Many people disparaged the growth movement of the Sixties and Seventies, mainly because they didn’t understand what it was about. They called it “the Me Generation,” failing to see that knowledge of the Self was the path to Self-Realization. They called its adherents hippies, New Agers, flower children, failing to see the nascent drive towards unitive consciousness that the drawing together of so many people represented.
I was a late-blooming flower child, more spiritually and intellectually inclined. However once I began to see some of the advantages it offered, I became practically ensconced in it. Three-month encounter groups, consciousness-raising, activism, travels to India, psychedelics – I definitely sampled everything it had to offer.
And I was deeply, deeply grateful for the learning it communicated and deeply, deeply sad when it ceased to become society’s assumed preoccupation. While I didn’t think that knowledge had died, it certainly hasn’t flourished either.
This generation has a different kind of knowledge, which is exceptionally powerful and useful, but that generation has ingredients, which were then evoked by the words “personal growth,” not generally known to this generation. (1) And I wish they were.
I’m not asking us all to dust off the Beatles and let it all hang out. But I am asking those among us who were privy to that knowledge to come forward and re-present it again.
Unfortunately the guiding lights of that era, at least in the human-growth movement, are mostly gone. Some few founts of wisdom, such as Werner Erhard, are still here and doubtless will play a very big role in coming events. Others who arrived on the scene later, like Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra, have some of that knowledge, but more the kind of knowledge that is generally known today (much by their own efforts) combined with a degree of the former.
What we need and could use at this time is some who definitely remember the learnings that we had about awareness, responsibility and communication, to use John Enright’s categories, the contributions made by Fritz Perls, Carl Rogers, William Schutz, Esalen, est, even Transactional Analysis because that too was a big part of it.
In the years since the Seventies, we’ve undergone a concerted campaign to dumb us down. Vaccines, chemtrails, flourides, nanotechnology, microwaves, TV frequencies – every strategy the Illuminati could use they did to dull us out, stifle our higher functions, and dampen initative and dissent in us. Perhaps they saw what the New Agers of a former time were capable of doing and never wanted it to happen again.
But it is happening again and we need those pioneers back. We need the contribution again of those who dedicated their lives to raising consciousness and focusing our attention on our personal responsibility for this world.
So I’m issuing an invitation to those who carry the sacred traditions of that particular consciousness circle to come forward again and teach us once more how to raise our consciousness, increase our awareness, communicate in ways that move and empower, and take responsibility for our world.
This is the time we’ve been waiting for. And all of us reading this are the ones we expected. There’s no doubt that we’ll be successful this time but how successful depends on us.
One of the phrases that Werner Erhard contributed was “making a difference,” and a difference that actually makes a difference, shots heard round the world and ideas whose time has come. Now is our time to make a huge difference. We need to come together right now. We need to spread the word and act globally.
It isn’t that we were born too soon. We needed to experience that then to actualize it now. So I invite you who know what I’m talking about to come forward and begin again.
Footnotes
(1) Some might say “Are you implying that we’re not into personal growth?” No, I’m not. But the words were new to that generation and implied something that hasn’t seemed to survive to this day. If someone then said they were into “personal growth” then, one might expect to have a conversation with them about bioenergetics, gestalt, rebirthing, or rule reconstruction. But few of these disciplines seem to have survived the post-911 Illuminati end-game. Human-growth workshops don’t do well in a climate made rigid by hunts for domestic terrorists, the erosion of constutitional rights, and body searches at airports.