The Lower East Side in the 1960s

By the summer of Srila Prabhupada’s arrival at 26 Second Avenue, the first front in the great youth rebellion of the sixties had already entered the Lower East Side.  Here they were free – free to live in simple poverty and express themselves through art, music, drugs and sex.  The talk was of spiritual searching.  LSD and marijuana were the keys opening new realms of awareness.  Notions about Eastern cultures and Eastern religions were in vogue.  Through drugs, yoga, brotherhood, or just by being free – somehow they would attain enlightenment.  Everyone was being free – somehow they would attain enlightenment.  Everyone was supposed to keep an open mind and develop his own cosmic philosophy by direct experience and drug-expanded consciousness, blended with his own eclectic readings.  And if their lives appeared aimless, at least they had dropped out of a pointless game where the player sells his soul for material goods and in this way supports a system that is already rotten.

So it was that in 1966 thousands of young people were walking the streets of the Lower East Side, not simply intoxicated or crazy (though they often were), but in search of life’s ultimate answers, in complete disregard of “the establishment” and the day-to-day life pursued by millions of “straight” Americans.

That the prosperous land of America could breed so many discontented youths surprised Prabhupada.  Of course, it also further proved that material well-being, the hallmark of American life, couldn’t make people happy.  Prabhupada did not see the unhappiness around him in terms of the immediate social, political, economic and cultural causes.  Neither slum conditions nor youth rebellions were the all-important realities.  These were mere symptoms of a universal unhappiness to which the only cure was Krishna consciousness.  He sympathized with the miseries of everyone, but he saw the universal solution.