An Authentic Life 1.1 for pdf - Universalist Radha-Krishnaism

tion. The next morning, we asked for directions to
North Beach and were told, “North Beach is an old,
dead scene. You’re not beatniks, you’re hippies. You
should go to Haight Ashbury.” We followed that advice
and rented a cheap room at the corner of Filmore
and Oak in a black district near Haight Ashbury.
There was indeed a mutation of beats into hippies,
and the Haight was just beginning to become the
center of a new subculture. Frisco seemed clean and
beautiful. I was amazed I could walk down wooded
paths in Golden Gate Park and not be mugged. The
Haight scene was real low key and mellow. The long
hairs were friendly, and I noticed a big difference in
consciousness between people I associated with here
and in New York. People here seemed less violent,
friendlier, and generally more consciously evolved.
I got a job making sandwiches downtown at
Goldberg’s Delicatessen for the holiday season. I attended
the first dance at the Filmore Auditorium
sponsored by Bill Graham. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson
Airplane were on the bill. They were local
bands that played regularly along with a number of
other greats. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights
Bookstore in North Beach was a major attraction for
me. I went there to browse and buy books by poets
such as Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure and Gary
Snyder as well as books on Eastern spirituality, which
various beat writers had introduced me to.
At the Blue Unicorn coffee house, on New
Year’s Eve, 1965, I met Lydia. I just turned nineteen,
and she was a thirty-one year old bohemian, divorcee.
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