History of My Reading: Tales of Power

The 1960s psychedelic moment (subject of the previous entry in this series) was a gateway to other areas of inquiry, as well as to new understandings of human societies.  For example, the paradigm for mind-expanding substances leading to different cultural understandings of reality as well as spiritual dimensions was the series of books by Carlos Castaneda that began with The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in 1968.

Told in the first person, it relates the experiences of an apprentice to a Native expert in medicinal plants such as peyote, who becomes an apprentice to this man of power.  From the beginning but especially later on, the literal truth of this account has been questioned, but these books changed the vocabulary in a lasting way.

Part of their importance is expressed by anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt in his introduction to the first book.  Stating that "This book is both ethnography and allegory," he writes more generally of anthropological work among Indigenous peoples that "the world is differently defined in different places.  It is not only that people have different customs...It is, rather, that the worlds of different peoples have different shapes.  The very metaphysical presuppositions differ: space does not conform to Euclidean geometry, time does not form a continuous unidirectional flow, causation does not conform to Aristotelian logic..."

Many experienced or at least glimpsed what Casteneda called "nonordinary reality" in the 60s through psychedelics.  Here was a link to ancient cultures that explored such realities, with something like a system of meaning explored in these books.

I have a specific memory of reading The Teachings of Don Juan in Boulder in 1969, where it was widely read in the counterculture.  But I really became interested in the series when I read Tales of Power in 1974,  then the previous two books (A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan.)  I eventually read the following four books in the series, which concluded in 1987, with a further elaboration in 1993's The Art of Dreaming.  

Each volume after the The Teachings moved farther away from a direct connection to psychedelic substances, as Carlos no longer needed them to gain access to this non-ordinary reality of Don Juan.  In this sense, it mirrored the counterculture. Psychedelics--including cannabis--contributed to interest in other areas, such as Native American cultures more generally, Eastern religions or practices, and ecology.

Some of the leaders of these awakenings were also veterans of the so-called Beat Generation, such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, so there were several streams feeding into these tributaries of interest.  But there were other figures who arose directly out of the 1960s counterculture, including a figure who had a huge following in the Bay Area, named Stephen Gaskin.

A Korean War combat vet, Gaskin taught English at San Francisco State.  Turned on by his students (who started the process by taking him to see A Hard Day's Night) he began holding a class in which he merged ideas from a number of areas of interest to the psychedelic generation.  These blossomed into his Monday Night Class, which drew thousands to hear him at the Family Dog ballroom in San Francisco.

Stephen (as he called himself) spoke in the vocabulary of that culture, organizing elements of Eastern philosophies and western religions, psychology (often Jungian) and esoteric sciences.  He particularly talked about "fields" of energy and telepathy.  These were not only discourses that emerged from stoned culture: most of his audience was stoned when they heard him.  (As he told them "stoned" is derived from "astonished.")  This added another dimension, so when he talked about "this matters" in both its meanings--as consequence and as physical stuff-- his audience felt the implications of the two together with an extraordinary depth.

Some of these talks were transcribed in a book, Monday Night Class.  I attended several of these sessions, which were mesmerizing but also at times overbearing. I recall escaping from one to walk by the ocean for awhile.  But his basic messages were simple and profound and in all senses, sensible:  We have all we need, including the ability to be more conscious and change for the better.  We can figure it out and act, peacefully and compassionately.

Stephen also organized the First Annual Holy Man Jam at the Family Dog in 1969, which included appearances by Ram Dass and Alan Watts.  (I was there, and I still have my ordination certificate as a minister of the Universal Life Church from this event.)

Alan Watts was a major cultural figure in the Bay Area, due to his years of radio and television talks, primarily on aspects of Zen.   I have several of his many books, but the one that was most current at this time was The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.  I probably also got the reprint of the long article Beat Zen/Square Zen/and Zen about this time, at the City Lights Bookstore.

Watts was the village explainer of Eastern and lesser known western philosophical ideas, relating them to politics, science and ecology.  But he was not a simplistic popularizer--he dealt with complexities and subtleties as well as exposition and making connections.   His prose on the page was clear and well-organized.  Though he had a touch of  bullshit ego in person, his English-accented voice and manner of speaking lent a down- to- Earth quality.  Many of his recorded talks are still broadcast and popular on YouTube.  The dated elements are more often about western society than Eastern systems.

A few years later, Stephen Gaskin led a convoy of some 25 vehicles (mostly old school buses) on a speaking tour through the states.  Some of those talks were collected in another volume, The Caravan.  I got a review copy of it at Boston After Dark/the Boston Phoenix in 1972, and judging from notations, I probably wrote about it.  Shortly after that tour, Gaskin led an even bigger convoy to Tennessee, where they set up a commune called the Farm.  Over more than 40 years it became the largest, longest lasting and most successful of the 60s communities.

Journalists scrambled to explain the psychedelic era and the "hippie scene," often with scurrilous results, occasionally sympathetically, as in We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us Against by Nicholas von Hoffman, who became more prominent in the 1970s, eventually becoming a commentator on 60 Minutes.  In this book he emphasized the Generation Gap, which stands out now as perhaps the most characteristic and almost unique element of the 1960s.

For those of us marooned in the Midwest, reading Tom Wolfe's account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was as close as we got to being "on the bus" at the high point of the psychedelic era in California.  Along with perhaps The Right Stuff, this tour de force remains for me Wolfe's best book.

But the book whose title at least first defined the era was The Making of A Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak, published in 1969.  In addition to the unique qualities of that minority of early baby boomers that comprised this counter culture, Roszak emphasized its rebellion against "technocracy," which harks back to Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd and before that to the work of Lewis Mumford.

In retrospect, what Roszak wrote now seems a highly personal view, questionable or clearly mistaken in some details, though he also got a lot right. But the book's biggest immediate and lasting effect was to give this phenomenon a name: the counterculture.  Only a few years before this book, the word "culture" in common parlance still chiefly meant opera and ballet, otherwise called "high culture."  Its meaning as an anthropological categorization was popularized mostly by Margaret Mead in her magazine columns and media appearances.

 It took awhile before Americans could see themselves as having a separate culture, and other peoples and other times having equally valid and self-justifying cultures.  Until then, there was just "civilization," the right way (the American way) with other peoples just ignorant and misguided, to be pitied, feared, reformed and/or subjugated. (This view, needless to say, recurs even in our time.) That other cultures could have different ways of doing things (like childbirth) or different metaphysical ideas simply meant they were wrong.

That their own children could be part of a separate culture (or, anthropologists insisted, subculture) was astonishing.  But the idea was widely discussed and debated, until it stuck.  It's been the counterculture ever since.

Roszak continued to write about the counterculture and its points of view, from the 1970s (Where the Wasteland Ends, Person/Planet) through to the 21st century, in a brilliant book that went by several titles until it settled on The Making of An Elder Culture.  Roszak also added another key idea to the cultural dialogue by coining Eco-psychology in a 1995 book of that title.

In the first decade of this century, Roszak and I began an email correspondence and maintained it for awhile.  I don't recall how it started.  I think we mostly discussed the publishing biz.  He sent me a copy of his 2003 novel, The Devil and Daniel Silverman, which I admired and enjoyed.  Roszak passed away in 2011.

The cultural--and countercultural--aspects of the 1960s cannot be disentangled from the political, mostly because of the Vietnam war.  The most important books I read on those subjects, coming soon.  Watch this space.