Planetary Meditation: Jimi Hendrix’s jam with a Hawaiian cult surfing collective
The 1960s was a decade awash with cults. The adolescents of the age had been raised in the shadow of Cold War doomsday sirens and the evident scarring of World War II. So, it comes as no surprise that they were flirting with different ways to go about life. The one presently prescribed by the stilted status quo seemingly offered nothing but bloodshed, violence and times of kowtowed conformity. Having served in the army himself, Jimi Hendrix felt this very clearly—armed with little more than a guitar and an open mind, he set out to offer an alternative.
Looking like an art nouveau fantasy incarnate, it was clear to onlookers that he was a man open to the far out things in life—you couldn’t be that inventive on the guitar if you didn’t have such an open disposition. He had been exposed, at least more so than most, to the scourge of the Vietnam War, and he saw something identifiably agreeable in the writings of James E Lovelock on the notion of Gaia that views Earth as a single living system. “I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E O Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores,“ the English environmentalist, who died aged 103, put it.
“We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else,” Lovelock wrote. “We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth”. This outlook struck a chord with many at the time. However, fuelled by LSD, many took this rather agreeable thesis and twisted it in myriad strange ways to meet their own ‘groovy’ ends.
This is where the Planetary Meditation cult in Hawaii comes into it. Little is known about this odd little group of surfing hippies, and if it wasn’t for the film Rainbow Bridge, they may well have faded out of memory. The movie, directed by Chuck Wein, was envisioned as “a kind of space-age Candid Camera. We’re going to place Pat [Hartley, a Factory Girl] in all kinds of real-life situations, and film what happens. We’re going to shoot a lot of film and just see what comes out of it,” the director said prior to filming.
Along the way, she encountered “dope smugglers, priests and nuns, acidheads, gays, groupies, environmentalists, and a group who claimed to be from Venus”. This spiritual journey was set to culminate on the slopes of Mt Haleakala on the Maui island of Hawaii. This was the domain of the Planetary Meditation cult, a rather more peaceful offshoot of the Brotherhood, an LSD-pedalling collective on the run from the FBI. They had set up a base in the volcanic hills of the area and began setting up a long-lost surfing doctrine of strange spiritualism.
Wein even claimed to biographer Shapiro that the whole thing was funded after “a group of people meditated for several months and travelled astrally to visit those with sufficient funds to finance the venture.“ However, one of the more naive members of the cult recalls shockingly seeing a rainbow surfboard being cut open to reveal a hefty bag of smuggled psychoactives, which may have had something to do with the economics of the island. And it might have had even more to do with the rampant UFO sightings sending a slew of “like-minded” souls flocking there in the hopes of seeing strange cigars near the rocky craters of Mother Earth.
For all its absurdity, this was, in fact, a bonafide revolutionary offshoot. They were living an alternative life to the capitalism of society. This appealed to Hendrix, who took little convincing to play a free show for the film in a grand meditation experiment. Even those present struggle to recall exactly what this experiment entailed, lest for the general strands of Hendrix’s sweet music, om chanting, celestial charts, surfing, and, of course, the odd substance thrown into the mix.
From the Rainbow Bridge footage, the free-for-all is evident. Hendrix jams amid coastal winds, high and flowing. And then that was that, in myriad ways. The show ended, the experiment wrapped with its results as obfuscated as its initial aims, and then Hendrix begrudgingly returned to civility at the behest of his management, only to die a month later in London. When the movie was finally thrown together and shown in California, it is said that 50% of the sold-out cinema consisted of narcs and the rest filled it with so much smoke that you couldn’t even see the screen.
Therein lies the difficulty of viewing this odd snippet of history clearly: it showcases one the greatest and most significant musicians in history jamming out with a separatist cult near enough to realise their own revolution, and yet it is forgotten, achieved nothing, and didn’t even know what it was doing at the time.
But it still makes for a seismic opening monologue that fits the bill all the same. “The world is in the throes of accelerating chaos,” it begins. “The ever growing dysfunction is dehydrating the mind of man and woman. And what are you doing as society disintegrates? Who will pick up the pieces? The burnt out torch to finish the relay to a better, saner world. And what are the new young, the new old doing, as the earth dissolves beneath their feet? Are the new young, the new old, anonymously working on something to postpone the prophecy of Armageddon?”
Before shining a light on its centrepiece: “Jimi Hendrix one of the stars of rainbow bridge, reminded us in a song a few days before his death, that the messenger is coming, and the world is not ready for its final event. Or IS now the time?”
The time for what? Well, perhaps in the opening monologue alone, it even had an answer for that: “The new young wish to help make a better world. They don’t want to inherit the pieces. Peace. World peace forever is within reach. The messenger has said so. And the new young, the new old believe. But you are skeptical. Lean back. Be joyfully shocked and enlightened that other eyes and minds are seeking a better way. A way out. An escape from a frozen world into a flexible sphere, where there’s more of singing and laughing than crying and dying. Worlds of ressurection. Worlds of reincarnation.”
Utopia may have been found for a brief jam with a demigod, but it was soon lost to obscurity down the bottom of a baggie.
