![]() Overlapping with the Bohemian craftspeople, it was not identical. Then there was the Beat Generation of the Fifties. I asked my mother what they were and she said they were crackpots I determined then and there that when I grew up I was going to be a crackpot. In those days, they were generally gathered around the entrances of the local health food stores. I recall seeing them when I was a child - my nose pressed against the car window as we drove through the environs of Hollywood. Gary Snyder insists in his writings that their tradition goes back in West Coast history past the turn of the century. People like them had been in existence in California at least since the early Forties. Playing music, singing folk songs and dancing whenever they felt like it, they did not seem especially gaudy in their colorful clothes. A natural sensuality appeared in their body movements that did not seem distracting. In their conversation they were knowledgeable without seeming pompous. Self-styled gypsies who lived in the canyons and foothills and desert areas up and down the coast from Los Angeles, they were tanned, wiry and weathered. Self-sufficient individuals who lived by means of their craft, whether it was leather carving or pottery or one of a dozen other skills, they were bearded and long haired in the years before anyone employed by a corporation was permitted to look so outlandish. What could be gathered about the people who came there to peddle their wares was significant. That it was less commercialized was only part of the difference. As a custom it survives even now, but before the media discovered the hippies it was not the same. More recent traditions also influenced what was coming to be.Įvery year near Thousand Oaks, California, was something called a Renaissance Faire. Among the people in the Haight-Ashbury that Alan Watts did not want to see named were many scholars of Zen. Neither was it easily co-opted nor did it degenerate into superstition. Zen remained alive and vigorous for many more generations than would otherwise have been possible. Although such responses might baffle the student, they did not encourage him to glibly pigeon-hole the Doctrine. Zen is called Zen, but when the monk asks the master, “What is Zen?” he does not receive a definition but a whack on the head, or a mundane remark, or a seemingly unrelated story. We intended, however, to avoid abstractions that short-circuit thought. We were not making an effort in either direction. For in those days what we called ourselves was not to obscure what we were, and what we were was open to experience.īecoming hung up on avoiding names, of course, can be as misleading as being named, classified and forgotten. Bohemians, Beatniks, mutants, freaks and groovy people were names used with due caution. Between a hard-bopping hipster and a gentle flower child there was a distinction, and neither label stretched to include us all. As a social entity we were not yet stereotyped. Alan Watts said that as soon as somebody discovered a name for the phenomenon, it would kill it.Īlthough we sometimes called ourselves hip or hipsters or hippies or flower children, at that time those were just names among many that seemed occasionally fitting. At one point they chatted about the flamboyant new people populating the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. They hadn’t decided to be the Love Generation they had decided to put aside striving for appearances.Īn interview was published in the Los Angeles Oracle, a transcript of a conversation between Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder and Alan Watts. Before then it was more or less unconditioned, and it consisted of people who believed in being unconditioned - in finding their faces before birth. But those were names given it by the media. In 1967 in California something existed that has since been characterized as the Love Generation, the Hippie Movement, the Counter-culture and Flower Power. When Jesus spoke, his words were not immediately called Christianity. Cultural trends and movements also have unborn expressions. Let your attitude be as unconditioned as before you emerged from the womb. Don’t put on a face for the outside world. Very early in the Zen tradition in China, a seeker was instructed to return to his face before he was born. don’t leave OM without it!”įor Camden Benares and Robert Anton Wilson Face of the Unborn an arsenal of strange loops and fractal surprises. In the words of Antero Alli, author of Angel Tech and other rebellious manifestoes: “Zenarchists everywhere will be delighted. A non-combative, non-participatory, no-politics approach to anarchy intended to get the serious student thinking. Zenarchy is a way of Zen applied to social life. The Shortest Theological Debate in History Laughing Buddha Jesus Still Loves us All!Ĭhange Number Three: Parallel Communications
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