The Only Thing Missing Was Sufis

I went down to this Conference on Consciousness thrown by a student group in Philadelphia. It was like a near late warning of the Seventies Consciousness Carnival. There was gurus to the left of us and gurus to the right of us. The disciples of the 14 year old guru handing me leafletsiannouncing his arrival in town, the disciples of the 140 year old guru inviting me up to his parlor. Above us were the people who want to plant a permanent colony on the moon, believing that from this act fulfilling Man’s Destiny in the Universe, will cascade both the new technology capable of solving our problems of starvation and city, and the social and psychological unity necessary to overcome our divisions and put it to work. For background we had an illustrious panel of former associates of Leary — Humphrey Osmond, who coined the word “psychedelic” ; Ralph Metzner, the Maps of Consciousness man, who gave a workshop in fire/light yoga at five bucks a head; and so on. Only Baba Ram Dass was absent as they talked about' charismatic leadership, where it gets and what it costs, and how it’s faring today. We also heard from Saul Alinsky and a hypnotist and my feminist friend from Boston, and so on. All we were missing was the Sufis. And just as well; not because of them, but the aura that surrounds them now. The Sufis are the cocaine of the Consciousness Movement. I don’t know what they’ll dajtor your nose, but people wear the badge of association with them as they display coke spoons, with the same snobbish enthusiasm, innocent and corrupt, and it puts me off.

Before I left, I went uptown to see the 140 year old guru. He didn’t look 140, but then he might not if he were, right? The room grew crowded with disciples radiant in His presence, he waxed eloquent on Hindu metaphysics and the morality of higher consciousness. I asked him what to do about the fire in my fingers. He pounced on me for example like a terrier on a rat, cackling told me it was all monkey play, veils of Maya, etc. ha ha. Well, I've known that line since I read the Bhagavid-Gita at 16; and I know what else the Gita says, about how you work it out here. Afterwards the guru told my friend about me: "Too much ganja (weed)." So he can read my aura! I can't remember whether it was four cigarettes or five I saw him smoke, sitting there in an easy lotus, cocky as any macho teacher in the classroom . . My buddy says he doesn't eat, but he sure has a taste for lifesavers.

Drugs were our first consciousness trip, and that mass patterning persists. Ira Einhorn, the Philadelphia enzyme who convened the gathering of friends that masqueraded as that conference, talks about heroin: For people assailed by stress, body and mind, it reduces wild discord into a simple pattern, orga nizing all the acts and consciousness and stress of life around relating to the drug. But we are all besieged by incoherence now, the culture is tearing apart with glacial slowness, and everyone in it feels the chaos of new system rising in old. In everyone there is a hunger for the simple solution, the Way that organizes everything else around itself, makes sense out of the Chaos - not by em bracing it all in some higher synthesis, but by choosing only a small part of it to deal with.

And so we see the Jesus communes, the Lyman family, the Gaskin tribe, even the farm communes; gurus sprout ing everywhere, like magnets picking up some loose iron filings; missionary bands pushing yoga, encounter groups, alpha training, bioenergetics and rolfing, Krishna chanting, Maharishi medita tion. . . whoo! You take over, name a few. Much of what's around is interest ing and valuable, if you're looking for raw material to build on. But people are taking it in somewhat like smack or speed, to cut down all the complexity to safe and narrow limits. -

Forecast for the next five years: Con sciousness will be the country's growth service industry. Too many people will take to the easy lotus, giving up the task of integrating what we have begun.

Michael Rossman is the author of two books, The Wedding Within the War (Anchor, 1971) - a "poetic history" of the Move,nent - and On Learning and Social Change (Vintage, August 1972), a book on radical education theory. He is presently living in Berkeley.