CHAPTER 1
Spirituality and the present climate
Can you see any hope for this homicidal, neurologically crippled species otherthan a mass religious ecstatic convulsion?TIMOTHY LEARY
In 1963 the mere mention of the God concept was good for a laugh. By 1965 it wasmany people's most serious concern.JEFF NUTTALL
THE 'SPIRITUAL QUEST OF YOUTH'
There is a serious danger at present in some writing and thinking around thearea of youth and spirituality that the 'spiritual quest of youth' will beexaggerated and distorted to such an extent that the more widespread phenomenonof extreme conservatism in social attitudes will continue to spread unchecked.To some extent indeed the latter can be seen as a reaction against the former:the revolt of many of the young both against western materialism and against theprevailing political malaise has provoked many adults to a defensive andreactionary posture. But to an even greater extent, the present climaterepresents the persistence of a tradition which never died out among theyoung. Most young people never revolted, never protested, and never undertookany spiritual pilgrimage. They remained, like their parents, conventional andconservative.
In an earlier study, I attempted to describe some of the characteristics of the'youth culture' of the 1960s with specific reference to its search for aspirituality. I was criticized by a number of reviewers for doing what Ispecifically denied that I was doing: describing the movements of youth in thatperiod in exclusively 'religious' categories, and generalizing on the basis of asmall minority of young people in central London. It is essential therefore torecognize the wider context and to define one's limits. I do not believe thatthe movements associated with the 'counter-culture' and the 'radicalization ofyouth', which have now been described in a number of studies, have so faraffected modern society to more than a marginal extent. The impact on the bigcities, with their concentration of journals, meetings and access to the media,can help to promote exaggeration. But the fact is that the cultural trends whichI and others have described represent significant minority movements. As onesociologist noted: 'Life in Burslem, Tadcaster and Crewe was not greatlyaffected.'
At the same time, the movements are more significant and their influence moresubtle than is often appreciated. Moreover, the interest of young and not soyoung in spirituality never was confined, and is not confined today, to the'counter-culture' even in its widest connotations. It is a phenomenon whichstill awaits adequate research and documentation. For me, it marked the startingpoint in my ministry of taking personal spiritual guidance seriously, and led meto re-examine my own inner life and inner resources. I found that the demandsmade upon me required more than personal planning or sociological skills, andthat I was being led to a deeper exploration of the most neglected area ofclergy training, ascetical and spiritual theology.
During the 1960s it was frequently being argued that the future of humanity was'non-religious', that society was secularized, and that the church's missionmust be based on that assumption.
We came increasingly to believe that all this was true. Even our religiousestablishments, our various Vaticans came to believe that it was true. They havebeen operating, more or less, on this assumption ever since. This assumption isnot true: it has been discredited not by theologians but by events. In fact wewere entering—not a secularized age, as we thought—we were enteringan age of incredible religiosity.
The view that society was increasingly and inevitably 'religionless' wasseverely criticized by the American sociologist Andrew Greeley. Arguing that'the basic human religious needs and the basic religious functions have notchanged very notably since the late Ice Age', Greeley concluded:
I do not believe that religion is in a state of collapse and none of theempirical data that I have available lead me to believe that it is ... Thereligious crises of the intellectual community by no means reflect the religioussituation of the mass of the people. 'Western man', 'modern man', 'technologicalman', 'secular man' are to be found, for the most part, only on universitycampuses, and increasingly only among senior faculty members, as the studentsengage in witchcraft, astrology and other bizarre cultic practices.
By 1968 it was clear in many sections of modern life that there was a renewedinterest in 'spiritual' issues.
It was a confused and bizarre interest which many who worked with young peopleencountered. There were those who used LSD and other psychedelic drugs andimmediately sought guidance, both from other trippers and from those outside thedrug cultures altogether, about further explorations of consciousness. Thewritings of Alan Watts and Ronald Laing became very popular. Both were concernedwith the breaking down of the barriers by which the ego, the transitory wakingself, prevented the experience of transcendence. For many young people, it seemsthat LSD initially helped this process, but they wanted to move on from thisexperience. They described their need in openly spiritual terms, so that eventhe Interim Report of the Canadian Government's Commission was led to comment onthe degree of interest in religion among drug takers. These young searcherslooked wherever they felt their need might be met—meditation schools,paperback mysticism, Yoga, even the church. But the church seemed ill-preparedto meet that need.
These young people were not restricted to any one social class or culturalgroup. Not all among them were drug users, and most of them were not 'hippies'.They were a very mixed group. What they did seem to have in common was a searchfor meaning in their lives, and by this they meant an inner meaning, aspiritual meaning. Ronald Laing referred to their search as a quest fortranscendence of the ego, for 'meta-egoic' experience.
People who explore states of ego-loss, or are precipitated into themwilly-nilly, search for references: maps of the worlds within worlds, of meta-egoicspace and time. Most people involved in this don't refer to the Christiantradition for their terms of reference. They go not to the Bible but to theTibetan Book of the Dead, the biography of Milarepa, the Tao Te Ching, theSecret of the Golden Flower, to the Buddhists, Zen, Tibetan and other schools,the Taoists, the Sufis, the Hindus. Such texts that seem able to speak to thecondition of these meta-egoic ego-loss experiences, over barriers of egoic-time,space and cultural conditions.
It was this quest for transcendence and ego-loss which was very frequentlyassociated with the use of psychedelics, and by 1967 the psychedelic movementhad grown into a mass culture, concentrated particularly in the Haight-Ashburydistrict of San Francisco. In Britain, London's streets became familiar with thesurface features of psychedelia. Beneath the surface, a new spirituality seemedto be emerging.
The place of LSD and other chemicals in this emergence should not beexaggerated, but it was and is of great importance. It was not a question of thesimple causal link: psychedelic drugs merely opening up the consciousness andleading directly to spirituality. It was rather a resurgence of spiritualitywhich for a time used the only resources which were available in a technologicaland materialistic culture—chemicals. In one sense the psychedelic movementwas simply the application of the highly respectable 'Better living throughchemistry' thesis to the realm of the spirit. Or, as Meher Baba put it in 1968,'God in a Pill'. Soon after the early work with Leary on psychedelic drugs, hiscolleague Richard Alpert sought out a guru in India who told him,
LSD is like a Christ coming to America in the Kali Yuga. America is a mostmaterialistic country, and they wanted their Avatar in the form of a material.The young people wanted their Avatar in the form of a material. And so they gotLSD. If they had not tasted of such things, how will they know?—how willthey know?
Alpert, even though he ceased to use drugs, continues to hold that when usedunder reasonably conscious conditions, these agents have enabled some people tobreak out of their limited perceptual vantage points and understand alternativepossibilities of reality. Less positively, and perhaps more cynically, TheodoreRoszak commented in 1968:
The gadget happy American has always been a figure of fun because of his facileassumption that there exists a technological solution to every human problem. Itonly took the great psychedelic crusade to perfect the absurdity by proclaimingthat personal salvation and the social revolution can be packed into a capsule.
The basic thesis of the psychedelic movement was expressed by Timothy Leary inthe early days of his drug experiments. The human brain, he argued, was 'capableof limitless new dimensions of awareness and knowledge', but 'you have to go outof your mind to use your head; that you have to pass beyond everything in orderto become acquainted with the new areas of consciousness'. Jerry Garcia of theGrateful Dead noted, 'Acid has changed consciousness entirely. The U.S. haschanged in the last few years and it's because that whole first psychedelicthing meant, "Here's this new consciousness, this new freedom, and it's here inyourself."' Michael Hollingshead, the Englishman who first introduced Leary toLSD, has documented in great detail the way in which the drug search assumedspiritual dimensions and a theological language. In his book The Man WhoTurned on the World, he claims that
we are seeing a change in the nature of western man due to a shift in emphasisaway from a theological revelation to an ontologist mysticism, that is,authority of a Divine Person to the more individually 'free' belief in absoluteNature. In either approach to God, we are reminded that we are summoned to adeeper spiritual awareness, far beyond the level of subject-object.
Many years earlier, Aldous Huxley had written of 'the chemical conditions oftranscendental experience', while in the nineteenth century both Benjamin Bloodand William James were concerned with the issues of drugs and mysticism. Indeed,the link between drug use and the attainment of spiritual status is extremelyancient.
The pharmacology of LSD and the historical course of the psychedelic movementhave been discussed elsewhere, and ought not to detain us here. The importantpoint is that to make the drug the centre of attention is a mistake. The mostthat any drug can do is to accentuate or suppress functions in behaviour whichalready exist. Drugs cannot in principle introduce anything new into the mind orinto behaviour. So it was soon rediscovered that the entire range of 'drugeffects' could be produced without the use of drugs, by traditional methods ofconsciousness change—meditation, sensory deprivation, fasting, chanting,Yoga, dancing, and so on. Moreover, these 'natural', non-chemical methods mightenable the state of enriched consciousness to be continuous and lasting. So outof the psychedelic movement grew an interest in non-chemical approaches, inmethods of self-exploration and enriching of consciousness by natural means.Hence we have seen through the late 1960s and 1970s the blossoming of a widerange of spiritual movements and groups whose aim is to raise the level ofconsciousness.
For it has been a central assumption of this new spiritual quest that the Westis suffering from severe spiritual deprivation, what Roszak calls 'a diminishedmode of consciousness'. It was this point which Laing made so powerfully in hisbest-selling work The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise,which first appeared in 1967.
We live in a secular world. To adapt to this world the child abdicates itsecstasy ... Having lost our experience of the Spirit, we are expected to havefaith. But this faith comes to be a belief in a reality which is not evident.There is a prophecy in Amos that there will be a time when there will be afamine in the land, not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but ofhearing the words of the Lord. That time has now come to pass. It is thepresent age.
Laing ironically was assuming the mantle of the theologian at precisely the timethat many theologians were writing as though they were psychiatrists! Otherswere to make the same point. 'We are heading into a profoundly religious age',wrote McLuhan in 1968, while the economist E. F. Schumacher strongly attackedthe autonomy of economics and urged the recovery of spirituality. 'The guidancewe need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value ofwhich utterly depends on the ends they serve: but it can still be found in thetraditional wisdom of mankind.'
The particular form of the 'traditional wisdom of mankind' which was beingrediscovered and re-experienced in the 1960s was eastern rather than western,Hindu rather than Christian, non-rational rather than rational, occult ratherthan prophetic, and emotional rather than intellectual. Charles Reich referredto it as 'the new consciousness', and said that 'the extraordinary thing aboutthis new consciousness is that it has emerged out of the wasteland of thecorporate state, like flowers pushing up through the concrete pavement'.Monica Furlong saw it as a revival of the ancient theme of spiritual journey.
The return to primitive forms of journey such as witchcraft and astrology; thenew found interest in meditation and in contemplative forms of experience; theadoption of eastern forms of religion, particularly Buddhism, Zen Buddhism andVedantism; the attempt to understand something new about the meaning of thegroup, by group dynamics and new forms of communal living; the turning to drugs,especially LSD and cannabis, in an attempt to learn something new about the selfand its meaning; the expression and sharing of some of this ferment of thoughtin pop music and musicals like Hair; all of these seem to me to beattempts to set out upon, or talk about, an inner journey.
It is significant too that Hermann Hesse's novels became popular in this period,for in Siddhartha Hesse uses the account of one of Buddha's journeys asa way of recounting his own quest for spiritual direction.
In this quest, journey or search, we can identify three central themes whichseem to be present in most of the forms which the journey takes, though they arenot all present together at the same time. The first is a disenchantment with,or lack of interest in, the conventional, established religions of the West,particularly institutional Christianity. The second is a desire fortranscendence, for deeper ways of experiencing reality. The third is a concernfor peace, for justice, for human liberation and human fulfilment, combined witha disillusionment with mainstream political solutions. Some of these themes incontemporary spirituality will need more detailed examination.
THE JOURNEY INWARDS
In Hesse's Siddhartha, the young son of a Brahman priest discovers that,while he can make other people happy, he is not himself truly at peace. He hascontemplated, meditated, and used the great Om mantra, but in spite of all hisefforts, he remains empty, 'his intellect ... not satisfied, his soul ... not atpeace, his heart ... not still'. He needs to replace intellectual knowledge bydirect experience, to find the reality within his own self. 'One must find thesource within one's own self.' So Siddhartha goes off into the forest with hisfriend and confidant Govinda in search of an authentic spirituality. After someyears of ascetical discipline, he still finds that the ego is present, he isstill not at peace. So he goes in search of a Buddha, and Govinda becomes theBuddha's disciple. Siddhartha, however, chooses 'to leave all doctrines and allteachers and to reach the goal alone—or die'. In his search, he 'hasdiscovered the comforting secret that a teacher is unnecessary'. He moves on toa city where a beautiful courtesan Kamala instructs him in the art of love, buthe later leaves the city for the forest. He thinks of suicide but is deterred bythe distant sound of the Om mantra from his past, and he goes to sleep. He wakesto find Govinda, now a monk. Siddhartha, however, realizes that he has, throughhis struggles, become free of his ego-self, and he remains by the river,learning from its voices. He has attained Buddhahood.
The whole book, of course, needs to be read. It is hardly surprising that Hessebegan to assume the status of a cult figure at the point in the 1960s when manyyoung people found themselves undertaking precisely this journey—aspiritual pilgrimage, without a teacher, free from the forms and structures ofthe past, a quest for the Self beyond the self. Siddhartha's pilgrimage is infact Hesse's own. 'All these stories dealt with me, reflected my own path, myown secret dreams and wishes, my own bitter anguish.' They reflected the path,the dreams and the anguish of many.
Leaving drugs behind, many young people came to feel that the journey might bestbe pursued through meditation. Meditation schools, groups and cults, mainlyHindu in orientation, now flourish in many places, as well as occult movements,and the more traditional disciplines of Zen and Sufi mysticism. Nor has thisrevival of exploration of the eastern traditions affected only the young, or theex-drug user. Some of these movements now include many middle-aged and elderlydisciples as well as many young people who have never used drugs. The easternschools which exist in Britain fall into three main groups, according to theirorigins in Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic traditions. Hinduism assumes many forms.Its scriptures are the Vedas, and its disciples are often linked together inashrams, or community houses. The most important and best-known of the Hindusacred texts is the Bhagavad-Gita, and this now sells widely in Britain in thetranslation by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, the founder of the KrishnaConsciousness movement. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali also come out of the Hindutradition and are one of the essential texts for practising contemplationthrough Yoga. Yoga and Vedanta in fact are the two major schools which grew outof the Hindu literature, and movements derived from both schools are popular atthe present time. Yoga is widely taught and practised in London and othercentres, although the most popular form is a very westernized version of HathaYoga, propagated for health purposes, from which most of the contemplative corehas been removed. Sometimes there may be a simple form of meditation offered,but the basic appeal is that of physical fitness and agility. But there areschools which go much deeper, and a visit to most large bookstores willintroduce the inquirer to the literature of a wide variety of such schools.
