The Psychedelic Revolution

here's what i think about that -- a simple story:

Most of us “Children of the ’60s” came from middle-class American families with middle-class American roots and middle-class American values ingrained in us since childhood. When the time was ripe, we threw off our parents’ values and society’s norms in an attempt to be free from all the chains of hypocrisy and greed that were consuming America. But there was one thing that kept all the LSD trips, all the intellectual enlightenment, all the swelling emotions charged by the meaningful songs of our prophets from breaking those chains. The one thing we lacked was the power to break free from the rotten, selfish seed that was passed on to us from our middle-class fathers. Though we could not see this at the time (we were too caught up in the excitement of the moment), we would soon enough.

As we young hippies got older, our desire for middle-class comforts began to outweigh all the “enlightenment” we had received. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” was a forewarning of what we’d be like by forty. It proved to be true. By the time middle age arrived, we were no longer out to change the world. Our voice had been silenced. What our parents had wanted for us all along - security, success, becoming a valuable asset to the prized heritage of middle-class America c" was now ours. We’d become a part of the American Dream we had protested against in our youth. Our greatest challenges now came from trying to justify our “yuppie” success or explaining away the compromise of getting our own thirty-acre kingdoms.

Yes, the hippie exterior eventually wore off, exposing the roots that were still there. Like it or not, we’ve become a generation of “hippie-crits.” Being a hippie-crit is like wearing a mask that you think is really you, but when you pull it off, you see that underneath the mask, you’re really no different than your daddy. You act like someone who detests the establishment, pretending you want nothing to do with it, while all along living in what you condemn.

A hippie-crit is a person who presents himself as someone from the ’60s Movement, who prides himself in nostalgic memories and cynical comments about the future, but all the while compromising his integrity for the comfort of the middle class. A hippie-crit is worse than a hypocrite in many ways, because as a ’60s hippie he proclaimed the ideal of a better way, an alternative to the 9 to 5 job, and as a ’90s hippie-crit he is firmly entrenched in what he once scorned. Despite the words he speaks, he has compromised the goals he once sought.

Our parents’ view of life was one of hard work, faithfulness to wife and family, and living by the golden rule. They were actually a lot closer to the Garden than us because they lived more closely to the covenant of conscience that all mankind has within to lead them back to their Creator. At least they made no bones about working hard to support their families (that’s us!) ?and for the most part, they gave us a standard of loyalty and faithfulness that we could at least remember in the height of all our rebellion.

After all is said and done, the love of self-life has proven to be the failure of the Movement. No student is greater than his teacher, but when he is fully trained, he will be just like his teacher. You are what you are. You can’t escape the seed in you that’s been passed on to you from your father. That nature is passed on from one generation to the next. It’s inherent. The birth of the Movement came from a stirring of the heart, but nothing in the ’60s had the power to deliver us from the death grip human nature had on us.

Remember walking down the street stoned out of our minds, thinking we’re different from the Establishment around us? Remember the pride we had when we ridiculed the guy in the three-piece suit and laughed to ourselves, thinking we were free? In the midst of a scene like this, did it ever dawn on us that we were just like him or realize that what was in us was no different from what was in our parents? To see this is to take the first step toward the open door of freedom.

There can be no true Movement unless we find a way to escape from those corrupt, selfish spiritual roots. As mature, middle-aged ex-hippies, we ought to be able to know this by now. But what can we do about it? Our only escape from these roots is to experience a true renaissance, a rebirth, a regeneration of our human spirit. Where can we find someone with the authority to bring about this renaissance? Where is the man who is free from the curse of self-life? By definition, love is giving yourself up or laying down your life for someone else. So, someone with the authority to lead such a Movement would also have to be someone who loved. The life he lived would be full of love, not merely in words, but in actions, right?

 

What is the point you are trying to convey with that story?
Just because most "hippies" returned to the establishment and such as portray in your story, that doesn't mean they are the same as they were before ingesting LSD.
Not to mention that a lot of the stuff relayed in that story has little to do with psychedelics and everything to do with being a teen to early twenty's year old.
You may not realize that aspect until you yourself have grown past young adulthood.

Every person I have ever heard or talked to about LSD all agree on one thing, it changes a person, for good or ill, if you try LSD, your world view will never be the same again.

It's those little personal paradigm shifts that I'm talking about. Of course most of the hippy generation went out and got jobs, got degrees, yada,yada, BUT, I guarantee each one of them carries something with them from their LSD experiences.
I just think maybe you dont see some of the changes that have occurred since the psychedelic era of the sixties for two main reasons;

1) Your just simply too young, many of the subtle changes of which I speak had already become entrenched into the collective psyche of the nation/world, by the time you made an apperance on the planet, so you dont notice it because for you that is how it has always been.

2) Your looking for some dramatic, drastic shift, that you can point at and declare as a product of a "psychedelic revolution". Ain't gonna happen my friend.
Seriously if what I'm saying isn't true do you really think we would have research going on with LSD,DMT,MDMA,marijuana, all legitimate research being carried out by people who lived through the 60's and managed to keep hold of some of the ideals and ideas.

Do you think thier would be hybrid cars if there wasn't the "psychedelic revolution" 40 years ago?
Desos you need to look at the big picture by means of the small and subtle changes in attitude and our collective paradigm.

 

That is true that every person has probably been changed by LSD to an extent but the way I'm interpreting what Desos is saying is more like your first paragraph. I am to young to know what people thought of LSD in the 60's but from my reading and watching documentaries a certain percentage of users viewed it more as a sacrament, and with those drugs and ideals they were going to change the world. Well, looking back on it now it appears that LSD was just that generations drug of choice, a youthful escape from the future they saw themselves taking as they became more and more like their parents, really nothing more and nothing less. So LSD has really become like a nostalgic artifact of that time like cocaine in the 70's and I guess MDMA in the 80's/90's.

While the drugs and ideals may have helped shaped culture and created new inventions and ideas, the culture still firmly remains.

 

the point is that the drugs are the tools. we are the vessels. i don't really care if we have hybrid cars, or even if psychedelics became legal. because in the end it still comes down to the simple fact that our cars are fueled by the blood of our soldiers, and our cities are outgrowths of enviromental destruction, and our safety and wellbeing comes at the cost of personal freedoms.

 

There is no price on well being. It is wishful thinking that carries the price.

 

Black holes cause permanent destruction of all data that enters them.

 

Wow! That seems like your contradicting yourself and not getting what I said. You say you hate cities because of the destruction of nature, but you don't care if we have hybrid cars?

It's not our cars that are fueled by blood, it's the economy that has oil as one of the major monetary resources. Since the beginning of civilization economies have been fueled and maintained by militaristic might and blood.
Why are you shocked by it now? Because as I stated too you a year ago, it is YOU who have emotionally grown past childhood and can perceive morality and have a more developed sense of righteous indignation at the injustices and atrocities you are now newly aware of. They were always there, you just didn't notice.
That whole revolutionary mentality of needing to bring about change is part and parcel of growing up and going through the teens and twenties.
Every single person I know has gone through this phase to one degree or another. Some may just write a letter or two to some politician, some my try to blow up the politician, some just rant and bitch in forums, but everyone goes through this phase regardless.

What happens when we grow past this phase isn't that we no longer see the wrongs, just that we start to realize that to actually affect lasting change it has to be done within the framework with which we have to work.
Radical protests and festivals make headlines for sure, but no lasting change, as was noted in the story you presented. Lasting change comes slowly, and through patience and perseverance.
Don't get discouraged because you don't see the changes you feel we need manifest immediately, but rather fight on for changes that will make your children's lives better. It often takes a generation or two for such changes to become solidified.

Honestly do you think Martin Luther King Jr. ever thought that a black man would be president in his lifetime (provided he expected to live out a normal life)? I seriously doubt it, but he knew that the small spark that was started would only grow until the fire could no longer be ignored. 40 years later there is a black man in the white house.

Keep up your path and fight, just know that some of the things you would like to come to fruition won't be realized until long after we are both dust.

Good to get back into the fray with you, Desos:cheers2:

 

We have data going in but no data coming out is a stretch, whether or not black holes are permanent we have no data on at all.

 

transformation is my point; some occurances of it we call "bad", "destruction", etc, when really birth would be malignant without death.

 

Yup, if it weren't for all the wonderful advancements in science and medicine that make life so much more comfortable and affords us so much leisure time where would we be?

I mean infant mortality rates would still in the 40-50% range, average lifespan would still be 45-50, there wouldn't be over 6 billion people on this rock, there wouldn't be the resulting pollution from that many people, etc.,etc.

Thats what is so great about this universe we exist in, everything is a fucking catch-22 situation, your damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Ain't it all just grand!
And here we puny little shits sit trying to make sense of it all, or more accurately try to cram it all into a convenient little box that we can handle called philosophy or religion or science or whatever.

Aren't we a sight to behold as we thump our chests and proudly proclaim with hands on hips that we have the ANSWER or at least we think we are on the path towards it.

Many has been the time after a session of mental masturbation in these forums that I have sat back after reviewing the topic of discussion and my and others comments and laugh my ass off at how arrogant and asinine we sound as we try to decipher all that is before us.

This one claims this to be the way, while that one says no, no, your mistaken, mine is the path to follow.

Humans are so funnny.

Yup, life is a joke..............................................being played on us.
Thats ok, I enjoy a good laugh even at my own expense.

 

lizards..

 

i thought that way for a while, but then i realised that in the process of falling into that framwork we end up making compromises that we should not be willing to make.

"The peace movement is a movement whose members are still being crippled by the society from which we are trying to free ourselves and others. Contrary to some interpretations, the movement's erraticism and inconsistency tell us more about the sickness of the society in which we are in revolt..."

because when you work within that framework, then your efforts are more often than not abused and misconstrued.

there are avenues open to every individual that would provide to them the things that are needed to make real change in society. the question is whether they are willing to see it or not.

yep.

 

I do agree with the above, but that is the ideal, we exist in the real and have to make adjustments to our implementations of the ideal into the real.

 

The real framework we have to work with is the condition of embodiment. There is no mechanism for inducing change "from within". Any attempt to change the system is regarded as a threat to the organism and we are immediately attacked by the white, or "right" corpuscle, and things fester around us till we are spit out or it dissolves our intent to the point that we forget why we came. Growth occurs, a flower unfolds when it is time. I know that infinite patience brings immediate results and limited patience brings limited results.

 

You know, one other point that often gets overlooked is we all associate the 60's with the psychedelic revolution, but it actually started in the 40's-50's. When many from fields of science, art, philosophy, religion and common folk experienced LSD. That is when the ball started rolling.
You view the psychedelic revolution as the radical, dramatic "be-ins" and peace-love-joy type of shit.

I don't, I view it as the ways in which our views of ourselves, our world, our rights and possibilities that lay before us as a species have changed as a result of exposure to these substances. The paradigm shifts that have taken place since the discover of LSD are many and often unnoticed.
That is what I think of when I think of the psychedelic revolution, not hippies and flower power.

As far as the peace movement deal, sounds great, but in reality sometimes you have to kick some ass to enjoy the rewards of peace.

 

if we stay to true the ideal then the ideal becomes the real. starting with yourself, and then others will follow if what you are doing has any truth to it.

what we can't do is change the system. but what we can do is create our own. if there is enough truth to our own system then it will be empowered, and if there isn't, then it will fail. that is what is happening to the system of mainstream society, it is failing. reality works more on the principle of truth than it does on any kind of survival system or economical system. if we live by the truth of our divine nature then we will not need to worry about anything else. the danger comes, through misconstrued and false truth. because that kind of thing can endure for a while, but not eternally.

 

but birth and death only occurs as the result of an imbalance. it serves to swing the scales to set and fix the imbalance. if we could instead understand the imbalance and fix it, then there would be no resulting action from the imbalance in the first place. no?

 

Of the state we call death, we have no information. I don't see any imbalance. The only perspective that we have is a living one. What we call birth and death can best be described as respiration. We breath in , we breath out. The tide rises and the tide falls. This rise and fall is an oscillation between two physical propositions, one is absolute zero and the other the speed of light. As we approach absolute zero things slow down, as we approach the speed of light time slows down. These absolute extremes are not violated in time. In other words things never come to a complete stop. There is morning and evening the first day. There is morning and evening the second day. These days are not divided by day and night. Day and night are both the spinning globe. The true movement occurs during the transitioning period, morning and evening.

 

What imbalance our you referring to that results in birth and death?

 

They do? I was under the intuitive impression that birth and death are the foundation for all reality; or put another way, that birth and death are aspects of what we may call the Ultimate Archetype, which one can take as the single entity/phenomena/reality that it is (a coin) or, a path which you choose over and over again, to split the basal foundation of all into two seperate, discrete, apparently competing one-sided coins (a geometric and metaphysical absurdity).

I would love to hear why you think birth and death are nothing short of the most sacred and natural occurances in existence. You show powerful christian roots in your thoughts; do you forget the significance of the *death* of christ? His birth was miraculous in the mundane world, but his death was miraculous even in the divine world.

Again, mundane = divine, I'm just trying to adapt my thoughts to your axiomatic framework, which is extremely dense.