From Palo Alto 1962-66, and Dropping out in earnest

Q6 Spring 1964-65, Apr-Jun 1965
POLS 153 Polit Soc Thry, 5, B
ENGL 25 Shakespeare, 4, F
PHIL 194 Probs Chinese, 4, I (GPA 1.1)

It’s amazing to me now, but I was still a Stanford student going to classes after the adventure at the Oakland Induction Center. I went to the Shakespeare class for the first meeting, if only to see the young professor who was rumored to be involved with Carrie at Radcliffe, leading to her dropping out and transferring to Stanford. I decided that I was not about to embark on another attempt to get into Shakespeare. I didn’t even make the minimal effort to withdraw, so I failed the class.

I never went to see what the Chinese Philosophy course was, but I did withdraw (after the deadline) so I got an Incomplete. But somehow I was drawn into a course called “Theoretical Foundations of Political Sociology”, taught by Charles Drekmeir.

Drekmeir was charismatic. Some of his core students became the first generation of Stanford radicals. We read Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and several other theorists. While I was taking LSD and playing drums in my first rock band, I was doing all the reading, working hard, and earning a B in his course.

On campus I was talking with classmates about finding my way into philosophy without getting involved in symbolic logic and linguistic philosophy, which dominated the department and seemed a dead end to me. A friend told me he lived in an off-campus boarding house run by a dropped out philosophy grad student named John Ketchum, who was also averse to the direction of academic philosophy. They were currently doing a close reading of Edmund Husserl’s Ideas : General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Since I was basically homeless and it seemed to fit my intellectual needs, I visited one evening to check it out.

I loved the ambiance.  It was a dignified Palo Alto academic mansion, with lots of warm dark wood. Dinners were eaten together in a large family dining room, with great curry dishes from the full-time cook. But they were already half way through Husserl, which made it virtually impossible for me to engage in the core activity.

I don’t remember living there very long but I do remember two things. The first is that after hitchhiking from Big Sur to Palo Alto after my first LSD trip, I was looking in the house library for something, anything, that would give me some context for what I had just experienced. Nothing seemed even remotely helpful until one book resounded like a great bell. It was The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch translated and with commentary by Phillip Yampolsky. This was an early precursor of my  transition from psychedelics to zen meditation as core spiritual practice.

The other thing I remember from the short time I lived at that house is having my drums picked up from the garage to take to Homer Lane to audition with the Vipers. So these two things happened in a brief period during Spring Quarter 1965, after I went to try to enlist.

The first of these was LSD at Esalen.