A lot of people had that experience of being free, and those people are like an invisible virus in the culture at large today.
After we left the Mime Troupe, we were rolling stones, just out there.
Am I sounding incredibly pompous?
Any political agenda and organization which doesn't begin with personal responsibility is just half the argument. It's just not going to succeed.
Any structure is mutable, but once you've chosen it, then you have to accept it-if you're ever going to get any depth.
Around 1975, I was working for the governor of California, running public policy in the arts.
Basically, in an autonomous system, you're on your own.
Business is a subset of the environment, not the other way around. You can't have a healthy economy, you can't have a healthy anything in a degraded environment.
Everyone acknowledged that we were the products of bourgeois culture. There was a lot of competition, certainly among the men: Who was more bourgeois? Who was more revolutionary?
Everyone knows that our current system is kind of like legalized prostitution. The corporate sector completely controls the civic sector.
I attracted enough attention starting at 40, which is already beyond the demographic curve, and I had my 15 minutes where it was kind of a toss up as to whether or not I was gonna be a star.
I don't remember too many ideological discussions. I think people really stayed away from that.
I got out of college and I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State. I was working as an actor at the Actor's Workshop, being abused as a intern.
I have one extremely able and overworked assistant who helps me. It's a busy life.
I have two children. One is a doctoral candidate, one is 13.
I no longer see anything as free. And free means not interdependent. I look at everything as a Buddhist, as a Zen student for the last 15 years.
I sat in rooms and listened to people oppressing everyone in the room in the name of freedom. So all human beings, to some degree, are unevenly developed.
I see great continuity in young people today, in people trying to make a difference, and I'm very heartened by that.
I think it's good that people value their bodies and take care of them. I think if you cross the line and begin using your body as an asset or as an extension of your vanity, you've gone too far.
I think the '60s were an extraordinary time. I feel bad for the kids today who missed this wonderful confluence, which was simultaneously a confluence of the global and the mythological.
I think the most critical thing, because it is the biological common denominator for all life, is the environment. All human affairs take place in the environment.
I would say 90 percent of my mail and phone calls are from people who want some kind of help or succor or commitment from me to do something.
I'm actually regarded as a movie star in Europe and treated with a lot of respect and deference there.
I'm not a fraternity boy... I'm happy to be right here, right now. I'm really loving it.
I'm not a person who feels like I've yet lived the high point of my life.
If I believed in limits, there's an absolute limit. The only way I was going to understand what life was really about was to struggle, to fight, to do combat with it.
If we didn't have radio and television and newspapers, life for most people would be kind of routine and humdrum.
If you really believe in the interdependence of the universe, you are the problem. The problem is not outside me. I'm the problem.
In a communal house it was no fun to live anywhere with an angry woman.
In a world of surpluses, you need new inducements, other than stuff to get people on the treadmill.
Interdependence is a fact, it's not an opinion.
It came home to me indelibly that I was never going to change anything in America by walking around carrying a sign. It was a great revelation. It saved me a lot of anxiety and a lot of wasted energy.
It's just been a practice, addressing the angelic in people. They like to have that part of themselves recognized.
Kennedy invited us into the White House-the first time in the history of the White House picketers had been invited inside. This made front page headlines.
Money is a way of creating scarcity.
Once you've experienced something with the totality of your being, you can't go back.
People like us were not going to be any more comfortable in a leftist nation-state than we were in a rightist nation-state.
The body is an inviolable limit. And you have to really hurt it before you know that.
The city was taking an authoritarian police view of the whole matter. We started feeding them and sheltering them and setting up medical clinics, just because it needed to be done.
The guy who accused me of being a bad revolutionary clawed his eyes out on an acid trip and is in an asylum today.
The self is just not a worthy enough vehicle to worship.
There was a degree to which we were hard guys. We were the only hippie group that was accepted by the Hell's Angels.
There was this loose linked sense of family and sharing of resources and alliances. You'd go someplace and you'd stay for awhile, and you'd pitch in and work there and live.
There were months where I was sort of asleep on my feet.
There were real prices to pay, and sometimes the body, sometimes your life itself, was the coin.
There's a line: a little water is good for you, too much is not good for you.
To be engaged means to follow issues that impact your life.
Washington is where things first came together for me. I understood how the game that was described, the politics of America that was described, was not the real game.
We didn't think of ourselves as impoverished.
We were accused of being pretty chauvinistic by some, but I'm not the guy that can answer that. My perception was always that the women had all the authority that we did.
We were arrested in many places and we had a lot of adventures.
We were respected by the Black Panthers. The first Black Panther Party newspaper was printed in my house. We were into hard kicks, and smack and speed and acid were among them.
What I say to you is now governed by 25 years of Zen practice. I think the world is always what it is and what it has been.
What we succeeded in doing was creating a world in which we were totally engaged, in which we were not alienated.
When I was a young man I had high hopes that my generation would make substantive changes. And I think we did. But I didn't anticipate what we would lose as well.
With the clarity of one's early 20s, I decided that theater was no longer an adequate vehicle for change, because the fact of paying at the door told you that it was a business.
You don't see artists sitting around a lot, talking about ideology. They find out what they believe, and what they're doing, by doing it.
You don't stick needles in your arms for 12 years if everything's OK on the inside. So I put myself into therapy. I worked with him for four years, he died, I started all over with someone else.
Peter is a songwriter who sings and plays the guitar.
He was a member of a radically political theatre performance troupe. They were called "The San Francisco Mime Troupe".
Pter tested for the role of Indiana Jones in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. The role eventually went to actor Harrison Ford.
Peter spent 15 years in the counter culture of the 1960s. He wrote a memoir at this time entitiled Sleeping Where I Fall that has sold five hardback printings and has two paperback editions. A chapter in the book entitled "Carla's Story" won the Pushcart Prize for Excellence in Non-Fiction in the years 1993 and 1994.
Peter and actress Glen Close narrarated the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics held in Utah.
Peter has done many voiceovers and radio adverts. His voice has been compared to Henry Fonda's voice.
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