Hacker News Reader

Many people in the USA observed the same thing.

That's what the term 'yuppie' implied for a lot of people.

All these people from the late 1960's and 1970's that spoke about dropping out or how awesome it would be join a short lived commune and so on and so forth only to became intensely materialistic and image obsessed in their 30's.

Which then spoke to the idea that a lot of the 'ultra spiritual' stuff that hippie movement was involved in was nothing more then getting wasted and being fashionable. And when it was fashionable to be materialistic and image-obsessed they turned into that.

This may confuse people who associate hippies with anti-war movement, but the anti-war movement was largely a separate from the hippies.

I think (have no proof) that many people who identified as hippies got later involved with non-hallucinogenic drugs like cocaine and that made them forget about spirituality and they became yuppies.

The thing about spiritual awakening I believe is you have to do something with it, nurture it, or it fades away.

Or maybe many of the hippies got married and got children and that way became more materialistic. The spiritual way is the way of the monk. Or nun. Maybe

>> The thing about spiritual awakening I believe is you have to do something with it, nurture it, or it fades away.

Indeed, integration is key but often elusive without doing a lot of work outside of psychedelic experiences.

>> I think (have no proof) that many people who identified as hippies got later involved with non-hallucinogenic drugs like cocaine and that made them forget about spirituality and they became yuppies.

There's a cycle that seems to have happened to a lot of people in that era:

Breakthrough experience, followed by a failure to integrate. The adept then attempts to replicate or revisit the experience (to varying degrees of success) followed by further failures to integrate. Eventually, a bad experience (or lack of access to the tools) leaves the voyager with a malaise (or worse) to which causes them to either abandon the quest, or else to apply simpler, more 'reliable' chemicals which then lead to a much more mundane cycles of drug use.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...

>“Now you see here,” I said. “Everyone in this conversation is in favor of universal love and transcendent joy. But I’ve seen the way this works. Some college student gets his hands on some DMT, visits here, you guys tell him about universal love and transcendent joy, he wakes up, says that his life has been changed, suddenly he truly understands what really matters. But it never lasts. The next day he’s got to get up and go to work and so on, and the universal love lasts about five minutes until his boss starts yelling at him for writing his report in the wrong font, and before you know it twenty years later he’s some slimy lawyer who’s joking at a slimy lawyer party about the one time when he was in college and took some DMT and spent a whole week raving about transcendent joy, and all the other slimy lawyers laugh, and he laughs with them, and so much for whatever spiritual awakening you and your colleagues in LSD and peyote are trying to kindle in humanity. And if I accept your message of universal love and transcendent joy right now, that’s exactly what’s going to happen to me, and meanwhile human civilization is going to keep being stuck in greed and ignorance and misery. So how about you shut up about universal love and you factor my number for me so we can start figuring out a battle plan for giving humanity a real spiritual revolution?”

>“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

>“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

This is so good! Thanks for sharing :)

Now if you could only tell me how to drive to the exit so I can get out of the car...

> The funniest thing is, the guy who was most outspoken about his transformation, about feeling 'the wisdom of the plant spirits', and how all this here was 'a dream reality', after a few years became a cop. Another friend is today a wealthy corporate lawyer.

It's good to be wary of cheap spirituality. Thanks for sharing your story. I've seen similar. It's that whole Steve Jobs taking LSD kinda thing, isn't it?

>the guy who was most outspoken ... after a few years became a cop. Another friend is today a wealthy corporate lawyer.

Or perhaps people who seek power and aren't afraid to take risks are the sort of people who end up trying ayahuasca.

We'd need more data about people who had ayahuasca to establish a link :-)

The problem with this comparison is subjectivity. We will never know if they became better versions of their own self, nothing happened or the whole thing changed them for the worse, because we would need to access the parallel in time with their lives without the experience, to objectivelly understand the phenomena.

In their particular evolutionary ladder, how many stairs they jumped?

In the end the best way to understand this, is to understand what they tell you about themselves, how they were before and after the experience. It may not look much from your perspective, but it may be something better, from their point of view at least, then what was possible before..