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Quote by: arielmessenger  It has, only it's now so embedded in mainstream American culture nobody but old hippies know it's there.
History may not record this but it's true--the countercultural revolution that happened in the '60's was defeated from within by a split that happened that was memorialized at Chicago when police wacked Alan Ginsberg with his flower outstretched and the Chicago Seven were locked up.
The Vietnam War and the Left ruined the '60's radical social change movement by reattaching the counterculture movement back to the same old world at war with people taking sides as combatants one way or another--where its remained ever since--young people who take on the hippie garb do not have the old hippie attitudes-they are political protestors who will in a few years join the ranks of the mainstream one way or another--seen it happen too many times to know what we have today is not the same--the utopian idealism is gone.
Now that I know where the Abrahamic religions really started in India, I highly suspect some ancient Vedic gurus were lofted into peaks of highest consciousness at an early time in human civilization with the aid of the two powerful psychedelic plants right in the area--cannabis indica and opium poppies.  |
There is a hard-to-get book by Terrence McKenna called Food of the Gods (not to be confused with the H G Wells classic) where he traces the history of how psychedelic plants and mushrooms were used by early religions and so forth. He extended the study originated by Whitehead on that topic. Some of that information can be found on-line
Amazon.co.uk: Food of the Gods: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs and Human Evolution: Books: Terence McKenna