A Change of Consciousness: A Hippie’s Memoir of the Sixties and Beyond
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Publisher Description
1968. San Francisco transformed a naïve 18-year old preppie from a small town in the Midwest into a hippie. Here are the tales of a time of seeking magic. These are the stories of an aged hippie, of the times he lived through and where they took him, the memories of an unconventional life.
It began, as it must have, with sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. The tales go from New Year’s Eve with the Grateful Dead to founding the first co-op house at Stanford with forty other co-ed dreamers and from the Cannibal Hitchhikers of Merced to doing the Timothy Leary Turnaround in El Paso.
The author helped build a commune in New Mexico, where he went to law school, and then went up the Alaska Highway to assist in the Massage Parlor Murder trial and over the seas to Jerusalem. He settled down in New Mexico and helped save the sacred lands of Jemez Pueblo. Less fortunate happenings included a good friend’s murder being turned into a national media sensation and another friend being sent to prison by the corporation they opposed.
Beneath all runs the strong thread of spiritual seeking, from a retreat with Ram Das to sufi dancing at Lama, and the foundation of family. Family lost and found, family newly created, and the incredible hippie family from college days the bonds of which remain unbroken.
All the memories are here and the author’s reflections on what hippiedom wrought and where it has taken him are here as well.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lawyer and debut author Greenfield writes of his life as an unregenerate hippie, striking a chord among like-minded aging boomer readers as he successfully captures the "extraordinary times" that transformed both America and Greenfield, as well as how he "shared in the adventure and risk-taking of an era that sought great change." His journey from semi-rural Danville, Ill., to college at Stanford and life in San Francisco in 1968 began a lifelong procession down "the path less traveled at every opportunity." He participates in the antiwar movement, lives in one of Stanford's first communal houses, attends Grateful Dead concerts, experiments with LSD, and moves to a commune in New Mexico, where he dances in the Sufi fashion with the legendary Baba Ram Dass. He then spends time in Jerusalem and Alaska before beginning a career in law in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, where he fought against the greed of New Mexico's largest electric utility. Through it all, Greenfield's charmed life is bolstered by both his good sense of humor ("My vision of Israel did not have hookers in it") and his belief that an "evolution of consciousness can end the separation of each from the other." Looking back, he believes that the 1960s "have at least given us the hope that we can produce such an awakening." (BookLife)
