Religion

“Purpose”:   What is it All About?

The cover of Purpose, “a contemporary musical for youth,” flaunts a 1960s vibe, from the big bubble letters that make up the title, to the dull yellows and bright red-orange colors that make it pop. Printed in Nashville in 1968, this musical score seems to fit right in with the hippie culture of 1968. That is, until you open it. The purpose of Purpose, the Preface Notes explain, is “To guide youth in discovering a meaningful life in Christ.” Purpose does anything but embrace the carefree, anti-establishment mentality that is so often associated with the era.  Here are the titles of some of the numbers: “What is it all About?”  ”Peace on Earth”;  ”Trouble Me, Lord;” “What Does It Mean to be a Christian?”  ”To Someone the Savior’s Love.”  And so on.   (By the way, Purpose the Christian musical is not to be confused with “Purpose,” one of the numbers from the famously profane “puppet musical,” Avenue Q.)

So what purpose does Purpose serve today? It reminds us that, while our memories of the year may be dominated by sex, drugs, draft evaders, and mainstream society drop-outs, there were many other sides to the 1968 American prism.  Although Evangelical Christians were no more representative of American culture as a whole than hippies or Monkees fans or segregationists, they help us understand how complex the events and reactions of 1968 were for Americans.  It’s also a useful reminder that the roots of the born-again Christian movement–so dominant and headline-grabbing in the 1970s–were firmly planted in the “hedonistic” 1960s.

I’m sure that Christian schools and church groups mounted productions of Purpose in 1968, but if they did, there are no remnants preserved on the Internet, that great attic of memory.  (One song, “Just As I Am,”  the last in the show’s lineup, seems to have outlasted the others, at least to judge by the number of covers by Christian groups and singers visible on YouTube.)

It’s hard to look at any 1968 musical without thinking of Hair, and Purpose contrasts especially well. Take their approaches to religion, for example. Purpose is an overtly religious score intended to be performed by church youth groups. With lyrics such as “For the Christian way must be walked every day,” the music emphasizes the importance of structured, institutional religion. Hair, on the other hand, relies on subtle references that emphasize spirituality outside the church. The song “Looking for My Donna” is a prime example of this approach. Even though their answers are different, both musicals are asking the same kind of questions. Purpose asks, “What shall I do with my life?” Hair implores, “Where is the something/where is the someone/that tells me why I live and die?”

Together, these musicals show how multitudinous the opinions and practices of Americans were in 1968 and yet how they were connected by similar threads of a search for meaning, relevance, and… purpose in their lives.

THANKS to 1968 Exhibit Intern Katie Bates

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The Teachings of Don Juan:  A Yaqui Way of Knowledge is a surprising artifact of 1968.

Surprising, since the extraordinary impact of this book really doesn’t come until its paperback version published (and reprinted endlessly) in the 1970s.  But here it is, in an extremely rare first edition, issued by the University of California Press in probably fewer than 1250 copies.  The original price was $5.95.  This particular example was recently offered by an Internet seller for nearly $3000.

Once upon a time– say, about 1971-72–”everybody” was reading Castaneda.  The Teachings of Don Juan, by then in a paperback edition with a semi-psychedelic cover, was on hundreds of thousands of college-room bookshelves.  (Full disclosure: I was not one of the “everybody.”  I’ve just read this seminal 1960s book for the first time.)  There were several sequels in the early 1970s, including  A Separate Reality (1971) and A Journey to Ixtlan (1972), and even an appearance by Castaneda on the cover of TIME in March 1973.  But the original book’s notoriety is all the more surprising since it began as a work of (allegedly) serious, unassailable–if hardly conventional– anthropological scholarship, presented here in a plain, decidedly un-groovy university press edition.

Peruvian-born Carlos Castaneda was a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles, and Don Juan was based on his dissertation research from the early 1960s on medicinal plants used by Indians of the Southwest United States and northern Mexico.  It is emphatically not dissertation-like in style or substance.  Within its first few lines, Castaneda is introduced to a Yaqui Indian, Don Juan Matus, who is alleged to be a powerful brujo, or shaman. Castaneda becomes apprenticed to him (not an easy passage) and is introduced to mind-altering organic hallucinogens such as peyote, jimson weed, and psilocybin mushrooms.  When Castaneda died in Los Angeles in 1998 (a death clouded in mystery and suspicion), the L.A. Times obituary writer called the book a “strange alchemy of anthropology, allegory, parapsychology, ethnography, Buddhism and perhaps great fiction,” a book that “made Don Juan a household name and Castaneda a cultural icon.”

One of the extraordindary things about this book was its instant and widespread critical reception.  How did a re-write of a Ph.D. dissertation (or maybe a master’s thesis; sources differ), published by a university press in a tiny edition, attract immediate, glowing reviews in the New York Times?  ”An extraordinary spiritual and psychological document,” wrote Charles Simmons in the Times on August 14, 1968:  ”Its style is so severe and yet easy, its narrative effects so expert, that if it had been published as a novel it would be, I think, destined for fame.”

The Teachings of Don Juan landed on fertile cultural territory in 1968, bringing together so many elements that now so clearly define the time:  a seeking for alternate pathways to spirituality; an openness to the teachings of “primitive” non-Western teachers or “gurus” (Don Juan is called a guru by more than one commentator); an eager, even grasping experimentation with mind-altering drugs; and a reverence for indigenous cultures, especially American Indians (and especially those of the Southwest).

Anthropology?  Fiction?  It  hardly seems to matter anymore, as it continues to maintain a firm grasp on its status as cultural icon.

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The guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and US colleges

Just about 42 years ago, this issue of LOOK magazine was hitting American mailboxes and newstands.  On the cover was one of the more unusual stories of our transformative year:  the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the impact of his “transcendental meditation” on the American college scene.

Beatles, Mia, and a Beach Boy in India

Actually, the Maharishi (only “Mahesh” is part of his given name; maharishi and yogi are honorifics) had been making international news since the 1950s, teaching his meditation techniques and spiritual beliefs on an incredible series of round-the-world tours, including the United States (his first tour here was in 1959) and cities on nearly every continent.  But it was only when the Beatles (along with Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence; singer/songwriter Donovan; and Beach Boy Mike Love) made a pilgrimage to India in early 1968 to study with the Maharishi that his fame exploded.  The Beatles, of course, were “more popular than Jesus,” in John Lennon’s famous line from 1966; and Mia Farrow had been an American tabloid fixture since her marriage to Frank Sinatra in 1966. (Her breakout movie, Rosemary’s Baby, wasn’t released until months after she returned from India.)  Suddenly, in early 1968, the beatific image and inscrutable pronouncements of the Maharishi seemed to be everywhere.

“The Non-Drug Turn-On Hits Campus”

Not surprisingly, the guru and his teachings had their greatest impact–in the United States, at least–on young people.  ”TM” followers were mostly white, college-educated baby boomers, rejecting the conventions (like traditional Western religions) of their parents’ generation and seeking distinct new identities and “heightened consciousness.”  The author of the article here in LOOK goes to a lecture by Jerry Jarvis, head of the Student International Meditation Society, the principal vehicle by which American college students connected with transcendental meditation.  (The preppy kids on the magazine cover are at Yale, but the event described here is at Berkeley.)

Something super-groovy

“The students had heard of the Maharishi . . . There wasn’t one who didn’t realize that he was the same jet-age guru who had guided the Beatles off the psychedelic drug scene by way of a new, nonchemical turn-on.  The motives of the Berkeley crowd were typical: some came to hear about what had gotten the Beatles so excited; some had a vague interest in all things Eastern and alien; many were acid heads or pot devotees in search of ‘mind-expanding’ ecstasy without the ill-effects of psychedelics (the chief of which being jail).  But more than anything else, the majority of the crowd knew individual meditators who were noticeably Better People as a result, and who must therefore be on to something super-groovy.”

The article concludes by quoting a “Los Angeles meditator”:  ”The student’s life is so tense today.  You go to school and get involved in the peace movement and the Sexual Freedom League and everything, and, gee, by that time you’re too uptight to have to think about studying too!  We’re really fortunate in this generation to have the Maharishi.”

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1968: THE END IS NEAR

The opening this coming weekend of the world-ending apocalypse movie 2012 makes me wonder–what did Apocalypse look like in 1968?  There were many people–”many” may be a gross underestimate–in 1968 who thought that the year was full of evidence that the End Was Near.  I ran across this advertisement for . . .  for what?  On its surface, it’s an ad for The Plain Truth magazine, and a book, The Wonderful World Tomorrow, which was also the name of the radio show featuring evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong.

Born again– in 1968?

“Garner Ted”:  That great combination of names– so redolent of all radio evangelists, of Southern good-ole-boys–has stuck with me all these years, though I didn’t really remember who he was until I started this research.  (Unlikely that I would have remembered him from his appearances on Hee-Haw, the country-music knockoff of Laugh-In.)  Garner Ted’s brand of evangelism calls to mind the “Born Again” movement, and evangelists Jerry Falwell, Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker– in other words, something more associated with the 1970s, rather than the Sixties. But–here he is, Garner Ted,  in full cry in 1968, in a full-page, full-color ad in LIFE magazine, of all places, not something marginal and weird.  And he and his ministry (at the moment in partnership with his father, the even better-known Herbert W. Armstrong, a partnership that would go off the rails in just a few years) are seizing on the day’s headlines to offer proof positive of the coming of the end times. Here are the opening salvos of the ad:

“It was never like this before”

“All of a sudden what’s happened? It was never like this before.

“Unsafe to walk on streets–in city or in town!  Your house may be broken into if you’re away! Crime rampant, even in residence areas!

“Student revolt in 20 countries–violence on campuses.  Disheveled hippies lolling about aimlessly.

“Unhappy marriages–increasing divorce– juvenile delinquency!  WHY this sudden breaking down of family life?

“Racial strife, mass demonstrations, riots, looting, VIOLENCE!  And threat of nuclear war!”

. . . “Many scientists are frightened!  They and even military leaders are now using such phrases such as ‘Armageddon’–and ‘the end of the world.’  Humanity’s BIG problem, now, is SURVIVAL!”

Here’s a subject that’s ripe for investigation:  the roots of 1970s charismatic Christianity, “televangelism,” and the “born-again” movement in the Cold-War anxieties and social turmoil of the 1960s, especially the upheavals that came in 1968.   “Covering 1968″ would be happy to hear any thoughts about this– the sooner the bettter.  Time is running out.

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