Allen Cohen

San Francisco Oracle, Human-Be-IN, History of the Haight-Ashbury

Allen Cohen (e-mail : sforacle@prodigy.net)

Allen Cohen was a young poet from New York, drawn to the Haight-Ashbury by the prevailing bohemian spirit.  One night, he dreamed of a psychedelic “rainbow-colored” newspaper which would be seen throughout the world.  With the support and funding of interested locals, the first issue of “The Oracle” appeared on the streets of the Haight-Ashbury in September, 1966.  With its stunning split-fountain printing and psychedelic artwork, The Oracle was one of the most beautiful newspapers ever printed.  At its peak, over 100,000 copies a month were printed, and true to Allen’s dream, it was indeed seen around the world.

Biography

Allen Cohen was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. He studied philosophy and literature at Brooklyn College and set out on his search for the holy grail leading him to San Francisco in 1963 where he became part of the new American Renaissance in the Haight Ashbury. In 1966 he founded and edited the San Francisco Oracle, the hippie psychedelic, rainbow hued, underground newspaper, and helped produce the Love Pageant Rally and the Human-Be-In.
He has written two groundbreaking books of Poetry – Childbirth is Ecstasy and the Reagan Poems. In 1990 he produced a compilation of the Oracles as The San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition. In 2002 he edited an anthology of poems on 9/11,An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind. He teaches in public  schools in Oakland And Berkeley and is working on a political book, 25 Ways to Save America Before The Corporations the Fundamentalists and The Militias Take Over Completely.

The San Francisco Oracle.

	A New Look at the Summer of Love by Allen Cohen Yes, it is 35 years ago since San Francisco's biggest concern was how many of America's youth, now known as baby boomers, would descend upon the Haight Ashbury in search of the holy grail of sex, drugs and rock and roll. In the spring of '67 one of the members of the Board of Supervisors considering whether to allow the expected hoards to sleep in Golden Gate Park said, "Would you let thousands of whores waiting on the other side of the Bay Bridge into San Francisco." Of course, in the Haight Ashbury we referred to this holy grail as free love, expanded consciousness and the ecstatic experience. We looked upon that summer as the beginning of a children's crusade that would save America and the world from the ravages of war, and the inner anger that brings it forth, and materialism. We had already identified our lives with the world as a political and social entity, and the planet as a unified environment, an earth household. Love, we believed, would replace fear and small communal groups would replace the patriarchal family and mass alienation. There was two aspects to the experience of the 60s: the resistance to the war, and the psychedelic experience, personified as political activists and hippies. For the most part these two vectors overlapped in the same individuals, so that many of those who actively resisted the Vietnam war had used LSD and smoked marijuana. As a society we have tried to understand the sixties mostly as political resistance to the war, but have mostly ignored and denied the changes in values and culture brought about by psychedelic experiences. It is difficult to estimate how many people used LSD between 1965 and 1975 when the war finally ended. One chemist, who wasn't as productive as some, told me he produced and sold seven million doses. My off the cuff estimate would be that from 10 to 30 million people took LSD on the average of six times. "Tripping" was common in every area of society from the wealthy and politically powerful to the arts, sciences and media. LSD was trendy, exotic, ecstatic, messianic and dangerous. It promised psychological healing and spiritual transcendence and often delivered. It should be acknowledged that it could also cause pain ("bad trips") and psychotic breaks, and even suicides, and in the case of the Manson Family, it was an accomplice to murder. There was an aura of living dangerously on a psychological frontier that was part of its mystique. But given the amount of its use, I would say it was the one of our least destructive national obsessions. Why did so many people take this dangerous voyage? What have been its effects? To understand this we have to reconsider the Haight Ashbury, the Hippies and the Summer of Love. The predominant feeling among the Hippies from about 1965 through the summer of '67 was that they were agents and witnesses of a dawning of a new age. An age in which the warrior spirit, that had vaulted western man to the domination and potential destruction of creation, would be dissolved in the spiritual transcendence of the saint. Ghandi and Martin Luther King were our heroes and we had turned to the rich heritage of Asian mysticism and metaphysics for our inspiration and our practice. We leaped across oceans and through time to pre-Christian mythologies like the American Indian, the Egyptian and the occult and pagan philosophies of Europe. We studied with Buddhists and Indian gurus, native shamans, witches and yogis. We turned from Aristotelian and Christian dualism to the four pronged logic of Vedanta philosophy. We studied the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, Alan Watt's books on Zen Buddhism, Black Elk’s visions and Hermann Hesse's novels, especially Siddhartha. We wouldn't leave the house without consulting the I Ching, or our Tarot cards or our astrological charts. Were we being naive or superstitious? No, I think this was the most important and long lasting aspect of the 60s despite the backlash of the 80s.and 90s. It was the beginning of a renaissance in thought and culture similar to the Renaissance that brought Greek and Roman images and ideas back to Europe in the middle ages. Ideas that eventually led to the end of the domination of the Catholic Church, the rise of the nation state, the rebirth of democracy and the development of science. We were becoming world citizens. Peace and love weren't just slogans but states of mind and experiences that we were living and bearing witness to. Living in harmony with the earth was an ideal that we felt and perceived as real experience. We were bringing forth a second Renaissance that would change human culture. In the face of the Cold War and nuclear weapons these changes in philosophical and spiritual orientation would slowly displace the Warrior Spirit and bring us to a new stage of evolution. The transformation of the inner warrior has had its outer effect in the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev said to an American reporter, "I'm going to do a terrible thing to you. I'm going to take your enemy from you." The Summer of Love was the peak of the Haight Ashbury experience. Over 100,000 youth came to the Haight. Hoards of reporters, movie makers, FBI agents, undercover police, drug addicts, provocateurs, Mafioso and about 100,000 more tourists to watch them all followed in their wake. It was chaotic and wonderful and "heavy" as we used to say, and the experience was shared and spread throughout the world. The police and Tac Squad raided the street every weekend gradually driving most of the originators to all parts of the world to plant the seeds of change. The process of cultural liberation began in the seventies with the conscious drive for Women's' Liberation and Gay Liberation and the Black Liberation movement, so brutally feared and attacked by the CIA and FBI. Yes, political reaction set in, but that didn't stop the new ideas from spreading. We have seen the rise of psychological insight, alternative medicine, and spiritual values and practices in the New Age Movement. The tremendous interest in ecology and whole planet thinking began then, and the continuing call to the young to rebellion and awakening, through the liberating effect of rock and roll music in all its permutations emanated from the Sixties. The beginnings of the computer revolution also has its roots firmly in the sixties Many of the founders of the desktop computer had their minds altered by the use of psychedelic drugs. Their revolt against the elitism of the mainframe paralleled the “distrust authority” attitude of the hippies and the anti-war movement. Their minds had been moved by the “language of light.” In the eighties the new ideas and values spread to Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and even China. The deeper meanings of Peace, Love and Community spread through the universality of the music, and the ideas of the pilgrims that had experienced or been influenced by the cauldron of the Sixties. In Prague, Chekoslovakia during the peaceful revolution there, John Lennon's "Imagine" was sung by 200,000 people as they sung the Communist dictatorship down. Esalen Institute had been doing exchanges and training in the former Soviet Union since the Seventies. In Tianamen Square the Chinese students played Beatles' and Rolling Stones' music over loud speakers. Most recently the students marching in the streets of Belgrade against the Milosevic dictatorship were giving flowers to the soldiers standing in their path, as we had done at the Pentagon in 1967. As we approach the millennium, the wave of peace, this eternal yearning of the soul, continues to sweep over the world. Age old rivalries and hatreds and injustices are dissolving. Sometimes the pain heightens before the medicine of mediation and peace can be applied. But things definitely are a-changin' between the Palestinians and Jews, the Muslims and Croats and Serbs, the many colored people of South Africa, and even the British and Irish. As we had predicted, the Sixties generation has entered the White House but with so many forces pulling at its skirts that too much has been compromised to the attacks and resistance of the right wing and reaction has set in like a fog bank. In the rottenness and corruption of the political system and its control by corporate interests and Christian fundamentalism there seems to be a return to the 19th century. But it can only be a brief reflex reaction to the tremendous forces of change that are beginning to transform the world. A new generation of youth are trance dancing in floating laser illuminated warehouse dances called Raves in San Francisco and Acid House and Acid Jazz in England. There is a mood of change that again threatens to overturn the reactionary and puritanical grip on American culture perpetrated by corporate power and religious fundamentalism. The gap between the rich and the poor increases and Corporate arrogance loots the middle class. But the Era of Compassion born in the Sixties, and repressed in the Eighties and crucified in the 90s may be ready to be reborn into the forefront of American culture. Open the door the future is coming through! copyright 1995 Allen Cohen References:
	E-mail to Allen: sforacle@prodigy.net   Regent-press at www.regentpress.com
	http://www.woodstocknation.org/sforacle.htm
	http://www.woodstocknation.org/zorro.htm
	http://www.woodstocknation.org/allen1995.htm
	http://www.sixties.com/html/cohen.html

"ZORRO"
from
HAT POEMS

by
Allen Cohen

Book can be ordered from Allen Cohen at 
sforacle@prodigy.net

Oct 2003: An Eye For an Eye makes the whole world blind poets on 9/11

Regent-press at www.regentpress.com
Book can be ordered from Allen Cohen at 
sforacle@prodigy.net

The Fallen Tower - September 11, 2001