Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The way is peace, the road is love, October 8, 2002
This generally well-executed and hard-to-put-down book is a fictional(ized) reminiscence about What Really Happened according to someone who was at ground zero when the love bomb went off.That is, I _think_ it's fictionalized. At the very least, author David Rey Echt has changed his name to "Trevor" for the purposes of the narrative. I don't know how much of it is really supposed to have happened. But it doesn't matter, because the novel is true in the most important sense: something really did happen during the Summer of Love, and it wasn't just that a bunch of kids did a lot of drugs and had a lot of sex. Zen master Seung Sahn once remarked to his then-disciple-and-protege Stephen Mitchell that the hippie mind was just a quarter-inch away from enlightenment. You'll find similar views echoed everywhere from Stephen Gaskin and Ram Dass to (more recently) Skip Stone's _Hippies A to Z_ and John Bassett McCleary's _The Hippie Dictionary_. And on my own website I write as follows: "It may be best to regard the hippie movement, on its spiritual side, as a recent example of that perennial underground countercultural mysticism that always seems to swell up, like grass through the cracks in the sidewalk, whenever a dogmatic and/or authoritarian worldview, religious or otherwise, holds cultural sway." So you may well imagine that I'll be sympathetic to a novel suggesting that at the heart of all of this is a spiritual event that . . . well, I'd better not spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it yet. But fictional or not, the personal journey described in this book is realistic, and the spiritual advice is sound. (For whatever it's worth, this review is being written by someone who has been known to tote around a battered copy of Stephen Gaskin's _This Seasons' People._) Echt has clearly done his spiritual homework. What can I tell you _without_ spoiling anything? Just that it follows the travels of a young man named Trevor from Topanga Canyon to San Francisco on a journey of spiritual enlightenment. I can also tell you that there's some serious mojo in this book (or, more precisely, accessible "through" it, if you know what I mean). There are a few passages that will actually give you the spiritual equivalent of a contact high just from reading them. That's a nice feature, given the aim of the book. If you lived through this period of time (whether or not you were at ground zero), this book will help to remind you of its real meaning. If not, the first-person narrative will show you what the air tasted like, so to speak. Either way, this text can push you a little further toward mindfulness, if you want it to. One last thing -- I absolutely hate to Deduct Points For Spelling, so I'm going to pretend I gave it four and a half stars. But the reader should be aware that there are lots of typos and grammatical gaffes that got past the proofreader(s). This doesn't bother everybody, and I don't have any particular problem reading around such things myself. (And I think it's good to be understanding about the fact that, particularly at non-mainstream publishers, authors are often left to proofread their own books.) Nevertheless, if you _do_ care about such things, be warned.
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Message of Love, January 27, 2001
For many, the Summer of Love was a time when hippies ruled supreme in their Day-Glo attire, when psychedelic acid tests replaced cocktail parties, brotherly love replaced prejudice, freedom replaced conformity, and sharing replaced greed. It was a time to change the rules, to experiment with novel living arrangements, open relationships and of course powerful mind-expanding drugs. For others, like David Echt, the Summer of Love presented a unique opportunity for a grand leap in personal and human evolution. It was a special time when the cosmic energy was right, and people with newly opened minds could decide our collective future. One could choose to either work within through meditation and yoga, or work out in the world, expressing their karma through positive action and service to others. In his book, Echt seeks the deeper meaning of that special summer and reminds us of how much we grew as individuals and a group through those extraordinary experiences afforded us in the late 60s. Through the use of psychedelic drugs and by exploring eastern philosophies, we learned new ways of looking at life that made more sense than what we'd been taught by parents and school. We discovered our common ground and a deep unity and brotherhood. Could this timely enlightenment save humanity and the world from destruction at a time when our species' fate could be decided with the press of a button? The story follows the life of Trevor, an open-minded twenty year old from L.A as he seeks answers to life's important questions during the summer of '67. Leaving a failing relationship, he casts his fate to the wind and finds signposts guiding him towards his true path, which takes him to the Monterey Pop Festival, then Haight-Ashbury where he meets the Messenger. The Messenger arrives just in time to help him and others sort out their novel experiences, for which our western society has no reference, placing them in a spiritual context that gives them tremendous meaning. Like many during that period in history, what we sought, and what we found were two different things. We sought our individuality, and we found our humanity. We sought an end to war, and discovered how important it was to find peace within. We sought free, carnal love, and found a transcendent universal love. We tried to stay high on drugs, only to discover the natural high. We needed to express ourselves and we unleashed a profound artistic creativity. We sought personal freedom and started a social revolution. It's taken over 30 years for many of us to reassess those years and see the events of the past in a positive light. David Echt, has done justice to that time and after reading this book, I for one have a renewed sense of meaning and purpose. Let's pick up where we left off, and help those generations that followed us to discover the truth; We can still make a difference, we can still change the world.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nostalgia, Spirituality, and Food For Thought, October 2, 2002
I enjoyed this book very much but I am giving it four stars because it has a lot of editing errors that need to be corrected. This is a novel about a young man, Trevor, growing up in the '60s who like so many people during that time hears a different drummer and after following his path through the bohemian Topanga Canyon lifestyle in Southern California and breaking up with his girlfriend as their life-styles and values become increasingly divurgent, heads north to the Monterey Pop Festival and the hippie haven of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco.
As Trevor encounters several synchronicities and follows their trail his path takes a spiritual turn and through the use of first LSD and then meditation he opens to a deeper understanding of what is happening during the Movement in SanFrancisco and all over the world during that Summer of Love. He meets a small community of people who are studying with a Master, a type of guru of transcendental spirituality, and they learn that there is a deliberate shift in consciousness that is being encouraged and supported from beings of high vibrational realms. The Flower Power era is NOT a coincidence but a deliberate paradigm shift. The book resonated with me because I grew up during that time and in those very same places and it rang very true to life. The 1960s was a complex, lovely, brutal, exciting and mind-expanding time, a time when many people took quantum leaps in their spiritual, emotional, intellectual and artistic growth. This short, sweet novel expresses some explanations for the climate of that time. It offers insight into how many people were feeling and thinking. The main character, Trevor, is portrayed very realistically and develops from a curious and open-minded young person into a seeking and realizing pilgrim on the path of self-actualization, peace, amd harmony. So many of us trod that same path. The '60s was not the same thing for everyone, my experience was much more political than Trevor's, I took way more LSD and listened to way more rock 'n roll, but my spirit opened up in exactly the same way to a unique vibration that almost seemed to be in the air and the water at the time. If you lived during that time you may enjoy a nostalgic look backward. If that is not your era you may enjoy this lovely window into a part of that experience.
At a time when the world seems to have forgotten how to love, this gentle book can go a long way toward reminding us of the capacity we all share for harmony and unity and peace. It might nudge you into recognizing how much fear you carry around with you and help you lay that aside in favor of love. Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair...and read this book.
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