E-Book Overview
Some deep alternative current has begun flowing out of the spiritual adventures and identity struggles of recent generations. Of course, we didn't create the conditions or questions of this new age; we got caught in them. The ground shifted, the old gods departed, the economic and political utopias crumbled, and the traditional answers were washed away. We didn't leave home; home left us. How did a nice Jewish boy from Nebraska become a Buddhist in California? Join Wes "Scoop" Nisker as he takes us on a hilarious, wild ride from West to East and back again in his quest for true self and enlight-enment. Combining the best elements of memoir and social commentary, Nisker uses his own story to illuminate the Baby Boomers' roots of spiritual hunger in postwar America. His journey begins in middle America (Nebraska to be exact) in the middle of the twentieth century, travels through the heyday of the Beats and the Hippies, the birth of the modern environmental movement, and winds up in the current epi-center of Buddhism in the West -- California. Full of colorful and immediately recognizable figures of art, religion, and popular culture -- from Alfred E. Newman to Allen Ginsberg -- The Big Bang, the Buddha, and the Baby Boom is a guided tour of both the outer and inner move-ments that have culminated in the growing culture of Western Buddhism -- a lasting, vivid picture of how the Baby Boom generation came to be identified with spiritual seeking, how they went about the search, what they have found and created, and what their true legacy is.
E-Book Content
The big bang, the buddha, and the baby boom The Spiritual Experiments of My Generation
WES NISKER
This book is dedicated to my daughter, Rose, and to all of her generation. Question authority. Question reality. And may all manner of things be well with you.
“The whole great form of our era will have to go. And nothing will really send it down but the new shoots of life springing up and slowly bursting the foundations. And one can do nothing but fight tooth and nail to defend the new shoots of life from being crushed out, and let them grow. We can’t make life. We can but fight for the life that grows in us.” D. H. Lawrence, note to “The Crown”
Contents
iii
Epigraph
Introduction: The Time of Your Life vii 1
Starting Out Confused
2
Generation
3
A Brief History of Our Self
4
The College of Your Choice 25
5
The Down Beat
6
Flower Children
7
The Whole World is Listening 52
8
Outward Mobility 71
9
Inward Mobility 93
10
The New Age 102
11
Scientific Mystics
12
Green Consciousness 134
13
The Last News Show 151
14
Spiritual Politics 167
15
Coming Down
1
11 17
35 43
119
184
Epilogue: Carrying On 195
About the Author Praise Cover Copyright About the Publisher
Introduction: The Time of Your Life
Mine is not the “greatest generation.” The people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II have laid claim to that title, leaving us with an impossible act to follow. Our struggles have been more personal than those of the greatest generation, and our enemies more elusive. We faced the great depression of physical and spiritual homelessness, and armies of psychological demons. We were born into an age in which the old stories are too old to have any meaning and the new ones still too new. We grew up in a society in which God was being doubted, truth itself was being disproved, and salvation kept changing its brand name. We lived through so many revolutions—social, political, sexual, and scient