What Did The Hippies Want?
by Alicia Bay
Laurel
November 19, 2001
We wanted intimacy--
not a neighborhood where you didn't know anyone on the block,
or you competed, kept up with the Joneses.
A hunter-gatherer or early agricultural
community meant that people lived,
worked and sought deeper contact with the holy spirit as a group,
and they all knew one another, from cradle to grave.
I used to call my hippie friendships "a horizontal extended
family,"
as opposed to the ancient tribal extended family,
which was multi-generational, and therefore, vertical.
We wanted a culture which acknowledged the human body, not just
for sex,
but to hug each other, to be naked without shame,
to revere the body with natural foods,
beneficial exercise, herbs, baths, massage, deep understanding.
This was not part of the culture from which we came.
We wanted a culture that thrived on gift-giving.
We hitchhiked, shared our food and drugs, gave away our possessions.
People who could afford to buy land invited others who could not
to live there.
We opened free stores, free clinics, free kitchens,
not just in the Haight, but everywhere we went.
We wanted be living proof that God(dess) was taking care of us
and therefore there was no need to hoard.
We wanted to live without the constraints of time.
We wanted to wake up each day and decide what would be the most
fun to do that day
--or just find out as it went along.
We wanted to go with the flow, follow our bliss, be here now.
This was in complete opposition to the culture from which we came.
We wanted new ways to value one another, rather than by wealth,
status, looks, achievements, machismo, as our culture of origin
had taught us, and continues to teach us through the media.
We wanted to value one another for being lovable and real.
We valued spiritual depth, which we referred to as "heavy."
We admired one another for being happy.
We admired those who offered selfless service or peaceful resolution
of conflict.
We wanted a spirituality that actually caused you to grow as a
person,
not one in which people attended religious gatherings for social
status.
We wanted to be guided by our own Inner Spirits, rather than by
priests.
We thirsted for the spiritual awareness and grace we experienced
on psychedelics, without psychedelics, or in addition to them.
Many hippies would spend their last cent on a weekend workshop
that promised to "change your life forever."
That was how so many gurus found followers in those days.
We wanted to live in harmony with the earth,
the plants and animals, the indigenous peoples of the earth,
with each other, with ourselves.
We were the fuel behind the rapid expansion of the environmental
movement.
We experimented with living arrangements that we thought would
harmonize with nature.
We sought out indigenous tribal elders as our teachers.
We wanted to make the things we wore and used with our hands,
grow our food and medicine, feel all kinds of weather--
all the experiences our modern urban lives had excluded
in the name of convenience and comfort.
We wanted to live on the road, have adventures,
build things that hadn't been built before, and live in them.
We wanted to live our mythic selves,
give ourselves names that resonated with our souls,
dress in costumes that expressed our dreams,
do daring deeds, dance as if no one was looking,
decorate our homes with magical things,
listen to music that took us out of ordinary reality
into altered states of awareness.
We wanted to see life without violence.
We wanted media that contained truth.
Some of us risked our lives to find out what the government was
doing and let the underground press know.
We wanted to talk about things in print that we were not allowed
to discuss in our culture of origin.
We wanted to live without stupid, arbitrary rules, either for
ourselves or for our children.
Some of our children, as adults today,
say they wish we had been more protective of them, or offered
more structure.
We only knew what we endured,
being as culturally different from our culture of origin as Chinese
are from Italians,
and punished for it, and wished to spare our children these experiences.
However, some portion of kids raised by hippie parents
grew up to be hippies themselves.
At that point, one can say, a new culture was born and continues.
Please visit Alicia's Tao
of Teachers Profile.
You
will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness
consists of.
You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
Albert Camus
Slave Economy or Tribal Living?
Author Unknown
Centuries-old cultural conditioning has given us a nasty neurosis:
the belief that happiness must be "earned".
It can be "earned" only by enduring unpleasantness (eg
work, pain, misery).
But how do you know if you've endured enough unpleasantness to deserve
happiness?
Another unspoken game rule:
"responsible adults" can never endure enough unpleasantness
to truly deserve happiness.
Laid on top of the first neurosis is the idea that spending money
will make you happy.
This is toffee coating on a bad puritan apple.
If you spend enough money to give you the (advertised) conditions
for happiness,
the neurosis emerges in the form of apparently random worries, guilt,
"feeling shitty", etc.
Worrying is the easiest and most popular way to negate happiness.
So: we never stop working,
we never stop spending money,
we're never really happy-ideal conditions,
coincidentally, for a certain type of slave economy.
Thoughts
& Quotes
by Timothy Leary
"My advice to people today is as follows:
If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous
system seriously,
if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy
process seriously,
you must turn on, tune in, and drop out."
"drop out, turn on,
then come back and tune it in...
and then drop out again,
and turn on,
and tune it back in...
it's a rhythm...
most of us think God made this universe in nature-
subject object-predicate sentences...
turn on, tune in, drop out...
period, end of paragraph.
Turn the page...
it's all a rhythm...
it's all a beat.
You turn on, you find it inside, and then you have to come back
(since you can't stay high all the time) and you have to build
a better model.
But don't get caught - don't get hooked -
don't get attracted by the thing you're building, cause...
you gotta drop out again.
It's a cycle.
Turn on, tune in, drop out.
Keep it going, keep it going...
the nervous system works that way...
gotta keep it flowing, keep it flowing..."
"It must be emphasized that the evolution from fourth-circuit
gravity
to fifth-circuit levity is much, much more than a struggle between
generations.
The DNA strategy calls for continuous acceleration of the genetic
script,
and evolution has never happened faster than at present.
The bitterness of the old species grows increasingly paranoid,
violent, vengeful."
"I love topics the Establishment says are taboo.
When I found out I was terminally ill I was thrilled.
You've got to approach your dying the way you live your life
- with curiosity, with hope, with fascination,
with courage and with the help of your friends....
Death is life's greatest event."
"Acid is not for every brain -
only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome,
hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences.
This elitism is totally self-determined.
Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please
abstain."
"There are three side effects of acid:
enhanced long-term memory,
decreased short-term memory,
and I forget the third."
"Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow men."
"Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow man from altering his
or her own consciousness."
"Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at
the top."
"If you don't like what you're doing,
you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove."
"In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they
did after feudalism.
You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk
show."
"Learning how to operate a soul takes
time."
"Science is all metaphor."
"The universe is an intelligence test"
"We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history.
But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go."
"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition."
"You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind."
"Your mythic guide must be one who has solved the death-rebirth
riddle."
Please visit our Timothy
Leary Tribute
Paul
Krassner's Blog
"The Legacy of Timothy Leary"
Why Tribal Living?
1.
Tribal living is the logical end result of brotherly love.
Love demands gathering up into groups as it grows.
Soon nothing but daily contact will bring happiness between
the brethren as their love grows.
2. It is the most economical way of life.
The expenses are shared by many, and purchases can be in wholesale
or volume.
3. This is the only way to liberate the land.
Many people putting money into a purchase fund can quickly
buy land.
One person usually has a difficult time.
4. As we grow in spiritual things, we realize that private
possessions are a millstone around our neck.
Yet we must have the tools as soon as you feel that gentle
call from Mother Nature that lets you know that you are ready.
As Wise People we must be ready to help others when they desire
to join a tribe.
We must have more than mere book larnin.
We must know how to apply The Wisdom Teachings of right-thinking
and healthy-living
for the body, mind, and spirit to our lives, and how to guide
others to learn to apply it to theirs.
We must know how to organize tribes efficiently for survival,
how to maintain cooperation in the tribes, and how to live
during the days of tribulation.
In electronic engineering, one schemes, computes, and draws
schematics of a new electronic gadget,
then takes it to the bench and builds one to see why it wont
work.
No matter how good the planning, a group of people still has
to try their ideas, remove the bugs, and make it work.
Their experiences then save later tribes from the same mistakes.
This is what is happening now.
The tribes are beginning to form.
-From the teachings of Father Eli-
The
Hermitary
Please Visit: Communes-Past
and Present!
