Browse Topics
Counterculture
A Practical Faith
An Interview With Swami Kriyananda
At age fifteen, Ananda cooperative village is a thriving northern California community with more than 150 full-time residents — quite a feat considering that the average life expectancy of such ventures is less than 30 days. While its founder, Swami Kriyananda, credits much of Ananda’s success to the blessing of his guru, Paramahansa Yogananda — around whose vision of a “self-sustaining world brotherhood community” Ananda is built — his own strong leadership and practical know-how have been important guiding factors.
October 1983Picturing The Earth
An Interview With Stewart Brand
Ivan Illich has said he’s realized that computers are deeply new. Flying was not that new, telephones were not that new, industrialization was not that new, cars were not that new. But computers are really new, so we have no immunity to their virulence. Here I am coining money on their virulence.
July 1983Reluctant Resister
I had finally reached, within the secret recesses and labyrinths of this jail, the silent center and perfect still point of human suffering. Behind those thick steel doors, entombed in concrete, curled in a tight fetal position on a cold metal bed, lies the suffering body of Christ.
July 1983The Depths Of A Clown
An Interview With Wavy Gravy
I got spotted by a plainclothes cop, who called the Secret Service and the FBI. He started patting me down and felt this bulge in my pocket. He said, “Is that a gun?” and took it out and these teeth started clicking on his hand. I said, “Quiet, our leader is speaking,” and he gave me back the teeth and said, “Get out of here, you’re too weird to arrest.”
May 1983Looking Back
Tuli Kupferberg On The Not-So-Bygone Sixties
In the Thirties a lot of artists were radicalized, the Village was radicalized. The streams were always together, and the Sixties seemed to be a real fruition of this period. It seemed as if it was going into the mainstream. The mistake, of course, was that it was just a youth movement, and it made no contact with anything past student life. And when the main student issue, which was the war, dissolved it was seen to be organizationally and theoretically a weak movement, because it was not able to link up with the rest of the country, the working class, the middle class, and with the older age groups.
December 1982Changing Things
An Interview With David Spangler
We are completely and wholly unique and in a very special one-on-one relationship with the divine. If I can recognize that in my life, there may still be things I want to do, changes I want to make, growth I want to achieve, but I can do so companioned by this spirit of playful and compassionate lovingness. If I can find ways of extending that to others as God has offered it to me, then I’ve found a real gift.
October 1982Hitchhiking And Other Tales Of The Road
The shade of a lightpole, the glittering goose, Marc Chagal
January 1982An Interview With Medicine Story
In the tribal way there is a concern not only with the family and the tribe, but also about a continuum that began with the ancestors, with maintaining a way that has been passed down, a good way, a sacred way, and passing it on to the unborn generations. This is the only major world viewpoint that has such a heavy reliance upon the unborn generations. There is a tradition always to plan for seven generations ahead.
September 1981Excerpts From The Incompleat Folksinger
I guess in modern life you have to plan. But there’s such a thing as planning too much. There’s such a thing as planning too early. Here’s what jazz musicians can teach the politicians of the world: we must plan for improvisation.
May 1981New Age Politics: Healing Self And Society
Social action that is not based on a firm sense of self can only be based on guilt or rage — and guilt or rage do not allow us to see clearly; they render us, in fact, extremely susceptible to manipulation by demagogues.
April 1981
