Venture under Maharajji’s blanket as Bob and I take a DeLorean time machine back to the 60s revolution. We discuss the spiritual awakening and the mind blowing music of that time. The 60s does have a message of love for today and the revolution that is now!
“There was a major shift that occurred in the 60’s, the shift from what you call absolute reality; thinking that what you saw and what your thinking mind thought it understood was only one kind of reality. And there was another experience of reality. William James, of course, had said that many years before, if you remember his quote,
“Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We might spend our entire life without knowing of their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and there they are in their completeness”.
It’s interesting that William James said that when he was a professor at Harvard. I was thrown out of William James Hall for doing what he said.
Up until the 60’s, the primary spiritual containers were the organized religions of this culture. They were primarily the holders of the ethical constraints of the culture. They motivated people to behave ethically through fear and through internalized superego. The primary mediator between you and God was the priest, so there was a priest class. What the 60’s did through psychedelics, initially, was blow that whole system apart. Because it made the relationship to God a direct experience, once again of the individual. Of course the Quakers have had that, and had a long history of it as did other traditions. But in terms of mainstream, this was a new concept coming into the culture, which was spiritual and not formally religious.
Most of the time, up until then, mystical experience had been pretty much denied and treated as irrelevant in our culture. I was a social scientist, I just spurned it, I cynically spurned it. I wouldn’t even read that stuff. Rilke said about that period that the only courage this demanded of us, was to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, the most inexplicable, that which we may encounter.
Mankind, in this sense, has been cowardly and has done life endless harm. The experiences that are called visions, the whole so called spirit world, death, all these things that are so closely akin to us have been, by daily parrying, so crowded out of our life, that the sense with which we could have grasped them are atrophied, to say nothing of God.
In the 60’s that changed. Most of us recognized a part of our being that we had never known before. We experienced a part of our being that was not separated from the universe. We saw how much of our behavior was based on the desire to alleviate the pain from our own separateness”
-Ram Dass
Bob Salihar is a music teacher
His website
https://www.onlineguitarbassandvocallessons.com/
