In these memoirs, Roger Siegel depicts a particular trajectory of the 1960's experience that is distinctively American, counter-cultural, and radical. Like his fellow travelers Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and George Harrison (with whom he had an intense, decades long friendship), Roger is the original Beat turned Hippie turned Divinity. In these memoirs, we read what is now becoming the perennial tale of the Jewish kid "gone east." A boundary crosser from the start, drawn to the alternative and non-conformist, everywhere and everyone has something to teach him. Roger tells vivid, eloquent stories about tutoring in Harlem in 1962 (?), where, "I found more communication, community, honest friends, and life than anywhere else." He plunges us into the epicenter of the Black Power movement, then the Civil Rights struggle in Alabama.
As a young Bohemian on the lower east side, Roger provides close-up, sensual views of jazz-clubs, poetry readings, art shows, and early rock'n'roll gigs. A magnet for the legendary, by the time he is twenty-five, he has had passing and/or prolonged acquaintance with such countercultural icons as Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Emmett Grogan, Howard Zinn, Peter Orlovsky, Sonny Liston, George Harrison, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, The Beatles and The Grateful Dead.
In 1963, Inspired by On the Road, he takes off on a psychedelic experience in Mexico, practicing photography, crossing boundaries and geographies only to discover the limitations of drugs. He is a man of action, Scorpionic, even at nineteen, willing to put his life on the line for his inclusive politics and rejection of inequality or discrimination of any kind. A radical, he is involved in the "relentless pursuit of more effective forms of action."
He is also an artist. "All the arts" he writes, "speak to changing the world to a better place." Always learning, searching, seeking for meaning, his mind is hungry for the Real. The heart of these memoirs traces Roger's thirst for meaning, his first of many encounters with Prabhupad, his relentless pursuit of experience beyond the pleasure of the senses. When he writes of his encounter with Prabhupad: "big blocks of past garbage floated up and away forever, as if my subconscious self was doing a Spring cleaning," he knows of what he speaks. Be prepared to laugh, though. Roger writes with what I call hilarious understatement, such as when Chickie (whom he later weans off Heroin) flags Roger's father down a busy New York street to tell him how much he loves his son. There is also the marvelous relationship between the writer and his dog, Que Tal that he threads throughout the Mexico and New York portions of his narrative. And there are tender and true love affairs; his wife Yamuna and other equally interesting women accompany him on his journey.
The second half of the book involves Roger's initiation into Krishna consciousness by Prabhupada, his work establishing the first US ISKON center in New York, the second in San Francisco, his times developing an ISKON Presence in London (where he recorded the Radha Krishna Temple "Hare Krishna Mantra" with the Beatles), to India, then back again -all between the years 1963 and 1968-the height of the counter-cultural revolution in London and the United States.
Roger is living testimony to the best parts of the 1960's: the hopeful idealism, the re-valuation of the natural, the transcendental, and the innocent. We eagerly await the second installment his memoir detailing his life and times, 1968 and beyond.
Hindu (1765)
Philosophers (2327)
Aesthetics (317)
Comparative (66)
Dictionary (12)
Ethics (44)
Language (350)
Logic (80)
Mimamsa (58)
Nyaya (134)
Psychology (497)
Samkhya (60)
Shaivism (66)
Shankaracharya (233)
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