Zen Bones was recorded in the Avalon Ballroom on March, 29, 1967, in San Francisco, during a 'Zenefit' to raise funds for the Tassajara Springs Zen Center. The event marked the beginning of festivities for what became the counterculture's Summer of Love.

"We are all one suchness--- and suchness comes and goes like everything else, because this world is an on and off system...now you see it, now you don't. When you wake up to this, and realize that the more it changes,the more it's the same thing, that you are really a playing of this one energy, and there is nothing else but that--and that it is you--but for you to be always you would be an insufferable bore."