8 The Grateful Dead’s Spiritual Context

Abstract

The Grateful Dead's Spiritual Context the acid tests and afterwardsThe first time that music and lsd interacted in a way that really came to life for us as a band was one day when we went out and got extremely high . . .and we went that night to Lovin' Spoonful. . . .It was just truly fantastic.We began to see that vision of a truly fantastic thing.It became clear to us that working in bars was not going to be right for us to be able to expand into this new idea.And about that time the Acid Test [sic] was just starting to happen.-jerry garcia (1970) define the revival of paganism and witchcraft in the 1970s.The so-called Jesus Freaks or Jesus People are another example of a case in which 1960s drug-related spiritual exploration served as the seed for clearly organized religious expression. 2 The Grateful Dead's religious practice also arose out of a broader context of spiritual beliefs and practices.While there was a bewildering variety of modes of spiritual expression and traditions at play in the (specifically San Francisco) hippie scene, there do seem to have been some core princi ples that relate especially strongly to the Grateful Dead's own work, particularly the emphasis on the experience of merging telepathically together with others as a fundamental spiritual aspiration.Stephen Gaskin was an enormously influential figure in the Haight-Ashbury spiritual scene who worked with hundreds of hippies every week in his Monday Night Class. 3 From his perspective, the pursuit of telepathic union with others was the core of all au then tic spirituality and religion. 4 Gaskin did not start out with the intention of becoming a spiritual leader.Indeed, he claims not to have been seriously involved in religion in his earlier life: "I . . .had no religious upbringing and was on a completely materialistic trip." 5 As Gaskin tells it, his spirituality was something that he developed for practical reasons, with the goal of making certain sorts of highly valued experiences more pos si ble.Specifically, his spirituality was designed to support and interpret the experiences of telepathy that he felt he'd had while under the influence of entheogens.For him, moral action and spiritual development are necessary in order to permit telepathy and other miracles to happen.He learned to see religion not as arbitrary beliefs, but as an eminently practical guide to life: "I got into religion in the early days of the hip thing in San Francisco, and I had experiences that convinced me that religion was real and that what I thought was an empty morality structure was a description of how the universe works." 6 These "experiences" included, most prominently, telepathy, for which he felt that religion (properly understood) provides the basic princi ples that allows it to operate.While Gaskin and his group were pursuing telepathic abilities, "we said, there's prob ably some kind of a best system that you could run this kind of a thing on that works good for every body. . . .We started putting this thing together, and then it started getting recognizable as the pieces fell in.And we saw that it looked just like Chris tian ity, and it looked just like Buddhism, and it looked just like every religion, because that's what a religion is." 7 The link between religious ethics and telepathy is logical because, from Gaskin's point of view, what he and his fellow hippies were doing is what all