Golden Thread: Meher Baba—Chapel Hill—1967
by Barbara Scott (Hyderabad: Meher Mownavani Publications, 2002)
Review by Kendra Crossen Burroughs
We are beginning to see the publication of spiritual memoirs by people who never met Meher Baba in the flesh but who received His call inwardly. The first was Kenneth Lux’s book Meher Baba: Avatar of the Tortoise, which combines an introduction to Meher Baba with a personal narrative of His impact on Ken’s life. Now Barbara Scott has written the story of how an entire community came to Baba in the wake of a spiritual tidal wave known variously as “the Rick Chapman Talk” and “the Chapel Hill Darshan.”
The year was 1967, the place a North Carolina college town called Chapel Hill—the “Greenwich Village of the South”—and it was a pivotal moment in Baby Boomer history, when the old-guard Meher Baba movement populated by “cute little old ladies” was about to be invaded by beatnik/hippies, druggies, dropouts, artists, freaks, iconoclasts, and other mad young mystics.
Momentum began to build the night of a terrible rock concert by a band called the Godz, during whose intermission a straight-looking Rick Chapman appeared before a giant projected photo of Meher Baba and declared, “You think you’re high, but you’re not high…. He’s high.” The so-called Rick Chapman Talk (at which Henry Kashouty also spoke) was delivered the next day, on Sunday afternoon, May 14, attended by some fifty people, median age 23. A goodly number of ripe fruits were to drop into Baba’s lap as a result of this legendary event, startlingly referred to as a “darshan” by Baba Himself in a telegram received after the fact. The recipients of this incredible grace felt, as Art Lester put it, “like we had always known Baba, but were just remembering it.”
What Barbara calls the “Chapel Hill/Meher Baba collision” was no accident. The Avatar undoubtedly “laid cables” when His car passed through the town on the way to the hospital in Durham in 1952. Kitty Davy thus wrote in Love Alone Prevails: “It is perhaps significant that the first of a large number of young people in the U.S. to be drawn to Baba were from Chapel Hill.” These new Baba-lovers were among the first to start going to the Center in Myrtle Beach, where Kitty and Elizabeth became their “mother hens” and Lyn and Phyllis Ott proved uniquely qualified as mentors to a bohemian crowd. The young people renounced their acid trips, put up a “sincere and comical” struggle to achieve celibacy, thrilled to discussions of spiritual planes and the destruction of three-quarters of the world (“great stuff,” said John Gunn), and went to bed at night confident that Baba was mysteriously “working on them” in their sleep. Eventually, as they (and their counterparts elsewhere in America) learned more about Baba’s ways, they would realize that life was not going to continue in unbroken blissful transcendence. They must bravely face the challenges ahead of them: “Having based our identities and self-esteem on the ‘cool’ drug subculture,” Barbara writes, “we now had to build a new image that would please ourselves, please Kitty and Elizabeth, the Otts, our families, and of course—Meher Baba.”
In an engaging literary style that betrays not a little erudition, Barbara deftly sketches in the characters and thickens the plot with direct quotes from them, ranging from the one-liners of Winnie Barrett to the wisdoms of Harry Muir, a conscientious objector writing from his prison cell. We are transported back to a more innocent era at Meher Center, when Phyllis Ott could do a Tarot reading, a volunteer worker opening a window might stand on a chair Baba had sat in, and retreatants would sit and “rap” all night long on one another’s cabin porches—all of these things now disallowed. Ironically, as Barbara observes, it was these very young people, with their anti-rules-and-regulations stance, who forced the rules into being by their free-spirited behavior. You can take Baba-lovers out of the subculture—but can you take the subculture out of them?
The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote that “the world is made up of stories, not of atoms.” There are worlds and worlds of stories hidden between the lines of this book. The book is complete as it is, yet one wants more—wants Barbara Scott & Co. to be there to take a few questions from the audience. No doubt when members of our generation, as the new “little old ladies” of the Meher Baba movement, hobble to the stage at some future sahavas, further juicy details will be revealed of what happened when Baba issued His call to His children of the West in the late 1960s.