Episode 103 - Turn Off Your Mind

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.