Born into a modest blue-collar immigrant family in San Francisco’s Sunset District in 1950, Jackie Speier strongly considered entering a convent before choosing to become a lawyer, and served as legislative counsel to Representative Leo Ryan. On November 18, 1978, she joined a fact-finding mission (that the State Department deemed safe) to explore constituent concerns about relatives involved with Jim Jones’s People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. In the events leading up to the infamous cyanide-laced Kool-Aid mass murder of 918 people (the largest massacre of American citizens before 9/11), Ryan and Speier, after visiting the compound, were ambushed at the nearby jungle airstrip. Ryan died, struck by 45 bullets. Speier was shot five times. In great pain, she pretended to be dead until the gunmen left, then waited for 22 hours before receiving medical attention. She conceded to death—but death didn’t come. It was then she made a vow that if she survived she would dedicate her life to public service.

With four bullets still in her body, Speier currently serves as House Representative of the 14th District, which includes parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties—the same seat once held by Ryan. Determined to fulfill her tarmac vow, Speier has gone on to become a courageous legislative champion of underdogs, notably on issues of women’s rights, LGBT, wage discrimination, sexual harassment, worker safety, veterans’ benefits, gun reform, and much more. She serves on two prestigious House Committees (Intelligence and Armed Services) and has lately been in the headlines as a key participant in the presidential impeachment hearings.

Her autobiography, Undaunted, tells the story of a devout Catholic’s rare gift of faith and resilience in the face of an unusual series of life hurdles. We caught up with the tireless congresswoman late one evening as she was wrapping Christmas gifts before boarding a plane back to Washington D.C.

Common Ground: How do you embody Undaunted, particularly in light of the impeachment hearings in Washington?

I think you can never give up. Whether we feel that there’s going to be a conviction in the Senate is really not relevant to our process in the House. Historically, I’ve seen things change overnight. I feel very strongly that the president has committed a high crime and misdemeanor and bribery. We would be totally irresponsible if we let him get away with it. Because if he does gets away with this, then any president who follows can get away with anything. He said, “I can do anything I want under Article 2 of the Constitution.” If allowed, this creates an autocracy within a couple years.

From a viewer perspective it feels like civil war in terms of the divisiveness. Can you put readers in the front row as to what the vibe is like in the House now?

No, it’s actually not. Most of what you hear as divisiveness is the Republicans playing to an audience of one. They’re trying to get their gold stars so Trump will help them get reelected. It’s all about self-preservation.

How do you respond to detractors who accuse Democrats of staging a witch hunt?

It’s hard for me to take that seriously when this was the result of a whistleblower complaint that has been fully corroborated by the president’s release of the summary of his phone call with [Ukrainian president] Zelensky. All the testimony we’ve heard since only corroborates it more and has added new elements in terms of his unwillingness to release the [foreign aid] money, which impacts our national security. If Russia is successful in taking over the Donbass region of Ukraine, that’s the beginning of World War III in Europe.

How did your childhood and family life teach you about grit?

I grew up on Irving in the Inner Sunset and then in South San Francisco and eventually went to Burlingame for high school. My parents were very blue collar. We had a fairly austere childhood. There weren’t a lot of perks and extras. I learned grit by having parents that weren’t softies. They were disciplinarians, tough on us. With my own kids I sometimes fail at being so tough. [laughs] Maybe I didn’t want them to turn out as tough as me.

Did you have a happy childhood?

Yes. I mean here I am wrapping Christmas presents and it’s kind of funny because in our household we didn’t make Christmas lists. You just got whatever you got. [laughs] One year I got a dented suitcase! That was my Christmas gift! It was modest. We went on only three vacations during my entire childhood. One was to the World’s Fair in Seattle. One was to Tijuana and Ensenada, the other to Yosemite. We didn’t stay in hotels. We stayed in a camper.

You occupy the same House seat that Leo Ryan did more than 40 years ago. What kind of man was he?

He was an iconoclastic kind of guy. Some might describe him as a bit of a loner. I used to say, “He eats bureaucrats for lunch.” He believed in what I call experiential legislating. He wasn’t content to have a bureaucrat say, “This is how it is.” He wanted to find out for himself. Early in his career, after the Watts riots, he went down there as a substitute teacher. He spent a week at Folsom prison. He went up to the ice floes in Newfoundland and Labrador during the harp seal hunts. He was quite unique and put his constituents first.

What compelled him to investigate Jonestown?

He had constituents with young adult children that had gotten involved in the People’s Temple. They formed a group called the Concerned Relatives, complaining that their letters weren’t getting through to their children. Congressman Ryan did what his other colleagues representing constituents in San Francisco didn’t do because they were too reliant on Jim Jones, who had the ability to rally 2,000 people if a precinct walk was needed. In many
respects Jim Jones was credited with helping George Moscone get elected and then helping him successfully repel a recall election.

What were you expecting when you went to Guyana?

I was very nervous about the trip even though the State Department was telling us that everything was great—that we had nothing to worry about. I had listened to all of the interviews and I just felt that we didn’t know enough. I really feared. I was about to buy a condominium in Arlington, Virginia, but I literally put a clause in the contract saying that it was contingent on my surviving the trip because I didn’t want my parents to be saddled with a property 3,000 miles away.

I even wrote a note to my parents that I left in my desk drawer saying that if anything happened to me I wanted them to know that I loved them, that my life had been great. And by the way I had a thousand-dollar life insurance policy at the credit union. [laughs] Kind of funny, thinking back on it. So I had a premonition, but I also felt that if I didn’t go I was going to discourage women from being successful in staff leadership positions in Congress because there were very few at that point.

The Jonestown story is spellbinding. Do you mind sharing how you wound up getting shot five times and left for dead?

It was a very intense experience. When we got there we started interviewing many of the constituents, the children of constituents. I had brought all these letters that I wanted to hand deliver. The people we interviewed seemed to be subject to mind control because they all repeated the same thing to me. We weren’t getting very far and then toward the end of the evening Don Harris, who was the NBC reporter, hands us a note with the names of two members who wanted to get out. My heart sank because I thought, “Oh, my God, this is it. It really is true.”

I spent the night in a cabin with five members of the People’s Temple. They were rugged cabins with tin roofs. It rained all night so I was just hearing this pelting sound and couldn’t sleep. Then the next morning Congressman Ryan and I retrieved the one woman and young man who openly wanted to leave. As they got their belongings word spread that some people were leaving. Then more and more people wanted to leave. It got very, very tense. The tension was so high. Jones was complaining and scolding the defectors. We finally got out and I thought we’d dodged a really potentially risky situation. As it turned out we went to the airstrip where I’m loading passengers onto the plane and unbeknownst to us a tractor trailer with seven gunmen had followed behind us at some distance. They had come onto the airstrip. I had my back to them so I didn’t see what was happening.
They started shooting.

Congressman Ryan was shot and I turned and as I was trying to go toward him he got shot again and dropped. So I ran under the plane and hid behind one of the wheels—and then played dead. Then at some point they came and just started shooting at point-blank range. Congressman Ryan was shot 45 times. They riddled his body with bullets. I had been shot five times.
I’m lying on this airstrip, and I thought, “Oh, my God, this is it. I’m 28 years old, I’m never going to live a long life, get married, have kids. This is it.” So I said the Act of Contrition [the Catholic prayer expressing sorrow for sin and asking for God’s help] and waited for the lights to go out. And when they didn’t I had this vision of my grandmother who was then 87 flash in front
of me. I thought, “I just don’t want her to have to live through my funeral if I can avoid it.” So I pulled myself up at some point, dragged myself around the plane because the engines were still running, and someone shoved me in the cargo hold. Obviously the plane wasn’t going anywhere because it had bullet holes in the engine and one of the tires.

Eventually they took me out and placed me in a tent on the side of the airstrip—unfortunately on an anthill. [laughs] But as I’ve said many times since, “You don’t sweat the small stuff when you’re dying.” I was on the airstrip for 22 hours without medical attention and thought I was going to perish—either they were going to come back and finish us off or I would die there. It was a painful time. The NBC producers Bob Flick and Tim Reiterman eventually came to the tent with some 150 proof Guyanese rum and got me through the night. I promised myself that if I did survive I’d never take another day for granted and would live every day as fully as
possible and dedicate my life to public service. And that’s what I’ve done.

For those who don’t know the story, can you explain what ensued that day back at Jonestown?

So in the middle of the night, even though there were no cellphones back then, word came through the jungle that the White Night trials that they had rehearsed many times had actually been done for real, and that people
had died. I remember lying there thinking of all these people I had met—including a group of about 40 that wanted to leave.

How many died

918. They refer to it as a mass suicide, which it wasn’t. It was Jim Jones executing all of them by force or persuasion. Babies and children were injected with the cyanide. They didn’t drink the cyanide Kool-Aid.

Drink the Kool-Aid—that’s a loaded expression for you.

Yeah. I’m not fond of it although I’ve used it once or twice myself.

This makes you something of a de facto expert on cults and cult behavior.

Not by choice, obviously. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, but I certainly observed it up close and personal.

We live in the Bay Area, which is known for its counterculture and alternative spirituality. After Jonestown have you been particularly cynical?

People’s Temple was not a church, it was not a religion, yet they got all the protections that we give to churches under the First Amendment. I think the fact that Jones was able to cloak himself with a religious cape made some look the other way. There were a lot of political reasons why people and local law enforcement looked the other way. Illegal conduct, whether it’s pedophilia under the cross in the Catholic Church or the kind of sexual and physical abuse that Jim Jones engaged in—none of it is above the law.

What physical handicaps do you endure as a result of getting shot and what reminder do they provide?

I have a badly scarred body so that’s obviously a reminder, although I must say after 40 years it’s just part of who I am. I think that it’s really important for us to accept who we are and embrace it. It took me a long while to deal with that but eventually I asked myself, “Am I going to hide the rest of my life or live it?” One day I was on a beach in Hawaii, totally covered, and I thought, “It’s time.” I threw down the sarong and walked across the beach. Some people stared but most people don’t care. It was a very empowering moment.

Gun control has always been a very personal issue for you. Would you contextualize what’s going on in DC in this regard?

You mean what’s not going on? It’s really criminal that the National Rifle Association still has as much clout as it does and that simple bills like comprehensive background checks can’t get passed. I think the day of reckoning is coming. I think there’s going to come a time in the not too distant future when the sane people in this country rise up and say, “This is crazy.” Then we’ll get some laws on the books. Why would we want to give a felon or domestic violence abuser the right to buy a gun online and not be -subject to the check that would prevent them from getting the gun if they went to a licensed gun dealer?

As a legislator you’re known as a champion of the underdog, defending women’s rights, LGBT rights, victims of wage discrimination, survivors of sexual misconduct in the military—the list goes on. Can you talk about the causes and reforms that are dear to you?

This just happened. It will be in the National Defense Authorization Act this year and it’s why I do the work I do. Earlier this year a 14-year Green Beret named Richard Stayskal came and saw me, as I chair the Military Personnel subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. He had gone to a military base hospital with a horrible cough that wasn’t going away. They took a CAT scan and found he had a lesion—but they didn’t tell him! They made note of it and said he’d be referred to oncology—but nothing happened. Six months later he comes back coughing blood, asking to see a physician not on base. He immediately discovered he’s got stage 4 lung cancer. There is this 70-year-old Supreme Court decision called the Feres Doctrine that basically prevents service members from suing the government in a non-combat situation. Now, it makes sense under certain circumstances, but it doesn’t make sense for medical malpractice.

An inmate in a federal prison who gets bad healthcare can sue the federal government, but a service member can’t! So I introduced a bill to change that and it just won a court decision. So in the National Defense Authorization Act, $400 million will be made available over ten years for medical malpractice for service members who are not in theater, who are in a non-combat setting. I named the bill after Richard, and I can’t tell you how thrilling it was to call him to say his family will be cared for. This was a case that simply set off what I call my “outrage meter” so I did something.

There are so many, but what else would you like to highlight?

Reproductive health is an area I’ve spent a lot of time on since I was in the state legislature. When second trimester abortion became a huge issue, I talked on the House floor about one of my pregnancies and my abortion. This gave women around the country the ability to recognize that it’s nothing to be ashamed about. I mean if it threatens the mother’s life and the fetus isn’t going to be viable outside the womb, it’s an appropriate medical procedure—a decision that should be made between a woman and her physician and not government legislating in our wombs.

Sexual harassment and MeToo-style legislation is another one, no? Weren’t you personally a victim of sexual misconduct?

I was but it happened once. It wasn’t like so many of these situations where you have a woman who is constantly being harassed. The typical setting is where you have one person in control and others dependent on them—with
their livelihoods impacted. I did a lot of legislation on violence against women when I was in the state legislature and I got the Rules Committee to require a sexual harassment training every year for members of the state legislature.

When the MeToo movement took off I thought, “This is an opportunity to try to fix the system.” Now if a Congressmember sexually harasses a staff member and there’s a settlement it’s not going to be the taxpayers picking
up the tab—it’s going to be the member. I am glad we were able to change the law in Congress. [laughs] It may be the best way for them to keep their zippers zipped.

[laughs] You’ve surely seen some interesting things in your career.

I have, that’s for sure.

Your book mentions a paternal grandfather having molested you. Are you comfortable talking about that?

I almost didn’t write about that because I had done a really good job compartmentalizing it. Later as I was trying to understand why I spent
so much of my career on issues around violence against women it finally clicked—it was because my grandfather had abused me.

I just didn’t want to have women treated like that. I decided to write about it for two reasons. Part of the problem is that it’s much more widespread than we talk about—20 percent of children are sexually violated by a family member. And then I decided this would not become another issue I hid from—another example of how we can overcome a lot.

It is said that politicians are either totally corrupt or squeaky clean. You’ve a rare reputation for being fastidious. I’m wondering how you witness corruption in politics.

Actually, I think most members are squeaky clean. Because you have a Duncan Hunter or a Chris Smith then there’s this expectation that they are all on the take. Donald Trump is on the take, using the position and office to benefit personally.

I witness corruption when I hear members say, “I really want to vote for that but I can’t because of what they’ll do to me in my district.” So many times I have seen circumstances where a member is basically bought off for a couple thousand contribution dollars. It’s pathetic.

When I was dealing with the issue of payday lenders and the predatory interest rates they charge—like 400 percent! How you can ever get out from under those circumstances? They prey on people in low-income areas—there were two Congressmen representing low income areas who wouldn’t vote to lower the interest rates because they had gotten money from payday lenders. But most members aren’t subject to that kind of corruption. Of course, we’d all do a much better job if we just went to public financing of elections.

What kind of political leadership do you predict for our children’s generation?

There were a lot of very talented newly elected Millennials in 2018. I’m very optimistic they’ll tackle issues we can’t seem to deal with, like gun violence, gun safety measures, and climate change. I think we have to get rid of the Electoral College. We should limit the length of time that you can run for an office. And we really have to have public financing of campaigns. We have a Supreme Court decision that now gives gay couples the ability to marry, but if you tried to pass that in the House right now you couldn’t.

After you survived Jonestown, life retested you with a series of personal tragedies. Can you describe those?

Everyone focuses on Jonestown because it was so dramatic, but the biggest test of my life was when my husband was killed in an automobile accident. I was pregnant with our second child, a high-risk pregnancy. I had thought
I never would get pregnant again, and I did. Then my husband gets killed! It was the most grotesque nightmare. I couldn’t fathom what was happening to me.

Shaking your fists at the heavens saying, “God, I can’t take this anymore.”

I thought, “Why are you doing this to me? Why am I being tested?” Everyone goes through those kinds of experiences and then something
wonderful happens. You know, there’s always another day. What got me through is the three Fs: family, friends, faith.

Let’s talk about those, starting with family.

I would not have made it through that crisis without family and without friends and without faith. My family has always been there for me. Now both my parents are dead, but they were absolute rocks and I could always count on them. I want to pay it forward and be that for my children as well.

You have lifelong friendships with women that you’ve cherished over the decades, including a group known as “the yoga girls.” What can you teach young women about friendship?

It doesn’t just happen by having a Starbucks or two. It’s like tending a garden. You have to till the soil, pull the weeds. You can’t ignore it. You have to constantly be tending it, watering it, adding fertilizer. That’s true with friendships too.

For me it was important to stay grounded and not forget my roots. That was measured by whether the friends I had before I got into politics were still my friends throughout my life. I’ve friends from long before I was in politics, friends I’ve acquired through trauma, such as the Merry Widows Club, the Yoga Girls. They’re extraordinary sources of support if you are willing to put in the time and effort—the value redeemed is priceless.

I picture your Bay women friends in Congress fist bumping in the halls—Nancy [Pelosi], Anna [Eshoo], Dianne [Feinstein], Kamala [Harris], Barbara [Lee], Zoe [Lofgren]. It must be exciting.

It’s not what you think, actually. I mean we’re all really busy and we’re all supportive of each other, but it’s not like that. I do spend time with Anna. We’ll celebrate her birthday next weekend at our house. Mike Thompson and I are very close. I’m certainly good friends with all the members from Northern California in particular, but everyone is so busy when they’re back in DC that it’s frankly hard to find the time.

I presume the opposite is true, that Trump supporters despise you. Isn’t there a group called Women Who Support Trump?

Oh, I don’t know. I don’t read bots and I don’t read my Twitter account very much. My staff could tell you there are people out there who are not fond of me but that goes with the territory.

What’s the vibe between opposing members on the Intelligence Committee? How do you get along with Devin Nunes, for example?

He’s not a good example because he’s so polarizing and so pugnacious. The more outrageous his comments the more campaign contributions he receives. So he is motivated by a strange set of principles. I have warm relationships with a number of Republican colleagues—not so much on HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] because it’s become a very difficult committee.

But for the MeToo Congress Act that passed I give 50 percent of the credit to my very conservative Republican colleague from Alabama, Bradley Byrne. We worked very closely.

Can you talk about how faith has played a role in your life?

I’m a devout Catholic. I go to Mass every Sunday. I’m a lector at my parish. As a youngster I would go to Mass on Sunday even when my parents didn’t. I was so proud that I had a missal before I was technically old enough to have one. I was just born with this faith. It’s been an extraordinary gift and not everyone has it but I’ve been very lucky.

What about it hooks you so sweetly?

I don’t know. I went to a Catholic girls’ high school by choice, not by parental pressure. It was something I wanted. I contemplated becoming a nun, spent a weekend at the convent. It really fills my soul and my heart. I’m always grateful for that hour I spend every week just contemplating goodness and trying to reflect on the past week and how I could’ve been a better Christian—and [laughs] perhaps looked at some of my opponents differently than I did.

The Catholic Church has been rocked by sex scandals. Have these shaken your faith at all?

I can’t begin to tell you how pained I am by it, but it also speaks to a church that hasn’t kept up with the 20th and 21st centuries. I think priests should be able to marry. I think women should be able to be priests. But my faith is stronger than what a particular man who happens to be a pope says about Catholic dogma. That said, Pope Francis has been a breath of fresh air. He inspired me actually to go spend the night in a homeless shelter as he too did that after becoming pope. I thought, “If the pope can do that I certainly can.” I learned a great deal.

You practice yoga. I’m wondering if you’re equally drawn to its Eastern spiritual philosophy?

I’d like to learn more about Eastern philosophies because I respect all religions. I’m drawn to the Jewish faith. I’m actually one-quarter Jewish, and whenever I go to a synagogue and participate in the service I feel like I’m home as well. I’d like to know more about Buddhism and there’s something to be gleaned from the Muslim faith. Unfortunately, schools do not put as much emphasis on world religions as I think there should be. We would all become better human beings by studying religions.

Do you have a final message for young people, particularly young women aspiring to activism and public service?

Don’t wait for someone to tap you on the shoulder. Don’t wait your turn. You can be extremely effective at any age—really. One reason I wrote the book was to give young women a road map for how to survive anything. There isn’t a straight path to success and happiness. We are tested many times in our lifetime, and you can get over a great deal of angst and pain and frustration by just continuing to move forward. Don’t allow yourself to sit around and wallow.

Any final message for Common Ground readers, many of whom are constituents?

Resilience. My story is about resilience. I think we grow up thinking that life will take a certain path if we just do these three or four things, and yet we get knocked down and we struggle to get up again. In my experience we all have the resilience to overcome whatever trouble comes. Whether it’s in elective office or activism, people do make a difference. I find myself quoting Margaret Mead frequently: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.” A small group of people can do a great deal. Be good. Be kind.

Rob Sidon is publisher and editor-in-chief of Common Ground.

The First (Out of the Closet) Yogi to Run for U.S. President

Born in Houston in 1952, Marianne Williamson was raised in the Judaic tradition of tikkun olam, whose basic tenet is “Repair the world.” With a voracious appetite for spiritual understanding, she studied comparative religion and philosophy. Her discovery of A Course in Miracles, a self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy, led to a successful 35-year counseling and writing career. In 1992, with Oprah Winfrey’s support, her first book, A Return to Love, became the fifth most-sold book in the United States.

A long time spiritual-political activist, Williamson deeply trusts God’s unlimited capacity to solve social problems. In 1983 she created Project Angel Food, a meals-on-wheels service that has since served 11 million homebound people with AIDS. Compelled in part by the sad recognition that government has devolved into little more than a system of legalized bribery, she decided to run for the highest office. Her courageous candidacy has garnered mass attention as she is the first yogi-of-sorts to speak to the political establishment—a watershed moment in the eyes of many, including Common Ground readers who similarly resonate with such plain spiritual philosophy.

We spoke with Marianne for our Women issue to discover that her fundamental values—Take care of the babies, take care of our home—are the core building blocks of her political agenda. In her quest to speak simple truth to power she learned up close that presidential politics is not for the faint of heart. Nevertheless, she perseveres on internationally televised debate stages and rallies. Her legacy, we predict, is that she has forever broken a barrier and thus engaged an often apolitical swath of society. More importantly we predict that she’s paved a new acceptance of such commonsense idealism—something that will inspire a future cadre of awakened political leaders.

Common Ground: Six years ago we spoke and got the scoop about your run for Congress. Now you’re running for president of the United States. What prompted this decision?

Marianne Williamson: I can’t say I know what prompted it, except in a larger sense. Donald Trump’s election changed everything, not just for me but for many people. None of the decisions that any of us made once he was elected came without that reference. Millions of people consciously or unconsciously were asking “How can I help?”

Many in our so-called yoga tribe are elated to witness someone actually espousing their values on a national platform. It had seemed impossible, so congratulations on breaking the barrier. What’s it been like for you in the trenches?

It’s part exhilarating, part brutal. After the second debate I was getting a lot of attention and clearly somebody didn’t like that. Three days after the debate some vicious smears started appearing. That’s been pretty rough. I’ve had a dignified career for the last 35 years. To see myself viciously mischaracterized has been difficult but hey, this is serious business, running for president. I didn’t think it was going to be a walk in the park. At a certain point, you simply cross the Rubicon and you deal with whatever. When people are supporting you, spending their energy and their money and their time, you owe it to them not to indulge yourself emotionally any more than you have to. So yes, there have been some difficult moments—but attitudinally I just throw water on my face, tell myself to stop whining, get over myself, get up, and keep on doing what I’m doing.

Takes courage. Is it your faith that makes you fearless—like being on a mission from God?

Let’s put things in perspective. There are women in this world who, if they were to criticize their government in a fraction of the way I criticize mine, would be put in prison, possibly tortured, possibly killed. We have a very low bar in our culture when talking about courage and fearlessness. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to live in a country where I’m able to run for office, to say whatever I want. Yes, I might be mocked. But in other countries it would be far worse. One of the reasons I’m doing this is because I love freedom. I know that sounds like a cliché but it’s true. I know how
important it is to the world, that there’s a place where we even try to allow people to soar. So no, I don’t think of myself as courageous or brave, I just think of myself as unwilling to be silent at such a time as this.

Like all of us you’re following your spiritual path, but did you hear a voice that said, “Go! Enter the viper pit of presidential politics”?

If you have an internal decision-making process, it’s the same process no matter what the decision. You take in all the data but then your gut, your heart, your God is the decider.

Spiritual audiences are typically apolitical. Why? Do you feel your mission is partly to push people to be externally focused and politically aware?

I am Jewish and Jews are not apolitical. Tikkun olam is a basic tenet of Judaism; it means “to repair the world.” Jews know all too well how politics affects our lives. So I’ve never been comfortable with this cultural spiritual niche that has trended so apolitical. For one thing, it’s not very spiritual. There’s no serious spiritual or religious path that gives anyone a pass on addressing the suffering of other sentient beings. All this “false positivism” stuff isn’t spiritual at all, really. There’s a difference between transcendence and denial.

Hasn’t there been a longstanding schism between marchers and meditators, so to speak—two different camps?

Not for my generation. When I was in college, we read Alan Watts and Ram Dass in the morning and went to Vietnam antiwar protests in the afternoon. There weren’t two separate groups then. The cultural and political and spiritual and sexual fervors of the ’60s and ’70s were all mixed together. It was only after that time that the two camps separated. I grew up at a time when there was a very easy, amicable marriage between what we’d now call the meditators and the marchers. And even today, don’t kid yourself; there were a lot of meditators at that Women’s March on Washington. For me personally, the marriage of the two has always been my sweet spot. I taught A Course in Miracles and I founded peace organizations; I wrote books about spirituality and I founded AIDS organizations. The two never were separate for me. I simply think you have to try to practice what you preach, or what does it all mean?

What was it like growing up Jewish in Houston in the ’50s and ’60s? I imagine a discrimination that taught lifelong lessons…

No. The kind of anti-Semitism my parents’ generation had experienced had pretty much passed by the time I was growing up. I came from a large family and there was a strong Jewish community in Houston, so I didn’t experience anti-Semitism growing up. I knew about it, I heard about it, I was aware of it…but I wasn’t personally affected by it. I knew about World War II and the Holocaust, but most of the stories I heard were things of the past. But then I grew older, and with my name being Marianne Williamson, I would hear people say things around me that I don’t think they would have said if my name had been Schwartz or Steinberg. So yeah, I began to understand things more deeply as I got older.

[laughs] Funny how that works!

No kidding.

Was religion important in your family?

God was certainly important. Not to be questioned. But Judaism is more than a religion—it’s a people. You’re born a Jew, you die a Jew. It’s your ethnic identity. So yes, I would say that my Jewish identity was very important when I was growing up. It’s an essential identity, like being Black or being Latino or being anything else.

Could you briefly explain A Course in Miracles and how you migrated there?

A Course in Miracles is a self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy. It’s not a religion. It refers to itself as a psychological mind training—a self-study course in forgiveness. It’s a psychological training in giving up a fear-based way of looking at the world and replacing it with love.

It’s not difficult, really, but it’s very different. What’s difficult is getting over our resistance to doing it. What’s difficult is giving up the judgmental attack thoughts that dominate so much of our thinking. The consciousness that dominates the world is so full of fear, and the thinking of love is opposite of that. It’s like training your mental muscles to see the world in a different way, to think that everything that’s not love is a call for love, to think that love is real and that everything else is a product of the mind that doesn’t need to stand forever.

Were such views pooh-poohed in politics?

Not if you understand history! The two most powerful political movements in the 20th century were Gandhi and the Indian Independence movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement. Both were based on the philosophy of non-violence as first articulated by Gandhi: that self-purification precedes the most powerful political activism, and love heals political relationships as much as it heals personal ones.

What kind of insults have you borne, specifically?

I don’t think the point is what kind of insults I have borne. The point is that politics can be a dirty business. It’s not about me. Politics is rough. I didn’t go into it thinking it was going to be a walk in the park and it hasn’t been, but none of that is important. “She’s a crystal lady… she’s woo-woo… she’s anti-science… she’s a lightweight thinker.” Give me a break.

What’s important is what I’m saying to the American people. What’s important is that we have lost a sense of public morality. What’s important is that our public policy is dangerously divergent from the goodness in our hearts. What’s important is that one percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, leaving millions and millions of people in daily, chronic economic anxiety. What’s important is that millions of American children live with chronic trauma. What’s important is that our national security agenda is based more on short-term profits for defense contractors than on a plan for a peaceful planet. What’s important is that we have 12 years to reverse climate change. What’s important is that we must address racial healing at a deeper level.

What’s important is not what kinds of insults have been aimed at me. That is profoundly unimportant in the larger sense of things.

In the larger metaphysical picture how do you frame the Trump phenomenon?

Trump didn’t create our biggest problems; Trump was created by our biggest problems. Once we started turning the businessman into a god, it was probably inevitable that the most perverted, distorted image of one would appear among us.

For decades, we’ve allowed an amoral economic system to take precedence over a proactive demand for democracy and humanitarian principles. So why should we be surprised that the exact embodiment of such a worldview would emerge?

If you don’t tend to your marriage you have no good reason to be shocked if your spouse leaves you. If you don’t tend to your health, you have no reason to be shocked later if you get diagnosed with an illness. If you don’t tend to your business, you have no reason to be shocked if the business goes under. We have not tended to our democracy. We have not proactively cultivated democracy—not to even mention ethics and goodness and love and mercy and compassion—at the center of our political functioning and our collective behavior. We thought, what exactly, that those things are a done deal and would drive themselves? That was very naïve of us. And Trump has certainly been an awakening.

Every time somebody says “Oh, I’m not political…” I say, “Everything is political.” If you say, “I’m not political” and you didn’t vote because you’re “not political”— you sure did vote. You voted for the people who are absolutely thrilled that you didn’t vote. If you’re not proactively casting the light, then you are partly responsible for the darkness. If you don’t wake up in the morning and dedicate your life to love and service, then that same energy will be dedicated to neurosis and pathology. The mental energy is going to go somewhere. That’s true in our personal lives and it’s true in
our collective experience.

With all the dirty backbiting, how can you blame a sensitive spiritual aspirant from running far away?

Oh, please. Let’s not use sensitivity or spirituality to justify laziness, brand protection, and lack of courage.

I’m dumbfounded at how our society not only condones but actually rewards narcissistic behavior.

We are in a de-evolutionary period. We’ve been devolving in some of the ways you just described. But a lot of people are now looking around saying “Oh, my God, what have we wrought?” That’s a good thing. There’s a healthy horror that people are feeling today. We have to face that horror to find the inspiration to change the conditions that produced it.

In our bubble there’s evidence to suggest that we are evolving at light-speed. What might precipitate a mass wake up?

If Trump being president doesn’t wake you up, then you took some wicked sleeping pill.

I’m sensitive to the bubble we inhabit and try to be especially open-minded with everybody, including Trump supporters. But when leaders such as Brazilian president Bolsonaro direct their unconsciousness on Mother Earth, my heart breaks. The line is crossed.

Well, I have some bad news for you. If you think things are bad now, give this president a second term. The prospects are chilling.

Let’s use the environment to start talking specifically about some of the platforms of a would-be President Williamson.

We need a World War II level mass mobilization to reverse climate change. We have to do that, because the alternative is nothing short of existentially threatening. This isn’t a left versus right issue; it’s a survival versus mass extinction issue. We’re talking here the prospect of social collapse such as we have not seen in the modern era. Everything from mass starvation and food shortages to economic crises, huge swaths of land uninhabitable because of the heat, inability to grow food, and millions and millions of global climate refugees. We. Must. Not. Let. This. Happen.

We need to shift from a dirty economy to a clean economy, sequester carbon, reforest, develop alternative sustainable systems of energy and transportation, deal with animal factory farming. Pass a Green New Deal. All of those things are critically urgent. They are the only path to a survivable future. It goes so far beyond something like just rejoining the Paris Accords, which of course we need to do. It goes beyond making sure a world class environmental scientist is the head of the EPA, which of course we need to do. We need to enroll the American people. This is the reason I believe someone like myself should be president—because the job entails enrolling more than 300 million people in an effort that we cannot accomplish if we are opposed to one another.

We didn’t fight World War II as Democrats or Republicans; we fought it as Americans. Everybody understood who the enemy was, and it wasn’t each other. We have a common enemy here: an ever- accelerating climate crisis. We can deal with this. We can lead the world in dealing with this. But we need a shift in our collective consciousness to do it.

Could you describe what your proposal is for a Department of Peace?

Right now we spend 760 billion dollars or more on our military budget. We spend 40 billion dollars on our State Department. The State Department’s mission is diplomacy, development, and mediation. Within the State Department budget there’s 17 billion that goes to USAID (United States Agency for International Development)—for long-term development and humanitarian assistance.

Also, within that 40 billion, less than one billion is spent on peace-building agencies. Peace-building is a very interesting concept because peace-building skills are every bit as sophisticated and represent every bit as much expertise and courage as do military skills.

There are four factors which when statistically present indicate there will be a greater presence of peace and a diminished incidence of conflict. Those our things are 1) expanded economic opportunities for women, 2) expanded educational opportunities for children, 3) reduced violence against women, and 4) the amelioration of unnecessary human suffering. Those things could be likened to preventative medicine within the body politic.

Yet right now our national security agenda is like an old allopathic model of healing the body. You don’t cultivate health, you just wait till symptoms arise and then you seek external remedies to eradicate or suppress the symptoms. We’ve moved past that in how we look at the body and we should also look past that in how we see society. Sickness is the absence of health; health isn’t the absence of sickness. And war is the absence of peace; peace isn’t the absence of war. We need an integrative politics now, to best understand how we should move forward.

Our national security agenda is based primarily on endless preparation for war, which has nothing to do with a proactive agenda for peace. You can’t just back yourself up into peace. My plan for a Department of Peace means bolstering the already existing peacebuilding efforts and agencies within the government, to the point where they are equal partners with the military. And just like we have war games, if I am president we will also have peace games. We will declare peace, domestically and internationally. That is one of the pillars of the campaign. And just like we have a military academy we will have a peace academy, where people actually graduate from a four-year curriculum in peace studies.

This being our Women issue, how does your being a woman bear on your political messaging?

Simple. Take care of the babies, take care of our home. Take care of the babies, take care of our home. Take care of the babies, take care of our home.

In your platform you propose a Department of Children and Youth.

Our country ranks at or near the bottom on almost every indicator regarding governmental policies toward children. Far too many children fall through the cracks; 13 million are hungry, and millions go to school in classrooms that don’t even have adequate supplies to teach a child to read. When children cannot read by the age of eight their chances of high school graduation are drastically diminished and their chances of incarceration are increased. In the richest country in the world, withholding education from a child is a passive form of oppression. It’s absurd the way we base
our educational funding on property taxes! That means that if a child comes from a well-to-do neighborhood, then his or her chances of a very fine public school education are excellent. But if not? Then not.

Millions of our children are traumatized by violence in their homes, their neighborhoods, and their schools. Millions live with chronic trauma and PTSD rivaling that of war veterans. And all of that must change. We need a massive realignment of investment in the direction of our children. I want a US Department of Children and Youth to co-ordinate all programs involving children, providing everything from community wraparound services to trauma-informed education to nutritional services to mindfulness in the schools. Every school in America should be a palace of learning, culture, and the arts. We should have a whole-student approach to education, aimed at preparing students not only for the skills and jobs of the 21st century but also for 21st century democracy. Children deserve to thrive, and we’re responsible for helping them do that.

As a woman how did you experience the Hillary Clinton candidacy?

I was a Bernie supporter, not because I had anything against Hillary but just because my politics were more like Bernie’s. After the primaries were over I certainly switched over and supported her. I think people are having a delayed reaction to the misogyny in that campaign. I remember watching the debate where Trump walked so menacingly behind Hillary and I remember remarking to someone, “That’s violence against women right there!” I still can hardly believe that any woman could have watched that and not recognized the subtle violence for what it was.

How do you view some of the other female Democratic candidates? We can name them, starting with Tulsi Gabbard.

I love Tulsi. I’ve gotten to know her a bit. She’s great. Kirsten Gillibrand was also very nice to me when she was on the campaign. And I adore Elizabeth Warren.

Amy Klobuchar?

I don’t know Amy or Kamala [Harris].

There’s optimism in our circles about Senator Warren.

I love Elizabeth. She’s great.

Let’s talk about some of the other platforms, like your reparations plan for example.

Whether you’re a country or an individual, you can’t have the future you want if you’re not willing to clean up the past. Racism is America’s original character defect, and both reparations for slavery and some kind of reparations for Native American justice are necessary if we’re to have the future we wish. We need a season of moral repair, and that will not be accomplished with just an economic policy here or a climate policy there. We need a much more fundamental pattern disruption, a more integrative politics that speaks to many levels of our dysfunction. That’s why reparations are different from simply race-based policies.

Race-based policies can be a continuation of the same paternalism that got us here. “I messed with you and now I’m going tell you how I’m going to fix it.” Reparations are more than that; they carry moral force. They go beyond economic restitution. They carry an inherent mea culpa—an acknowledgement of a wrong that has been done, a debt that is owed, and the willingness on the part of a people to pay it. That accomplishes more than just economic restitution; it accomplishes a psychological, emotional, and spiritual change as well.

I know Oprah Winfrey is a big Marianne Williamson fan. What role has she played in your life?

Oprah was very generous to me in the beginning of my career and I’ll always be extremely grateful to her.

If you don’t become president of the United States what do you hope will be the legacy of your candidacy? What would you have achieved?

We’re having conversations no one else is having, about children and race and peace and more. A presidential campaign is a field of energy like no other, and many people are hearing us. The more people share in a conversation, the more people share an idea, the stronger it becomes. So whether the American people wish to turn those ideas into public policy remains to be seen, but as long as I’m running then they have the option. As long as my heart leads me to share these ideas, as long as people keep showing up to hear me and support the campaign, then I’m here.

Besides becoming president, what’s your greatest personal, spiritual aspiration?

I just pray to become the woman that I’m capable of being—and to be happy. Those are actually the same thing of course. I’m too old to think that circumstances determine our happiness, so I’m past dreaming that this or that circumstance would make too much difference.

How do you define consciousness and how does this consciousness become the operating system in your life?

The consciousness that matters most is love. In fact, it’s the only Real consciousness. Everything else is maya—illusion. I struggle just like everyone else with the constant temptation to perceive without love. I assure you: A presidential campaign gives you plenty of opportunity, plenty of temptation to perceive without love! It calls for a lot of psychological and emotional discipline not to be triggered by pretty much everything that goes on.

Do you still think about the goal of becoming enlightened?

I think that’s what we’re doing here on this earth. It’s all that’s going on.

What are some of your great joys?

My great joys have been and are love.

What particularly ticks you off?

The things that cause me outrage and heartbreak are the same things that cause everyone else outrage and heartbreak. How are we letting children starve? What are we doing to the earth? How do we cast each other out of our hearts so easily?

What do you make of Trump’s conversation with the Ukrainian president? Has his Teflon run sheer with this one?

I’ve made a statement in support of the impeachment inquiry. It gives me no joy to note the danger that he poses to our democracy.

Who’ve been some of the big heroes?

My father. And my mother. Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhi. Jefferson, Lincoln. Susan B. Anthony.

Gloria Steinem?

I don’t know if I’d call her a hero. But I greatly admire her. She’s been a role model to me, that’s for sure.

What women do you consider exemplary in the area of love?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Might you share a message to younger readers, particularly young women?

I feel such anguish for young women who haven’t had their babies yet, who worry about the drinking water and the condition of the soil, the future of the earth, the sale of pesticides. I understand their fear and I have great respect for those who are awake, participating in the revolutionary impulse that will turn all this around.

Can you share a final message to Common Ground readers, many of whom are longstanding fans?

There are so many more of us who love than who hate in this country, but the lovers have got to step up now. We need the visionaries, the lovers, the artists, the yogis, the scientists, the teachers, the healers to enter the political fray now. We can’t just stand on the sidelines. It’s time. Rehearsal is over.

I’m very grateful to all the people supporting my campaign—and to those who are considering supporting it. That support is everything. Money is unfortunately everything in a political campaign because it pays for the infrastructure without which it can’t happen. Money in politics is the cancer underlying all the cancers in our country today, and public funding for federal campaigns is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. Until that happens though, financial support is essential.

There are a lot of good people running. I don’t think of myself as running against anyone—I’m running with the others. But if people look at Marianne2020.com, hear me speak, and come to believe that the things I’m saying are the things that need to be said, I hope they’ll step up and join us. To those who think the things I’m proposing need to be done—I hope you will shout it from the mountaintops and do what you can to take this all the way. This is a critical moment in our country’s history, and we need to rise to the occasion. There is an old rabbinical saying that says volumes: “You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you permitted to abandon it.” That was said ages ago, but it was said for us.

Rob Sidon is publisher and editor-in-chief of Common Ground.

Ram Dass is a longtime friend of Common Ground. We learned that his health is failing and in recent days he has come very close to leaving the body. We begged his closest aides to let us connect with him for one short final conversation—and our wish was granted.

Ram Dass is the subject of a terrific new documentary, Becoming Nobody, that will premiere in September. Jamie Catto directed and co-produced, along with Raghu Mitchell.

Common Ground: You could leave the body any day. What does this feel like, this waiting game?

Ram Dass: I am not waiting or looking forward or back—I am simply inhabiting each moment in its fullness. The concept of Be Here Now that I have been speaking about in different ways over these last many years turns out to be the most relevant game in town, at any age.

Do you ever feel scared or apprehensive?

I feel in concert with Ramakrishna, who when he was initiated into the non-dual state shouted out, “I want to worship the Mother!” He was interested only in the Divine dance of two—the essence of the Bhakti path. So I am not scared but I am working on my preference of being in the Bhakti relationship.

Are you still learning, or just applying what you’ve already learned?

Of course every day is part of the curriculum. Every encounter with humans or nature—every thought that takes one away from the truth—is a learning experience and it goes on through the transition to the next incarnation.

How is your relationship with Maharaji (Neem Karoli Baba) felt at this stage?

He is my constant companion. He is living proof of our potential to tell the truth and love everyone, which is what he told me to do when we were in India together. This teaching continues to reveal itself more and more to me each day.

I attended the world preview of Becoming Nobody. Terrific. Can you explain the title? How is this documentary different from the many that preceded it?

Everyone wants to be a somebody in order to keep their identities and roles safe and sound. We have so many protective shells, so many defensive patterns; when we drop all of that we can begin to move from ego to soul—and then eventually all of our motives begin to come from a place of compassion where we say, “What can I do for others?” not, “What do I want? What do I need?”

How would you characterize your remaining attachments to this earthly plane?

My attachments are to all the loving people who I see day to day, either in person or virtually. Maharaji said, “Love goes two ways—I am attached to you as you are attached to me.”

After the publication of Be Here Now you were catapulted into fame as a spiritual teacher. What has been the general arc of your spiritual maturation as a teacher over the past 50 years?

As my disembodied friend Emmanuel said to me once, “Ram Dass, don’t you see that life is a curriculum? Why don’t you get on with the program?” And the arc has always been through my dayto-day relationship with my guru.

On the Do-Be-Do spectrum, you historically advocated for BE. Can you reflect on the Do-Be paradigm from your current vantage point?

Whenever we are a doer then we are living from separateness—we can’t make much of a dent in our social action if we are using only our minds to change things. Our hearts need to be open and more kind, loving, and compassionate. Then we can live on a plane of consciousness that is based in being love, being truth—radiating from our core.

You were the earliest pioneer of the psychedelic movement, which has blossomed many times over since you and Tim Leary were fired from Harvard. What are your reflections about the contemporary surge of psychedelic acceptance today? What advice might you provide to spiritual aspirants, especially young people, experimenting with entheogens along the Path?

I don’t think my view has changed. Maybe Maharaji changed things a little for me. He said the psychedelics can take you into the room with Christ for a short period of time and then you have to leave. And I found that Maharaji takes you into that room eternally.

“What a long strange trip it’s been…” That Grateful Dead lyric might just sum it up. Any parting reflections on the long strange trip?

The trip has been rich and full of both sweet and bittersweet moments but has always been full of grace. And through it all the embracing of fellow travelers on the path—that connection with sat-sang—has been and remains to this day a milestone for sharing our deepest hearts in love.

My deepest pranams to you, fellow voyager. This is weepy, but please share a final message to Common Ground readers, many whom have followed you for the distance.

“Loving awareness” is a wonderful mantra to repeat and it allows you to move your perspective from ego/mind to spiritual heart/soul in the center of your chest. “I am loving awareness…I am loving awareness…I am loving awareness…”

Safe journey, dear friend.

Ram Ram.

Rob Sidon is publisher and editor-in-chief of
Common Ground.

Michael Pollan loves the written word. He worked as an editor at Harper’s Magazine while writing his first book, Second Nature, on nights and weekends. While writing his second book, A Place of My Own, he took the plunge to become a full-time writer. His big successes came with Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and In Defense of Food, which all became bestsellers and established him as a leading voice in the natural foods movement. The winner of numerous writing awards, Pollan is a chaired professor of journalism at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley.

In 2018, with his latest work, the well-researched How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, he again quickly captured the international spotlight—this time by urging a medical and cultural reassessment of psychedelics, which had been categorically vilified and criminalized as part of the government’s war on drugs.

Pollan grew up Jewish but took little to no interest in spirituality, preferring to appreciate life from an empirical scientific perspective. Pollan is a busy man who lives in the Bay Area, where we caught up with him to discuss a myriad of topics ranging from the art of teaching journalism to how his recent psychedelic experiences helped him transcend his limited ego and find deeper connection. We discussed how psychedelics changed his own mind, notably by improving his capacity to stay present during his father’s passing—as well as broader mysteries such as “What is the nature of consciousness?”

Common Ground: Change Your Mind has gotten such a positive reception, taking you from being a natural foods superstar to a superstar in the psychedelic movement. How has it affected you personally?

Michael Pollan: It’s been a huge surprise to me—that the general reader was ready for a book on psychedelics. There had not been one, or not in a long time. Most books on psychedelics are written for people in the community by people in the community. I tend to write as Everyman and as an outsider entering into a subculture rather than as a member of that culture. I was surprised the book was embraced by as many people as it was, both inside and outside that culture.

Switching from being the food guy to the psychedelic guy has been challenging in some ways. Being the food guy’s easier. The questions people ask are not nearly as searching or personal or poignant. People ask “Should I eat this? Is gluten evil? Is caffeine evil?” Easy questions to answer. The psychedelic guy gets quickly in touch with the depth of human suffering around mental illness. I have had hundreds of requests asking if I can make a referral. People will tell me about their suicidal son or their alcoholic father. I realize the book has fanned the flames of hope for a lot of people but I can’t deliver on it. I can’t make referrals and never do. It’s too dangerous for everybody involved because these guides are underground. I have learned something about where the public is, which is lonely, disconnected, addicted, depressed, anxious. It’s been moving to realize the depth of the problem.

What is breaking open in the zeitgeist?

The response to the book has helped me understand that we need help. The tools mental health care has are inadequate. The big surprise has been to see how much work is needed to help people with mental suffering. If [these psychedelic medicines] can realize the promise they’ve exhibited in early trials, it’s going to be a huge deal. It’s not a foregone conclusion but these could just be the kinds of tools many people are looking for. That’s one thing.

Also the drug war is losing steam. It’s becoming widely recognized that it’s been a failure resulting in throwing lots of people, especially people of color, in jail for little reason. The government doesn’t need it. I’ve always thought the drug war was about how the government accrues power. Once you had a war on terror post-9/11, you didn’t need drugs for excuses to curb civil liberties and assert government power. We’re seeing drug problems apart from illicit drugs. The opiate epidemic was essentially started by pharmaceutical companies, not by El Chapo or anybody like that. Our understanding of drugs is shifting. People are willing to look at them one by one and not lump them together as this great evil.

In fact people get in trouble on legal drugs and sometimes thrive on illegal drugs. In the zeitgeist we’ve decriminalized or legalized marijuana recreationally in ten states and many more for medical. That has changed the image of all illicit drugs.

A collective shift in consciousness?

People are looking for a change in consciousness. You have Boomers who first experimented with psychedelics now reaching a second chapter where they’ve become relevant again. Boomers are getting older, facing cancer diagnoses and their own mortality. With their kids out of the house you’re seeing Boomers revisiting psychedelics and you’re seeing Millennials discovering them for the first time.

Then there’s the hole in the doughnut of parents with kids at home. I find them most resistant to anything positive I have to say about psychedelics—because it’s complicated. There are always some mothers in the room whose ears are closed whom I can feel are clenching. They can’t listen—until I talk about the risks and the problems—and there are real problems attached to psychedelics.

Aside from that group I’ve found an openness on the part of people in their 80s who are curious and have approached me about access to psilocybin or underground guiding. Even my mother-in-law, who’s 92, inquired. But I make no referrals and supply no medicine.

More than 50 years ago Timothy Leary was the Pied Piper goading the culture to turn on. He’s been criticized for going too far, too fast. Do you fear being compared to Leary for these reasons?

No. I think you’re the first person to compare me to Timothy Leary. I have been criticized for being too positive in my portrayal of psychedelics. Of course if you’ve had the experiences you’re bound to betray some exuberance and excitement about the potential. I’ve tried to temper that by describing terrifying trips and talking about the real psychological risks. People do get into trouble! I have never suggested they’re for everybody or to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” I’ve also never provided medicines. Those are important distinctions. I may have the cultural ear on the subject, as he did, but have the advantage of learning from his mistakes, which were considerable.

He made a contribution, without question. He created a world safe for this new generation of research and for this renaissance by turning on so many people. He also contributed to the backlash. I’m hoping not to do that by taking pains not to say the kinds of things that antagonize people.

Let’s talk about risks. My take is—“What goes up must come down.” How do you caution people?

I was a very reluctant psychonaut. As a science journalist I felt it was incumbenton me to study the risks. A lot of people told me about the benefits—but what were the risks? I looked closely and was surprised to find that the physiological risks were remarkably slight. These are essentially not toxic substances. I’m talking about the classic psychedelics, DMT, LSD, psilocybin. They’re also non-addictive. They’re not really drugs of abuse in that they’re not habit-forming. In the case of cocaine or heroin the lab animals will self-administer with the lever contraption until they die or are addicted. In the case of LSD they’ll do it once and never again—not habit-forming—which is a significant worry about a drug.

The problems are more practical and psychological. The practical problem is that people sometimes do stupid things. Their judgment is disabled and their physical ability is sometimes disabled. People walk into traffic and fall off buildings. That can happen, especially in an unsupervised setting. And then psychologically—Johns Hopkins did a bad trip survey of thousands of people about their most challenging experience and about eight percent of them sought psychiatric help over the course of the next year. That suggests people had gotten into some serious psychological trouble, and that’s worth being aware of. Again, these are not supervised trips and that does change things.

There are a certain number of people who have psychotic breaks on this. They may have been schizophrenic but not yet manifested and the drugs tipped them over. It’s worth saying that marijuana can do that too, and alcohol. A parental divorce can do it. A lot of trauma can initiate schizophrenia in people who are genetically inclined.

It’s rare but some people experience recurrent imagery long after they’ve taken the psychedelic, the acid flashback. Basically people at risk for serious mental illness should stay away but those risks can be mitigated by doing psychedelics in a guided situation where someone has checked you out medically to make sure you’re sturdy enough to have the experience. But compared to other drugs I think the risks are remarkably slight, especially when you consider that there is no LD50 or lethal dose for LSD, yet the LD50 for Tylenol is a pretty small number of pills.

As a reputable journalist was it not legally self-incriminating to go out on a limb about your experiences?

Yes insofar as I am confessing to violating federal and state drug laws, but no in that it’s not a usable confession. I did have the book carefully lawyered, but honestly I was more concerned about protecting the guides I was profiling than in protecting myself. I was confident I hadn’t gotten myself into any kind of trouble. The risk to my reputation was probably greater but I teach at Harvard and Berkeley and haven’t gotten any shit from either institution—yet. [laughs] Knock on wood.

You were never drawn to the spiritual quest. Yet now in the psychedelic conversation you find yourself in the center of questions such as “What is consciousness?” What role did family religion play in your upbringing?

[laughs] Next to none! I was bar mitzvah’d against my will and that was the most religious thing I ever did. It was more of a marketing opportunity for my dad’s law firm and for my parents, who wanted to have a big party. I felt it was completely hypocritical. I was not a believer then and I’m not now. My point of view was that the laws of nature could explain everything and any claims to the contrary struck me as implausible. I tended to be a materialist though I have come to see the value of Jewish ritual and holidays.

A good grizzled empirical journalist?

[Laughs] Exactly! But my psychedelic experience shook that. And it wasn’t just my experience. I started out on this journey interviewing cancer patients, many of them terminal, who’d had profound, transformative spiritual experiences on psilocybin in drug trials at NYU and Hopkins. My talking to them raised all sorts of questions. Was what they were seeing true? Was their insight into the nature of ultimate reality something that could be confirmed? Was it plausible? That made me curious to try it. I realized I’d been a long time through life not thinking about it and that it was something to explore, even if I was skeptical. I thought I would learn something and maybe have a spiritual experience. Was that even possible? Because I don’t think I’d ever had one—except the warmth and good feeling of a shared meal or something, which I have described in spiritual terms.

I had the conception that spiritual experience was equivalent to a supernatural experience—that to believe in a spiritual realm was to believe in a world beyond the world that we can prove with our science and our senses. I was skeptical. I thought the opposite of the word material was supernatural.

What did your experiences reveal?

During my experiences that I describe in the book (and that I’ve thought about since as it’s become more vivid to me) is that spiritual experience is a powerful self-experience of connection. It’s a lowering of the walls that separate us from other people and nature. It’s an escape from the subject-object duality. We tend to think of ourselves as the only perceiving subjects, either us individually or us as a species. Everything else becomes an object. Of course when you believe that way it comes with the feeling that there’s nothing stopping you from doing what you do to the things you objectify—which is exploit them in one way or another—and not honor their own subjectivity or the fact that they have interests and agency and sovereignty.

What was so powerful to me was that as I experienced the dissolution of my go I felt a deeper connection to the people I was thinking about. And this deeper connection was particularly strong with regard to nature, which suddenly was just as conscious as I. So I came to understand that what stands between us and spiritual experience is the ego that builds walls and objectifies. What a wonderful thing that psychedelics could give a glimpse of a postegoic consciousness! It’s scary to lose your ego, obviously. But if you feel safe and willing to take the leap there are incredible treasures that lie on the other side.

Yay! And there’s a neuroscientific explanation about how the mind becomes quiescent with psychedelics.

Yes, but it’s important to preface that we don’t really know very much about he mind or how it works. We have some clues but anything I tell you will probably look very different in ten years or five years. Or maybe next week! But a very interesting thing happens to the brain on psychedelics, at least by the measure of our imaging technologies, MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] and MEG [magnetoencephalography]. There is a part of the brain that is very closely identified with the self or the ego called the default mode network, and it goes quiet, gets quiescent as you said, with psychedelics.

The default mode network is a part of the brain that involves several tightly linked structures including the prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the limbic systems that are involved with memory and emotion. It’s a big communications hub in the brain that is involved with such things as self-reflection, time travel (which is very important to having a sense of self, being able to imagine yourself in the future or conjure memories from the past), theory of mind (the ability to put yourself in the shoes of others and impute consciousness to other beings, which is central to empathy and moral philosophy and things like that).

This is also where we go to worry and obsess and it’s where our mind goes when it’s wandering and not engaged by a task, or not engaged by the outside world. So it’s not an entirely happy place as it can get very self-reflexive. There’s evidence that depression is the result of an overactive default mode network, but psychedelics turns it off, or almost. When that happens some interesting things happen.

They’ve correlated the drop-off in blood flow and activity to the default mode network to a perception of ego dissolution. In other words if you’re feeling ego dissolution that’s how it looks in the MRI machine—these areas of the brain going quiet. So that’s one kind of proof that this is the home address of the ego to the extent that it has one.

They’ve done such tests on meditators.

When they scan the brains of very well experienced meditators, people with 10,000 hours of meditation, they put them in an MRI and they too have a dramatic drop-off in default mode network activity. I’ll bet if you could measure other experiences that provide a sense of flow or a strong connection with others or nature that you’d see something very similar. I think it’s interesting that the loss of self, which of course is a goal of meditation, has these benefits.

The other thing that happens when the default mode network goes offline is that interesting things happen in other parts of the brain. Since it is the communications hub lots of signals pass through it. When it goes offline, parts of the brain that don’t ordinarily communicate with one another begin to. They strike up what’s called “cross talk.” So you will get a situation where the visual cortex is speaking directly to your memory or your emotion centers. You’ll start seeing things that you’re wishing or fearing.

Isn’t there a name for that?

Hallucination.

What is synesthesia?

Synesthesia is the cross-firing of different senses, so you can suddenly see a musical note or smell a note, or hear the sound of a certain smell. That too may be a result of taking the default mode network offline and letting networks involved with visual perception talk to networks involved with audio perception. I had a very strong experience of sound creating a landscape where every note represented a thing, a palpable thing in that landscape. One of the more interesting phenomena of psychedelic experience is synesthesia. Some people have it naturally but most of us don’t. And psychedelics kind of reliably will do that.

With psychedelics it seems one can hack “into the Garden” so to speak. But eventually the effects wear off and one is bounced out. We can’t live on psychedelics to maintain that state.

After I had my most profound psychedelic experience, the one I describe in the book where I experienced the dissolution of my ego and the sense of complete merging with a piece of music, in the integration after I asked my guide, who I call Mary, “So I’ve had this big experience. I realize the ego is not the be all and end all, that you survive the death of your ego and it can be quite wonderful, but what do I do with that? What good is it? My ego is back in uniform, on patrol, up to its old tricks.” And she said, “You’ve had a taste of something and that something is quite profound and you can cultivate it.” And I said, “How?” And she said, “Through meditation.” For many people meditation is the way that you convert whatever the fruits of psychedelic experience are into an everyday practice, because you’re right, you can’t take psychedelics every day. Nobody would want to. It would be counterproductive.

But it’s no accident that all of the important American Buddhists of the Baby Boomer generation who brought Buddhism to America such as Jack Kornfield, Joan Halifax, Jon KabatZinn, all had important psychedelic experiences which they will talk about now. Their thinking was “How do you bring this into your life?”

My experience was that the psychedelic experience made me a better meditator. I had a sense of the destination I was trying to get to. It’s always easier to get back to a place than to get there for the first time. So I found it very useful to the extent that I am cultivating that post-egoic vision—mostly not successfully. But that’s the place where I work on that stuff.

[Laughs] So you’ve evolved from the grizzled empiricist to a New Age spiritual dude?

[Laughs] No, I wouldn’t go that far because my understanding of spirituality is pretty secular. It doesn’t require any kind of supernatural belief or faith. I’ve met so many people in this community who are convinced that there is a transpersonal dimension to consciousness. I get where that comes from and you certainly have that feeling on psychedelics, but I’m loathe to assert that the kind of insights you have on psychedelics about ultimate reality are necessarily true. They might be. Maybe we should take them seriously but I’m not sure quite how seriously to take them.

My understanding of spirituality is pretty consistent with Western psychology—that connection is really the key. And connection happens when you let down your guard, which is to say when you take your ego offline to the extent you can shrink it. And many things do this. The experience of “awe” has that effect too. You can understand this strictly in psychological terms without having to use spiritual vocabulary. I think the spiritual vocabulary is good at suggesting just how special and meaningful those moments are, or “sacred,” as spiritual people say.

Subsequently have you been drawn to spiritual philosophy or dipped into the texts?

When I was writing the book I did. I got interested in Buddhist and Hindu thinking about the mind, which is a pretty coherent systemic examination of consciousness. It’s as good as anything we’ve come up with. So I did look at that, usually in secondary sources. I was curious to read about consciousness. Where does it come from? How is it generated? Is it generated? Might it lie outside?

The wisdom of the sages is that everything is consciousness and ego separates us from That.

And that mind precedes matter, too. I mean we assume it’s the other way around. That’s the flip. The flip is seeing that “Oh my God, these are all manifestations of mind—all this material world stuff.” So for me to have gone from thinking that was ridiculous to having an open mind is to have made an awful long journey. But I’m not all the way there yet. I’m still chewing on it. I also wonder if there are ways to know this for sure.

You could trust. Or have a near-death experience.

Not eager for that. I’m still enamored of the scientific method of testing propositions, and I don’t know how you test this one.

I’ve long been spiritually curious. It’s been long path of identifying and confronting my thoughts, mind, ego—never easy.

It’s a challenging path because the landmarks along the way can be confusing and maybe the method that works for living in the material world doesn’t work in that world. I’m a very novice explorer of these territories, having only had these brief glimpses.

I think spiritual people are happy to share. It’s like “Yay, come on board.”

[Laughs] Oh, I know, people are very welcoming! I haven’t gotten the reaction of “Oh, newbie.” That’s also been true with people with a lot more psychedelic experience.

What is your opinion about microdosing, which has become very popular? I see it as a kind of crutch for keeping the lights on and for staying in the zone.

I don’t know that microdosing has any particular spiritual implication. It doesn’t seem to be how people are using it. They’re using it for healing and to get a little productivity boost at work, neither of which sound like particularly spiritual endeavors. I didn’t write much about microdosing because we don’t know very much about microdosing. We have the anecdotal reports now of several thousand people that Jim Fadiman has collected and it’s a very interesting data set. But it’s uncontrolled and there have been few if any controlled trials of microdosing to indicate whether something real is happening or whether this is a placebo effect. Not to discount the very powerful placebo effect!

It wouldn’t be surprising that a psychedelic, even in a small dose, would prepare the mind for some significant change, because of what psychedelics represent to us. But rigorously controlled double-blind trials might ruin this
very good placebo. I think the jury is out but without doubt there are people who find it useful. But it’s not about shrinking the ego. It’s about a kind of brain vitamin. I have talked to people who feel it’s helped with their depression or anxiety and others who feel it’s helped with their creativity.

You seem to be a genuinely happy person. Is that a fair assessment?

I think you’re born with a certain temperament. I am a glass half-full kind of guy. I know because I’m married to someone who’s otherwise. If you’re in long-term relationship you tend to push each other to your corners of personality. It’s the luck of the draw. I don’t see myself as having had an outrageously happy childhood or anything, but I generally have a positive outlook. I keep telling people, “Don’t worry, Trump won’t even be on the ballot in 2020.” I’m starting to realize I’m going to be wrong. I warn people not to take my political prognostication with too much seriousness.

Where did you grow up? What did your daddy do and that kind of stuff?

I grew up in the suburbs of New York, first on the South Shore of Long Island, then on the North Shore. We moved when I was six. Both were suburbs. One was a lower-middle-class tract house. Then when my parents were doing a little better we moved into a prettier, leafier suburb called Woodbury with curving roads rather than a grid. I went to public school and was very attracted to nature. I spent a lot of time in the woods and had a vegetable garden when I was eight. I always liked to grow food. I didn’t call it a garden. I called it a farm because it was a going concern. When I could grow a couple strawberries I put them in a Dixie cup and sold them to my mom.

It wasn’t all sweetness and light. My dad was an alcoholic. He’s dead now so I can say that. Watching him get sober, which didn’t happen until he was in his 40s, was an amazing lesson in the power of self-transformation. He just did it. I saw him reinvent himself several times. That was a great model to me—that you can hit bottom and rebuild your life. He also reinvented himself professionally. He was a lawyer and then a corporate guy. He had a small business investment company and then became a teacher. Then he became a writer and then a consultant. He ended up having a powerful impact on many people as their consultant. He became a kind of guru to a lot of people. I still run into people who say, “Your dad changed my life.” So transformation, which obviously is the title of this book, is a subject very dear to me. That’s been part of my attraction to gardening—watching transformation up close.

Mom?

My mom was a very creative person and a writer. She’s still alive. She was training to become a teacher when I was a teenager. She had four kids. I was the oldest. She wanted to go back to work so she got a degree so she could teach. But there were no jobs so she ended up working at New York magazine. First she got a job as a secretary and then became the editor of Best Bets, which was a very popular shopping column. She’s since written cookbooks and a shopping guide to New York. She was the more literary of the two, the big reader. My dad was not a big reader except for thrillers. She went to Bennington College, where I also went, and was a literature major. We shared that love of books.

Your father died recently. How did that play out for you?

He died in January of 2018. He’d been sick for a while with cancer. First he had esophageal cancer, which he actually beat. Then he had lung cancer. He’d been a smoker for a long time. What can I say? It was horrible. One of the reasons I wrote this book, I realized in retrospect, was because I was very curious about death and how one processes the prospect of dying. I started this quest on psychedelics talking to people who had cancer diagnoses. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to them was because I really couldn’t talk to my dad about this. He processed his diagnosis very internally, by often putting it out of his mind entirely. Having a conversation about death or mortality was not something he wanted to do or was capable of doing.

So here was this cohort of people, these patients who had had this psychedelic experience that left them dying to talk about it. They were so engaged by what they’d seen that they had this incredibly open, candid, lucid way of talking about death because they had glimpsed it. They had rehearsed it and in a way had a near-death experience. That satisfied a lot of my curiosity about the conversation I couldn’t have with my dad. I think the amount of time I spent with people who had cancer equipped me in some ways to be with him for the end, and to my surprise I was able to be very present, both figuratively and literally, at the end.

I spent the last eight days or so living with him in his apartment doing my best to take care of him, make him comfortable. He died at home. I wasn’t the only one. My sisters were very present too and several of his grandchildren. He literally died surrounded by his family. These things are never beautiful but it was better than it could’ve been. Was he peaceful at the end? No. I don’t think he was. Was he ready to go? I’m not sure. There’s so much I don’t know. I know much more about the deaths of these strangers than I do about him.

Didn’t your wife credit psychedelics as having helped you become more patient and present with your dad?

Because people like you were asking, “How did psychedelics change you?” I was asking my wife the question as I was trying to find a way to illustrate or quantify that—because it’s kind of subtle. It’s not like, “I was that way and now I’m this way.” She offered that example and I think she was right—that I was much more open and present with my father’s death. I’m a very busy person and could’ve manufactured reasons I couldn’t be there every day at the end. But I wanted to be there. I wanted to be available to him. I wanted to understand the process as best I could. So I may have psychedelics to thank for that. One of the domains of personality that changed was in the direction of greater openness.

You mentioned your dad’s alcoholism. Was he part of the 12-step program?

He got sober on AA, was religious about going, and worked the program well. We had all celebrated the annual anniversaries of his sobriety since the late ‘70s. He very much believed in a higher power and became a spiritual person. He basically converted the philosophy of AA into his business philosophy and his how-tolive philosophy, and had a very successful consultancy that sold people the wisdom of AA although they never knew it. “One day at a time.” “It gets better.” “Your problem is between your ears.” All these things he got from AA.

You document that AA had a psychedelic inception.

There’s some interesting crossovers. The cofounder, Bill W., had already gotten sober on a psychedelic called belladonna at a hospital in New York in the ’30s. Later in the ’50s in LA he received LSD therapy and became convinced that this medicine could help people quit drinking. In the ’50s the theory was that the LSD trip was like the DT’s, delirium tremens, that it gave the same conversion experience that drunks got who hit bottom. He thought it should be part of the fellowship and brought it to the AA board but they felt that it would be a controversial and confusing message given that they believed in swearing off all intoxicants. They rejected his proposal.

I used to go to meetings with my dad just to keep him company because he wanted me to see what was going on. I thought the spirituality of AA, the higher power and the emphasis on community were to dilute and hide its Christian identity so as to be as open as possible. But they were not actually. Their view of spirituality was like the psychedelic view of spirituality—that faith in a higher power was part of an effort to transcend ego—that ego consciousness is what gets you in trouble with substances like alcohol. To the extent you could disclaim responsibility for what happens day to day and realize that there is a higher power involved, you could lighten the load of your ego. At least that’s how I understand it.

Psychedelic therapy in the ’50s and the way AA developed its methods also shared a similar kind of spirituality emphasizing connection. You go there to get connected to other people. Until you’re connected you’re not going to be able to break your addiction. You’re sustained by these connections because you don’t want to let people down. They’re there to help you if you slip. There’s a turning both toward a higher power on the vertical axis and toward community on the horizontal axis.

How were you drawn to becoming a journalist?

I was an English major, always interested in writing and publishing. I was involved in a literary magazine beginning in junior high school and was on the newspaper in high school. I was the movie critic and the food critic, basically so I could have free dates in New York City. I just loved ink. In high school I worked for the Vineyard Gazette on Martha’s Vineyard and for the Paris Review in college. Then I was an intern at The Village Voice, then got a paying job there. I didn’t think I could make a living as a writer so editing was the next best thing. I worked as a magazine editor at a succession of magazines that flopped, leading to one that manages to survive, Harper’s. I worked there for ten years as an editor and began writing in a serious way with my first book, Second Nature.

I wrote on weekends and in the evenings, and started my second book there, A Place of My Own. Halfway through I realized I had started it all wrong and had to go back to the beginning. We had just had our son Isaac and the idea of writing on weekends and evenings no longer had any appeal. I reached a fork in the road where I had to decide—did I want to stay at Harper’s as a magazine editor or was I willing to take the leap and become a full-time writer? It was a very important fork in the road. I decided to become a writer.

We left New York to live in rural Connecticut where we could live more cheaply and send our kid to public school. I finished my second book and launched my third [The Botany of Desire] and that’s when I made a living as a writer.

You were worried about financial success?

My wife was a painter. Usually when you’re married to a writer or a painter, one has a real job with benefits, but neither of us did. So it was a stretch for a long time.

[Laughs] I can’t calculate the numbers but you’ve sold a lot of books, my friend.

I have, actually. I have been so lucky because I’m no better than so many writers but I’ve caught a couple cultural waves. Usually you’re lucky to catch one and I’ve caught two pretty big ones. I feel fortunate and that’s one reason I teach writing—to hopefully share with others.

How is journalism a creative process?

On a couple levels. The most important is figuring out how to organize material and tell a story. Life doesn’t automatically resolve itself into narrative—it has to be coaxed. A lot of the creativity is figuring out “Where is the story?” “Where do you start?” “Who’s the hero?” “How does it end up?” The old problem of framing nonlinear beginnings, middles, and ends. How to find the laundry line that knits a story together and that you can hang your exposition on. I see writing as taking this three- or four-dimensional reality and passing it through the needle of a narrative, one word or one sentence after another.

Then there’s the creative skills that go into connecting with people so they tell you things they probably shouldn’t—interviewing. Or keeping someone longer than planned. [laughs] I compliment your creativity!

Oh gosh! Thank you. Is there something specifically “Michael Pollan” about your approach to teaching journalism?

I don’t know if it’s specifically “Michael Pollan” as I’ve never taken a writing course and don’t really know how others teach. I learned to write as an editor at Harper’s. The way I teach is getting people to write and then I edit what they do. It’s incredibly time consuming. I wish there were a better formula because I don’t enjoy it. But there’s tremendous value to actually seeing how someone takes a sentence that is written in the passive voice and turns it around to an active voice. You can put that on a blackboard all you want but unless they’ve actually seen you perform that jujitsu it’s never going to stick. I do close editing on my students’ work. I talk about structure and how any piece has an x-axis and a y-axis and needs that laundry line to pull people through. The most common statement in office hours is “I can’t find a laundry line.”

At 15 I learned a lifelong lesson about discipline and keeping a clear head for writing. During summer school I would smoke weed, listen to the Grateful Dead, and write. Of course I thought my stuff was great but the next day it turned out to be inchoate crap. What’s your experience with mind-altering substances and the creative process?

Coffee and tea are important to my creative process—great aids to focus. Psychedelics are the opposite. As I described, that needle eye that you’re passing the thread of narrative through—forget it. Psychedelics are not going to help you. Caffeine is good for narrowing focus whereas psychedelics draw you to all those other things that you’re ignoring. Alcohol as never had anything to do with my writing though it’s a way to unwind after you’ve written. Pot—never.

What are some of your next projects? Is being a food journalist still in your bag of tricks?

I’m writing about something right at the intersection of food and drugs and that’s caffeine. I’m doing a long article about caffeine because I’m interested in it. It’s one of the cleverest drugs ever invented by a plant for the manipulation of animals.

I’m profoundly not a fan. I believe if you want more energy—drop caffeine.

What’s the problem with caffeine? You think it takes as much energy as it gives, or it takes more?

Yes. The recognition came a long time ago in the ’80s after doing cocaine all night, grinding my teeth as the birds were waking up. I had this flash about those old ads that said “Speed Kills.” Basically you can whip the horse and it will jolt—but you’re pulling from somewhere.

That’s a very Emersonian take—that there’s a compensation. That might be true but it’s a very old American idea and one of the questions I am trying to answer. Is it a free lunch? So you don’t use caffeine? Is there another stimulant?

I don’t [laughs]—a journalist who doesn’t use caffeine! I guess I meditate as a way to keep it in control.

I’m going to go cold turkey as part of this to explore some of those issues but keep putting it off. I don’t know why.

[Laughs] Because you’re hooked.

[Laughs] I’m totally hooked. I agree. But I think an addiction where you can get what you’re addicted to and you have an expectation of a continuous supply—is that such a bad thing? I don’t know.

Any general particular likes or dislikes you care to mention in closing?

Too many to enumerate. The current political moment is the top of the list. I’m worried for our country in a way I never have been before. I didn’t worry through the ’60s, as crazy as it got when I was waking up to news of the assassinations of my heroes like Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. I had a sense we were still moving in the right direction despite the craziness. I don’t feel that way now.

Journalism is under attack. What’s your assessment about journalism today?

Journalism has never been more indispensable and never been more precarious at the same time. There’s a tremendous audience for journalism but there’s no longer a reliable business model. That seldom happens, right? Normally if there’s an audience for something somebody figures out how to pay for it. The New York Times is figuring it out. A few places are figuring it out. It’s really hard, especially at the level of local journalism. I worry about that. It’s no accident that the collapse of local journalism is accompanied by the rise of a politics of ignorance—not to mention corruption. You need journalism to keep tabs on things. I worry about what’s happening at the state level—state government—where the scrutiny of that powerful local paper in a state capitol is gone in so many places. We’re going to pay the price for having weakened journalism. The companies that weakened it, like Facebook and Google—they’ll pay a price too. They didn’t mean to but essentially they’ve hollowed out journalism. It’s absolutely the wrong time to be weakening journalism.

A final message to readers, many whom are your fans?

Thank you. Thank you for reading me. It means a lot that people still read books. Thank you for reading anything, not just me. Thanks for reading magazines. Thanks for reading print. Thanks for supporting writers.

Rob Sidon is publisher and editor-in-chief of Common Ground.

Chuck and Sue Kesey met on a blind date as freshmen at Oregon State in 1956. Thereafter inseparable, they married and started Springfield Creamery after graduation in 1960. Chuck’s novelist brother, Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, famously led the Merry Pranksters on the virgin Further bus ride to New York in 1964. Chuck was on board. Sue, who was pregnant with their son Kit, stayed home with toddler Sheryl but later flew to join the freewheeling Pranksters—notably Neal Cassady—as they beset Gotham’s literary elite and set the groundwork for the ensuing hippie movement. The brothers remained very close until Ken’s death in 2001. In his younger days, Ken is said to have worked at the Creamery when he needed money.

At Oregon State, Chuck was fortunate to study with some of the leading minds in the nascent field of probiotics. Intent on introducing Lactobacillus acidophilus into the human food supply chain, Chuck finally got his chance while tinkering with recipes with company bookkeeper Nancy Hamren as the creamery transitioned to making a newfound hippie food, yogurt—Nancy’s Yogurt, to be precise. Acidophilus soon became a mainstream ingredient in the U.S. yogurt making process, and Nancy and the Keseys have long actively championed probiotics as a health boon.

In 1972 financial challenges befell the Creamery and the Grateful Dead were summoned to perform an emergency bail-out concert that not only saved the company but also cemented the connection between the Dead and the fabled Oregon Country Fair, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The musical connection between the Keseys and the Bay Area continued as the then unknown Huey Lewis distributed Nancy’s Yogurt as a day job before becoming a star. Lewis allegedly wrote “Working for Living” while making yogurt deliveries.

As early natural products pioneers, Chuck and Sue have long been in the vanguard of market trends and humorously helped sustain the industry’s founding artisanal spirit. They have steadfastly resisted the trend of corporate consolidation—keepin’ it real and all in the family.

Common Ground: So 60 years ago, you two not only got married but also started Springfield Creamery. Whole lotta love! How did you meet?

Sue Kesey: [laughs] It was a blind date. We were freshmen in college and there was a spring dance coming up. One of the ladies in my dorm had met Chuck and knew he was looking for a date. She said I’d be perfect for him. He showed up at my door in this big boat of a car in his ROTC uniform.

Chuck Kesey: Yeah, had to take ROTC back then. It was a 1952 DeSoto convertible.

SK: It was kinda jaw-dropping. The car, the handsome young man with a lot more hair than he has now [laughs]—the ROTC uniform. He was funny and he was fun to talk to. Then we went out again and never looked back. Just kind of hung out with each other. When I met his family it felt like I’d known them forever.

CK: My dad put her to the test and took us on a hike to the bottom of Steens Mountain at the Little Blitzen River Gorge. Nobody goes there. It’s got great fishing but it’s a trek. I remember it took us eight hours to walk out.

SK: Not many people do it but they’d done it before. I think Ken and Faye were with us too. I can’t remember, but it was a test to see if I could walk down and back and be tough enough to join the family.

Ken was your only sibling. What was it like growing up together?

CK: Every weekend my dad planned an adventure. No matter what grade we were in, we fished every creek and every river and clumb very mountain in Oregon. And we hit it over and over and over again. We walked to the end of the world.

Were you also a wrestler?

CK: Yeah, I’ve done a lot of wrestling. My son was a wrestler. My son-in-law was a wrestler and a coach. My grandkids were wrestlers. We’ve got state champion credentials.

What is it about wrestling and the Kesey family?

CK: Wrestling is a family sport. It is a funny sport—very inherited. If you don’t have a family backing you up, you will have a hard time making it. When I go to a wrestling match I see the kids and the fathers and the grandfathers and the uncles. It’s a tough sport. Making weight was a big deal and that means that you’re dieting. That means you’re very conscious of what you’re eating. This throws wrestlers into health food immediately. You don’t waste any food and you’re constantly worried about eating the right thing.

Were you ever drawn to literature like your brother or are your temperaments so different?

CK: I’m more in the world of science and he’s the more in the world of literature. He didn’t believe in science as much as I did, but we understood each other’s viewpoint rather well. When he ran out of money he would work at the creamery [laughs]. He was that close.

Your brother was at the bleeding edge of the hippie scene with all the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests. How did you relate to that?

CK: Before hippies was the Beat generation. Ken immediately went to San Francisco and looked at the champions of the Beat generation and went right through that. We knew a lot of those guys and that was an evolution into the hippie generation. I watched it happen. I watched Ken in it. Both Beat and hippie—these are negative words put out by the media to make it not look very good. Hippie actually comes from the Chinese heroin dopesters who would drop to their hip—they couldn’t get off their hip. That is where the word comes from.

I never heard that.

CK: I had a hard time keeping up with Ken, I can tell you that. He pushed us into that other world of social change. You could see the change with Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and the bus. I was on the virgin ride traversing America to New York, which was risky scary business. Nothing like that had ever been done. And this was right when the cops had learned that they could arrest hippies rather easily—and out comes the bus. They just didn’t know what to do with it. They would stop it every time they got a chance. We were way ahead of the psychedelic movement, which didn’t have much to do with ours, going across America on the bus. The psychedelic hippie movement attempted to imitate the bus movement but it’s hard to imitate something.

Sue, were you together on the bus?

SK: This was 1964. Sheryl was two and I was pregnant with Kit so I didn’t ride across the country. I did fly over and join them in New York and meet Viking Press and Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg and all of the superstars and look at their world. We went to the World’s Fair, which was great.

What’s story of coming off the bus into New York?

CK: We went to a meeting at Viking with Sterling Ward, who was Ken’s agent. And there were all of the literary superstars in this apartment overlooking New York. It looked they owned New York. They were drinking wine and listening to classic music and in came the bus with fifteen people who had been riding across America. We wanted to play. We wanted to jump up and down and run around. They wanted to listen to classic music and talk philosophically. And I just saw that—whoops—just like that I saw literature change right there as Neal Cassady blew in like a wind-up energy ball. They just didn’t know what to think. This was a very off-scale literary happening.

From what I’ve heard Neal Cassady always left an unforgettable impression.

CK: Neal Cassady was the bus driver, who changed the tires, the chains. He was an unbelievable phenomenon. He was perfectly capable of talking at 100 miles an hour and not stopping. One time he drove across America in an old 1950 car in 60 hours, by himself, nonstop. He never stopped, never slept all the way across. That’s who Neal Cassady was.

Was there a family religion growing up?

CK: When you’re a little kid it was every day—“I pledge allegiance to the flag”—you had to do that every morning. My folks were Southern so that meant getting into the Southern Baptist world, and how this carries through into the world of relationship. This is why Ken takes LSD. It’s about “What’s going on in there? Let me see the truth. Let’s get down to it.”

Where in the South?

CK: Arkansas Ozarks. From the distance of things I got to see clearly into the reality of America. From the distance of things I got to see clearly into the reality of America through the eyes of my Grandma Smith. When I was little she’d go into long detail about her childhood and I’d grill her on it mercilessly. My dad migrated from Texas to Colorado and walked with the covered wagons. He met my mom in La Junta, Colorado, in a creamery and that’s where Ken and I were born. We lived in Colorado until the war broke out. Dad was in the service and we were moved to California when I was in first grade. After the war, instead of going back to La Junta, Daddy took jobs in Oregon bouncing through the creamery business as a cheese maker, butter maker, ice cream maker. My grandfather had already come to Oregon. He was a farmer who worked as a sharecropper. He never owned a house, never owned any land, never owned anything.

You’re the originators of the probiotic movement. How did you come to be the first to put acidophilus in yogurt?

SK: At Oregon State University in his core studies in dairy science and microbiology Chuck was fortunate enough to be there with professors who were bringing this to the forefront. They understood acidophilus from the veterinary side of things because it had been used for treating calves for scours [livestock diarrhea] for ages.

Yogurt was relatively unknown in the ’60s. Why do you think it was adopted as a hippie food?

CK: Food trends come and go but it was inevitable because the probiotics are really important genetically in how to make a good, healthy human being. You couldn’t keep it down and it’s still getting bigger. The good bacteria produced by lactobacillus are more than you can produce yourself.

SK: You can call it hippie food, I call it the Food Revolution. It was people looking to change the world. Part of that change happened with changing what they were eating. We were in the right place at the right time with the right product and the right connections to make this move to introducing yogurt. Chuck said, “We’re gonna put acidophilus in it because it is what people want.”

Now it’s mainstream.

CK: I knew that if you ate lactobacillus acidophilus, that you didn’t have so many diseases, that your inflammation was lower, and you could live considerably longer. It was pretty rare to understand the world of probiotics back then and it’s still rather mystifying in the medical world right now.

Clockwise from top: Springfield Creamery circa
1977; Jerry Garcia, Veneta, OR, 1972 benefit
concert ; the ticket and poster for the event

Can you tell the story of how Nancy came to be the namesake?

SK: Nancy Hamren came from San Francisco and had come to work as our wonderful bookkeeper. She and her grandmother had made yogurt for a long time. She even had a yogurt formula. It was originally a terrible formula but she and Chuck worked together and it went from there. Nancy was answering the phone in the office and taking orders from these new little fledgling coop stores and natural food stores that were popping up all over. Nancy was selling the yogurt over the phone and Springfield Creamery yogurt didn’t sound good. Chuck didn’t want his name on the product so it just became Nancy’s Yogurt.

Before yogurt we had a nine-year run doing just milk and glass bottling. We did hundreds and hundreds of bottles and gallon jugs be cause we had the only creamery that could do glass. We had a bottle washer and did milk for schools and milk for co-pack.

Nancy worked for us full time for 44 years and still comes in for an afternoon a week or two to help out in the office. It’s been a great run as healthy yogurt was exactly the right thing we needed to hang our hat on to stay independent. Nancy is still active on the International Probiotics Association board of directors. She is knowledgeable and always hungry to learn new things and is still part of our group.

In 1972 the Creamery nearly went belly up. Can you tell the story about the day a rock band saved a yogurt company?

SK: We had just converted in 1970 from doing milk to making yogurt and didn’t have much money to do it with. There was no big influx of investors or anything financing this. It was pretty tight and we needed money so the only people we knew who could generate money were the Grateful Dead. Chuck asked if maybe they’d do a benefit concert.

So you drove down to Marin County and just pleaded your case, and how did that go? I’m just curious. Do you remember that day?

CK: I drove down to Marin County and well, that was just normal business, but we knew Ramrod [Lawrence Shurtliff] pretty well. He was the head roadie and he later become the president of the Grateful Dead. And we knew Jerry Garcia so we had a lot of avenues to get a yes. Then we had to rent a field and build a stage. This was before concerts. There wasn’t much to copy. It was the biggest concert ever at that time in Oregon and it was outdoors in a field. And we had 15,000 – 20,000 people.

SK: It was challenging but it all came off and became ultimately the classic concert that the film Sunshine Daydream came from. We faced the stage west for an afternoon concert, which meant we just about baked the band because the sun was in their eyes and putting their guitars out of tune and so forth. Because it was a really hot day, over a hundred degrees.

CK: Hundred and seven. We thought we’d make money but after all the trouble we didn’t make any money. The Grateful Dead are really good guys. I think they gave us 10,000 dollars at the end of it and that got us through the financial hump. The tickets were only three dollars. That was a mistake but that was Ken’s number.

For Deadheads this is considered a monumental show. What are some of your other recollections?

CK: It was hot and everybody but the Grateful Dead said this was the nekkidest concert they’d ever been to. Nobody knew how much water it would take to put on a concert. No body had a clue. We had a water truck to squirt the crowd and fortunately I went to jump on the truck just before because someone hadn’t moved the water truck. I realized it wasn’t a water truck—it was a sewage truck. That was nuts! They’d grabbed the wrong truck. They were one minute away from squirting the crowd with the sewage. That woudda done it!

This is underground stuff but supposedly the 31-minute “Dark Star” recording from that show was so inspired that it was petitioned and accepted to be included into a NASA space capsule. Did you know that?

CK: [laughing] I didn’t know it.
SK: I didn’t know that but that’s great!

You didn’t realize that your visit to Marin County to petition the Dead not only saved the company but may still be having extraterrestrial intergalactic ramifications.

SK: That’s funny.

The Oregon Country Fair is the granddaddy of summer festivals, now celebrating 50 years. I went only once but loved it. You’ve been at the root of this tradition. Can you explain the connection and what makes the magic there?

SK: It is a fun interesting gathering, an escape from reality that started small. It’s hard to believe it’s been 50 years but when I look at how old our kids are—yep—it’s been 50 years! You used to know everybody. We’ve been a food booth for all these years so it’s kind of a working weekend. For sure it’s simpler to just come and attend and wander around than it is to operate a food booth but everybody comes by to say hello. There’s great people, great music, great art, great crafts.

What I appreciate about the Fair is its vigilant steering committee and artisanal ethos. It’s not like you’ll find Coca Cola and Pepsi products sold there, or any packaged goods. It’s unique and very strict and everything is handmade. This creates a unique high vibration in the woods.

SK: That’s true. I was on the food committee for 25 years and that’s what we did. We followed that criteria on the food side. On the craft side it’s the same thing. You have to be the one making your stuff. You can’t bring in pre-made stuff. There’s been some great food that started at the Fair, people making their little dream thing that evolved into products that are part of the natural food movement. It’s been an incubator.

Coconut Bliss is another home-grown artisanal brand.

SK: Yep. I remember when Luna and Larry came for the first time to the food committee with their application. They were selling some Coconut Bliss product in a few stores here in town but and we accepted them first as a food cart. Then people found them and it went from there. Rising Moon Ravioli is another one that started with a booth. I’ve enjoyed having my hand in knowing these food people and seeing them come along.

The Grateful Dead again played a hand in cementing the tradition of the Fair ten years later in 1982.

SK: The 1972 concert became such a marker that there was a push to do it again in ’82, which we did. The Fair had been renting the land and this concert, which was another great concert, gave the Fair the rest of the money needed to finalize the land purchase.

CK: We probably did the first frozen yogurt ever made then but we didn’t call it frozen yogurt. We had not a clue of what to call it. Eventually we made ice cream bars and Ken Babbs didn’t know what to call them so he eventually called them Yogi Bars.

Your family maintains close ties in the music business.

SK: Our son Kit went on to produce several other Grateful Dead shows. Along with being the operations director at the Creamery he runs the McDonald Theater and Cuthbert Amphitheatre in Eugene and keeps the family with our fingers in the music industry and the concert business.

And then there’s the Huey Lewis Bay Area connection. Can you tell the story?

In the early mid ’70s one of our first yogurt distributors in San Francisco was a gentleman named Gilbert Rosborne. Gilbert was a magazine distributor and was originally from Eugene. He was going to all these stores in the Bay Area and he says, “I could distribute yogurt. Let’s figure that one out.” So he put together this little company and got himself a cold storage place down in San Francisco. He would come pick up yogurt and take it down there and distribute to the stores. His partner was a kid named Huey Lewis who was a musician playing clubs at night and delivering yogurt in the day.

Eventually Huey became quite a star. He always says that he wrote “Working for a Living” while he was driving yogurt down to stores in Santa Cruz. He’s a neat guy and we’ve been privileged to know him all this time. Finally his music started paying off to where he didn’t have to be a yogurt distributor anymore.

He’s older than I but we went to the same high school.

SK: Is that right? Kit had him at the Cuthbert Amphitheater a few summers ago. It was fun. So it continues on. Keep those connections.

In 1994 didn’t you experience a fire that just about wiped you out?

CK: It started upstairs in the storage area, probably a fan short that ignited the wood or something. But it pretty well flattened the Creamery, which is a complicated monster full of many moving parts. I had counted that we had 350 motors, and now we’ve got double that again. But once the Creamery burned down—whoops—you’ve lost your market. And whoops—you’re out of business. But we put it all back together and were producing yogurt within 28 days.

SK: Just in time for the June 1994 Grateful Dead concerts at Autzen [University of Oregon]. We were rebuilding around ourselves as we were manufacturing. It was a colossal effort working around the clock. Actually about ten days after the fire this thing happened when we were like empty shells. George Siemon, who was starting Organic Valley, was making a visit to Oregon to talk to farmers who were transitioning to organic. I don’t believe I’d met him before and I said, “I’d love to meet you. Our creamery’s not quite in a production state right now but come on by, we’ll talk.”

So he got here on a Saturday afternoon and looked at the building. I was kind of, “Oh yeah, we’re building this, we’re gonna do this. We’ll be back up running in a couple weeks.” I think he thought I was completely mad because the whole thing looked like it would never run again. Anyway, he came over to our house and we had dinner and this wonderful conversation. He actually ended up staying all night at the house because we talked so long. He was operating a cooperative, and this is what Chuck’s dad operated, a dairy cooperative. We were going to be part of this organic milk pool that was being created. George was proposing knitting these amazing networks together. We have been working partners with Organic Valley ever since and they are great friends. It’s been a good ride.

CK: He’s pushed Organic Valley into a very successful business.

You’re old-time survivors in the natural products industry. Are you surprised at the growth that occurred?

CK: I’m only surprised at how slow it is occurring. I think it takes really a long time for something to happen. Take probiotics. As I sit here I know that I may live longer if I eat probiotic yogurt—but not many other people know that.

I remember these funny old [Dannon] TV commercials that showed old Russians who lived to be over 100 and what they had in common was that they all ate lots of yogurt. Do you know what I’m talking about?

CK: I do. But the thing you’re talking about is facts that are 80 years old. These are not new facts. Yet it’s taken 80 years for human beings to attempt to come around. They’ve done the same study in Korea where the people that eat fermented food live longer. And it’s not the cowbell, it’s the bacteria. This world of probiotics is way bigger than you can imagine and can influence your everyday health unbelievably.

What is your sentiment about this new era of synthetically engineered foods, gene splicing, and new genetic modifications that technologically can generate cell-based foods—meats—non-organically in fermentation labs and not on farms?

CK: It’s hard to even step into there. SK: It’s not that we don’t believe in it, it’s just that it’s not what we’re doing so I don’t really have an opinion.

What trends in the natural products industry do you find positive, and which not so much?

SK: The natural products industry is like anything else that starts grassroots. At the first Natural Products Expos there were maybe 50 or 60 manufacturers with booths and everybody was in one room. That was all the new natural products that were available. Now it fills the entire Anaheim Convention Center plus the hotels. A tremendous amount of the products shown are owned by large corporations, so the natural-organic movement has obviously caught the attention of large food companies because it was a positive thing. And they wanted it in their world too.

CK: That’s true of the yogurt world. We have a hard time competing with gigantic companies that are so big that they own the store. For us to exist in that world is really difficult.

SK: It’s challenging for a small family-owned company to continue to thrive. But when you make good products and you have a niche that people respect hat’s where it all is. The merging of so many brands under larger corporate shields helps get good food out to more people, which was always our goal. Generally there are more and more people eating better and better food in spite of it all. Even if they’re owned by big companies it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a negative. That is just the change in the industry.

Surely you’ve been approached many times but you put an emphasis on running an independent family business.

SK: We haven’t exactly been approached. We just get a lot of feelers, a lot of letters, you know, saying there are people interested. That is not something we’re pursuing at this time at all.

CK: Too busy to think about it. We have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees—the classic small business problems. When the Creamery was young it was run almost all with cousins. The effect was we put ‘em all through college.

Don’t you have the longest track record of employee longevity, with folks sticking around for decades?

SK: That’s true. The folks that started with us at the beginning have all now retired. I mean we have I think fifteen plus people who have actually retired and who had been with us anywhere from 30 to 45 years when they retired. It speaks well of the kind of family company that we attempt to operate. Now the challenge is finding really good employees to join. People are searching for good people. Replacing long-term employees is a challenge because you’re losing that intellectual historical depth. The people that started with you when you were struggling at the beginning and stayed with you through when things were successful, they have a different feel and respect for their job that a lot of times the newer folks don’t have. They don’t know what it was like. They’re doing a wonderful job but they are reaping the rewards of the folks who struggled from the beginning.

There’s this funny saying, “Hippie marriages don’t last,” but you’ve been together more than 60 years. Your brother Ken was married from 1956 until his death in 2001. Hippies I know like Wavy Gravy and Larry Brilliant too have been married for more than 50 years.

SK: We enjoy each other. We have these wonderful children. We are running this business. It just seemed like the right thing to do all this time. I don’t really question it very much. I can’t imagine it being any other way.

Like any family you’ve had your tragedies. I hate to bring it up but Ken died too soon and so did his son, your nephew, Jed…can you tell the story?

CK: Ken died too soon, but it wasn’t as big a shock as Jed dying. Jed was a wrestler and he was tough. He wrestled for the University of Oregon and [in 1984] they took a van to Pendleton and were going across the top of the mountain when it slid off the road, turned over, and fell down a 300-foot mountain. That was pretty sad. Ken never got over it. It’s the kind of thing you don’t get over.

SK: Thankfully we were honored to have Chuck’s mother, Geneva, with us up until a year ago when she passed away at age 101. She was a great lady with a delightful wit and wisdom. She was really the connection, the family matriarch.

CK: We fed her a lot of yogurt and a lot of kefir. And the other side of it is we’re full of babies right now. We now have a great-grandson who was born four weeks ago. So another generation is coming.

Are you optimistic about the world your great-grandchildren are inheriting?

SK: Well, some days I think about that and I’m not too optimistic. I think, “My goodness.”

What advice might you have for young people reading this who might be inspired by the kind of career you found in the natural products industry?

SK: If you can work for yourself and be creative, creating something that you are in charge of, whether it’s in natural products or whatever… Chuck and I always said after a number of years of running our own business that we would be terrible employees. We were so used to being so independent and running things the way we saw fit. So my advice is try to be independent and work for yourself or with a group of friends to do something that’s viable and important and earns you a living that allows you to enjoy life and family.

CK: I recommend independence. Take a chance on something you believe in.

Rob Sidon is publisher and editor-in-chief of Common Ground.

The Spiritual Odyssey of Do-Good Hippie Doctor Larry Brilliant

Larry Brilliant was born in 1944 in Detroit—where he met and eventually married his high school sweetheart, Girija. The grandson of an immigrant Jewish bricklayer, he was the first in his family to go to college. He studied science and medicine on a scholarship after his father testified against the Mafia and suffered a retaliatory hit that sent the family reeling into poverty. In the course of his first San Francisco visit during the psychedelic Summer of Love he forged his identity as a do-good hippie who enjoyed countless “on the bus” excursions such as being cast as the doctor on the Medicine Ball Caravan, a sequel to the Woodstock movie.

A chance encounter with Be Here Now author Ram Dass in New Delhi in 1971 steered the couple toward meeting their lifelong guru, Neem Karoli Baba (also known as Maharaji), who mysteriously and accurately predicted Larry’s becoming a World Health Organization doctor who would participate in the eradication of smallpox, a painful disease estimated to have killed hundreds of millions, if not billions.

As an experienced epidemiologist drawn to Karma Yoga (the path of selfless service) as inspired by Maharaji, in 1978 he co-founded the Seva Foundation, a non-profit that has thus far restored vision to more than 5 million underserved blind people in more than 20 countries.

As a technologist whose early friendships with Steve Jobs and Stewart Brand led to co-founding the Well, a prototypic online community, he later became the inaugural executive director of Google.org, and the board director of the Skoll Foundation and Salesforce.org.

Defying the notion that “hippie relationships don’t last,” he has been with Girija for more than 50 years, through life’s ups and downs including the loss of their then 26-year-old son Jon to cancer in 2010.

One of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and winner of the TED Prize, Larry humorously shares his adventures as a madcap spiritual seeker in his aptly titled autobiography, Sometimes Brilliant. We caught up with Larry in Marin County, where he lives.

Common Ground: You helped witness and certify the eradication of killer smallpox. Would you tell the story of Rahima Banu?

Larry Brilliant: Rahima Banu was a girl on Bhola Island in Bangladesh. She contracted smallpox in 1975 and unlike many she survived. Five years later, on Christmas Day 1980, when Rahima coughed and her scabs fell off, a disease with a long unbroken chain of transmission—going back to the pharaohs—was finally eradicated. Good on us as humans! Because it took more than a village. It took hundreds and thousands from all religions and countries, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Shinto, Jain, and tribalists—that’s what it took to get to that place. I was but one of the epidemiologists for the World Health Organization to stand witness and certify that last case. It was an honor.

Most people have no idea about smallpox. Can you describe it?

Some people think what Job endured in the Old Testament was smallpox. Others think it was one of the ten plagues of Exodus. Imagine having one of the most painful furuncles or boils but on every single inch of your skin and inside your mouth and your nose, inside of your trachea, your respiratory system, inside of your penis, your vagina, anus—the most painful disease you could imagine. It killed hundreds of millions, maybe billions. In the 20th century alone smallpox killed between 300 and 500 million.

Your guru, Neem Karoli Baba, foresaw your role in the eradication of smallpox. Can you tell the story?

Neem Karoli Baba, who was known as Maharaji, was Ram Dass’s guru. My wife Girija and I first went to India in 1971 and bumped into Ram Dass in New Delhi at the American Express office. He happened to be picking up the first copies of Be Here Now. We didn’t really know him yet, but he recommended we visit his guru’s ashram, which we did. Maharaji was famous for always saying sub-ek, All-One. He taught that all religions, all people, everything are one. We studied a wide variety of texts from many religions and gradually became lifelong students. Maharaji nicknamed me “Dr. America.”

One day, after we had been living in his ashram for six months, out of the blue Maharaji says to me, “Dr. America! How much money do you have?” Girija and I sat there a little flummoxed. I answered, “I’ve got 500 dollars.” He said “No, no, I don’t mean here. How much do you have back in America?” I responded that I had about 500 dollars in America. He started laughing and said, “Five hundred dollars here, 500 dollars there, 500 dollars here, 500 dollars there. You are no doctor.” Now this got to me because that is exactly what my own mother had said to me: “You only have 500 dollars? You’re not making any money? You can’t be a real doctor. Why did I send you to medical school?”

Then Maharaji laughed and laughed and giggled and did this thing where his eyes kind of moved up in his head pretending to be the swami, repeating, “Five hundred dollars here, 500 dollars there. You are no doctor.” Then he got absorbed repeating, “You are no doctor, you are no doctor.” I was lost in the meaning, thinking like my mother—that I had to be a materialistic success to prove I was a physician. Then he looked at me shaking his finger as he started shifting from saying “You are no doctor” to “U-N-O doctor, U-N-O doctor.” Let me explain that while in America we say UN to mean United Nations, in India and much of the world UNO means United Nations Organization, which is what it is technically called. Then he started giggling and laughing and clapping and took my arm and pretended to jab a vaccination, saying, “Dr. America is going to be United Nations Organization doctor. You’re going to go to villages and give vaccinations against smallpox. They are going to eradicate smallpox. This is God’s gift to humanity. This one kind of suffering is going to be lifted off the backs of humanity. This is God’s gift because of the hard work of dedicated health workers.” Well, needless to say I didn’t understand. I was in a state.

His prediction was correct but not immediate, right? It took a long time.

Right, because I was just, like, “What do you mean?” He said, “Go, go to the job at the UN at WHO” [World Health Organization]. The Indian devotee who translated was emphatic: “He wants you to go to New Delhi now.” Girija and I looked at each other, not understanding, but he kept saying, “Go, go, get a taxi, go, take a bus, go, go.” So we did. We took a seventeen-hour overnight bus to New Delhi. It was daytime when we arrived and we were looking disheveled when we found the WHO office. The receptionist, Mrs. Edna Boyer, who was Anglo-Indian, greeted us. “Hello, how can I help you?” I responded, “I’m here to work for the smallpox program.” She said, “Well, we don’t really have a smallpox program. We have one person here who’s sort of looking after that.” But it was obvious when she saw me that I was not fit for working in the smallpox program or any UN program and they escorted us out.

We returned to the ashram, another seventeen-hour bus ride back, whereupon Maharaji asked, “Did you get your job?” I said, “No, no, there’s no job.” I couldn’t even get the words out of my mouth before he said, “Go back. Go now!” We thought, “Okay, we’ll stay a week this time,” but nothing materialized. Over the next two months I made over a dozen trips to Delhi and no job for me. Gradually I began to realize that wearing a white ashram gown with a beard down to my chest and hair down to my back was not the best interview suit. So I gradually trimmed my beard and traded my ashram clothes for a suit and tie. Then, through a whole set of what seemed like magical circumstances I was offered a secretarial job. Although I had graduated from medical school and finished my internship I had no training in epidemiology, no training in public health, no training in how the UN worked, and I was twenty years younger than most WHO doctors. And I was the only one ever to be hired directly in India. The only thing I had of value was that I could type and spoke both English and Hindi. They had to create a job low enough for me. I was hired as the puppy, the mascot on the team. But over time I worked my way into the field.

And the rest is history, as they say.

[laughs] That is how it started.

When you first met Maharaji, weren’t you skeptical that it was a bogus cult?

Having been brought up in a monotheistic world, the polytheistic world of bowing down to stone idols and touching the guru’s feet and the kind of worship and obeisance that’s paid is very difficult for a Westerner. I didn’t feel right about that, yet everybody else there seemed to feel perfectly fine about it. I felt like I just didn’t belong. Then a bunch of stuff happened like the story I just told, where Maharaji clearly saw into the future. Girija was the reason I stuck it out, and I learned that if you were around long enough you would see this happen time after time. That made me realize that if this was a cult I was very lucky to be there.

How was religion important growing up in Detroit?

Sadly religion only gave me something to rebel against. In Judaism you’re bar mitzvah’d at 13 and confirmed at around 16. In confirmation class the rabbi gave us a writing assignment asking students to pick between God and science. I wrote, “I pick both” [pause]. Because I couldn’t imagine a world not being more in awe of God—as a scientist [pause]. The other part of my answer was I couldn’t imagine loving God and not appreciating science as one of the methods God used to create the world.

And those were wrong answers?

He didn’t like those at all. He called me in front of the class to defend them, which I did. Then he asked that I recant. I said, “No, this is what I feel.” He said, “Well, if you feel that way you can’t be confirmed,” and kicked me out of class.

Years later I was invited to be the keynote at the American Conference of Rabbis—a huge thing at the Fairmont Hotel with more rabbis than you can imagine. I began my keynote by saying, “I’m really surprised you invited me here. I was kicked out of my confirmation class.” And they all started laughing. I interrupted my own talk and turned to my host asking, “Why are hey laughing?” He got up and said, “Because you’re the third speaker in a row who got kicked out of their confirmation class. This seems to be the career path” [laughs]. So that’s the part that religion played for me, though I love Jewish culture and the concept of tikkun olam.

Let me read you a poem from the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.” That is my kind of Judaism.

Can you talk about your father and the example he provided? I know he stood up to the mob in Detroit.

It’s timely now to talk about immigration. Immigrants come here and take the toughest jobs and live hardscrabble in tough areas. My grandfather came here and was a bricklayer in Detroit. My father never graduated from high school, was a welterweight boxer, and earned a living running numbers on the streets. He gravitated toward the fringes but was the most gentle, kind, loving, reliable person you could ever meet. Eventually he owned a business, Brilliant Music Company, running coin-operated vending machines, nickelodeons, jukeboxes. This was an all-cash business in bars that interested the serious Mafia, which pressured him to take over his business. But he said no. The mob even murdered one of my dad’s employees, in the office.

One day, Bobby Kennedy, who was a senator at the time, came to our house. He was running the McClellan Committee, investigating organized crime. I wasn’t home but according to my brother and my mother he asked my dad if he would come to Washington and testify against the Mafia. My dad said, “Look, what they’re doing is the wrong thing, and how could I say no to a Kennedy?” Then my dad said to the family, “This may be difficult for us as a family but it’s the right thing to do.”

He went to Washington and testified. I saw him on television and on the front page of the Detroit News. But when he came back, just as he expected, the Mafia firebombed his company. They actually ran a truck into the front glass and left a fire explosive device behind. Fearing for my brother and me my dad had us evacuated on a plane to hide with my grandparents in Cleveland. Through it all my dad was impeccable. He was kind and gentle and thoughtful and thorough, but he did carry a gun. If a gun at home is supposed to make you feel comfortable, this gun made me feel exactly the opposite.

I am sorry. Didn’t your father and grandfather die within a week of each other? How did that affect you and your poor mother?

My dad died of cancer, and five days later when we were sitting shiva [the Jewish period of mourning], my grandfather died—all the men in my mother’s world. For me and my brother it was devastating but for her—I don’t think she ever recovered. And we didn’t have any money. My dad didn’t leave any insurance. I was lucky to get a scholarship to go to Michigan or I would not have been able to go. I started working, also doing vending machines because I had watched my dad do them. I had my own vending machine route. I sold papers, I sold sparklers. I didn’t know what an entrepreneur was but I became one.

When did you first come to San Francisco?

Before finishing medical school I came to San Francisco in the middle of the Summer of Love for a summer job as a civil rights specialist, working for the federal government trying to make sure that hospitals did not discriminate against African Americans. And like every young person who came from the Midwest, I had no protection against the seductive power of the ’60s. I willingly succumbed, but it was very light experience with psychedelics.

It is said of the ’60s, “You were either on the bus or off the bus,” and you were clearly on. How did you get on the bus?

After finishing medical school in Michigan I came to Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco to complete my internship. This is a crazy story but at one point I found myself helping amid an encampment of Native Americans who had occupied Alcatraz in protest at the time. I even delivered a baby on Alcatraz. Then at the same time there was another incident where a young Indian brave cut his arm open with a big knife [to commit suicide] in protest. I was there sewing him up, trying to keep him alive, but he kept removing the stitches. He was bleeding everywhere. Eventually a Coast Guard cutter brought us both from Alcatraz to the San Francisco docks to get him to SF General. I was covered with his blood. When we arrived at the docks there were lots of newspaper reporters and TV cameras who had come to report the story. They all asked me about my experience with the Indians on Alcatraz and this was televised quite a bit. Apparently somebody from Warner Brothers saw me on television and I was offered a job to be a young doctor in a movie called The Medicine Ball Caravan.

This was originally going to be about the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and traveling with psychedelic bands—the idea being that hippies looked a lot like Indians and we were going to put up teepees and live like Indians for six weeks following these rock ‘n roll concerts. The concept was unclear but it seemed like fun, so my wife Girija and I agreed to go.

And that’s when I met Wavy Gravy, who was just so different from anybody I’d ever met—so kind, and passionate, thoughtful, truthful, funny, with rainbow-colored false teeth and a duck bill hat with a real duck’s bill! He had read everything and studied all the religions. And of course he had famously been the MC at Woodstock and had been on the Merry Prankster bus. The film had a dozen big Greyhound buses filled with actors and actresses and one was the Hog Farm bus, which was basically a spinoff of the Prankster bus. We rode with them and I found myself getting closer and closer to Wavy and happier every time.

The bus tour ended in Washington D.C. and then we were flown to London for the finale, which was a Pink Floyd concert. After The Medicine Ball Caravan journey was finished in London, Wavy suggested we keep the party going by getting our own buses to go through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and India to get to East Pakistan, which is now called Bangladesh. There had been a huge cyclone there and the idea was to do good by bringing medical supplies and food and having fun. Helping and having fun—that’s what we wanted, so Girija and I again joined.

There was civil war between East and West Pakistan so we never made it all the way to East Pakistan, but instead took a left turn into Nepal where we had all sorts of hippie adventures. Wavy has been my best friend for more than 45 years. That’s a long way of saying I’ve always been on the bus and we’re still part of the Hog Farm.

For someone who came of age in the era of hippie free love, you’re something of a conservative, having been married for more than 50 years. What’s the secret sauce?

[laughs] They said “Hippie relationships will never last” but Wavy and his wife Jahanara have been married for 52 years. Every relationship has its own secret sauce. Girija, who was Elaine before changing her name in India, was fifteen when we dated in high school. I was sixteen. During college we were apart and I missed her and called her once a year to say “How you doing?” She thought it was weird.

In my last year of medical school I happened to go on a date to a play at The Living Theater, and sitting right in front of me was Elaine. I just couldn’t believe it. I was so happy to see her. I kept talking to her. Her date wasn’t happy that she was talking to me and my date wasn’t happy I was talking to her. That night I just happened to have a pomegranate with me. It’s not like I carried a pomegranate wherever I went but I must’ve been shopping and bought one. I just reached over and handed it to her. The pomegranate symbolized something for us, maybe craziness. The next day we started dating again and never stopped.

You had three children together and shared the same guru. I know that in 2010 your then 26-year-old son Jon died of cancer, which led you both to lose faith, at least provisionally. Can you tell that story?

Jon was our middle child and the life of our family. When he died we were very broken, as if none of our spiritual training nor seeing all those dying children in India had prepared us for this, and we were mad at God. We were mad at Maharaji.

A guru is a lot of things. Guru means “dispeller of darkness.” It means “teacher,” like a rabbi or priest, but in Hinduism there’s this idea that your guru is someone who knows you throughout many incarnations and is like your soul doctor. In that sense some people think your guru is kind of an insurance policy. Certainly many people around him would think of Maharaji that way. Like if your car broke down Maharaji will find the tow truck to come. And if your child was sick you would call Maharaji and in some way hope that the child would become better. When my child became sick he didn’t become better, he died. And it seemed so unfair.

Perhaps it’s a silly superficial way to think about your teacher but we sort of thought he was covered by the United Insurance of Maharaji policy. And of course he wasn’t. And despite all the wonderful things that had happened to me, all the wonderful blessings and people I had met and the work at WHO, he died. And because my training program included seeing thousands of little babies die, so many in my arms from smallpox, I thought I was prepared for anything. Of course I wasn’t.

We know of a couple of other families, who when somebody died they took the guru’s picture off the wall. I think the closest we came was we took his picture and turned it with his face to the wall for a few months as we were unable to talk about it or to seek solace or consolation in any of the great teachings or prayer. Then as the acute pain began to diminish we realized that there had been so many joyful days. We did not want to lose the wonderful things about how bright and lively and smart and funny and full of love Jon was—to not let him die twice. That helped us. We started thinking our spiritual job was to make the days of joy of his memory exceed those of pain. Sometimes that works, other times it doesn’t.

How do you think about Maharaji now, who left his body more than 45 years ago?

It’s extremely inconvenient. I’d love to talk to him right now. But I do in a way. There’s a conversation always going on in the background.

Going back to the hippie days, how did psychedelics play a role in opening you up to Eastern spirituality or Maharaji?

I’m a scientist trained in medicine and before that I trained in nuclear physics. I don’t think that I would have been able to see Maharaji (in the sense that Castaneda uses the word see) if I had not taken psychedelics. My mind would not have permitted the kind of logical conundrum of someone like Maharaji who clearly lived in a different dimension.

As a hippie doctor with the advantage of retrospect, how can you advise young people who may be tempted by the lure of psychedelics?

I’m really torn by that question because it’s a fraught subject. It’s an individual thing and not generalizable. If it were my kids it’s not going to be a one-word answer but a looong conversation. I am grateful for psychedelics but we also didn’t have the widespread yoga, meditation, and all the other alternative ways of getting to the same answers. Those safer alternatives are more accessible now. I’ve seen people who turned out wonderfully and I’ve seen people dead in elevator shafts with needles in their arms. I saw a kid at a Rainbow Gathering filled with LSD thinking he was God and could fly. He leaped off a cliff and died. I pronounced him dead. Widespread irresponsible use of psychedelics as a party drug is so dangerous and sacrilegious and de-values the magic. Gnōthi seauton—that is the Greek inscription written above the famous Oracle of Delphi. It means “Know thyself.” That is always going to be the real answer.

Guru devotion is so misunderstood, particularly in the West. Were you ever cagey about showing your devotion, especially within scientific circles?

No. I learned from Ram Dass early on that if you have a secret then go public with it. For a long time he felt it diminished him that he would talk about everything in public but not that he was gay. He tells the story about how he and his boyfriend were standing in line to see a pornographic movie when this elderly woman says, “Ram Dass, oh my God. My life is complete. I’ve been reading Be Here Now and [pause] what are you standing in this line for?” And Ram Dass said of all the conversations he’s had that’s the one he thinks about so often because he was leading a double life. The next day in a speech he said, “I am a gay man.” And it was so liberating. First he realized that nobody cared at the level they did in the ‘50s and everybody was thrilled that he was that open with them. So I learned to do the same thing about your love for your guru. Hey, I’m an old antiwar hippie spiritual guy who lived in a monastery—who likes to play golf. That’s my dirty little secret. [laughs]

You co-founded Seva Foundation. Can you explain the background and ideology of Seva?

This is the path of Karma Yoga. There are many yogic paths but the idea that Maharaji taught me most is Karma Yoga—of merging with God through acts in the world. The key is to have no attachment to those acts, no holding on, no taking credit. Seva Foundation started 40 years ago because I felt like I got too much credit for the smallpox eradication. I felt like an imposter since I was the mascot. Later I became a professor of epidemiology and learned so much more that I felt like I wanted to do it again. And so did the other people who had been in the smallpox program.

Girija and I wrote an article called “Death of a Killer Disease” that was published in Quest, which is a Christian magazine that was widely read. For some reason a lot of people started sending notes in the mail that basically said, “Keep doing what you’re doing.” And money. We got envelopes filled with checks and cash—more than $20,000 worth. So we had to figure out what to do with it. Girija said, “Let’s call together a meeting with all the people we wrote about in the article and ask them what to do with the money.” So that led to a meeting of the most improbable people you could imagine. Lots of United Nations diplomats, lots of CDC epidemiologists, Dr. Nicole Grasset, Michigan professors, Ram Dass, Wavy Gravy with his propeller beanie. There was a Catholic nun, Lama Surya Das, Hog Farm friends, Neem Karoli Baba devotees—we were a funny-looking group.

At the meeting we asked, “What should we do with the $20,000?” We thought we would use the money to pay the expenses for everybody’s coming to the meeting but Nicole Grasset was most adamant that we should work on eradicating needless blindness. And instead of spending $20,000 for the meeting the attendees kicked in another $20,000 and that’s how Seva started—to help provide critical eye care to underserved communities. Steve Jobs kicked in another $5,000 and joined the board and became one of our secret Santas. Seva has helped 5 million blind people regain their sight in more than 20 countries.

And you throw great parties! Can you talk about your friendship with Steve Jobs and how he was spiritually motivated?

In some ways Steve was one of the most profound spiritual seekers I’ve met because he was so intense and determined to find the answers to questions that everybody looks for. He read about Neem Karoli Baba and after dropping out of Reed College flew to India to meet Maharaji, but by the time he got there our guru had died and been cremated. Steve felt like all of us, lost. We’d all felt we lost a parent. Steve stayed in the ashram for six months, shaved his head, became vegetarian, walked barefoot, and ate only living foods, which is difficult to do in India. He hadn’t started Apple yet. He was one of the young hippies just like I was one of the young hippies.

Back in America he wrote me about how impressed he was with the idea that you could have a global impact eradicating a disease. He visited me a couple times in Ann Arbor while we were thinking about starting Seva. We’d go for walks talking about the meaning of life. He was always on fire when he talked about that. He was a wonderful man. I’ve heard these stories about what a mercurial manager he was but when he was running Apple when it had 17,000 employees there were 17,000 people who would laid down in front of a train for him. That’s who he was. He was that kind of a leader.

You were a co-founder of the Well and the first executive director of Google’s foundation as well as a director of the Skoll Foundation and Salesforce.org and have lots of experience with the tech elite. There is an unprecedented wave of mindfulness infiltrating Silicon Valley and I wonder how you gauge the spiritual consciousness of that trend?

Meng Tan, who was one Google’s first employees, and Mirabai Bush created a program called “Silly” for Search Inside Yourself. They began teaching meditation at Google. The techies loved it. And it went to so many other places. Salesforce founder Marc Benioff is a meditator and the company has meditation rooms on all the floors. We had an event at Salesforce called Dreamforce, where I was one of the speakers talking about mindfulness, reminding that one should never talk about mindfulness without also talking about compassion. Because mindfulness alone—if it is to give you a tactic to be better at your work, or more alert—if it isn’t for the purpose of being more compassionate, then it’s not the real mindfulness.

Comes back to that funny rift between do-ers and be-ers. Is it more important to do—or to be? Do? Be? Doobie do be doo. [laughs]

That schism became our inner joke at Seva. Ram Dass represented the be-ers and always wanted Seva to slow down and smell the flowers, work on ourselves and interpersonal relationships. Meanwhile Dr. Nicole Grasset and Dr. V (Govindappa Venkataswamy) wanted us to do more and more eye surgeries.

Once there was a huge fight between Ram Dass and Nicole in our garage in Chelsea, Michigan, at the second or third Seva meeting. Ram Dass was essentially saying, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Or what do you gain if you give sight back to 100,000 blind people but lose your way? And Nicole said, “Who gives a damn about my soul? I don’t matter! I could roast in hell as long as I know that there’s no more suffering in the world! I will be content.” It was like watching Mother Theresa argue with the Dalai Lama—a wonderful moment. They’re obviously both right. Do-be-do-be-do! [laughs]

Pranksters like Ken Kesey and Wavy Gravy clearly had their own brand of altruism, though not necessarily with the spiritual overlay.

Kesey was an incredibly spiritual person, larger than life. I once heard Stewart Brand say that Kesey was one of the most Christ-like people he’d ever met. Wavy is really one of the deepest and most profound mystics but that’s a part people don’t know unless they watch his movie Saint Misbehavin’.

What are your concerns for future generations and the planet?

I wonder what Mother Earth thinks about us calling this the Anthropocene era! [laughs]

I’m conscious that after World War II we watched the gut-wrenching horror show of skeletons emerging from the concentration camps and the mushroom clouds, the tens of millions of dead soldiers. We saw what human beings could do to each other. We peered over the abyss and looked into hell and collectively said, “Never again.”

Every country agreed, without even talking about it, to give up a little bit of its sovereignty believing we were all in it together. A torrent of new organizations was created such as the UN and WHO, the Security Council, and so many more. We witnessed a rush of centripetal forces bringing us to the notion of one global village. Today it’s the opposite. We have centrifugal forces fleeing the center, splintering us apart, trying to divide us by religion, by gender, by race, by geography. Nationalism. Provincialism. Dutarte. Ertegun. Putin. Brexit. Trump. Xi. Just keep naming ’em.

I think it’s logical that we should be concerned about global threats such as pandemics because who’s going to stop it? Who will respond if everybody goes back to their nation state trying to stop the virus at the border without caring about any other place? What about climate change? It is not something that can be fixed by nationalism. What about water? The melting of the Himalayas? Nuclear weapons? Cyber weapons? If nationalists abrogate all of our treaties the world becomes much more dangerous. Global issues are solved at a global level and provincialism is the opposite.

How would you grade your generation’s report card?

We would get an Incomplete [laughs]. The story is not in yet. It was quite an eye-opener when I listened to Newt Gingrich as he created his Contract for America that led to the Republican takeover of Congress. When asked what was his motivation he said he was so offended by the counterculture that he wanted to do the exact opposite of everything we did in the ’60s. At that moment I realized the great law of physics, that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. It is also true for social movements.

In that light I look at the rise of the Tea Party and right-wing evangelical Christian communities and I think of the kind of freedom, experimentation, alternative living arrangements, alternative sexual and marriage arrangements, communal living, disdain for materialism, and kind of nascent hedonism that fueled the hippie movement. And while I loved it and still think it was one of the greatest moments in American or world consciousness, I would be disingenuous not to not remind myself of the kids who died in elevator shafts with needles in their arms or the one on LSD who leaped off a cliff. So you can’t look at the hippie movement, the drugs, without recognizing that there were externalities—both great ones and sad ones. It was great for some. It wasn’t good for everybody.

How might you compare the enthusiasm and zeitgeist of the ’60s to today?

Millennials are much like we were in the ’60s. Yes, there are jokes about Millennials being unable to get anything done because of their endless narcissism but that’s not my experience. I see a generation much like ours, pushing the boundaries of inquiry, trying to break down barriers. Look at the rapidity with which gay marriage is accepted within the Evangelical youth community! In Silicon Valley, Millennials won’t work for a company that violates their values. They vote with their feet and walk out. I see a generation inheriting the best of all that history has provided including the kinds of mindfulness practices we talked about earlier.

You’ve been at this a long time. Do you ever feel jaded?

I’m not jaded at all. I still believe in God and Maharaji and as bad as it is—we’ll get through this. It’s been much worse. We forget that they called them World Wars because they were world wars! Far fewer people are dying in uniform. In the last 50 years the life expectancy has increased by more than 25 years. The percentage of people living below poverty has dropped by 50 percent. When I was working in India and Bangladesh 50 percent of children died before the age of five. Yes, the world could drift toward fascism. We’re certainly flirting with it in many countries but I see so many good things.

A final message to Common Ground readers?

Stick with it. Don’t give up. The journey of self-discovery, the journey to creating a fairer and more equitable world, of combating racism and sexism and all the isms—hatred—these are lifelong battles. Nobody said it was going to be easy. Martin Luther King quoted a Unitarian minister who said, “The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” But he did not say that gravity alone made it bend. He said, “If you want that arc to bend toward justice it needs your help.” You’ve got to jump up and grab that arc and bend it down. It doesn’t bend toward justice on its own.

Rob Sidon is publisher and editor in chief of Common Ground.

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist born in 1944, the youngest of eight children of sharecropper parents in Eatonton, Georgia. As an 8-year-old she was blinded in one eye while playing cowboys and Indians, which prompted her interest in reading and writing. She was valedictorian of her high school class, earning a scholarship to Spelman College, where she met the likes of Martin Luther King and Howard Zinn. In 1963 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she became pregnant and had an abortion—an experience that led to a bout of suicidal thoughts that inspired Once, her first published collection of poetry.

In 1967 she married Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They settled in Jackson, Mississippi, where they were harassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan, despite becoming the first legally married interracial couple in the state. In 1969 Alice bore their daughter, Rebecca; the couple divorced amicably in 1976. Alice and Rebecca have long been estranged.

In 1982 Walker won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple, which was made into a Steven Spielberg hit movie in 1985 featuring Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah Winfrey. The novel and film generated painful criticism from black groups who denounced the portrayal of blacks, but the controversy died down by the time the story was adapted into a Broadway musical in 2005.

An avowed feminist who early on taught college courses on black women writers and became editor of Ms. Magazine in 1973, Walker in 1983 coined the term “womanist”—to mean “a black feminist or feminist of color.” Walker claimed “womanism…a word of our own” to unite women of color with the feminist movement.

A leading figure in liberal politics who participated in the early Civil Rights and anti-war movements, Walker was also part of the female activist group Code Pink, which traveled to Gaza in 2009 in response to the Gaza War. In 2012, she refused to authorize a Hebrew translation of her book The Color Purple, criticizing Israel as an “apartheid state.”

The author of numerous novels and poetry collections including Hard Times Require Furious Dancing and Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart, Alice, a longtime Bay Area resident, is the subject of film director Pratibha Parbar’s Beauty in Truth.

Common Ground: The world is transfixed by the Supreme Court nomination hearings, which feel like the Civil War since they represent a challenge to Roe v. Wade. What’s your sentiment, especially since you personally experienced having an abortion in college?

I think that it’s every woman’s right to control her body. If you’re not ready to have a baby, you should not have one. I have had two abortions in my life and they were done because I realized I could not afford to keep anybody’s children, mine or anybody else’s. My mother had eight children but never wanted to have eight. She wanted to have six. I was the eighth child. One of the things I learned was how it feels to really know that your parents do love you but that they really wish you hadn’t been born.

I think that people should realize that half of the people who are born on the planet are accidents—unplanned. It’s cruel to make people suffer for something that was an accident, in that they didn’t plan to have a baby. They thought they were just having a wonderful experience. So I don’t think there’s a place for the judges or anyone to insert themselves. Grownups pretty much know what they need and want. If they don’t want to have another child, they shouldn’t be forced to have one.

How would you convey this sentiment if you were trying to sway an audience of female conservatives?

I have no idea. All I can do is talk out of my own experience.

You’ve spoken about this universal wisdom of women, as I understand it, in the context of tempering the male impulse to destroy. Can you elaborate?

I think you’re referring to a talk I gave about indigenous people in the Southern Hemisphere and I am forgetting the name [of the culture] but they understood men’s and women’s different tendencies in the role of creation. They had the idea that women’s role was to create and men’s role to destroy—but women had the power to say when to stop. The men in the culture were supposed to heed the warning from the women as to when to stop their destructiveness.

We don’t have that. And this is one of the things that indigenous people, especially the ones from deep indigenous-rooted cultures, find so strange about our culture: The men just destroy and waste and pollute and the women never say “Stop.” Now if the women try to say stop, nobody pays much attention. Our lack of balance is really obvious to people who have lived in cultures where things are more balanced and where there’s a deeper understanding that you cannot just continue to trash the planet without limits.

Going back to the Supreme Court—it’s been a very cruel court for most of its existence. I can’t claim high reverence for it as it has made us grovel to get even tiny freedoms. Then it has delighted in snatching those away whenever somebody with a lot of money or power could force somebody on the Supreme Court to basically make us feel like idiots for believing that we could have a country where everybody could more or less be free if they left other people in peace.

You were very active in both the Civil Rights movement and the women’s movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s. What difference did you see between those movements?

The Civil Rights movement started in the South but it’s heavily African American. The leaders were African American people, mostly men but a lot of women leaders behind the scenes. The women’s movement in this country was mostly white, especially in the beginning, but in other parts of the world of course it wasn’t—which is what people tend to forget. We tend to think that it started here but all over the world women have been struggling to be free—being pro-abortion and opposed to brutality from the husbands and men. The women’s struggle is not so new. It’s just that it found a voice in the ‘60s and ‘70s and a coalescence. In the West we have a greater ability to project the happenings.

You knew Martin Luther King. What was the effect of meeting him?

We met when I was a student and he came back to Morehouse College where he went as a student. I went to Spelman for a couple years, which is a women’s college right across the street from Morehouse. He was a fully grown person in his full fierceness as a warrior—a compassionate warrior. I must’ve been a sophomore, or even a freshman, fresh-person. Anyhow he had an incredible impact on me because he seemed to be fearless. Now I don’t think that was true. We all have fear—it’s a natural thing. He had decided that his love outweighed his fear and he really loved us. He inspired us out of that love.

This is our Women’s issue so let’s talk about Mother Earth. I’ve heard you lament that the earth has been muted, that the landscape is silent, leaving an inert terrain for the likes of Monsanto to plunder.

Monsanto is just one in a long line of plunderers. I come from Georgia, in the South, where hundreds of years ago they pretty much destroyed that land. They started destroying it by cutting down all the trees and then burning all the stumps and planting cotton. That wiped out that whole ecosystem. What you see now is nothing like it was before white European people moved to this continent. That silencing of nature is the legacy—they just couldn’t stand any kind of noise.

One of the problems with our short attention span and our educational system, which is so terribly faulty, is that people have a hard time understanding that Monsanto is just the head of the beast that we’ve been dealing with for 500 years. It’s just that we’re seeing it now because it’s so stark. Not long ago we couldn’t even imagine that Western and postmodern
technology would actually start killing the immense ocean. We thought, “My God, the ocean is so huge—how could you do that?” Well, they’re doing it. It’s the murder of the planet. It’s tragic for many of us who have been trying to draw attention to the fact that it’s being stolen and killed. It’s hard for people to see it because these connections are not made. The ahistorical sense is strong. We cannot move forward in full understanding if we don’t know where we’ve been.

Long before it was in vogue you were experiencing shamanic plant medicines like Mama Ayahuasca. How did those journeys inform your Earth wisdom?

When I encountered Grandmother Ayahuasca and the teachings it was astonishing, confirming that the earth is alive. It’s conscious. I say Earth but it’s whatever else there is here—wherever it is we are—and that it’s wonderful, and right! It taught that we were living in such a magical realm that people didn’t understand.

Honestly there’s not a person you could ask the question, “Where are you?” Because who would know? Or “How did we get here?” Nobody would know. What Ayahuasca does for the person who is a real seeker is teach that this is just one realm among many endless other realms and maybe you can get a peek into some other realm if you have a guide.

But then without a guide you get lost, like Timothy Leary and those people who went down to Oaxaca. Do you know the story of how they met up with Maria Sabina?

Not really.

She was this shaman who was healing people with mushrooms. And they came with their Western way—basically just to get high and have a hallucinatory adventure, whereas she was working at the level of curing the soul and connecting it to the planet, to the earth, and to whatever other realm. There was a lot of confusion and distance from each other and inability to fully connect and feel trustful with each other—because of all the past—the disasters of missteps and of their trying to make some kind of American fun out of another culture’s deep wisdom. People have not wanted to do the hard work of actually being taught to understand another way of relating to our life support. And we’re paying the price.

Your mother raised you Christian. What was the effect on you, as a way to speak about your background?

I ran away from church when I was eleven because my parents were too tired to make me go anymore. First of all, I couldn’t understand what the preacher was saying and I don’t think he understood what he was saying. I loved the music. People were kind to me and loved me but I didn’t believe. I sat there looking out the window pretty much the whole time because to me, the church is everything — the planet, Nature. That’s where I felt at home.

So I stayed home and had a wonderful time with the elements, the wind and rain and the sky and trees. I grew up absolutely loving Nature. Now that doesn’t mean that I didn’t also love some of the really good people that were talked about in church. I really liked Jesus, a lot. I resented the idea that I had to look at somebody being tortured on the cross. I thought it was just so wrong, especially for my culture because we had enough lynched people being tortured. We didn’t need to have another. It was hard on the spirit.

Did you gravitate to Eastern spiritual philosophies? What has been the general arc of your spiritual quest?

Nature, Native American, Taoism. I feel closer probably to Taoist thought. Basically to just be quiet in Nature and to be respectful of its ways and to try to model myself more on how Nature does instead of how some out-of-balance human with too much money is doing. That has been a great saving of my life—to have these teachers.

Also Buddhist thought. Nature first. Taoism second. Buddhism third. And then there’s just my mother’s incredible radiance as a being who connected with the earth and who truly loved what it could produce by working together in Nature. That was my model for how humans — if they worked respectfully with Nature — could create incredible beauty and sustenance for humanity.

You grew up poor and became very successful. Was material success a motivator for you? Has it been satisfying?

I grew up very, very poor but I never felt incapable of securing a decent life for myself and my children, if I had children. My ambition was to have a decent life in community, not a well-to-do life. It’s true that I have done very well because I work hard and my books have sold a lot of copies and all that stuff. But I still live very simply. I still have a garden. I still have chickens and a very simple life.

I’ve heard you say that even women who do achieve a lot are still often managed by men. How was that your experience?

I’m not.

I heard you say that growing up in the South you came to expect that every white man was just like Donald Trump—that this is just how they are.

Yeah, I mean there was no way I could ever assume that they were any better than Donald Trump. I mean, how would that have happened? I didn’t know another kind existed. I didn’t know that there were decent white men until I was seventeen. The first one was Howard Zinn, and I’m so thankful. I tell you, it’s just amazing.

The irony is that you fell in love and married a white man who became the father of your daughter.

Oh, no, no, no. I didn’t even like that he was white. How dare he? I was annoyed that he was white. I fell in love with his soul and it’s not like I’m marrying a Donald Trump from Georgia. I’m marrying somebody who’s risking his life to help me have a life. There’s a big difference. At that level of being color is ridiculous. I mean color is always pretty ridiculous but really, when you’re in Mississippi and the Klan is leaving its calling card at your door and people are firebombing houses and killing people, you don’t really think that much that the somebody you like is white. You think about them as somebody that you’re really hoping will be safe.

Suffering is the great teacher. I’ve heard you speak about the glowing preciousness of life and I’ve heard you also speak about deep suffering. How do you reconcile those seemingly opposite narratives?

I reconcile them because they have to be if you expect to stay alive. A lot of people are committing suicide but I don’t plan to do that because I feel that life gives pretty much what you put into it. In my case I put all my gratitude for what I have, as life can be sometimes up and sometimes down, bountiful and whimsical. Life is both, but on balance it’s a wonderful life, even with all the suffering.

I have suffered a lot and I’ll probably suffer more but I have seen some incredible sunsets and amazing rivers. I’ve been swimming in some. I’ve met some incredible people. Endless the joy that exists here when you can clear away your own cobwebs.

Is there a fundamental message within these titles like Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart and Hard Times Require Furious Dancing?

They are their own message. Hard Times Require Furious Dancing—that’s pretty much where we are. The earth has had about as much as she can stand of us as humans who just destroy things, and so she’s sending up hurricanes and typhoons and earthquakes and whatever she can come up with. She’s sending them right in on us. And I don’t blame her, she’s put up with us for a very long time and I feel like I’ve done my part not to be damaging but I think she’s pretty sick of us.

So what can you do when times are so incredibly hard? You do all your political work, you do all your philosophical work, you do all your poetry and your novel writing. Then there’s nothing much left but to meditate and dance. The thing about hard times is that they’re so fraught with the energy of disaster that it’s a furious dance — but it is a dance.

Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart comes from a Buddhist concept that I learned from Pema Chödrön about how we are shot in the heart. Constantly now. I mean there’s always something that just gets you. And the trap would be to just keep trying to yell at the person who is doing it, like yelling at Trump, just as an example. So while you’re screaming at the archer you’re dying because you haven’t tended your own heart and learned how to take out the arrow. You could actually try to learn to do that—to take it out. Then when you have your heart open and healthy again you’ll have more energy to deal with all the incredible horror that we are all faced with now. But you can’t do it if you’re screaming at the person or situation that caused it.

I’ve heard that The Color Purple came through you like a divine download.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Rob, I never use that term—download. But let me just tell you. This is the brief version: I lived with my grandparents when I was 8 years old and I loved them very much. They were extraordinarily kind to me—my grandfather especially. Yet as younger people when my father was growing up my grandfather was a terrible person—and also my mother’s father. They were batterers—just terrible people. I did not understand how that was possible—that they could transform. This grandfather whom I knew as an 8-year-old, who died in the course of time, was someone I wanted to spend more time with consciously. He was a gentle, kind, thoughtful old man. So I felt like I’d been with them but I was so little and life was so tough that I didn’t understand hardly anything.

So basically that story [The Color Purple] comes out of a little 8-year-old who wanted to understand her grandparents, and her parents and her community, but who didn’t have the time. So when I had an opportunity I moved my house from New York to California and I wrote it in a year.

The Color Purple attracted so much criticism from the black community back in the day. How did that criticism affect you?

The criticism was very painful. It was undeserved. It was ignorant because most of the people had not read the book. Then they criticized the movie. But by the time it was turned into a musical there was no more criticism left, which was very interesting. A lot of those people had died, and then some of the others had children who started teaching them about sexism and wife beating and incest and all those things that now everybody knows and talks about. So it just died away.

After The Color Purple I started a publishing company [Wild Tree Press in 1984] and went to the country and published other people and went swimming in the river and kept on admiring this great creation we live in. That’s the other part of that kind of trial. You see how ridiculous it is. It hurts, and yet when you’re sitting under a redwood tree that’s 500 or 700 years old by a river that just seems really far away.

As an artist do you ever look back at novels such as The Color Purple with the decades of intervening wisdom and think, “Oh, I might re-tweak this or that”?

No, there’s no point. I don’t have time. I keep writing. I’m going forward. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen my blog but I write and publish something several times a month. I don’t feel the need to go back. I did it the best I could then. It’s true to what was, in my ability and my heart, I don’t re-tweet. [giggles] Re-tweak.

You’re coming out with a new book, sharing your personal journals. I’m curious what those will be about and why you’re moved to share them.

Well, we can talk about that when I get to that, but I’m not there yet.

What pains you most?

Abuse of the earth and of people pains me the most. I can hardly stand what is being done to children—almost everywhere. I mean poor little things. If I were a child spirit being incarnated somewhere I would go back. I wouldn’t need an abortion. I would just say “Nope, I’m not coming here.” I really would say that to almost any child spirit because we don’t deserve the children we have. We treat them badly. Even the ones who are quote “well-todo”—the rich ones—I find that they don’t have much of a life either. Maybe because they are kept separate from the reality that so much of the planet is being destroyed and that children almost everywhere have very little say in what happens to them. I mean they are really just treated abominably. That is the hardest thing.

Something that pains me is the thought of young girls undergoing female circumcision. It’s something that Eve Ensler taught me about.

That’s another whole front—the abuse of children. Children just don’t get to have a say in what is happening. It’s hard to bear.

What makes you happiest?

I’ve had a good life. With all the struggles, all the suffering, it’s been amazing. I’m so grateful. Even though the ocean is so badly polluted and the whales are dying it’s still an incredible thing. I’m glad that I lived at a time when I didn’t realize what was happening to the earth. I feel like those of us who are around this age should be very grateful that we lived here at a time when it was still solid. It was still firm under our feet. That’s a gift of huge magnitude.

Rob Sidon is publisher and editor in chief of Common Ground.

Nicholas and Amanda Giacomini enjoy a rare yoga love story, having met on January 2, 2000, at an Ashtanga teacher training held by their mutual teacher Larry Schultz. Nick was only 20 and Amanda was married at the time. They learned to be good friends before becoming lovers—a virtue they claim helps sustain their collaborative partnership.

Amanda hails from Massachusetts. At 17, following her graduation from Andover Academy, she came to study fine arts at UC Berkeley. Nick is a fourth generation North Bay native whose parents divorced after his father came out of the closet when Nick was becoming a teen. Raised Catholic, he says now that homosexuality-as-sin confusion was one of the many triggers that catapulted him into a depressed crisis that included plenty of drugs and police arrests. He was expelled from every school he attended until he wound up at the Hanna Boys Center in Sonoma, where he found refuge in music, art, and sleep. He credits yoga with transforming his life and has fashioned a successful career as MC Yogi, a sought-after instructor, performer, emcee, and visual artist who earned multiple invitations to teach at the Obama White House along with headliner appearances at the world’s most prestigious yoga festivals.

With fascinating stories including multiple nearfatal car accidents, Nick and Amanda share grounded yoga wisdom—particularly for being such a young couple. Nick’s music uniquely combines uplifting spiritual messages with contemporary hip-hop beats. He has released multiple albums and a memoir, Spiritual Graffiti: Finding My True Path, while Amanda is creator of the 10,000 Buddhas Project. We caught up with them at their Point Reyes yoga studio, known as Yoga Toes.

Common Ground: “So you’re stronger than you think you are, Lucky.” What’s the significance of that phrase?

Nick Giacomini aka MC Yogi: [laughs] Larry Schultz, my first yoga teacher, said that to me. Larry was a crazy rock ‘n roll kind of motivational yogi who started It’s Yoga in San Francisco. He had famously toured and taught yoga with the Grateful Dead. He called me Lucky because that was my grandfather Toby’s nickname. Toby was a gregarious outgoing generous spirit, always giving things away and making people smile and laugh. He used to always say, “Man, it’s so beautiful! How could it get better than this?” Everyone called him Lucky, not because of some external, superficial materialistic reason but because of his heartfelt attitude. He felt that just being alive meant—we’re lucky. When Toby was in his twilight years I became his sidekick and copilot. I’d drive him around and people started calling me Lucky. It was contagious.

The Giacomini family has been in West Marin since the 19th century, no?

The little I know is that the Giacominis came from Italy during the Gold Rush and ended up settling around this area—Petaluma, Sonoma, and Marin County. They didn’t have a lot of money but did have a strong work ethic. My grandfather was a product of the Depression. One Christmas day he said to my grandmother, “I sold the family car and I bought a truck and I’m going into the trucking business.” He started small, hauling stuff from the dairies, and worked hard. Then he kept going until at one point he had the feed store, semi trucks hauling stuff all up and down California. But it all started from one single truck and his desire to make something with his life.

He grew alongside the regional dairy industries—the Stornettas, Straus Creamery. He was based here in Point Reyes?

Yeah. My grandma grew up in Petaluma. And my mom’s family emigrated from a small poor island in Portugal. My mom told me she never owned a pair of shoes before she came to America. They didn’t speak English nor have any money. Seven brothers and sisters came over and worked on the farms. I’m fourth-generation on my father’s side and first-generation on my mom’s side. Both sides of my family had that in common—working really hard and creating a life in the New World.

You grew up Catholic, right? Were they pious?

Both my parents were Catholic but it was my grandmother on my dad’s side who was very pious. We called her Big Mama. She was my first catechism teacher. Every night she used to do the rosary and pray for the family. I’d often sit with her and we’d read from the Bible together and go through the rosary.

What was the effect on you—the Godfearing Catholic background?

My only real connection was through my grandma. I saw her devotion and how it influenced her life and I was inspired by that but I didn’t resonate with Catholicism and the Church in terms of the dogma. It just seemed disconnected for me. All that superstition and dry empty robotic rituals that I didn’t understand. [chuckles] And the stories of Hell—that heavy trip! As a kid I just remember it felt weird and didn’t make sense.

Then when you were about eight your dad comes out of the closet at a time when society was less tolerant of homosexuality. Can you describe how you took that on?

I was too young to really understand what that meant but yeah, it was like a heavy secret. I mean I ended up moving around and going to different schools and going to Catholic school and the indoctrination of the Church is that this was a sin, which I never totally understood. It just became heavy baggage that I had to lug around and figure out.

It seems that before your life went into a downward spiral you’d had a happy childhood until your parents divorced. Was this because your dad came out of the closet?

Yeah, that was really the catalyst.

You’ve had a number of near-fatal car accidents. Can you describe the first?

That accident happened right as the divorce was finalizing between my parents and it happened at the exact midway point between my parents’ homes. My world was cracked open because both sides of my family started to drift apart and I started falling into the gap. I didn’t know what I could rely on anymore—spiraling me on a journey to try to figure out what was real.

Do you remember the accident itself?

I remember very clearly. We almost died. We were listening to Bob Marley in my dad’s car. CDs had just come out and we just got Exodus. All of us were in a general good mood going up this hill when my dad’s tire caught in the gravel. He tried to correct it and actually overcorrected. As he tried to get us back on the road the car spun and hit a telephone pole nose-first. Then the car rolled down the hill. It all happened in slow motion but it was very dramatic. My sister’s hand went through the window and I just remember the chaos and the screams and the confusion. I ran up the side of the mountain to get help because I was the oldest. Right as I was about to step onto the road someone yelled “Stop!” I was about to step on the broken electrical wire. So I almost died twice [laughs]! Then we were ushered into the ambulance.

Indirectly, this first accident introduced you to yoga?

It wasn’t until many years later that I found out that the incident led my dad to his first yoga class with Larry Schultz. A friend of his recommended that he go to a yoga class to help recover. He did and became dedicated to the practice. In the same way my grandmother was naturally devoted—that inspired devotion in me. Perhaps because it was natural and not superimposed on me. When my dad started practicing yoga he never talked about it. It just seemed to enter his bones. Eventually I noticed his transformation and how he was becoming more relaxed and in tune with himself and I became curious. Eventually I asked him what was going on and he replied, “It’s yoga.” Now that I’ve been practicing yoga for 20 years and teaching for 18 I have found that most people come to yoga because of some tragedy or health crisis. Something is broken and they’re trying to reconnect.

Before finding yoga you went far afield, a kind of lost bad boy.

Becoming a teenager is a confusing time for anybody, trying to figure out who you are in relationship to yourself, your parents, your religion, fitting in with friends. I started doing drugs and partying pretty young and failed all my classes. I kept getting suspended and got kicked out of every school I attended. I was never violent or anything but just disconnected, aloof, detached—seen as a problem kid. The fact is I was struggling with depression. My parents put me in therapy and wanted to medicate me. The therapist recommended Ritalin and Adderall. Personally I think I was just having a spiritual crisis of not knowing what was real and reliable.

Besides drugs how else did you cope as a teen?

Three things. One, I’m a dreamer. I used to love to sleep and escape within my dreams. I found it was a controlled way to escape the pressure and pain of the external world. I almost became a narcoleptic. I flunked my classes because I wouldn’t pay attention to the teacher or do any homework because I was always sleeping.

The second thing was music. I’d put my headphones on and drown out all the arguments and whatever was going on externally. I got lost in the world of music. The third was art. Since early on I loved to draw, which helped me develop my imagination. I had to figure out ways to deal with the world on my own terms and essentially turn pain into art. I think this is why in a lot of ways I am just so creative.

I am comparing you to Noah Levine’s [Dharma Punx] story but my impression is that yours wasn’t as heavily drug infused.

I’m good friends with Noah and we definitely have a rhyming journey but I never spiraled that far. Early on I witnessed firsthand a couple kids that I ran with who overdosed, committed suicide, got involved in really heavy drugs. I realized I had to draw the line somewhere. Some part of me knew there was a limit to what I could get away with. I never went so extreme that I couldn’t come back. I never went down the road of opiates and heroin or sniffed anything. There was some intuitive thing or maybe the voice of my grandpa or some higher angels.

I’ve often driven by the Hanna Boys Center, which looks ominous, and wondered what it’s like there. You’re the only one I can ask.

After getting kicked out of every school, including continuation-type schools for troubled kids, I ended up going to the Hanna Boys Center, a group home in Sonoma. Honestly, at first that place was really sad but it turned out to be a blessing. I really lacked the structure and the discipline needed to just put one foot in front of the other and get through. So it helped me get my grades up and graduate. Everyone has a different experience but mine was positive.

As you know I’m raising a teenager who’s giving me a revived glimpse into that tricky age you’re describing. I see a lot of drug use but sometimes I question what’s worse—the concentrated THC or the misogyny coming from hip-hop. What’s your take on the music?

sighs] There’s a lot of troubling messages in the music world. Unfortunately it’s been like that for a long time. But there are also really inspiring, powerful, profound artists. I was lucky because when I was young my dad turned me on to Bob Marley and we used to listen to the Beatles and I was really into soul music. And I’ve always gravitated toward music that had roots in devotional music.

Yeah. What about good old-fashioned love songs?

[laughs] Yeah, love songs. We live in a busy, noisy, hectic, chaotic world but that doesn’t mean that love is not shining powerfully underneath in the form of silence and presence. I think it was through my yoga that I was able to really turn up the volume on my breath and turn down the volume on my chattering monkey mind. Yoga helped me get in touch with that space inside myself where I could tap into my own music. I think everyone, on some level, needs to figure out what kind of song they want to sing. Sometimes you’ve got to listen to a lot of different kinds of songs before you figure out what’s yours. I decided I want my life to be a devotional love song.

In your tradition of hip-hop rap did you ever feel like the goody two-shoes? The presumption is that had you gone in another direction you might’ve been more affluent as a music man.

One of the first pieces of advice I was given from this record industry guy was that I should be more angry, like Eminem. But I didn’t really feel that. I was practicing yoga and meditating all day. I’d become vegetarian. I was reading scriptures and hanging out with older people and vibing on everything that yoga was offering. Yoga had turned me around at that point and I was genuinely lit up. My music came across as kind of nerdy and weird but also kind of fun and free. Honestly I think that’s what helped me stand out. When you do something that is authentically in your heart it’s going to stand out because everybody else on some level is just trying to fit into the status quo. There’s actually power in being different.

I learned how to adapt while staying true to my vision. And I think that the more I progressed and the more I produced, the more I realized how to connect to my audience. That’s the real dance—to find the balance. B.K.S. Iyengar said something to that effect: “The definition of enlightenment is becoming innocent without becoming ignorant.” I resonate with that because as we get older we tend to get bitter and jaded as we see how messed up and dark the world is and how corrupt so many of our institutions are. Through yoga and meditation I realized that the only real power I have is to keep coming back to my own alignment. I can increase my own ability to stand in my truth regardless of what’s going on around me. That’s a real practice but not easy.

I know Common Ground readers appreciate your yogic messages like “Be the Change” or “Give Love” but do you ever think “Dang, too bad these aren’t getting into underserved neighborhoods”?

Here’s the thing about music—it’s like wind. Music goes where it wants to go and finds its way to the places where it needs to be heard. That’s the power of music. I don’t have demographics or target markets or think tanks. I’m an independent artist so I just make the music that’s authentic to me and trust the universe that it’s eventually, maybe not in my lifetime, going to find the people who appreciate it and can benefit from it. It’s not my business who ends up listening to it. That’s beyond the realm of my control. My power is to develop my craft and keep working to make better songs.

You just now finished teaching a class. You teach yoga every day, right?

Yeah, all over. I teach in juvenile halls, I teach to at-risk communities. I was just in Southern California teaching to a summer program that brought together 300 at-risk kids from six different schools. I love teaching yoga and sharing my story because I get to look into the kids’ eyes and see how far I’ve come. I can remember what it was like at 14 or 15 and not knowing what was going on. And you know hopefully I can help shine a little light.

Between drawing and singing and teaching, do you have any preferences?

It’s something of an evolving wheel. Some days I just want to meditate. Some days I just want to teach. Some days I want to perform. Some days I want to study, or write, or I want to travel, or stay home, But it all revolves around the same hub—the center of that wheel is living a life that’s rooted in direct experience—of being present as much as possible and being open.

You’re a good value for a festival producer because you can emcee, perform, teach, give workshops. What am I forgetting here?

[laughs] Not a one-trick yogi! Well, Amanda and I paint murals together. We design stuff.

[laughs] I think it’s time to talk to Amanda. [to Amanda] Hi Amanda! Why don’t you tell the story of the first time you met this boy.

Amanda: It was day two of the new millennium, January 2, 2000, and I had already been practicing Ashtanga yoga in San Francisco for about six years with Larry Schultz. Larry had coaxed me to take the teacher training even though I had no intention of becoming a yoga teacher. My practice had plateaued so I consented. I met Nicholas on the first day of teacher training. He was having lunch with Larry. I remember sitting with him and not really saying too much to each other when all of a sudden Larry starts talking about how all these couples had met through him and through yoga and how they fell in love and got married and opened their own yoga studios. In Larry’s mind a great wave of yoga was spreading around the world through moments like this. In retrospect it felt Larry was having a prophetic moment and saw our whole lives spread out before us. That was the first moment we met.

But you were married at the time.

Yeah, so I wasn’t exactly like “Who’s this?” I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just meeting someone and going to practice. Then we became really good friends during the training and then I fell in love with him.

It wasn’t too long afterward that he nearly killed you in a car. Can you tell the story?

It was the morning after his 21st birthday and we hadn’t seen each other for a whole month as I was trying to figure out what trajectory my life was going to take. Was I going to try to stay with the person I was with? Or was I ready to be in relationship with Nick? The deciding day was the day of his birthday—and, well—I decided to show up to his birthday!

Also that night we found out that his dad had gifted us tickets to a weeklong intensive with Pattabhi Jois, our teacher’s teacher from India. The retreat started the next day in Encinitas. So this was a big exciting thing and we being big yoga nerds loaded up my car to go. We timed it so that if we drove all night we could make it to the first practice in the morning. So we’re driving fast down the I-5 and at some point close to dawn Nick, who was driving, nodded off at the wheel. I had been asleep so I woke up as the car was spinning. It was very strange because I didn’t have time to become afraid of the crash because I woke up in the middle of it. It was very surreal! I saw the car—almost like watching it from above, in slow motion. I saw the car spinning and going off the road and then all of a sudden felt the impact when we broke through a fence and started to roll off the highway. The car flipped several times and finally came to a stop. I remember looking own and checking: “Are my arms and legs still here?” Very surreal and I’m obviously in shock but I was asking myself, “What’s happening in this moment?”

[laughs] It was a very romantic car crash because the car had stopped on its side and Nick reached up and unbuckled me and I kind of fell into his arms. We climbed out of the car and we were in a field of wildflowers at the break of dawn. And there was another moment of, like, “What is happening?” I remember again thinking, “Is this really what’s happening or did we die?” “Are we now in some celestial realm?” Before the crash we had made the mistake of listening to soothing Indian ragas, which are not good driving music. The cassettes were still jammed in the car stereo.

Oh my God, you’d have been better off listening to the Beastie Boys. So you didn’t know if you were alive or dead?

It was a very surreal moment. Someone saw the car go off the road and had called Highway Patrol and so we had a period of quietness and being together at sunrise making sure we were okay. Then an officer came and checked on us. The car was totaled like an accordion—towed away. We grabbed our stuff, got a rental car without skipping a beat. Unbelievably we continued to make it to our practice with Pattabhi Jois. [laughs] Now I do most of the driving.

What was your impression upon meeting Pattabhi Jois for the first time?

It was amazing. What struck me was that at Larry’s studio, It’s Yoga, which was big, I was used to practicing with 70-80 people, which is a lot. But in Encinitas with Pattabhi Jois in the gymnasium it was like an army of 500 Ashtangi yogis practicing together, an exhilarating community to experience for the first time.

Relationship is arguably the most challenging yoga. It’s statistically rare for a young couple to stay together for nearly 20 years. What’s your secret sauce?

We came together through yoga and that continues to be our core connection point. Yoga has given us each a strong individual foundation and it’s created a strong foundation and stability for the marriage.

Okay, but it also appears that the yoga community is rife with healthy libidos. Have you crossed that barrier as the novelty of each other wears off?

Nick: One of the things we do is we meditate a lot together and I think the process of just being quiet and still and peaceful in the same moment has a way of realigning and recalibrating everything. Sometimes it’s the simplest practices that are effective when you’re doing them together and that creates harmony and unity.

Amanda: No, I feel lucky. Nicholas is really a fun person to be married to. He’s always keeping it fresh, He’s always creating new adventures for us to go on and life has never been dull. So I look forward to seeing what’s around the corner. I’m always amazed. When we were first together studying yoga I remember the yoga sutras talking about “thought, word, and deed.” I embodied that thinking, “If I’m going to be true and married to someone let it be in thought, word, and deed.” Once you start talking badly about your partner or talking about being with other people or being flirty conversationally that can be a slippery slope into some action that you maybe weren’t even intending.

For me loyalty is a discipline but you have to be on guard because we’re all human. Another of my favorite sutras is “Prevent the trouble that is not yet come.” So if you feel like a situation could end up going a certain way, getting weird, just don’t go. Don’t get too close to the fire that could burn your house down. Be careful.

I read the story about your first trip to India where you attended an elaborate Indian wedding. At one stage the grandfather presiding over the wedding turns directly to you as he’s reading the traditional vows and says, “This is where they promise, above all, to be friends.”

I think we’re lucky because I was with someone when I met Nicholas and we didn’t become intimate for a long time. We became friends first. I see a lot of people who become attracted to each other and then are having sex within days or weeks. All the while they are saying, “You’re my soulmate; we should be together forever,” but it’s like, “Whoa! These people never even learned how to be friends! They never learned how to just be normal together.” I think friendship has been a big part of our being together a long time because we had to slow down in the beginning. We’re good friends and we like being together. We share a lot of stuff about what’s going on regularly the way you would with a good friend.

You don’t have children. Was that a conscious choice?

I always thought we would and then as we got older we just never did. And it was a conscious choice. We talked about it regularly. With the lifestyle of a musician and traveling yogi being on the road if we had had children one of us—probably me—would’ve had to stay home. Some couples manage to stay together on the road with kids but I didn’t think that was going to work. So we decided to create a life where we could be together out on the road. That became our goal.

You always travel together to all the festivals and conferences?

Yes, 99% of the time. Occasionally if there’s not a requirement for me to be there and I’m tired I will stay home. Or if I need to be here for the studio. But most of the time we’re together. Somehow we’ve been able to weave it all together so we can go to the same event. He’ll perform and teach and I’ll teach and I’ll paint a mural and we can do it together. When we met I was already painting and had a studio in the lower Haight. Nicholas loved to draw and paint too so we would hang out there all day and work on canvases together. I would draw something until I felt stuck and I would give it to him and then he would draw on top of it, wipe it out, stick something else on it, and then give it back to me.

Nick [laughs] They were never really that good but we had fun doing it.

Can you describe the 10,000 Buddhas project?

The idea came to me on one of our trips to India in 2007 when we decided to visit these remote beautiful ancient Buddhist caves called the Ajanta caves. Inside one of the caves I saw a mural of 1000 little Buddhas sitting together. After I came home I did a few tiny sketches but that image stayed with me for years. Finally I got tired of it bothering me and decided I’d paint my own version of what I remembered seeing in the caves. I started painting them with oil paint and we are actually in the room with them now [points to wall]. These are Buddhas numbers 1 to 99. It took me about nine months to finish because of all the details—on their little hands, their little faces. It was very peaceful and meditative process doing this painting. I didn’t want it to end. When I was close to finishing this one I decided I would keep going until I’d painted 10,000 Buddhas. Now it’s already up to 14,000.

Wow! But they’re not equally this detailed.

[laughs] No, I quickly realized that at the rate of 99 a year I wouldn’t be around long enough! So I made paintings with ink and brush and then picked seven that I really liked and made them into stencils. That sped it up and scaled it up. After several years of just painting on wood and canvases I started painting on the sides of buildings. I have a few that are about three stories high, big murals.

So cool. And you two get to paint together! I’m curious if you see any of the residual of Nick, the once disturbed youth?

[laughs] It sometimes gets triggered. His resistance to authority figures. He doesn’t like anyone telling him what to do.

What’s a side we don’t see?

Really, he is a loyal sweetheart who is happiest spending time with family. The MC Yogi I know that not everyone gets to see is him hanging out with family, being a jokester, making people laugh.

To Nick: What is your main message to troubled youth?

Nick: Freedom through discipline. My main message is “Ask yourself—what’s the thing that you really like doing? What do you like to do when no one is around or if you’re not getting paid to do it?” For me it was listening to music, which led to making music. It was reading comic books—which led to drawing. Then practicing yoga led to teaching. So my message is “Find what you love, identify that and just develop it.” Then let go of the attachment. Don’t put a lot of time pressure on yourself because it’s not going to come to fruition in the time that you probably think. But if you keep watering it and feeding it and devoting yourself to what you love doing, it’s absolutely going to blow your mind—how amazing your life can be when you find that calling.

In your Lost Boy days I bet you could have never imagined teaching yoga at the White House. How many times did that happen?

Three or four times. Every year they would have an Easter event on the White House lawn with activities and famous athletes and musicians. Michelle Obama had the idea to include yoga because she had started the Let’s Move initiative to counter the obesity epidemic. It was a really amazing, cool experience because people came from 50 states. [laughs] But no! Never in my life did I think I’d go to the White House!

So it wasn’t like you were giving privates to the First Family?

[laughs] No, I didn’t have that kind of security clearance. Although I did give Michelle Obama a fist bump.

Larry Schultz was right nicknaming you Lucky.

I’m extremely blessed. It goes back to hearing my grandpa say, “What a beautiful day it is!” and ”What a blessing it is just to be alive.” We learn from people, not by what they say but through how they are. That was ingrained in me.

Final parting words?

Thank you. And maintain the common ground.

Rob Sidon is publisher and editor in chief of Common Ground.

Michael Murphy was born in 1930 to a prominent family in Salinas, and took an early interest in both sports and religion. He started on the premed fraternity path at Stanford but radically switched to become a yogi after stumbling into a comparative religion class taught by Frederic Spiegelberg. This kind of behavior was unheard of in Salinas in the early 1950s and the family was moved to sue both Stanford and Spiegelberg. Eventually they desisted and came to accept their son’s vow of chastity and his daily routine of deep meditation lasting from six to eight hours.

After an Army stint during the Korean War and an extended visit to the Sri Aurobindo ashram in India, Murphy returned to San Francisco, where he paired up with Dick Price, a spiritually inclined Stanford classmate. Together they started Esalen Institute in 1962 on the Big Sur property owned by Murphy’s fiery then 90-year-old grandmother.

Esalen quickly became famous as a progressive international hub that attracted A-list artists, celebrities, and intellectuals (far too many to list) from a wide range of disciplines. It became identified (and mis-identified) with a number of pioneering movements, notably the Human Potential Movement and its many spinoffs. By any yardstick Murphy is a spiritual philosopher and mystic, yet he was schooled in boxing by his own father and claims this tutelage influenced his ability to defend Esalen’s fierce independence for nearly six decades. Dick Price died while hiking in 1985.

Murphy has written many books, including Golf in the Kingdom and The Future of the Body. He and his wife, Dulce, support a broad range of research initiatives and have long been on the frontlines of Track Two citizen diplomacy aimed at improving strained relations between nations, notably the US and Russia and the former Soviet Union, through influential nongovernmental backchannels. Late in life they had a son, Mac. They live in Mill Valley, CA, where we caught up with them.

Common Ground: Can you tell the story of growing up in rural Salinas?

Michael Murphy: I had a very fortunate childhood and upbringing. My father’s family landed in Salinas in the 1890s and my grandfather was a much-loved doctor who built two hospitals there. In many ways it was an archetypal Scots-Irish family that put a premium on storytelling. My grandmother was quite a character—a redhead with four redheaded kids. My grandfather delivered John Steinbeck, who became a lifelong friend of my father’s. Reading and storytelling were in the air. My father was a lawyer. My brother was designated to become a writer and I was to be a doctor.

Sports were important?

Sports were a huge thing for us. My brother Denny and I were good athletes and we both had to learn to box as kids because my father boxed at Stanford. He actually had three professional fights and won all three. By the time I was 15 I hated blows to the head so I quit. We would ride horses in the rodeo and slide off these horses to wrestle little calves. It was a kind of kids’ version of steer wrestling. I started golf at 14, which is late to start golf, but I got good enough to compete in tournaments.

Steinbeck’s Salinas was a tough town, no?

A tough cow town of growers down there—very different from what it is now. I got a good look at the kinds of things Steinbeck was writing about in The Grapes of Wrath and his subsequent books. For example there were big strikes with the Okies who came from the Dust Bowl. In the late ’30s Harry Bridges’ communists came down and took sides with them against the growers. My father moved us kids out of town to be out of harm’s way. On another occasion a Chinese tong [gang] came down from San Francisco and killed many of the Chinese in Salinas—a mass shooting. Americans forget their history and how violent things were. Al Capone was running things in Chicago and ended up here at Alcatraz. Baby Face Nelson was hanging around Sausalito.

I grew up with a certain safety but also an awareness of how tough it was. After my first broken nose in boxing my father actually said, “Mike, you need one more to be a better-looking guy.” He said, “You’re a peaceable guy; you don’t have to fight. But if you do, you learn to break their nose with the first punch” [laughs]. This was his enduring lesson that I prize because we’ve had lots of fights at Esalen Institute. I’ve never had to break anybody’s nose physically but yes—metaphorically. You’d be surprised at our feisty history [laughter].

What was your religious upbringing?

I was the only churchgoer in the family and became an altar boy. Originally my grandmother took us to the Episcopal Church. My father’s side—he was heavily skeptical, being a lawyer. It was Mark Twain and Clarence Darrow and HL Mencken. My mother was Catholic. Her family was from the French Pyrenees. She was clearly psychic, but not a churchgoer. During summer church retreats I’d get it into my mind that I was going to become a minister. My family did not want me to be a minister [laughs].

Thinking back I was a very religious kid but, honest to God, can never remember praying to Jesus—it was God. I just couldn’t buy the stuff about angels and the Virgin Mary. I somehow picked up Will Durant [The Story of Philosophy] and was quoting Spinoza as if I understood him. I didn’t but his high panentheism appealed to me, his kind of mysticism.

So you went to Stanford to become a doctor.

I’d gotten interested in psychology and becoming a psychiatrist but in my sophomore year I stumbled into a lecture by Professor Frederic Spiegelberg, who taught comparative religion. He was popular at Stanford. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him, when he came before 600 students in the auditorium in total silence. He didn’t say a word and had everyone’s attention and then in a big voice said, “BRAHMAN.” Well, I was lit up.

That was the first word he uttered?

The first word he said—BRAHMAN [booming voice]. He was lecturing on the Vedic hymns. By the end of this hour walking back up to the fraternity—I mean the wet head was not dead—I was still a slicked-back Stanford student but the thought dawned on me: “I’m never going to be the same.” It changed my life. I was filled with a fire, particularly for the work of Sri Aurobindo’s Life Divine, which I read that summer. I started to meditate and was playing golf in a half-stoned state. My younger brother pronounced that I’d become a “Golfing Yogi.” This fire grew to such an extent that during my junior year I quit premed. I quit the fraternity and my family almost went into shock. In those days in Salinas nobody knew what a yogi was, except as somebody who laid on a bed of nails and looked at the sun [laughs].

At Stanford they let their good students do “directed reading” and Spiegelberg became my primary advisor. I read what I wanted and got the credits to graduate. I read heavily into the various subjects that eventually flowed into Esalen.

Did you have the support of your family as you were becoming an esoteric contemplative?

When my father saw what was going on he said, “While you’re at it, son—you’ve dropped out of your fraternity, dropped out of premed, now you drop out of the Murphys.” He said it that way. “No more money from us.” At first he was going to sue Stanford and sue Spiegelberg but he didn’t. And later when I was in the Army in 1955 I got a check in the mail for $5,000, which today would be like $50,000. The note said, “In case you want to go to India.”

What happened?

They loved me and got used to it. They just came around. Eventually my dad became the lawyer for Esalen.

Let’s hear the Esalen story. You and Dick Price had the idea. How did you connect with him?

After college I joined the Army during the Korean War and had the easiest job, stationed in Puerto Rico—fighting mosquitoes [laughs]. It was a time when I could read and meditate and do sports. Back then I used to meditate for many hours every day. Afterwards I went back to Stanford for awhile and eventually to India to be at the Aurobindo ashram. After India I was still finding my way in San Francisco. I didn’t know it yet but I had already developed this idea for Esalen.

Dick and I had been classmates at Stanford but didn’t know each other as he had his own evolution. He had been aware of me because I had been a campus hotdog and had won elections as student rep and people thought I should run for student body president. He knew that I had flipped to become this yogi. It turns out he too had flipped with Spiegelberg at Stanford and after graduation was going around with Alan Watts. Then in ‘56 Dick went into the Air Force but had a far different experience than I had in the Army in Puerto Rico. He too had lit up spiritually but in a way that put him in the brig, the military mental hospital.

Dick’s father was the executive vice president of Sears and Roebuck, which was a big deal then, and was a friend of Stuart Symington, the Secretary of War. They got him an honorable discharge on the condition that Dick get out of this state. He ended up in the Institute for Living [a private mental facility in Hartford]. Did you ever see A Beautiful Mind, about John Nash? Well, he was there at the same time. The horror of it, Rob! He suffered 67 insulin shock treatments. Finally he got out and recovered and heard about me living in San Francisco and came there to find his next step.

I was living at this place on Third and Fulton which was like a mini ashram, owned by Haridas Chowdhury, a prominent brilliant young professor from Calcutta, the founder of the California Institute of Integral Studies. So when Dick came I said, “Why don’t you move in?” He did and then we went down for a retreat at the Big Sur property that my grandmother owned. And then the adventure started. We were both 30. You must have heard some of these stories, with Hunter S. Thompson?

No, but I would love to hear the early stories about your grandmother’s property and Hunter S. Thompson.

My grandfather died after the war and my grandmother fiercely managed the mini property empire that included this Big Sur property. She was a character—a very Victorian woman and kind of intimidating. She had one good eye that was forbidding when she looked at you [laughs]. She promised she would never sell the property even though there had been a lot of offers—from the Pebble Beach Company. D.H. Lawrence’s wife Frieda had come around to buy it. She came with her husband’s ashes in a jar.

By this time my grandmother was close to 90. I tried to see if I could take it over but she said no. She told everyone, “If we ever give this property to Michael he will give it to the Hindus” [laughs]. She was the boss, the godmother, and my father was her consigliere. She wouldn’t let him take over either, and she hired a 21-year-old Hunter Thompson to be the caretaker of the place.

Thompson wanted to be a writer and was originally attracted out here because he admired my brother Dennis, who had already written a bestselling novel [The Sergeant], and ended up getting this job from my grandmother. When Dick and I went there a 19-year-old Joan Baez was living in one of the cabins. No one knew who she was. Henry Miller would be down there four or five times a week bringing celebrities like Anaïs Nin and Lawrence Durrell.

Were they just squatting on the property?

No, they would come down to the baths during the day. Hunter was living in wing of the old family house with his lady friend, writing his novel and wondering who we were. I had to convince him that I was part of the family. Hell, he had an arsenal of weapons—tracer bullets by the hundreds! What happened is that on weekends this Muscle Beach gay crowd would literally take ownership of the baths. One night they tried to kill Hunter. They grabbed him and were going to swing him over the cliff. Fortunately Hunter was pals with another woman, not his lady friend, who was about 250 pounds and could land a haymaker with a billy club [laughs]. The two of them had to fight their way out of this gay gang. And there was also this Pentecostal group to whom my grandmother leased the property. Anyway, the next day there was gunfire. Hunter was shooting into the bushes because he thought they were coming to get him. So I said, “It’s time to tell my grandmother what’s going on down here.”

Then my father got into the act and said, “We’d better let Mike take over this property because otherwise we’re all going to be in jail together.” It was out of control. My grandmother kicked Hunter off the property and eventually the Pentecostals left.

What was your impression of Hunter Thompson?

[laughs] A very spirited guy to say the least! Out of the hills of Kentucky, 6’3″, broad shouldered, lean, fully armed, high jest crazy in a gonzo sense—but serious about writing. He would take a novel and copy it longhand, just to get the feeling of it. He had done that with my brother’s novel. He did it with Hemingway and other writers. He turned out a lot of books that still age well. The whole Beat thing was going on with its off-kilter surrealism but intellectually I would not put Hunter with the Beats—he was a true original.

The madness [laughs]! One time his buddy John Clancy, who later became our lawyer, was getting married on the property and their best man was a goat. They had dressed it in a necktie and glasses! And Hunter was making beer. But the problem was half his beer bottles would explode all over the place!

Another time Dulce and I visited him in Aspen and he was firing hundreds of tracer bullets over John Denver’s house—they were raining down in the night sky. It was like the bombing of London! He must’ve had a supernormal liver because he drank a lot and took lots of drugs.

Did you know Neal Cassidy?

No, I never knew Cassidy, but I did get to know Ken Kesey from Stanford. They came down on the Merry Prankster bus but I never got in with that crowd. For some reason the Grateful Dead never came.

Did you tap into the psychedelic culture of the time?

It never really worked for me. I only did it about eight times. I had an intuition that it wasn’t good for my brain but people were getting stoned there all the time. Aldous Huxley and his wife Laura gave me LSD for the first time in Mexico when we started Esalen. They had the pills from Sandoz. Huxley died in ‘63 but said many things to me and was a big influence on us. We named our main meeting room “Huxley.”

On another occasion I remember roaring around the place with Dick Alpert and Tim Leary but that’s a whole other story [laughs]. We had a lot of dealings with Tim and helped him while he was in prison. I saw him off and on until he died.

Michael Pollan’s new book [How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us] gives Esalen credit for keeping alive the serious reconsideration of federal drug policy. We had a seminal conference in 1998 that led to the Johns Hopkins research. Esalen brokered a lot of stuff that’s never been described before, much of it documented in a big book [Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion] by Jeff Kripal.

You never had problems with the law?

In ’64 I met the head of the DEA for Northern California, who taught me about the Fourth Amendment, against search and seizure, habeas corpus—a basic reason for the American Revolution. I mean we colonists had slaves but we were also slaves—to the British [laughs]. Anyway, the Fourth Amendment says that no one can tell people what to do without a warrant from a court. He informed me that this applied to innkeepers as well as to the police. He said, “If you try to regulate your guests they’re going to sue the hell out of you and they will win.” He said, “Your responsibility is to make sure the dealers never come there. We will hold you responsible for that—and [pause] we know all about you.”

What follows is one of my favorite stories where I earned my spurs with the community because of Big Bad Bill, who was 6’4″, built out always with a tight black T-shirt, black hat, and he was the biggest and most prominent dealer walking around the property.

Word got out that I had to tell him that he could never come back and everybody was wondering who was going to win this one—little Mikey or Big Bad Bill? But I looked him in the eye and said, “You can’t come back on this property again. The DEA knows you’re here [dramatic pause]. In fact they’re watching us right now.” I lied but he believed me. He nods and says, “Thank you”—then stood up and walked away, and everybody’s going “Whoah!”

Then we started having Joan Baez folk festivals out on the deck of the swimming pool. By then she had gotten famous. When she sang at Esalen her extraordinary voice hit those high notes and—you won’t believe this—there would be a four- or five-second resonance down the coast. And the marijuana smoke billowed…and up on the perimeter Highway Patrolmen and DEA guys…letting us be…but ever watchful. Thankfully we never had an arrest on the property. There has never been a murder. In those early years there was an element of miracle that we got through alive.

Where were you during this time? Where was your spirit? Your ego?

Good question. I was old in certain ways. I mean I was keenly aware of the metaphysical baloney that comes down on all sides because I had read so much about it. But Dick and I were also very young with no business experience. It was a huge new adventure that lit up my entrepreneurial side. If I simply read somebody’s book and then wrote to invite them—they came. So I got to meet my heroes—and also see how human they were!

I wasn’t meditating six or eight hours anymore but I was on fire in a different way. Instead of a Jnana yogi [path of knowledge] I became a Karma yogi [path of action] of a certain Tantric persuasion. That’s a long story. Sexually I was a virgin until I was 32 so I was still a virgin when Esalen started. I had a couple of royal misadventures on the erotic side, including a marriage that lasted three months. We eloped to Sparks, Nevada, and I woke up the next day going, “Gee, how did that happen?” [laughs]

[in disbelief] How did you manage to maintain your virginity until you were 32?

Well, basically our gang in high school didn’t play spin the bottle and didn’t fuck. I was popular with the girls but was religious and also hated the whole idea of going steady, the whole trading rings thing. At Stanford it was basically the same dynamic. But after my sophomore year with Spiegelberg—which was a huge influence—and Aurobindo, the guru, who advocated “No sex”—well, you’re just going to have to believe it: I took vows of chastity. I said, “I am going to go for it.” I was 20 and I maintained it until 32. At Esalen once it [sex] started I found it hard to stop.

Did Esalen identify more with the Beats or the hippies?

Neither. Jack Kerouac had written a book, Big Sur, in the ‘50s and he described the property before it was Esalen. Then in Esalen’s earliest years Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, and other poets whose books were at City Lights bookstore did readings. We had a regular series in those years with Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Bishop Pike, and Alan Watts. The four of them did a rip-roaring seminar in 1963. So traces of the San Francisco Renaissance or the Beat Generation were evident but I have to resist labels. I prefer to say Esalen Institute is a complex place [laughs].

For example, one afternoon in 1962, on one half of the property you had Arnold Toynbee, the famous historian, talking about the coming of Buddhism to the West. It looked like the mid-‘50s. All the attendees were wearing neckties. And simultaneously on the other side of the property Allen Ginsberg was reading poetry and most of the folks were half naked. The word “hippie” was not invented until 1967 and when it was Esalen got mislabeled “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” because we had a center in San Francisco by then and the media picked up on it.

Esalen did become the de facto headquarters for the Human Potential Movement and was tagged with the Gestalt-Fritz Perls connection.

That’s another over-identification. Fritz Perls was a wicked genius. He had a supreme gift. He’d look at you and instantly know more than you wanted to know—and then he would tell you. There are people like this. Esalen gave him a base of support and brokered his emergence and fame. In fact he probably came closer than anyone to “capturing the flag” through his influence on people, including Dick. In the early ‘60s it was so fluid what happened inside and outside the seminar rooms. You’d have Fritz coming up, very confrontational, right in the dining room, and he’d sit down and look you over and make some remark. It could even be nasty. And boy, it would stay with you because he’d invariably hit the mark. A lot of people, when they saw him coming—they would duck! But he was also an extremely creative innovator in the field of therapy. Since his death in 1970 Gestalt therapy has evolved and morphed to become more relationshipbased, kinder and smarter and better. Gordon Wheeler, who is the current president of Esalen, has been a central leader of its development.

Esalen was a place for education.

Yes, it was never a hospital or a place for therapy. “Education of the whole person” we’d say—educating emotional intelligence to broaden one’s behavioral repertoire. Therapy by implication means you’re there as a sick person with symptoms. Now, people do come with illnesses and sickness and psychological problems, but our whole thrust was that therapy would get done in the wake of education.

You had high standards. One needed high educational credentials to run a seminar there, right?

From day one we labored to have the best teachers we could get, like any college or university. We’ve said no to far more people than we’ve said yes. But how do we judge? We did get some characters there. You and I both know many creative people on meds. Sometimes given the environment at Esalen, they start to feel great and decide to go off their meds—and pretty soon they’re standing on a bench doing this [pretending to fly]! So you have to deal with them kindly, yet be tough enough to take down someone who gets violent and haul them away while observing their legal rights. Fortunately we never had a malpractice suit.

Golf in the Kingdom came out in 1972. What is the premise?

In simple terms it’s a tall Irish tale, a fiction that kind of came to me. Michael Murphy is on his way to an Indian ashram in search of the greater human nature but thinks he’ll play one last round of golf at the links of Burning Bush. Unbeknownst to him he’s put in with a golf professional, Shivas Irons, who is a shaman. Over the course of 24 hours Shivas implicitly invites him to enter the mysteries with him but oh no, Murphy first has to go to India to find it. So he walks right past the doorway to enlightenment that’s there for him. This is what many of us do. We are all born to this possibility. It beckons to us and we walk past it—while it’s hiding in plain sight.

It was the first book I tried to write and it was never edited. It’s been translated into 12 languages and sold close to 2 million copies and is arguably the best-selling golf fiction book. It’s become a catalyst for sports psychologists looking at the mental game, the inner game. For me it has opened doors I never would have imagined. For example, John Brodie, who played quarterback for the 49ers, reached out to collaborate. It led to a sequel called In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports and more importantly to my big book, The Future of the Body.

The Future of the Body is a sophisticated philosophical treatise that in many ways describes the endless potential of being in the zone, no?

The idea is that we are spring-loaded for supernormal life but our parents and our coaches and our priests didn’t tell us. And we all walk through life accommodating ourselves into a culture where we’re smaller than our potential—to get along, to survive. So I resist capturing the essence of Future of the Body or of peak mystical experience with phrases like flow or in the zone. These are all nice ways to talk about it but it’s a little too narrow for me. We do have to be big enough to meet the world that’s trying to emerge. Most of life is hiding in plain sight. That’s the most radical statement. We can walk through a doorway and get unstuck, like in Alice in Wonderland, and find out, “My God, what have I been missing?”

You and your wife, Dulce, have a long track record of working to improve relations with Russia. Can you explain this initiative?

The idea has been to create citizen diplomacy. We call it Track Two Diplomacy, and you can see the website that explains this [Trackii. com]. It is a non-governmental approach to improving relations between nations in conflict through informal, private-sector collaboration. It started for me in the late ‘60s when early teachers started to come from Europe to Esalen and told us about the action deep inside the old communist regime. I started writing letters to Russia in Then there was a popular book called Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain that documented much of the same stuff as the Human Potential Movement—describing “hidden human reserves.”

In 1971 I went there and met the characters described in this book. Among others there was a famous telepathist, Karl Nikolaiev, whom I watched in action and it was real telepathy, unbelievable! There is no way there was any magic or cheating. And others like Jim Hickman and Stanley Krippner went over. So we bonded with healers, shamans, people doing paranormal research, spiritual healing, and a little bit in sport already, interestingly. And our interest grew and grew. At the same time the fear of nuclear confrontation was growing.

In 1980 America boycotted the Moscow Olympics but we were encouraged by the very guy—we happened to know him—in the Security Council who was running the boycott to attend a separate conference that was taking place during the Olympics. So it was not exactly heroic on our part because here’s the guy running the boycott who said “Go.” Anyway we got instant entree into these two separate worlds. One was the Bohemian underground and the other was straight into the Central Committee of the Soviet Union, and the Politburo.

We deliberately did not associate with official dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn because we knew if we played that game we couldn’t go in as far. Instead we became friends with people like Valentin Berezhkov who had been Stalin’s interpreter and Vladimir Posner, Russia’s famous journalist, the equivalent of Charlie Rose and Walter Cronkite. After nearly forty years Vladimir is like a brother to me; he wants his ashes scattered at Esalen. So through these friendships and dialogues and the implicit aim of helping end the Cold War we just lit up. Dulce really lit up! She, more than anyone else, has held this initiative together.

We’ve brokered hundreds of exchanges. One was connecting the Russian writer’s union—that’s how they control you over there—and getting them into the International Pen Club, which is the international association against censorship. Dulce carried a lot of the water on that one, right at the hinge before Gorbachev and Glasnost, working with people like Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, and John Irving.

Another thing we did was with Rusty Schweickart, the Apollo 9 astronaut, where we helped form an alliance between cosmonauts and astronauts called the International Association of Space Explorers. That group has been meeting ‘til this day. That was initially brokered by Esalen. And that in turn gave birth to another organization—I can see their office across the street [points to the Mill Valley offices of the B612 Foundation]. They are leading the attempt to watch and deflect asteroids that could hit Earth.

Wow! And didn’t you bring Boris Yeltsin to America for the first time?

Yes. There were young people around Yeltsin who wanted us to bring him, so we did. He didn’t come to Esalen but we paid for the trip and Jim Garrison, who was the director of our project then, squired him around. Literally, in a Houston supermarket [pause] Yeltsin had a conversion experience [long pause]. I mean he just blew up [pause]! That he’d been lied to all his life by the Communist bosses!

The difference between Yeltsin and Gorbachev was that Gorbachev thought communism could be fixed. Gorbachev was the primary one responsible, with Reagan, for ending the Cold War but Yeltsin was responsible for dumping communism and then splitting up the Soviet Union into the 15 republics. So it took the one-two punch to accomplish all of that but we paid for and brokered that trip which led to Yeltsin’s rejection of communism.

Unfortunately our foreign policy establishment has made mistake after mistake since Yeltsin came and the Americans helped to dismantle the old system. Since Nature abhors a vacuum, in came these tough guys and oligarchs and then it got out of control. Putin brought in law and order and helped open a way for Russia to prosper in large part by suppressing the various ethnic mafias that emerged—violent mafias that made the Sicilian mafia look like a bunch of pussies [laughs]!

What do you make of USA-Russian relations in this Trump era?

Not good [sighs]. And that’s not primarily Trump’s fault. His reflexes are correct in wanting to reach out to Putin but that just riles up our MSNBC and CNN on the left, who are justified in criticizing his often clumsy and crazy-seeming Russian policy. Plus the collusion or quasi-collusion involved in his election—that’s not helpful. But meanwhile some of America’s best diplomats and scholars with whom we are affiliated are working to improve these relationships. It’s a work in progress. The world today is getting more accident-prone, particularly because Russia and America between them own 92% of all the nuclear weapons on Earth. One bomb could take out the Bay Area—so for that reason alone…

What ticks you off?

Tyranny. In all its forms. And this willingness to come in and to take over someone else’s good work. I’ve experienced it at Esalen. Somebody will come in and say they know better even though they don’t even know what you’re doing. That angers me as does this outrageous behavior of Donald Trump. He has the right impulse with Russia and Kim Jong Un—mafia chiefs know how to deal with mafia chiefs. But his bullying, his incivility, his swagger through the world—it can’t go on much longer. Something’s got to give.

I do have a strong archetype in a Jungian sense for freedom—we have to keep winning our freedom. My experience of people is that love and safety come easier for most people than freedom. Unfortunately this leads to a compliance with bad things in the world—and a slowness to take a stand and go for the good. We need to find good stories for ourselves. That’s why I believe in evolutionary panentheism—that the Divine is immanent and is disclosing itself in the course of time. We’re here to enjoy it and foster it. And at times we have to fight for it.

What is the Center for Theory and Research at Esalen?

This was a part of Esalen I organized as a way to nurture the kinds of programs we do that are not open to the public. You could call it our research and development wing. We sponsor research initiatives and hold invitational conferences around the world. It started in 1963 to mark it off as a “safe space” because organizations can consume their young. Organizations get muscle-bound and the worst ones become cults. In this sense we’re like a college where the trustees and the administration cannot go in and tell the professors how to do their research.

The empirical exploration of “evidence for life after death” is one example. We’ve had arguably the smartest group of people working on this for 15 years because it’s not going to happen at Stanford or Harvard but they would come from places like Stanford and Harvard.

What are other topics?

The Russian-American relations work we discussed has been going on for decades but it has also been going on with the Middle East between Palestinians and Israelis. We’ve done a lot to promote the scientific study of Somatics. Don Johnson for years brought leading Somatics teachers together with scientists to look at what’s really happening in practices such as Rolfing, Feldenkrais work, and sensory awareness training. And just as we’ve been involved with psychology, philosophy, and religion, Esalen has also always been at the cutting edge of ecological study with a big influence of the Rudolph Steiner-Alan Chadwick-type practices like organic gardening, biodynamics, permaculture. All these kinds of ideas and modalities have been featured for decades in Common Ground magazine. To some extent we’ve grown up side by side.

Indeed [laughs]. Are you ever starstruck by the high-profile celebrities with whom you interface?

I am often in awe of people’s accomplishments but the star-struck phenomenon wore off in the first years. That said I could barely speak when I first met Aldous Huxley [laughs].

Do you miss Dick Price? He died while hiking in 1985.

Of course I miss him. I will always be grateful for his comradeship in the early years. He had fantastic resilience and humor. He used to describe thorny situations by saying, “This is hopeless [pause], but it’s not serious.” You just had to laugh!

I know you miss your dear friend George Leonard.

Oh yes. He was the West Coast editor of Look magazine and was involved with the Civil Rights movement and various other great occasions, both as a change agent and eminent journalist. More than anyone he helped steer us through the media onslaught we endured in the late ’60s and ’70s. He was an Esalen officer and board member for decades, alerting us to countless complexities of American politics and culture. He and I started the Integral Transformative Practice, in which I’m still involved. Yes, I miss him; we were like brothers.

It just seems you’ve every gift—brainpower, athleticism, connections, luck. You’re hardwired with spiritual insight. How do you factor providence in your life or the notion that you’re reincarnated to serve a mission?

[speaking slowly] Providence—it’s a hell of a word. Basically I believe in providence. Reincarnation—I am open to it but I have no memory of a past life. I’m a lucky guy so at times I am tempted to believe in reincarnation. How did I end up with that property at that point in life with that deep, powerful calling? By the time I was 11 I was forming a worldview and by 15 it was pretty well developed. When I walked into Spiegelberg’s class it just lined up. Yet so many people have walked into his classes but nothing like that happened.

When Esalen started I kept a journal of coincidences. I had just bought a dozen copies of Abe Maslow’s Psychology of Being—mind you we hadn’t even started Esalen yet—when Abe Maslow of all people drives into the place—looking for a room! What do you make of that? I’ve often thought, “Who the hell’s running the show here?” There certainly is some Esalen dharma and hey, I am open to all the graces and notions of reincarnation. I do have a firm conviction that Atman is Brahman, that deep down we are one with the All.

And now that I am about 88 I think a lot about life after death and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. How do you die? How do you cross over? All that is up for grabs now—and what will happen to Dulce and Mac?

Can you end with a message for Common Ground readers, many of whom know Esalen and many of whom do not?

Well, I can say to everybody, “Really embrace your dharma.” If you don’t know what your dharma is, call for it. Call to God for it. Call to your best friends for it. And then go for it. Life will reward you. That’s my main message.

Rob Sidon is publisher and editor in chief of Common Ground.

Burning Man founder Larry Harvey died on April 28th after suffering an earlier stroke. He was 70 years old. We loved Larry and will treasure his unique creative spark. Oh yeah… he really started something!

In commemoration we’re reprinting the 2016 Common Ground interview with him and pay homage to the ephemeral nature of all things—the underlying ethos of the Burning Man.

Thirty years ago on a whim, Larry Harvey and his buddy Jerry James built an eight-foot wooden man in their basement and decided to haul it to SF’s Baker Beach to burn it. Onlookers were drawn to the flames, and spontaneous performances ensued. The ritual took place annually three more times at the beach before the Golden Gate Police discovered the shenanigans and issued a prohibitive edict, forcing the merrymakers to find a new venue—a prehistoric desert lakebed near Gerlach, Nevada. There, Black Rock City, as it is known, swells from a population of zero to 70,000 leading into Labor Day weekend before resuming to homeostasis without a trace. A highly principled gathering espousing radical inclusivity, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance, Black Rock faces challenging growing pains in the face of its massive international popularity.

Larry Harvey was born in Oregon in 1948 and was adopted by elder parents who shared their stories of the Great Depression and fleeing the dust bowls of Nebraska—an underclass upbringing that informs his viewpoint about the 1%/99% divide. We spoke with Larry in San Francisco on a broad range of topics including his recent trip to India and Nepal, spirituality, the natural, and the supernatural.

Common Ground: Times have changed. When we spoke back in 2009 I recall you were modestly proud that the New Yorker magazine had run a little cartoon mentioning Burning Man, as if the festival had just barely crested from discreet obscurity into the vernacular of literary circles.

Larry Harvey: That’s gone apace. Obama just made a joke mentioning his daughter wanting to go to Burning Man.

I think it’s a household term now. What was the joke?

It was at the annual [White House Correspondents’ Dinner]. The president is a talented comedian who can be wickedly funny. He knows how to do it and do it deadpan. He was joking about Bernie Sanders, saying, “I feel the Bern,” adding, “Just the other day a young person came to me and said, ‘I’m through letting politicians stand in the way of me and my dreams.’ And we said to Malia, ‘No, you can’t go to Burning Man.’” It was a very general joke, but by suggesting that even the president’s daughter might want to go to Burning Man is legitimating. That’s just an indicator of the degree of acceptance.

If our ideal had been to become a counterculture, then I suppose you could say, “Oh, you’ve lost your edge,” but I’ve never thought of it as counterculture. I’ve always thought of it as culture. So our notion is that we can affect the world, not the other way around.

As large-scale events go, 70,000 attendees is unexceptional.

It’s modest, like your average football game. But like rock concerts and water theme parks, normal entertainment probably isn’t going to affect the world much. One of our good results is that we’re getting about 20% coming from out of the country. You can walk out in Black Rock City and readily hear five or six languages. That shows where demand is coming from; it’s become a really international place.

What’s the distinction you’re making about rock concerts and such?

That they are about people in seats being entertained by someone else who is active. The crowd can cheer, but that’s the extent of participation. We’re not that—the people who come are the entertainment. They’re more than entertainment because it’s relentlessly participatory and predicated on wholehearted action that connects. It’s hard to not participate at Burning Man. It’s not some finished product that’s trotted out having been rehearsed and rehearsed and calculated to appeal to the public.

What do you think is the public’s stereotype about Burning Man?

I don’t know what the stereotype is, but I think that what motivates people to come is still rather old-fashioned—the rule of three. If one friend tells you and another one tells you and a third one tells you, it gives you a kind of a three-dimensional view of things. That’s when people say, “I’m going to go.”

I suppose people see the images on the Internet and think, “Yeah, that’s cool.” But it takes a great deal of determination, not only for tickets but all the preparation and the effort, which far exceeds what is normal. My gracious, when the president makes a joke about it, we’ve permeated the mainstream in some ways, which just means people are generally more receptive and are hearing more positive things now. The old [bacchanalian] stereotypes aren’t reported very often, and it begins to seem legitimate.

This is the festival’s 30th anniversary. How does that make you feel?

I’m not big on anniversaries, but yeah, it’s a good start. That’s how I look at it.

Can you point to specific turning points—landmarks along the way?

Most change is incremental, so you’re unaware as it creeps up, but there were certain dramatic turns that leapt up as new plateaus—change born out of struggle. Of course 1990 was a big year because that’s when we moved to the desert [from Baker Beach]. 1996 was a big year that reduced down to a disagreement about what Burning Man was about. A majority of us ended up saying we wanted to build a civil society to create a public environment where people could be secure enough to fully enjoy their freedom and be able to make contact with one another. That’s when we began to think of Black Rock City as a city. That was very hard to do in an environment where bullets were flying and cars were driving at reckless speeds with the lights turned out at night. Fear and freedom don’t go well together. Fear doesn’t make you free. So that was an argument. The origination of the temple [in 2001] was an important change that is now considered integral to the experience. That didn’t exist until David Best invented that.

Some say the addition of the temple created a spiritual component.

I’d like to think it was there incipiently. Of course my idea of spiritual is probably broader than most people’s. I know spirit when I see it. Spirit flies about on wings. It’s infectious. Team spirit—it’s infectious. It can turn mean, but spirit quickly animates people and can affect them with a bioelectric current. That was always there. No one might have labeled it spiritual. Certainly not those who think formal religions have a trademark on spirituality. But I think increasingly in our society, people don’t look at spirituality that way. There are all kinds of practices that are considered spiritual, many of which don’t involve worship.

I want to talk about spirituality later but first want to discuss this timeline. It seems to me that a new era began after the event first sold out in 2011. Ticket mania ensued.

That was another landmark. The bad thing is that the demand for tickets being at a 4-to-1 ratio has put enormous stress on the community—it’s a supply-and-demand challenge. We’re in the middle of that and going to initiate a change this year that I think will surprise and gratify the community.

Once, you mentioned that Burning Man ran a unique ad in Common Ground long ago.

I think it was 1997. It might have been in the early 1990s. We were sweating that we would go broke, so we put in this little ad that was purposely made low context. You had to know something about Burning Man. It wasn’t “Burning Man, this, this, this!” which would be distasteful.

When we spoke back in 2009, you leaked in Common Ground that Burning Man would become a nonprofit. Even some employees and insiders learned of it for the first time then.

That’s been another landmark that’s doing great, developing its own legs. That’s enabled the next step we’ll be taking. There’s a picture that was done by a very talented artist that hangs in one of our restrooms, a big picture showing this stick-thin woman standing with this alarmingly large pink baby with a little hat on its head representing the nonprofit. The suggestion is that the nonprofit was going to become greater than the event, and that’s actually starting to happen.

But the LLC still exists.

It’s a wholly owned subsidiary, so it’s actually part of the nonprofit. I don’t own anything nor do the other five partners. We sold our shares for $46,000. If we just held onto it as private property, we’d all be multimillionaires.

I assumed that was the case.

No, it’s not the case—though there have been critics that have scoured records to try to discredit us. It’s required by law to do a nonprofit financial report every year, and ours was more forthcoming than most. We answered a lot of questions. My salary has been published and that of the other founders. That temporarily silenced the critics, who were astonished. I think they were reasoning from what they would do if they were in this position.

I don’t mind being an employee. I’ve now held this job as an employee for longer than I was ever employed. I was briefly employed as a bicycle messenger and as a taxi driver, but that’s about the extent of my normal employment experience.

One of your main roles is picking the theme each year. What in the collective zeitgeist led you to choose the “Da Vinci’s Workshop” theme?

Yes, that’s one thing I do. What happened during the Florentine Renaissance foretold the future. So we thought there were strong analogies with Black Rock City and Florence. Certainly it was a center of innovation, nearly equal to the Golden Age of Greece, where geniuses and art flourished as never before within a small span of time. I don’t think that was caused by a genetic anomaly—that all these geniuses were born. It was because society was so organized that it rewarded talent and led to a dynamic social interaction that opened the path. I wrote an essay called “Following the Money.” I was interested to know why Florence flourished in this precocious way. One way to understand it is to look at the economics.

The older I get, the more I’m interested in economics. That might seem odd because many people fancy that Burning Man is this moneyless utopia, but of course that’s ridiculous because we spend upwards of $32 million to produce that city, and the participants spend more than that. It’s true that commercial transactions aren’t happening there, but that’s the result of innumerable millions of commercial transactions that happen in preparation, such as raising money through crowdfunding and from contributions to build art. Looked at that way, $70 million to $80 million flow through the streets of Black Rock City every year. Many wealthier people have funded large art projects, but nobody knows about them because they never want their names mentioned.

You travel in interesting circles because you mesh with starving evicted artists and also with the modern-day Medicis, the billionaire caste against which there is a backlash.

They’re all part of Burning Man. Florence was supported by two big economic engines, the textile trade and banking. Up to 40% of the incomes of the wealthy was spent on clothes. The wives kept meticulous records about the clothes they bought, how they were altered, where they went. They inherited a medieval calendar, and there were constant public events, and they didn’t want to go to the next event in the same costume they wore at the previous one. It was social status.

They didn’t have Teslas then.

The wool guild built the great cathedral in Florence. They did these public works out of civic pride—like at Black Rock City. [Those public works] cradled the entire Renaissance that emerged, enlarging the identity of everyone, high and low alike. That was the norm of citizenship then, and it made Florence a beacon for the rest of Europe. It’s not quite the norm now, as people point out. You have people in the higher reaches of society who are just glorified consumers. They look like hogs at the trough and it makes people look innately selfish, but it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s been charged [at Black Rock City]—that there is a sherpa class that is sweated. But we think that we can lead people to a sense of rich and poor alike—and that’s rather an old-fashioned idea, isn’t it?

The trickle-down?

No, I don’t mean trickle-down. I mean that some of that wealth can flow down and then up like an artesian well. We’ve lived too long in a Hobbesian worldview that everyone is very selfish. America, looked at through eyes beyond our shores, is the most selfish nation on earth. We’ve monetary capital, but in the sense of the total sum of human connectedness—social capital—we are poor. Monetary capital isolates us further and further from one another until it looks like it could turn into a social civil war between the haves and have-nots.

How do you answer critics who now feel that Burning Man too reflects this reality?

Well, some people are amazed that this teeming international city isn’t free. I’ve heard that. “You mean it’s not free?” Well, no, it costs money, and that’s why we’re talking about money this year. We never said commerce was evil. What kind of idiocy is that? Do you think commerce is evil?

Personally not.

Well, I don’t know many people who do. If that’s evil then your shirt is evil, your pants, your shoes, your socks are evil. Where did you get them? You bought them, didn’t you? Did you tend the sheep and then weave those things? Do you live completely independently of every other human being and not engage in trade? Not even hunter-gatherers do that. They trade with one another. The unaided human is a pathetic thing. The only way we can survive is to cooperate and collaborate with one another, and [trade] is one way of doing it. Only a consumer would think that by going to the desert and living without exchanging species for eight days that they achieved some sort of salvation in a naughty world.

Burning Man mirrors that 1%/99% thing. We usually don’t point this out, but we, as the organizers of the event, are the government out there and have the federal presence, so we can work reforms that seem to be bearing fruit. The master reform was to say that we don’t want a class of people who can buy their way onto the playa, as it became rather apparent that too many had carried bad habits in their life with them onto the playa, and in their plug-and-play camps were living in gated communities. But every camp has its share of sparkle ponies.

What’s a sparkle pony?

That’s someone who doesn’t participate and help out. Camp chores? No, they’re too covered with glitter to do that, too narcissistically inclined. They say, “I want to be part of the camp. Oh, and there’s food, great! I’ll help.” They get there and put on their costumes, and they’re gone. You never see them again, except maybe at mealtime. Sparkle ponies are a widely distributed species. They’re just not incident to privileged camps. Show me a camp, and I’ll show you some sparkle ponies in it.

Societies have always protected themselves—particularly the 1%. They’ve gated themselves to avert being raided, to protect their women.

Yes and no. In great cities the rich and poor witness one another. We’re not going to wave a magic wand and say everybody is equal. Some people will always have more resources. I won’t say that everyone is talented either. But everybody in their being is equal. That’s an unconditional value. Radical equality—that we have in common. That’s where it lies—along that spiritual gradient.

Inequality and elitism are controversial and antithetical, but what can government do?

We did what Bernie Sanders is demanding. We use money from selling high-end tickets to subsidize low-income tickets. We can do that. During the whole ticket controversy, someone said, “Well, if you have to take money from these rich parasites, then I just hope these people aren’t thanked.” Well, those are interesting manners! The truth of the matter is that many wealthy people donate to art projects and don’t want to receive public attention.

A lot of things we can’t control, but for instance, we can control camp placement and some supplies. Everyone wants a good placement. So we show preference to theme camps because they do socially constructive things benefiting their fellow citizens. And we let them arrive early. If you want these privileges and conveniences, then you have to give. So we try to mandate some participation for this category of camp. And not just so you can say, “I interacted with the public. We put up a little stand and gave popsicles for an hour.” No, no. You know how theme camps are. But we can’t be like Mao and march the middle class to starve in the countryside. Or Pol Pot—that wasn’t nice. We’re gentle.

[Laughs] How do you police?

Because I wanted to see for myself, I wore this big worm costume that was hellish, like a sauna. In it I went out and visited some of these erstwhile plug-and-play camps that applied to be theme camps. I had a list. If they had a bar, I would order a drink to see if they’d serve a lowly invertebrate—this worm who just wandered in off the street. I actually had a good experience. I saw some things that needed improvement. I communicated some of that to our folks who are in charge of placing camps.

[Laughs] Did you ever let on that you were the mayor?

Well, I’m not the mayor, but I was clocked once.

You were punched?

Clocked—it’s a gay term for when you’re in drag and they catch you. No, I just wormed my way into the camp with my fellow, Tom Sawyer, who just died of cancer. He was a delightful man. He was the forward one, and I was just the worm that came in on his arm. “My wormy friend needs a drink. Please, sir.” I learned a lot. It was really interesting. I saw how they were adapting or falling short or surprising by giving more than anyone could’ve imagined. We worked that reform, and no one really noticed the nature of the reform we instigated. They didn’t see that if you organize society in a new way, and if you look at money and change society, you can cannibalize it to do constructive social things. All we’ve ever done is move the social furniture around so that it conditions behavior to make change. People who might seem like devils turn into angels, and it can happen readily because in the end, people want to feel real and be connected to one another. For all the addictions we have and our selfish consumption and all those things that isolate us from one another, what people yearn for deep down more than anything is connection. That’s why Burning Man is famous worldwide.

A city where the 1% and the 99% cohabitate.

The metaphor is the 1% and the 99%, but that’s only half the thought. Because if we think we can make progress in mending that split instead of just pandering to resentment and fear, then that will be an example in our little test tube experience. That’ll be an example that the world could profit from.

Economic disparity is dominating this conversation, but it’s also the national conversation.

It’s very much on our mind. Glamping—glamour camping—Burning Man for the high-end people—we don’t want to become that! I can speak for myself. I don’t come from the middle class, I come from the working class, the mud sills.

What are mud sills?

My father grew up in a mud hut called a soddy. That’s what they do on the Great Plains. They dig up the turf that was matted with roots, and they’d stack it up and make it into bricks. It’s called a sod house. My parents were dust bowlers from a humble walk of life. They left Nebraska after all the soil blew away. My mother went out to get the laundry one day, the white sheets flapping on the clothesline, and they were blood red, menstrual red. She looked up, and the sky was roiling red with windborne soil. “That’s Oklahoma,” said someone standing nearby. A Biblical catastrophe that ruined everyone. The height of my father’s worldly success was running Shorty’s short order café in this little obscure town of Hemingford.

Where were you born?

I was born in Oregon in 1948. Both me and my brother were adopted, and my whole childhood was shadowed by those Great Depression dust bowl stories. At the time, the farmers who didn’t trust the banks did a kind of atavistic thing and put all their cash in safe deposit boxes so they’d have it secure. But when all the soil blew away, the bankers were pulling up the gangplank fast. They were going to sail away and wanted to protect their assets. They wouldn’t let the farmers open their safe deposit boxes. It was a terrible injustice. That’s what people in the underclass suffer daily. Today I’ve achieved a degree of worldly success and moved through all these strata of society, but I haven’t forgotten my roots. I know a lot of people who are not going to have a lot of money, and I see the world through that lens.

My father was born in 1899, something of a Victorian really, eloped with my mother and traveled, doing odd jobs like building silos. They made their way to Oregon in the early 1940s because there was money to be made on the West Coast in support of the war. He taught himself to be a carpenter and built one of the first campers—I think—before the RV. It was a Model A Ford, and he built a cabin over it so they could live in it, a modern version of a covered wagon. Refugees from the dust bowl pretty much had to invent something like that.

My father was a very self-reliant man who wouldn’t accept help from no one. But they also realized that if they stuck together, they could better survive than if they were alone, just like wagon trains. Oddly enough, both my parents would say rather wistfully, almost in a melancholy way, that during those years traveling with other people, someone could find macaroni and someone could find some tomatoes and then everybody feasted together. In a puzzled way they’d tell stories of deprivation but end up saying, “We really felt part of something.” And that maybe that was the happiest period of their lives together. So there’s something to be learned from that.

Was there a spiritual or religious framework you grew up with?

Nothing formal. Their church was the Masonic Lodge and camping. Those two things. As soon as my brother and I were old enough to make a choice and didn’t go to church, they quit going. They figured they had done their social duty. So I never heard God spoken of as a real thing, but they reverenced nature and would speak with awe of natural beauty. They came to the Northwest and had never seen anything like it. Such a well-watered land, so beautiful—some of the most fertile land on earth. They loved camping. Now that was spiritual.

What’s the story of your adoption?

It was a gray-market adoption. A lawyer and a girl “got into trouble,” as they used to say. I guess I was conceived in the back of a car. My parents loved us but were laconic and stoic and weren’t expressive. It was luck of the draw. I loved them and still have their pictures up in my home. My brother is an accomplished photographer. We were both adopted and were everything to each other. Both of us, for some reason that we don’t fully fathom, had this ambition toward art and wanted to accomplish something and be recognized for it. I like ambitious people who want to stand out and do something special. I don’t think they offend against the Democratic dogma.

Was your boyhood happy?

No. There I was on the farm, and I wanted the big city. I so badly wanted a sophisticated milieu. I even taught myself the word milieu. I was this pint-sized impresario who organized my classmates to do theatrical things, and I’d write and produce it and recruit the town and get the adults to bless it, but in all of that I was unhappy. We were estranged from people and didn’t socialize. There was hardly anybody my age for miles around. My brother was four years older, and his experience was different. He left when I was just hitting adolescence, so I was very unhappy.

Of course you’d wind up in San Francisco. When did you first arrive?

When I was in high school I hiked to the Haight just before the hippies discovered they were hippies. It was already there, ready like tinder, but they weren’t yet wearing hippie gear; they were dressing out of Goodwill. It was just loaded with young people, and you could feel the buzz of excitement. Then I came back and lived with a girlfriend just off Haight Street in the “Autumn of Love.” I then came back the last time in January to witness the “Winter of Love”—some interesting snapshots. I concluded that the hippie movement had no economic basis aside from selling drugs and getting checks from home. In the Winter of Love, the upper-middle-class hippies moved out or melded back, and it got violent and shady. An aerosol graffito said “We love you, Janice.” And someone else had written “Speed kills.” That pretty much says it all.

Did the hippie culture inform Burning Man in any way?

It never did historically. It was very down to earth in the beginning, with quasi-Bohemian carpenters—very San Francisco. Later on, the Cacophony Society showed up, and they were oddballs who spoke with a louder voice, so they made the history books. I was always attracted to odd, creative people—weirdos of one kind or another. Or freaks, as we called them. That was the highest praise you could give anybody. Is he a freak?

The circles quickly expanded and got heterogeneous pretty quick. I’m on a little one-man crusade to exhume the memory of the carpenters. Pre-Burning Man there was a little scene that I fell into. A fellow named Dan Richmond hosted a little soirée where we drank, played guitar, and talked about philosophy and art. That’s where I met Jerry James, who was my partner on the beach when we went down with the man. The help we recruited was from this construction milieu. That’s who the core was.

You went to Nepal and India earlier this year. My hope was to capture an interview on the phone while you were witnessing the other burning man, on the burning ghats [open cremation grounds] along the banks of the Ganges.

We didn’t make it to Varanasi. We were in Delhi and had adventures there. I liked it. Yeah, it’s pretty intense, culturally conditioned of course, and ordered in that way. I don’t have a problem with that. I grew up in a world that was wholly immediate. Grow food in the ground and plow the fields. Make your own furniture. In Kathmandu there were children wading around in this muddy and probably polluted pond gathering little fish to eat. It was pretty grody, but it didn’t really appall me.

Where I lived we had a very muddy lake where all the neighborhood urchins would go, and we shared this mud bank with the cows that would shit in the mud. We were happy as clams just to swim around in that lake. It took me back to the mud sills. I’m not trying to romance poverty, but I have enough sense to see when people are connected by folkways and some kind of ethos and a sense of shared experience—that’s my touchstone for value.

Have you studied much of the spiritual philosophy of India? Do you gravitate to that?

Not much. I’m interested but am not very well read there. There are interesting ideas you pick up by just living in California. I think a lot of the spiritual disciplines have great worth in America; they make sense to me. The only time I depart then is when it becomes supernatural. That’s because of a medical condition. [Laughs] In the presence of the supernatural, I break out in hives and the itching is unendurable. So if anyone attempts to convert me to a supernatural belief, I just get itchy. I thought about having it treated, but it actually serves me!

What’s your distinction between soul and supernatural?

Supernatural says there’s an invisible world that has all the attributes of our world except there’s no evidence for it. But only if you’re an adept can you understand it and can tell other people. That turns into power and it gets political, like someone controls the spigot. So there’s the spiritual guy with the spigot, and he releases [makes a knob-turning gesture] a little more, then a little more, and that’s an awful lot of power for anybody to have. Because I pay attention to politics, that tempers my understanding of religion. I’m an atheist by faith, but I’ve had mystical experiences which were real. They certainly formed me and changed me, but you can have a mystical experience and not believe in the supernatural. It’s not necessary. In fact, it might get in the way. A lot of spiritual teachers tell you, “Don’t get self-conscious about that.”

What about the notion of reincarnation?

To answer those questions, you don’t have any evidence so all you have is faith. When I talk to religious people, I’m not interested in their beliefs. I just talk to them about their faith—although sometimes their beliefs furnish anthropological interest. What I mean by that is that their choosing to disbelieve they’re supernatural helps me make my life more meaningful. It helps me find my way. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I was adopted as the founding experience of my life. You know—the parent that wasn’t. At an early age I decided that what I had was nature and an immediate experience of nature—wandering around in world solitudes.

How does your being adopted inform your beliefs?

It gave me an existential point of view. I was raised by people who said, “You are what you make yourself to be.” They didn’t dress it up as an intellectual notion. So I grew up relating to trees. Anything alive fascinated me. To this day animals fascinate me. Children too—any bloody thing. That’s God enough. It doesn’t have to be a landlord.

I haven’t thought about it to this instance, but maybe being severed from my blood parentage—which gave me a lot of pain—I’ve come to think was a great gift, a blessing—this feeling that you are what you do. That’s what Burning Man is. Out there people don’t say, “I’m a professor” or “I’m this” or “I’m that.” You just are what you manifest in this immediate place where everything seems hyperreal. That’s what I always wanted anyway. If it’s hyperreal, who needs God? That’s the only attraction—that God is that He, She, It—and is super real, the source of reality.

I like your image of the spigot holder.

I’m tempted to do a [variation on a] theme about that, but I don’t know if I can get away with it. I like The Simpsons—whenever they show God, he’s this outrageous gaseous vertebrate thing with many eyes and limbs, profoundly alien. To me as a kid, no one ever talked about religion as if it were real. So it just seemed flabbergasting, like something in a not very good comic book.

I was raised to see nature and high ethical ideas, such as my father had, as a source of spiritual, soulful connection. He didn’t call it “right action,” but the symbol of the Masons is a square and compass, so he being a carpenter was a sucker for that. Moral strength and an inner compass—that’s right action and that’s enough. In my view, this is it—not like some moral credit card of “I’ll make it up in my next life” but this meaningful experience, in the present. This [pointing to the ground] really counts! Not some nonsense of “maybe when I get up the karmic ladder, things will be okay.” This is the ride. That’s just my conviction.

After all the semantics, I think the message is “Thou art That.”

Thou art That, yeah. Again and again and it comes back to the mystic underpinnings of religion. Every religion starts out that way and then becomes more institutionalized and political and coercive and hierarchical. But I’ve been to good churches of different faiths—synagogues and California kinds of churches. I’ve lectured there and feel comfortable there. I just speak to their faith. The dean of Grace Cathedral said to me, “Well, you are a theologian, aren’t you?” I thought that was very cool.

I have a trope I’ve used. I say to them, “If I were to put a bunch of people from different beliefs together in a cage and said, ‘You figure out what God is and what’s the right view,’” it’s conceivable that when I came back there wouldn’t be a hank of hair or piece of bone left—that they’d kill each other [pounds fist] over what’s unconditionally real. That would be the history of religions. It starts with Thou art That and turns into Supreme Being. Why can’t we invert Supreme Being back to being is supreme? A great burden would be lifted.

Of course, you remind me of my conversation last year with your friend David Best, the pound-the-table nonbeliever temple builder.

Isn’t that a funny fact, that these artists who make temples as a tribe are mostly atheists?

[Laughs] I am sorry, but he’s such an unconvincing atheist, you know, building these superb temples all around the world and helping people. Again, maybe it’s semantics but maybe—They are That. Maybe They are—Being Supreme.

David is soulful and has a spirit—we all do. And he is really, really good at communicating spirit. Art is a spiritual thing. Anybody who understands anything about art understands that it’s a spiritual proposition. A vision is defined by the light that comes out of it, not the light that shines on it. Artists create visions. That’s what they do. That’s what makes them a handful sometimes.

How does it feel to be the founder of Burning Man?

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that. It can be nice to walk into a room and think that people are inclined to like you. It can be a nuisance, and it can be very off-putting. There’s no point complaining about it since everywhere I go, everybody just wants to talk about Burning Man.

Your legacy might wind up in the history books.

Legacy, schmegacy. Yes, the older you get the more you think in terms of affecting the future. So even as your vitality begins to falter, it’s tremendously heartening that something is going to grow beyond the term of your life. It’s nourishing in the present and gives heart to live. The idea that they’ll be talking about me in 100 years—what kind of garbage is that? [Laughs] Big deal, I’ll be dead, and I don’t believe I’ll look down from heaven, obviously.

Rob Sidon is publisher and editor in chief of Common Ground.