Hi Platt, Platt:
> >From Wiki: "Hippie philosophy also credits the religious and spiritual > teachings of Jesus Christ, Hillel the Elder, Buddha, Mazdak, St. Francis > of Assisi, Henry David Thoreau, and Gandhi." With all those influences > the result is bound to be "woolly." There are still some hippies around, > mostly in California. But the movement is largely kaput. Khoo: A hippie came by a number of years ago. He had this website on tantra yoga and they do all this raindance peacefest kind of stuff out of Oregon I think. He came by connected with the Raja Yoga community here and conducted some much appreciated sessions, in my apartment where he stayed for a few weeks. Yes he had an American Indian name Glowing Feather and an Italian one that I dont recall. Now he is happily married in Florida and spends half the year in Costa Rica. I guess like Glowing Feather, the rest of the hippies moved on to become fathers and mothers, raise families and in their own way am living the American Dream. I am trying to investigate the possibility that hippie culture has indeed been integrated fully into the American mainstream in more acceptable forms and versions. The have in a sense lost their "woolliness" and now appear in forms you may not recognise. Anyway I am reading from a book by R C Zaehner, Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe published in 1972 and quote this paragraph when describing the Taoists in the Chapter on LSD and Zen on the Confucian-Tao antagonism: " Against all this the Taoists reacted violently, for they were quite literally the drop-outs of their time - anti-intellectual, anti-organisational, anti-status seeking, anti-moralist. Indeed the following lines fromt he Tao Te Ching (19) might be taken as the hippies' charter: Banish wisdom, discard knowledge, And the people will be benefited a hundredfold, Banish human kindness, discard morality, And the people will be dutiful and compassionate, Banish skill, discard profit, And theives and robbers will disappear. If when these things are done they find life too plain and unadorned, Then let them have accessories; Give them simplicity to look at, the Uncarved Block to hold, Give them selflessness and fewness of desires For the Taoist, every advance in civilisation, every technical achievement, is a cutting and hacking at the Uncarved Block, that primitive state of unity in which man felt to be at one with all Nature and his fellow men" . Zaehner goes on: " The Taoists made themselves ridiculous because they dropped out of the dominant civilisation of the day; the hippies too make themselves ridiculous because they are trying to do what can only be done without trying" Rather a radical observarion but I found it interesting that he compared hippies to the Taoists, and that the book was published one year after the hippie era was deemed to have ended. Today I read that several of the hippie era, maybe themselves hippies too are now liberal politicians and several of their ideas have been adopted into mainstream American culture and society. If that is so, thats quite a lot of progress for hippie culture. Now I know hippies have been discussed before but we need to discuss them again in reference to the perception of Buddhism being woolly and all that... Okay, I understand the rest of your questions and my questions to you of them were meant for Bo to answer. So we will wait for that. Best regards Khoo Hock Aun Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
