![]() |
Gridley Lorimer Wright IV, Shivalila founder |
Of all the Fifties Establishment-types who Turned On, Tuned In and Dropped Out in the subsequent decade, few Turned On more completely, Tuned In more deeply, or Dropped Out more thoroughly than one Gridley Lorimer Wright IV. The scion of an upper-class Buffalo, New York family, Wright began the Sixties as a button-down Wall Street stock trader and conservative Republican, and ended them as a long-haired psychedelic guru and anarchist commune founder, as well as the leader of a small, nomadic, LSD-using and polyamorous sect that would become known as Shivalila.
Born in 1934, Wright attended Westminster Prep as a
teenager, and then entered Yale University. Years later, Libertarian political theorist
Murray Rothbard remembered him as a young adherent of the early-1950s
conservative movement at Yale, a disciple of William F. Buckley and Russell
Kirk who saw atheism and materialism as the root evils facing America and the
West. For awhile, Wright even served on the staff of the paleo-Right American Mercury alongside George
Lincoln Rockwell, a Navy vet and illustrator who would later achieve infamy as
the leader of the American Nazi Party.
When Wright graduated from Yale, he married, and found
work as a stockbroker in New York City. Sometime in the early 1960s he moved to
Southern California, settling in Malibu. Sociologist Lewis Yablonsky, who at
the time was writing a book about the controversial nascent-cult Synanon,
remembered first encountering Wright at a Malibu community meeting, where the
conservative Republican broker spoke to support the group’s right to develop
their property in the beachside town.
While in Malibu, Wright switched careers from broker
to county probation officer. The new job kept him busy only three days a week;
during the rest of the time, he experimented with marijuana and LSD, stretching
his consciousness far beyond the upper-class-Yalie, Goldwater-Right universe of
his young adulthood. Eventually he quit working altogether, stopped shaving,
grew his reddish-blond hair to shoulder-length, and swapped Brooks Brothers
suits and wingtip shoes for kaftans and sandals. Then in late 1966, the newly-minted
hippie turned his Malibu Canyon home into a 24-hour-a-day crash pad for local freaks
and runaways, which didn’t exactly endear him to his wealthy neighbors.
![]() |
Gridley Wright with followers at Strawberry Fields, Malibu, California |
In early 1967, Wright moved the party to a property in
Decker Canyon, several miles west of Malibu proper, where he (loosely)
organized a commune. He dubbed the settlement “Strawberry Fields,” after the
Beatles song, and “decided to let anybody else who wanted to come, come.” There
was no structure at Strawberry Fields – the only rules were that alcohol and hard
drugs were verboten, and that
residents and visitors had to confine their activities to the property
boundaries. Otherwise, one could freak freely.
![]() |
A young woman Freaks Freely at Strawberry Fields |
At any time, Strawberry Fields boasted between 30 and
35 residents, with over 100 during weekends. About half the hippies and
trippers there hailed from the San Francisco Bay Area – the Haight Ashbury was
already losing its allure for its original denizens, and many were migrating to
fresh freak enclaves across the West Coast. Wright envisioned the commune as “a
place of accelerated evolutionary change,” where people could safely trip on
acid or other psychedelics, and expand their consciousness without interference
from, or with, straight society.
![]() |
The Strawberry Fields garden.
Wright's then-girlfriend Tatian is at center, in the red top.
|
As with so many other improvised communities of the
time, Strawberry Fields didn’t last long. The place was a magnet for every
misfit and crazy in California, and dealing with them and their
less-than-salubrious lifestyles gave Wright cases of hepatitis and pneumonia.
The would-be hippie guru barely escaped arrest when the law removed a
five-year-old from the premises for smoking marijuana. And when a misplaced
candle burned down the main commune house, he decided it was time to shut down
Strawberry Fields. Wright tried to organize another commune at Gorda, near Big
Sur, but that experiment turned out to be even shorter-lived, and more
disastrous, than the Southern California-based one.
During this period, Lewis Yablonsky interviewed
Wright, who would become the sociologist’s Virgil in a journey through the
Sixties subculture. Wright, by now an unofficial spokesperson for Los
Angeles-area hippiedom, spoke to Yablonsky from the comfort of his Malibu home,
as naked teenage hippies paraded through the living room and the burnt-sage
odor of marijuana wafted through the house.
When asked about his political leanings, Wright told
Yablonsky he had none. The onetime right-wing activist eschewed the radical ideology
and action of much of the counterculture. To change the world he said, one had
to change one’s consciousness first, and Fighting
the System not only wasted time and energy, but reinforced the
oppressor/victim roles that were keeping people from truly open communication.
On the other hand, Wright also spurned the “flower children” ideal; he believed
anger and hatred were natural, healthy emotions that only became dangerous when
they spurred physical violence.
The Los Angeles Oracle underground newspaper interviews Wright |
Wright’s own ideals were tested when he endured a
well-publicized pot bust and trial. In May of that year, the hippie leader had
appeared on a Los Angeles radio program, and when he discussed the sacramental
use of marijuana and LSD, he casually mentioned on the air that he’d gotten
high just before the interview. When he came out of the studio, cops were
waiting with a search warrant at his car, which gave up a small amount of
marijuana. Since mere possession of pot was then a felony, they arrested him.
Five months later Wright went on trial. He immediately
dismissed his defense attorney, and chose to represent himself, confident that
he could make a case for marijuana as a holy sacrament that deserved the same
legal privilege that peyote did for American Indians. Wright said the hippie
subculture “has every characteristic of any religion, especially the secret
type of religion – one that is persecuted as the early Christians were, as
small cults of secret societies have been all throughout history…The thing that
we have that is secret about ours, from the Establishment, are the rites in which
we use the dope. Those are not allowed to be observed by non-members. That is
what it actually works down to.”
Although not only Yablonsky, but Unitarian minister
and Harvard Divinity School graduate Ernest D. Pipes testified at the trial that
Wright was a bona fide religious leader, and the hippies’ marijuana use was a
key part of a legitimate spiritual quest, the law didn’t agree. After a
two-week trial Wright was found guilty, labeled a “false prophet” by the
presiding judge, fined $300, and put on five years’ probation with the
understanding that he wouldn’t use, or advocate the use of illegal drugs during
the term. True to his anarchistic philosophy, Wright continued to do both, and
was sent to jail for the next eighteen months.
When he emerged from custody in early 1969, Wright
headed to the Far East. Like many Western hippies, he believed that Enlightenment
lay beyond the repressive, rule-crazy confines of his own society, and could be
found by exploring Asian spiritual and cultural ways.
In 1970, he ended up in Kuta Beach in Bali, then a
sleepy village little frequented by tourists. Believing he’d found “home,” he
burned his American passport as an offering to Shiva, the Hindu god of
destruction, and then moved into a little shack on the beach. There he meditated and wrote chapbooks of
poetry, which he exchanged at a nearby coffee house for donations. Wright also
befriended both expatriate hippies and locals, who sought him out as a yoga
teacher.
Keith Lorenz and David Salisbury, two Americans who were
recording an oral history of rapidly-modernizing Bali, encountered Wright at
Kuta Beach. Fascinated by Wright, who was calling himself “Abra Lut” during
this period, the two taped a lengthy interview with the gone-native guru, where
he expounded on his ideals and life.
![]() |
Gridley Wright in Bali |
Wright told the pair that several years earlier, he’d
had a vision of a shared community that would separate itself from modern
society and the consumer culture, and live as a tribal, collective unit. After
his time in Strawberry Fields and in jail, he realized that the vision wouldn't
work in America, so he traveled to Asia to seek out ways of life more conducive
to this ideal.
The interviewers noted that Wright smoked a lot of the
local strain of cannabis during the interview. He said that pot enhanced his
creativity, and served as a bonding agent for hippies and other potential
members of the new world he was trying to create: “It’s the religion of today –
religion started out as a turn-on like this, that brought people together so
they felt closer.”
Intimacy – physical, emotional, spiritual – was what
the seemingly egoless Wright was all about in Bali. “Everybody that I’m with is
me,” he told the interviewers. “Right now I’m a witness in a mirror…anything [people]
see in me is a projection. It’s the self talking to the self. I’m reflecting
ways of perceiving, interacting, playing with the environment.” Wright believed
that in his interactions he was recreating the immediacy and novelty of
childhood – the ideal mental state for true learning and spiritual peace.
Wright, who believed in past lives, felt that he was
in the final of a long series of incarnations, and that his current human
existence was the last one in which he could fully transmit his gathered wisdom.
“I am fulfilled, I’ve realized everything,” he said. “There ain’t a game that
I’ve run into in a long time that I haven’t remembered from a long time back in
all its variations, including this one.” He had transcended all worldly ideals
or desires save one: “that the whole world would go crazy, so then it would
finally be safe for me and the kids.”
As with the Yablonsky interview, Wright was speaking
under the shadow of legal persecution. He claimed that some local Balinese had
adopted him as a sort of mascot of Western hipness, but then got angry when he
started to play his guru role too seriously with them. They reported him to the
local authorities, who raided his hut, loaded him in a Jeep, and dropped him in
a detention center. His captors were puzzled
by the passport-less, penniless American who accepted his fate with Buddha-like
passivity, and endlessly played mind-games with them, so he was returned to his
shack while they figured out their next move. Eventually he was seized again and
forcibly deported to the United States.
Back in California, Wright was once again able to
assemble a small coterie of followers. This time he organized it as a formal group,
and dubbed it Shivalila, in homage to
the Hindu deity to whom he’d sacrificed his passport, and who was often
associated with ritual cannabis use.
Shivalila’s basic beliefs and practices were recorded
in a 1977 work, The Book of the Mother.
According to Wright, who penned the work under the auspices of “The Children’s
Liberation Front,” their vision of collective consciousness came about during a
ten-year period, wherein the members took over 12,000 LSD trips. They had
started out in the Western Hippie subculture, but had also journeyed to more
traditional tribal societies, and had tripped with Third World peoples ranging
from Afghani Sufis, to Tibetan Buddhists, to Indian Shaivite Hindus. Wright claimed that when he dosed tribal
peoples with acid, not a single one experienced the hallucinations or
freak-outs traditionally associated with the drug in the West.
![]() |
Two now-rare Children's Liberation Front books: Shivalila, and The Book of the Mother |
The sect’s covenants evolved from these experiences,
and according to the book, “represent the only known social contract
specifically established to sustain group consciousness.”
The Covenants were:
I.
Ahimsa. Shivalila is an open, nonviolent
community. (Violence is an act that directly affects structural damage to
cellular integrity. People of Shivalila will not under any circumstances resort
to violence or call upon any institution that uses violence or threats of
violence.
II.
Sattva Ava. People of Shivalila will make
no contract in respect to truth without stipulating that truth is relative and
that body, mind, and environment are indissoluble. Correlatively, people of
Shivalila will not testify in any matter involving issues of guilt or nonguilt.
III.
Bhramcari. People of Shivalila do not own
anything on any plane – psychic, material, physical, or fantasy.* People of
Shivalila do not acknowledge private or group ownership of anything.
Correlatively, people of Shivalila will not participate in any relationship
involving privacy or secrecy.
IV.
Tantra. A person of Shivalila will have
sensual/sexual relations with another only after that person has manifested
some identification with nature and babies.
The object of Shivalila was to manifest higher consciousness through these practices. Wright believed that there were nine stages of human consciousness, ranging from “Neuro-electro-atomic” to “Universal mind”, a God-like state of being that “will only manifest through the unified focus of no less than three persons.” The goal for Shivalila, and for the human race on the whole, was to achieve full use of all nine levels, so that full, honest communication could take place between individuals, egoistic differences could be erased and the tribal group mind would harmoniously direct human affairs.
To Shivalila, the key to this consciousness was the experience of childhood. Wright said that the Western nuclear family instituted both patriarchal dominance and matrifocal dependency. A better way to raise children, he said, was in a commune, so that they would have multiple sources of both authority and sustenance, and would think more “tribally.”
Wright discouraged mothers to identify with their birth children, saying that it created neurotic, egoistic attachments. Instead, he said that mothers should “facilitate the development of psychic/sensual relationships with a broad variety of people” so as to fully develop the child as a social, tribal being. He even banned books and toys from Shivalila, since such artifacts separated children from spontaneous experience and the collective play of the community.
Shivalila never grew beyond twenty or so members. Wright and his followers maintained a nomadic existence, spending the Seventies drifting through Asian ashrams and North America communes, in search of a place where they could expand their consciousness with LSD, and raise a new generation of children in the tribal consciousness Wright believed could save humanity. When Wright heard the story of the Tasaday, a tribe of indigenous Stone Age people on Mindanao in the Philippines, he took his people to the island to meet them, only to be turned back by government officials who believed the last thing the Tasadays needed was to be corrupted by a gang of Western acidhead cultists.
To Shivalila, the key to this consciousness was the experience of childhood. Wright said that the Western nuclear family instituted both patriarchal dominance and matrifocal dependency. A better way to raise children, he said, was in a commune, so that they would have multiple sources of both authority and sustenance, and would think more “tribally.”
Wright discouraged mothers to identify with their birth children, saying that it created neurotic, egoistic attachments. Instead, he said that mothers should “facilitate the development of psychic/sensual relationships with a broad variety of people” so as to fully develop the child as a social, tribal being. He even banned books and toys from Shivalila, since such artifacts separated children from spontaneous experience and the collective play of the community.
Shivalila never grew beyond twenty or so members. Wright and his followers maintained a nomadic existence, spending the Seventies drifting through Asian ashrams and North America communes, in search of a place where they could expand their consciousness with LSD, and raise a new generation of children in the tribal consciousness Wright believed could save humanity. When Wright heard the story of the Tasaday, a tribe of indigenous Stone Age people on Mindanao in the Philippines, he took his people to the island to meet them, only to be turned back by government officials who believed the last thing the Tasadays needed was to be corrupted by a gang of Western acidhead cultists.
Wright also found himself unwelcome in stateside alternative-culture circles. In the
book The Wizard and the Witch, Oberon
and Morning Glory Zell, founders of the Neo-Pagan Church of All Worlds,
recounted how Wright and his group, who had co-opted several members of a
Missouri commune, tried to recruit their own preteen daughter by dosing her
with LSD. The girl also told her parents that Wright had attempted to seduce
her.
Enraged, Oberon Zell confronted Wright, grabbing one
of his henchmen’s pistols and holding it to the cult leader's head. Coming to his senses,
Zell instead invoked the Mother Goddess’ curse on Wright, and reported
him to Child Protective Services, who showed a distinct lack of interest in the
case. Frustrated, the Zells and their daughter relocated to Oregon, hoping that
if the Show-Me State wouldn’t administer justice, the Goddess would.
In the late Seventies, Wright and his entourage landed
at Black Bear Ranch in California’s Siskiyou Mountains. Black Bear seemed to be
a more rural, and more disciplined version of Strawberry Fields twelve years
earlier – “free land for free people” where anyone who was willing to work and
cooperate was welcome, and where children were raised communally.
Initially, the Shivalila tribe seemed to fit right in
the community. But tensions soon appeared between its members, and the longtime
residents, many of whom were political radicals deeply suspicious of
self-proclaimed gurus. A 2006 documentary about Black Bear, Commune, featured interviews with former
residents who saw Shivalila as an arrogant cult whose members spent most of
their time dropping acid and hanging around with the commune’s children, and
who tried to impose their own visions on the essentially anarchistic
settlement. Ex-Shivalila members who appeared in the film, on the other hand,
felt they were merely being honest and open with the regulars, per Wright’s
teachings of egalitarian, free communication.
![]() |
Shivalila at the Black Bear commune, circa 1975. |
Eventually the Black Bear old-timers called in
reinforcements from outside the settlement, confronted the Shivalilites, and
forced them to leave the land. Wright and his people departed, along with a
couple of Black Bear residents who’d shifted their alliance to the middle-aged
guru, and – amazingly – at least two commune children who’d bonded with the
child-centered clan, and had chosen to go with them rather than stay with their
biological families.
Once again driven from California, Wright and his
entourage returned to Asia. Imitating their leader’s action years earlier in
Bali, the Shivalilites journeyed to India, destroyed their passports, and pled
with Indian officials for asylum, claiming they faced persecution in the United
States. (Ironically, asylum was denied them largely on the grounds that the
cultists lacked valid passports.) They tried to settle in the arid Indian state
of Rajasthan, but an epidemic of measles and diphtheria there claimed the lives
of four of the group’s children. Wright, who claimed that Western medicine had
no place in the primitive commune’s life, had forbidden inoculations to his
followers.
By now, the 45-year old Wright was tiring of the conflicts
and constant travel, and told his followers that he would die in
India. He had been lately claiming that he’d lived before as Krishna, Buddha,
Jesus and Muhammad, and that he’d taught all one soul could. Eternity beckoned.
Wright’s premonition came true on December 22, 1979.
Weeks earlier, he had been visiting the Indian tropical seaside state of Goa
when he was stabbed several times by a deranged Australian hippie. Complications from the wounds set
in, and the 45 year-old guru died of double pneumonia in a Goa hospital ten
days before the end of the 1970s. Five members of Shivalila were with him when
he passed on, and they had his earthly remains cremated Hindu-style, and
scattered near the sea in the town of Panjim.
Shivalila struggled to stay afloat in the wake of
Wright’s death. Most members of the group returned to the United States, where
they distributed The Book of the Mother and
tried to live his ideals in a society that seemed less hospitable than ever to
the Sixties psychedelic-tribal vision. Some settled on Hawaii’s Big Island, and
eventually opened an intentional community called Dragon’s Eye, which combined
Wright’s teachings with those of other social and spiritual reformers. The
community continues to exist as of this writing, and is now considered
“mainstream” enough to host 4-H sustainable-agriculture programs.
As for Wright, little trace today remains of his
influence. Chris Lorenz, the nephew of one of the men who interviewed the guru
at his Bali retreat, maintains the gridleywright.com website, which sells a CD
of the 1971 interview, and displays articles and news clippings about the
“figure of the 1960s counterculture.” The Commune
documentary revived some interest in Shivalila, although the group’s
child-centric practices, and Wright’s flat-toned narratives over footage
of the group, creeped out more than a few viewers.
Perhaps Shivalila, and the man that founded and
directed it, can best be summed up in one of Wright’s own poems, “Kali’s
Dance”:
I am, of course, quite mad
And when it became impossible to hide it any longer in my homeland where madness is illegal, I split, Making the scene in just about every age, culture and whatnot that was available around the world, lookin to see if there was a place where madness wasn't either immoral, illegal, heretical, or witchcraft; in other words somewhere I could let it all hang out without scaring everybody so they were blind to the ultimate joke; somewhere that was a stage for my brand of live theatre and my cast of freaks. I didn't find that place, for everywhere I went I found fear of nothin I ever did but of the insanity in my eyes. |
Sources/More Info:
The Book of the Mother. Bakersfield, CA: Children's Liberation Front, 1977.
Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religions, Eighth Edition. Edited by J. Gordon Melton. Detroit: Gale, 2009. "Shivalia", pp. 683-684.
The Hippie Trip, by Lewis Yablonsky. New York: Pegasus, 1969.
The Wizard and the Witch: An Oral History of Oberon Zell and Morning Glory, by John C. Sulak. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2014.
Aquarius Rising, an unreleased 1967 documentary by Pierre Sogal (attributed). The segment on Wright and Strawberry Fields can be viewed here.
Commune, 2005 documentary film by Jonathan Berman. Trailer here.
Special thanks to Shivalila member Natec Harijan for her feedback on this piece.
Thank you
ReplyDeleteThanks for thr info!
ReplyDeleteInteresting read. Never had heard of it before.
ReplyDeleteIt probably isn't that amazing that 2 children chose to leave Black Bear with Shivalila. Hippies/ counter culture communities usually have a radical view of parenting, with the child/ adult 'choosing' the attachment.
ReplyDeleteI know of a much more recent example of this, where a child of 11 had chosen to go and live with a family in England, and the 13yo had gone to France with a larger group. The younger child died when she was hit by a car. Presumably the mother was of the same type as Scarlett Keeling's mother - trusting their child's judgement too much.
If you want your ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend to come crawling back to you on their knees (no matter why you broke up) you must watch this video
ReplyDeleteright away...
(VIDEO) Get your ex CRAWLING back to you...?
I got my first electronic cigarette kit on Vaporfi, and I recommend getting it from them.
ReplyDeletewell-written history, lots I did not know! I found your site through a Google search while rervisiting some jounal papers belonging to my late aunt, who was at the Missouri commune when Tim (Oberon) Zell and the Church of All Worlds confronted Gridley. (My aunt , who died in 2001, noted then that the child who had ostensibly been dosed with LSD by Gridley was 4 years old (!) and that one of Gridley's beliefs was that "we grow best from freak-outs." She began this journal page, in August 1974, saying that her previous journal was "burned on a fire last week in one of those crazy moments; Gridley Wright, the guru of pain, power-tripped me into giving up an 'attachment' by throwing it into the fire."
ReplyDeleteHey! I am getting bored, please fchat with me ;) ;) ;) ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████
ReplyDeleteVery interesting article, thank you!
ReplyDeleteI would LOVE to get hold of the recording from Bali that is mentioned in the article.
The website gridleywright.com which used to sell the CD, is no longer active and I have had no luck in contacting the owner of the domain name.
I actually have the first half of the recording (which is 34 min and 26 sec) but I do believe that it's longer since Califia mentions stuff from that interview which is not said in the part that I have got.
Does anyone knows where I can get hold of the entire recording?
Thank you so much in advance! You can contact me on davva.extra @ gmail.com
Thank you for this account of Gridley's life. I was one of the children (dark haired one in stripped shirt) that can be seen running around in the the video of Strawberry Fields. I was there with my mother, sister, and two brothers. I was seven years old when I had my first LSD trip. I found this website while doing research for the memoir I'm writing. If anyone has anymore information, please contact me. Thank you, Gabriella
ReplyDelete