As a young man, according to the music newsletter The Broadside of Boston, he spent a number of years traveling the country and learning harmonica and banjo from such musicians as Brother Percy Randolph and Obray Ramsey.
Irwin Silber, editor of Sing Out Magazine, wrote that Lyman’s "mournful and lonesome harmonica" provided "the most optimistic note of the evening".
[6] In 1966, supported and funded by Mekas, Lyman published his first book, Autobiography of a World Savior, which set out to reformulate spiritual truths and occult history in a new way.
In 1971, Lyman published Mirror at the End of the Road, derived from letters he wrote during his formative years, starting in 1958 from his initial attempts to learn and become a musician, through the early 1960s as his life widened and deepened musically and personally.
The final entries, from 1966, simply express the profound joys and deepest losses which defined and gave his life direction and meaning in the years to come.
The Fort Hill Community, to observers in the mid-to-late Sixties, combined some of the outward forms of an urban hippie commune with a neo-transcendentalist[10] socio-spiritual structure centered on Lyman, the friends he had attracted, and the large body of his music and writings.
[11] Members of Lyman's Community briefly included the young couple Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, two non-actors who had been discovered and cast by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for the lead roles in his second English-language feature Zabriskie Point.
Michael Kindman, founder of the East Lansing underground newspaper The Paper, briefly worked on Avatar and remained with the group for five years.
[12] Journalist and poet Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy rock magazine and author of Das Energi, spent a few months on Fort Hill.
Funds were used to purchase houses in the Fort Hill area for members to live in, construction tools, and vehicles, along with sound and video recording equipment for Lyman's use.
Lyman seemed to believe that one could only be truly creative when one was "real" or "awake" – defined in practice as experiencing intense pain or anger – and that fear and cowardice caused one to remain "asleep" or even to die.
It contained local news, political and cultural essays, commentary and more personal contributions, writing, and photography from various members of the Fort Hill Community, including Lyman.
Throughout the first year of its existence, it cultivated a national audience and many more people visited Fort Hill at that time, some eventually staying and becoming part of the community.
His writings, along with others in the publications, could be poetic, philosophical, humorous, and confrontational, sometimes simultaneously, as Lyman at various times claimed to be: the living embodiment of Truth, the greatest man in the world, Jesus Christ, and an alien entity sent to Earth in human form by extraterrestrials.
According to both Felton and Kindman, Family member Owen deLong applied for and eventually got a job as program director at alternative community radio station KPFK in Los Angeles.
Although he had not mentioned Lyman or American Avatar, deLong immediately began taking the station in what management and staff considered a peculiar direction.
[9][12] On The Dick Cavett Show in 1970, Mark Frechette said Lyman's group was not a commune: "It's a 'community', but the purpose of the community is not communal living.
The family had homes in Kansas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Martha’s Vineyard, each with a house for adults and one for children.
"[20]: 49 A member of the Fort Hill Community, speaking to Walsh under condition of anonymity, said that Lyman "purposefully overdosed on drugs in Los Angeles, California, sometime in 1978" following a long illness.
The skills acquired in refurbishing the structures of the Family compound led to the founding of the Fort Hill Construction Company.