Clare Mancini Mamaroneck

Bill Graham in the Green Mountains' Alps, c. 1994 (Author: Carl Mattern)

This series of pictures documents the life and travel of the American guru. He made an indelible mark in the life of America's first born guru, the late Charles Judson Ulysses Graham, the self-styled Buddha of spiritual transformation and revival, who spent many of his life in the mountains of New York's Hudson Valley. It was the most spectacular case of spiritual celebrity that the world has ever seen. It was not an ordained monk, but many of those who have seen this pictures of Graham have also been charmed -- and perhaps awed -- by his power of mind control, his beauty, and his extraordinary mastery of self-styled "Yogi," world-class acrobatics in the art of self-hypnotism, his nearly seamless ability to manifest the most apparently benign of all psycho-spiritual disorders.

Graham was one of the last great popular spiritual leaders of the present era, the spiritual leader of the "crisis," the black mass--on the "beach" -- for which he was called, between 1949 and 1970, to hold esoteric sessions with thousands of people who had nothing to lose from becoming New Age Movement yogis, the monks and mystics, in "the awakening of the masses" to the truth of Reality -- the greatest of whom are the Tibetan Bön. [1]He made a tremendous impression on the world of high society, but nothing could ever "convince the skeptical" of what had been, and always had been, something of a religious, spiritual "panic system," whose spokesmen have always been people who have some inexplicable fear to go on believing in something, and they seem to think they were persecuted for that reason. Graham's approach with no need for such nonsense, and with almost no effort on his part, was, I think, the very best -- and most refreshing -- available among "New Age" and "Integral" ecumenics.

Many and very mixed reviews have tried to deny the existence of such an ecumenical movement that would have the "Masses" to come in and help put on a show--he did go into the Sixties with that and the Hare Krishnas, and they were immediately shut down.