Are We Evolving As A Society?

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:32 pm by Ambaa Choate

Are We Evolving As A Society? 2015-03-13T22:32:12-04:00 Ambaa Choate

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Somehow it seems like whenever I go on vacation, I come back sick. I think this is another example of my strong mind-body connection and they are both shouting: But we don’t want to go back to the office! I got back from my honeymoon just in time to come down with the flu. This has led to a lot of sitting on the futon and watching Netflix while my husband brings me juice. I watched a documentary called Commune and it got me thinking about the huge changes in America through the 1960s and 70s.

Seeing and hearing footage from 1968 and the following years at Black Bear Ranch was very moving. I was not alive in that time. I was born in 1982 and I am fascinated by learning about the culture and experience of people of my parents’ generation. It seems like there was an enormous sense of change at that time. Things were going to be better, a new world was being built. Nothing would ever be the same again.

But then the people who lived on this commune got older. They had children, they drifted or went to a more traditional lifestyle. While their values are still present in their work today, hardly any still live in the state of idealism that led them to join a commune. Their children for the most part have mainstream lives. That huge change that was anticipated never really came to fruition.

And yet things did change. Not as enormously noticeable as they expected, but life didn’t return to the 1940s and 50s way of having sharply divided gender roles and a dedication to narrowly defined success. Something really did change. Who I am exists because of what these people did. They brought Indian philosophy to the west and without the influx of Hindu ideas, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to be exposed to Hinduism and connect with the best spiritual path for me.

It was interesting to see in the documentary that the commune’s emphasis on community living was so extreme that one woman was told she couldn’t be an artist because it was too individual a pursuit. Yet if I were to name one thing that the hippie generation brought us, it would be individual choice. The freedom of individuals to pursue the things that most fulfilled them rather than becoming just another cog in a machine. The movement was imperfect, flawed, but there was no blueprint to follow. There was no guide and I have to respect the new ways of thinking that they brought to our experience as human beings.

We children of the generation after the “flower children” seem to be more cynical, more hardened. We have witnessed the ending of a dream of social justice and I’m not sure we believe anything with the fervor that those who went before us believed in the changing of society.

So all this leads me to wonder where we are heading as a society in America. And how societies anywhere in the world grow and change. What are we growing towards? Is all our work to create a better world actually making it happen?

I’ve always believed that the world is running down. That entropy is making societies more and more derailed. The Yugas go from perfect to chaos and we are smack in the middle of the chaos portion. A lot of people sense this running down. The “end times” idea, the apocalypse coming. But then we as people have always had a tendency to look backwards with rose-colored glasses at the “good old days.”

As lifestyles subtly change through the generations, what are we moving towards?

http://www.itv.com/news/update/2012-08-20/singer-of-flower-power-anthem-dies-aged-73/

(Given that I currently have a fever, I can only hope that this post makes sense!)

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