Art Kunkin: Mystic in Paradise
By LIONEL ROLFE calclass@earthlink.net
My
old coffeehouse buddy from the coffeehouses of the '60s who started the
Underground Press Movement when he began publishing the Los Angeles Free Press
is a metaphysical guru who lives in the high desert these days.
If you lived in Los Angeles during those heady years, you might remember the
Free Press, which was also affectionately known as the "Freep." The
seed money for the paper was put up by Steve Allen. The underground newspaper
movement spearheaded the nation's counterculture, and by the end of the decade
there were underground newspapers in most major cities. In Atlanta, for example,
the underground newspaper was known as The Great Speckled Bird.
Today Art Kunkin is in his mid-70s and has certainly aged well, but whether you
could say he will likely get his wish of living to 200 years is another
question. Kunkin needs to live that long so that he can accomplish all the
work he says he has left to do.
He resides in a trailer surrounded by his books and records and 400 acres of
high desert at The Institute of Mentalphysics in Joshua Tree. Some nearby sheds
and an abandoned farm house are his satellite facilities for storing his books
and papers.
The institute has a number of beautiful auditoriums, meditation centers and
lodging, some of which were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Art regularly
lectures there on "Turning Lead Into Gold With Alchemy,"
"Stopping the Aging Process," and otherwise finding liberation,
enlightenment and success in one's daily life.
But the work for which he has a particular passion is bringing together a
multimillion dollar grant to house his material in a real library. Art's library
is not limited to the underground press; it includes rare copies of books on
alchemy dating back to the 1600s. History, politics, philosophy, medicine,
science and metaphysics are covered in great depth in his
collection. He wants to create a state-of-the-art digital interactive library
for the edification of future generations.
Although the Free Press is preserved on microfilm at various repositories, he
has many of the actual negatives from which more than 100,000 copies of the
paper were printed each week and, unlike today's so-called alternative
papers, were sold for a quarter when the Los Angeles Times was a dime.
Today's "alternative press" claim they are descended from the
Underground Press Movement, but it is a vague claim -- and besides which, they
have to give their papers away, while readers contributed a good share of the
cost of publishing papers like the Free Press.
Those were heady times -- the civil rights struggle and then the anti-war
movement which characterized the '60s and early '70s. The Free Press was not
only the nation's first underground newspaper, it made Kunkin virtually the
voice of the counter culture.
The counter culture was an unlikely amalgam of progressive politics, from
Marxist to left-wing Democrats, and metaphysicians and mysticism. Art started
out in politics, and moved toward metaphysics in the early '70s.
He began as a tool and dye maker in the '40s, then was business manager of the
Trotskyist The Militant. When others of us at the Xanadu and later Fifth Estate
coffeehouses, several of whom were refugees from the Los Angeles Times copydesk,
gathered to complain about how badly a new newspaper was needed, Art, who also
had been a printer, starting putting out the Free Press while everyone else
gabbed.
The paper struggled along until the riots on Sunset Strip, and suddenly the
hippy paper was sometimes more influential than the Times. It did so by the
simple expedience of telling the truth. The Freep actually affected the Times'
style, if not its essence, when its Sunday West magazine ultimately hired many
of Kunkin's writers, including yours truly.
People liked the new kind of journalism. They were tired of the "Big
Lie" told by the status quo. Kunkin said that the reason his paper
prospered so was because he sensed the coming changes on a molecular level -- in
his own head.
You may laugh, but I worked at the old Free Press and got a weekly paycheck more
or less on time, and a fairly good one at that. The paper had incredible
readership and got its good stories because readers called them in. The city's
establishment came to tremble at the paper's power. And everyone in town read
and talked about it each week.
Those days are forever gone. Now Art reads the Times, mainly to find out which
of his old Marxist comrades has died. He attributes the fact that he's still
going when many of them are not to their inability to develop their
consciousness.
After the Freep, he first turned up as a journalism professor at Cal State
University, Northridge. Then he was president of the Philosophical Research
Society in Los Angeles (on Los Feliz Boulevard) after the passing of Manly
Palmer Hall. Then he served a seven-year alchemy apprenticeship at the
Paracelsus Research Society in Salt Lake City.
Kunkin insists he has not lost his political concerns. But there are also other
things, and says most of his former fellow politicos just couldn't understand
that.
He's equally harsh on his fellow metaphysicians, "Most are charlatans, but
a few of them really have it, are the real thing." Kunkin, who was a close
friend of Timothy Leary, thinks Uri Geller "has it," for example.
Kunkin does not feel the political situation is really as hopeless as it now
looks.
"Dynasties like the Bushes are loosing their grip -- and partly it's
because the American people are much more conscious than they used to be,"
he insists.
And he includes fundamentalists Christians in that. He believes when someone
proclaims Christ as their savior, that is a legitimate expansion of their
consciousness. He says people just have to be educated to understand that they
don't need Jesus to obtain consciousness, and eventually more enlightenment.
Kunkin dates his becoming metaphysical from the early '70s, when he was under
incredible strain, trying to keep the "Freep" alive. After he
published the home addresses of various state narcotics agents (who were busy
framing and busting often-times innocent people for political reasons), he was
jailed, no one would print the paper, and just to blow off some steam, he
disappeared to the Mexican border with a young woman, and did drugs and other
tantric things in a motel room for several days.
It was when Kunkin was offered an all-expenses paid junket to San Francisco to
attend a mind control event that he became a convert to the metaphysical. After
some powerful mind-blowing psychic experiences, he was a convert. He studied
everything from Kabalah to Sufism before realizing his heart lay with the
Tibetans and The Book of the Dead.
Do the Tibetans believe in reincarnation? He was asked this question by my
friend Mary Elizabeth Raines, a hypnotist by trade, who accompanied me to the
desert.
This gave Kunkin a chance to explain that the Tibetans don't believe in
reincarnation in the sense that the term is usually understood. After death,
most of the energies, from the emotional to the intellectual, return to take
other life forms, but the specific individual is not returned -- except in very
rare cases.
A few anointed souls are able to transform their soul into another body, he
says. He explains that is not something to be taken lightly. He prefers not even
to mention the name of the process for fear it will be published in any
article I write. But there is an ancient way of doing such things, he assures
us. "And it has a name, I just prefer not to tell you."
On the other hand, if you take one of his courses, you might convince him to
tell you the name of the process by which to obtain immortality.
You can contact Art Kunkin at...
artkunkin@gmail.com
or
www.life-extension-info.com
*
Lionel Rolfe is the author of the just released third edition of "Literary
L.A." He also wrote "Fat Man on the Left."
*
Lionel
Rolfe is the author of the ebook, "Death and Redemption in London &
L.A." (deadendstreet.com). He also has authored "Literary L.A."
and "Fat Man on the Left"
Four Decades in the Underground," both from California Classics Books and
available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble online.
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Lorene
Lionel's daughter Hyla
Laura Huxley, the widow of the writer Aldous Huxley and Lionel
Lionel and Oliver
Lionel at Gladstone's