Only a few hours before I was to leave Berkeley to catch the Alameda County bus that would take me back over the bridge to S.F., where I would then wait inside the Greyhound station until I could board the bus to L.A., a friendly blond-haired, blue-eyed, hip-looking white woman, looking like she was in her 20's, who had a California regional accent, suddenly approached me on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue, about three or four blocks away from the campus, while I was standing there with my large knapsack. The young white woman was someone that most men in the 1970's would likely have characterized as a "California beauty."
"Hi! Did you just arrive here in Berkeley?" she asked, with a friendly smile.
"Actually, I'm planning to leave Berkeley tonight?"
"Why are you leaving?"
"I'm running out of money and I have to hitch back to New York City soon."
Continuing to smile in a friendly way, the young white woman then asked: "Maybe you'd like to stay around for a few more days and visit the Ashram where I live?"
"You live in an Ashram?" I replied with surprise. And we then got into a 10-minute philosophical/political discussion in which I explained why I probably wouldn't fit in philosophically with the spiritual community that she had found now fulfilled her spiritual needs in the 1970's.
By the 1970's the liberal ideology that the U.S. Establishment's corporate mass media and U.S. public and private school educational/political indoctrination system disseminated did not provide an accurate explanation for why the Civil Rights and anti-war movement of the 1960's could not win its demands for racial equality in the USA and peace in Vietnam. Or why many young people in the USA were brutalized by U.S. police when they protested on campus and in the streets in the 1960's and early 1970's. So many young people in the USA became political radicalized and, for a while, felt that the New Left's neo-Marxist ideology propagated less myths about U.S. society than did the U.S. Establishment's corporate liberal ideology.
The Kent State and Jackson State massacres and U.S. government and local police harassment, imprisonment and even killings of Black Panther Party activists and other Movement activists convinced, however, many "stage-in-life" radical youths that changing the world by means of New Left movement political action was not possible; and the U.S. women's liberation movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's convinced large numbers of young U.S. women that the New Left political movement was too patriarchal and male chauvinist to ever create a new world in which all women were free and equal. As a result, large numbers of these dissident and politically alienated "stage-in-life" politically radical youth seemed to get into some form of New Age spiritualism, East Asian religions or some hippie variation of a religiously Christian sect, like "Children of God" or "Jews for Jesus."
Hence, even on a previously politicized campus like UC-Berkeley or on streets like Telegraph Avenue, by the 1970's you were just as likely to be handed a flyer that attempted to recruit you to some New Age, Eastern religious or hippie Christian sect as you were to be handed a flyer for some local protest, that would generally attract fewer supporters than the same political group's previous monthly demo.
Once the young white woman concluded that I was either too intellectual or still too philosophically New Leftist a street person/nomad to be a potential recruit for her Ashram, she soon lost interest in continuing our discussion on the street; and, still smiling and friendly, wished me well, before she headed back to eat her evening dinner at her Ashram. I then started walking down to Shattuck Avenue to catch the Alameda Country Transit bus that would take me into San Francisco; where I would then walk to the Greyhound bus station and wait there for the late evening bus that would take me down to Los Angeles.,
