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Karma Cola published in 1979 is a series of anecdotes written by Gita Mehta. It speaks of her encounters with Western travelers who come to feel “one with nature” in the heartland of spirituality, India. The accounts of the travelers take you through a rollercoaster of emotions and in the end, you are left feeling entertained, confused, and very informed about the lifestyles and mindsets of the time. Through her recollection, the author reminds us of how followers have interpreted spiritual teachings and in turn encourages some of us to revisit our own spirituality.
The book starts with the author painting a picture of the 1970s when from a global perspective, spirituality is at its height in India. The author writes of the World Conference on the Future of Mankind. Global leaders, diplomats, authors, journalists, scientists, film stars, and yogis of prominent standing come together to talk about the best chance we’ve got at this thing called life. The who’s who of the world discusses topics like the significance of moral action. An event so outdated and perhaps out of style that I couldn’t find evidence of it on Google.
This event would take place in Vigyan Bhavan, a significant convention center in India. Later in the day, the convention center would host the Conference of the Pacific Area Travel Association, to discuss airfares, costs, and comforts. A few miles away Swami Muktananda (pictured left), founder of Siddha Yoga, holds a seminar. Today, Siddha Yoga centers and scores of other spiritual movements and meditation centers can be found around the world.
In the United States, the 1960s were a time when a counterculture movement was shaping up. Students were in tune with a former Harvard professor, Timothy Leary, who believed in unlocking their consciousness through the use of LSD, a new psychedelic drug. He called on his students to, “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” In Western popular culture, musicians furthered the change by adopting the great Hindu mantras into the powerful lyrics of rock and roll. The music was heightened with 18 to 21 stringed sitars accompanying the electric guitar and sax. Musicians like John Coltrane and The Beatles turned towards Indian sitarist and composer, Pandit Ravi Shankar and Indian guru, Maharishi (pictured) who developed Transcendental Meditation. TM is a technique for inner peace that is vouched for by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and QB Tom Brady who, “Love[s] it.’
And this, the changing West welcomed unto themselves. The void of unsatisfied desires stemming from Cold War conflicts brought in post-materialistic values of environmentalism, zero-growth, and anti-war. And the general public, mostly the younger demographic, our grandparents, caught on. Students followed colleagues that looked a certain way and expressed certain beliefs and together they began to adopt alternative lifestyles The US government considered the new “turn on, tune in, drop out” attitude a national threat, and LSD was made a Schedule 1 substance – illegal to manufacture, consume, possess, etc.
In response, millions of young travelers turn eastward where drug laws were more relaxed, where the population was too much to be singled out, and where their core philosophy was born. The Beatles publicly renounced drugs back home but in the east, the new students of mysticism would begin to associate drugs as a path towards enlightenment. Direct your attention towards the iconic Hindi song cum power ballad “Dum Maaro Dum,” from the film “Haré Rama Haré Krishna,” a very anti-drug movie released in 1971. A young Indian woman sings of taking another drag in the lord’s name, with foreign travelers in a shack in Nepal while her brother sings back at her to correct her immoral association of god with drugs. Though the film isn’t remembered as much, the first half of the song’s message stood the test of time. And pretty soon the pursuit of spirituality would be mostly associated with drugs and sexual freedom by a large portion of newer followers. Here the writer begins to confront a compound of two factors – one, the desperation of young travelers to find themselves and to find spiritual awakening, by using hard drugs as a channel, and two, the East assuming this role and enabling the mass marketing of a dial-up nirvana delivery service, which brought in more affluent believers. This would ultimately tip the balance of how we see spirituality today as either “obscure or oracular.”
What stands out about this book is that Gita Mehta was there. She actually seemed to be everywhere. She speaks of a woman who leaves behind all possession, is accused of murder, evades arrest, and lives for years under a tree, who aims of being a high priestess at Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. She writes of an English aristocrat who drinks a guru’s urine turned to rose water but is still urine, under the polite and encouraging pressure of a crowd of devotees. She writes of sexual awakenings and drugged epiphanies, of people who are obsessed with their inner reflection and mirrors. It’s all good fun until you realize each of these stories makes one person in the millions of followers that form a protective covering for what happens in the spiritual marketplace – where the students meet the guru.
Gita Mehta writes of a Hindu-minded Dutch millionaire found nude and dead, in front of his commode with the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” in his hand. The book upon which the manual on using psychedelic drugs “Psychedelic Experiences” by Timothy Leary is based, also served as the lyrical inspiration behind The Beatles track “Tomorrow Never Knows” released in 1966, two years before they would join the Maharishi to take part in Transcendental Meditation – and we’ve come full circle.
The misunderstanding stems from the various interpretations of teachings like “karma”. To the Hindu god, Krishna as he advises Arjuna, it means being bound to act, that only action can save you from the bondage of action. However, today the term karma stands in for coincidence, chance, déjà vu. As of 2010, Karma Cola, the title of this book, is also a carbonated drink made in Austria with natural sweeteners and no added sugar, caffeine-free and gluten-free, suitable for vegetarians and vegans. The idea was born in New Zealand, where three friends materialized their interpretation of the word “karma” in the form of a cola that is “good for the land and good for the people who produce it and consume it.”
The problem, in the author’s words, “Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong.” The pages are dotted with whimsical commentary of people’s mindsets. Though the author is curious and witty it’s worth noting that she can be quite stuck on a critiquing path as she works her way towards certain personal biases. As it’s a series of separate accounts, the events can be hard to place in a timeline as the writer rarely mentions details like dates and names. We are after all seeing this world through her eyes. However, as she talks of the watered-down spiritual tourism, she does write about what its [spirituality] meant to be and what it can still become.
If you would like further reading on the subject check out the following books:
1. American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation How Spirituality Changed the West by Philip Goldberg
2. The Electric Kool-Aid Test by Tom Wolfe
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