What's Goin' On?

Hello Everybody,

Wow, it's been a long while, the Universe was calling me to wander for a bit...

Thanks to those of you who wrote in while I was gone, I answered your questions at the "Ask The Hippy Guy" link. It shouldn't take as long next time.

While I was away I started a pad at MySpace, the address is http://www.myspace.com/po_man_sings ...or you can just click on the new link in the Blog list. Good to be back!

Peace and Love, The Hippy Guy

Teach Your Children

Children held a very special place in the hearts of hippies.
We vowed never to grow up,
we called ourselves children of the universe, star children and things like that.
Children are pure, clear eyed, and largely unwearied by this cynical world.
We held children in very high esteem.

We knew that sooner or later parenthood would cause us
to have to make many uncomfortable decisions
about our uncompromising quest for unrestricted freedom.
In the movie Woodstock John Sebastion sings about the kinds of things
we might hear from our own children someday:

"Hey, Pop...My girlfriends only three,
she's got her own videophones
and she's a takin LSD.
And now that we're best friends
she wants to give a taste to me...
But hey, Pop...How come you're tuning green..."

From the hippy point of view, everything begins and ends with the children.
In fact the same movie begins with a song from CS&N written about Woodstock:

"I came upon a child of God,
He was walking along the road,
and I asked him 'Where are you going?
'this he told me.
He said 'I'm going on down to Yasquer's farm
going to join in a rock and roll band.
Gonna camp out on the land,
and try to set my soul free."

And of course there's the unforgettable rock classic by the same band, "Teach Your Children":

"Teach, them all your dreams
the ones they pick
are the ones you'll know by."

And then there was one of the very most popular posters
that you would find just wherever you found hippies,
copies of an original artwork painted by a nun.

"War is not healthy
for children
and other living things."

Powered by ScribeFire.

The Hippy Guy, where cool is the rule.

The Universe

Hippies knew what quantum theorists would discover decades later, that the universe is a singularity, it's all connected. It may be multiple faceted, but that's because it's alive. It's permeated with consciousness.

"To the Native American all things are alive. To the white men, all things are dead already." -Native American wisdom

The universe was our teacher. All you had to do was to attend, in consciousness, to be aware of the fact. Some empiricists might call that magical thinking, but these days we know that the universe is a singularity, is alive, and apparently conscious. Thanks to hippy guy Fritjof Capra for the Tao of Physics, man. If you read such things and aren't hip to how
magical the universe really is, you must be brain dead or something.


Everywhere I went the universe was there to show me something. To prove it's consciousness to me. It was the big Everything, man.

One day after our high school rap session, which was always followed by a wonderful group Om chant, my friend looks at me and says, "I have a mantra for you." Which was wild
because we'd never discussed such things at all, really. But he looked at me and said, "Om kria babji nami Om. It means the absoluteness is the teacher, the teacher is the absoluteness." Heavy, man. Because like, those were my thoughts exactly.

Sometimes the universe seemed to me in consciousness like an ocean. Some people stood on the shore looking at it, others waded in, some even swam. But if you had faith, that was like having a surfboard. Even still, some people would paddle around, you know. But others would make if their life to ride the waves, to remain above it all, and to become a part of the universe instead of being a bonehead that insisted that the universe become a part of their own meager consciousness.

To me it's like, Jesus wouldn't have even needed a surfboard because he *was* faith. He was nondifferent from his faith. That's what happens when your consciousness becomes universal, absolute. Enlightenment. All we need to do is wake up and embrace that greater reality. "Seeing the Buddha walking down the road, a man ran up to him and asked, 'What
*are* you!?' To which the Buddha replied, 'I am awake!' "

And to me the permeation of consciousness in the universe began to manifest all the more in everything because the hippies left the door open on purpose. It manifested itself in our art, in our music, in the clothes that we wore, in our attitudes towards everyone and everything, our attitude towards the universe itself, of which we are undeniably a part. In such a singularity, we never truly escape what we put into it. Negativity will come back to haunt us, just as positive thoughts will come back to reward us. We can't escape the universe, and each and every one of us is part of it's condition. So then the question is who is putting all the negativity into things, and who is making the universe just a little bit more wonderful. Who's being ugly about things, and who's being beautiful.

To me, Universalism is it's own reward. But to be good at it, one has to practice. Just like anything else.

Powered by ScribeFire.

The Hippy Guy, where cool is the rule.

Quotes

"Everybody in here is wearing a uniform." -Frank Zappa

The fascists are back. Stand up and be counted. Better get on one side or the other.


"Nobody's right, if everybody's wrong." -Buffalo Springfield, from the song, "For what it's worth".

Powered by ScribeFire.

Counter Culture

Most people today just don't understand how profoundly psychedelics influenced the world. Nothing new about that, really. People have been doing psychedelics from time out of mind, man.

LSD was a CIA plot that backfired on them big time. Before you knew it, minds were liberated everywhere. Instead of being under the same old propagandist spell of years and years, acid made it seem like you just landed on the planet today and began to look around. Then you couldn't help but notice all the bullshit everywhere. But instead of getting depressed about it, it was like the universe said to you somehow, "Ain't that sumthin'", and it just made you crack up at the enormity of life's absurdities. How can anyone take lieing fools seriously? Well, of course you had to take things like the war, and jackbooted storm trooper police brutality seriously. But that it would win out over the universe? No way, man.
What a joke these fascists are, man. When you get right down too it. Only, you know, when you really think about things like war, it's no laughing matter.

Anyway, acid heads profoundly influenced every kind of art and design work of the times, sometimes in obvious ways, but as often in far more subtle ones. Psychedelics had become part of our legacy, whether fascists want to admit it or not. And according to the Native Americans, part of our heritage as well.

Now, when I'm talking about these psychedelics I'm not talking about the garbage that's been on the streets since the mid seventies which is mostly strichnine and arsenic. I'm not talking about stupid stuff. I'm talking about what was real LSD, but mostly, natural is better. Peyote, shrooms, these days people don't make good drugs. But they should allow better drugs, because then people wouldn't self medicate themselves in this insane society with stuff like speed or sniffing solvents, man. People could, like, you know, smoke some weed or some peyote or something. And for cheap. They wouldn't be turning to all of these drugs marketed by the CIA, man. Meant to make us addicted, stupid, ineffective. No, I like my drugs to be cerebral man. Something I can think behind, you know? And back in the day we educated ourselves about drugs. Everybody knew and accepted the saying "Speed kills."
Which is why we never knew any speed freaks. Or glue sniffers, or heroin addicts, or cocaine addicts, we weren't stupid man. We had self respect. Lot's of pot heads. Lots of acid heads. But none of this other bullshit. Very, very rarely. Out of who knows how many thousands of people I'd partied with, I knew met one speed freak, one heroin addict, and one coke head. All that changed in the later seventies when coke and maggot gagging disco came in as a CIA plot to undermine the counter culture. The "Me generation". Barf, man.

Then they went about their propaganda to make the counterculture look stupid. As for me, I'm proud to have been a hippy. We changed the world, man.

Powered by ScribeFire.

The Hippy Guy, where cool is the rule.

Quote

All things must pass. - George Harrison

Come to think of it, that was in the Bible too.

Powered by ScribeFire.

The Rolling Stones

Life used to be so good.

One day I'm sitting around and this other chick calls me and asked me if I want to drop some acid and see The Stones. I was like, "You can't be serious." She laughed. She knew me so well, man. We had a great time. Stevie Wonder opened the show and really was wonderful. I was really, really impressed, man. But the guy behind us who was drinking from a gallon of Spanada wine passed out and didn't wake up until everybody was stomping the floor wanting the Stones to do an encore. I felt sorry for the dude. Afterwards we were standing in the parking lot of The Forum and somebody handed me a lit joint out of their car window. After I finished that, I nearly passed out, man.

But what this really far out chick didn't know was that two days before that I'd tried to get Stones tickets at the forum but failed. I failed even though I stood in line for like two days. It was so sad, man.

More and more people showed up at The Forum box office for tickets. Must have been thousands. Everybody was being cool and partying, you know. But as it grew later people began to like inch their way closer to the front by the box office, nobody wanted to be left out. Since some people were sneakily advancing their way closer to the front of the line, I had this brilliant idea. There was a whole lot of these parking lot dividers, the sawhorse type, sitting across the street doing nothing, so my friend and I lifted a few so that we could establish our area around the box office. Then you needed a password to get back in.
Wonderful, right? But then the people around our cordoned off area were getting invaded, and they went and lifted some partitions. And then the people around them did the same thing. After awhile you had to know a half dozen passwords if you wanted to get back to where I was. So everybody just stayed put and camped out all night, getting high, whatever.

The last of the heavyweight party people were just starting to crash when the sun began to come up. That's when everything changed. Somebody stood up and stretched, then everybody started jumping to their feet and pushing forward, man! As everybody packed in sardine style the partitions all came down. Everybody finally mellowed out until they opened the box office. Then everybody freaked out and started pushing towards the front. It got so bad that they stopped selling tickets to my line until everybody mellowed out. My line didn't move for about an hour. Then, oh, man. They ran out of tickets the couple before me and my friend. Bummer, man!

So, here I am sitting at home thinking, "I guess the universe just didn't want me to go to see the Stones." But when my girlfriend called I suddenly realized, the universe just didn't want me to pay for it man! Far out!

What a cool chick, I think about her to this day. She ended up being a DJ at a radio station in San Francisco, last I heard.

Powered by ScribeFire.

The Hippy Guy, where cool is the rule.