Baba Ram Dass & The Spiritual Community Guide

Many years ago (and I mean MANY years ago) I chanced across an already ancient looking book from 1973 called The Spiritual Community Guide. It is basically a mish mash of spirit funk and US West coast guffaw connected with cults, gurus, yoga, weird diets, psychedelic drugs, mushrooms and herbs; music, nudity, theosophy and the New Age of Aquarius, with a gazetteer at the end of health food shops, astrology courses, and adverts about drinking your own piss. OK, I’m lying about that last bit, but it wouldn’t be out of place. The funny thing is, I don’t know how it came into my life, but it has exerted a rather strange mystical force since I first opened its tattered pages and started reading articles and philosophies from people whose names I couldn’t at first even pronounce. It was one of my very first genuine connections with the way out hippy shit that was later to blossom and flower into the zany Taj Mahal of unorthodoxy that constitutes, well, me. Owing to its obscurity it must have been a small scale publication, perhaps retailed through health food stores and alternative establishments, which makes it all the more odd that it should enter my small sphere.  Anyway, I will drop in occasional Blogs from the Spiritual Community Guide and see what you think. This one is one of the more normal ones from Baba Ram Dass, who had only just authored the best seller Be Here Now, in 1971.

By South Utsire