The San Francisco Oracle covered mind-expanding practices from drug use and yoga to many varieties of religious experiences.

In “Yoga and the Psychedelic Mind” (from the Oracle‘s fourth issue, titled “Doctor Leary & the Love Book”), yoga practitioner Bob Simmons compares reaching a state of heightened consciousness through taking acid and through practicing yoga. Simmons, like many in the counterculture, was attracted to the Hindu religion due to the central aspiration to “liv[e] in accord with the infinite wisdom of the universe.” Here he charts his own spiritual journey from Tangiers to Europe to New York City, and describes how Hinduism offers a richer account than Western psychology of those experiences — “tripping” — that take you into “uncharted realms of consciousness.”

Simmons’s piece helps explain the larger context in which Berkeley dressmaker Liane Chu drew upon “Eastern” fashions out of admiration for non-Western religions and lifestyles. For Simmons, Hinduism offered a model for understanding the complete spectrum of human experience, with all its dimensions accounted for.

The article also raises the question of how, in the underground press, young white people often became ambassadors, or spokespeople, for non-Western cultures. We might ask what qualified Bob Simmons for this role, and how his own representations of the fit between yoga and tripping would have resonated (or not) with those who were quite rooted in the world of yoga practice.