In February 1967, a short-lived underground newspaper published a discussion between four 60s icons, recorded aboard the ferry Vallejo at the time Alan Watts owned it.
Here’s how Watts introduced his companions: “I’m this evening, on my ferry boat, the host to a fascinating party sponsored by the San Francisco Oracle, which is our new underground paper, far-outer than any far-out that has yet been seen. And we have here, members of the staff of the Oracle. We have Allen Ginsberg, poet, and rabbinic saddhu. We have Timothy Leary, about whom nothing needs to be said (laughs). And Gary Snyder, also poet, Zen monk, and old friend of many years.”
The opening discussion, which sounds like a who’s who of the 60s counterculture, regarded the peace movement:
Ginsberg: This swami wants you to introduce him in Berkeley. He’s going to have a Kirtan to sanctify the peace movement. So what I said is, he ought to invite Jerry Rubin and Mario Savio, and his cohorts. And he said: “Great, great, great!” So I said, “Why don’t you invite the Hell’s Angels, too?” He said: “Great, great, great! When are we gonna get hold of them?” So I think that’s one next feature…
Watts: You know, what is being said here, isn’t it: To sanctify the peace movement is to take the violence out of it.
Ginsberg: Well, to point attention to its root nature, which is desire for peace, which is equivalent to the goals of all the wisdom schools and all the Saddhanas.
Watts: Yes, but it isn’t so until sanctified. That is to say, I have found in practice that nothing is more violent than peace movements. You know, when you get a pacifist on the rampage, nobody can be more emotionally bound and intolerant and full of hatred. And I think this is the thing that many of us understand in common, that we are trying to take moral violence out of all those efforts that are being made to bring human beings into a harmonious relationship.
Ginsberg: Now, how much of that did the peace movement people in Berkeley realize?
Watts: I don’t think they realize it at all. I think they’re still working on the basis of moral violence, just as Gandhi was.
Ginsberg: Yeah…I went last night and turned on with Mario Savio. Two nights ago…After I finished and I was talking with him, and he doesn’t turn on very much…This was maybe the third or fourth time. But he was describing his efforts in terms of the motive power for large mass movements. He felt one of the things that move large crowds was righteousness, moral outrage, and ANGER…Righteous anger.
Leary: Well, let’s stop right here. The implication of that statement is: we want a mass movement. Mass movements make no sense to me, and I want no part of mass movements. I think this is the error that the leftist activists are making. I see them as young men with menopausal minds. They are repeating the same dreary quarrels and conflicts for power of the thirties and forties, of the trade union movement, of Trotskyism and so forth. I think they should be sanctified, drop out, find their own center, turn on, and above all avoid mass movements, mass leadership, mass followers. I see that there is a great difference—I say completely incompatible difference—between the leftist activist movement and the psychedelic religious movement. In the first place, the psychedelic movement, I think, is much more numerous. But it doesn’t express itself as noisily. I think there are different goals. I think that the activists want power. They talk about student power. This shocks me and alienates my spiritual sensitivities. Of course, there is a great deal of difference in method. The psychedelic movement, the spiritual seeker movement, or whatever you want to call it, expresses itself…as the Haight-Ashbury group had done…with flowers and chants and pictures and beads and acts of beauty and harmony…sweeping the streets. That sort of thing.
Watts: And giving away free food.
Leary: Yes…I think this point must be made straight away, but because we are both looked upon with disfavor by the Establishment, this tendency to group the two together…I think that such confusion can only lead to disillusion and hard feelings on someone’s part. So, I’d like to lay this down as a premise right at the beginning.
Ginsberg: Well, of course, that’s the same premise they lay down, that there is an irreconcilable split. Only, their stereotype of the psychedelic movement is that it’s just sort of the opposite…I think you’re presenting a stereotype of them.
Snyder: I think that you have to look at this historically, and there’s no doubt that the historical roots of the revolutionary movements and the historical roots of this spiritual movement are identical. This is something that has been going on since the Neolithic as a strain in human history, and one which has been consistently, on one level or another, opposed to the collectivism of civilization toward the rigidities of the city states and city temples. Christian utopianism is behind Marxism.
Leary: They’re outs and they want in.
UTOPIAN, RELIGIOUS DRIVE
Snyder: …but historically it arrives from a utopian and essentially religious drive. The early revolutionary political movements in Europe have this utopian strain to them. Then Marxism finally becomes a separate, non-religious movement, but only very late. That utopian strain runs right through it all along. So that we do share this…
A transcript of the sessions can be found at Creative Systems Thinking.