Trying to Groove with the GURU.

• Author: Shumsky, Susan
• Position: LITERARY SCENE - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

THE PERFECT cliche of hippiedom--that was me in 1966. A "flower child," I fully embraced the counterculture lifestyle. The hippie movement was our new religion, where we supposedly lived in peaceful communes, loved everyone, handed out flowers to strangers, experimented with all things forbidden, "did our own thing" (meaning whatever, whenever), and generally created an alternate universe in a parallel dimension.

We all were broken in some way and, like Humpty Dumpty, sought to put our shattered pieces back together. We bucked "the establishment" that betrayed us. We "stuck it to the man" that churned out nine-to-five robots living plastic lives in cookie-cutter suburbs. We abhorred violence, politics, and useless wars in overseas jungles. What we sought was world peace.

In 1967, kids came from all over the U.S. to join us. About 100,000 gathered in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. Dressed in outrageous costumes, they arrived in VW Bugs and buses painted with psychedelic neon designs. They crashed on the street, in hippie pads, or in Golden Gate Park. Everyone was talking love and peace and getting high. Many were runaways or tourists, but they found togetherness and Utopia, even for just one "Summer of Love."

Harvard Psilocybin Project leaders Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) acted as our official tour guides to altered states through LSD, but my personal goal was not about drugs. I was seeking nirvana--whatever I imagined that to be. Leary and Alpert introduced us to the Tibetan Book of the Dead in The Psychedelic Experience. I tried to "turn on, tune in," and achieve what Leary, Alpert, and others claimed to get with psychedelics.

LSD led me to the edge of stark raving madness but, during my third, final, and only successful acid trip, I lay in the grass on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in Big Sur, grinning blissfully for four hours--completely unconscious. Where was my nirvana? What was the point of tripping when I was out cold?

After this, my main focus was scouring bookstores on Telegraph Avenue for every text I could find about Buddhism, Hinduism, and spiritual enlightenment. Since the University of California, Berkeley, had an Asian Studies department, I sought books that helped me understand my psychedelic experiences.

Alan Watts' books said we needed a "meditation guide." In 1966, good luck finding "meditation" or anything remotely similar in the Yellow Pages telephone directory. So, I tried doing it myself, lying on my bed (clearly, I did not even know...