I lived the early months of 1973 in Berkeley, CA as a kept man. A kindly lady named Ethel Needler let me stay rent-free in a small apartment, on the the top floor of her home, that she had made for renting to students. Her middle-aged son lived with her. She and her deceased husband owned The Manila Hotel when Jean and Douglas MacArthur lived there.
I had enough money to purchase, for a few months, wheat and honey to mix with water and cook as pancakes. That was my diet, exclusively, during those months, except for meals Mrs. Needler cooked for her son and occasionally invited me to share.
However, this was arguably the most productive and inarguably the second great pivotal moment of my career. Mrs. Needler lived near Telegraph Ave. and the UC campus, so I made assiduous use of the libraries and bookstores crowded thereabouts. One could enter them all in those days: GTU's numerous, UC's several, and one bookstore in particular, on famed (and for some notorious) Telegraph Ave., who carried Swami's books. There I could read those and other books without layout out of spondulicks. It was glorious. Everyone tried to help. Everything then was hard copy or microfiche.
I made a special inquiry into the writings of Paracelsus, aka Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hoenheim. My high school science teacher enjoyed regaling us with that worthy's full name. One of the GTU libraries was well-stocked in this regard.
These records of those days are by way of being a mixture of elaborated study notes with answers to self-assigned examination questions. In other words, records of inquiry presented as expository, exclamatory, and exhortatory expostulations.
The crisis impinging was, in one facet, discovering who one is and what one should be doing, in another facet, what to do and why in a civil society exhibiting zest for incivility, in another facet, discovering what is happening with the churches, and why, and what a clergman should be doing in consequence thereof, and in the top facet, what does an orthodox Christian clergyman, responsible for the Faith and its tradition, think and do in standing of decisive experience for Sathya Sai Baba?
All these forces, justly considered epistemological and spiritual crises of the first order, bore together upon me during those early months of 1973, and I am pleased to say that I bore them, integrated them, reconciled them, united them, and surfed them, so to speak, successfully during those months of intense and exhilarating labor.
A man is not whole, not mature until he has fought tooth and nail to the death against God and prevailed.
These three essays are of a piece with Ritual. That pamphlet I composed for a conference hosted by The Wenner-Gren Foundation and convened by Margaret Mead and her daughter
Mary Catherine Bateson. I ended up not attending the conference and returning the monies advanced. All, these three plus Ritual, belong to and together comprise my total literary output from those glorious months in Berkeley, CA in 1973. Interestingly, and to my mind miraculously, these scans are made from original typescript, which have passed through nearly fifty years now.
An acquaintance and his friend surprised me by visit just as my last bag of wheat was nearly empty. They gifted me $50 and took me for breakfast at . . . an International House of Pancakes! After breakfast I asked them to accompany me to my favorite bookstore on Telegraph Ave., where I spent the $50 for a copy of Will Grohmann's Wassily Kandinsky, which I had been reading at the store and yearned to study at home.
Later, they invited me to join them in San Diego, which I did in the late spring of 1973. There, they took me one evening for pizza at Rocco's Pizzeria in Pacific Beach, the only vegetarian pizzeria in San Diego at that time. Mary, the owner, waited on us. Two years and considerable drama later she became my wife and then mother of the children Swami gifted us to rear.
