Episodes
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The last episode ended on the evening of April 5, 1968. I was unexpectedly leaving Washington DC as my college had been abruptly shut down following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was in a friend’s car and as I looked back, I could see that the clouds in the darkening sky were flickering red, reflecting the light of the fires that were burning, as violence had begun to break out in the city. Within a week, 1,200 buildings had been burned, 12 people were killed and 14,000 federal troops were still occupying the nation’s capital.
Now even though the murder of Dr. King was one of the most tragic and deeply disturbing events that could possibly have happened, I am not going to focus on the assassination itself, or on the profoundly traumatic effect that it had on the country. Thousands of articles have been written about it by hundreds of authors who have a much deeper understanding of history than I do.
Instead, for the purposes of this podcast series, which again focuses on the ways that consciousness began to evolve in those days, as witnessed through my own personal lens, there are a few key points that I would like to bring up.
The first one is that Dr. King was a far greater figure than the iconic public servant that is presented in the current annals of American history. Even though he was one of the primary founders of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as one of the nation’s most inspirational orators, there was much more to him than that.
He had a highly enlightened view of human potential as well as of its ultimate destiny. As such, he was continually expressing some of the deepest essential truths concerning human wisdom and understanding. In reality, he was at the very forefront of the enormous expansion of consciousness that was beginning to take shape back then. And it is truly hard to grasp how far ahead of his time he really was.
The easiest way to realize this is by looking at his lofty position on non-violence, both as a means for resolving conflict, as well as for moving the evolution of humanity forward. For the sake of clarity, let’s compare it with the law of the jungle, which has been the basic modus operandi of humanity since civilization began.
As a species, our knee-jerk reaction to the seemingly dog-eat-dog world we live in can be summed up in one basic phrase - might makes right. It began in the time of the caveman, as tribe fought against tribe, and over time, man began the process of inventing weaponry. Primitive spears and clubs turned into bows and arrows and swords. And thus, the arms race began.
To our great misfortune, it has continued, unabated since then and the constant development of ever-increasing firepower has only served to heat things up. Tragically, even though times have changed dramatically, this basic concept of settling disputes has remained exactly the same. When push comes to shove, we resort to good old fashioned brute force. From the one-on-one fist fight, all the way up to massive conflagrations fought between millions of soldiers, it’s still the same old story. One side prevails due to its superior weaponry, along with its unbridled willingness to inflict severe pain and death on the other side. And of course, it doesn’t matter how many innocent people have to suffer and die. What difference does that make when it comes to getting what you want?
Now, even though this unenlightened unconsciousness has remained unchanged since the dawn of human history, remarkably, throughout every era, certain people have emerged who seem to be tapped into a deeper level of understanding. With a higher and more compassionate perspective, non-violence is usually the central theme of their approach and from a very early age, Dr. King was clearly one of them. Indeed, he spent his entire short life trying to elevate human awareness to this higher viewpoint.
At the root of his understandings was the work of Mahatma Gandhi, whose brilliant use of non-violence helped overthrow the brutal British rule that had subjugated the Indian people for nearly a century.
His interest in Gandhi grew over time, and following his successes with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, Dr. King felt the desire to travel to India to gain a deeper understanding of the life and teachings of this unlikely, yet remarkable leader. Finally, on February 3, 1959, he and his party, which included his wife, departed for a six-week visit to the ancient land. “To other countries I may go as a tourist,” he told reporters when he arrived at the airport. “But to India I come as a pilgrim.”
His aim was to study how political goals can be accomplished through the use of non-violent methods, rather than through the use of brute force. According to Gandhi, it was the fundamental difference between using the higher parts of our hearts and minds, rather than just relying upon the primitive, survival-based impulses of anger and fear.
The visit proved to be an extremely powerful experience for him and he stated that it had helped clarify and empower his dedication to alleviate “the suffering, the exploitation, the injustice, and the degradation of human beings.”
These noble, universal feelings had only grown since his return, and when he formally came out against the war in Vietnam, he also stood against the horrible injustices of the economic exploitation practiced by “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out, with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”
Along with his stance on non-violence, there is one associated factor regarding the tragedy of the King assassination that I would like to mention at this point. In general, as far as race relations in the United State had been concerned, black people had always been delegated into a fundamentally subservient position in the society. While it was within their civil rights to express their views regarding the racial injustices that existed in the country, it was always firmly understood that it had to be done in a basically respectful and civil manner.
But that mindset had begun to change a bit in the mid-sixties, and it was brought into focus on March 6, 1964, when Cassius Clay, the young boxer who had just become the heavyweight champion of the world, changed his name to Muhammed Ali and announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam, which was also known as the Black Muslims.
This controversial movement was part of a larger sentiment that had been gathering momentum that became known as “Black Pride” or “Black Power.” Along those general lines, the Black Panther Party was formed just two years later.
I remember these developments very clearly, and in particular, I was struck by something that Malcom X once said. An extremely charismatic leader, as the chief spokesman for the Nation of Islam, he summed up the emerging point of view in a way which I found to be particularly clarifying. “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they won't even admit the knife is there."
Now, of course Dr. King clearly understood the sentiments and feelings behind this point of view, but he never wavered on the issue of non-violence. As an ordained minister who took his work extremely seriously, the idea of using violence to accomplish the goal was completely out of the question.
As such, he felt that the motto of Black Power represented “essentially an emotional concept” that meant “different things to different people.” Even though it “was born from the wombs of despair and disappointment…and is a cry of pain,” he had deep concerns that “the slogan was an unwise choice,” because it carried “connotations of violence and separatism.”
In his view, the real way to create change was to amass political and economic power, and then use it to achieve ennobling change. As far as the higher destiny of the country was concerned, he believed that “America must be made a nation in which its multi-racial people are partners in power.”
Now, the truly remarkable thing about Dr. King is that he had the ethical and moral standing to bridge the gap between the various viewpoints and promote a more inclusive path. And this basic fact makes his loss to the country and to humanity itself all the more tragic.
With all of this in mind, the outpouring of grief that followed the assassination was staggering. The funeral was set for Sunday, April 7th in Atlanta, and in an official proclamation, President Johnson declared it to be a National Day of Mourning. All sporting and theatrical events were to be postponed, with all flags lowered to half-staff.
Of course, not everyone in the country was aligned with the idea of paying respect to the memory of Dr. King. Lester Maddox, the staunchly segregationist governor of Georgia always looked upon King as a major villain, who had no right stirring up the black population to go against the venerated laws and traditions of the South.
As funeral arrangements were being made, the governor was approached with the idea of having Dr. King’s body lie in state in the Capitol building in Atlanta, but he flatly refused. On top of that, he declared that no flags in the state of Georgia would be lowered to half-staff either.
When his position was relayed to Washington, although the federal government had no power over his refusal regarding the use of the state Capitol, it did have the power to enforce the lowering of all flags in the nation, so the flags in Georgia were lowered in accordance with the decree.
The funeral itself became an iconic moment in American history. At first, the city of Atlanta estimated that about ten thousand people would be in attendance. But by the time of the funeral approached, it became clear that this estimate was way off.
It took place on April 9, 1968, in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was born and raised, and began with a private ceremony at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King had co-pastored with his father. The intimate service was attended by just family and friends. But then something truly extraordinary happened.
A four-mile long funeral procession began from the church to Morehouse College, which was King's alma mater. King’s coffin was placed on a simple wooden wagon which was pulled by two mules. As the procession got underway, approximately one hundred thousand people joined in and walked along with it.
The global media coverage was extensive. Major American networks broadcasted the event live, which allowed millions of viewers across the country to participate in the intense feeling of collective mourning. Throughout the country, people who were driving in their cars spontaneously turned on their headlights, as though they were driving in a funeral procession.
The simple wooden cart being pulled by two mules highlighted King's commitment to the struggles of the poor and marginalized in society, while the throng that walked behind the coffin was also filled with hundreds of major celebrities who had flown in to show their respects. Leaders from the field of government and politics were mixed with the top tier of the county’s athletes and entertainers. The list of notables who walked in that somber procession is far too large to include here.
Again, as I’ve mentioned regarding the JFK assassination, I wouldn’t even try to put into words what it all felt like. Let’s just say that the injustice and the hopelessness of it was simply overwhelming,
And on top of it all, the fact that one of history’s major apostles of non-violence was brutally murdered for what he stood for was far beyond ironic and it soon became gasoline added to the fire; significant violence erupted in more than 125 American cities across 29 states. Nearly 50,000 federal troops occupied America’s urban areas. Thirty-nine people were killed and 3,500 injured. These uprisings produced more property damage, arrests, and injuries than any other uprising of the 1960s.
In all, it was just a truly, horrible feeling, and with that, let’s end this sad episode here. But even so, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
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In the last episode, we took a quick look back at Robert F. Kennedy’s rise to the senate in November of 1964. Then we mentioned that in 1967, the soon to be anti-war candidate, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy had approached him with the idea of opposing President Lyndon Johnson for the nomination of the Democratic Party for President of the United States. But Kennedy had quickly turned the idea down. Now back to early 1968.
Everybody knew that Bobby was certainly no friend of LBJ’s. They had a long and well-known history of animosity between them. But again, for many significant reasons, he didn’t think the timing was right to mount a challenge against a sitting president, so he just stayed in the wings and watched Gene McCarthy try to take him on.
Then on March 12, 1968, something completely unexpected happened. The largely unknown senator from Minnesota, whose grass roots campaign had been largely run by a group of underfunded student volunteers, made a truly significant showing in the New Hampshire primary, and it proved to be a shocking upset.
Lyndon Johnson, who had the powerful name recognition of the incumbent, was well-funded and well organized with a huge staff of seasoned supporters. But he won only 49.4 per cent of the vote. And incredibly, McCarthy won a remarkable 42.2 per cent, which really took everyone by surprise. Suddenly it became obvious that the anti-Johnson, anti-war sentiment in the country was far larger and deeper than anyone had calculated.
Overnight, the equation had clearly changed and Johnson was not as firmly in the driver’s seat as he seemed to be. And as you can imagine, the outcome caught Senator Kennedy’s attention as well.
Now, there have been several biographies about RFK written over the years and many of them have examined the evolution and inner growth that led him up to this time. He had traveled extensively throughout the entire country and his views on the makeup of the American culture had broadened deeply.
I remember watching some of his speeches and noticing that there did seem to be something different about him, like a deeper level of empathy and compassion was emerging, especially for the underdog. And he seemed to have let his hair grow longer as well, maybe to emphasize his youth. Not that he needed it - he was only forty-two years old, afterall.
Anyway, it didn’t take him long to make up his mind. And just four days after the outcome in New Hampshire, on March 16, 1968, in the same room where his brother had done it eight years earlier, Robert F. Kennedy announced his intention to run for president of the United States.
Of course, his move was met with mixed reactions. Many people in the anti-war movement called him an opportunist, coming in only after McCarthy had courageously paved the way. But somehow, it seemed much bigger than that, like he was on a completely different level from the rest of the prospective field and was capable of producing the major change in the county that was so desperately needed.
“It is a time of difficult choices, a time of danger and opportunity,” he said. “It is a time for all of us to choose whether we will stand for what we believe in, or whether we will be silent.
“I believe that we can build a country where every man, woman, and child has the opportunity to live up to his or her full potential. I believe that we can build a country where every person is judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. And I believe that we can build a country where the pursuit of happiness is not just a dream, but a reality.
“But in order to do that, we must first have the courage to change,” he continued. “We must have the courage to stand up and speak out for what we believe in. We must have the courage to demand better from our leaders, and better from ourselves.
“That is why I am here today. That is why I am running for President. Because I believe that we can do better. Because I believe that we must do better. And because I believe that together, we can build a country that is worthy of the ideals that we hold dear.”
So that was it. Wherever you stood - like it or not, with him or against him, anti-war or pro-war, Bobby was in the race. The game was on. And suddenly everything had changed completely. This was an enormous development, as well as a major surprise to a large portion of the country. Suddenly, the idea of serious opposition to the war in Vietnam had reached an entirely new level, to the delight of the entire anti-war movement.
Of course, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota wasn’t happy about it. He had personally approached Kennedy five months earlier, arguing for an anti-Johnson initiative and urging him to run, but Kennedy had squarely turned him down, saying he said he didn’t want to challenge Johnson at that point in time.
A lot of other people in the anti-war movement were skeptical about Kennedy as well, feeling that he was an opportunist who only found the courage to run after McCarthy had bravely paved the way. But Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been standing firmly against the war for nearly a year, felt otherwise. He felt that RFK’s entrance into the field was a real help because it made the case against Johnson even stronger. As he stated, “I think both Mr. Kennedy and Mr. McCarthy represent the kind of competence, dedication and relevant thinking on the basic issues that confront us today, that they are the kind of men that present the alternative that I think we need.”
But it really didn’t matter how you looked at it - the race for the presidency had suddenly and radically changed because Kennedy had now entered it. Besides his enormous name recognition, on a deep level he also represented the JFK Camelot mythology to a large portion of the general public, and his announcement had an immediate impact on the entire country. He quickly began active campaigning, targeting the key primaries that were the closest on the schedule. And when it came to managing a presidential campaign, he was a true expert, for he had overseen every aspect of his brother’s incredibly successful race.
Over the next few weeks, things began to settle into the new political normal and then, toward the end of March, suddenly, President Johnson’s office requested airtime from the three TV networks. He wanted to make a major speech regarding the status of the war in Vietnam. His appearance was scheduled for Sunday night, March 31 and at 9:01pm, the president began to address the nation.
He started by giving an extensive overview about the state of the war in Vietnam. He discussed troop levels and urged Hanoi to consider a recent US initiative for peace, after which he went on about the real chances for ending the war and praised the US determination to bring the situation to a successful conclusion.
After going through these topics for over an hour, he began to discuss his actual role in the process, “I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year,” he stated. “With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour of a day of my time to any personal partisan cause or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office - the Presidency of your country.”
Then at that point, with no warning, he suddenly shocked the world. “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” he said. Then he quickly ended his speech.
It was a major bombshell and absolutely nobody had seen it coming, not even the closest members of his cabinet or staff. He had kept his decision completely private, but suddenly, here it was - Johnson was out and the presidential race was now wide-open.
Almost everyone believed that it was RFK’s entrance into the field that did the trick, but years later, it came out that Johnson’s health had been seriously deteriorating and he didn’t think he was physically up to the callosal demands that would be facing him. He had pretty much made up his mind several months before the McCarthy/Kennedy phenomenon had even begun to emerge.
But none of the reasons why he did it mattered. All that mattered was that he was stepping down, it seemed like a whole new era had begun, and suddenly, things seemed incredibly bright. With Bobby Kennedy, Gene Macarthy and several other key players emerging into the forefront, a true change of direction for the war, as well as for the entire country seemed imminent.
Although I don’t remember a whole lot from that particular time, I do remember that night very well. The next day, our entire campus seemed elevated. Who knows? Maybe the summer of love and the sudden emergence of flower power had something to do with it. But it really didn’t matter. All we knew was it was it seemed like we were in the Wizard of Oz; black and white had turned into color and we weren’t in Kansas anymore. April had begun, spring was about to dawn, and there was no telling what the future might bring. It was a great feeling.
Suddenly, this elevated mood seemed to light up the world. And although major challenges were still plentiful, a new sense of optimism had begun to set in and it was truly a magical time. But unfortunately, it didn’t last long, for only four nights later, on Thursday evening, April 4th at 6:05 pm in Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was brutally murdered.
Now, details traveled much more slowly in those days. Don’t forget, this was still a dozen years before the idea of 24-hour news coverage had even begun. I do remember hearing that Dr. King had been shot, but the next morning, the enormity of what was happening really got driven home. At my first class, the professor announced that school was immediately closing and that basically, we should all get out of town as quickly as possible. The best thing to do now was to just go home.
By that evening, I was on my way back to Philadelphia in a friend’s car and as I looked back at DC, I could see that the clouds in the dark sky were flickering red, lit by the color of burning flames. It was clear that some truly disturbing days lay ahead.
So, let’s let this terrible news mark the end of this episode. We’re entering into a tough time now, but as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
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As the last episode ended, we had begun to examine the speech that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had made as he publicly came out against the war in Vietnam. He talked about his lifelong commitment to non-violence, saying he had been compelled to speak against the war effort because the United States had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
He went on to link the war to the nation’s economic injustices, arguing for a fundamental moral shift in the country's priorities. He called the festering US involvement in Vietnam, “some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war.” And he declared that “America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic destructive suction tube.”
Indeed, he found that the amount of money that had been spent in producing such meaningless destruction, was simply obscene. Total expenditures had surpassed $252 billion by end of 1967, while over 25 million Americans were still living below the poverty line.
And don’t forget, our troops weren’t a bunch of volunteers fighting for a cause that they considered to be worthy. Far from it. This war was being fought by draftees. The country was under a mass conscription order, and if you were a male between the ages of 18 ½ and 26 and you didn’t have a deferment, you were either going to fight or you were going to jail.
On top of all these other issues, the number of black soldiers fighting in the war was out of proportion. You had nearly 80,000 black soldiers being forced to fight a war that was 8,500 miles away, while their families were largely treated as second class citizens back home.
But given all this, on a larger level Dr. King still had a sense that a major change of some kind was beginning to take place in the world and he stood squarely behind it. But it was going to take a lot of sincere effort and prayer. As he said, “Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance.”
“Somehow this madness must cease,” he continued. “We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.
“I speak…for the poor of America… I speak as a citizen of the world… as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. Then he concluded, “I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.”
Today, this is considered to be one the greatest speeches of his lofty career. But things were quite different back then, and to say that his decision about the war wasn’t well received would be quite an understatement.
But Dr. King was well aware of the probable opposition he would face as he went into the church that day. The idea of standing against the war had presented quite a difficult conundrum for him because it meant standing against President Johnson, who had been an enormous ally of the Civil Rights movement during the course of his entire presidency. He had been a powerful force of positive change in the lives of black people throughout the country, and the idea of opposing him on the war was rife with significant difficulties.
And indeed, it proved to be so. A large portion of the Civil Rights movement was shocked that King chose to oppose Johnson and the NAACP called the speech a “serious tactical mistake.” But the opposition in the mainstream press was far stronger than that.
The editorial board of the New York Times said that King’s position was an oversimplification and that when it came to the Civil Rights Movement and the War in Vietnam, "linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion." The Washington Post said that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people." And Life magazine said his speech had been “demagogic slander that sounded like a script from Radio Hanoi.” But Dr. King stood strong and began stepping up his antiwar efforts.
As I mentioned earlier, there were three powerful events that happened in 1967 that would have a significant impact on the American involvement in Vietnam. Dr. King taking a stand against the war in April was the first. The second happened on June 20, 1967, when the controversial, yet enormously respected world-famous boxer, Muhammed Ali, was sentenced to five years in prison for draft evasion. And just to be sure that everyone understood where the government of the United States stood on the issue of the war, on the same day that Ali was convicted, Congress voted 337-29 to extend the draft for four more years.
Finally, on November 30 of that year. Eugene McCarthy, the astute senator from Minnesota, formally announced that he would oppose Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic party’s nomination for president.
At the time, it seemed like a relatively minor event. McCarthy was basically unknown and even though Johnson’s popularity had begun to dip a bit at the time, it was common knowledge that he had a secure hold on the party and that there was no way he could be defeated for the nomination. McCarthy’s announcement seemed largely symbolic.
Now, let’s go back to January of 1968. But before we get into what began to unfold politically, let me give you a very quick overview of what I was doing at school, once I returned from winter break. The reason this will be so quick is because I was doing very little at the time, unless pledging a big fraternity and partying your brains out can be categorized as an accomplishment of any kind.
I wasn’t paying much attention to anything outside of the realm of my own little world and I barely paid attention there either. As far as the war was concerned, I rarely thought about it. I had a solid college deferment through to June of 1971 and the whole mess would certainly be over by then, so I had nothing to worry about. Other than that, I guess I had forgotten that I had come to college to learn anything, at least not scholastically. I was busy developing the attention span of a common house fly, along with the clarity and depth of a thin layer of mud. It’s not necessary for me to add any concrete details here. Just let your concept of absolute cluelessness fill in the blanks.
So, back to the political world. Shortly after his announcement, to everyone’s surprise, even though it was still relatively small, Senator McCarthy’s campaign began to gain some traction. It seems there was a little more anti-war sentiment in the country than most people had noticed.
At one point, it became generally known that, along with a few other groups, McCarthy had privately tried to convince New York senator Robert F. Kennedy to run against Johnson in the primary. But RFK was quite hesitant about it. Although he was unquestionably opposed to him, he felt that Johnson was in a totally secure position and that opposing him would be a bad choice for both the party and the country, as well as for his own possible future plans.
It’s important at this point, to step back a little and take a look at RFK or “Bobby” as he was generally called, who was in a completely unique position in the country at the time. To start with, he was probably one of the first major figures in the United States to be routinely referred to by just his first name. Whenever TV or news reporters mentioned “Bobby” everybody knew exactly who they were talking about.
And that’s because, as many of you know, he had become a major figure in America ever since his older brother, John F. Kennedy, had been elected president in 1960. As his tenaciously brilliant campaign manager, Bobby had overseen every aspect of the successful win. And then, as Attorney General, he became the most trusted member of the cabinet. Indeed, someone once asked JFK if Bobby was his number two man in Washington and he said that not only was his number two, he was also his number three, four, and five as well.
Then, during the horrible ordeal of the JFK assassination, Bobby was center stage with the family throughout the entire nightmare. In the months that followed, he rarely made appearances and when he did, the scars of agony and grief were deeply etched upon his face. But nine months after the assassination, something truly remarkable happened at the Democratic party’s national convention in Atlantic City on August 27, 1964.
It was the final day of the proceedings and they were going to show a film commemorating the life and accomplishments of JFK. The auditorium was packed and the program was being carried live on all the TV networks. Bobby was scheduled to give a very brief introduction to the film, and after a few preliminaries, he was finally introduced.
As soon as he walked onto the stage, the entire auditorium spontaneously erupted into a massive standing ovation. For the first few minutes, it was overwhelmingly powerful, but it quickly turned into something much more, as the crowd simply would not stop cheering. Even though he tried to speak several times, they wouldn’t let him and the standing ovation just went on and on. It seemed that a huge wave of emotion had been spontaneously released and was being showered upon him, as though the whole country was holding him tightly in a fond embrace.
It had not been organized, there was no demonstration of any kind and no accompanying music. It was just Bobby standing in front of several thousand people who were expressing their deep admiration and affection for him and what he stood for, including those golden days of Camelot that had been brutally stolen from the country. It went on like that for over twenty straight minutes and it was truly extraordinary.
A few months later, RFK decided to return to public service and was elected the United States senator from the state of New York. From 1965 on, along with being a major figure in American politics, he became an effective and widely respected United States senator as well.
Now, this is a perfect place to end this episode, as Senator Kennedy was about to make a political move that would have a major impact on the country. So, as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
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We ended the last episode with a quick look at the groundbreaking Beatles album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the powerful effect it had on popular music and on Western Culture in general. For many reasons, the album, which was released on May 26, 1967, seemed to elevate the mass consciousness of a significant segment of society to a new and higher level. And then a month later, on June 25, 1967, the old Fab Four took things up another notch.
On the first internationally broadcast television program to be beamed simultaneously around the world by satellite, the Beatles introduced their classic masterpiece, “All You Need is Love,” which became an instant anthem for those amazing days.
They had invited a bunch of guests to be on stage with them as they performed the song, including the Rolling Stones, the Who and many others. It turned out to be an incredible celebration and along with the music and the expanding tenor of the times, a new form of appearance had come into the world as well. It was the hippy look and it quickly became known as the uniform of the counter culture. It’s hard to describe because of its individualized, free and unencumbered, styleless style. But one popular phrase of the times sums it up - you just “let it all hang out.”
And the Beatles, along with everyone else who joined them on the stage, all wore it well. Now, there was nothing subtle about what was going on. They were clearly making a statement and the entire Western world reacted.
Shortly thereafter, the remarkable summer of love got under way, with its happenings, be-ins and other mass gatherings, boldly celebrating the emergence of this newly liberated way of being. The concept of Flower Power had been born and spread like wildfire, verifying the old adage that, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
Now, I haven’t mentioned anything about what I was doing personally back then, but it was a pretty incredible year for me as well. As a senior, I was elected president of our high school, (which was a relatively big deal for its time and place), I had also met and fallen in love with my high school sweetheart, Sally, and we had our own magnificent, teenaged summer of love. And to top it off, the basketball team that my father had founded only a few years earlier, the Philadelphia 76ers, won the NBA Championship.
By the way, that high school romance of ours is still in full swing. We went on to get married, had a wonderful daughter, and as Sonny and Cher sang long ago, “the beat goes on.” However, for the purposes of this podcast narrative, what’s important here is that from my little perspective, everything seemed right with the world.
Finally, the endless summer came to an end and I soon departed to Washington, DC and entered American University. One of the very first things that happened to me there presents an accurate picture of both the nature of the times and of my personal state of mind. I was living in a dorm and on one of the first nights, we had a meeting of the residents of our floor. There were about sixty of us and it went on for over an hour.
Towards the end, the floor supervisor summed up the dorm rules and then added, “So when it comes to alcohol, as long as you’re not too drunk, you’re going to be okay. If you are too drunk though, you’re going have to go before the disciplinary committee. Okay, so I guess you’re asking – “What is the definition of being too drunk?” he asked with a smirk.
“Well, if you get on the elevator and you’re too drunk to remember what floor you live on, or if you’re too drunk to remember what your room number is, or if you’re so drunk that you pass out in the hall before you even make it to your room - then you’re too drunk. If you’re less drunk than that, you’ll be fine.”
Everyone had a good laugh, like hey, we didn’t know college was going to be this much fun. But then, his entire demeanor changed and, sounding like a tough cop on the beat, in a curt, strict tone, he said, “Of course, if you’re caught smoking marijuana, you’re immediately expelled. We have no tolerance for that here.”
There was dead silence in the room and I thought to myself, “Who the hell is going to come to college and smoke marijuana?” It seemed like the most absurd idea in the world. “Why would anybody do that?” The mixture of college and marijuana seemed completely incongruous.
As you might deduct, at eighteen and a half years old, to coin an old phrase, I was as straight as they came. I had never smoked anything at all and had never had an alcoholic drink of any kind in my entire life. And that was fine with me. I had other plans. I was enrolled in the School of Government and Public Administration and following graduation; I would go to law school and then join my brother in the law firm my father had founded.
Anyway, it turned out to be a terrific opening semester for me. I went home for winter break to enjoy some sorely missed, extended time with Sally, and as the year came to an end, the only bad thing that I have to say about 1967 is that it turned into 1968.
So, here we go. But this takes us into some rather dark territory and intestinal fortitude becomes an absolute must. By now, you probably know that the first place to start talking about this year is with the ever-deepening quagmire of Vietnam. Although I hadn’t been particularly aware of it, besides everything else that had happened in 1967, it was also the year that a small, but significant portion of the American public had begun to question our involvement in that war.
Through it all, Lyndon Johnson kept reassuring the country that even though the financial and human costs had been high, our effort in Vietnam was proving to be more than justified and things continued to go quite well for us over there. However, his rosy picture darkened considerably when something called the Tet Offensive broke out at the end of January of 1968. Without warning, the North Vietnamese launched a massive, well-coordinated attack throughout the entire country, including the South’s capital city of Saigon.
As the brutal fight continued to rage on, it became an enormous blow to US public opinion in two significant ways. First, it showed that the optimistic spin that had been put on the war was deeply flawed. And secondly, it prompted something revolutionary in TV news. Due to enhanced technology, all of the networks began to cover the war in graphic detail, and kept it in the lead position of their major broadcasts.
This constant exposure brought the bloodshed home in a way that had never been seen before. Horrible images, filled with violent battle scenes brought the war into the living rooms of the American public on a nightly basis, which was deeply disturbing to the entire country. Suddenly, Lydon Johnson began to seem like a major liar and his approval ratings, which had always been robust, began to tank.
At its peak, his approval rating had been 74% with only a 15% disapproval. By the end of February 1968, primarily due to his mishandling of Vietnam, his approval rating had sunk to a dismal 41% with a seriously significant disapproval of 48%.
On a personal side note, I used to take the train to Philadelphia on a fairly regular basis to visit Sally, who was still in high school. I would travel to and from Union Station in Washington DC and I began noticing something eerie. On every trip. I would walk by a restricted area where there would be about 20 – 30 rather small, flag draped metal boxes with a military official standing nearby.
Soon, I became aware that these were coffins carrying the bodies of US soldiers coming back from Vietnam, and the human toll of it all began to dawn on me. I soon realized that these weren’t just some metal boxes in the hallway of a train station. No. In a very short time, each one of them would become the sad focus of deep mourning, as the family and friends of the fallen would try to make sense of their dear young ones taken far before their time. All of this death! And what was it that what we were we fighting for again?
At this point, to set the stage for what was about to come, it’s important to look back to 1967 once again, at three events that were to have an impact on the anti-war movement. The first one took place on April 4, 1967, when something truly extraordinary happened. After months of agonizing deliberations, and in a move that was incredibly controversial for the time, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. firmly and unequivocally announced his staunch opposition to the war.
In order to understand the significance of this, let’s remember that there have been very few people in American history who can match his moral and ethical standing. Of course, he is mainly remembered for his groundbreaking actions in the realm of Civil Rights, but as lofty as those accomplishments were, they are only a small part of who he really was.
For in essence, he had always considered himself to be primarily a preacher who had dedicated himself to doing God’s work. And as such, he stood for peace, equality, and dignity for all people, everywhere, not just for those aligned with the American point of view.
In a major address before a packed house at the Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. King meticulously outlined his reasons for taking his anti-war stance.
He then began to address the issue of non-violence. Throughout his life, King had been deeply influenced by the work of Mahatma Gandhi and had espoused the path of non-violence in everything he did, especially in the inner cities of America. And because of that, he now couldn’t justify the hypocrisy of not opposing this massive war effort. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government,” he said.
With those deeply striking and incredibly powerful words, let’s let this be the end of this episode. We’re just beginning this part of the story, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
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In the last episode, I briefly described my grandfather, who was a lifelong mystic, and his reactions to the dream I’d had about my father and his ring, which was followed by its mysterious disappearance. I also mentioned another unusual incident concerning the ring that took place about twenty years later, when a friend told me about a vivid dream he’d had where my father had given him a message for me, saying that I should “remember the ring.”
Now this wasn’t a childhood friend, he knew nothing about my father, and had no idea if this message was going to mean anything to me at all. As you can imagine, the fact that it had come through a completely objective third party and had happened a full twenty years after the original incident made quite an impact on me.
So, that completes this part of the narrative. In summary, even though my life had been turned upside down by the sudden death of my father, which had been accompanied by two inexplicable events that had defied all logic, I put it all behind me, or so I thought. I continued with my eleventh-grade life, which basically meant that I returned to my everyday state of constant activity.
Now, as I’ve mentioned a few times earlier, this podcast narrative focuses on the massive evolution of consciousness that began in the early1960s, as experienced through my own individual lens, which brings us now to the middle of 1966.
On a larger level, at this time two huge influences were beginning to shake American society to its core – First, the enormous evolution of the Beatles and their profound impact on popular culture, and second, the war in Vietnam.
With the Beatles, as we mentioned in the last episode, at the end of 1965, they had come out with their revolutionary album, Rubber Soul, which George Harrison said was the first music they made when they were all regularly smoking marijuana. It had enormous appeal and was having a major effect on all of popular music.
By the way, their old friend Bob Dylan was breaking some new ground of his own. In March of 1966, he brought out a radical new song that caught everyone’s attention. Its free-wheeling, raucous sound was far more in the style of a New Orleans Dixieland band than of rock and roll. And in the wild chorus, with his background musicians singing along in high hysterics, he kept repeating the signature line, “Everybody must get stoned.”
The song was over four and a half minutes long and got a ton of airplay on almost every pop radio station. So, on a daily basis, with a clever twist of words and a message that was unmistakable, millions of music fans would listen to Dylan constantly urge them to try marijuana. It was quite an advertisement.
A few months later, the Beatles took it all one step further when they released their groundbreaking album, Revolver. Again, according to George Harrison, while Rubber Soul was the first album they made under the influence of marijuana, Revolver was the first one they made under the regular influence of LSD.
The easiest way to describe this remarkable collection of songs is that it was incredibly trippy. One song, “Love to You” followed the form of a classic Indian raga, complete with sitar and tablas. Nothing like it had ever been heard in the west before. Another major breakthrough was the soul-stirring “Eleanor Rigby,” which brought an entirely new level of depth to the Beatles repertoire. All the other songs on the album became instant classics as well, but one track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” deserves some special attention because it was specifically designed to boost the evolution of consciousness.
Apparently, John Lennon had been influenced by a book called, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner. The book claimed that under the influence of LSD, it was possible to shed the limiting nature of constant ego identification and emerge into a higher, more enlightened level of awareness. And it gave step by step instructions on how to do it.
Supposedly, after Lennon bought the book, he took LSD and followed the instructions to a tee. Soon after that, he wrote the song, with the psychedelic nature of the music combined with the mind-expanding lyrics. He said he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting on top of a mountain, as he enlightened the public to the message of possible God realization that underlies the LSD experience.
“Turn off your mind relax and float downstream,” he sang. “It is not dying, it is not dying. Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void. It is shining, it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within. It is being, it is being. That love is all and love is everyone. It is knowing, it is knowing…”
Some years later, George Harrison offered an interesting perspective on the song as well as on their evolving perspective at the time. “From birth to death all we ever do is think: we have one thought, we have another thought, another thought, another thought,” he said. “Even when you are asleep you are having dreams, so there is never a time from birth to death when the mind isn’t always active with thoughts. But you can turn off your mind.
“The whole point is that…the self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in the outward manifestation of the physical world. . . is just clutter.” Then he concluded, “The true nature of each soul is pure consciousness. So, the song is really about transcending, and about the quality of the transcendent.”
Of course, this understanding about the higher nature of our consciousness was extremely advanced for its time. And whether the public understood it or not, the message was still pouring out to millions of people on a daily basis, subtly or not so subtly affecting their consciousness.
The innovative album caught on in a flash and the influence of psychedelic music began to grow significantly. Over the next few months, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, the Jefferson Airplane, the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors all gained enormous popularity, along with many, many other groups.
A new idea of a higher, more evolved state of being was clearly being born in the culture. And speaking of the culture, in a larger context, something called the “counter culture” was beginning to emerge, which not only challenged the mainstream norms and values, but also advocated for social change. Embracing ideals of peace, love, and unity, it was all vibrant, inspiring, alive, and unmistakably - young.
But at the same time, another enormous, yet rather sinister influence was in the early stages of taking over the consciousness of the country as well. As you probably know, it was the ever-broadening tragedy of the war in Vietnam.
Even though no one seemed to be paying much attention to it, like an undiagnosed cancer, it just kept metastasizing. President Lyndon Johnson continued to insist that the constant build-up of US troops was the right thing to do because at all costs, we had to prevent communism from taking over the Pacific Rim. And the costs were getting pretty serious.
In 1964, we spent $53.4 billion on the effort in Vietnam. In 1965, we spent another $54.5 billion and in 1966, it escalated to 66.4 billion. That’s a total of $174.4 billion. Not that anyone looked at it this way, but in those three years, instead of being used for warfare, that amount of money could have abundantly fed well over a billion people.
And the human costs were building as well. The US troops which had numbered 23,300 in 1964, grew to 184,300 in 1965, then onto 385,300 by the end of 1966. And with that, the truly horrible number - how many people actually died there – kept swelling. In 1964, 216 US soldiers died. It grew to 1,928 in 1965, then onto 6,350 in 1966.
Now that’s just US troops. When it comes to how many of the North and South Vietnamese people died, no one really knows for sure, but an estimate of 10-1 is used as a conservative approximation. So here are the basically revolting numbers related to those three years of war - $174.43 billion just plain wasted on destruction, with a total of over 96,000 human beings needlessly killed.
Even so, at that point, there still was very little opposition to the war and President Johnson stood resolute and strong. Afterall, he wasn’t about to let the Pacific Rim go communist. And on a side note, he was damned if he was going to be the first US President to ever lose a war.
So that brings us to 1967, which would go down in history as a truly magical year. Many volumes have been written about it and there’s not a whole lot to say that hasn’t already been said. On the grim side, the US involvement in Vietnam got much worse, to nobody’s surprise. We went up another 100,000 troops to a deployment of a staggering 485,600 soldiers. And US deaths went up an additional five thousand to 11,363. That’s 17,713 families who buried their young sons and daughters who had died trying to protect the Pacific Rim from going communist. Not that any of us even knew what that concept meant.
So. the dark side had gotten darker. But incredibly, the light side was about to get much lighter. On May 26, 1967, the Beatles released what was probably the most monumental album of their entire career, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. This major phenomenon, turned the pop world completely upside down.
The album was filled with references to transcendent states of consciousness that were being now being experienced by millions of baby boomers around the world. It featured the most psychedelic song anyone had ever heard yet, called “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The music was absolutely hypnotic and the mind-altering lyrics broke radical new ground on many levels. The initials of the title happened to be LSD, but according to John Lennon, that was just a coincidence. However he always said it with a smile.
George Harrison took his Indian raga theme one step further in his song, “Within You, Without You.” It was what is called a “Satsang Song” in the Indian tradition because it expresses some of the deeper truths of their ancient wisdom. “Try to realize that it’s all within yourself, no one else can make you change,” he sang. “When you see beyond yourself you may find that peace of mind is waiting there. And the time will come when you realize that we’re all one and life flows on within you and without you.”
Meanwhile, on the very last song of the album, “A Day in the Life,” after a mind-blowing journey through some seemingly random news of the day, to mesmerizing music played by a 40-piece orchestra John hypnotically repeats the stanza, “I’d love to turn you on.” By then, several million people knew exactly what he was talking about.
Now, I still wasn’t one of them yet, but that part of the story is coming up soon. Which makes this an ideal place to end this episode. As you might guess, things keep on evolving, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened and let’s get together in the next one.
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As the last episode ended, I had given a quick overview of my grandfather, who was a lifelong Orthodox Jew, but was also a mystic with his own set of metaphysical understandings, especially about what was happening in modern times.
Among his teachings, he used to tell us was that there are always highly evolved people living on Earth, who are here to help bring about the Divine Plan for the evolution of humanity. In the ancient tradition, such a person was called a Kal-El, which means “vessel of God.”
As a brief note about that term - when I first started reading Superman comics at about age eight, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Superman’s real name on his home planet of Krypton was Kal-El. I never gave it much thought and figured it must have been some kind of coincidence until several years later, when I learned that Superman had been created by two Jewish guys, Jerry Seigle and Joe Shuster. I guess they thought of him as a vessel of God doing good, so naming him Kal-El was no coincidence.
Also, when it comes to comic books, surprisingly, my first introduction to the idea that human beings could evolve into a higher level of consciousness came from reading about it in a comic book. I was around twelve and I still remember the moment when the concept first hit me.
After years of being devoted to Superman and Batman, I had gotten introduced to a new company called Marvel Comics and its highly innovative, new characters began to expand the horizons of my imagination. It still featured action stories, but they dropped in some extra tidbits. Like in one episode of the Fantastic Four, there was an alien named “The Watcher,” from an advanced race of beings, who had become friends with Reed Richards, the leader of the Fantastic Four.
One day, Richards wanders into The Watcher’s laboratory when he isn’t there and picks up a baton-like device. Suddenly he’s rooted to the ground, can’t move and his head begins to morph into a much larger size. The Watcher suddenly bursts in, grabs the baton out of Richards’s hands and brings him back to normal.
Once Richards is fully restored, The Watcher explains that the device he was holding was a “consciousness enhancer.” In those few seconds, it had moved him forward a thousand years and he had actually become a highly evolved human being of the far distant future.
As a fellow scientist, he asks Richards what the experience had been like. Richards says he couldn’t retain the details, but he could remember that he had become fully merged with the creative power of the cosmos and the inherent joy of being in that heightened state of awareness was indescribable.
The only thing I can say about being exposed to that idea is that it completely blew my mind. It was several years before that expression became popular, but that cosmic comic book really did it to me.
If it was possible for human consciousness to evolve to a significantly higher level, as an extrapolation, I began to wonder if it were possible for me to do it. And could I do it in this lifetime? A certain ideal seemed to take root deep inside my mind, almost like a trophy had been placed on some distant shelf in time to remind me to take up the quest to approach this noble goal at some later point in my life.
Anyway, let’s get back to my grandfather and his belief that the modern technologies, including television, were being used by God to expand human awareness and that there are always Kal-El’s or vessels of God on earth, helping to further his work.
Remember that Zayde, my grandfather, was the absolute spiritual head of our extended family and one day, to my sheer delight, he decided that the TV character, the Lone Ranger, was in reality, a Kal-El.
This basically changed the workings of our family because now, whenever the Lone Ranger was on TV, my grandfather had to stop everything and sit and watch the entire episode. Whatever was happening around him, lunch or dinner, party or celebration – it didn’t matter. He had to stop and watch the show.
Now, this was a terrific development for me because the Lone Ranger was my favorite TV program, and if it had something to do with God, it was all the better. Because in my book, watching the show was a million times better than sitting in Hebrew school for an hour and a half.
Zayde would watch each episode with total focus, and after it ended, he would give a short teaching on the moral of the story. Here’s one shining example that is still enshrined in my memory.
An hourlong origin special about how it all began was being shown, and we watched it together. As it started, the Texas Rangers were ambushed and left for dead by the bad guys. Tonto, the Ranger’s future Indian companion, comes upon the scene, realizes that one of the Rangers is still alive, and nurses him back to health. Since he’s the sole survivor, Tonto calls him the Lone Ranger.
A few weeks later, they find a big white stallion lying near a bush bleeding to death, apparently gored by a bull. The Ranger and Tonto spend weeks caring for it. Once it fully recovers, they tie a rope around its neck and lead it into an open pasture.
“Your horse was killed, and now Great Spirit has given you a new horse,” Tonto says, appreciating the synchronistic workings of the universe.
“He’s not my horse yet, Tonto,” the Ranger replies.
As they stand in the field, the horse feels its strength returning, and with its nose twitching, senses the call of the wild. The Ranger pats it on the head and slowly removes the rope. Then suddenly, he gives it a sharp slap on the rear.
The horse bolts forward and breaks into a mighty gallop, charging full speed to the top of a hill. It rears back on its hind legs, neighing in triumph, standing tall against the sky.
But when it comes back down on all four legs, a change comes over it. It tilts its head to one side, and then, as though sensing a call beyond the wild, it trots back over to the Lone Ranger and just stands there next to him.
“There, there, Big Fella,” the Ranger murmurs to him, gently stroking its muzzle. Then he turns to Tonto, and in a clam voice, filled with absolute certainty says, “Now he’s my horse.”
The show went to commercial and Zayde turned to me, his face glowing like he had been staring at a burning bush.
“You see?” he asked me. “It’s all about free will. God will never force you. He’s just waiting for you to choose to be with him. You can do it whenever you want, but it’s really up to you. God’s in no rush. He has all the time in the world. And more.”
Then, as always, he quoted some Hebrew or Yiddish phrase that I didn’t understand. “You know what that means?” he asked me. I never did.
“It’s simple. ‘In the dark, you’re blind. But in the light, you can see. So, stand in the light and open your eyes.’” Then he touched the middle of my forehead with his index finger. “There’s a lightbulb in there. But it’s up to you to screw it in and turn it on. Understand, Davy?”
So, that’s a brief introduction to this deeply esoteric man. Now let me tell you what happened when I told him about the incident with my dream and the disappearance of the ring.
As you may recall from the last episode, I had experienced a vivid dream with my father. At the end of it, I gave him back his ring and it dissolved into white light. Then, the following morning, after my first period gym class, I was shocked to find that the ring had mysteriously disappeared out of my wallet, which I had securely locked in my locker.
A few days later, during my regular weekly visit to him, I told my grandfather what had happened and he was completely transfixed. Every detail seemed to tell him something special. The fact that it took place in the lobby of the synagogue, the fact my father seemed younger and had a healthy-looking tan, the fact that he chuckled when I told him that he died and said that it wasn’t real, that it was just a trick…all these things amazed and delighted him.
Then, when I got to the part where the ring had dissolved into a white light which filled the room and that I felt a happy presence in the light, he got quite still and didn’t move for a few moments. I didn’t quite know what to make of it, so I went right into telling him how the ring disappeared out of my locker the next morning. After I finished, he seemed deeply moved.
“So, understand, Davy, that you were shown a lot here, especially at such a young age,” he said. “All that you need to grasp at this point is that this life is much more than it seems to be. Try to keep that idea in the back of your mind as you grow, because take it from me, it will always be true. Now matter how much you know, there will always more to learn. That’s just the way it works. As a path to infinity, it’s an infinite path, and it’s always more wonderful than you can ever understand, especially at your age. So, just keep opening up to it.”
He broke into a warm smile and said, “It gives you a lot to think about and there are a lot of maybes here for you to consider. The ring turned into light in the dream, then it disappeared the next day in real life. Maybe that means there’s a deep connection between the two realms,” he said. “Much more than most people know.”
“Also, Dad said there’s no death, that its just a trick God does to get people to think about him. So maybe you should give this whole thing a lot more thought. I’m sure that you will, over the years.”
“And you said that you both stood there, holding the ring and it felt like a bridge between you,” he continued. “Maybe he’s telling you that the bridge is real, that it’s still there and that you’re still connected, even beyond death. Maybe you’ll always be.”
“And you know what else? The ring turned into light and you felt yourself get pulled into it. What was that like?” he asked me.
“It was incredible,” I said. “It had a presence that was filled with comfort and joy and I don’t think I’ve ever been that happy.”
“Exactly,” he agreed. “Maybe, that light took you into Shamayim (heaven). And maybe he wants you to remember that feeling. Remember what that taste of heaven felt like. Don’t forget, the reason we came here in the first place is to find our way back home, so maybe you should enshrine that feeling in your heart. and maybe it can help you get there somehow.”
“Now look, this whole thing is just like a lot of other things you run into in life. Maybe some of it was real. Maybe none of it was real. Or maybe all of it was real. Who knows? I do know one thing, though - you have the rest of your life to figure it out. And that probably won’t be long enough!”
His eyes were twinkling, and he gave me one of his glowing, impish smiles. He did this kind of thing all the time. He’d use the word “maybe” in the tradition of the great Talmudic teachers he’d studied for years. They don’t tell you things. They just plant seeds and inspire you to help them grow.
So, that’s the end of what he had to say about my seemingly metaphysical experience with the dream and the ring. But there is one other quick story I’d like to add, which took place about twenty years later.
One Saturday night, I was at a big party and out of nowhere, an old friend who I hadn’t seen in quite some time came over to me. He said that he’d had a strange dream recently and he needed to tell me about it.
In the dream, he was in a crowd of people and a platform rose up with a stranger standing on it. The stranger looked at my friend and said, “I am David Richman’s father and I want you to give him a message for me.” Then he lifted up his hand and my friend could see he was wearing a ring. Suddenly, the ring started glowing with light and the man said, “Tell David that I said to remember the ring.” Then he repeated himself. “Give David Richman this message. Tell him I said to remember the ring.”
My friend finished and looked at me quizzically for a moment. “I don’t know if that means anything to you, but I just felt I had to tell you.” You can imagine what an intriguing shock that experience was for me!
Well, there’s nothing more to add to this part of the story, so let’s let this be the end of this episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind, and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
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In the last episode, I described a most unusual dream that I had. My father had been dead for almost six months and I dreamt that he appeared to me, looking alive and happy. He told me that his death wasn’t real, that it was just a trick. And he went on to explain that there really isn’t such a thing as death, it’s just a public relations stunt that God came up with to get people to think about him.
Then he noticed that I was wearing his black star sapphire ring. He told me he didn’t want me to wear it anymore and, in the dream, I gave it back to him. At that point, a tremendous light appeared and everything dissolved into it. The light carried a wonderfully warm sense of happiness and joy in it and I woke up in an extremely elevated state of mind.
Let’s pick up the story there.
I began my day as usual. As I drove to school, I reflected on the dream from a psychological perspective. My second semester of psychology was almost over, and the mysterious workings of the mind were really starting to fascinate me.
As I thought about it, I was quite impressed with this dream as it had been a perfect mental placebo for me. In the theater of my mind, my father looked great. Healthy and smiling, he said he had never really died, and that it was only a PR stunt. He called it a gimmick, which I loved. It was a term he used a lot in the early days of the team, but I had forgotten all about it. Yet it was exactly the way he used to talk. Indeed, everything about him was familiar, comforting and reassuring. In short, he was just the way I would have wanted him to be if he were alive.
And there was also a strong God theme running through it, which made perfect sense because I was getting so much religious exposure every day. As the dream ended, I had seen this beautiful light, filled with an essence of peace, happiness, and contentment. I felt like I was finally coming back home and experienced an overwhelming love. Then I merged into it. It was all classic heaven stuff.
I didn’t know what to make out of my father’s ring though. I had given it back to him and it had turned into light, which started the whole heaven part. It probably had some subconscious meaning and I figured that I’d bring it up with my psychology teacher.
Anyway, as far as dreams go, it had been a real beauty. And if my mind’s purpose was to comfort me and bring me a little happiness and peace, it had certainly done its job. I felt great in the dream. And as a matter of fact, I was still feeling rather elevated from it as I drove along.
When I got to the school parking lot, I took the ring off and looked at it. I liked it, but I always felt a little odd wearing it. I had just turned seventeen, and it was the type of thing you’d see on a fifty-year-old man.
I didn’t care, though. It was his, and I was going to wear it for the rest of my life and give it to my kids. I put it back on and went into school.
***
It was a Friday morning, and I had gym first period. When I got to my locker, I followed my usual routine. I wore two rings, a gold initial ring, and his black star sapphire. I took them both off and put them carefully inside my wallet, next to a ten-dollar bill I had brought because I was going to buy a new basketball after school.
I took off my wristwatch, wrapped it around my wallet, and put the whole thing in one of my shoes. Then, I put my books on top of my shoes and locked my locker. I double-checked the door and the lock to make sure it was all secure. I had been doing the same routine twice a week for five years and I was confident that it was as tight as a drum.
It was a beautiful May morning, and I played touch football with my friends, a bunch of jovial, eleventh-grade jocks. After gym ended, I took a shower and got dried off. Then, I opened my combination lock, swung open my locker door, and put my clothes on. I took the books off the top of my shoes, took out my wallet, removed my watch, and put it on my wrist. Then I opened my wallet to put on my rings, and the world stopped.
To my extreme shock and disbelief, my father’s ring was gone!
Everything else was exactly as I had left it. My gold initial ring and the ten-dollar bill were still there, undisturbed. But his black star sapphire ring, the one I had given him in the dream just a few hours earlier, was gone. It had disappeared without a trace.
All I can say is that suddenly, reality didn’t make any sense. What had just happened, quite simply could not have happened. It just wasn’t possible. My head started spinning and I felt disoriented. I sat down on the bench in front of my locker and tried to pull myself together. To make sure I wasn’t losing my mind, I went over all the details again to see if I had made a mistake. But I hadn’t. I remembered everything precisely.
“Somebody must have stolen it,” I thought for a second, but obviously, that wasn’t the case. The locker had clearly been undisturbed when I came back after my shower. The combination lock was still locked, and the door was untouched. And besides, why would someone steal just that one ring and leave the wallet, the watch, and the gold ring, not to mention the ten-dollar bill?
I thought about the dream again. It was now nine in the morning and I had only been awake for a couple of hours, so everything was still completely fresh in my mind.
I realized how strange the whole thing had been. I didn’t remember feeling drowsy at all or ever falling asleep and then, all of a sudden, I was back in the synagogue chapel. And there had been nothing dreamlike about it at all. Actually, I had never felt more awake in my life. And on top of that, unlike my usual dreams, it hadn’t faded one bit. Normally, I forget my dreams before I even start breakfast. But this time, I could remember every single detail, especially my father’s tan, smiling face.
He said that he hadn’t really died and that it was a trick. Then he had me give him back his ring. When we held it, it turned into a brilliant light. And now, just a few hours later, in real life, it had vanished into thin air. What can I say? What had just happened just wasn’t possible.
Still dazed, I sat in front of my locker for a few more minutes and then the bell rang. I knew I had to hustle because my next class was all the way on the other side of school. There was nothing left to do but get on with my day.
My logic had hit a brick wall and as I got up and started walking, I still felt completely out of sorts. But as I hurried along, I noticed that everything felt just a little bit lighter, as if the old bounce was starting to come back into my step.
***
A few days later, it was time for me to go visit my grandfather, my father’s father, and I couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say about the dream I’d had, followed by the seemingly otherworldly disappearance of the ring.
We had always had quite a deep relationship, but it got much deeper after my father died. He and my grandmother lived about twenty minutes away and for one reason or another we would see them at least once a week.
After I had my first strange dream experience, where I had the precognitive dream that my father had died and it all came true the next day, I told the experience to just a few family members and some very close friends. Along with all the sadness we all felt, many people also felt a little extra sympathy for me because I was the youngest, and most of the ones I told about the dream just shrugged it off, as something that either didn’t happen, or at least not the way I had remembered it. But not my grandfather. He believed every bit of it, completely.
Now, before I tell you his reactions to the dream-ring-disappearance sequence, let me fill you in a little bit about him, as he was quite a unique individual. Although I haven’t mentioned him in the podcasts very frequently, he was one of the main influences on me in the younger part of my life, and is a central figure in “Wilt, Ike & Me,” the memoir that I’ve written about those early days.
We all called him Zayde, which is the Yiddish term for grandfather. Although he was still the patriarch of our extended family, my father, who was his eldest son and a prominent attorney and businessman, had assumed most of the family’s worldly responsibilities. But still, Zayde remained the undisputed spiritual head of the family. That respected position never changed.
And on the spiritual side, he certainly had the credentials for it. He had grown up in Lithuania as an orthodox Yeshiva student and as a gifted singer, he was being trained to become a cantor. In the Jewish tradition, the rabbi leads the service and gives the sermon, but the cantor is the one who actually sings the prayers. And ideally, he should sing them with so much understanding and feeling in his heart, that the prayers go straight up to heaven.
Zayde could really do it, but he had to give up his lofty profession when his family fled to America. His young wife had gotten pregnant, and he had to make a living, so he became a wallpaper hanger. Eventually he opened a paint and paper store in South Philadelphia and he and his family lived in the small living quarters above the store. He still remained true to his orthodox religion though, carefully practicing all of its customs and traditions. But on top of that and somewhat secretly, he was essentially a mystic, with a deep understanding of the more arcane elements of the faith.
You could see it whenever you looked at him. There was a twinkle in his pale-blue eyes and he always seemed to have a funny look on his face, like he was learning some kind of deep lesson and was ready to burst out either laughing or crying, or sometime, a funny kind of combination of both.
Along with all his training, both traditional and esoteric, he had evolved some of his own theories about the cosmos, as well. He said God was always pulling humanity closer and closer to him, and the new communication technologies - radio, movies, and TV, were all a part of a great divine plan. Bear in mind that none of them had existed in his early life, not even electricity.
He had seen them all develop and to him, they had been created to help teach humanity profound lessons, enabling it to achieve its highest potential.
Now, this is actually a great place to end this episode. Of course, there’s a lot more to come, so, as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened, and let’s get together in the next one.
-
As the last episode ended, I was beginning my return to normal life after the unexpected death of my father. The unanticipated event had turned my entire world upside down.
After remaining home for a one-week mourning period, when I returned to normal life, everything was exactly the same as it had been when I left it. Same classes. Same teachers. Same friends. Everything was the same. Except nothing was the same and it would never be again. It’s a terrible feeling and everyone who has experienced the early stages of deep grief is painfully aware of it.
However, there was one thing that was radically different in my new daily routine, which was that I was now going to synagogue every morning and every night and would be doing it for eleven months. The same held true for my brother, who was eight years older than me.
It was a big eight years at that age because while I was in the middle of high school and living the life of a teenager, he was in his last year of law school, had been married for a few years, and his wife was about six weeks away from giving birth to their first child.
But even so, we had always done everything together. We even lived in the same room in our house until he moved out for college. So naturally, we started attending the daily service together.
Very early in the process, I came to understand that while the ritual of saying the mourner’s prayer is ostensibly to honor the dead, in reality, it provides a tremendous benefit for the living survivors. It was an enormous help to me on several key levels, and the most important one for me was that the rabbi of this particular synagogue was truly a spiritual giant. We got to spend an enormous amount of time with him and became extremely close.
So, that new way of life began for me in the second week of December of 1965. Let’s jump ahead almost six months later to the end of May of 1966. As I’ve said, we have an enormous amount of resiliency at that age, and even with all the trauma around the death, I was still having a great year at school.
My brother, Mike and I had been attending services every morning and night. We never missed a service and we intended to keep it that way, but suddenly something came up that was going to be an insurmountable problem for him.
His last year of law school was coming to an end and soon, it would be time for him to take the bar exam. A two-day cram course was being offered that went until nine each evening and he was going to have to miss services for two nights.
It was upsetting to him but there was no away around it and it absolutely had to happen. The first night came and I attended the service without him. It really was no big deal and I didn’t pay any attention to it.
It was a normal night. I ate dinner with my mother, went to the synagogue and said the prayer, came home and did my homework and eventually got washed and went to bed. Then, one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me took place
For some reason, I didn’t feel tired at all and thought I was going to have some trouble falling asleep. I was just lying there, and the next thing I knew, I suddenly found myself back in the chapel of the synagogue once again. It was a strange sensation because I felt like I had actually gone back in time. The events that had just happened a few hours earlier started happening again. It was like watching an instant replay, but instead of just watching it, I was living through it.
Everything happened exactly as it had, just a few hours earlier. Services ended, and I walked out of the chapel. But this time, when I entered the main lobby, I heard a sharp sound. “Psst! Psst!” It was clear to me that whatever that replay had been was over. I knew I was in new territory because nothing like this had happened earlier.
The sound came from my left. I looked over at the dark corner near the sanctuary doors and suddenly, my father stepped out of the shadows.
Amazed, I walked right over to him. As I got closer, he gave me a warm smile and I was struck by how great he looked. He was wearing a gray suit with a purple shirt. The collar was opened, and he had a dark, healthy suntan like he had been in the Caribbean or Hawaii for a few months. He also seemed a little younger, with slightly more hair, which was slicked back. In short, he looked tremendous.
“Where’s Michael?” he asked, as soon as I got close.
“Oh, he couldn’t come tonight,” I said. “He has to study for the bar exam. They’re having a cram course, and tonight’s the first class.”
“Oh, right, right. That’s good,” he said, sounding like he knew exactly what I was talking about. “He’ll pass it. He’ll do fine. He’s going to become a lawyer, and he’ll go right into the firm. Everything’s going to work out well for him.” Then he got a little serious. “But, watch out for your sister, though,” he said soberly. “She’s not doing so great.”
“Sybil?” I wondered. “What’s the matter with Sybil?”
I didn’t say anything, but as I thought about it, I remembered that she had never shown any emotion after he died. She had been extremely stoic, always stone-faced and never crying or even shedding a tear. Maybe that had something to do with whatever it was he was talking about.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “She didn’t show any emotion after you d—”
I was just about to say the word died, when the impossibility of what was happening hit me like a ton of bricks. Suddenly I remembered the actual truth of the matter – that he was, in fact, dead.
I guess I had been so glad to see him, I hadn’t realized it at first. But now it all came rushing came back into me. The reason I hadn’t seen him for all this time wasn’t that he had been away on some tropical island. It was because he had dropped dead on the floor of the Boston Garden six months earlier. He was long since dead and buried. Yet here he was, standing in the synagogue lobby, happy and healthy and talking to me like everything was normal.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here? You’re dead!”
“No,” he said, with a slight chuckle. “No, no. That wasn’t real.”
“What?” I asked.
“It was just a trick,” he replied. “It wasn’t real.”
“What do you mean, it wasn’t real?” I shot back, a little perturbed. “Of course, it was real!”
How could he say it wasn’t real? It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Everything about it was a nightmare. Our family was completely devastated, and since then, we had gone through month after month of relentless pain. I wished to God it wasn’t real, but unfortunately, it was as real as it gets.
“You died. You’re dead,” I blurted out, even more upset. “It was terrible. There was this big funeral, and everyone was hysterical. It was awful.” An enormous rush of pain welled up inside of me. “It was horrible. You died! We buried you and you’re dead!”
I was ready to break down in tears. But then, just like old times, he made his familiar gesture and held up his right hand, signaling me to calm down and listen to him. Just seeing him do it made me feel a little better.
“It wasn’t real,” he said, calmly. “It was just a trick.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, bewildered.
“A trick. You know a stunt, a gimmick.”
I still had no idea what he meant, but I didn’t say anything.
“Listen to me,” he said, sympathetically. “There is no death. It’s just a public-relations stunt God does to get people to think about him. That’s all it is. It’s not real.”
I didn’t know what to say. There was absolutely, positively no question about the fact that he had died. It was irrefutable. And yet here he was—alive and well, telling me it was all just a stunt. As confident as ever, he certainly looked like he knew what he was talking about. He looked great. In fact, I’d never seen him look better.
“See?” he said, with a smile. “It’s all just a trick.” Then he added, “Some trick!”
At that point, my mind went blank. I don’t think I could think anymore, and frankly, I didn’t care. It was just such a relief to be with him again and listen to him explain something to me. It didn’t matter if I understood it or not.
As I looked at him, I realized I had forgotten how much I really missed him. I hadn’t seen him for six months. It had been an eternity of constant pain and I had gotten used to it. But now, alive or dead, we were back together again, and the pain was gone. I was happy and felt like my old self again - two long-lost and long-forgotten feelings.
He looked at me with a warm smile for a moment. “I see you’re wearing my ring,” he said, looking down at my right hand. He used to wear a black star sapphire pinky ring that he got when he went to the Japan Olympics to sign Luke Jackson to the 76ers. My mother gave it to me after he died, and I wore it every day.
“Listen,” he said somewhat soberly. “The stone in that ring has a vibration that’s bad for your body. I don’t want you to wear it anymore.” I didn’t say anything.
Then his face lit up. “Hey! I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Since I never really died, why don’t you give it back to me?”
Without giving it a second thought, I took the ring off and held it up between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. He reached up and held it exactly the same way. I thought he was going to take it, but he didn’t. Instead, we both stood there, holding the ring between us, like a statue.
After a moment, I felt it start to vibrate. Then, like an instrument being tuned to a higher note, something within me quickened. The ring began to glow, getting brighter by degrees until eventually, the whole room was filled with a brilliant light.
But it was more than just a light. I could sense a happy presence to it, a warm beauty that was extremely comforting. And it felt familiar to me as well, like I knew it from somewhere - another time and place from long before my memory began.
I felt myself being slowly pulled into it, as though it had its own field of gravity. It got stronger, like the current of a river nearing the ocean, and the light got even brighter. The more light I saw, the lighter I felt, along with a deep sense of happiness and joy. And finally, an all-encompassing love enveloped me, and I lost all contact with space and time.
I have no idea how long it lasted, but I finally began to regain awareness of my body. There was a gentle transition, almost like the physical world gelled into reality around me and I found that I was laying in my bed, wearing my pajamas. It took a little more time, but I soon realized it had all been just a dream.
Soon, I was completely back in the real world. Obviously, my life was unchanged, and my father was still dead. Naturally, I was disappointed. As fulfilling as the experience had been, I quickly understood that the whole thing had been just a fantasy that my mind had created in my sleep.
Even so, it had been a deeply wonderful experience to feel happy again. It was the first time since the night he died, that the heavy burden that I constantly felt was lifted from my heart. For those few moments, I had gotten to be my old self again and realized that I had completely forgotten the way life used to be, before the road had turned, and I had come upon the Vale of Tears.
Now you may be thinking, “OK. So what’s the big deal? You had a happy dream that your father was still alive. Why is that one of the most amazing things that has ever happened to you?”
All I can say is, we’ll get into that in the coming episode. For now, keep your eyes, mind, and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
-
The last episode ended on the evening of December 3, 1965 when my father suffered a massive heart attack and died instantly during a nationally televised NBA game between the 76ers and the Boston Celtics.
As I have mentioned previously, this podcast series examines the enormous evolution of consciousness that began to take place in the western world during the 1960s, as well as looking at what happened to me personally during those turbulent times, which led to my life-long commitment to the greater realization of human potential.
It also seeks to present you with some fundamental ideas that you might find useful as you grow through your own inner evolutions, which is something we all do, whether we’re aware of it or not. That’s just the way our intelligence works.
So, even though the events surrounding my father’s death were extremely traumatic, this is not an autobiographical look back at them. Rather, I am going to describe some of the realizations I experienced that began to open a pathway to my own inner growth.
Looking back, I can see that without having the slightest awareness of it, I had been living my life with two basic assumptions that I had been taking for granted. As naïve as they may sound, these assumptions were simple - everything was going to stay the same and I would live forever.
Of course, I knew intellectually, as we all do, that that these ideas are ridiculous. In reality, everything here ends and everybody dies. But as we all must learn sooner or later, there is a vast difference between believing a theoretical concept of something and experiencing the actual reality of it. And that’s especially true when it comes to death.
For me, the aspect of sudden death was a powerful and rather rude teacher. It felt like having to learn how to swim because the luxury cruise ship you had been traveling on suddenly sank. The next thing you know, you’re in a freezing cold ocean and you notice a dark fin sticking out of the water that keeps circling around you. Of course, that’s just a metaphor, but that’s kind of what it felt like.
But the death itself was also accompanied by an additional, mysterious factor. On top of the shock and grief, I had to ponder the series of cryptic omens that had preceded it that were particularly unnerving.
As you may recall, along with several less intense events, I had experienced a jarring, recurring nightmare for three consecutive nights, followed by an incredibly vivid dream that my father had died. Then in the real world, the dream came true the following night, exactly the way I had dreamt it. In metaphysical terms, this is called a pre-cognitive dream, which is more of a prophecy than a premonition.
So, under the surface, there was always this other element that I had to deal with, which was the uncanny experience that I had somehow foreseen the future. It had been incredibly strange and I had to ask myself – “How could that have happened? How could you have seen something in such detail the night before it happened? And, what does that say about time and the nature of life itself?”
There was another deeply troubling aspect to the experience as well. In real life, when I began living through the events of the dream, I knew exactly what was coming next and I wanted to change the events. But to my severe shock, I found that I had no control over anything whatsoever.
The incredibly odd fact was that I had absolutely no volition. Nothing that I thought, felt, or decided made any difference at all. I was awake. This was real. But it was like I was walking through a movie that had already been made. I knew that nothing could be changed because somehow, I knew that the present had already happened in the past. It was all too overwhelming to even try to understand.
Some years later, I came come across a profound quote from Einstein that seemed related. “The distinction between past, present and future is nothing but a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Of course, I found the idea fascinating, but in trying to grasp it, all I could come up was that my understanding of my life in the world was incomplete, and that there was a lot more that I needed to learn, to say the least. It’s like you’re living your adult life learning your lessons and something unexpectedly alters your reality. Suddenly you feel like a preschooler enrolled in a babysitting club at an advanced university.
Everything had changed so fundamentally for me that I felt like I didn’t know this world anymore. As boxer Mike Tyson once put it, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” And believe me, it was quite a heavy punch for this 16-year-old kid to take.
At the foundation of it all, the basic impermanence that underlies all of life had become abundantly clear to me. My father had been an incredibly powerful person, the central figure not just in our family, but in the entire world around him as well. And in less than five seconds, he was gone for good. Vanished without a trace.
So, it quickly drove home the fundamental impermanence of life. Nothing here lasts. Everything ends. Which brings up some deeper questions. Why does this creation even exist in the first place? What are we doing here? What is the real purpose of my life, if there even is one?”
Suffice it to say that I eventually put all these thoughts and questions aside and got on with living the new version of life that had been presented to me. And it picked up pretty quickly. After all, I was in the middle of my junior year in high school and we are blessed with a tremendous amount of resiliency at that age.
As soon as I began to return to my normal school life, a nice little coincidence happened for me. You may remember from a previous episode that my father had made me promise that I would say the Kaddish prayer for him after he died. I made that vow on a Saturday and eight days later, I said the prayer for the first time at his graveside. Amazingly, I had completely forgotten about that promise until those first words came out of my mouth that day in the cemetery.
I started attending the synagogue near our house twice a day and I had to get into the routine of getting ready to go there every morning and night. A new Beatles album had just come out and I got into the habit of listening to it as I prepared to leave.
Like all their other albums, its songs took up permanent residency in my mind almost immediately upon hearing them. The album was called “Rubber Soul” and it was quite a departure for the band. Many years later, once the Beatles had become history and were being studied from a cultural perspective, this album came to be viewed a major turning point in their career.
Listening to it was giving me quite an emotional boost and one day, I heard a deejay say that the release date for Rubber Soul had been December 3, 1965, which was the exact day that my father died. Now, all my life, I’ve been one of those people who are always on the lookout for “signs.” It’s hard to explain exactly why, but if you happen to be one of them, you understand.
Anyway, for me, this information meant that somehow, everything was in synch. As insanely disruptive as the death had been, on some level, it all made sense and in some way the universe was still in good working order. I might very well have been grasping at straws, but who cares? The fact that the dates were identical made me feel a little better. And no matter how small, I needed all the “feel better” I could get.
Importantly, from the larger standpoint of the evolution of the times, the group had a distinctively new sound. Later this would be understood to be the very beginnings of psychedelic music, and the songs were mainly written and recorded while the band was under the steady influence of marijuana. If you listen to the song “Girl” you can hear someone inhaling a joint, and George Harrison once commented that the album was “the first one where we were fully-fledged potheads.”
But the songs had a new level of depth to them as well. Remember that Bob Dylan had once told the Beatles that he liked their songs, but the trouble was that they weren’t about anything. John Lennon said that he took that comment in on a profound level, and when you listen to him sing “Nowhere Man,” it certainly sounds like it.
“He’s a real nowhere man. Sitting in his nowhere land. Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.” Those words immediately got me. At the time, it sounded like he was talking about everyone, myself included. He continued, “Doesn’t have a point of view. Knows not where he’s going to. Isn’t he a bit like you and me. He’s as blind as he can be. Just sees what he wants to see…”
In the present day, the song is looked at as an absolute classic and we take it for granted, but back then, it was truly incredible to hear these kind of ideas expressed in a Beatles song. In another cut, “Norwegian Wood,” George Harrison played the sitar for the first time ever in western music, which was truly a sign of things to come.
And finally, there was the song, “The Word.” It’s a song about love, but it’s not a standard love song because it’s actually about universal love, which is a theme the Beatles would expound upon seriously over the next few years. “Say the word and you’ll be free. Say the word and be like me. Say the word I’m thinking of. Have you heard the word is love? Now that I know what I feel must be right. I’m here to show everybody the light. Give the word a chance to say that the word is just the way.”
So, at the end of 1965, big changes were underway. The Beatles had evolved into a new level of musical genius and don’t forget, they were the leading force of cultural change in the entire word, so the larger world of popular music was changing in an enormous way as well.
And as difficult as it had been for me, I had gone through the first truly major change in my life, and one of the key parts of it had been the fact that I had gone through an experience that had defied science and logic. But something even bigger was waiting for me just around the next corner.
Let’s take that up in the coming episode, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
-
In the last episode, we looked at two disturbing events that happened to me during the last week of November of 1965. In the first, I was sitting in synagogue with my father and toward the end of the Saturday morning service as the rabbi was announcing the prayer called the Mourner’s Kaddish, with a sudden sense of urgency, my father had me swear a solemn oath before God that I would say this prayer for him after he died. Surprised at the completely unexpected request, but taking no serious note of it, I made the vow.
Then a few nights later, I had a harrowing nightmare where I was being chased by an invisible killer. I ended up standing before a huge wooden cross that clearly represented death to me. A hooded monk who was standing next to it, telepathically said to me, “You have come upon it.”
Then to my extreme dismay, the dream turned into a recurring nightmare, as I had it on the following two nights as well. Now, as you may sense, we are beginning to approach some rather dramatic territory and before we start, I would like to mention a couple of key points, by way of introduction.
First, the events that were about to unfold would alter not only my entire life, but more critically, my most basic understandings about the nature of existence itself. Foundations were being laid that would lead to the massive inner revolutions I would grow though during the deeply turbulent times that were about to follow.
Secondly, the main reason that I am recounting these events is to provide some possible encouragement to anyone who may be facing some hard times and might want to explore the deeper sides of human intelligence and the potential that lies within each one of us. So here we go.
The next part of the story begins on Thursday night, December 2. My father was leaving for Boston the next day for the big 76ers - Celtics showdown in the Boston Garden. It was still early in the season, but the stakes were already enormous.
For me, the day had flown by as any standard eleventh grade day normally did. After dinner, I finished my homework, goofed around a little and finally went to bed, but I never got sleepy. I was much too agitated.
My mind seemed to be spinning around about my social life, my schoolwork, and of course, the gigantic upcoming game with the Celtics. But I knew that none of that was what was keeping me awake. The real reason I couldn’t fall asleep was because I was too afraid that I was going to have that horrible nightmare again, and I just couldn’t face the prospect of going through it all one more time.
I don’t remember getting tired or drifting off to sleep. I was just lying in bed with my eyes closed and the very next thing I knew, I felt a funny sensation in my stomach, like I was in a moving car that had just come over a hill and was on its way down. I opened my eyes and saw my hands resting on the steering wheel of a car. I looked over them at the hood and realized I was driving my father’s Cadillac.
I came down the hill on Spring Avenue and turned left onto Heather Road, as I had done a million times before. Our house was on the corner.
With slight concern, I noticed that there were a few cars parked in front as I drove by, which was out of the ordinary. I made a right turn into the driveway, pulled up, and got out of the car. I walked around back and came in though the kitchen door.
My mother was on the phone with her back to me. She didn’t turn around. My father’s younger brother was standing in front of the stove with his arms folded across his chest. He kept staring down at the floor, as though I wasn’t even there.
I went into the main hall, and up the stairs. I turned left at the top and walked up to my sister’s room. As usual, her door was closed. I put my right hand on it, and stopped for a moment. Starring at the back of my hand I thought, “Well, this is it.”
I pushed the door open. Sybil was standing in the back of the room with a few friends. She looked up at me. “Daddy’s dead,” she said. “We don’t have a daddy anymore.”
“This is terrible,” I thought to myself. “But why are you talking like this? You’re twenty years old, and you sound like a four-year-old.”
I didn’t say anything and walked out of her room, down the hall, and into my room. I sat down on my bed, and suddenly got overwhelmed with an intense anger at God.
“Why did you do this?” I thought. “Why in the world did you have to do this?” I closed my eyes and smashed my fist down on the large end table next to my bed. As soon as my fist hit the table, I opened my eyes and felt completely disoriented. I was still in my room, but instead of sitting on my bed, I was lying in it. It took a few moments for me to grasp that I had been asleep and as real as it had seemed, the entire experience had only been a nightmare.
Of course, I was relieved. I had just gone through the horrible experience of having my sister tell me that my father had died. And now, thankfully, I realized it had all been just a bad dream. Still, on a deep level, I was profoundly shaken because in truth, there had been nothing dreamlike about it.
I was happy about one thing, though – I hadn’t had a repeat of the horrible dream with the killer and the cross. At least that recurring nightmare seemed over.
***
Now, it was Friday morning, December 3, 1965. I picked up my good friend Marty and drove him to school. But as soon as he got in the car, I felt compelled to tell him all about my dream. I felt like I should tell someone because if it happened to come true, I didn’t want to be the only one who knew about it in advance. It seemed like the kind of thing that could drive you nuts if you didn’t handle it right.
We only talked about the dream for a quick minute as we drove, and then switched to our plans for the upcoming weekend, which was packed with social events. The school day flew by in a flash, and the next thing I knew, it was Friday night.
There was a big party and I was going to drive across town, pick up my girlfriend, and bring her with me. It was a half-hour ride each way, and when it came time to leave, I suddenly didn’t feel like driving by myself. I called Marty and asked him to come with me. He agreed if we didn’t take my Sprite, which was only a two-seater. He was six-one and didn’t want to be cramped-in for that long.
The 76ers – Celtic game was going to be on national TV and my mother was getting ready to watch it. My father had flown to Boston with the team. I asked her if it was OK for me to take her Pontiac. “You better not,” she replied. “Sybil has a bunch of friends coming over, and she may need it.” She turned on the TV and sat down on the couch. “Take the Caddy,” she said, nonchalantly.
Without giving it a second thought, I hopped into my father’s car and picked up Marty. About twenty minutes into the ride, I suddenly felt like hearing some music. “Let’s listen to the radio,” I said and turned it on. I hit the middle button, but there was no sound at all – just dead silence, which was very strange. That button was always set to our local rock ‘n roll station, and a loud-mouth deejay, a pop song, or some annoying commercial was blaring all the time. But now I heard nothing, and the ongoing silence was absolutely deafening.
It lasted long enough that I thought the radio was broken. Then, finally, someone in a solemn voice came on and said - “We have just received a report from the Boston Garden that the owner of the 76ers, Ike Richman, has collapsed at courtside.” It paused. “His condition is unknown.”
I quickly turned it off. I didn’t want to hear any more. We drove to my girlfriend’s house. As soon as we got there, I called home. My sister answered, and she sounded perky and happy, like she was having fun with her friends and everything was fine.
“Sybil, what’s happening?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” she replied lightly. “Everything’s fine. Listen, Mommy is leaving for New York soon, and she wants to see you before she goes. She’s waiting for you, so come right home.”
“Sure, I replied. “I’ll be right back.
“Great,” she said, cheerfully. Then in a slightly different tone, she added, “Come home now, David. Just come right home.” It was a minor change, but I heard it in a major way.
“This could be anything,” I said to Marty as we drove back. “It could be indigestion. Or maybe he fainted from the lack of air in the place.” I paused, then said the obvious. “Or he could be dead.”
Finally, we got to Spring Avenue, came over the hill, and as I started driving down it, I got a funny feeling in my stomach. I looked at my hands resting on the steering wheel and gazed at the hood of my father’s car.
That moment began one of the strangest experiences of my life. As soon as I felt that odd feeling in my stomach, my dream from the previous night began to come to life, in front of my startled eyes and it was uncanny. As I lived through it, I knew exactly what was coming next. I turned left onto Heather Road and drove past the cars that were parked in front of the house. I felt they were not a good sign, just like in the dream.
It was kind of like having a déjà vu, but very different. Déjà vu means “already seen,” and you feel like somehow, you’ve already lived through the experience that you’re currently having. It’s like remembering the present. But it’s usually quite vague, and only lasts for an instant.
There was nothing vague about the experience I was having. Quite the opposite. It was crystal clear. And it didn’t vanish at all. It just went on and on.
As I drove along, one part of my mind was normal, with regular thoughts and feelings. But another part knew exactly what was coming and wanted to change it. As I was about to turn into the driveway, that part said, “Park on the street. Don’t turn into the driveway. You know what’s coming if you park in the driveway. Don’t do it. Do something else!”
That seemed logical, so I decided to park on the street. But then I made a deeply disturbing discovery: I had no control at all over what was happening. Even though I had clearly decided to park on the street, I robotically turned into the driveway, shut off the engine and got out of the car.
“Don’t go in the back door. Go around front,” I told myself as I started walking. “Just go in the front door. Do not go around back. Don’t do it!” I thought about whether I had the key to the front door with me, but I knew it didn’t matter. I knew I would be going in the back.
It was like was watching a movie that had already been shot, but I was now living through it. And now, not only did I know what was coming, I also knew I couldn’t change it.
I got to the back door and walked into the kitchen. Sure enough, just like in the dream, my mother was on the phone with her back to me and never noticed me. Neither did my Uncle Ray, who was standing in front of the stove with his arms folded across his chest, looking down at the floor.
As I walked out into the hall, I knew it was time to go upstairs and face the news. And I knew it didn’t matter what I thought or did. What was coming was coming.
I got to the top of the stairs and looked down the hallway at the door to my sister’s room. I could see that it was closed and I walked over and put my right hand on the door. I looked at my hand and had the same thought I’d had in the dream. “Well, this is it.”
I pushed the door open. My sister was in the exact spot she was in the dream, surrounded by a few friends. She looked up at me and said the exact words from the dream. “Daddy’s dead. We don’t have a daddy anymore.”
And then I had the same thought that I had had in the dream. “This is terrible. But why are you talking like this? You’re twenty years old, and you sound like a four-year-old.”
I walked out into the hall and down to my room. I sat on my bed and became overwhelmed with the same intense anger at God.
“Why did you do this?” I thought in a rage of anger, confusion, and despair. “Why in the world did you have to do this?” And just like in the dream, I smashed my fist down on the end table next to my bed.
In my dream, at that point I woke up. This time, when my fist hit the table, the bizarre state of reality I had been in came to an abrupt end and I was snapped back into normal life. Except there was no such thing as normal anymore.
Instead of waking up from a nightmare and realizing it had only been a dream, my horrible nightmare was becoming reality. And the devastating truth of it was unmistakable. This was no dream. This was real life. And my father was dead.
Although it may be a bit abrupt, this is an ideal place for us to stop. So, as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open and let’s get together in the next one.
-
At the conclusion of the last episode, in late November of 1965, I was having a happy life as a normal sixteen-year-old eleventh grader. Things were going well and everything seemed right on track.
However, even though I had hardly noticed, a few things happened, which in retrospect could be seen to have been subtle warnings of a coming change. First, my father had told me that he would never be a grandfather and given the fact that my brother’s wife was seven months pregnant, that meant that he had less than two months to live.
Then I had unexpectedly ran into an old comic book that had two mysterious stories concerning Abraham Lincoln and death, which I found to be hauntingly disturbing. Again, I paid no real attention to any of these at the time. But two more events were about to happen that would take things to another level.
The first one happened on a Saturday morning as my father and I were sitting in services in a modern synagogue near our home in Elkins Park. He was thinking about changing our affiliation, as we still belonged to our original temple, but it was a twenty-five-minute drive each way. This place was close enough that we could walk, which was a dream come true for him.
Toward the very end of every Jewish service, a prayer is recited called the Mourner’s Kaddish. It is one of the keystones of the religion, and every congregation does it, all over the world. Interestingly, even though it’s done to honor the dead, it never once mentions death or dying. It’s a prayer of praise, and the idea is that you always praise God, no matter what happens. As much as your heart may be broken, the teachings say that there’s always a pathway that leads to salvation.
As we sat there, the rabbi invited the mourners to rise to say Kaddish, and one of the kids from my school stood up, which surprised me. “I know that kid,” I whispered to my father. “I didn’t know anybody in his family died.”
Suddenly, to my surprise, my father got extremely serious. “This Kaddish prayer is much more important than you know,” he said, speaking in a tone of voice I had never heard before. It was incredibly solemn and I could barely tell it was him.
“I want you to promise me that after I die, you will come to services and say Kaddish for me, every morning, and every night. And that you will do it for the full eleven months.”
It was a strange moment for me. I had never heard him that somber before and besides, it didn’t make sense - he was only fifty-two. There was no question that I would say Kaddish for him after he died but that was twenty or thirty years down the road. “Of course, I will, Dad,” I said matter-of-factly. “You know I will.”
Then the weird got weirder. “We’re in synagogue,” he said, still in that extremely somber tone. “We’re in front of the Torah and I want you to make a solemn vow to me now. And understand, this is a vow that you are making before God himself.”
Now, we were extremely close and nothing like this had ever happened between us. He had never asked me to promise him anything before in my entire life. It seemed like a bizarre request, coming from him at this point in his life, but if this is what he wanted, why not? “OK,” I said, concealing the fact that I was slightly taken aback.
“Good,” he said. “Now, repeat after me.” He paused, and then, like a judge administering an oath of office, he slowly recited the vow, one sentence at a time. And I repeated it after him, word for word.
“I promise before God, that after you die, I will come to services and say Kaddish for you every morning and night for the full eleven months, so help me God.” When I said the last phrase, he exhaled deeply and slumped forward in his seat, with his eyes closed.
He didn’t move a muscle and for a second, I thought he might have passed out. It could have been for just an instant or it may have been much longer. I don’t remember now. What I do remember is that there was a deep sense of completeness in that moment. But it wasn’t a positive feeling. It felt more like the completeness of the grave.
The next thing I knew, they started singing the last song of the service, which is a happy, cheerful hymn. Whenever I heard that song it always lifted me up, basically because I knew that services were over. My father opened his eyes and looked relieved. He seemed like his normal self again and started singing along with the song. Whatever that strange spell was, it was over.
When we got outside, it was a beautiful day and we were both happy as we walked home in the bright sunlight. I always loved that time right after services. I had fulfilled my obligation to God and to my father, and I could finally get on with the carefree part of my weekend.
***
Then, a short time later, on Monday night, November 29th, I had a deeply disturbing nightmare. Someone was trying to kill me. I was desperately running for my life on a deserted part of the beach in Atlantic City, in front of the Boardwalk. It was daytime, but the atmosphere was dark and foreboding, like a major storm was brewing.
As I ran frantically, the would-be killer kept firing a gun at me. But the assailant, the gun, and the bullets were all invisible. Still, I could hear the loud crack of the gunfire and feel the sharp zing of the bullets as they whizzed past my head and exploded into the sand in front of me. The assassin was hell-bent on my destruction, relentless and getting closer all the time.
In sheer terror, I ran under the Boardwalk to hide. But once I did, the whole scene immediately changed. Suddenly I was standing in a dark cave and everything was completely silent. Before, when I was running for my life, I heard the panting of my breath, the thumping of my feet on the sand, and the hiss of the bullets as they flew past my head. Now everything was dead silent and absolutely still.
I was standing in front of an old, brown wooden cross, with hundreds of lit candles all around. A monk in a dark-brown, hooded robe stood in front of it. The hood concealed the monk’s face entirely.
“Behold! The cross of the Crucifixion!” I seemed to somehow hear it inside my mind, but I knew it was coming from the monk. Then oddly, a few complete ideas appeared in my consciousness at the same time. Unlike linear thinking where one thought follows another, they all became clear to me at once.
I knew this was the actual cross from the actual crucifixion and that things were serious. I understood that the cross was a symbol for death, commonly used to mark a grave. And the final message was – “You have come upon it.” I looked at the monk, then back at the cross. Everything seemed frozen in time, like a still picture. The candles had stopped flickering, nothing moved and the stillness seemed to have a presence all its own.
Suddenly, I felt a sharp slap in the middle of my chest, right on my sternum. I gasped in an enormous amount of air and the next thing I knew, I was lying in my bed, in my pajamas.
I was in my room, it was morning, and I realized it had all been a dream, a terrible nightmare. My right hand was resting on my chest. I must have stopped breathing in my sleep and then subconsciously slapped myself awake.
I was shaken and didn’t move for a few minutes. I finally got up, got dressed, and had my breakfast. But as I started driving to school, I was still disturbed. I hardly ever had nightmares and certainly never anything like this before.
By the time I pulled into the school parking lot though, I was much more relaxed and decided to let the whole thing go. After all, it was just a bad dream. Maybe it was something I ate. The rest of the day was uneventful, and everything seemed fine.
And it would have stayed fine, except that night, Tuesday, I had the same exact nightmare again, right down to the tiniest detail, through to the very end. Now I was rattled. This was more than just a nightmare, it was a recurring nightmare, which made it doubly serious.
Then, to my extreme shock and dismay, the next night, Wednesday, I had the exact same dream. Again, I was being chased along the beach by an invisible killer, firing invisible bullets at me. I ducked under the Boardwalk, and it turned into a cave. There was the cross and the monk. Again, I got the same set of inner understandings, ending with the message - “You have come upon it.” And again, I slapped myself awake.
I didn’t know what to do. Three straight nights of this recurring nightmare was unnerving. And on top of that, the fact that it had a big cross in it was deeply disturbing. The truth is, I didn’t like crosses. They always made me feel uncomfortable. And it wasn’t due to any differences in religious beliefs either. It was much deeper than that…a visceral feeling, like getting punched in the stomach.
I felt it the very first time I ever saw a crucifixion statue, which was when I was about six. We lived in the Northeast section of the city, across the street from a church and I was having a catch with a friend. The ball flew over and landed near the front door of the building. When I went to get it, I noticed that the church door was open. The place had always been mysterious to me, so I thought I’d go in and take a peek.
The very first thing I saw in there was a huge cross with a lifelike porcelain statue of a nearly naked man nailed to it. The guy was dead. And there was a crown of sharp thorns stuck into his head, with blood streaming down his face.
Thorns! I couldn’t believe it. My mother grew rose bushes and always warned me to be careful of them. Still, I got stuck in the finger once. It bled a lot and it really hurt. Seeing a bunch of thorns stuck in this poor guy’s head was revolting. The rest of his body was a real horror show too, with whip marks all over it and nails hammered into his hands and feet.
It was easily the most gruesome sight I had ever seen in my life. It made me sick to my stomach and I ran out of the church at full speed, crossed the street and collapsed onto our lawn. My head was spinning, and I was out of breath. But the firm ground and familiar smell of the grass made me feel better. After a few minutes, I calmed down.
Then, out of nowhere, an unexpected rush of rage came over me. Filled with anger and fury, I thought, “Look what those goddamn bastards did to him!” I was only six, but it wasn’t the thought of a child. I felt like I wanted to kill somebody.
Crosses always bothered me after that. Later, in college, I studied the symbol’s deeper meanings, along with the concepts of sacrifice, grace, forgiveness, the soul’s triumph over death, and its eventual reunion with the immortal father. And while they’re all ennobling ideas, the cross still reminds me of humanity at its worst, and of things gone horribly wrong. And I still get the same visceral feeling.
The jarring symbol had now played a central role in three recurring nightmares, and I decided if it happened again, I would talk things over with my mother. Maybe it was time for me to go see a doctor or something.
Well, as far as the ongoing narrative is concerned, this is an ideal place for this episode to stop. All I have to say at this point is – fasten your seat belts! As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open and let’s get together in the next one.
-
We ended the last episode in April of 1965 when George Harrison and John Lennon of the Beatles were unexpectedly given a dose of LSD by their dentist at a dinner party that he was hosting for them. This was done without their knowledge or permission, and although it could have had some significantly negative consequences, fortunately for everyone concerned, it all worked out well.
At this point in the podcast series, it’s important to understand that this narrative is about the evolution of consciousness, especially as it happened on a mass level beginning in the mid-sixties. And that will serve as a lead in to some of the remarkable experiences I had at the time, which led to my lifelong involvement with personal growth, which is just a simpler term used for the evolution of consciousness.
As we’ve seen, two substances, marijuana and LSD, played significant roles at the time, but they were just catalysts for the massive changes that were beginning to take place. Critically, this isn’t about those substances, how they work or the positive or negative aspects of them. This is about the liberation and elevation of human consciousness itself, which can easily happen with or without the use of external stimulants.
Indeed, myriads of people have experienced enlightening inner growth without ever using any of these kinds of substances, and by the same token, plenty of people have taken large amounts of them and have gained very little, if any lasting enlightenment. So, it all depends upon the individual involved, as well as on the circumstances that help set the stage.
That being said, let’s take a brief look at what happened to John and George that night at their dentist’s home and then, what happened to Ringo and Paul a little later.
It seems that George had a profoundly illuminating experience that night. As he said, “I felt this amazing sensation come over me. It was like an intense version of the best feeling I ever had in my life. It was wonderful. I felt in love with everything and everyone. Everything was perfect and beautiful, and I wanted to tell everyone how much I loved them — even strangers.
“I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience within twelve hours. It changed me, and there was no way back to what I was before.”
Indeed, there was no way back for him and the same held true for John as well, who said about that first night, “God, it was just terrifying, but it was fantastic.” He began taking it on a somewhat regular basis and later he said, “LSD was the self-knowledge which pointed the way. I was suddenly struck by great visions when I first took acid. But you've got to be looking for it before you can possibly find it. Perhaps I was looking without realizing it.” I’ve always felt that given the cultural framework of the time, that was quite a profound observation of his.
About moving forward, George said, “John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid because we couldn’t relate to them anymore. Not just on the one level — we couldn’t relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much. It was such a mammoth experience that it was unexplainable. It was something that had to be experienced, because you could spend the rest of your life trying to explain what it made you feel and think. It was all too important to John and me.”
Ringo joined John and George for their second LSD trip on August 25, 1965 and his experience seemed positive as well. “I’d take anything,” he later said. “It was a fabulous day. The night wasn’t so great, because it felt like it was never going to wear off. Twelve hours later and it was, ‘Give us a break now, Lord.'”
Paul was a bit more hesitant, and despite repeated pleas from his bandmates, he held out for over a year. But when he finally gave it a try, he said, “I always found it amazing. Sometimes it was a very, very deeply emotional experience, making you want to cry, sometimes seeing God or sensing all the majesty and emotional depth of everything.
“It opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God … It is obvious that God isn’t in a pill, but it explained the mystery of life,” he said. “It was truly a religious experience.”
So, in the larger context, by the end of 1965, the stage had been set for what was about to come. The Beatles had been opened to a higher understanding of consciousness and their music and everything else about them had begun to evolve. Significantly, they would have a major effect on both the music and the messaging that was about to transform the entire culture.
But remember, there was also another major factor that had been put in place during the same month that the Beatles first got high with Dylan. And that was the fact that the US Congress had basically given Lyndon Johnson the right to activate the American military in Vietnam in any way he saw fit. And by the end of 1965, he had begun to significantly exercise that right, right or wrong.
Unfortunately, the statistics tell the tale. By the end of the year there were 184,300 US troops deployed in South Vietnam and 1,928 US soldiers died there that year. That is more than a 700% gain over the previous year’s totals. It was still getting relatively little attention, but tragically, things were just getting warmed up over there.
Now, the end of 1965 also brings us to a time of a major, critical change in my own life as well. As you may have noticed, I have said very little about my life so far and there’s a good reason for it. I had been living a standard, normal American life, and nothing out of the ordinary had happened to me yet.
If you know of my personal history, you might find it a little strange for me to say that nothing out of the ordinary had happened to me yet. After all, I had grown up in a somewhat unusual environment. My father was a prominent Philadelphia attorney who started the 76ers and had moved Wilt Chamberlain into our home. Wilt was my roommate when I was in tenth grade, so of course, those were some incredible times.
But as unusual as they may have been, these are not the kind of “out of the ordinary” events I’m talking about. As you will soon see, I’m referring to something completely different.
Anyway, as November of 1965 was drawing to a close, I was making my way through eleventh grade and enjoying it thoroughly. I had a great family with lots of terrific friends. My future seemed well-planned and rather rosy as well. I would finish high school followed by college and law school. At some later point my brother and I would inherit our father’s law firm as well as ownership of the 76ers. So, everything seemed pretty much set up for me.
Speaking of the team, the season was coming into full swing, things were going well for us and the NBA championship seemed clearly in sight. So, there I was, a normal, happy sixteen-year-old, eagerly looking forward to what was coming next.
But the truth is, as we all must learn sooner or later, you can never really know what’s coming around the next corner. The actual reality of the future always remains unknown. The past, of course is a different story. And with the clarity of hindsight, it’s fairly obvious that some troubling signs were starting to appear in my path.
The first one was barely noticeable at the time. My brother’s wife was about seven months pregnant and my father and I had driven over to visit them one afternoon. When we got home and pulled into the driveway, I asked him, “So how does it feel now that you’re going to be a grandfather?”
“What do you mean?” he asked me.
“Does it make you feel old or anything?”
He didn’t respond right away and just stared out at the rose garden near the back door of our house. “I’m never going to be the grandfather to this child,” he said. There was a distant sound in his voice, like he was talking from afar. “No. I won’t be the grandfather,” he continued matter-of-factly. “I’ll be the father’s father, but I’ll never be the grandfather.”
He used to say quirky things like this all the time. It sounded like he was splitting hairs and I didn’t pay any attention to it.
***
A second subtle omen came in the form of a comic book. I was in student council and started thinking about running for school president. My high school was quite large, with about two thousand students. If I wanted to run, there would be a lot to do, and it was time to give it some serious thought. One night at dinner, I mentioned it to my parents and they both encouraged me.
The next day, when I got home from school, an old comic book of mine was on the end table next to my bed. I hadn’t seen it in years, but I immediately recognized it. It had stories about each president of the United States. My mother kept a few boxes of my childhood things in the basement and had pulled it out, probably to inspire me.
As I looked at the cover, I clearly remembered that there was a strange story about Abraham Lincoln in the middle. I quickly flipped it opened and sure enough, there it was, “Lincoln, the Mystic.”
It had two parts. The first was called, “I Am Not Dead – I Still Live.” It showed a letter from a psychic that was found in Lincoln’s desk after he died. Supposedly, it was a channeled, life-after-death message from a close friend of Lincoln’s who had been killed in battle. Written backwards, it had to be read in a mirror. It said - “I am not dead. I still live…I experienced a happy reality - a glorious change by the process called death… Man lives on Earth, to live elsewhere, and that elsewhere is ever present. Heaven and Hell are conditions, not localities.”
You might be surprised to learn that Lincoln had kept a letter from a psychic in his desk at the White House, but it’s in the archives of the Library of Congress.
I went on to the second part, called “The Most Famous Pre-Cognitive Dream in American History.” It showed Lincoln asleep in the White House. A mournful sound wakes him up. He gets out of bed and starts walking toward it. As he gets closer, he realizes that it is the sound of people sobbing in misery. He enters the East Room and sees a coffin on a flag-draped stand, guarded by soldiers.
“Who is dead in the White House?” he asks one of them. “The President,” comes the reply. “He was killed by an assassin.”
The crying gets much louder and Lincoln looks into the coffin and to his shock, he sees himself lying there. He stares at his dead body for a moment, then he suddenly wakes up and realizes it had all been a bad dream.
Looking back on these small events it seems like I was being given some information about what was to come. The first part came from my father. If what he said about never becoming a grandfather came true, whether he knew it or not, he was telling me that he had less than two months to live.
The second and third came from the comic book about Lincoln and they were both about death. One said that in truth, death is not an ending, it’s actually a glorious change into a happy reality. And the other said that it’s possible to have a pre-cognitive dream of death that can quickly come true.
Again, I barely noticed these three factors at the time and certainly didn’t see any connection between them and my life at all. That being said, this is a good place to end this episode. As you might guess, the unfolding story is about to go a few levels deeper, so as always, keep your eyes, mind, and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
-
In the last episode, we looked at two critically important events that happened in August of 1964 that would eventually have truly profound effects on Western culture, as well as on world history in general. On August 7, the US Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and 21 days later, on August 28, Bob Dylan got together with the Beatles in their New York City hotel suite for a casual evening of fun.
Again, neither event seemed overly important at the time, but in the long run, they were truly critical. By a nearly unanimous vote, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution effectively gave President Lydon Johnson “carte blanche” to direct the American military operation in Southeast Asia however he saw fit.
A few weeks later, at the party New York, Bob Dylan got John, Paul, George, and Ringo high on marijuana for the first time in their lives, blowing the doors of perception wide open for them. And significantly, in their altered state, he told them that he admired their songs, but the problem was that they weren’t about anything. This casual comment proved to be deeply moving to them in terms of their creativity.
The last episode was titled, “Tale of Two Seeds,” and that’s exactly what it was because two very different seeds had been planted. And within a rather short period of time, both of those seeds would sprout and start growing like wildfire, and ultimately, one would be the undoing of the other.
But let’s veer off a little here for a quick reminder of what this sequence of episodes is all about. As I’ve mentioned a few times earlier, the underlying theme of all of this is the evolution of consciousness that began to take place in a very serious way back then and has continued, through to this day, although often quite subtly.
As the series has unfolded, we’ve gotten some terrific feedback from our subscribers, but there has been one question that has come up a few times and I’d like to address it briefly. The question is, “What do you mean by the term “evolution of consciousness?”
It’s really quite simple. Essentially, we each live in two worlds - our external world and our internal world. Our external world consists of everything that is happening around us on the outside, which generally involves our friends, our family, our career, our home, our car, our pets, and so on. And on the other hand, our internal world relates to everything that is going on within us – our thoughts, our feelings, our knowledge and understandings, our memoires, etc.
The term, “consciousness” simply refers to this inner world of ours, which holds the mass composite of all the intelligence that is within each one of us on an individual basis. When our consciousness grows toward the positive, it turns us into better human beings, and the term “evolution of consciousness” is used to simply identify this wonderfully powerful kind of positive inner growth.
Now, human society is largely a reflection of the overall state of consciousness of the human beings in it, so the more highly evolved our individual consciousness becomes, the better the chances we have of living in a kinder and more humane society. In other words, better people will always create a better world.
In this regard, history has shown that the artists of any age usually play very significant roles in stimulating the inner growth of the people of their time. Along these lines, although I haven’t been able to find out who said it, I once came across a great quote about the role of the artist in society. It divided people into two categories.
The first one is made up of society’s solid, reliable, hard-working people, the ones who go to work every day and do all the things we need to keep our lives going. It said that these are the people who make the world go around. But it said that the job of an artist isn’t to make the world go around. The job of the artists is to make the world go forward. As a wanna-be artist, painting the colors of words onto the canvass of ideas, I found the idea to be quite inspiring.
So, with all that being said, let’s go back to the Beatles in August of 1964. Apparently, when Dylan got them stoned that night, it began a bit of a love affair between the lads and the weed. As happened to so many of us upon our first exposure to the mind-altering powers of THC, they began perceiving things in a very different way. After that, getting high on marijuana became a normal part of their abnormal lives, and their music, along with everything else about them began to undergo a slow, but dramatic metamorphosis.
Small and subtle as it was, I clearly remember the first time I became conscious of a definite change in their music in December of 1964. I was in tenth grade, finishing my first semester of high school and a new Beatles album had just come out called Beatles 65. It was always a major event whenever a new one of their albums came out and this was no different.
All the songs were remarkably great, as they always were, but there was one that seemed just a bit different. John Lennon was singing. His voice had become incredibly familiar to me and always made me happy. The song was about a lost love, but instead of just being sad, it seemed to have a new sense of pathos in it. And in the slow introduction, I couldn’t believe the words that I heard him sing. “I’m a loser. I’m a loser. And I’m not what I appear to be.”
I was pretty surprised. To me, he seemed to be the coolest superstar in the whole world, which to my young mind made him one of my major heroes. And now, I am hearing this greatly influential voice tell me that in actuality, he’s really a loser and he’s not what he appears to be.
And there were some pretty deep ideas in the rest of the lyrics as well. “Although I laugh and I act like a clown, beneath this mask, I am wearing a frown. My tears are falling like rain from the sky. Is it for her or myself that I cry? What have I done to deserve such a fate? I realize I have left it too late. And so it’s true, pride comes before a fall. I’m telling you so that you won’t lose all. I’m a loser. I’m a loser. And I’m not what I appear to be.”
It's not like it was that all that big of a deal for me, but still, something seemed noticeably different. Clearly it was a break-up song, but also clearly, it was not a song that didn’t mean anything.
I didn’t notice it at the time, but in a larger sense, some initial seeds of concepts of change were being planted in my subconscious mind. “Maybe I’m a loser too, and maybe I’m not what I appear to be. And you know what? Maybe this whole world isn’t what it appears to be. And what about life itself? Maybe life isn’t what it appears to be, either. These are really important questions and you don’t really know a thing about this kind of stuff, do you?”
These hadn’t exactly formed into thoughts yet, just somewhat ethereal feelings and of course, I had no answers. Far from it. I didn’t even have any questions. Again, it was just a subtle feeling, like on a very deep level, a curtain of some kind was about to be lifted. Again, these were the earliest of times for me. It would be several years before I would find myself being forced to explore the treacherous terrain of self-deception.
As far as the society was concerned, at this point, it's important to remember that during the mid-sixties, as well as for at least the ten years that followed, the Beatles were by far, the most influential force in popular music. Of course, there were many other tremendous musicians during that time as well, far too many to mention here. But the Beatles always led the way, coaxing the culture down the yellow brick road for at least a decade.
All in all, a truly remarkable output of rock music became the primary source of influence to the seventy million American baby boomers. With their radios and record players constantly blasting the beat, it became the soundtrack of their lives as they made their way through the incredibly influential years that led them into becoming the people they eventually became.
By the way, on a completely different track, let’s take a look at a few statistics regarding Southeast Asia as the year of 1964 came to a close. At the close of 1963, the US had 16.300 “advisors” active in South Vietnam and 122 of them had been killed that year. By the end of 1964, the number had increased by over 40% to 23,300 and 216 of them had been killed. Not that anyone was paying any attention to it. These weren’t particularly alarming numbers and Vietnam could have been on the moon as far at the general public was concerned. A vast majority of the American population had never even heard of it.
But the Beatles music had definitely begun to change. It started out with a random song here and there, but the same way that random rocks trickling down the side of a mountain can suddenly catalyze a massive avalanche, in many significant ways, the Beatles were about to change the world.
In this regard, one evening in April of 1965 marked the beginning of their next phase, as their newly elevated path was unexpectedly launched into hyperspace.
John Lennon and George Harrison, along with their wives, went to dinner at the home of their dentist. The dentist served them a meal, followed by coffee and dessert, and it seemed like he made sure that John and George drank all their coffee. Then, a short while later, he told them that he had spiked their coffee with LSD.
Of course, dosing someone with LSD without their consent is a terrible thing to do. History has taught, as Timothy Leary’s research at Harvard had proclaimed much earlier, that the drug can wreak severely negative impacts when done in the wrong way at the wrong time.
Fortunately for the couples at dinner that night, even though it turned out to be a bit of a crazy ride, they still remained safe. But both George and John had some deeply profound experiences. But that’s enough for right now. As you can imagine, we’re coming into some interesting territory in the coming episodes, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
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As we ended the last episode, a party was beginning in a swank hotel suite in New York City. It was August 28, 1964, and Bob Dylan had driven down from his home in Woodstock to spend an evening with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, who had become known to the world as the Beatles.
Before we get into what happened on that magical evening, let’s step back a little and remember that we are looking at certain key events that took place back then that were hardly noticed at the time, but would have incredibly powerful effects on the massive changes that were about to come that would shake our society to its very core.
Two of those major events happened in August of 1964 and the meeting between Dylan and the Beatles was actually the second one. Let’s start this episode by taking a quick look at what happened a few weeks earlier, on August 4.
On that date, by a vote of 98 – 2 in the Senate, and by a 100% unanimous vote of the House of Representatives, the Congress of the United States passed something called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
The odds are high that you either never heard of it or barely remember it, but in essence, this is what opened the door to the ever-deepening US involvement in Vietnam. In a lot of ways, this event marked the very beginning of the coming catastrophe.
At the time, in the battle between North and South Vietnam, the US was backing the south against the communist regime of the north. But South Vietnam’s forces had been largely ineffective and the Johnson administration concluded that it needed to prop them up to prevent a communist takeover of the entire region. This idea was called the “domino theory” and was often used to justify deeper US involvement in the area.
The South Vietnamese began a series of naval raids on the North Vietnamese coast and to lend support, the U.S. Navy stationed two destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, in the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 2, they reported that they had been attacked by some North Vietnamese patrol boats and had returned fire. Later it came out that the US had fired the first shots.
Then on August 4, with the area under severely inclement weather, relying on radar readings, the ships thought they were under larger attack. The two ships fired at the area delineated by the radar readings and reported up the chain of command that they were engaged in a battle. But soon, the captain of the Maddox realized that not only had there had been no attack, there were actually no ships in the area at all. He sent the corrected information up the chain of command.
Then, as Johnson’s Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara said in the documentary, “The Fog of War,” things got a little foggy. No one knows exactly how or why it happened, but President Johnson, speaking with the full authority of his office, notified congress that the attack had happened.
He then addressed the country on national TV and explained the alleged facts of the alleged situation. And calling for action, he firmly stated that the US could not tolerate this kind of aggression on the open seas. Congress passed the Tonkin resolution which stated that “the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force.” Note that the key words, “as the President determines.
Now there are two key points to take away from this congressional resolution. The first one is that the report’s inciting incident was, essentially, a “false flag,” which means it never happened. Of course, it was only after certain secret documents about it had been de-classified in 2005 that the true information became known. All things considered; forty years of misinformation sounds about right.
But the second, and by far most important issue with the proclamation is that it gave the president the right to use US military force at his discretion, without having to go before Congress for authorization. They basically gave him Carte Blanche to direct the actions of the military in Southeast Asia as he saw fit. And as events would subsequently prove, he really took them up on it.
It’s not necessary to go more deeply into all this here. The important thing is, and no one it knew back then, tragically, the trap-door been set and soon, we would fall into the horrifying abyss of death and destruction that was lying in wait for us in Vietnam.
Now, on a much lighter note, let’s jump ahead three weeks to August 28 and the party in the swank premier suite at the Delmonico Hotel, when Bob Dylan joined John, Paul, George and Ringo for an informal get together.
Dylan was always a big influence on the white-hot band from England. He had hit the big time about a year before the Beatles had emerged and they really looked up to him. Now, although they had both become major forces in popular music, in reality they operated in distinctly different musical frameworks. All of the Beatles’ songs were about standard romantic themes, while Dylan’s carried much deeper messages.
He had begun as a protest singer and quickly came to be considered the voice of the new generation. But he had recently gone through quite a change and was working on a new album called, “Another Side of Bob Dylan.” And indeed, it clearly was a very different side of the rapidly evolving artist.
In his new music he was dealing with themes that were far more personal than societal. Still, on the deepest level, his new songs were every bit as revolutionary as his protest songs had been, and as deeply insightful as well, but in a very different way.
One of his new songs was called “All I Really Want to Do.” Instead of being tied down to the normal roles of a standard romantic relationship, he expressed the liberated desire for freedom and individualism for both partners. He sang, “I ain’t looking to compete with you, beat or cheat or mistreat you. Simplify you, classify you, deny, defy or crucify you. All I really want to do is baby be friends with you.” No one had ever heard anything quite like it before and it quickly became a big hit.
But there was also a rumor about this new direction he was taking. According to one record producer who claimed he had been there, Dylan had tried LSD for the first time earlier that year.
As I already mentioned about Dylan, he always has been and still is, prone to keeping the details of his private life extremely private. So, nobody knows if or when he ever did LSD, how many times, or anything like that. But he wrote a song back then that found its way onto his new album and some observers consider to be the first popular song ever written about an LSD trip.
The song was called, “The Chimes of Freedom Flashing” and this deeply poetic statement quickly became an iconic standard in the annals of popular culture. Dylan seemed to have entered into a different dimension, where he was getting a sense that a major change in consciousness was approaching, that would bring freedom and liberation to those who were suffering from the slings and arrows of humanity’s unending inhumanity. It was and still is quite a powerful idea.
In the song, he and a companion were having a dramatic, multi-sensory experience as they witnessed what he called, “the chimes of freedom flashing.” He said the chimes were “Flashing for the warriors, whose strength is not to fight, flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight. And for each and every underdog soldier in the night.” He went on, saying they were “Tolling for the searching ones on their speechless, seeking trail, for the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale, and for each unharmful gentle soul misplaced inside a jail.” And in the last verse, he proclaimed that the chimes were “Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed, for the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse, and for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe. And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.” Obviously, this guy was light years ahead of his time.
Anyway, back to the party with the Beatles. It started out in a friendly, light hearted manner and stayed that way for a while until unexpectedly it went up a notch as Dylan told the group that he had brought along some rather high-grade marijuana.
He said he had assumed that the Beatles were already getting high because he thought the lyric to one of their famous songs was - “It’s such a feeling that my love, I get high, I get high, I get high.” They all had a good laugh because the actual lyric in the song was “I can’t hide. I can’t hide. I can’t hide.” Not “I get high.”
The hilarity continued, one thing led to another and before they knew it, the fab four, along with their manager Brian Epstein, got stoned for the first time in their lives. And it seems like they got really stoned, because, as it can happen, rather than just having an elevated inner feeling, it seems they took a little journey through the doors of perception and started having some rather profound realizations.
You might have heard the term, “the doors of perception before,” as writer Aldous Huxley used it as the title for his 1954 book. It comes from the quote by William Blake, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is – infinite.” And that’s kind of what happened to them that night.
Paul McCartney felt like he was having an inspiring brush with enlightenment. He said something to the effect that this was the first time in his life that he felt he could really think. He had one of their assistants grab a pen and paper to keep writing down all deeper understandings he kept having.
Apparently, as the revelry of the evening continued, at one point Dylan made a comment to them that went in pretty deep. At the time, 100% of the songs the Beatles were writing and singing were about the ups and downs of standard, romantic boy-girl love, and that was their entire repertoire. That was it.
Dylan told them that he really enjoyed their music and he did. He often said that they had a great sound, that their melodies were terrific and their harmonies were perfect. But he said that even though he liked them, he had a problem with their songs and his problem was that they weren’t about anything.
Supposedly John Lennon got blown out and later said that Dylan’s comment had produced some major realizations within him, prompting him to start writing about deeper themes that were “outside of just the meat-market.”
In retrospect, many cultural historians believe that this meeting between Dylan and the Beatles marked the very beginnings of a major change that would soon completely transform popular music, which in turn, would change the entire world. We’ll go into it all this little more in depth in the coming episodes so let’s call it quits for now. As always, keep your eyes mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
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We ended the last episode with the Commencement Address that President Kennedy gave at American University, which marked a major thaw in the cold war, leading to a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. That was on June 10, 1963. Now let’s move on to June 11th.
Governor George Wallace, in defiance of federal desegregation orders, attempted to block the enrollment of two African American students at the University of Alabama. Symbolizing his resistance to federal integration efforts, he stood in the doorway and proclaimed, “Segregation Now. Segregation Forever.” It’s hard to know if he thought his action was going to intimidate the President, but it did no such thing. JFK quickly federalized the Alabama National Guard, who immediately removed Wallace from the premises.
That night, the President delivered a televised address to the country announcing that he had ordered the National Guard to ensure the enrollment of the two African American students. Then, emphasizing the importance of upholding the rule of law and the Constitution, he clearly reaffirmed his administration’s full support of the Civil Rights movement.
It turns out that the month of June was to become a truly historic month for him because as it continued, on June 26th, he made his legendary trip to West Berlin. In his world-famous speech to 120,000 wildly admiring West Berliners, he said, “There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.” Then, with the wit of biting sarcasm he continued, “Freedom has many difficulties and Democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.”
At that point, he concluded the speech with words that went down in history, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner.” Of course, it meant, “I am a Berliner.”
At the end of the trip, he left Berlin for a four-day visit to his ancestral homeland in Ireland, a journey that can only be called a love fest. Not only was he the first US president to ever visit the emerald isle, his trip was celebrated as the return of a truly beloved native son, and wherever he went, he was mobbed by adoring Irish crowds. He then moved on to two days spent in London consulting with Prime Minister MacMillan before returning to Washington.
Following his return from the exhilarating trip abroad, it was time to begin preparing for the coming presidential election. Although it had been a promising first term, he still had a tricky path to navigate in 1964, as his political enemies were powerful and the road ahead of him had some serious obstacles.
During these early, pre-elections days of October and November, there were rumored to have been two other events that may have happened which would have critically changed world history if they had come true. The first one is that Kennedy, concluding that the government of South Vietnam had become too unstable to justify further US support, had supposedly set in motion plans to terminate all US involvement in Vietnam by the end of December, 1965, He had made up his mind and we were pulling out.
The second possible event is the report that Kennedy had decided to drop Lyndon Johnson from the ticket for the election of 1964 and had told him so.
Now, there is no substantial proof to verify either of these claims and there never will be. Still, if you let your imagination run wild a little, you can see how the history of the coming era would have been radically different.
Whatever his plans might have been, they would have had to remain top secret given the turbulent politics of the upcoming presidential election. In that regard, he began to embark on some politically-motivated trips. On November 2nd he left for Chicago, followed by a trip to Tampa, Florida on the 18th. Then, on November 21, he and the first lady departed for Texas.
They went to San Antonio, then Houston, and then to Fort Worth, where they stayed overnight. The next morning, they took the short flight to Dallas and arrived at 11:38 AM. They got into the presidential limousine and left Love Field at 11:55, arriving in downtown Dallas following the short ride. The streets were lined with throngs of awestruck people, enthusiastically cheering them on, as the most recognized and charismatic couple in the entire world slowly passed by. As they basked in the warmth of the adoring crowd, the motorcade continued on, into the brilliant sunlight of what was shaping up to be an absolutely perfect day. Then, at 12:30 pm, the unthinkable happened.
***
It’s neither necessary nor possible to begin to describe the effect that it had on America, and in particular, the youth of America, as the plague of that horrible news spread like wildfire throughout the population. And it went on for the full thirty days of mourning that followed. For me, when the assassination happened, I had just begun ninth grade, my last year in junior high school and I was in the sadly unfortunate position of being just old enough and just young enough.
I was old enough to understand the true gravity of the tragedy, but still young enough to have my childhood sensibilities shaken to the core. And let’s not even talk about that four-day stretch of dark days. There was the assassination itself, followed by a day of absolute shock, then the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on national TV, followed by the incredibly sad and deeply somber funeral, as the forty-six year-old, fallen hero of the republic was laid to rest. It was all so sad, but also, it was all so weird.
For the first time ever, the whole country stopped to watch television as the entire nation stood still for the six-hour funeral. Something like this had happened before, on April 14, 1945 when President Franklin Roosevelt was buried, but that was only on radio. This was completely different. It was much more graphic, as one incredibly grief-stricken image after the next was broadcast to the entire western world.
And when it comes to tragic images, the spontaneous salute that John-John gave to his father’s flag-draped coffin as it passed him by was seared into our collective memory. Nobody saw that heart-wrenching moment coming.
It was almost as if we were being taught as a culture, a dramatic seminar on the ever-present possibility of sudden death…how everything can come to a screeching halt, no matter who you are. And subconsciously the message was clear - if instant death can happen to someone like that, who was at the absolute pinnacle of power, it can happen to any one of us. We can be gone in a flash. And then nothing is the same.
In total, all three major networks suspended normal programming for four days and played seventy consecutive hours of the live coverage of the proceedings. From a mass media perspective, the only other time anything like this has ever happened was the coverage of the 911 attacks in 2001.
Again, the purpose of this series of podcasts is to focus on the mass evolution of consciousness that happened during this formative era, as well as to examine my own story as I went through it all. At this point, to put it simply, we all had the wind completely taken out of our sails. Our daily lives continued, but again, it was all so sad and it was all so weird, like we were painfully groping our way through the shadows of a slowly unfolding nightmare that never seemed to end. And then, suddenly, something completely different happened.
***
Exactly eighty days after the assassination, on the night of February 9, 1964, variety TV show host Ed Sullivan walked onto the stage of his Sunday night program and with five words, spoke a phrase that absolutely changed everything - “Ladies and Gentleman – The Beatles.”
Seventy-Seven million people were watching and for the youth of the country, it was like a magic spell had been cast, designed to dissipate the suffering and the pain that had enveloped us. In an instant, one phase of our life ended and another began. The mourning period was over and suddenly, it was time to sing and dance again. And boy, did we!
Once more, it is neither necessary nor possible to begin to describe what happened. Suffice it to say that everything changed for us almost overnight, as this thing called Beatlemania set it. We had four new heroes, these guys named John, Paul, George and Ringo and they were so cool, yet so incredibly upbeat at the same time. Their music was truly amazing but there was also something else about them, something intangible. They seemed to be happily above the toils of life, like they had just arrived from another planet that ran on nothing but pure fun.
And on top of it all, their haircuts were like nothing we’d ever seen before. It seemed a little strange at first, but within a few months, all the guys were copying them. I know I went from the standard buzz-cut to the new mop top as soon as my hair would grow out. If it sounds like we were completely awestruck, we were, but don’t forget what we’d just been through, not to mention our age – I was just a month shy of turning fifteen.
Amazingly, it ended up that the Beatles were just the first wave of what became known as the British Invasion as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who, the Hollies, the Zombies, the Kinks, Herman’s Hermits and God knows how many others came cascading into the country. It seemed like every day, wave after wave of new songs washed up onto the shores of our AM radios, which we had blasting all the time. And that’s not to mention all of the new remarkable American music that helped launched us into hyper-space, as well.
Of course, we were still going to school and studying, as normal life continued, But, a massive new party had obviously begun, with the Beatles leading the way.
Things went on like that for about six months. Then the Beatles hit an unexpected, little turn in the road, when on the night of August 28, 1964, they finally got to spend an evening with one of their primary musical heroes, the enigmatic Bob Dylan.
Now this was another one of those events that was only a very quick couple of hours, and it was largely unnoticed at the time. On one level, it was just your standard meeting of two major musical superstar acts. At the time, the Beatles were enjoying a level of fame that had never been seen before. And along with also being extremely famous, Dylan was the most influential musician of his time.
It started out with a lot of goofing around, a lot of partying, you know the standard kind of things that can happen in a glitzy high-end hotel room in New York City when the absolute pinnacle of rock and roll gets together to relax and have a good time.
But it ended up being quite a bit more than that. Even though it was extremely subtle, again, those subterranean Teutonic plates were set in motion and a major earthquake was looming, just over the horizon. Well, this is a perfect place for us to stop, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
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We closed the last episode by looking at the emergence of Bob Dylan onto the Beat Scene in Greenwich Village in 1962, and we mentioned his song, Blowin’ in the Wind, where he asked some deeply troubling questions about what was going wrong in the world and said that the answer to them all is blowing in the wind.
Now Dylan has never confirmed nor denied that he was referring to marijuana in that song. But if he was, it was a pretty obscure reference because
less than 4 per cent of the US population had tried it at the time, and a vast majority of people had never even heard of it.
It’s known that a lot of the “Beatniks” were into it, including my sister who was attending a big university in a major US city, so it was probably starting to get around, although her private escapades were always kept top secret.
There was another drug, LSD, that was flying well under society’s radar screen as well, but there were two major differences between the two substances. While marijuana got you high, meaning it put you into of an elevated state of mind, LSD was a powerful psychedelic, capable of significantly altering your entire sense of reality. And, although the far less potent drug, marijuana, had been against the law since 1937, remarkably, LSD was still legal.
We’ll get into the effects of these substances on American culture more deeply as the story unfolds. For now, let’s go back to the period immediately following the Cuban Missile Crisis and take another look at President Kennedy.
It seems clear that serving as the Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces during those harrowing thirteen days had a profound effect on him and most historians believe he started to seriously explore ways to reduce the tensions between America and the Soviet Union.
When the crisis began, Kennedy had authorized his brother Robert, the Attorney General and a key member of his cabinet, to set up a back channel of communications with the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin. JFK felt that it was imperative to have a reliable form of direct communication with Khrushchev.
According to released Russian documents, the Soviet premier’s son-in-law Alexei Adzhubei, met privately with the President to confirm that the Attorney General would be speaking on his authority. When he asked JFK if Bobby was his “number two” in Washington, JFK replied that he wasn’t just “No. 2, but 3, 4, 5 and 6.” The message was relayed to Khrushchev and the back channel was secured.
Once the crisis had been resolved, the two leaders set up a permanent, direct channel that became known as the “Hot Line.” Before it was officially completed in June of 1963, it could take as long as twelve hours for the two sides to communicate. Twelve hours is an obvious eternity in a world filled with massive atomic weaponry. Now, at least communications were on a much sounder footing.
In various public statements and speeches that followed, President Kennedy began expressing a stronger commitment to peace and the importance of finding diplomatic solutions to international conflicts. He emphasized the need for dialogue and negotiation to prevent the escalation of tensions. And he began to prioritize Civil Rights in Americas well.
Like most members of my generation, I had always felt a kind of personal connection to him. I don’t want to sound too shallow here, but along with all of his other accomplishments, he just seemed like the coolest guy in the world, and we all looked up to him. A commentator once put it this way. Nixon reminded us of who we were, and Kennedy of who we wish we were. It was for obvious reasons. He was young and handsome, came from a very wealthy and powerful family, had a beautiful wife who seemed like royalty, along with two adorable kids.
And on top of all this, his life played extremely well in the mass media, which was still in its earliest stages. The truth is that besides being president, he was also the most charismatic media superstar in the world. He would routinely hang out with the hottest entertainers in show business and everybody was totally enamored by him. At the top of the heap was Frank Sinatra and his pals, who were known as the “Rat Pack” and as the presidential campaign began in 1960, Sinatra changed its name to the “Jack Pack.”
Supposedly Jack and Frank were very tight and obviously Frank ran with a huge circle of A-List celebrities. All the glitzy pieces of the political/entertainment puzzle formed a glamorous mosaic when Marilyn Monroe sang happy birthday to JFK at his 45th birthday gala celebration in Madison Square Garden. Popular culture as basking in the high life, with John F. Kennedy at the very top. So, again, I had always been pretty taken with him.
Looking back on it from a cultural perspective, an interesting side note is that Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor who became a major counter-culture guru, claimed that JFK had been experimenting with LSD during this time as well.
According to Leary, at one point in mid-1962, a very impressive woman in her early forties came to visit him in his office at Harvard. She said she was an artist living in Georgetown and wanted to learn how to conduct LSD sessions. Apparently, a few of her female friends had a plan to turn some of the most powerful men in Washington on to LSD.
After a few meetings, she confided in Leary that she was having a serious affair with a very high-ranking member of the administration and he was interested in experimenting with the drug. Leary gave her detailed instructions on how to properly conduct sessions and things moved on from there. She began reporting her progress regularly to Leary and apparently things were going quite well. Along with the fact that this high-level member of the administration’s mind was expanding, their love affair was reaching extremely satisfying new heights.
Now, it turns out that Leary’s friend was no ordinary woman. Her name was Mary Pinchot Meyer. She came from a wealthy family, had known JFK since they were teen-agers, and they had been neighbors together in Georgetown. She was also extremely well-connected in Washington. Her sister was married to Ben Bradlee, a major reporter for Newsweek and a close friend of JFK’s. who later became the Executive Editor of the Washington Post. So, you can imagine how well-connected she really was.
I’ll tell you in a future episode how Leary came to the conclusion that JFK was the high-ranking member of the administration in question. Obviously, Leary’s theory has never been proven and it never will be, as all the players, including Leary, are long since dead. The whole thing could have easily come from a false memory of his or even a hallucination.
But it never mattered to me whether it was true or not because my focus has always been on the growth of human consciousness, regardless of the catalyst. And there is no question that LSD played a significant role in the massive changes that were about to overcome society during the next few years.
Also, and again I don’t want to sound too shallow here, but the idea that JFK might have been experimenting with mind expansion only made him seem cooler to me. LSD was completely legal at the time, many members of the intelligentsia had tried it, and I found the idea to be intriguing.
Regardless of the reason, Kennedy was making major strides in the direction of establishing a framework for the reduction of tension and the establishment of peace, not just with the Soviet Union, but around the world as well.
On June 10,1963, he took it a step further by delivering one of the most important speeches of his presidency as he gave the Commencement Address at American University.
He set the tone at the beginning by saying, “I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived--yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.” Then he continued, “I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
He then shifted to the relationship between America and Russia saying, “both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race.” And then he made a major policy announcement calling for a test ban treaty and stating that the US would suspend nuclear atmospheric testing if Russian would agree.
And then he went on, “So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved…For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”
The speech, which represented a break from contentious rhetoric, was revolutionary for several reasons. First, it marked a real thaw in the cold war. Although he acknowledged the ideological differences between the two superpowers, he still stressed their common humanity, which transcended those differences. Moving away from the adversarial language that had characterized the cold war for so long, he sought to create an atmosphere more conducive to negotiations and détente.
And critically, from the standpoint of policy, it represented a true breakthrough, as he announced his intention to pursue a comprehensive test ban treaty with Russia. Importantly, the speech received positive response both at home and abroad, which helped set the stage for the major diplomatic initiatives that followed, including the signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in August of 1963.
Today, it's hard to grasp how revolutionary his ideas as well as his actions were. From our modern perspective, his views were incredibly advanced for the times.
And when he talked about the commonality between the Americans and the Russians, saying that “we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal,” even though he was six years early, from his words, he almost sounded like a hippy who had just come back from Woodstock. Who knows - maybe Timothy Leary was right. Maybe he had been experimenting with consciousness expansion. But it really didn’t matter. What mattered was how he was steering the ship of state.
So, let’s end this episode by leaving things here for now. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
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The last episode ended with the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. As you may recall, one day at the height of the crisis, October 27th is considered by some experts to be the closest the world has ever come to a full-out nuclear war. And it is thought that the wise decision of one 34-year-old Russian naval officer was all that stood in the way of provoking what could have been the cause of the greatest single loss of life in human history.
The American public had been deeply shaken by the event. Early in the crisis, on the night of October 22, 1962, JFK appeared on national TV and outlined the situation to the country. He said that Cuba had in essence, been turned into a Russian strategic nuclear base, complete with long-range and unmistakably offensive weapons, clearly capable of mass destruction.
Saying that this now constituted an explicit threat to all the Americas and acting in the defense of the entire Western Hemisphere, he announced a strict naval embargo. Then he gave a clear and stark warning to Russia. “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
Clearly, the gauntlet had been thrown and the ultimatum was unmistakable. If you fire a missile from Cuba at any county on this side of the globe, we will launch an immediate and full retaliatory response upon you.
In closing, he said to the American public, “My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred.”
Nothing like this had ever happened before and a lot of people felt that a real catastrophe was at hand. Fortunately, the crisis resolved itself with no major incidents and things returned to some facsimile of normal. Still, most people remained extremely concerned about the future, because it had become painfully obvious that this ongoing cold war could get really hot, really fast.
Again, the evolution of consciousness is the focus of this story, along with an understanding of how certain societal and cultural events served to catalyze its emergence, so we’re going to shift our perspective a bit at this point.
We’re going to stay in the same time-frame, but we’re going to look at a different series of events, set against a very different backdrop.
In 1945, when the country had emerged victorious from the six years of hell that it had gone through in World War Two, it exhaled a deep sigh of relief that turned into a general state of conformity.
It seemed that we wanted and needed a calming sense of normality to set in after suffering the harrowing insanity of the unending torment of injury, misery and death that had overcome the world for what seemed like eternity.
It might have been a little boring, or even intimidating, but we wanted everything to be safely, sanely the same, at least for a while. And that’s what happened. America turned basic vanilla, 70 million babies were born and for a while, we just let it be.
But that kind of thing only lasts for so long, and then the younger generation starts to stretch its legs and flex its muscles a little. In the mid ‘50s a kind of subculture began developing around the country. In general, it featured a rejection of conventional norms including the materialistic and conformist aspects of the society.
It became known as the Beat Generation and interestingly, the term had been coined by writer Jack Kerouac, who claimed that it didn’t mean that you were deflated or beat. It meant you had the beat. It was something you could feel, like a jazz beat, and according to him, it didn’t matter what you called it. What mattered is that you had it.
Along with Kerouac, other key writers included Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassidy. The Beats became known for their exploration of alternative lifestyles, experimentation with drugs, and a deep interest in Eastern philosophy and spirituality. Although it began as a relatively small nuance of society, the seeds they planted throughout the fifties and early sixties would populate and grow into a massive forest. And like flower power on steroids, it would permanently alter the landscape of the entire culture.
Along with the poets, writers and folk musicians, other revolutions began to take hold in the entertainment world. In movies, a new actor named Marlon Brando was being noticed for his avant-garde style of acting, which created a radically different kind of hero.
With his ability to convey a feeling of inner turmoil and vulnerability beneath a tough exterior, he brought a new sense of realism to the screen. Soon after playing a conflicted blue-collar brute in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in 1953 he played a black-leather jacketed, delinquent motorcycle gang leader in “The Wild One.”
Early in the film, a possible girlfriend asked him, “What are you rebelling against Johnny?” With a casual shrug he replied, “What do you got?” His defiant attitude symbolized rebellion and constructed a new kind of “bad boy” archetype in film. James Dean took it a step further in “East of Eden” and “Rebel Without a Cause” and inevitably, movies began to change in a major way.
A similar, but louder revolution was building in popular music as well. A new rhythm called “Rock and Roll” had begun to emerge. In the early-fifties, artists like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Fats Domino fueled the flames of the vibrant new sound, and year by year, its popularity continued to grow. Then on September 9, 1956, the burning candle of rock exploded into a full-scale conflagration when Elvis Presly gyrated his way onto the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theatre. The genie was out of the bottle, sixty million kids went nuts, and that was only the beginning.
Meanwhile, a vibrant Beat scene had begun to develop in New York City’s Greenwich Village and a bunch of coffee houses had sprung up featuring folk music singers and poets. Thousands of onlookers were drawn to the streets on a weekly basis, just to check out the scene.
In January of 1961, as the Beat scene was in full swing, a 19-year-old kid from Minnesota hitch-hiked to Manhattan to see what he could see. He was a skilled singer-songwriter who played the guitar and harmonica, and a few years earlier, he had changed his name to Bob Dlyan. He began hanging out at the folk café’s and playing songs whenever he got the chance.
But it soon became apparent that this was no ordinary kid. He seemed to possess an extreme talent, both in writing and performing. Within an amazingly short period of time, he became one of the most important folk/protest voices in the city. Of course, that was just the beginning of a truly legendary career. Fifty-five years later, he was granted the Nobel Prize in literature and the New York Times estimated that he had written over six hundred songs.
But even back at the beginning, he seemed to be light-years ahead of everyone else. And there seemed to be something prophetic about his work. Surprisingly, he had secured a record deal rather early in his career, and in April of 1962, he went into the studio to record his second album. At one point in early September, he recorded his iconic song, “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall.”
In the song, in response to the question, “Where have you been my blue-eyed son?” he answered with line after now famous line. Listen to his poetic description of the visions he saw, which stood for the darkness that was engulfing the world.
“I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans. I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard. I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it. I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken. I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children. I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.” Then as if warning of the fallout from a nuclear blast, he sang the chorus. “And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”
The song was an immediate phenomenon with the beat generation and about a month later, it seemed to have been prophetic as President Kennedy went on TV to inform the American public about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and for thirteen days, the world held its breath.
A few months after that, things seemed to come back from the brink a little, but Dylan was just getting warmed up. He recorded a series of protest songs that instantly became classics and still are today. His first one sounded like it came right out of Eisenhower’s warning. It was called “Masters of War” and was incredibly powerful.
The first verse says. “Come you masters of war. You that build the big guns. You that build the death planes. You that build all the bombs. You that hide behind walls. You that hide behind desks. I just want you to know. I can see through your masks.”
A little later he continued – “You’ve thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled. The fear to bring children into the world. Let me ask you one question – is your money that good. Will it buy you forgiveness, do you think that it could?”
Then the last verse really puts the nail in the coffin. “And I hope that you die. And your death will come soon. I'll follow your casket by the pale afternoon. And I'll watch while you're lowered. Down to your deathbed. And I'll stand over your grave. 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.”
Maybe he was thinking that the masters of war were so tricky, they would probably fake their own death if would benefit them. Remember, in his warning, Eisenhower said to take nothing for granted. Regardless, representing the forces of life, he wanted the warmongers off the planet for good.
Before we close, a few points about the passage of time. First, it still always amazes me that Dylan was only 21 years old when he wrote that song. And besides his youth, these were still the earliest of days. JFK was still president.
We live now, knowing the history of what was to come, but back then, nobody knew it. Consider what was about to happen over the next seven years – JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby, Woodstock, Kent State. And the emergence of a new generation whose look and outlook would have been unimaginable back then.
But that generation was on the forefront of a conscious revolution that would ultimately bring the war machine to a grinding halt. Obviously, it was just a halt, not a stop. But at least it was a beginning.
Anyway, at that point in 1963, Dylan’s career launched quickly. On April 12, he played Town Hall. On July 27, he played the Newport Folk Festival and on October 26, he played Carnegie Hall. And earlier, on May 27, Columbia Records released his second album which had Masters of War on it.
But it had another song that blew the roof off the entire folk world. It was called “Blowin’ in the Wind” and it quickly became an anthem for American Youth. Dylan goes through a probing set of questions about the world as it was. “How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man? How many times must the cannon balls fly before they’re forever banned? How many deaths will ‘it take til he knows that too many people have died?”
Then, in the chorus he said, “The answer my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”
Now, I was in eighth grade when that song became popular and I remember hearing it and wondering, what the hell is he talking about, the answer is blowin’ in the wind? What is it that is blowing in the wind that could possibly be the answer to all these problems?
Well, we’re going to dig into that in the next episode. So, as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened. And let’s get together in the next one.
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In the previous episode that took place in March of 1965, I mentioned that although we didn’t know it, the western world was entering into the early stages of a turbulent upheaval that would eventually revolutionize human consciousness on a global level. As one of the seventy million American baby boomers who were busy growing up at the time, I was heading right into it, as well.
In the chapter of “Wilt, Ike & Me” that was included in the episode, I had made mention of three critical factors that would become significant influences in shaping the upcoming changes – John F. Kennedy, Bob Dylan, and marijuana. Like the subterranean movements of massive Teutonic plates, the foundational reverberations from these powerful forces were about to unleash a major earthquake.
As with the rest of us who lived through that era, I was radically changed by it, and I’m going to present some of the deeper impressions that it made on me. But before I do, there are a few things I would like to point out.
First, during that time I was exposed to a combination of events and influences that changed the trajectory of my entire life, and ultimately, personal growth became my primary focus. So, I tend to view things from that particular perspective. Of course, there are many other ways of looking at what happened back then and mine is only one of them.
I will also include some profound events that happened to me which opened my eyes to a larger vision of what human intelligence can become, which inspired me to reach for higher ground. I continue to be a work in progress, but so is everyone else who is still alive. Regardless of your hopes and dreams, if you want to move forward, you always have to start from where you are. And as any great card player will tell you – the trick to the game is in learning how to play the hand you’re dealt.
Regarding the societal history of what happened, some of what I am about to discuss can be proven and some of it cannot. But presenting historical fact is not the purpose here. And besides, history isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. According to George Santayana, the renowned American philosopher and educator, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened…told by people who weren’t there.”
As with the content of all these podcasts, the information that follows will simply be presented for your consideration. My suggestion is that you just take it and see what it does for you.
This episode is going to focus on JFK. We’ll get to Dylan and marijuana a little later. For now, we want to look at one essential aspect of JFK’s presidency, particularly his emergence as a champion of world peace.
Let’s start weaving this tapestry of time on January 17, 1961, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his Farewell Speech to the country. Before he became president, Eisenhower was the quintessential military man. He had graduated West Point in 1915 and remained on active duty in the army for thirty-three consecutive years. A five-star general in WWII, he served as the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, directing the allies to victory in that grueling six-year tragedy that claimed the lives of 15 million soldiers and 38 million civilians.
So, it’s three days before he’s about to leave office, and the soldier/president is bidding farewell to the people of the republic that he had served for his entire life. And what does say to them?
Well, at one point, he issued them a stern, now-famous warning. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” he said. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”
If you wonder that he meant by all this, it can be summed up in one simple, but simply dreadful fact – warfare had become extremely profitable. Both the constant threat of war, as well as its execution, creates an enormous, constant, and ongoing cashflow, regularly generating massive profits.
This makes it inherently dangerous, because of an inherently dangerous aspect of our current mentality – when it comes to being right or being rich, a lot of us will choose to take the money, regardless of the consequences. Our world is rife with examples of the unenlightened rationales that we use to justify our misguided actions, which are incredibly short-sighted to say the least.
In his speech, Eisenhower was the first one to coin the term, the “Military Industrial Complex,” which delineated the network of dependencies and relationships that exist between the government, the military, and powerful defense contractors. With his decades of military experience, he warned that we must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. He said that it was the unwarranted influences by the complex that posed the potential risk, due to the disastrous rise of misplaced power that could come from it. In other words, policy could become driven by profit.
When it comes to gaining influence, nothing beats just plain buying it, which is a practice that human beings began perfecting almost as soon as soon as they created money.
In modern times, money spent on lobbying congress is a reliable barometer for tracking influence sought. In 2022, the defense industry spent over $125 million in lobbying and its affiliates contributed another $17.5 million to the reelection of certain members of congress. A total of $858 billion was spent on US defense that year.
Now this is a number we readily accept today. It continues year in and year out. But in 1961, it was unthinkable. It reminds me of what Deep Throat said to Woodward and Bernstein in “All the President’s Men” about solving the mystery of Watergate, when he told them, “Just follow the money.”
Three days after giving his farewell speech, Eisenhower, the oldest man ever elected president at age 70, passed the gavel to the youngest man ever elected – John F. Kennedy, at age 43. And in many deeply profound ways, the old was giving way to the new.
We’re going to jump ahead a little bit here. We’re going to move forward 646 days, from inauguration day, Jan. 21, 1961, to October 27, 1962, which is considered by some to be the most significant day in human history which most people have never heard of.
Of course, John F. Kennedy is one of the most famous figures in all American history and he has been the topic of over 40,000 books, so I’m quite sure you’ve heard of him. But I’m also just as sure that you’ve probably never heard of someone named Vasily Arkhipov. But these were two of the key players on that fateful day.
As you may have guessed, it was at the very height of the incredibly dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy had recently learned that Russia had installed a significant number of nuclear missiles in Cuba that were easily capable of inflicting severe damage on over half of the United States. The President had put in place a naval embargo, blocking all cargo into Cuba.
Ominous threats between the two countries had been escalating and hostilities were rapidly building. Then, earlier on that October day, Russia had shot down a US spy plane, killing the pilot.
In America, Kennedy’s military staff was calling for an immediate counter attack. Meanwhile, the Russian commanders were demanding that Khrushchev take significant military action as well. Castro even wired Khrushchev calling for him to launch a nuclear missile targeted at Florida. In the extremely volatile situation, things had clearly gone from bad to worse.
Meanwhile, four Russian submarines were secretly lurking in the waters near the blockade and unbeknownst to US intelligence, they were armed with nuclear torpedoes.
At one point, the battery died aboard one of the Russian submarines, the B-59, and it lost all communication with the outside world, including with its command center. One of the major US destroyers in the area, the Charles B. Cecil, suddenly detected the sub and began dropping mini depth charges into the water to force it to come to the surface and identify itself.
On top of all this, the sub had lost its air conditioning and was running low on oxygen. The crew had become extremely anxious and it was getting worse. Believing that the war between the US and Russia had already begun, the captain started to prepare to launch one of their nuclear torpedoes. He would make a pre-emptive strike and blow the US destroyer out of the water.
Fortunately, though, the Russian rules of engagement dictated that the decision to fire a nuclear weapon had to be unanimous among all three commanders of the ship. At 34 years old Vasily Arkhipov, the guy you never heard of, was second in command and he resolutely refused to endorse the action of launching the torpedo. Instead, he went against the captain, insisting that in a non-combative stance, the sub should rise to the surface and identify itself.
An intense argument ensued for quite a while, but Arkhipov stood his ground and in accordance with the Russian rules, he blocked the launch. Finally, they decided to bring the B-59 to the surface. The two ships signaled each other of peaceful intentions. The Cecil stood down and the situation ended without further incident. Over the next few days, with a round of intense back-channel diplomacy between Kennedy and Khruschev the entire crisis was finally resolved.
It may not sound like much now that sixty years of history have gone by, but many scholars consider that moment on October 27 to be the closest humanity has ever come to a full-scale nuclear war, with all the tragedy that could have ensued.
If Arkhipov had complied with the captain’s order and that Russian sub had sunk the American destroyer with a nuclear torpedo, all hell might have broken loose and we don’t know what might have happened. We do know that Russia and America had major nuclear arsenals pointed at each other that were ready to launch at a moment’s notice. And those weapons were about a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, which killed about 100,000 people. If things had gotten out of hand, which could have easily happened, it is quite possible that fifty million people could have been killed within an hour or so. More casualties that took place during the six years of World War Two, would have been caused in less than a day.
Kennedy had been deeply moved by the entire episode. He headed the US position hands on, making all the key decisions from beginning to end and he knew how close we had come to a major, human-caused catastrophe.
He may or may not have known that just one 34-year-old man, standing on his own, outside the chain of command, made a decision that saved millions of lives. But Kennedy was a renowned student of history and had earlier passed around a book to his staff called “The Guns of August,” which told the story of how World War I took place due to a series of reckless mistakes coupled with poor diplomacy, and he fully understood what could have happened. He knew what was in his hands and he knew what he had to do.
We’ll stop here for now, but sometime after this harrowing incident JFK began to transform into an active proponent for peace. As the tale continues in the next episode, we’ll get into some fascinating theories about JFK’s metamorphosis. And then we have Dylan, marijuana, LSD and the Beatles on the horizon. So, essentially, the story is just beginning…
As always, keep your eyes, mind, and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.
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As you may recall, I am currently preparing to release a comprehensive personal growth program called, “The Higher Mind Training.” Its purpose is to help people harmonize their intelligence, which will allow them to transform the prison of self-sabotage into the freedom of self-empowerment.
We will have programs designed to address specific needs, like smoking cessation, freedom from drug and alcohol abuse, and weight loss. We will also offer a general personal growth training, as well.
As I have also mentioned in some previous podcast episodes, as part of the preparation effort, I am reviewing a large portion of the research material I have collected over the years, including some of the journals that I have kept, and I am going to present some of it to you for your consideration.
Although the material may seem to cover a wide range of topics, it all revolves around one central theme, which is the fact that as human beings, we have a remarkable potential within our intelligence which remains largely untapped and if we choose to, we can connect with it. Even small improvements in this kind of self-knowledge can significantly transform our lives for the better.
At this point, I’m going to look back at certain dramatic events that led me to explore some of the deeper sides of life, ultimately leading me to become deeply committed to the process of personal growth. Like each one of us, my personal life has been set against the background of the society and culture I’ve lived in, and as it will become apparent, the times, they were a changin’.
To set the stage, I’d like to start out with a short chapter from my memoir, Wilt, Ike & Me. It takes place in March of 1965 and I am beginning here primarily due to the nature of the times. Back then, hardly any of us knew it, but we were on the verge of a massive cultural change that would eventually revolutionize the entire western world. And even though it may not be obvious, in many, the revolution goes on today..
In those days, Wilt Chamberlain had been staying with us in our home for a number of weeks and it was quite an adventure. But this isn’t so much about Wilt, as it is about my sister, Sybil, a college student who had become a bit of what they called at the time, a “beatnik.” So, let’s take a look at a day in the life…
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A lot of the times in the late afternoon, Wilt and I would end up hanging out in my sister’s room at the end of the hall, listening to music. Sybil had a nice record player and was never there. She was a sophomore now at Temple University and was out all the time.
Her room was in its own part of the upstairs. Wilt was in my room, and I was in the guest room right next to it. That was on one side of the house, along with the bathroom. Then there was a long hallway that went past a small sundeck on the roof, and Sybil’s room was at the far end of the hall. It was a universe unto itself, and the door to that universe was always closed.
One thing I learned early in life is that you never, under any circumstances, entered her room without knocking first, and then you had to wait for her permission to come in. This was a cardinal rule and we all obeyed it implicitly. Only our homemaker, Geneva had free rein to come and go as she pleased.
Sybil was what was called a beatnik in those days. My mother just called her a vilde chaya, which is a Yiddish term that doesn’t translate perfectly into English, but basically means a “wild Indian.” And that shoe really fit.
She was a lot like the weather in our part of the world—lots of warm, sunny days but some dark, stormy ones as well. And as her little brother, while I enjoyed basking in the sunshine when it was out, I always knew to get the hell out of the way whenever one of those storms blew through.
She was by no means a bad kid, adored her parents and was fiercely loyal to her family. But she had an untamable wild streak running through her. And no matter what was going on, she was always her own boss.
The first time I really saw it was during the 1960 presidential campaign. My father was for Nixon. He was tight with the Pennsylvania Republican party and had met both Eisenhower and Nixon. He had even unsuccessfully run for Congress in 1956.
On top of that, he was no fan of the Kennedys. In his view, Joseph Kennedy had been weak on Hitler and he didn’t trust him when it came to Jewish welfare. And in my father’s world, the apple never falls too far from the tree.
Sybil, on the other hand, fell madly in love with JFK. He was the first candidate who was a real media superstar, and my fifteen-year-old sister was crazy about him. She pasted about five hundred pictures of him on her wall in a massive collage. I think my father got nauseous every time he saw it and avoided ever going into her room. Even after the election, her JFK shrine endured for quite a while.
Now that she was in college, her taste in wall décor had veered off into some new directions. One of her girlfriends was a talented portrait painter, who later became a famous courtroom artist. She painted three large full-color paintings for Sybil, who displayed them prominently in her room.
Two were portraits of Sybil. In one, she was wearing an enormous black-feathered hat. It looked like her head was covered by a dark, foreboding raven. In the other, she was seated on a big, comfortable gold easy chair, with an opened book lying face-down on her lap. From the sour look on her face, she was either the most bored or the most depressed person in the world.
But she hung the masterpiece of her collection in the center of the back wall, and it really grabbed your attention when you walked in the room. In the rear of the large painting was a blindfolded naked woman hanging from a meat hook by her tied hands. A priest stood in the foreground, dressed in a black suit and a black shirt with a white priest’s collar. He was holding a Bible in his hands with a gold crucifix on top of it. And he was staring daggers at you.
Sybil added her own piece of art to the mix. She made a collage and put it right next to the painting. She covered a large piece of poster paper with cutout photos of every form of human suffering imaginable. It was unbelievably awful. And in the middle, she put a true-to-life depiction of Jesus on the cross.
She was obviously making a statement of some kind, but it probably would have gone over better in a dorm than in her room at home. My father couldn’t stand it.
I was sitting with him in the kitchen having ice cream one Thursday night, while my mother was still in New York doing her charity work. Something seemed to be bothering him. The whole time we ate, he had a weird look in his eye, like his mind was on a slow simmer. Suddenly it exploded into full boil.
“God damn it!” he said and smacked his hand down on the kitchen table. He stood up, went over to a drawer, rummaged through it and pulled out a medium-size carving knife. “God damn it!” he repeated and angrily stomped out of the kitchen toward the steps that led upstairs.
“What the hell is this?” I thought and went running after him. Knife in hand, he went up the steps, then down the hall to Sybil’s closed door. He burst it open without knocking and flicked on the lights. I had no idea what he was up to, but I was glad she wasn’t home.
He walked right over to her human suffering collage, and using the sharp point of the knife, started scraping off the Crucifixion scene. He attacked it like a maniac and kept going until he had gotten rid of every last bit of it. When he was finished, he stood there and stared at the poster for a moment. Then he turned around and looked at me. I had absolutely nothing to say, and neither did he.
Now, of course, symbols mean different things to different people, and whatever that image meant to him, he clearly didn’t want it in his daughter’s bedroom. But now it was gone, and everything seemed fine. We walked back to the kitchen together, sat down at the table, and finished our ice cream as though nothing had happened.
My mother was absolutely horrified when she got home later, and he told her what he’d done. Somewhat of an artist herself, she felt he had no right to invade Sybil’s room and inflict his will on her creative expression. She thought it was appalling.
When Sybil got home the next day and my mother sheepishly began to give her the details, my sister made a point of being outraged. But her biggest effort was to hide her deep relief.
When my mother said, “Sybil, Daddy went into your room last night,” her heart sank, and she got really scared. But when she heard what actually happened, she was so happy she almost burst out laughing, but kept a straight face.
She told me years later that she always kept an ounce of grass in the drawer of the night table next to her bed. She couldn’t have cared less about the collage, but if he had found the marijuana, it could have been a disaster. She would have really had to reach into her bag of tricks to wiggle her way out of that one. We both knew she could have done it—she was that good. But it would have been quite a challenge, even for her.
Now, this was still the early days, when marijuana had just started blowing in the wind, and not too many people were smoking it at the time.
When she first started, I could clearly smell a pungent, unfamiliar odor in the air. It definitely was not the same as the normal cigarette smoke that pervaded every other part of our house. When I asked her about it, she told me she had begun burning incense. It was a new thing she had found, a study aid that would clear her mind and help her concentrate. It made sense to me.
One day, during Wilt’s stay, she was home in her room with the door closed. Wilt and I were in my room, and I had to drive him somewhere. As we walked out into the hall, it reeked of that smell of hers. He immediately picked up on it and stopped on the landing before we went downstairs.
“What’s that?” he asked me, taking a couple sniffs of the air.
“Oh, Sybil’s into burning incense now. She does it all the time. It helps her study.”
“Really?” Wilt, sounding impressed. He looked at me like I was five years old. “So, you think that’s incense, huh?”
I didn’t say anything. What else could it be?
“OK,” he said with a chuckle. “Incense it is.”
But before he moved, he took one more sniff and nodded in appreciation. “It smells like some pretty good stuff to me,” he added, and we left.
* * *
Before we close this episode, I want to add one other element to the mix. Behind her closed door, my sister always had music playing and at one point, for some strange reason, she seemed to have gotten into this hillbilly singer who had a high pitched, twangy voice and played a guitar and harmonica.
It was such a weird sound that I figured it must have been some kind of comedy album. I mean, why else would anyone pay good money to listen to someone who sounded like that? It turned out that the hillbilly singer was some kid my brother’s age named Bob Dylan.
Astonishingly, within another few years, he would become a major hero of mine and I would know all his songs by heart. But that was still a few lifetimes away. Again, these were the very early stages of a major, unprecedented change of consciousness that was about to disrupt the entire world, but we’ll pick it up again in the next episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened and let’s get together in the next one.
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I’m going to ask you to try to stretch your mind and imagination a bit for this episode. A true story is going to be presented to you. It took place in India, sometime around 1910 and you may find the cultural differences to be a little unusual for you. But on a subtextual level, a lot of important information is going to be presented as well, and you may find that it takes you to some interesting places within your own intelligence. I know it did for me.
As I mentioned a few episodes earlier, as my interest in Personal Growth began to grow strongly towards the end of 1971, I became aware of certain writers and speakers that grew into significant sources of information for me, and many have remained so.
One of these was the renowned Indian Yogi, Parmahansa Yogananda, and my earliest introduction to him was in the memoir he had written which was called, “Autobiography of a Yogi.”
At the time, I was being exposed to an idea about God and religion that was new and somewhat revolutionary for me. Rather than being far away from us, the Divine Essence was actually very close. In fact, closer than our own breath. And you didn’t have to die to get to be with it. You could somehow could turn your attention within and experience it now, while you are alive. Yogananda’s writings were very much in line with this perspective.
Historically, he came to America in 1920 and became a powerful force in the west until his death in 1952. His towering legacy still lives on, but this story is from a much earlier time in his life, when he was a teenager, still living in India. And according to him, it marked a truly major turning point.
For thousands of years, that country has had a tradition of gurus, who are teachers and master practitioners. They usually have a set of disciples that they teach. At the time of this story, Yogananda had recently become a disciple of a master named Sri Yukteswar and had begun living in his ashram, practicing, and studying to become a yogi.
But as a teenager and young college student, he was getting restless and wanted to travel to the Himalaya mountains. He thought he would go there to sit in silence to achieve continuous divine communion. Although he felt his intense yearning was sincere at the time, he later called it “one of the unpredictable delusions which occasionally assail the devotee.”
His teacher discouraged the idea, saying that "Wisdom is better sought from a man of realization than from an inert mountain." But Yogananda decided to go anyway.
As he was preparing for his journey, he heard stories about someone known as the “sleepless saint” who was supposedly always awake in an ecstatic state of consciousness. The story was that he had spent decades alone in a cave, practicing meditation and had achieved some kind of enlightenment. Yogananda decided to travel to the village in the mountains where this man supposedly lived and try to contact him.
After a few days on the road, as he got nearer to the village, he came upon a shrine that many people in the area considered to be a holy place, like Lourdes. When he walked into the temple, he was surprised to see that it contained nothing but a large stone ball. Most pilgrims bowed before it, but Yogananda, believing he should bow only to God, just walked out without offering any reverence at all to the huge stone ball.
He finally got to the village and started asking where he might be able to find this holy man, whose name was Ram Gopal Babu. And here is where his nightmare of confusion began.
He began to be told a series of conflicting bits of information. He was told that no such person lived in the village. He was sent to another village several miles away. When he got there, he was told he had made the wrong turn. In another village he was told he had just missed the man.
Finally, night fell and he found a place to eat and sleep. The next day, his fruitless journey got even worse, filled with hour after hour of following wrong information, in the blistering hot sun. Toward the end of the day, feeling completely hopeless as he was standing at a crossroad wondering which way to go, the extreme heat made him feel like he was ready to pass out. Then, he noticed someone walking towards him at a casual and very leisurely pace.
In his autobiography, here is what Yogananda happened next -
“The stranger halted beside me. Short and slight, he was physically unimpressive save for an extraordinary pair of piercing dark eyes. "I was planning to leave the village, but your purpose was good, so I awaited you." He shook his finger in my astounded face. "Aren't you clever to think that, unannounced, you could pounce on me?”
In the presence of this master, I stood speechless. His next remark was abruptly put. "Tell me; where do you think God is?"
“Why, He is within me and everywhere." I doubtless looked as bewildered as I felt.
"All-pervading, eh?" The saint chuckled. "Then why, young sir, did you fail to bow before the Infinite in the stone symbol at the temple yesterday? Your pride caused you the punishment of being misdirected…and today, too, you have had a fairly uncomfortable time of it!"
I agreed wholeheartedly, wonder-struck that an omniscient eye hid within the unremarkable body before me. Healing strength emanated from the yogi; I was instantly refreshed in the scorching field.
"The devotee inclines to think his path to God is the only way," he said. "Yoga, through which divinity is found within, is doubtless the highest road…But discovering the Lord within, we soon perceive Him without. Holy shrines …are rightly venerated as nuclear centers of spiritual power."
The saint's censorious attitude vanished; his eyes became compassionately soft. He patted my shoulder.
"Young yogi, I see you are running away from your master. He has everything you need; you must return to him. Mountains cannot be your guru." Ram Gopal was repeating the same thought which Sri Yukteswar had expressed at our last meeting.
"Masters are under no cosmic compulsion to limit their residence." My companion glanced at me quizzically. "The Himalayas in India and Tibet have no monopoly on saints. What one does not trouble to find within will not be discovered by transporting the body hither and yon. As soon as the devotee is willing to go even to the ends of the earth for spiritual enlightenment, his guru appears near-by."
I silently agreed.
“Are you able to have a little room where you can close the door and be alone?"
"Yes." I reflected that this saint descended from the general to the particular with disconcerting speed.
"That is your cave." The yogi bestowed on me a gaze of illumination which I have never forgotten. "That is your sacred mountain. That is where you will find the kingdom of God."
His simple words instantaneously banished my lifelong obsession for the Himalayas.
"Young sir, your divine thirst is laudable. I feel great love for you." Ram Gopal took my hand and led me to a quaint hamlet. The adobe houses were covered with coconut leaves and adorned with rustic entrances.
The saint seated me on the umbrageous bamboo platform of his small cottage. After giving me sweetened lime juice and a piece of rock candy, he entered his patio and assumed the lotus posture. In about four hours I opened my meditative eyes and saw that the moonlit figure of the yogi was still motionless. As I was sternly reminding my stomach that man does not live by bread alone, Ram Gopal approached me.
"I see you are famished; food will be ready soon."
A fire was kindled under a clay oven on the patio; rice and dhal were quickly served on large banana leaves. My host courteously refused my aid in all cooking chores. "The guest is God," a Hindu proverb, has commanded devout observance from time immemorial.
Ram Gopal arranged some torn blankets on the floor for my bed, and seated himself on a straw mat. Overwhelmed by his spiritual magnetism, I ventured a request.
"Sir, why don't you grant me a samadhi ?" (Note: In Hindu yoga, samadhi is regarded as the final elevated state of consciousness, at which union with the divine is reached.)
"Dear one, I would be glad to convey the divine contact, but it is not my place to do so." The saint looked at me with half-closed eyes. "Your master will bestow that experience shortly. Your body is not tuned just yet. As a small lamp cannot withstand excessive electrical voltage, so your nerves are unready for the cosmic current. If I gave you the infinite ecstasy right now, you would burn as if every cell were on fire.
"You are asking illumination from me," the yogi continued musingly, "while I am wondering-inconsiderable as I am, and with the little meditation I have done-if I have succeeded in pleasing God, and what worth I may find in His eyes at the final reckoning."
"Sir, have you not been singleheartedly seeking God for a long time?"
"I have not done much. For twenty years I occupied a secret grotto, meditating eighteen hours a day. Then I moved to a more inaccessible cave and remained there for twenty-five years, entering the yoga union for twenty hours daily. I did not need sleep, for I was ever with God. My body was more rested in the complete calmness of super consciousness than it could be by the partial peace of the ordinary subconscious state.
"In super consciousness, the internal organs remain in a state of suspended animation, electrified by the cosmic energy. By such means I have found it unnecessary to sleep for years. The time will come when you too will dispense with sleep."
"My goodness, you have meditated for so long and yet are unsure of the Lord's favor!" I gazed at him in astonishment. "Then what about us poor mortals?"
"Well, don't you see, my dear boy, that God is Eternity Itself? To assume that one can fully know Him by forty-five years of meditation is rather a preposterous expectation. However, even a little meditation saves one from the dire fear of death and after-death states. Do not fix your spiritual ideal on a small mountain, but hitch it to the star of unqualified divine attainment. If you work hard, you will get there."
Enthralled by the prospect, I asked him for further enlightening words. He related a wondrous story of his first meeting with a renowned Hindu avatar.
Around midnight Ram Gopal fell into silence, and I lay down on my blankets. Closing my eyes, I saw flashes of lightning; the vast space within me was a chamber of molten light. I opened my eyes and observed the same dazzling radiance. The room became a part of that infinite vault which I beheld with interior vision.
"Why don't you go to sleep?"
"Sir, how can I sleep in the presence of lightning, blazing whether my eyes are shut or open?"
"You are blessed to have this experience; the spiritual radiations are not easily seen." The saint added a few words of affection.
At dawn Ram Gopal gave me rock candies and said I must depart. I felt such reluctance to bid him farewell that tears coursed down my cheeks.
"I will not let you go empty-handed." The yogi spoke tenderly. "I will do something for you."
He smiled and looked at me steadfastly. I stood rooted to the ground, peace rushing like a mighty flood through the gates of my eyes. I was instantaneously healed of a pain in my back, which had troubled me intermittently for years.
Renewed, bathed in a sea of luminous joy, I wept no more. After touching the saint's feet, I sauntered into the jungle, making my way through its tropical tangle until I reached the village with the holy temple.
There I made a second pilgrimage to the famous shrine, and prostrated myself fully before the altar. The round stone enlarged before my inner vision until it became the cosmical spheres, ring within ring, zone after zone, all dowered with divinity.”
And so ends this part of Yogananda’s remarkable story, which was clearly worlds away from our own. As I mentioned earlier, I came upon this in the very early stages of my interest in personal growth and a few parts of it really hit me. And these parts still impress me, but on a deeper level as I continue to age.
Here are a few of them for your consideration. First was the general state of consciousness of Ram Gopal. He knew all about Yogananda before they ever met. He knew that he was travelling to try to find him and he knew about Yogananda’s refusal to bow before the stone in the shrine.
Also, he had meditated alone in a cave for decades and seemed to be in a permanently exalted state. Yet, even in that state, he mentioned that when we are talking about the Divine Force, or God, we are talking about the infinite, and practicing meditation for several decades in one lifetime isn’t necessarily as big a deal as it may seem to us. And finally, he healed Yogananda of back pain that he had suffered from for most of his life.
All this made me look at the state of my awareness at that time. I was a standard, twenty-two year old American know it all, who thought he knew it all, but was starting to find out a thing or two about some of the illusions of this life. And I started wondering what the greater potential of our consciousness is? It suddenly seemed like there was more to life than learning how to master the skills of how much, how many, where and when. All centered around the stone cathedral of “I, Me, Mine.”
We don’t have the time to go into more detail about how this story affected me. I just wanted to present it to you for your own personal consideration, and I hope you found it interesting and helpful, as well as somewhat enlightening. Enough has been expressed for this episode As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened, and let’s get together in the next one.
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