What do you think about the hippie culture?
Last question of the night.
It's a bizarre one.
I don't really have an answer, no?
Right, the hippie culture.
The hippie culture, not that I was a part of it, but I did read a lot about it and I've got pictures to attest to the fact that I was a wannabe hippie with bell bottoms and long hair and drugs, well, soft drugs anyway, and free love.
I remember going to these folk festivals with my parents who, and my father, they were both hippies, no?
We'd go to these folk festivals and eventually I managed to hook up with a whole bunch of women
And I think some of them liked me, and most of them were just kind of putting up with me.
But we'd walk around kind of dazed with our arms around each other, and everyone...
My parents got really scared because they thought we were having... They thought I was going to get someone pregnant or something.
My father came up to me with a bunch of condoms.
Anyway, this is maybe too much information.
Point!
Far too much information.
Sorry about that.
The point is I do have something to say about the hippie culture.
Because...
I think I do have some ownership of the term from my past even though I wasn't during the 60s I was about as hippie as you could get in the place and time that I grew up
So, two things.
First of all, the love aspect is great.
The free love, the peace, the whole John Lennon stuff, the things that John Lennon stood for after he left the Beatles, because he was really one of the epitomes of the hippie culture, I think.
Yeah, I don't know.
You know, this, all you need is love, is one.
But his later stuff, like, all we are saying is give peace a chance, that kind of stuff.
So some of these concepts are really good, and really beneficial.
Now, the problem is...
Love is not all you need.
It's not enough.
And when you still have lots of defilements, the reality is not like the concepts.
Now, you might say that they stole some of that from Hinduism, because there was a lot of the influx of Hinduism.
Zen Buddhism also was big in those times, which would have brought Buddhist principles of peace and
enlightenment letting go giving up freedom for example and so what you find found in the hippie culture was a lot of angry selfish indulgent people who really didn't have the peace happiness and
freedom that they were talking about.
John Lennon's a good example.
Many times he was a violent individual.
He was not a good example of, and there's a quote he gave, he said, I'm so full of anger, that's why I'm on about peace all the time.
It's because of how much anger I have inside.
So he actually tried to do meditation.
They did a lot of drugs in India and meditation.
And so...
It's not adequate.
There was no core to the hippie culture, to the hippie movement, even though they thought they had good principles, you know, core principles.
There was not enough enlightenment in it, so the minds of the people were not pure.
It just became a feel-good hedonistic movement, which is how we took it, how I was, obviously very hedonistic.
And so as a result, many of the people who were ex-hippies ended up becoming corporate and buying into society because it was just a fad.
The hardcore hippies became the yippies, the Abbie Hoffman generation.
angry, Abbie Hoffman who said, it's time for the flower children to grow thorns.
And so they became violent and they tried to secede from, they actually did secede from the United States of America.
It's quite an interesting story.
And failed miserably because of the anger and the violence and the suffering.
So it was an influx of many good qualities, but it's also a good example of how
Even positive qualities aren't enough.
Even positive qualities have to be let go of.
If you cling to positive qualities, you'll just end up becoming as angry as people who cling to negative qualities.
So this idea of peace put them at war with the rest of the world, or with the rest of America, or with government, for example.
People who hold peace rallies, right?
anti-war activists and so on which I think is a lesson that was learned and so when you see these Occupy Wall Street demonstrations you actually feel a little bit more confident about them because they seem to have learned something and they're much more Buddhist which is really cool you see them all sitting in meditation in the park for example
as you know they did in the 60s, but I would say there's probably less, I don't know, I mean, let's hope this is one of the lessons, or this is one of the lessons we should learn, and if people out there are involved in things like Occupy Wall Street or so on, you know, it's really a bad premise, and it's not really Buddhist to occupy anything
or to strive to force anything or to even get caught up and buy into this process at all, to even concern ourselves with it.
But for people living in society, the lesson we can learn is to
to internalize it, to actually be the piece that we're railing on about.
So be the change that you wish to see in the world.
And if there had been more of an emphasis on purity and less of an emphasis on love, I suppose,
then people would... You know, it's like getting your priorities wrong.
The whole emphasis on the qualities of mind of an enlightened being, as opposed to the emphasis on becoming enlightened.
Because only an enlightened being has pure love, pure compassion.
For the rest of us, it's tainted.
And trying to develop love is... This is why we don't...
encourage for most people to cultivate loving-kindness meditation as an intensive practice.
Because if your mind is not pure, it becomes corrupted.
If you start sending love out to people of the opposite gender or people who you're attracted to, then this is what it becomes.
This is how gurus arise.
They teach love and then they end up sleeping with their students.
This was the Zen Center of San Francisco, San Francisco Zen Center.
Very famous place.
And then they found out that this guy was having affairs with all of his students.
And he was an alcoholic besides.
So that's what I would say about the hippie generation.
It's nothing profound, I suppose, but nothing that people probably don't think themselves as Buddhists.
But I would say it's because of the lack of wisdom, the lack of understanding.
it was kind of a seems like it's kind of a everyone on board kind of thing get everyone to get involved with the movement and to just be happy as opposed to requiring being disciplined being disciplined and requiring
the purity of mind.
So it ended up, I think, getting derailed.
If it was ever on rails, I don't know.
But anyway.