I often like to link my essay up with some music, especially pop music between 1963 and 1974 or so, because it was the most beautiful, creative and fruitful time ever in pop music when folk and rock styles delved into deep and subtle experiences. But I am always glad to find good music from any and all periods, including some in the last 40 years, rare though it may be that I like the music of some genres as well as that from others. So let me know if I should consider your suggestions.
The song that immediately comes to mind for this topic is by The Doors, Break On Through to The Other Side. Its rhythms and strong melody line leads us into lyrics that speak of going beyond the polarities of day and night, pleasure and pain, and being chained and lied to and going through the wide gate. It jells with the discoveries about polarities and liberation I was making at the time this song was made late in 1966 and released in 1967. Another great song that contains those 3 words, "the other side," is Wooden Ships by Jefferson Airplane and Crosby Stills and Nash in 1969. It speaks of sailing away off to the hip side beyond the straight world, and of the battle between two sides going on among the silver people on the shoreline, and just one thing they got to know, who won? Another great song from 1968 about going beyond polarities to find freedom is Ride My See Saw by the Moody Blues and their songwriter John Lodge, who died a week ago. For an upbeat rock song it is especially hauntingly beautiful.
The Doors named themselves after the 1954 book by Aldous Huxley called The Doors of Perception. He said mescaline opened up these doors to higher consciousness for Huxley, just as other psychedelics opened up this rock music and art renaissance in the sixties. I went up to Oregon to see the total eclipse in 2017 and stopped on the way back to see the Summer of Love 50th anniversary exhibit in San Francisco, and was enthralled by what the psychedelic artists created between 1966 and 1969. Note that I didn't consume such substances very often myself. Since I have been studying the Kennedy assassination recently, I remembered that Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis and John F Kennedy all died on the same day, Nov.22, 1963. Needless to say the two authors passing on didn't get much press that day. Peter Kreeft wrote a novel in which the three men discussed religion together after they died. I have heard it said that they actually did meet after death and did this. I don't know if this is true; it probably only happened in the novel (Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley). I and sad and I miss people who die, but I wonder, will I still miss them pretty soon when I die?
The Other Side is a book written by Bishop James Pike with Diane Kennedy (no relation?) about his experiences of paranormal phenomena following his son's suicide by gunshot in 1966. The book was published in 1968 (quote from wikipedia). This term for life after death comes from this book. It is a bit more hip now to call it this instead of "heaven". In January 1999 I was having dinner with Mom and Dad and I mentioned Pike and The Other Side, and my Dad laughed. He didn't believe in this stuff. He died 3 weeks later, and my Mom Ethel's sister, my Aunt Margaret, was a medium, an essene, an astrologer and an organist, and Mom related my Aunt's story that as he passed over she contacted the once skeptical Edward Meece, my Dad, and that he said "wow, this is great!" He was a skeptic no more.
During the following Year 2000 I was developing my own psychic and holistic health fair at the New Thought church I was going to that was located just two blocks from my boyhood home. The church was located at the house where the girl I had been enthralled with when I was 9 and 10 years old named Crystal used to live. One of my exhibitors at my Fair that year said Dad was standing behind me, and soon afterward a minister there said the same thing.
Bishop James Pike and my Mom were both born in Oklahoma City, and they both ended up in the Bay Area in California. Mom and her parents went to the episcopal church in Oklahoma City, the same denomination of which Pike became a bishop. Mom's favorite minister back in Oklahoma City also came west and became a minister at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, the episcopal church where I was baptized by him and named after him. Mom always thought I should become a minister too. Pike was also there at Grace later. He was a prolific author and broadcaster, and became more liberal and famous as he went along. Mom admired him. He became increasingly radical and universalist and championed progressive causes. Finally, against church orders he married Diane Kennedy who was 25 years younger, and he resigned from his denomination saying that the poor would inherit the Earth but the rich would inherit the Church. It was in 1968, apparently, that I rode my bike two blocks over onto Glenwood Avenue, a street that begins right across from this New Thought church on Hicks Avenue that had once been Crystal's house, and I saw that my popular and sometimes bully classmate Scott Kennedy's house there was covered with confetti. Scott's older sister was getting married--- to Bishop Pike!
Unfortunately in 1969 James Pike and his co-author Dianne Kennedy Pike of The Other Side went on a pilgrimage to the desert in Israel where the essenes once connected to God and where Jesus fasted and discovered his mission, but Pike and Kennedy lost track of each other after getting stuck in a rut, and Bishop Pike died there, thus passing over to the other side. It was headline news. Years earlier I was hearing rumors one day as I went to my next class at school that "Kennedy" had been shot, and I first wondered if it was Scott who just got shot. But it was another Kennedy who died that day, Nov.22, 1963. I was shocked as I sat in my seat and heard the news of my president's death over the intercom. Later on Scott himself apparently mellowed out after his sister married Pike and he became a peace activist in Santa Cruz. He recently died, but Diane Kennedy lives on and has written new age type holistic and human potential books and has given uplifting seminars. I never connected with her, but I wonder now how Diane Kennedy Pike would have liked it if I had invited her to be a featured speaker at the Holistic Arts Fair that I produced and managed just half a block from where she used to live.
Now I attend both a universalist church, this one, and a spiritualist church too way down the street from here to the east. Mediums and ministers there have helped me contact my Dad again. The same medium who first said Dad was standing behind me at my Fair in the Year 2000 comes there to give readings, and I help with a psychic fair there in which she and I both have a booth. I may learn to be a medium there too, breaking through to contact The Other Side, and maybe even be a minister there some day, who knows? For now, I am content to be a writer.
LINKS
Break On Through to The Other Side by The Doors
Wooden Ships by Jefferson Airplane
Wooden Ships by Crosby Stills and Nash
Ride My See Saw by the Moody Blues/John Lodge
Both Sides Now by Judy Collins/Joni Mitchell
The Other Side of This Life by Fred Neil
The Straight Life by Bobby Goldsboro
The Other Side by
Bishop James Pike with Diane Kennedy
The Other Side on googlebooks
Diane Kennedy Pike
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Los Gatos