Kristo Gabriel : Maha Mantra (Chant and Be Happy).

https://vedabase.io/en/library/cabh/

[M]any in the crowd of about a hundred persons standing around the chanters found themselves swaying to or clapping hands in time to the hypnotic rhythmic music. “It brings a state of ecstasy,” said Allen Ginsberg the poet. “The ecstasy of the chant or mantra Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare / Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare has replaced LSD and other drugs for many of the Swami’s followers.”

At the same time, New York’s avant-garde newspaper The East Village Other ran a front-page story with a full-page photograph of Śrīla Prabhupāda standing and speaking to a large group of people in the park. The banner headline read “SAVE EARTH NOW!!” and in large type just below the picture, the mahā-mantra was printed: “HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE HARE RAMA HARE RAMA RAMA RAMA HARE HARE.” The article admired the chanting and described how Śrīla Prabhupāda “had succeeded in convincing the world’s toughest audience – Bohemians, acidheads, potheads, and hippies – that he knew the way to God.”

Turn Off, Sing Out, and Fall In. This new brand of holy man, with all due deference to Dr. Leary, has come forth with a brand of “Consciousness Expansion” that’s sweeter than acid, cheaper than pot, and nonbustible by fuzz.

The newspaper story described how a visit to the temple at 26 Second Avenue would bring “living, visible, tangible proof” that God is alive and well. The story quoted one of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s new disciples:

I started chanting to myself, like the Swami said, when I was walking down the street – Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare / Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare – over and over, and suddenly everything started looking so beautiful, the kids, the old men and women ... even the creeps looked beautiful ... to say nothing of the trees and flowers.

Finding it superior to the euphoria from any kind of drug, he said,

There’s no coming down from this. I can always do this any time, anywhere. It is always with you.

To San Francisco and Beyond

Early in 1967, several of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s disciples left New York and opened a temple in the heart of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, home for thousands of hippies and “flower children” from all over the country. Within a short time, Śrīla Prabhupāda’s temple there had become a spiritual haven for troubled, searching, and sometimes desperate young people. Drug overdoses were common, and hundreds of confused, dazed, and disenchanted young Americans roamed the streets.

Haridāsa, the first president of the San Francisco temple, remembers what it was like.

Haridāsa: The hippies needed all the help they could get, and they knew it. And the Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa temple was certainly a kind of spiritual haven. Kids sensed it. They were running, living on the streets, no place where they could go, where they could rest, where people weren’t going to hurt them.

I think it saved a lot of lives; there might have been a lot more casualties if it hadn’t been for Hare Kṛṣṇa. It was like opening a temple in a battlefield. It was the hardest place to do it, but it was the place where it was most needed. Although the Swami had no precedents for dealing with any of this, he applied the chanting with miraculous results. The chanting was wonderful. It worked.

Michael Bowen, an artist and one of the leading figures of the Haight-Ashbury scene, recalled that Śrīla Prabhupāda had “an amazing ability to get people off drugs, especially speed, heroin, burnt-out LSD cases – all of that.”

Every day at the temple devotees cooked and served to over two hundred young people a free, sumptuous multi-course lunch of vegetarian food offered to Kṛṣṇa. Many local merchants helped to make this possible by donating to the cause. An early San Francisco devotee recalls those days.

Harṣarāṇī: People who were plain lost or needed comforting ... sort of wandered or staggered into the temple. Some of them stayed and became devotees, and some just took prasāda [spiritual food] and left. Just from a medical standpoint, doctors didn’t know what to do with people on LSD. The police and the free clinics in the area couldn’t handle the overload of people taking LSD. The police saw Swamiji [Śrīla Prabhupāda] as a certain refuge.