the same round, leather-covered basket boats the Portuguese explorer Paes noted
when he passed through Hampi in the 16th century. Darkness descended, and they
had no idea where they were going.
Hours later, hundreds of us ferried across the river in the same leaky boats. We
threaded our way past crumbling walls and along paths lined with ominous palms,
following a trail of lanterns a mile or so on to a treeless plateau of moony rock. We
glimpsed black lights in the distance, hear the dull thud of techno. No chai ladies
tonight. We were partying in Bedrock.
Jörg crouched over his machines beside a large boulder dry-painted with the
appropriate icons for the night: peace, Om, anarchy. Though his music was old, his
mixing rough and his generator tepid, Jörg soon sank the dancers into the groove. I
started taking snapshots. Unlike Goa, where blissed-out hippies transformed into
ferocious assholes at the sight of a camera, nobody here cared. An Indian sadhu
passed through the crowd, joshing with a grizzled Italian in orange robes who
occasionally whipped out a conch shell and blew. “Who is the holy man?” I
wondered. “Who is the pothead?”
After a bug-eyed Jörg led us careening through an eon’s worth of cartoon
wormholes, dawn arrived, dusting the rocks with pale purples and rusty reds.
Fairytale temples emerged in the distant mist, but it was no hallucination. Jörg
climbed up on a rock and pumped his fist, exhorting us into a supreme embrace of
the moment. The shivers came, the lightning flash, the exquisite plateau: it was
nighttime, daytime, alltime. As the rising sun and the setting moon touched the
horizons on either side of us, the heavenly bodies seemed momentarily to align and
balance the fragile, fantastic orb on which we danced.
What follows such moments of pop gnosis is, as they say, another story. The
great problem with experiential spirituality is that experiences pass. As I mentioned
above, if there is no context or tradition of integration to work with the energies
generated, then it’s tough to say what will follow. We do not live by intensities
alone, and destratification, particularly involving psychoactive substances, can leave
quite a mess in its wake. Given the spectacle of the 1960s counterculture, we should
be wary of any claims, spiritual or otherwise, that place an ineffable electronic gnosis
at the heart of its global aspirations.
But it’s easy to grow pessimistic at this hour, and so I’ll leave the final words to
Gil, whose hopes about Goa’s initiatic trance-dance frisson are nothing short of
religious sentiment:
That’s when the seed is being planted in everybody’s consciousness at the
same time. The spirit has come and given that grace, and they’ve gotten
something. Hopefully, they’ll go home, and they’ll live in truth, and improve
their life.... They’ll start to be more spiritually oriented, and hopefully that
seed will flower and bloom. Light a light of love in their heart and mind.
Make them more sensitive and aware of themselves, their surroundings, the
crossroads of humanity, and the needs of the planet.268 GOLDEN GOA’S TRANCE TRANSMISSION