Category talk:Hippie movement

Removal of categories

User:Editor2020, please explain your changes. —Viriditas | Talk 19:58, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The Hippie movement is not a New religious movement, which is term with a specific meaning in the Sociology of religion.--Editor2020 (talk) 20:16, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm afraid you are mistaken. The hippie movement has been classified as a NRM by several scholars, most notably Timothy Miller, and this is true for other articles where you have removed the categories. —Viriditas | Talk 20:21, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I wanted to respond to your claim that the definition is specific to sociology. Since the filed of NRM is considered multidisciplinary, I'm not sure your statement holds up completely. —Viriditas | Talk 06:51, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Please provide a quotation.--Editor2020 (talk) 20:47, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I would be happy to do so. In the meantime, you can look at the hippie article. Can you also explain what you mean by the specific meaning given in the sociology of religion? That article said nothing about the definition of NRM. Could you provide one, appropriately sourced? Thank you. —Viriditas | Talk 01:31, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

The Hippie movement is not a New Religious Movement for one simple reason, it's not a religious movement.--Editor2020 (talk) 02:03, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

That statement shows that you have not done any research on hippies. If you had, you would have been aware of the unconventional religious nature of the subculture and how every source discusses it, from Pendergast, to Dudley, to Miller and many others. In general terms, Pendergast writes:

The counterculture movement was not expressly religious, at least not in conventional terms, but for many of its participants, life as a hippie was in some ways like belonging to a religion. Many people became hippies after having an experience, often under the influence of LSD, that converted them to a new set of beliefs or philosophy of life. Abandoning "straight" society, the hippie joined others who believed in peace, love, and togetherness. Unlike organized religions, there was no central rulemaking body and no book of religious teachings, but many hippies claimed that nature was their church and all the world their holy book...In the words of Timothy Miller, author of The Hippies and American Values, hippies rejected established religions and churches as "self-righteous centers of hypocrisy, stations for the blessing of the Establishment, wealthy organizations mainly interested in preserving themselves, havens for the narrow-minded, [and] anachronisms utterly irrelevant to modern life"...Like many other spiritual seekers during the 1960s, members of the counterculture explored Eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and were intrigued by the teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1911–), who in the mid-1960s brought a technique for concentration and reflection, called Transcendental Meditation, to the United States. Other people joined together and lived in communes, self-supporting rural communities that sometimes had spiritual components. Still others—especially those who were more easily persuaded—joined religious or seemingly religious cults, such as the Hare Krishnas and the Moonies (also called the Unification Church), and a few decided to follow Charles Manson...Like young people everywhere, hippies sought spiritual answers. Not surprisingly, hippies did so outside the conventional channels of family life and mainstream religions."

That's a very general view. Many authors go into further detail about the religious nature of the movement. —Viriditas | Talk 02:13, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Here's a quote. Not scientifically precise, but good enough for now. I'll get you a better one soon.

"Any religion originating in recent centuries having characteristic traits including eclecticism and syncretism, a leader who claims extraordinary powers, and a “countercultural” aspect. Regarded as outside the mainstream of society, NRMs in the West are extremely diverse but include millennialist movements (e.g., the Jehovah's Witnesses), Westernized Hindu or Buddhist movements (e.g., the Hare Krishna movement), so-called “scientific” groups (e.g., Scientology), and nature religions ( Neo-Paganism). In the East they include China's 19th-century Taiping movement ( Taiping rebellion) and present-day Falun Gong movement, Japan's Tenrikyo and PL Kyodan, and Korea's Ch'ondogyo and Unification Church. Some NRMs fade away or meet tragic ends; others, such as the Mormon church, eventually become accepted as mainstream.

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. quoted at,

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1B1-373377.html"

Please notice that all the groups mentioned are religions--Editor2020 (talk) 02:37, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

That some Hippies were religious and involved in a multitude of sometimes unorthodox religions does not make the Hippie Movement a New religious movement, in fact, it is proof of the opposite.--Editor2020 (talk) 02:48, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I'll dig up the quotes from Miller and others asap. I think the hippie movement meets the definition you give above. And you seem to have missed the part about hippies becoming religious after taking LSD (a hippie sacrament), and more importantly, creating communes and establishing new sects. The hippie movement was most certainly eclectic, syncretic, countercultural, outside the mainstream, and nature-oriented. Have you studied the hippie movement? I think it is amusing to note that hippies who attended Grateful Dead concerts widely referred to the experience as "going to church". —Viriditas | Talk 06:58, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Hippie movement as a new religion

"Many ethical systems are theological or religious in basis; if the hippies had an ethic, one many naturally ask whether or not they constituted a religious movement. The answer hinges mainly on how one defines religion...Definitions that involve such concepts as ultimate concern, however, could well include the hippies. The counterculture was a movement of seekers of meaning and value, a movement which thus embodied the historic quest of any religion. Like many dissenting religions, the hippies were enormously hostile to the religious institutions of the dominant culture, and they tried to find new and adequate ways to do the tasks the dominant religions failed to perform. Some outside observers regarded the hippies as religionists...Harvey Cox, for example, wrote..Hippieness represents a secular version of the historic American quest for a faith that warms the heart, a religion one can experience deeply and feel intensely. The love-ins are our 20th Century equivalent of the 19th Century Methodist camp meeings-with the same kind of fervor and the same thirst for a God who speaks through emotion and not through anagrams of doctrine. Of course, the Gospel that is preached differs somewhat in content, but then, content was never that important for the revivalist-it was the spirit that counted. Hippieness has all the marks of a new religious movement. It has its evangelists, its sacred grottoes, its exuberant converts.' Similarly, religion scholar William C. Shepherd found...'Since a set of symbols, certain ritual practices, and the production of social cohesion are all marks of religious systems, it is fair to say that our counter cultural young have developed a genuine form of religiousity, indeed a quite new form for the West because it does not include doctrines or truth claims about supersensual entitites.' Many within the counterculture itself also saw the movement as essentially a new religion...Jefferson Poland wrote, "we find ourselves (to our surprise) in a religious revival...' Ralph J. Gleason...believed that religiosity could not be ignored here or anywhere: "The need to believe is there. The knowledge is implicit in life itself and the desire to believe is so overwhelming that non-belief cannot be tolerated. It is part of the life support system and it must be there." - Miller, Timothy. (1991) The Hippies and American Values. University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 0870496948

"The "outer" aspects of religion are separable from true spirituality. Authentic spirituality, therefore, necessitates dropping out of institutional religion. This logic, whether expressly stated or not, permeated the psychedelic literature. A sizable number of Baby Boomers followed the logic to its conclusion and drifted away from the churches. And most never came back. This is not to say, however, that they had turned their backs upon religion altogether. Instead, they had arrived at an alternative, and more personally compelling, spiritual awakening." - Fuller, Robert C. (2000). Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History. Westview Press. ISBN 0813366127

"To many hippies the answer to the world's problems was for everyone simply to be "nice" to everyone else: "Make love, not war." In smoking pot they developed a ritual of sharing experiences of tranquillity and good fellowship. Passing the reefer from hand to hand had many of the elements of passing the communion cup among church brethren. As they sat casually about in silent harmony, relaxed, happy, and "mellow," they seemed to come in closer touch with each other and with a power of benevolence beyond themselves yet linking them to everyone else. Reversing the acquisitive, competitive-comparative values of the Protestant ethic, the hippie counterculture stressed sharing, giving, loving...In all these (and other) alternate life-styles and ritual performances there were conversion experiences comparable in power and effect to those in the Christian tradition...In many respects the rock concerts and festivals deserve comparison to the old camp meetings, where people entered into a special arena of religious enthusiasm with like-minded souls seeking release from confusion and ready to "let loose" in orgies of emotional enthusiasm...The high priests of these revivalistic ceremonies alternately mixed songs of love and songs of protest, which kept the emotions in constant tension. It was a new form of folk art; the words and music brought the varied feelings of unrest into articulate configurations that to outsiders (those not "with it") appeared to be little more than senseless clamor and cacophony. Rock music and folk songs expressed the various moods of the new-light movement but could give it no direction. Like a Pentecostal meeting, the Spirit gripped different people in different ways, and each was left to express it in the form in which it spoke to him or her..." - McLoughlin, William G. (1978). Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226560929

Psychedelic drug use as direct religious experience

"Most persons connected with the hippie movement never really elevated drugs to the point where they were themselves the object of religion. Instead, drugs were heralded as catalysts or "skillful means" for obtaining religious experience. Psychedelics were said to be vehicles to spiritual authenticity, not authenticity in and of themselves." - Fuller, Robert C. (2000). Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History. Westview Press. ISBN 0813366127

"As Masters and Houston explained, "When we examine those psychedelic experiences which seem to be authentically religious, we find that during the session the subject has been able to reach the deep integral level wherein lies the possibility of confrontation with a Presence variously described as God, Spirit, Ground of Being, Mysterium, Nnmen, Essence, and Ultimate or Fundamental Reality." [Stanislav Grof] wrote, "Everyone who has reached these levels develops convincing insights into the utmost relevance of the spiritual and religious dimensions in the universal scheme of things. Grof's model, like that constructed by Masters and Houston, appealed to many. A major part of the spiritual awakening of the sixties and seventies was the excitement of "discovery"...Psychedelics contributed to this excitement...psychedelics seemed to lend experimental confirmation to the kinds of metaphysical claims being made by those attracted to Eastern religions, the Western occult traditions, and the new human potential psychologies...Tuning in, then, was the key to enlightenment. Perhaps no one's life was more affected by tuning in than Huston Smith's...Smith's psychedelic illumination enabled him to see that Light was in all, all was in Light. Smith became increasingly fascinated with what he called the common vision of the world's religions-the vision of this emanationist cosmology. His lectures, workshops, and prolific publications all promoted the "perennial philosophy" that he was quite literally turned on to while visiting Timothy Leary." - Fuller, Robert C. (2000). Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History. Westview Press. ISBN 0813366127

"Lysergic acid diehtylamide provided the emotional excitement for the hippie religious experience. Dropping acid "blew the mind," cleared it of the "bad vibrations" of bourgeois society, producing psychedelic trips out of this world, demonstrating astonishing powers of awareness and sensibility within men and women that had been locked up by the repressive routines of bureaucratic life in school, business, and suburbia. The mass production of LSD after 1963 opened up a whole new realm of experience for millions of Americans. What "baptism by fire" did for the Pentecostalist and Zen satori did for the disciplined practitioner of Zen became immediately available at any time to anyone who could afford a couple of dollars for a "hit" or a "tab" of acid. To get "high" on LSD was to transcend this grey world and enter a many-splendored paradise..." - McLoughlin, William G. (1978). Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226560929

Unconventional syncretic approach

"Hippies tended to take unusual (by traditional American standards) approaches to religion, often emphasizing Eastern spiritual teachings, and they were often syncretistic, pursuing a sort of religiosity that combined elements ranging from Hindu mysicism to Neopaganism to Ouija boards. It's a fair guess that most hippies would not have been very welcome in most churches; for their part, the hippies were not interested in getting active in any conventional religious body." - Miller, Timothy. (1991) The Hippies and American Values. University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 0870496948

"The quest for personal enlightenment played a major role in the lives of many people involved in the counterculture. This was evidenced not only in the use of psychedelic drugs like LSD but in a widespread fascination with exotic forms of religious knowledge and experiences that fed into the larger critique of modern Western culture." - Fahlbusch, Erwin. Bromiley, Geoffrey William . (1998) The encyclopedia of Christianity. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. ISBN 0802824137

Religious leaders

"...a significant number of Baby Boomers looked to the apostles of the psychedelic revolution for spiritual direction. Alan Watts, Huston Smith, Allen Ginsberg, and Richard Alpert/Ram Dass were homegrown gurus...All four turned Americans' attention to Asian mysticism and the perennial philosophy long connected with the Western occult tradition. It was Leary, however, who made the clearest case for not needing to be attached to any kind of formal religion at all. A real religious experience, according to Leary, is "the ecstatic, incontrovertibly certain, subjective discovery of answers to four basic spiritual questions...the Power Question ("What is the ultimate power of the universe?"), the Life Question ("What is life? Why and where did it start?"), the Human Destiny Question ("Whence did humans come and where are we going?), and the Ego Question ("What am I? What is my place in the grander plan?"). In Leary's views, everything outside of these questions-rituals, dogmas, liturgical practices-is completely divorced from spirituality and is best seen as caught up in the corruptions of human institutions. The implication is that true spirituality is inward and personal." - Fuller, Robert C. (2000). Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History. Westview Press. ISBN 0813366127

"Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey became the high priests or gurus of this new form of spiritual ecstasy, and in spontaneous groups all around the country people found an alternative to Judeo-Christian worship and church brotherhood. For many it was a miraculous revelation; and though they never established formal organizations, they constituted a phenomenal new-light movement." - McLoughlin, William G. (1978). Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226560929

Hippie movement as shamanism

"The primitivism of the hippies was a clear refusal to accept the essential criminality of technocracy. It was in fact a celebration of the conceived ancient values of humanity. Roszak claims that their fascination with magic and ritual, tribal lore, and psychedelic experience were attempts to resucitate the shamanism of the past, understood to mean the communication of the powers of nature to the human community." - Geertz, Armin W. (2003) in Jacob Olupona, Jacob Obafẹmi Kẹhinde Olupọna. Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity. Chapter 2. "Can we move beyond primitivism? On recovering the indigenes of indigenous religions in the academic study of religion." ISBN 0415273196. p. 54.

Social group category

Please see Social group and tell me how the Hippie movement fits the definition. One of the vital characteristics of a group is that they are interacting. How did members of a worldwide movement interact? Social movement yes, social group, no.--Editor2020 (talk) 21:05, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Hippies were known for traveling, but I doubt the vast majority of them traveled that much. It looks like the article hippie should be categorized as a social group. User:Gilliam added that category to this page. I'll go ahead and remove it. —Viriditas | Talk 01:23, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Dreadlocks?

We is no Link to Dreadlocks? It's one of the unique Symbols of Hippies beyond the Rastafaris and brought from the indian Sadhus in 1970s. It has to be here! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:8109:10BF:CCA8:80A3:A7D8:CFD9:314 (talk) 09:14, 27 November 2016 (UTC)