial juncture in our country’s cultural history.

Jim Watson left the talk alone and went across the street to the Carolina Inn for supper (in those days the Inn offered a cheap buffet on Sunday nights when student troughs were empty). He was in a rare state of mind and thus astonished to hear people around him discussing Meher Baba « in a way that indicated they hadn’t been affected as I had. » In ensuing days, not knowing anyone else who attended the talk, « I found myself wandering around town, babbling to people about my experience, and asking everyone if they knew anyone who knew anything about Meher Baba. »

Sam Gray was later to say that the Chapman/Kashouty presentation was the « weightiest talk I’d ever been to » and he maintained thereafter a connection with Meher Baba through friends, a book, and a single picture.

A week passed, a week in which the buzz circulated about Meher Baba and his warning against drug use, and the exhilarating gossip about who might be on a higher plane, and what all this was going to mean in our lives. John had the last of a number of negative experiences of drug use and « at that point, (Barbara) and I held a little ceremony and flushed away the controlled substances we had been hoarding in our refrigerator and began a life of trying to love and obey Baba. »

John remembers :

« One morning a day or two after Rick’s talk, Barbara and I decided we’d teach our 3-1/2-year-old daughter to say Baba’s name... She was sitting in a highchair eating a bowl of cereal. Barbara said, ‘Jennifer, can you say ‘Meher Baba’ ?

“Jenni got a big grin on her face, stood up and pointing the spoon at Barbara she said ‘Mommy, you are Baba !’ then to me, ‘Daddy, you are Baba !’ and then to her younger brother, ‘and Christopher is Baba, and I’m Baba too !’”

Barbara phoned Scott, Sharon Harmon, and others during the week, and several people agreed they should go to the Meher Baba Center the following weekend to check it out. There was a loose plan to meet at some point either in Myrtle Beach itself or at the fabled « Baba Center » where, it was rumored, Baba’s female acolytes danced and prayed in long robes.

The first trickle of the soon to be steady stream of the Chapel Hill curious and committed seekers was Sharon Harmon. Planning to combine a visit to the Center with a visit to her grandfather in downtown Myrtle Beach, this vibrant teenager set out on Saturday, May 20, with two young men, one of whom was a black photographer who lived next door to Lorenzo.

In an incident that reflects the tenor of those times, the car with its biracial contingent was pulled by a patrol car near Conway, South Carolina. Because there were drugs in the car, Sharon « crammed them into everyone’s mouths before the cops got to the car. » The three were taken to Myrtle Beach for questioning, where they learned that there had been a large Ku Klux Klan rally in Conway the previous night.

Sharon says :

« I remember asking to make a phone call. (People had been known to disappear from police stations and I wanted someone to know we were there). I had the telephone number of Marshall Hay... he said to meet him in an hour at Mammy’s Kitchen... I remember saying I didn’t think we could because we were in police custody... well, exactly 55 minutes later the police could think of nothing else and let us go. »

Marshall told Sharon there was « somewhere she needed to go... I remember going into the woods... Marshall took us to the original kitchen... and Kitty Davy was there... I remember then a photograph on the wall in the back corner of a large room... and upon seeing it, Baba gave me a powerful glimpse of who he was... and it blew my mind totally. »

Sharon and her two companions went down to the beach, and she read through « the blue booklet, Sparks... it is divinely punctuated, by the way... late afternoon came and we were told we had to leave the Center. I remember almost nothing of the ride back — except that I was in a state of bliss. I remember going in the back door of Lorenzo’s. There were people standing around in the kitchen and I remember being overwhelmed to talk about my experience... then sitting on the floor in the bedroom telling people about Baba — or what I had experienced... and as a result of this interaction, several carloads of people left that night to go to the Center... and Chapel Hill was afire with Baba’s love. »

Here Art Lester takes up the tale, saying that Sharon :

« got back from the Baba Center and was pretty emotional and ran into the bedroom I was using at the time. She cried for a long time, and I sat on the floor outside, raw from coming down from acid and full of dislike for her. She came out finally, and I asked her, ‘Do you have anything to tell me ?’ I don’t know why. She said, ‘Meher Baba is God.’ I knew that it was true at once. And started liking her again.

« There was a window in front of me, and what I saw was the cross of the frame. Like a Christian cross. Something happened to me in that instant : I stopped talking, in fact didn’t say another word until the following day, when Scott Simmons, Lorenzo Durham... and I went to Myrtle Beach... when we got there, Kitty Davy said, ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’ »

This entourage arrived at the Center late on Monday, May 22.

According to Scott :

« From the Sunday of Rick’s talk to the following Sunday when I go to the Center is the most strange week of my life. I am in a state of disassociation, like a dead man walking. I felt nothing, I could feel nothing. And I couldn’t even feel upset by it. I was numb, divorced somehow from myself. Outside.

« Saturday evening, in an attempt to deal with this deadened state, I go to Lorenzo’s looking for amphetamine. I walk in on Sharon Harmon in Lorenzo’s living room. She is in a state of ecstatic rearrangement ; I literally see light pouring out of her face ; she is laughing and crying at the same time. But it is also instantly clear that she is in an elevated state, not any kind of breakdown. What has happened to her is very confusing but it has to do with a trip to the Center and with Meher Baba.

« My state of deadness is knocked aside by Sharon’s face. I become disturbed and crushingly depressed. I go home and later that night I get a call from Lorenzo : he and Art and others are driving to the Center Sunday morning to find out what has happened to Sharon. Lorenzo says to me : ‘Something important is going on and we must find out about it.’ Do I want to go ? I remember the phone to my ear, looking around the trailer I lived in. I felt like a deer trapped by a pack of hunting dogs ; I didn’t want to go, I didn’t not want to go ; I could move nowhere. And then I literally heard my own voice say ‘yes.’ »

After Sharon and before Scott’s entourage, the Gunns arrived in Myrtle Beach around midday on Sunday, May 21. Like others, they had to call Marshall (who was reached at his job at a miniature golf course) to meet them at the secluded Center gate, almost impossible to distinguish without prior knowledge that it was there. They were told that Sharon and her friends had been there « not long before. »

Barbara recalls meeting Kitty Davy, who at once put her at ease when she tried to call her « Miss Davy. » « Kitty, I’m called, » said the old lady in her most genteel English word order, and looking into her smiling eyes, Barbara felt that she was meeting a very dear friend.

John and Barbara were taken to the kitchen of the Center (now called « original » but then the only kitchen). In the waning afternoon they sat and talked for about an hour with Jane Haynes and Kitty. Chris Parsons was lurking in the shadows, on one of his many sojourns at Baba’s « home in the West. » As he was to say years later, « I feel like Baba’s been following me for years. »

Jane was elegant by the standards of the times, very much the lady. After Kitty left she stayed, trying to give these bizarre visitors a picture of what her contact with Baba was like. Both John and Barbara were now completely convinced that Meher Baba was « who he says he is. » On the way home, Barbara had a headache, the first time she recalls ever having had one, and later took it as Baba’s joke when she read his words to the effect that trying to explain the spiritual life is like trying to explain to someone who has never had a headache what one feels like.

The next contingent, which included Art, Scott, Lorenzo, and others, got in late Monday night. Lorenzo recalls a simple supper with Elizabeth Patterson, who was generally less accessible than Kitty or Jane, being concerned with management and leaving the hostessing to others.

Art wrote :

« It seemed like we had always known Baba, but were just remembering it. It was very exciting ; we sat up all night drinking coffee and rapping. I was in the Coop by myself and I had the feeling that Baba was working on me in my sleep. We were very young, but we knew everything... »

During the week following the Chapman/Kashouty talk, Nancy Sasser and her boyfriend decided they should « go to Myrtle Beach and meet the little old ladies who run the Baba house on the beach. » She made the choice between Myrtle Beach and Millbrook — the Leary/Kleps manse in New York. Figuring Myrtle Beach was closer, and probably a write-off, she reckoned to make it a quick trip.

Arriving home to Lorenzo’s by bus from Raleigh she found that the door to the house was locked — an unprecedented occurrence — « we never did that ever ! »

After having supper with Bob Underwood at the Carolina Grill she decided to call Scott Simmons to find out where everyone was :

« It was a most unusual conversation. I said ‘May I speak to Scott ?’ His mother went into what seemed to be a sort of thrill and said three times, ‘Scott is at the Meher Baba Center in Myrtle Beach.’ ‘Uh, thanks, Mrs. Simmons.’ ‘I’m just so proud that he told me where he’s going !’ »

And where was Scott ? He remembers :

« The drive down to the Center is difficult. My depression is profound. When we reach Myrtle Beach and begin the last stretch of journey to the Center, this depression like a weather front of heavy fog starts lifting as my heart feels a powerful stirring. I become alert, profoundly awake. As we move through the Center gate and down the road to the buildings, I see and experience oceanic waves of energy flowing through the woods into and over me. I see Baba’s face and recognize him as my oldest friend and lord and my reason for taking birth. When we reach the Original Kitchen and park, I have lost my voice. But though I can’t ask questions, Kitty Davy talks into the evening about the Avatar, the evolution of consciousness, the planes and the goal. I have finally heard about Baba. »

Nancy’s story continues :

« It was raining, coming down pretty hard. I was walking to Harry’s where we all hung out and exchanged news... the water was pooling, big juicy gorgeous puddles. I started to jump in the puddles and say ‘Meher Baba’ over and over... I sat down (in Harry’s) with a few people — talk, talk, there was always a lot of talk. I heard something that set me on fire and before I knew I said loudly ‘You don’t have to read anything to know that, that’s God !’ and slammed my coffee cup down. Sharon looked at me through her glasses and said ‘That’s Baba.’ »

No longer dismissive of the Meher Baba Center and its « little old ladies, » Nancy was truly ready for her pilgrimage. She went back to Bob’s and said, « I’m going to the Meher Baba Center — would you like to go and bring your car ? » In the spirit of those times, Bob assented and they headed off into the night.

Bob recalls, « At 11 p.m. we headed for Myrtle Beach, got lost, couldn’t find it. » He and Nancy tried to sleep in the car but were oppressed by heat and mosquitoes, so at 6 :00 a.m., utterly exhausted, they checked into a motel. After waking they called the Center and Marshall and Art came to meet them. « I should add, » says Bob, « that while I was genuinely interested in Meher Baba, I had no experience of his divinity and no intention of becoming a follower. Nancy on the other hand was becoming increasingly sure that she had ‘found it.’ So by the time we got to Myrtle Beach... she was enthusiastic and accepting and I was becoming cool... and skeptical. »

Nancy remembers :

« Poor Bob. All I could talk about was Baba. ‘This is it. It’s Baba’... I had a Universal Message that Ray (Kass) had given me in Harry’s... I was holding it in my hand all the way down to Myrtle Beach... I had not even looked at his picture in the Universal Message but I knew. »

Bob says :

« I recognized Kitty as the archetype of a wise woman and immediately liked and admired her. My impression of the Center was that it would be a great place to do drugs in... Kitty invited us to come back again and this meant a lot to me even though I had let it be known that I had little faith in Baba. »

And Nancy :

« Kitty Davy and Elizabeth Patterson came with dinner for all, cooked by Bessy, Elizabeth’s maid who worked for her for many years and had been to see ‘Mr. Baba.’ The air was electric — Baba’s love filled all space and time... I can still see Elizabeth wearing a navy blue dress, her blue eyes knowing, caring, making sure the story got told just right. »

Nancy stayed in the Far Cabin for a night, and « I threw my birth control pills in the waste paper basket. I wanted to be right, pure, for Baba. »

At breakfast, Nancy offered to help Kitty (« she was an older lady ») and told her « I’m going to move down here. » Kitty « so sweetly leaned over and said in my ear, ‘Say that if it is Baba’s will, I’m going to move here.’ » The training had begun.

« Each one, teach one » — so each of those who found their way to the Center returned to Chapel Hill bursting with energy and a burning desire to talk talk talk — but now, only about Meher Baba.

Through the Meher Center in a narrow sand ribbon runs a portion of the original King’s Highway, cleared before the founding of our nation. An old hymn, referencing another kind of path, contains these words :

« He will seed the desert with the rose — walking on the King’s Highway ; there is gladness where salvation goes — walking on the King’s Highway. »

The gate to that inner highway was now open wide.

[modifier] The One In The Many

Meher Baba, « compassionate father. » Formally, Avatar Meher Baba. Formerly, Shri Meher Baba. Informally and devotedly, just Baba.

This author finds it difficult to describe exactly how Meher Baba gave what he gave. One of his central messages was « I have come not to teach, but to awaken. » So to say that he taught seems contrary to his purpose (though he taught much).

And too, Baba was silent from 1925 (when he was 29) until his passing away in 1969. He communicated by various means including an eloquent set of hand signals, which can be seen in the many short films taken during his lifetime. To say that he said anything is awkward, as we use that word generally to denote oral communication. Much of what passed between Baba and those around him was beyond all definitions of speech, yet as real as any conversation.

Meher Baba has been the subject of many fine books, but for now let us examine what he was up to in 1967, just before the events of this account. Baba was in India, his birthplace and the scene of much of his work throughout his life, though his travels were many and wide.

In his 70s, and in fragile health, he nonetheless continued his tireless (and apparently nearly sleepless) life of internal work, and external outreach to his many followers. He was maintaining very strict seclusion at a palace called Guruprasad which had been donated to him by a devotee.

Despite the absolute discipline of his retreat, Baba seemed always able to make small exceptions when the love of a devotee demanded it. Thus when Rick Chapman came to his gate in 1966, a small exception was made, an audience granted.

Rick was a seeker, both teacher and student, privileged to travel in India with the aid of a Fulbright teaching scholarship. His meeting with Meher Baba (chronicled in other sources) was to affect not only Rick himself but — it could be said — a generation. Rick, like a few other lucky pilgrims of that era, was to have Baba’s darshan (presence) — to see him in the flesh — but only once.

For nearly all of his « working life » as Manager of Everything (the author’s words, not his), Baba strictly circumscribed any publicity concerning him. He told followers that they must strive to be sufficiently spiritual as to serve as examples of love and service.

This would lead others to question spontaneously the source of the follower’s inner motivation, and give leave to speak of Baba. Otherwise, they were in perilous waters in speaking or preaching about their Master, and would be better off not doing so (though Baba was infinitely loving and indulgent toward those who felt they just had to tell others about him).

The result of this restriction was that Baba was not, and never became, a master for the masses. The Westerners (American and European) who knew of him in 1967 were very few and functioned almost like a secret society. Thus it came as a major surprise when Baba let it be known that he wanted people, particularly the youth of America, to hear his message, and that he had designated a new and unknown young follower, Rick Chapman, to be his spokesperson.

Though Baba wished Rick to convey his central message (« Now is the time for all to know that I am God in human form »), he also gave him directives regarding the dangers of drug use, which were of great importance. His words on that subject, quoted here by Adi K. Irani, one of his close disciples, stand alone in their clarity :

« It is human, and therefore necessarily wrong-sighted, to view the result of the drug by its immediate relative effects — our inability to calculate its end result is beyond our human knowledge, and only the true Guide can point the way...

« Though LSD may lead one to feel a better man personally, the feeling of having had a glimpse of Reality may not only lull one into a false security but also will in the end derange one’s mind. Although LSD is not an addiction-forming drug one can become attached to the experiences arising from its use and one gets tempted to use it in increasing doses, again and again, in the hope of deeper and deeper experiences. But eventually this leads to madness or death.

«[... ].The experience of a semblance of ‘freedom’ that these drugs may temporarily give to one is in actuality a millstone round the aspirant’s neck in his efforts toward emancipation from the rounds of birth and death !

« It is good to know that there are drugs that alleviate human suffering, it is better to have a knowledge of a specific drug for a specific ailment, and it is best to put to use the specific drug for the benefit of the human body.

« But there is no drug that can promote the aspirant’s progress — nor even alleviate the sufferings of his separation from God. LOVE is the only propeller and the only remedy. The aspirant should love God with all his heart till he forgets himself and recognizes his beloved God in himself and others. »

One salient point about Baba’s words is that they were generally directed toward spiritual seekers, rarely to the world at large. While willingly giving advice and discourse on anything from diet to war to higher planes of consciousness, Baba had no interest in increasing numbers of followers, nor in luring people away from their chosen religious course.

His messages, while intriguing and helpful to those who sincerely sought a new or renewed path to the truth, lacked the flash and seductive promise of the more public gurus who were to gain ascendancy in the ‘70s.

So where does this small tribe of freaks and self-imposed outcasts — lurking communally in decrepit wooden houses in a small Southern town, hanging on the edge of LSD experimentation, listening to eclectic electric singers and poets for psychedelic clues about the universe, as they toked, smoked, dropped, shot up, and tripped — fit into the scheme of spiritual things ?

Nearly all of these young people would say of themselves that they had rejected the religion of their parents’ generation, had sought for something to replace it, had found nothing satisfying, and were experiencing an inner hunger that drugs seemed temporarily to sate.

Nancy Sasser says she constantly felt « dead inside » and yet expressed a sense that « something wonderful is going to happen to us. » From her earliest years she had « my time with God, » and despite a distressful childhood, managed to hold to a belief in God and a faith that things would turn out right.

Bob Underwood recalls an extraordinary encounter with an old woman on a bus in Washington, DC. « I knew at once that this person could straighten me out and had the answers to my metaphysical questions[... ] » In the course of conversation she made reference to Jesus Christ and showed him a picture she carried with her of Jesus, « halo and all. » Though she was Jewish, she declared, « How can I help but love him, he is my own flesh and blood. » Tempted to dismiss her as « another nut case » her « eyes full of compassion » nonetheless had a profound effect on Bob.

Barbara Gunn remembers arguing incessantly with her Presbyterian minister from an early age, feeling connected to Jesus but not to the church. She recalls singing in Sunday School and thinking, at age 5 or 6, « Why couldn’t I have been there ? » as she warbled, « Tell me the stories of Jesus I love to hear — things I would ask him to tell me if He were here. »

In a similar vein, John Gunn recounts :

« One theme that appears in [the writings of Kerouac, Ferlinghetti etc.] is reverence for Eastern religions or thought, in some cases grossly misunderstood, and I was so interested in that topic that I went to my prep school minister[... ] and asked to borrow all his books on Eastern religion. It was in 1961 and I was 17 years old. [He] gave me a stack of books that included D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Arthur Waley, and a translation of the Bhagavad Gita — maybe six or seven books in all. I read them all with fascination, but the one that really attracted me the most was the Gita. What struck me about the Gita was Krishna’s voice[... ] and I remember clearly thinking many times ‘I really wish I had been alive in his time and could have met him personally. »’

Some had latterly been delving into light, non-threatening « ways. » Alan Watts, mentioned above, was a Western dispenser of decaffeinated Eastern thought. In the search for clues, much matter was made of poetry and song. The slightly older generation of writers and poets seemed to be strewing clues in the verbiage, and arcane messages were read into the lyrics of Bob Dylan and others who were making mind soup a popular dish.

Some people turned to Native American spirituality, and some venerated the Buddha, reading the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse for signposts to that way. Most just took from here and there — dieting, meditating, and exploring the verbal and visual arts and collecting totemistic objects, things old, things Eastern, for contemplation.

Jim Watson effectively describes what many of us were going through during that pre-natal spiritual phase :

« An important moment in my life, I feel, was Christmas Eve, 1966. I was visiting my family in Chicago, and as usual, we attended the Christmas Eve communion service at the Methodist Church. In the Methodist Church, communion is for special occasions, or maybe once a month or so at Church. They pass this tray down the pews with these tiny glasses of grape juice. For the first time, I passed the tray on rather than go through the motions of participating in a ritual that bore no relationship to my inner life. I was sitting next to my Grandmother, who was visiting from California, and with whom I was very close. (She was a Christian Scientist, having found that faith as a young adult early in this century.) I saw a small tear on her face. Over the preceding years I had been feeling that I just didn’t buy this tradition I had been raised in, and somehow I feel that this was a point of spiritual honesty that was important in preparing me to know of Meher Baba. »

At one extreme of religious conviction combined with social awareness was Harry Muir, a prisoner who was corresponding that year with his girlfriend Sharon Harmon. Sharon, a young Chapel Hill artist and drama enthusiast, was faithfully maintaining an epistolary relationship with Harry, who had been arrested, court-martialed, and sent to Leavenworth Prison after refusing one morning, while in training for service in Vietnam, to put on his uniform.

Harry was a follower of Jesus and a person much concerned with the real meaning of religion, which he was trying to put into practice. His thoughts about these matters were the subject of many long letters to Sharon.

In April 1967, Harry wrote regarding earlier experiences with the « poor » of Appalachia : « Today the Great Society worries about their poverty, but they have a richness in their lives that is foreign to middle-class Americana. I cannot describe it except to say that they are alive. » In the same letter, Harry told Sharon : « Think about what you should do in the name and service of Love. Now you think God will give you an answer. He already has. Your job and mine is to let God/Love grow in us so that we can see that answer. »

Words like Sufism, kabala, bardo, and tao, infected our conversations. Ouija boards had a vogue, sometimes with disturbing results, with a hope to contact some other realm we sensed was there. The I Ching became a handy device for fathoming relationships and situations in a spare, passionless way. Edgar Cayce was highly placed on our pantheon of wise men, his revelations about health and religion a grounding force.

The cult of the « head » — acid head, drug-head, pot-head — was a cult of longing, seeking, and endlessly discussing, over coffee, beer, or macrobiotic rice communally dished out on swaybacked kitchen tables. According to Winnie Barrett, « We did drugs, mostly on the weekends, hung out at Harry’s and The Tempo Room. I wasn’t at all political, nor an artist or writer, so I found my social group to be other drug users. »

Significantly, in May 1967 none of us had gotten very deeply into Indian religion. We were nibbling on the frosting but had not tasted the cake. We had much to learn, though our worldly arrogance did little to suggest that we did.

Meher Baba, to most, would come as a complete surprise.

Our group was beginning to coalesce in the months before May 1967. Drugs and the natural affinity of one freak for another brought us together. The denim-clad political organizers made company with artists and liberal protesters, joined in the common bond of drug use. For some it was recreational, for others a serious habit, for still others it was regarded as a sacrament in a new kind of religious experience.

The local « pastor » (known as a « boohoo ») of the « Neo-American Church » (a poorly conceived parody of Native American religion concocted in an attempt to make the hip « sacraments » legal) was amassing a small library of spiritual and quasi spiritual tomes.

These he shelved in the parlor of that white two story house leaning out over Franklin Street, appropriately near the Greyhound bus station where more renegades arrived each week. There, amid a tatty splendor of draped scarves over darkened front windows (to keep the « narcs, » or narcotics agents, from seeing in), we met and talked intensely into the wee hours.

This « boohoo, » Lorenzo Durham, became the local leader of the NAC after the original boohoo, Will Bullard, was sent to state prison for possession of peyote, an early warning that the drug path was a thorny one. Lorenzo was a sincere seeker whose Native American heritage gave him a different set of eyes and ears. He recalls a tribal upbringing overlaid with his father’s evangelism :

« I saw everything from really spiritually directed people to total shysters[... ]. I had all my life this very strong link with God. Unusual phenomena were not unusual for me[... ] when I had the boohoo-ship dropped in my lap, the name I chose for our chapel was ‘chapel of divine light.’ This group had always had a spiritual focus. »

Nancy Sasser was the secretary of the Chapel Hill branch of the NAC. Lorenzo hosted a cast of a thousand freaks who passed through his creaking doors. Upstairs were rented rooms, their old-fashioned dimensions making them commodious even for couples (some married).

Just across the street was the Carolina Grill where greasy burgers were slapped out at a price suited for pinched budgets. Some of the more unsavory locals, with serious bad habits, rubbed elbows at its counter with poets and carpenters and none seemed the worse for the contact. In fact, there was a certain shiny-eyed idealism inherent in the bohemian spirit that celebrated encounters with the underbelly of society. Perhaps the element of social marginality had common cause with our desire to uncouple from the mainstream. It was a naive and pardonable view, and one that helped us feel comfortable wherever we found ourselves when our spiritual quest began in real earnest.

Though we were a strikingly iconoclastic lot, we had the will to organize ourselves, have meetings, and make plans. In retrospect this seems an obvious set-up for the loosely structured spiritual organization that was to become our responsibility. Most friends don’t hold meetings — it seemed we had already formed a kind of club, like children in a tree house.

And like children, we could easily have been led astray. It was not coincidental that Meher Baba was already speaking of his « children of the West. »

In early May 1967, our small brave band of non-materialist, angry, confused pilgrims was making plans. We had successfully, miraculously, organized a be-in on campus that April and were basking in the pride of having taken our vague causes — love, flower power, tie-dye, and homemade bread — to the masses. Greater events were to come, heralded by a meeting at Lorenzo’s on Sunday afternoon, May 14. At this meeting we were to finalize plans for a Buddha birthday celebration to be held May 20. Inviting the Grand Boohoo of the National Neo-American Church, Arthur « Kleps, » to that party was part of a scheme we had concocted to get free LSD on demand, as card carrying members of the NAC.

Leaders of the NAC had created a Meher Baba dart board, one of which mysteriously appeared at Lorenzo’s house for a few weeks. Perhaps in no quarter did Meher Baba evince so much hostility as among the NAC, with its affiliate member the redoubtable Tim Leary, who had coined the drug-users’ credo, « Turn on, tune in, drop out. »

Current NAC web sites make clear that we were heading in the wrong direction. Arthur « Kleps » (now deceased) made this pronouncement which he proudly shared with Leary :

« Our victory is over horseshit rather than bullshit. Bullshit is a rare and valuable commodity. The great masters have all been superb bullshitters. Horseshit, on the other hand, in the common parlance, refers to downright crap[... ]. We might take[... ] Meher Baba as an example of a master horseshitter. »

Arthur’s crudely designed Grand Seal of the NAC contains the device : « Victory Over Horseshit » (Millbrook, H.H. Arthur, online text). His anti-Meher Baba sentiments are matched by his virulent anti-Semitism and reverence for the Nazis, as well as his respect for those who « liberated the people of Tibet from the[... ] Dalai Lama. »

As this narrative will show, we were destined for far finer things than what Kleps had to offer. Help, like in the cowboy movies we watched as real children in the ‘50s, came just in time.

[modifier] The Usual Suspects Gather

At this remove, everyone in America thinks he or she knows what a hippie is, and could describe this phenomenon of the ‘60s in 25 words or less. In the time frame of the events of this chronicle, that nascent movement was a thin reed fighting for life in the crabgrass of suburban complacency.

Some of us became hippies, some of us never were, but all of us were stimulated by the possibilities inherent in the cultural surge. The word stuck. For our purposes it is necessary to beam in on the pre-hippie/post-beat phenomenon as it appeared in 1967 in the « Southern part of heaven, » because they were us, and we are the subjects of this chronicle.

As we were for the most part Southerners, and therefore slower and more genteel than the rest of the nation, the mantle of hip-ness fell upon our shoulders with considerable weight. We had to be hip for an entire state. « And it wasn’t easy ! » as Bob Underwood declared.

North Carolina in those years was still markedly provincial, with a mainstream ethos that pretty faithfully mirrored that of preceding generations. Our grandparents had believed that it was possible to « pull yourself up by your bootstraps » — our parents’ generation actually did so in the boom times following World War II. It fell upon us to reject what they had acquired and scorn the very act of acquisition.

For the majority of Chapel Hill’s demimonde, nonconformity was already a credo by the time we finished high school. For whatever reason — artistic temperament, higher than average intelligence, recognition of bisexual/homosexual longings, or just innate frustration, a sense that things ought to be different — the children who grew up in the safe and stolid ‘50s were ready, by the early ‘60s, to topple the icons and break the molds.

Tentative tremulous freaks found and affirmed one another. Considerable in-group solidarity was necessary to keep fragile hearts and minds fixed on the goal of being always different.

Means of identifying one’s cohort were necessary. When a convert to the beat/hip/bohemian fold arrived in Chapel Hill he or she would soon find seamy rooms, creaking beds, a place for a beer and the inevitable serious talk. In some of the more sedate but slowly collapsing houses on Franklin Street or West Rosemary, one could rent a room with chandelier, frizzy wires appending, wainscoting, high ceilings, and sloping hardwood floors.

He or she would be outfitted in the latest version of nonconformist fashion. For bohemians and beats the color for some time had been basic black. Denim, not yet either fashionable or ubiquitous, signified identification with the cause of the proletariat.

Some people wore army coats and other gear that appealed for its cheapness and its implied rejection of « straight » values (which were typified by classic colors and styles that had yet to break free from Victorian constraints). The nonconforming young man or woman of the early ‘60s did not so much wear clothing as display it. The advent of the comfortable and casual, the colorful and sensual in American dress was being previewed on the catwalks of nonconformity.

Alex Macintire, sadly missed since his untimely death in 1999, said it well in writing of our times and our people :

« We are all part of a cohort of people who passed through Chapel Hill in an unusual time. Our immediate group included the rag-tag end of the beats, major actors in the Civil Rights movement, proto-hippies, aspiring writers and painters, and one of the first large segments of the population in the US to ring all the changes on drugs and the mind and on religions from the Indian subcontinent. »

Alex compiled these notes in the ‘80s, in preparation for a reunion he dubbed « The Tables Down at Harry’s. » Harry’s Delicatessen was a major outpost on our mythological map of the old Chapel Hill. There the denimed denizens and professorial tweed set slouched in booths alongside harried student parents and the occasional « great » — a chance meeting in Harry’s with Jack Kerouac is one of our cherished recollections. And what better hero for a generation of fools and lost souls than the antihero who described us so aptly : « The only people for me are the mad ones[... ] mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn[... ] »

John Gunn, who was Alex’s dorm mate at UNC, put it this way :

« It seems to me that my generation occupied that little slot about 3 — 5 years wide in which our urges to be rebellious, to reject conventional values, had two different sets of prototypes : the hep and the hip, or the lifestyle and values of the beatnik and of the hippie. Before this transition took place in popular culture in the early sixties, I was reading Kerouac, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other beat writers, and I felt myself very influenced by them. »

Don Dickson described that era and the Harry’s scene :

« What ebbed and flowed and eddied around Harry’s was a kind of urgent, adolescent social pressure cooker in which most, in their own view, secretly did not measure up. You had either gotten there too late, had been in a fraternity, or gotten actually legally married, or any number of other deleterious stigma. »

Jim Watson expressed what could have been a bohemian credo, from his memories of that time :

« I was feeling more and more that I needed to face the fact that I didn’t really believe in anything ultimate[... ] figured you kept yourself busy with the outside world to avoid confronting the horror of the nothingness of the center.[... ] » Jim was beat.

By the mid ‘60s, the old bohemian order was breaking down. Tightly bound to classic forms and a fixed view of good (Epicurean, bacchanalian) vs. evil (Calvinist, mechanistic, materialistic), it no longer had the answers in a subculture rapidly going paisley. Suddenly all the strange bedfellows identified above became heir to a truly new revolutionary catalyst — psychedelic drugs.

Drug use had always been a feature of bohemian life. One hallmark of the subculture was a passion to experiment with consciousness, a determination to know and fearlessly embrace anything that might foster creative sensibilities or give a clue as to how to meet chaos and fear. Nonconformity is a loneIy outpost ; the blues are never far away. Drugs palliate these feelings.

Pre-‘60s, drugs largely meant depressives like alcohol, opium, and hashish, in which visions and ecstasy were mixed in equal measure with lassitude, unpleasant physical side effects, unconsciousness, and addiction.

Then came the age of the psychedelics — the age for which hippies had been born.

Psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, and more — were a different breed of catharsis. There was no blacking out. Instead there was heightened awareness and a sense of having embarked on a thoroughly engaging journey into another realm — hence the word « trip » soon gained parlance. At the time of these events, many psychedelic drugs were still legal, and could be manufactured by anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry. They were physically non-addictive and seemed to offer what so many were looking for — a glimpse of something higher, more meaningful than pedestrian reality.

Post-beat, pre-hippie, there were « heads, » those who had begun to experiment with LSD, peyote, and other hallucinogenic chemicals. The appellation « head » proudly referenced our intuition that the universe was within us, behind rather than in front of our eyeballs. (To his credit, Kerouac was to tell those who lingered with him through the long night, « Those drugs’ll make you crazy. »)

Bob Underwood, a college dropout living marginally in a room in Chapel Hill around that time, had read a book in high school, Drugs and the Mind, and « was fascinated that a chemical could induce profound visionary experiences, and wanted very much to explore this mental landscape. » His was a typical view of the drug experience as a place where one could go and still coexist with others, drawing inspiration from visions to be brought back home.

With a few micrograms of chemical dotted on a sugar cube we could enter a New World, parallel to or higher than ordinary consciousness.

As Nancy Sasser was to say, « We were finally into the joyous cosmology ! » No one who used these substances could deny their ability to draw a veil across ordinary reality — a veil of consistent, powerful, and beautiful illusions. Even for the non-religious, sacred imagery — the sound of etheric choirs and visions of medieval stained glass cathedrals — sprang up unbidden, from archetypes that had a motivating power far in excess of anything heretofore experienced. Using psychedelics often created a sense of sharing minds and thoughts, engendering a loving feeling among those who tripped together.

Psychedelics were convincing. They offered an answer. And, fittingly, the answer was vouchsafed to us, a reward for our seeking. Our cockeyed view of the world was the truth.

Before we delve any farther into these perilous and peculiar realms, we may need guidance. Lest we become confused as to what is truth, let us get acquainted with the central character in this tale : Meher Baba.

Chapel Hill – 1967. By Barbara Scott. © 2001 Barbara Scott