Montreal, 1969 Q & A - 19 (Conclusion)

Student: : Do you consider marijuana or tripping a good alternative to the pain of life and the terror of death?

AG: Do I  consider marijuana or tripping a good alternative to pain of life, the fear or terror of death? – No, actually, marijuana…  If anything, it will augment, or increase, or amplify, the anxiety, the realization, (or at least that's what I've found).  
The problem is that.. death is not terror, to be feared - Pain, physical pain, bodily pain, might be scary, you know - or.. painful (but…)  
  
I think, probably, the result of some experiences with psychedelics, (with acid, or peyote, or mescaline, or yage), would be to go beyond that attachment to the body, an attachment to the self, so that it would relieve some of the anxiety and fear of the self disappearing. It would involve a realization of  the mortal frailty and meat (sheer) nature of the body, occasionally.. Also, a realization of the phantom..spectral goldenness of the body, too.

(You realize), I don't mean it as a… It’s not an escape, for the most part, from the awareness of death -  "Tripping", as we call it, is not an escape at all (Actually, it's a meditation on the subject, and it's used - and chanted in mantras to Shiva – ganja or cannabis or marijuana, or grass, is used, in India, in the burning grounds - as a meditation (supplement), or path, or exercise, or… Yogis sit in circles and smoke, and chant mantra, and observe burning of  bodies in the burning ghat in Babughat in Calcutta (Kolkata), or Manikarnika ghat in Benares (Varanasi).  It’s an aid for contemplation of the fix that we're in, and leads, in a sense, to escape, in that, through contemplation, one realizes that there is nothing to be attached to. I mean, what have I got to lose if I die, Allen Ginsberg!  What a relief! What a burden down!………….   

Student:  Do you think that, ultimately,  drugs (and meat), are...

AG: Do I think ultimately drugs..?

Student: ... are an impediment.. from ego-dom to samadhi  ?

AG: From ego-dom to samadhi?  - I  don’t know, whether drugs are an impediment.  

No, obviously.. My theory.. I think they may be a reminder of a world existing. I think drugs can be catalysts to awakening of consciousness, nowadays [1989], in this particular yuga, or era, or scientific age, drugs can be used as a yoga. They're obviously abused for kicks-yoga. It's obvious that people (will) (fall for them) (particularly with speed, which is, I think, is like a big Nazi Mafia-type drag), and.. but, probably.. most followers of (Swami Bhakvedanta), his followers, ISKON (the International Society of Krishna Consciousness), most of the devotees, in all the cities, the (Krishna) devotees)… are people who’ve passed through the Acid Tests, who have gone through that, and so are (totally) looking for some more natural, non-synthetic, way to maintain a high consciousness (offered an approach  through the yellow-robed call, he says “No, I don’t want to come down”).  But I found that most of the Swamis, and also the disciples of Swami Satchidananda in New York, and also the disciples of Ramakrishna, who originally studied endocrinology and was a yoga teacher in New York City, most of them are people who are turned on to acid, and have then gone to yoga to try and nail down that consciousness and go through some kind of a permanent habit-change by means of yoga.  

Or Gary Snyder, who had a long long period of heavy Zen discipline study in Japan, began, I think, like myself, with natural hallucinatory experiences. Also, went on to peyote and American Indian peyote sitting and ritual, and then went into..had both the experiences, Wordsworth-ian-natural transcendental experience and also psychedelic experience. Snyder went on to Japan study zazen, or sitting meditation, in order to accomplish his body, or metabolize himself as a (pure) body  So that was my formula, so to speak, Use it as a catalyst.

                                                                    [Gary Snyder]

And there’s formulas by Baba Ram Dass who's a… which I quoted in a poem - (Baba Ram Das is Richard Alpert, formerly, a friend of (Timothy) Leary’s at Harvard) - who said, after he became converted into Hinduism in India last year... bhakti, devotional Hinduism which involves no meat-eating, and chastity - he had been a very heavy queen before! – wearing (the) robes, singing Hare Krishna, or singing Krishna, or Rama - he said, that his teacher in India [Baba Hari Dass] had said that when asked what acid was, (finally), he said,  "Acid is the Christ of the Kali Yuga", ["LSD is like Christ in America which is awakening the young folk in Kali Yuga.."], acid is the mechanical saviour of the age of mechanical destruction, that is to say, for those who are so sunk in cheap preservation in matter that they will not accept grace and beauty from the immaterial world, or the spiritual world, for those who will not accept the spiritual resolution of the conflict, acid has been produced as a totally imperialistic sacrament to transform subjective consciousness for those that are so attached to matter, that the only way they can transform themselves is by taking a pill. 

                                                                  [Baba Ram Dass]

Student: But, ultimately, I think, it may be possible to stop taking drugs..

AG: It may be possible to stop taking drugs. Richard Alpert stopped taking drugs,

but, it's not a question of stop or start, in terms of...  in relation to, religious spiritual development - and, I think it served as a catalyst for awakening many people in the West
to American-Indian, or Oriental guru, or the Japanese, or a Sufi, or even Hassidic Hebrew, ritual, for elevating consciousness. So here you have the place. It's like the formal Western catalytic yoga.

Student:  (But it's true, tho', that if one can meditate (in that space), establish a sincere psychedelic self-education, that you come away with a positive ….)

AG [to audience]: ( ... she's saying that if you meditate on the matter of (what is) the highest form  (the) heaven of psychedelics, you realize -  [to Student] - what? - that consciousness can go on by itself?, apparently)

Student:  (That consciousness can go to those things…)

AG: Yeah well, like I said, Gary Snyder had a natural illuminated experience, and so did I, and (William) Wordsworth did, and (William) Blake did, and most everybody does (and if there's no ego, who cares anyway?)  It's just that our civilization is so tense and repressed in that area of divine sensitivity that, we're so surrounded by cheap information, that a catalyst has come along and may be useful.

& then tape ends

[Audio quality is poor on this final tape, so there may be some minor errors in transcription here but... 

Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-three minutes in (in the fifth segment), and concluding at the end of the tape]

Montreal, 1969 Q & A - 17 - Krishna and The Void - Metaphysical Speculation

 

Q: Do you think that the void could be incomplete?

AG: I don’t know if the void could be, the philosophy might be incomplete, but I don’t think that the void is incomplete.

Q; But if you say that the void is the ultimate truth then how can you..

AG: I ain’t saying the void is the ultimate truth. I’m just saying that’s one of the…  You know what I would say? - All ideas as to the nature of the self , as well as to the existence of the self, as well as all ideas as to the existence of a supreme self, as well as all ideas as to the non-existence of the self, as well as all ideas as to the non-existence of the supreme self, are equally arbitrary, being only ideas. An experience of void, or an experience of supreme self are nameless experiences that really can’t be argued about one way or the other, or discussed rationally even. I’ve had experience of a supreme person and I’ve had a contradictory experience of the void . I’m not even in a position to know whether the experiences were even contradictory finally. It’s not emotionally satisfying entirely to say that we are empty phantoms entirely and there’s no.. that even Krishna is empty, which is what the Buddhists would say. But, on the other hand, I'm afraid of attachment, even to Krishna, as being an attachment also. Not that I’m that detached from everything. But if we’re talking philosophy...

Q: Previously you said you’d like to be detatched from the material. So an attachment to Krishna would automatically mean a detatchment from material...?

AG: Yeah, but then, except, you would have to be attached to the whole material structure of the Krishna consciousness too.  See, the Buddhists, in a way, are hipper because they say if  Buddha gets in your way on the road to Enlightenment, cut him down!   - or, they say “the Buddha is a stick of shit”. It’s an old Zen koan  [Editorial note - traditionally attributed to 9th Century Buddhist master, Linji]

[Shaktyavesa Avataras Sesa Naga, Lord Brahma, Narada, Christ, Bhaktisiddhanta, Srila Prabhupada,
Bhaktivinoda, Mohammed, Kumaras (clockwise), Buddha (center)]

 Q: What do you think about the prediction in the Shaktyavesa camp, that Krishna will reincarnate as Buddha...?

AG: Well, yeah, okay.. but there is an element of insistent provincialism in that, there’s a humorlessness to that - (and a humor to it, but there's also an element of insistency). It's like, "What if the Buddhists say that Krishna was a bodhisattva?, you know, one of the forms of Buddha? There would be a kind of insistency that one would find humorless.

Q : But  the Srimad Bhagvatam was written five thousand years ago, the Buddha only appeared twenty-six hundred. One has the..

AG: Srimad Bhagvatam was written when?

Q: Five thousand years ago

AG: The Bhagvad Gita or Srimad Bhagvatam

Q: Srimad Bhagvatam was spoken after Bhagavad Gita.

AG: Yeah. and when was Bhagavad Gita written?

Q: Five thousand… Approximately the same time but  Srimad Bhagvatam was...

AG: Yeah...well..I'm not enough of a scholar to know if that’s rationally correct or not, but, I mean, it’s..  See, I remember all the arguments I used to have with all the Christians - “The Bible’s the Word of God!” – I  just don’t believe it. I mean, I don’t even understand it in those terms. That’s so literalistic as to be…
 I mean, I was  (mock shrug) “Yeah? Is it? - Is it really? 
- And what does “five thousand years old” mean?

                                           [Cave paintings from El Castillo Cave, Spain, c. 37,ooo ,BCE.] 

                                      [Horses from the Hillaire Chamber, Chauvet Cave, France -  c.30,000 BCE.]
Post-Magdalenian cave-paintings have gods from the year forty thousand BC. I mean, they got pictures of Gods way back from forty thousand BC if you want an authority, if you want a shastra, go back to the caves in the Pyrenees, because, if age is going to be the criteria like that. Besides which, the Buddhists.. the Buddhist theology also has the idea of Adi-Buddha and the Buddha of the dinosaur-era too, which goes back before, too.  

AG: What time is it?
Q: (It's time, just before four (o’clock))

AG: Is there anything special we have to deal with? –or anything that we haven’t… Is there anything sensitive that we haven’t done? 

Q: Would you like to come for a Shabbat, Sunday?

AG: I’ll be leaving Sunday morning for Baltimore. I’ll try and get by the temple before I leave though.

Q: I was wondering if you could you pass on Gary Snyder’s address?

AG: Well, if you write him care of City Lights, he’ll get letters.

Q: And it’s the 24^th of November (in New York)?

AG: Yeah..except I think they’ve sold out already.  It’s (at) the Y, yeah..

Student: Once again - Mr Ginsberg will be appearing at the Union Ballroom (Montreal) tomorrow at eight o’clock ..thanks very much...

[Audio for the above can be heard here,  beginning at approximately twenty-three-and-a-half minutes in (fifth segment) and concluding at approximately twenty-nine minutes in] 

Allen Ginsberg, Montreal, 1969 (Q & A - 14) (Gary Snyder)

Q:  [in 1969] -  How close is your relationship with Gary Snyder.. (from a poetical point of view …. I don't mean sexual…)

AG: We’re old friends.  We never made it!   I was always wanting to make it with him and he was always, like, too tight-assed! - until he went through his Zen training, and in his Zen training he had to (put a mountain in a teacup), he also had to become a woman at one point. In other words, the different koans made him go through odd roles, and they was finally a point where he had to become, like, he had to become my lover in his own imagination (or the equivalent in Zen training, he had to become a courtesan or something like that)– but, at that point, we didn’t have to make it, because we’d already made it in the mind.

Q: (What's he up to now?)

AG: He’s working on the land, organizing ecology action groups. He’ll be in  ..He’s coming in next month and he and I are going to give a reading together at the YMHA in New York, which will be the first reading we’ve…

Q: Where? (When

AG: YMHA in New York, November 24 [1969]  That's like a poetry series that.. an odd or ancient poetry series that none of us have ever read at. Gary’s never been invited and I've never been invited before this year. So we’re going to put on a ritual poetry reading together with Buddhist chants and Hare Krishna and poetry. And then we’re going to go off and do some walking in the woods, around Thanksgiving, and figure what to do, because we have some… he has some land up in the Sierras and I have land bordering it and we’re going to try to figure out what we’re going to do with it, whether to keep it as a park or whether to build a structure on it.   We’ve been.. like.. kept close contact and worked together. I learned a lot from him, year after year, because he’s so.. so disciplined, so smart! His book Earth House Hold .. do you know that? It’s just this year out and it’s about one of the best humane suggestions for, like, return to Mother Nature and, like, invention of our own rituals.

Q: He gets sort of prophetic in that book. You know, like in his 1955 journal as a look-out, he mentions something about having a wife and baby and living by the sea, and then, you know he just did this (1967) Banyan ashram thing…  [Editorial note - Buzoko (The Tribe) at Suwanosejima - Nanao Sakaki, Gary Snyder & others - an experiment in communal living]

AG: Yeah – He’s got a lot of energy. I guess he’s one of the strongest.. of the older poets of the ‘Fifties, one of the strongest people. I mean he’s gotten harder and sharper as time has gone on. And more tender (which is what’s nice)

[Audience-member departs - AG: Goodnight sir - What was his name?  - (Charlie Richmond)  - Goodnight Mr Richmond - (wherever you are)]

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately one-and-a-half minutes in (fifth segment) and concluding at approximately four-and-quarter minutes in]

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 263

    

[The Last Gathering of Beats Poets and Artists, City Lights Books, North Beach, San Francisco, 1965" - Photographed by Larry Keenan - (front row: Robert LaVigne, Shigeyoshi Murao, Larry Fagin, Leyland Meyezove (lying down), Lew Welch, Peter Orlovsky, second row: David Meltzer, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Daniel Langton, Steve (friend of Allen), Richard Brautigan, Gary Goodrow, Nemi Frost, back row: 

Stella Levy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti] 

New York, Paris, Manchester, England -  Looking forward this summer to three big Beat extravaganzas. Taking them in order - June 3rd to 8th at the Howl Happening Space in New York City  (and in related spaces) - "The Beats and Beyond - A Gathering", a five-day celebration, coinciding with what would have been Allen's 90th birthday, organized by the irrepressible Bob Holman, featuring a veritable who's-who - Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, John Giorno, Ed Sanders, Margaret Randall, Hettie Jones, David Henderson, Steve Cannon - "and more" ("and beyond"). More details to be announced soon. Watch this space.

We've already announced it, but it's worth announcing again, from the 22nd of June to the 3rd of October in Paris at the Pompidou Center (Centre Pompidou) - "Beat Generation", a multi-media presentation, mapping "both the shifting geographical focus of the movement and its ever-shifting contours". Among the highlights, photos by Allen, William Burroughs, Robert Frank, Fred W McDarrah, John Cohen, and, of course, Harold Chapman's iconic shots of the Beat Hotel; a focus on the African-American Beat poets (Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman); a substantial focus on the West Coast muse (art work by Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, George Herms, Jay Defeo, Jess..), and plenty, plenty more 

"Focused on a precise historical period and deliberately making use of "low tech" media and means of reproduction (vinyl discs on turntables, carousel slide-projectors, 16 mm film projectors)", the curators write,  "this exhibition illustrates how profoundly the Beat Generation - in its expressive freedom, its breaking down of boundaries between disciplines and cultures, its "poor" ecstatic and contemplative aesthetic, and also its violence - influenced the development of today's countercultures, revealing it as their origin and casting light on on-going problematics."  

"The (Beat) theme will be reflected in all the Center's activities, with a rich program of events devised in collaboration with the Bibliotheque Public d'Information and Ircam - readings, concerts, discussions, film-screenings, a colloquium, a young people's programme at Studio 13/16, etc"

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with essays by the curators, Philippe-Alain Michaud and Jean-Jacques Lebel, and by Barry Miles, and others (and interviews, "the majority hitherto unpublished", with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Shigeyoshi Murao, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Brion Gysin, Allen, and William Burroughs) 

(If you're in Paris this summer, the Pompidou isn't the only place where you'll see work by Allen. Check out (don't miss) the Velvet Underground show (already opened and up until August 21)) 

The third - and final - "Beat extravaganza" is Manchester, England - the 5th Annual Conference of the European Beat Studies Network, taking place between the 27th and the 29th of June - "Talks, Films, Musical Performances" - The two key foci there, (but, as usual, there'll be a laudable range), will be "Music" and "Science". 

Did you know that Donovan helped Allen write those classic signs in the Bob Dylan Subterranean Homesick Blues video? - We didn't.
(Dylan and Bob Neuwirth, apparently, pitched in a goodly amount too) 

Did you know that "hippie", etymologically, comes from opium-smoking? - We didn't know that either.
For the latter we're indebted to a conversation between Allen and the founder of the modern Hare Krishna movement, A.C.Bhaktivedenta Swami Prabhupada, and an old copy of their magazine, Back To Godhead - see here
Swami Prabhupada: : Allen, what is this "hippie"?
AG: The word "hip" started in China, smoked opium lying on their hips [he demonstrates (the position)]. Opium and its derivatives then spread to the West, and were looked down upon by the people in power, who were afraid of the effects. As a result, people created their own culture…language signs, symbols… 

Allen Ginsberg Montreal, 1969 (Q & A - 13) - (The (Alternative) American Tradition)

                                [William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)]

Q:  (Describe for me some of your  important influences?)  

AG: William Carlos Williams as a poet - partly because of his charm and his human eyes. He had a..he had a kindly sympathy for younger poets and an openness that came from partly from being, like, just a simple, straight, doctor man, and a desire to write a poetry that was completely his own diction, and his own rhythms, and his own speech, rather than a poetry which is a reflection of another culture or an archaic or high-falutin’ sound. So he, like, turned me on to listening to my own talk. And hearing rhythms in that –  So “like, turned me on to listening to my own talk. And hearing rhythms in that" – and then, constructing poems which were projections of the.. or were formations of rhythms of the way we would talk if we were just talkin’. So Williams’ ear, I think, was important. He turned me on to listening to talk

Q: Is Paul McCartney dead?

AG: I don’t know, I didn’t go to his funeral. What is the symbolism of all that? I don’t understand that. 

Q: Neither do I

AG: It sounds to me like some kind of ..really negative gimmick, sort of, like a waste of energy, sort of, except it  - like there are beautiful things that can be examined in the texts of The Beatles and this sounds like a mockery of the examination of texts, you know, the teeny-boppers really should be reading between the lines, but it sounds like some cynical disc jockey has decided to sour everybody on it by, you know, like, creating a flying saucer within the lyrics and then..

Q: It's a nice game though, people are really enjoying it

AG: Okay (next thing) you know, it’s, like “game”

Q:  Looking for clues, man, because clues can be found in everything...

AG: Yeah.

Q: I’d like to know specifically in what way Walt Whitman  influenced  you. I mean, I sense a deep brotherhood in  ”A Supermarket in California”…..

AG: Well, I started reading Whitman heavily after I wrote "Howl", actually, and then I read through all of Whitman and that sort of re-enforced feelings I had. Specifically, well, first of all, the almost Hebraic long line thing, the breath, the breath of someone talking, instead of someone inching  out a poem, like someone actually babbling forth whatever was on the heart. so the line that came from the heart and went out is in Whitman. The second…

Q:  (I was thinking,  Is there a relationship between the long line and the breath (expansion)?

AG: Yeah. There’s I think a relationship, yeah.  Do you know the… Well.. If you hear Vedic chanting, it’s like it's.. or Hebraic chanting, it’s.. it’s a form of yoga, actually  - and brings poetry back to yoga, that long line, (whereas) you take a deep breath to pronounce a long line – but, it’s not just a line, it’s like his actual feelings because Whitman, sexually, was a very interesting, open, polymorphous perverse mammal, who was acknowledging tendernesses in areas that were forbidden at the time and are sill to a great extent [1968] forbidden to men. The basic thing, say, starting off as a homosexual, or someone with homoerotic inclinations, and probably being afraid of them, (I don’t think he made out very much actually. We don’t know - tho' I did meet someone who slept with.. wait wait…the grandson of President Chester A Arthur, Gavin Arthur living in San Francisco, slept with an English cleric named Edward Carpenter, who was the tutor to Queen Victoria’s children, I believe, or tutor to Prince Albert or something like that, who had gone to the United States and visited Whitman and made it with Whitman. So Gavin Arthur then made it with Neal Cassady, the hero of On The Road, so the transmission was complete)..  So..  Beginning with that, let us say that, at the vulgarist level, but Whitman was also acknowledging, or willing to acknowledge, on top of that, was that tenderness between men, open acknowledged frank tenderness between men, was the absolute necessary basis for a democratic society, because unless..   The rule was if the relation between (the) men citizens was “competitive rivalry”, (as it was pronounced to be by Hedley Donovan, the head of Time-Life Inc. – Quote “The American tradition is competition and rivalry”- Unquote) – If that’s so, well then you’ve got the kind of America that you’ve got now. If Whitman’s vision of interpersonal relationships between men comes true, which he says is the actual latent desire among men for a “comradely  tenderness", then a different kind of democracy energes, and a different kind of polis emerges, (a) different kind of man energes, a long-haired tender man, who’s not afraid of his homosexual component, whose not afraid of tenderness (doesn’t have to act it out but he’s not afraid of the blush of affection, doesn’t have to be afraid of his own unconscious), where the American, the Time magazine American of competition and rivalry has constantly to be fighting, fighting his own unconscious. So, finally, the Time magazine American is, finally, you know, (having a predatory relation with his chicks (sic) too - because they’re just more conquests rather than tender persons used..  

["Kausani, India February 1962; with Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder & his wife poet Joanne Kyger we made pilgrimage to Buddhist sacred sites, here visiting Lama Anigarika Govinda who lived on nearby ridge. Snyder & Joanne were visiting from Kyoto, Peter & I had come from Tangier". Photograph & caption by Allen Ginsberg © The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

Q: I also wanted to know how enlightening your trip to India was (when you went with (Gary) Snyder and Joanne Kyger)? 

AG: Well, (it) got me singing, started me singing, (19)61, (19)62. I learned a lot there. I learnt the Hare Krishna mantra there in India, and.. In fact, I started singing the Hare Krishna mantra in (19)63 in Vancouver. I think the first hip kirtan took place in )19)63 as part of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver Poetry Conference. After the first night we all got together (and George Bowering was there) and all began chanting Hare Krishna 

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty-seven-and-a-half minutes in (segment four) to the end of segment four and concluding at approximately one-and-a-quarter minutes in into segment five]

Allen Ginsberg (Montreal, 1969 (Q & A - 12) (Sex and Marriage and Kali Yuga)

                      [The Sexual Freedom League, Stanford, 1969 - Photograph by Larry Keenan]

Q: If somebody gave you the power to create a new sexual cult, what kind of cult would you create?

AG: I’d create one about me, so I could get laid… I haven’t been making out.. I haven’t been making out in about a year now! I’m getting old and tired and bored, you know! – I don’t know.. The other thing is… One thing I’ve been thinking is – it may be that all along the whole Catholic authoritarian political Western censorship on sex was literally to keep people interested, to keep people excited. Remember the old conservative argument, you know, that hip Catholics used to give, or that Conservatives used to give, that if you took off all the bars on sexual imagery and everybody could see anything they want or do anything they want then sex would no longer be interesting, that… Remember that argument, sophisticated argument? – It was true, I think – that the function of the suppression and ban was really to keep it, keep people excited and keep people frustrated and perturbed and with sort of half hard-ons so they didn’t spend their time thinking about sex all the time. With the new revelation, like, with the new open-ness that’s come about, in movies, books, even in personal conduct, I think people will become less attached to sex and I think biologically that’s really important right now, because, like, the more orgasms and the more reproduction we have, well the more orgasms leading to reproduction we have, the more dangerous the planetary situation is. So it might be that actually there’ll be a complete opening up of all sexual imagery, a complete experience of all varieties of sexual conduct and then like a relaxation of grasp, of sexual grasping. 




















People will suddenly turn around and face each other and realize there’s all this human meat walking around on the planet, it’s over-populated already, it’s all the same person to begin with, there’s too many of them, there’s too many of us, like the lemmings, you know, it’s time to begin looking inward a little bit and finding out like who this Big Soul is that populates the planet, rather than trying to reproduce more and more of them (as if we couldn’t get enough ever!)  Remember, it was not very long ago that it was considered “Be fruitful and multiply”, but also Chambers of Commerce considered it was a groovy thing if towns grew, You know they weren’t satisfied to have a nice little town with… They had to have.. The real-estate dealers, the banks, the local boosters, the Chambers of Commerce types who stood to make money if there were an over-population problem, if there were a squeeze, began drumming up industry and trade and, you know, were proud of the fact that they were having more and more people around. And now it’s become a curse. So, in other words, the new sexual revelation, in other words, the new body-openness may wind up leaving people relaxed about it and less..less horny, less hard-up, less..hung in their imagination. So, it may have been all along that all the Popes were sex-fiends! you know- keeping people in – keeping people in, locked in this meat-box, sort of   

Q: So where does marriage go? – the concept? the same way?

AG: Well, I don’t know. Already..it’s changed. Like, the Western marriage already was a weird marriage, as everybody anthropologically comments – and that the younger people seem to be tending toward group marriages or communal marriages ,at least in early adolescence and early teens and twenties, partly to try out a variety of sexual roles but also partly to (sort of) avoid the..that reproductive responsibility that the old army-vetetran marriage used to bring about, like, back from the war and knock out six children.

According to (Paul and Anne) Ehrlich, (Ehrlich, a biologist who wrote a book called The Population Bomb (1968)), the planet is doubly populated. There are twice as many people on the planet as the planet can comfortably support without people freaking out and beginning to murder each other and eat each other up. According to the.. some Vishnavite theory, we’re (1968) at the beginning of the age of destruction (Kali Yuga) and we have another…

Q: Four hundred and twenty thousand years to go.

AG: Four hundred and twenty thousand years to go. We’re already what? five thousand years into it?

Q: Five.. 

AG: Five?

Q: Five thousand..    

AG:Yes but then – but how many from the advent of Krishna himself?

Q: Five thousand.

AG: So it’s about five thousand and the era of the chanting of Hare Krishna mantra as a magic prayer to save, to grasp to, will last how long? do you know” 

Q:  At five thousand, peak and then the..

AG: Then it will continue, and I believe that people get sunk into materialism thereafter, and fewer and fewer know the name of Krishna, till maybe, I don’t know, another (twenty? thousands years, there’ll be nothing but reptiles crawling, or reptile-humans crawling, all over each other, forgotten Krishna’s name, eating..eating their own children!

Q:  The devotees will...

AG: Huh?

Q; And the devotees will be living underground……  
Q2: (and)  all the food (sources) will dry up, and we'll be just like a pig with the skin off)

AG: Yeah, and finally, at the end of it, so, (a), four-hundred-plus thousand-year cycle, a kalki  will have to come, and everybody’ll be so evil that they'll have to destroy it (in) order to start up another era of delight and get rid of all that evil. At least that’s the Hindu myth of it (probably not too different from Christian myth) 

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty-one-and-a-quarter minutes in (fourth segment) and concluding at approximately fifty-seven-and-a-half minutes in]