The Chimes Of Freedom

I think it is hard for those who didn’t experience the Sixties, or rather, for those who didn’t experience the times that were before, to understand what they brought about. What happened was truly a spiritual revolution, and it broke down old rules and opened up life in all areas. It did not, maybe, go as far as we were dreaming, for we were convinced that the old order would break down by 1984. Still, it changed the world for good.
I had had some hard times but in 1968 it turned around. My friend Nick told me that he now was living in an apartment with his girlfriend Lena and he invited me to come and live with them. His aim was to turn on as many friends as possible to smoke hash and eat macrobiotic food.
Every day there was a stream of visitors, and every evening they were offered brown rice with thoroughly sautéed vegetables, gomasio and tamari. Both before and after the meal the pipe went around and Indian ragas filled the air.
When I had enough of this social life I retired to my room for work, meditation, or sleep. It was here I began the translation of Dao De Jing and I also did this mandala of the Golden Flower according to the Chinese meditation book The Secret of the Golden Flower:


Cream was filming in Copenhagen and the hippies were to be extras, all dressed up in their best. My friend Gert and I, both in our Moroccan djellabas and turbans, were late for the bus that took everybody to the studio, but we were told to get on another bus. Here we sat in the back seat just about to light a good water pipe, when the bus stopped at a hotel downtown, and Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker entered. They were astonished to meet two Arabs in their bus offering them a smoke.
Nick invited them to his place that night and the huge Turkish water pipe went around well stuffed with hashish. Each one who took a hit had the same reaction: after a heavy fit of coughing they sat stunned for a moment and then keeled over and were asleep. When the pipe reached me, there was hardly anyone left upright in the room, and I decided I would rather go to sleep in my bed in my room. Next morning when I entered the living room the scene was eerie to behold; like corpses strewn on a battlefield they all lay as they had fallen the night before.
In the photo, Gert and I are number 1 and 2 from left, Nick is on the right.