Collaboration Journal
Special Feature
Interstates of Consciousness, Integral Yoga, and the Grateful Dead
LYNDA LESTER
Music here should be the way it is in India. It should be holy.—Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead lead guitarist[1]
I thought there was a possible holy perspective to the Grateful Dead, that what we were doing was almost sacred. . . . there was a time I felt this was the way the world would be going in a spiritual way, and we were an important part of that. I didn’t feel we were a pop music band.—Robert Hunter, Grateful Dead lyricist[2]
It’s about transcendence, and that’s what certain kinds of music does. It takes you from this, your normal waking state, to another virtual space outside of that, and that’s one of the powers of music that I’ve enjoyed over the years, to be able to enhance consciousness and do many things that you can never do without it.—Mickey Hart, Grateful Dead drummer[3]
When we get onstage, what we really want to happen is, we want to be transformed from ordinary players into extraordinary ones, like forces of a larger consciousness. And the audience wants to be transformed from whatever ordinary reality they may be in to something a little wider, something that enlarges them.—Jerry Garcia[4]
With the Dead onstage there are those moments of electricity … and the audience is very much a part of those moments….. just moments when everybody hears the same thing instantaneously and it becomes something very transcendental…. I liken it to the Divine—really, a moment of divineness. It’s real inspirational, real palpable inspiration … with us we strive for that moment a lot onstage.—Bob Weir, Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist[5]
The Grateful Dead group mind was in essence an engine of transformation … it felt then as if we were an integral part of some cosmic plan to help transform human consciousness.—Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead bassist[6]
Author’s note: The Grateful Dead was a quintessential American band born in the 1960s when change was in the air and a new spiritual awakening was being felt across the nation. Their music encompasses many genres—folk, bluegrass, country & western, blues, rock, jazz, world rhythms, space music, and polyphonic experiments with impossibly complex time signatures.[7] Their collective improvisations are noted for transporting listeners to a heightened reality that audience members call the X-factor, magic, alchemy, hyperspace, or the Zone—an array of experiences that might be identified in Integral Yoga as entries into the subliminal consciousness, emergence of the psychic being (inmost soul), or openings to the light, power, and presence of a greater consciousness.[8]
Grateful Dead music has continued to be widely listened to and gain new fans since the 1995 death of Jerry Garcia.[9] In view of the transcendence-inducing quality of much of this music, it seems to me that it could be seen as part of a larger yoga of nature that is leading humanity toward a subjective and spiritual age foreseen by Sri Aurobindo;[10] at the very least, it has been part of my own yogic path.
We can read about what it’s like to go into the inner and higher consciousness, but book knowledge can be as dry as crumbling pages in the attic. What does that experience feel like? And if we are, for instance, practicing Integral Yoga, how can we touch those inner and higher states without a guru, since here we are, marooned in the 21st century without the embodied presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and finding other spiritual leaders to be (perhaps) unsatisfying? How to get that profound and intimate contact with the Infinite?
We know that Sri Aurobindo said that the perfection of yoga will come when each person is able to follow their own path and nature in its rise towards that which transcends the nature.[11]
We know too that in October 1964 the Mother [Mirra Alfassa] said, “Your way will be your way, that has no importance—whatever the way, it does not matter … even the extravagances of the modern American youth can be a way.”[12]
And so, my friends, here is a story about an unusual spiritual apprenticeship: a journey with an odd group of musical explorers, a heart-of-gold band, a more-than-human entity, the famous—and infamous—Grateful Dead.
My compatriots in yoga have been laughing at me for decades, giving me fond but dismissive looks (there she goes again, tsk tsk!). They believe that the Grateful Dead are a symbol of hippie decadence, the Grateful Dead phenomenon is appallingly vital, and any sadhika worth a stick of incense wouldn’t go near it for fear of great corruption and possibly even drug addiction for life. Any idea that rock and roll could set you free is ignorant and misguided. Better to be listening to bhajans, perhaps, or some nice classical music. This amplified racket is delusional. Disturbing. Maybe damning! Here there be dragons!
But … but … I say in a small voice, it wasn’t that for me. I had a different experience. It wasn’t tacky, it wasn’t degraded; it was something wonderful and luminous. It was about riding rivers of light, seeing God face to face, knowing the Reality by which all else is known—
Yes, there were people around me taking drugs and partying—but I didn’t do the drugs, I didn’t go to the shows to party.
And what I felt in that voluptuous Grateful Dead sphere was a vibration of goodness and exquisite sweetness, a collective oneness, an atmosphere of joy—which, in the context of an intense communal focus toward transcendence, proved to be incredibly helpful for my spiritual education.
In fact, the Grateful Dead provided me with a bona fide occult training in the cartography of the inner realms.
You take what you can get.
In my case, I spent my first six years of Integral Yoga under the guidance of a charming, roguish mentor who took me to Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry, and Auroville—and to the cleaners. After that, I needed to regroup.
Back in 1980s America, there weren’t a lot of enlightened masters around. There were a lot of mixed characters and outright fakers, soon to be revealed as abusers, predators, and Rolls Royce–driving cult masters; but in the bare fields of Integral Yoga USA, who could help a young IY aspirant?
Jyotipriya of the East West Cultural Center in Los Angeles and Haridas Chaudhuri of San Francisco’s Cultural Integration Fellowship had passed on; Sam Spanier and Eric Hughes, cofounders of Matagiri in upstate New York, were fellow travelers, not spiritual teachers.
Being poverty stricken, I tried many times to get a loan for a return trip to India—but the bankers kicked me out of their offices and into their asphalt parking lots.
But here was this wonderful music!
So I said, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
What I found was delight in the atoms, miracles in surprising moments, and boundless discovery, all transmitted on an energy wave that was effortlessly smooth and supple.
And so, for what it’s worth, here are some experiences I’ve had with the Grateful Dead that have shown me firsthand that what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother said about the planes and parts of being is empirically verifiable—today, at this moment, in the hard, tumultuous, externalized lands of America.
I hasten to clarify that none of these experiences were drug induced; they were all pharmacologically unmediated. I’ve added footnotes to translate them into terms of Integral Yoga, since for some readers it might not be apparent.
But in fact for me, this masked-bandit band wasn’t a distraction or detour, it was the short way. The University of the Grateful Dead is where I got my undergraduate training in the interstates of consciousness.
Late-night Dead notes: Journal Extracts
June 7, 1980, at a Colorado show
The Grateful Dead open a rift in the material field and you see through it to a new world. Walls of ego drop off and your awareness spreads out sideways to infinity—no need for acid.[13]
August 26, 1981
Last night at the Blue Note during the premiere of the new Dead album Reckoning, I went into a state above the mind. I saw how mentalized perception is the substance of normal human consciousness, even when the mind is quiet. But I was above mind, tapped into a whole other power of seeing.[14]
March 5, 1982, listening to a Grateful Dead tape
It isn’t religion at all—it’s an arc of stars, bright mountain snows, laughter in the misting raindrops. It enfolds you with a richness of love, so sweet, so pure, so beautiful; through the convoluted intricacies of human relations, the upsets and turbulences, the small mutinies and nightmares, there it is and comes again—your being widening into a river, and the white brilliant spirit in your heart.[15]
May 31, 1982
Three minutes after I put on Dead Set tonight, the atmosphere started to change, consciousness entering my body as a golden warmth in the limbs, vision in the arms and legs. I saw that the harmonics Garcia produces when he taps two octaves at once, those overtones in the upper ranges, resonate with faculties in the subtle centers above the head.[16]
September 8, 1983, at a Colorado show
My body started trembling like quaking leaves; the sound entered my blood and infused my cells. Thought died, there was no movement in the hushed mind. Bodily vision replaced sight. My arms were the atoms to the stage. Matter was universalizing: I became the stones, I became continents and oceans. Physical limits vanished and I saw with whole-earth perception.[17]
June 12, 1984, at a Colorado show
The music is like sunshine and thunderheads on bright mornings, swallows in the sky: a great clear possession. It spreads out like vibrations in a force field, eddying and surging forward: sustained, beautiful choric magic with complex shifting shadows. You ride the currents of energy like Wonder Woman on her plane, gliding on the jet streams. You understand star language. You listen to other means of communication. You waken to another vision with other eyes.[18]
December 31, 1990, listening to the New Year’s radio broadcast from Oakland
Kundalini dances like blue St. Elmo’s fire in the solar plexus and up into the heart, intense, shimmering, vibrating a thousand times per second. Ego cracks like a stone egg and a bright new being looks out from within.
Oh, what sweet harmonies—all gold.
Layers of light dripping liquid gold.
The music is gorgeous; it swells in huge global waves, in swirls and bubbles, in paisley thoughtforms with graceful tails.
So much vitality—the band is charged with it, flinging it out like a dog drying off, running with it like kids on the playground.
Lyric poetry, a musical confectionary—many layers filled with delicious sweets, luscious and sugared, each instrumental part a revelation.
Little grace notes with cocky flourishes, not one tired moment—
Everywhere you listen there’s something wonderful.[19]
July 1991, listening to the Grateful Dead Hour on the radio
All of a sudden you’re a genius: suddenly your perception has accelerated to the speed of light. You see everything swiftly and grasp it clearly, brightly, through revelation. Your mind is hyperluminal.[20]
July 16, 2015, after five 50th anniversary shows
If only there were a way to go within ourselves and see with an inner knowledge.
If only there were a way to experience the larger mental being within us, the larger inner vital being, the larger inner subtle-physical being behind our surface body consciousness.
If only there were a way to have direct awareness of universal being and nature, a greater openness of the mind to cosmic mind and its energies, cosmic life and its energies, cosmic matter and its energies.
Oh wait, there is—the Grateful Dead![21]
February 19, 2018, listening to “Just the Jams 1978”
The music is dripping with spiritual power, a force for goodness on earth.
People still think the Grateful Dead is some hippie thing, a tattered, nostalgic clinging to the past.
No. It’s a key to the eternal present.
There’s a secret here, a blazing power and bliss and understanding that any fear-of-missing-out social media addict would give anything to experience if only it were possible.
This is the assumption of radiance, the descent of light.
New senses develop, talents and skills and masteries that have been experienced too by other seekers on other roads; but the collective weight of evolutionary human aspiration is reaching its maturity date, and we are moving beyond humanity to a new status of life.
Daybreak on the land, indeed[22]
April 9, 2018, listening to “Just the Jams 1978”
The music falls into your heart like atoms of joy, fills you with champagne delight.
It goes on for a long time, but not long enough—you could listen forever to those liquid guitar lines rippling out and carrying you away like a leaf on a golden river.
The air is bright with fireflies and sun drops.
Your consciousness splits into multiple child processes, all running at the same time; but you can keep track of them all, they’re all within you, synched together so beautifully—
Many eyes open in your head, inner faculties awaken.
Where are these musical thoughts coming from? These are not normal thoughts, they’re whisper thoughts, subtle thoughts, slippery swift perfect thoughts running fast in many layers.
The music fits you like your own skin, supple and shimmering and shiny, weightless, organic, breathable, luminous; you inhabit a new kind of body, a body made of light.
You’re slipping through the slipstream at light speed and it’s so easy—
Everything is simple and ordained, brimming with joy and power.
This is not normal reality—this is a shift in consciousness, a peeling back of the sky to see a world where things are the way they were always meant to be. You could spend hours in these wide cosmic spaces filled with smiles and stars.[23]
Coda
The longer I do Integral Yoga, the more I see how astonishingly different is each of our paths to the Divine—per which, these experiences may be relevant to none but myself.
On the other hand, maybe they can serve as one contribution among many to help normalize the understanding of subliminal consciousness. Perhaps by trading discoveries in this way we can begin to map for ourselves the inner lands, improve the science of subjectivity, and move closer to the next future envisioned by Sri Aurobindo.
What seems to me to be most important is not the particular method used to raise or deepen one’s consciousness, but the fact that knowledge of the planes and parts of being as described by Mother and Sri Aurobindo can be corroborated today, 50 or 100 years later. Documented experiences like these can challenge the materialist point of view and offer encouragement to the notoriously agnostic physical mind, which normally finds it difficult to apprehend supraphysical realities. It has always seemed to me that for those of us aspiring for spiritual cognition beyond the WYSIWYG world of the sense mind, dispatches from a new frontier of consciousness are inspirational. Maybe by sharing observations we can confirm that subtle inner and higher states are identifiable, navigable, and real.
Of course Integral Yoga is a long slog. Transient experiences are not established realizations; there are innumerable mixtures and mistakes, oscillations and stumblings along the way. But repeated experience builds a foundation for realization—and as Sri Aurobindo says, “If thy aim be great and thy means small, still act; for by action alone these can increase to thee.”[24]
And as the iChing says: “Perseverance furthers.”
And as everyone knows: Practice makes perfect!
Note: For those who would like to sample some Grateful Dead music, here are a few recommendations: Grateful Dead: Songs for Deep Listening
LYNDA LESTER is a director of the Sri Aurobindo Association and serves on the Collaboration editorial team. At a Southwest Pop/American Culture Conference in 2008 she gave a presentation called “From Sri Aurobindo to the Grateful Dead: Metanormal States and the Geography of Consciousness.”
Illustrator STEVE MORRIS is an artist and digital designer at Lightpourer Studios Artwork and owner of Steve Morris Photography. He has a background in information technology, computers, animation, TV graphics, and most recently, generative AI art.
NOTES
[1] The Smith Tapes, 1969–1972: Lost Interviews with Rock Stars & Icons, ed. Ezra Bookstein (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), p. 176.
[2] David Browne, “Robert Hunter on Grateful Dead’s Early Days, Wild Tours, ‘Sacred’ Songs,” Rolling Stone, March 9, 2015
[3] Amy V. Dewhurst, “Mickey Hart: God Is Sound,” September 8, 2022, https://mickeyhart.net/news/mickey-hart-god-is-sound-25435/
[4] James Henke, “Jerry Garcia Reflects on the Grateful Dead’s Relentless Success and Ever-Growing Catalog,” Rolling Stone, Oct. 31, 1991.
[5] The Aquarian magazine, April 1978.
[6] Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2005), p. 333.
[7] Mickey Hart, one of two Grateful Dead drummers, studied with Indian tabla master Alla Rakha and his well-known son Zakir Hussain, incorporating Indian rhythmic complexities into Grateful Dead music. In 1976 Hart, Hussain, and Jerry Garcia recorded a percussion-based musical album called Diga. One of the tabla players in this musical ensemble was Aushim Chaudhuri, son of Haridas Chaudhuri, who brought Integral Yoga to the U.S. in 1951.
[8] “The zone is hard to define, but unmistakable when encountered, a sacred space that lies behind and beyond the world we inhabit. It is … a place without time, but filled with consciousness…. When I enter the zone, transported there by the Dead … I am a consciousness without an I: the most awesome and liberating experience I have had the good fortune to live through. The zone is as close to pure Being as I have come.”—Gary Greenberg, quoted in Robin Sylvan’s Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. 91.
[9] This popularity may partly be due to several factors: 1) recordings of nearly all of the Grateful Dead’s 2,385 shows are freely available for listening and downloading at https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead; 2) since 2015, Dead & Company, the band formed by three members of the Grateful Dead plus guitar savant John Mayer and two other skilled musicians, has been filling stadiums nationwide with a new generation of fans; 3) 738 Grateful Dead tribute bands are currently performing in the U.S.; 4) in February 2024, with the release of a new archival recording, the Grateful Dead charted its 59th Top 40 album (41 of them since 2012), surpassing the record set by Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, who each had 58. The fact that the Grateful Dead phenomenon did not fade into obscurity with the 1960s counterculture but continues to persist well into the 21st century indicates to me that this music is something the Time-Spirit wants to preserve—perhaps because it still strikes a chord deep in the human heart.
[10] Sri Aurobindo described the beginnings of a subjective age whose art, music, and literature aimed at a “rending of the veil, the seizure by the human mind of that which does not overtly express itself, the touch and penetration into the hidden soul of things” and which pointed toward “the discovery of a new world within which must eventually bring about the creation of a new world without in life and society” (The Human Cycle, Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 25, p. 31). Of course with the Grateful Dead phenomenon, we are talking about a yoga of nature, not yoga in an ashram or a focused individual practice, so we might expect to see admixtures and obscurations as higher influences meet the shadows and resistances of humanity. But this is how all yoga proceeds, whether individual or collective, and the general evolutionary telos of Grateful Dead music seems clear to me.
[11] Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA), vols. 23–24, p. 57.
[12] The Mother, Notes on the Way, Collected Works of the Mother, vol. 11, p. 6.
[13] Entry into the subliminal consciousness.
[14] An experience of vision, not thought. Probably an ascent out of ordinary human mind into the calm, wide spiritualized mind that is awake to higher knowledge and whose central station is felt above the head. Sri Aurobindo writes, “When [the spiritual mind] gets its full liberated movement, its central station is very usually felt above the head” (Letters on Yoga I, CWSA, vol. 28, p. 158).
[15] Emergence of the psychic being (soul consciousness).
[16] Descent of shakti into the body; awakening of the physical consciousness; opening to the overhead consciousness.
[17] Expansion into some sort of physical cosmic consciousness.
[18] Entry into the subliminal consciousness.
[19] Several experiences are noted here: 1) the movement of kundalini and the wakening of the psychic being (“a bright new being looks out from within”); 2) the perception of golden light, similar to what Sri Aurobindo describes in his poem “Thy Golden Light”: “Thy golden Light came down into my brain / And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became” (Collected Poems, CWSA, vol. 2, p. 605); 3) the sweetness of divine ananda (bliss) resulting from an inner hearing that brings revelatory knowledge.
[20] An intense opening into what might be some level of the intuitive mind, several levels above the ordinary mental consciousness. Sri Aurobindo says that the intuitive mind is characterized by “its intuitions, its inspirations, its swift revelatory vision, its luminous insight” (Synthesis of Yoga, CWSA, vols. 23–24, p. 477).
[21] Phrases taken from Sri Aurobindo’s Life Divine, CWSA, vols. 21–22, pp. 541, 552, and 561.
[22] Speaking of experiences such as “the assumption of radiance and descent of light,” Sri Aurobindo says, “the secret of it is in the heart, not the mind—the heart that opens its inner door and through it the radiance of the soul looks out in a blaze of trust and self-giving (Letters on Yoga IV, CWSA, vol. 31, p. 628); he notes that “one feels or sees the descent of light, one feels the descent of peace or Ananda” (Letters on Yoga III, CWSA, vol. 30, p. 7; 2) In the evolution beyond mental consciousness, the Mother says, “Perhaps the very multiplicity of approaches will yield the Secret—the Secret that will open the door” (Mother’s Agenda 1962, vol. 3, New York: Institute for Evolutionary Research, 1982), p. 158); 3) “Daybreak, daybreak on the land” is a phrase in the Grateful Dead song “Playing in the Band.”
[23] Several experiences are noted here: 1) the “champagne delight” of ananda, often described by mystics as spiritual intoxication; 2) seeing out of multiple points of awareness (i.e., experiencing knowledge by identity with each note, chord, instrumental line, and musical pattern) while at the same time experiencing knowledge by identity with the central Self in an all-encompassing unity; 3) perceiving with a lightning-fast intuitive mentality; 4) possibly a direct experience of what Mother calls the New World, which is developing in the subtle physical as matter is permeated by a higher force.
[24] Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human, CWSA, vol. 12, p. 459.
