Excerpt from Chapter 10: Psychedelic Sages
Allen Ginsberg has been made to stand in for many aspects of the 1960s— “tutelary deity of the flower people,” “bohemian prototype,” “hairy freak,” “father goddam to two generations of the underground”—so it’s with some hesitation that I present him, a tragicomic hero, an icon, a metaphor for yoga in the Age of Aquarius. But I’ll do it anyway because, as a matter of public record, it was probably Ginsberg who pioneered this graduated approach to psychedelics and yoga and because Ginsberg saw himself as an example.
Back in December 1960, the poet had spent a weekend at Leary’s place in Newton, Massachusetts. There, with his lover Peter Orlovsky, he took a large dose (36 mg) of psilocybin. Afterward, he wrote up a testimonial. Psilocybin was “some sort of psychic godsend” that “aids consciousness to contemplate itself.” It catalyzed “transcendental or mystical awareness,” and “a kind of useful, practical cosmic consciousness.”
At this point in his life, Ginsberg had felt compelled to expand his consciousness via psychedelics. (Besides the psilocybin, he had ingested pretty much every variety then available.) And this had negative as well as supremely positive consequences.
On the plus side, Ginsberg was adding new types of perceptions— cosmic ones—and what he described as “new data” to his field of view.
On the minus side, the drugs made him sick, sick with fear (of, he confessed, a serpent, and more broadly death) and quite literally sick to his stomach.
In 1962, off Ginsberg went to India. Ginsberg’s India was a seedy place, a great and wondrous place for a young Beatnik whose dishevelment was a form of protest. It was not a particularly spiritual place.
He did meet a number of Yogis including Swami Sivananda in Rishikesh, who ran an ashram where you could learn Hatha and Raja Yoga. The swami told Ginsberg, “Your own heart is your guru.” He, along with some other “holy men,” pulled Ginsberg out of his mind and back into his body. They said, “Live in the body,” Ginsberg recalled in an interview for The Paris Review in 1965, “this is the form that you’re born for.”
It wasn’t that Ginsberg gave up drugs. He still used them, but he had found other ways to reach “euphorias, ecstasies of plea sure.” He started chanting as soon as he got back to North America (at a poetry conference in Vancouver in 1963).
Swami Muktananda, a Kashmir Saivite, gave him a mantra, and he worked with that one for a year and half. By the time Prabhupada showed up in New York City in 1966, Ginsberg considered him and his message “reinforcement for me, like ‘the reinforcements had arrived’ from India.”
Soon enough, Ginsberg was using his mantra—his breath and his body—to reach startling and ecstatic states right there in view of all the world and all the TV cameras and hundreds of young, turned-on people assembled to protest the Vietnam War at the Democratic National Convention in August 1968.
Ginsberg had agreed to attend the Festival of Life after its organizers, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, assured him there would be no violence. However, the Festival of Life turned into a carnival of brutality, piped to Americans in color during prime time.
Ginsberg did the only thing he could think of. He started chanting in Lincoln Park.135
Ginsberg had begun his chant on Sunday afternoon. This went on for hours. But the way Ginsberg was singing “Om” so irked an Indian listener he or she wrote a note to Ginsberg pleading him to do his mantra “seriously by pronouncing the ‘M’ in OM properly.”
Ginsberg complied, and soon enough his breathing became more regular, and then not too much later he felt a tingling in his feet that spread to his whole body, until it was “one rigid electrical tingling—a solid mass of lights.”
The electricity running through his body forced him to straighten his spine. He put his legs in full lotus, something he could rarely do comfortably. People grabbed his trembling hands.
And he kept chanting.
This was American yoga circa 1968.
Its avatar wasn’t Krishna. (Watts, impish and lusty, might have made for a decent Krishna.)
It wasn’t Shiva. (Though Huxley, who had died the day JFK was shot, had had something of Shiva’s austerity to him.)
And it certainly wasn’t Kali, who was far too bloodthirsty a deity for American tastes.
It was Ginsberg in his thick, black-framed glasses, his beard and his beads and his stringy, long hair sitting in lotus position in Lincoln Park, Chicago, on a hot August day.
As more than twelve thousand police patrol the streets, he chants.
As the police club unarmed protesters and reporters, he chants.
As people come and go, swelling and shrinking the circle, he chants.
As the sun went down and the city lights went on, Ginsberg chants.
And for all his chanting, Ginsberg didn’t bring peace to Chicago, or even to Lincoln Park for long.
What actually happened to him came out only the following spring, in an interview with Playboy magazine.
On that August day, Ginsberg turned his body into some sort of divine vessel.
He felt “as if I were breathing the air of heaven into myself and then circulating it back out into heaven.”
He felt “cellular extensions of some kind of cosmic consciousness within my body.”
He no longer feared death.
“I was able to look at the Hancock Building and see it as a tiny little tower of electrical lights,” Ginsberg told Playboy, “—a very superficial toy compared with the power, grandeur, and immensity of one human body.”
He said, “It felt like grace.”