page_title: Hippie
section_title: Spirituality and religion
hierarchical_section_title: Hippie / Ethos and characteristics / Spirituality and religion
caption_attribution_description: English: Timothy Leary, family and band on a lecture tour; State University of New York at Buffalo (1969) (Buffalo, New York). NOTE: If redistributing my work, please credit my work with my name, Dr. Dennis Bogdan, since I am the original author, and please be consistent with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License agreements. Note: Image featured in University of New England (2015) article. (Drbogdan (talk) 20:37, 28 March 2017 (UTC))
context_page_description: A hippie is a member of the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The term hippie first found popularity in San Francisco with Herb Caen, who was a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
  The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date". The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and many used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore altered states of consciousness.
  In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and Monterey Pop Festival
context_section_description: Many hippies rejected mainstream organized religion in favor of a more personal spiritual experience.  Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism often resonated with hippies, as they were seen as less rule-bound, and less likely to be associated with existing baggage. Some hippies embraced neo-paganism, especially Wicca. Others were involved with the occult, with people like Timothy Leary citing Aleister Crowley as influences. By the 1960s, western interest in Hindu spirituality and yoga reached its peak, giving rise to a great number of Neo-Hindu schools specifically advocated to a western public.
  In his 1991 book, "Hippies and American Values", Timothy Miller described the hippie ethos as essentially a "religious movement" whose goal was to transcend the limitations of mainstream religious institutions. "Like many dissenting religions, the hippies were enormously hostile to the religious institutions of the dominant culture, and they tried to find new and adequate ways to do the tasks the dominant religions failed to perform." In his seminal, contemporaneous work, "The Hippie Trip", author Lewis Yablonsky notes that those who were most respected in hippie settings were the spiritual leaders, the so-called "high priests" who emerged during that era.
  One such hippie "high priest" was San Francisco State University Professor Stephen Gaskin.  Beginning in 1966, Gaskin's "Monday Night Class" eventually outgrew the lecture hall, and attracted 1,500 hippie followers in an open discussion of spiritual values, drawing from Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu teachings.  In 1970 Gaskin founded a Tennessee community called The Farm, and even late in life he still listed his religion as "Hippie."
  Timothy Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. On September 19, 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as its holy sacrament, in part as an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the use of LSD and other psychedelics for the religion's adherents based on a "freedom of religion" argument. The Psychedelic Experience was the inspiration for John Lennon's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" in The Beatles' album Revolver. He published a pamphlet in 1967 called Start Your Own Religion to encourage just that and was invited to attend the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In  a gathering of 30,000 hippies in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park In speaking to the group, he coined the famous phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out". The English magician Aleister Crowley became an influential icon to the new alternative spiritual movements of the decade as well as for rock musicians. The Beatles included him as one of the many figures on the cover sleeve of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band while Jimmy Page, the guitarist of The Yardbirds and co-founder of 1970s rock band Led Zeppelin was fascinated by Crowley, and owned some of his clothing, manuscripts and ritual objects, and during the 1970s bought Boleskine House, which also appears in the band's movie The Song Remains the Same. On the back cover of the Doors compilation album 13, Jim Morrison and the other members of the Doors are shown posing with a bust of Aleister Crowley. Timothy Leary also openly acknowledged Crowley's inspiration.
  After the hippie era, the Dudeist philosophy and lifestyle developed.  Inspired by "The Dude", the neo-hippie protagonist of the Coen Brothers' 1998 film The Big Lebowski, Dudeism's stated primary objective is to promote a modern form of Chinese Taoism, outlined in Tao Te Ching by Laozi (6th century BC), blended with concepts by the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC), and presented in a style as personified by the character of Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski, a fictional hippie character portrayed by Jeff Bridges in the film. Dudeism has sometimes been regarded as a mock religion, though its founder and many adherents regard it seriously.
caption: Timothy Leary, family and band on a lecture tour at State University of New York at Buffalo in 1969
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