California Cosmology: A Quick Look At My Own Checklist

I did a brief review of Alston Chase's checklist of California Cosmology, Chase appearing to be the source for the term in thinking about today's Paganism.

I grew up in the rush and swirl of California Cosmology as it was taking shape in the post-WWII San Francisco Bay Area. My appreciation of Neo-Paganism and my own Craft practice draw deeply from California Cosmology.

But I think that California Cosmology incorporates plenty of elements that Chase doesn't mention in his checklist. What's more, I soaked up California Cosmology not simply by learning about grand concepts such as Zen Buddhism or Hinduism or self awareness exercises or ritual magic but also through experiencing specific places, people, processes, movements, and events. When I was growing up, the San Francisco Bay Area had a vibrant, creative, experimental, distinctive, and influential local/regional culture that not many years later ended up being submerged by an emerging national culture. The San Francisco Bay Area revealed--and reveled in--a world view very much its own.

Here's my working check list of the elements of California Cosmology [in no particular order of importance]--

• Ralph J. Gleason
• Herb Cain
• Ramparts magazine
• 1959 Shinryu Suzuki sits zazen; 1962 SF Zen Center founded
• 1954 City Lights founded, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
• Kenneth Rexroth
• San Francisco Renaissance and Beat poets
• Bohemianism
• Josephine Miles
• Elsa Gidlow--Druid Heights, Marin County
• Ansel Adams
• Free Speech Movement
• Lenore Kandel
• Dan O'Neill
• Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan
• John Muir
• West Coast labor movement, ILWU, Harry Bridges
• William O. Douglas
• The San Francisco Sound
• The Folk Revival
• International Workers of the World
• KPFA, Pacifica Foundation, Lew Hill
• Alan Watts
• San Francisco Mime Troupe
• North Beach nightclubs, comedy
• Human Potential Movement
• Environmental impacts of human activity
• Lively local radio and TV
• Latham Foundation for Humane Education
• The sciences of Biology and Ecology
• California Academy of Sciences
• Notable ethnic diversity, the presence of immigrant communities
• Family organic gardening
• Local bartering of goods and services
• The Civil Rights Movement
• The Anti-Vietnam War Movement
• Large universities and national research laboratories
• Landscape and geography of the region
• Gary Snyder
• Malvina Reynolds
• Companies sustaining technological innovation, e.g., Hewlitt-Packard and many others
• Mohandas Ghandi, Ghandian pacifism in politics, nonviolence in political action
• Zen Buddhism
• Hinduism and Yoga
• Lively and diverse popular occulture and esoteric community
• I AM Movement and other spiritual and/or occult communities
• UFOs
• Emerging Gay/Lesbian Rights Movement
• Renaissance Faire, Society for Creative Anachronism, medieval revivalism
• Critical examination of Christianity and many of its denominations, often by adherents
• Overall world view sustaining creativity, experimentation, wholism, systems thinking, and, probably, overconfidence in human abilities

And I could go on listing elements of California Cosmology as I, growing up, soaked it up. The challenge, for me, is trying to sort out which elements influenced me more and which influenced me when.

I have, for instance, written several blog posts about some encounters with living beings that happened to me at a very early age, long before I had any awareness of something I'd consider a cosmology or world view. These encounters had a telling influence on my later Neo-Pagan practice and outlook. But they were unique events.

Other experiences were not unique, yet they were limited as to time and place. The ways that Mare Island Naval Shipyard and the part that it played in my developing awareness of the human world and how it works is a good example. Other experiences were shared much more widely.

I think that California Cosmology has played an important part in the development of American Neo-Paganism. But I know that California Cosmology embraces a range of elements that go beyond a checklist like Chase's. California Cosmology has a distinctive political, economic, and technological dimension. Concern for well-being, reverence for life, and psychological/emotional/spiritual wholeness--plus an ambiguity or uncertainty regarding just how things fit together--influence the metaphysical dimension of the California Cosmology.

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California Cosmology: A Quick Look At A Checklist

Over at Blog O'Gnosis, Anne Hill quotes a checklist of elements of California Cosmology offered by Alston Chase. As part of my own ongoing project How I Got To Be A Neo-Pagan Witch--California Cosmology beating at the heart of it--let me take a look at Chase's checklist. In particular, I'll add a brief comment vis a vis the element's influence on the youthful me, growing up and getting Neo-Pagan in the San Francisco Bay Area.

For Chase, California Cosmology is a flowerbed of exotic religions and an eclectic cornucopia of offbeat ideas-

Tao--was an influence, mostly thanks to Alan Watts and KPFA radio; San Francisco had an active Taoist community

Hinduism--was an influence, mostly thanks to Alan Watts and KPFA radio

Zen Buddhism--was an influence, mostly thanks to Alan Watts and KPFA radio; San Francisco had a small and active Zen community

Hua-Yen Buddhism--I don't recall this as an influence distinct from Buddhism in general

Mahayana Buddhism--was an influence, mostly thanks to Alan Watts and KPFA radio: San Francisco had an active Buddhist community

Gnosticism--was an influence, mostly as part of popular culture

physics--University of California, Berkeley/Lawrence Laboratory vs. Stanford in the arena of particle physics was an influence

Heideggerian phenomenology--not much of a distinctive influence on me until college days

Jungian archetypal symbolism--not much of a distinctive influence on me until college days

Yoga--not much of a distinctive influence on me until college days, when I began to do it; I was aware of Yoga thanks to Alan Watts

biofeedback--not a distinctive influence on me, although I did have several EEGs

Transcendental Meditation--not a distinctive influence on me

psychedelic drugs--in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the 60s? yes, they were an influence

self-awareness exercises--yes, a distinctive influence

psychotherapy--apart from popular culture, not a distinctive influence

pre-Socratic philosophy--not a distinctive influence

the 'Inhumanism' of Robinson Jeffers--not a distinctive influence on me

Gandhian pacifism--yes, a distinctive influence; in particular, I paid attention to the then Institute for the Study of Non-Violence

animism--not a distinctive influence, apart from popular culture

panpsychism--not a distinctive influence, apart from popular culture

alchemy--not a distinctive influence, apart from popular culture

ritual magic--not a distinctive influence on me, apart from popular culture; I probably starting thinking of ritual magic as something that it was possible to do when Anton LaVey's Church of Satan caught the public's eye

What Chase's checklist reminds me is that there are lots more elements that could be added to a checklist of California Cosmology. And that California Cosmology--for me--was and continues to be lived rather than listed. Growing up, I participated in California Cosmology as a holistic process, not as a tally of elements. That participation in a holistic process--in which different elements took on varying importance at this moment or that one--and in relation to events that provided contexts--is one reason that it's difficult for me (and others like Anne Hill) to untangle all those elements.

Well, I'll Keep On Truckin'!

http://gnosiscafe.com/gcblog/2007/07/16/california-cosmology/

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They Call It California Cosmology--I Call It My Own!

Over at Blog o' Gnosis, Anne Hill talks a little about what and where we both have our roots--something that some folks call California Cosmology (although I don't like this term and don't think that there is one but a constellation of them!) Anyway, she writes:

California cosmology is what I grew up on, catching glimpses on the radio, tv, and on the streets as a Bay Area youngster in the 1960s and 70s. It was wild and free, challenging, esoteric, erotic, and hinted of a grand future for humanity.

Most of my blog posts have something to do with this California Cosmology and how the challenges, opportunities, and possibilities of growing up in this heady Witch's brew of esoterica, erotica, creativity, defiance, and--importantly--regional culture made me the practitioner that I am today.

Look, as a young teen aged boy in junior high school, no matter my science and science fiction fannishness, I had no intention of becoming a practicing Neo-Pagan Witch. I was interested in technology and sensible meaning and learning about the palpable world and ways to comprehend it. I was not interested in doing real magic. I did not believe that real magic was possible, only something to fantasize. I played at working magic, mostly to discover how others responded to play acted magic.

I liked the landscape and the climate of the San Francisco Bay Area. I felt comfortable on that landscape and within that climate. But I did not consider the land itself as a living being. And I did not recognize the roots and ties that had already grown up between me, the land where I lived, and the life of that land.

But--what do you know?--a speech therapist passed along to me, a clumsy 8th grader, a deep and sound instruction in magical practice and metaphysical wisdom. Without saying a word about it. So I was doing real magic long before I realized it. And by the time I did--I had already experienced the alchemy. It had already transformed me--profoundly.

This all worked for me the way it did, and probably the same is true for Anne Hill, because, within California Cosmology we grew up in, nothing-- nothing --appeared a strange to us as it did, and would have, to folks in another of America's then still vibrant regional cultures.

Every day, I saw world destroying weapons systems, nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, being built more or less in my backyard, and others, bombers, flying overhead. Down the road they were poking around into the nature of matter and building big machines to do it. Russian bombers and missiles had us targeted.

Let me tell you, after this, seeing flying saucers is not so strange. Why wouldn't ufo aliens visit Mt. Palomar?

Let me illustrate this another way. George Lucas, who also grew up amidst California Cosmology, made American Graffiti and the Star Wars saga. California car culture is not so far away from California space ship culture.

It all grows out of the same hyper-fertilized ground. The vision that created custom cars is the same one that created space ships and star voyaging. UFO aliens crossed paths with hot rodders in the Mojave Desert.

There's a lot of currents flowing within California Cosmology. One of the dilemmas I face when I blog about becoming a Neo-Pagan Witch is how to identify them in their distinctiveness yet activate them in their simultaneity.

For instance, what does topless dancing have to do with it?

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