Sixties The Years That Shaped A Generation Counter Culture Explosion Vietnam War

The Sixties The Years That Shaped A Generation was a decade of change, experimentation, and hope that transformed an entire nation. It was a time when a generation rebelled and lost its innocence. The Vietnam War, the struggle for racial equality, and the birth of a counter-culture explosion were some of the changes that took place in America. The social and political changes that took place in America determined the future of its citizens and neighboring countries. Many of our current laws and perspectives are strongly shaped by the changes that began in the 1950s, reached a peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and continue through today.

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It was a time when a generation rebelled and lost its innocence. From the Vietnam War to the struggle for racial equality to the birth of a counter-culture explosion, the 1960s was a decade of change, experimentation and hope that transformed an entire nation. Sixties The Years That Shaped A Generation traces the events of one of the most turbulent and influential periods of political and cultural change in the 20th century and the powerful impact forced on an entire generation. There is disagreement even today over the failures and accomplishments that were born from the 1960s, but one thing is certain there has never been a time quite like it. Sixties The Years That Shaped A Generation highlights the tumultuous and exhilarating moments of a decade that continues to have a profound impact on our society today from American foreign policy to the birth of the environmental and gay rights and women's liberation movements.

On October 6, 1967, a mock funeral ceremony called "The Death of the Hippie" was held in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The event started at the Psychedelic Shop on Haight and proceeded to Buena Vista Park. The event was organized by Peter Berg and was held one year after California banned LSD. The purpose of the event was to commemorate the conclusion of the Summer of Love, which many participants had left the scene to join the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s, to resume school studies, or simply to "get a job." The event featured a funeral procession, Hells Angels parading, and youths dancing around a bonfire.

On May 30, 1966, Nevada and California became the first states to enact controls over the hallucinogenic drug LSD. In June 2021, a bill to legalize possession of psychedelics was approved by the California Senate, which would remove criminal penalties for possessing or sharing numerous psychedelics, including LSD and MDMA, for adults 21 and older. In February 2020, the California legislature approved a bill to decriminalize the use of psychedelics, including LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, DMT, mescaline, MDMA, mescaline, ibogane, and ketamine.

The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement that emerged in the post-World War II era. It was centered in the bohemian artist communities of San Francisco’s North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice West, and New York City’s Greenwich Village. The Beats, which included poet Allen Ginsberg and author William S. Burroughs, were iconoclastic writers who experimented with form and depicted explicit subject matter such as sex, drugs, and hedonism, which made them highly controversial in their day. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers, better known as Beatniks. The term "Beatnik" was coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in April 1958. The Beat Poets were a new generation of poets who rebelled against the conventions of mainstream American life and writing and became known as the Beat Poets. Their writing explored the human condition, including sex, love, and darker topics.

The Beat Generation was a literary movement that began after the Second World War and known for its liberal attitudes towards life. The Beat Generation was influenced by American culture and was broadly popular in the 1950s. The movement rejected traditional narrative elements of novels, short stories, and poems, and materialism. The writers in this movement valued things like the clear and explicit portrayal of the human condition, sexual liberation, and more.

Definition and Explanation of Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a movement that was focused on rethinking the way that writers regarded contemporary culture, the past, and the future. The writing the came out of the Beat Generation explored, more freely than ever, the human condition. This meant writing openly about sex, love, and in addition to darker topics. The most important writers of the period were Herbert Huncke, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Lucien Carr. This group met one another around the Columbia University campus in New York City, an interesting origin considering that their work is broadly considered to be anti-academic.

The group sought to write in an authentic style that was unfettered by poetic norms or academic expectations. Ginsberg used the following quote to describe their work:

First thought, best thought.

They were experimental with the construction of their poems, as well as their subject matter and how they approached it. They were influenced by the work of poets like William Blake, in addition to the music of the period, specifically jazz, surrealism, and Zen poetry. Drugs also played a role in their understanding of their art, as did a broader disillusionment with literature in the post-World War II period.

Origin of the Name “Beat Generation”
The name “Beat Generation” was introduced by Jack Kerouac, one of the original founders of the group. He used it as a way to allude to the perceptions of the group as underground and anti-conformist. The word “beat”, Kerouac said, was actually first used by Herbert Huncke and Kerouac appropriated it to mean “upbeat.” The group also liked the association with music.

Beat Generation Characteristics
Sexual liberation and exploration.
Portraying the human condition clearly.
Experimentation with psychedelic drugs.
Rejection of materialism
Exploring religion, Western and Eastern.
Rejection of narrative.
Non-conformity
Spontaneous creativity.

Examples of Writing from the Beat Generation
‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg
‘Howl’ is without a doubt Ginsberg’s best-known poem. It’s also known as ‘Howl for Carl Solomon,’ and was published in 1956 in Howl and Other Poems. The poem is separated into three parts and a footnote. The first part is the most commonly read. It was described as Ginsberg as “a lament for the Lamb in American with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths.” Ginsberg wanted the poem to express the pent-up frustrations of his generation and the artistic possibilities. Here are a few lines from the first, and most famous, part of ‘Howl.’

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, Ginsberg, like his contemporaries, ought to throw off academic and societal pressure, turning instead towards creative freedom and expression.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
On the Road is considered to be one of the great American novels. It was published in 1957 and is based on the writer’s travel with his friends across the United States. The novel is a defining work of the Beat Generation and has been ranked as one of the most important books of the 20th century. Here are two lines from the novel that help define it:

I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Naked Lunch is a 1959 novel written by William S. Burroughs, one of the leading members of the Beat Generation. It is made out of vignettes and can be read in any order. The vignettes/chapters are taken from Burroughs’ personal experience. In the novel, readers will encounter passages about drug addiction, including heroin, morphine, and more.

It has been included in several lists of the best novels of the 21st century. Here are a few lines from the book:

I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don’t see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.

Importance of the Beat Generation
The Beat Generation is one of the defining movements of American poetry and one of the most important parts of the broader modernist movement. Its influence can be seen in the hippie movement of the following decades and the development of music, film, and visual arts. The Beat Generation is often cited as influential in the demystification of drugs, a broad American spiritual revival, a new respect for land, indigenous heritage, as well as a leading force in the sexual revolution.

MK-Ultra: Mind-Control, LSD and the US Government In 1953, with the US in the midst of the Cold War and paranoia blanketing government foreign policy, Operation MK-Ultra was born. As a fully government-funded project, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ran MK-Ultra for over ten years, researching ‘truth’ drugs like Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to aid ‘mind-control’, interrogation, and torture. The actions of the CIA and US government during this time period displays much about cold-war dynamic, post-war American power, and the nature of the American government itself. MK-Ultra is, most ironically, the story of how the CIA brought LSD to the US.

The US government was first alerted to the prospect of the Communist use of mind-control in 1949 during the trial of Hungarian Cardinal Mindszentry, a known opponent to the Communist regime. During his trial, Mindszentry looked absent-minded, showed ‘robotic movements’, and confessed to crimes that he had never committed. The US government, rather hastily, presumed some form of behaviour manipulation. Worried, the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, quickly assembled a team to evaluate Russian interrogation practices. Another shock for the US government came via the return of US prisoners of war captured in Korea. Not only did the soldiers come home claiming that biological weapons had been used by the US army in Korea, something that the US government had always denied, but they also praised forms of the Korean lifestyle and criticised those of the US. With this, the US government became convinced of the Korean use of brainwashing. And so, in 1953, $25 million of government funds was given to the Technical Services Division for MK-Ultra projects to “study human response to drugs and environmental conditions that could manipulate individuals to perform behaviours against their will.”

It was Dr Sidney Gottlieb, chief chemist at the CIA, who was to be the mind behind MK-Ultra. Historian Stephen Kinzer emphasises the anonymous nature of Gottlieb’s role; even at the CIA, his work was completely unknown, yet Gottlieb had what Kinzer describes as a ‘licence to kill’ by the US government. Gottlieb was directed by Dulles to find a truth-drug in order to win the Cold War. Gottlieb’s approach was to first find a way to destroy the existing mind and then find a way to insert a new line of thought.

Previous work on hallucinogenic drugs was mostly conducted by Nazi ‘doctors’ in concentration camps during World War Two. Gottlieb decided, therefore, to hire Nazi scientists and their Japanese counterparts to discuss their findings. The CIA found that German military physicians working at Dachau and Auschwitz had been experimenting with barbiturates, morphine derivative, and mescaline for interrogation purposes since 1943. Gottlieb had been interested in Mescaline, which had been trialled at Dachau, as an attempt to ‘eliminate the will of the person examined.’ Yet, it had been concluded that mescaline was ‘too unreliable to be a truth drug. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.’ Therefore, the CIA looked towards a new Swiss drug: LSD. Gottlieb was so convinced by the effects of LSD that he bought the world’s supply for $250,000, in an attempt to hinder Communist attempts to secure the drug. In doing so, the CIA brought LSD to America. As a consequence, Kinzer describes Gottlieb as the ‘God-father of the LSD subculture.’ It is certainly ironic that the very drug believed to give the government the power to control minds ended up fuelling a generational rebellion that aimed to destroy everything the CIA stood for.

Kinzer suggests that MK-Ultra was simply the continuation of research started by the Nazis in concentration camps. Indeed, Gottlieb experimented on thousands of unwitting patients, most significantly prisoners. In Lexington, Kentucky, seven African American inmates were fed triple doses of LSD every day for seventy-seven days. This was all an attempt for Gottlieb to see how much of an overdose would destroy a human mind. In another experiment, inmates were given overdoses of LSD for year so that Gottlieb could study the long-term effects of the drug. These inmates were told that they were involved in experiments researching a drug for schizophrenia, and all MK-Ultra practices were conducted in absolute secrecy.

Gottlieb additionally tested in universities across the US, setting up fraudulent philanthropic foundations to fund research on LSD at institutions such as Yale, Harvard, UCLA, and Georgetown. Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, got his first dose of LSD from one of these experiments, along with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hunter, and Ted Kaczynski (‘The Unabomber’).

One disturbing string of experiments conducted by MK-Ultra staff was titled ‘Operation Midnight Climax.’ The operation involved setting up specially designed apartments so that MK-Ultra staff could watch as female sex-workers (hired by the CIA) would bring home CIA agents and spike their drinks with LSD. The experiment was used to see if government secrets would be spilled whilst on the drug. Gottlieb concluded that the experiment merely revealed that men were likely to talk after sex: the involvement of LSD made little difference. These experiments are important in displaying who the victims of MK-Ultra were. Participants were often on the fringes of society and therefore incredibly vulnerable, chosen in the belief that if a victim ever found about their involvement in MK-Ultra, they were unlikely to be believed. In this respect, the CIA seem to have accomplished their aim, for many still believe that MK-Ultra is a conspiracy theory, despite government documentation proving otherwise.

Experiments were also conducted outside of the US though, just like domestic experiments, they violated basic medical ethics and were often even more brutal and inhumane. ‘Patients’ were suspected enemy agents, refugees, and captured North Korean prisoners of war, who had no connection to the outside world, thus making them easy to ‘dispose’ of. The international experiments resulted in a large number of deaths and involved intense combinations of drugs, torture, and interrogation techniques. Little official information is known about these experiments due to the destruction of MK-Ultra documents at the request of Gottlieb and DCI Richard Helms in 1973. This suggests that Gottlieb and Helms knew that their experiments were inhumane and – if their contents were leaked – highly damaging. Indeed, one CIA informant noted in a 1979 interview: ‘I think every last one of us felt sorry to attempt this kind of thing, we knew we were crossing a line. Every decent kid knows he shouldn’t steal, but he does it sometimes, we knew damn well that we didn’t want anyone else know what we were doing.’

After ten years of experimentation, MK-Ultra petered out. It was clear that, whilst a mind could be destroyed, it was all but impossible to configure a new one. However, Sidney Gottlieb’s career at the CIA continued. Kinzer describes Gottlieb, during this period, as the ‘poisoner-in-chief’ as head of the Technical Services Staff. A chemist by profession, Gottlieb helped to develop poisons to use for the benefit of the CIA. He was involved in plots to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. Gottlieb was forced to retire in 1973 after the removal of Richard Helms following the Watergate scandal. As his patron and protector, without Helms, Gottlieb could not work under anonymity at the CIA and hence the MK-Ultra documents were destroyed.

Gottlieb, now in his mid-50’s, retired to India with his wife to help those suffering with leprosy. It was an odd activity for an ex-CIA agent to take up in his retirement from a career of brainwashing, interrogation, and drug experimentation, but one that Kinzer suggests was an attempt to clear his conscience. It was during his time in India that Gottlieb’s participation in secret CIA operations was revealed and he was called to testify for the Church Committee in 1975. The Church Committee was a US Senate select committee, set up under President Gerald Ford in 1975. It investigated abuses by the CIA, FBI, and other government services in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Although the Church Committee uncovered thousands of documents related to MK-Ultra, Gottlieb was seen only as a chemist, with the full extent of MK-Ultra yet to be exposed. Most of the work to reveal Gottlieb’s true role was conducted by the victims of his experiments. With the revelations that came out of the Church Committee, members of the public were able to slowly piece together their experiences and finally understand what had happened to them. However, Gottlieb died in 1999, having faced little consequence for his actions. Kinzer describes Gottlieb well as ‘an outlaw that served power. A creator but also a destroyer.’

MK-Ultra is a story that gives us just a small insight into the overwhelming power of the CIA and American government. It reveals the frantic, secretive nature of the Cold War and the levels the US government was prepared to go to in order to upstage the Soviet Union. However, in doing this they let thousands of their own citizens down, deceiving them and involving them in experiments that would haunt many for the rest of their lives. We only know a small section of MK-Ultra’s story; what we know are the details that the US government felt was acceptable to release to the public, though many documents remain classified or redacted, which suggests that the real history of MK-Ultra is a horror story beyond the greatest imagination.

The Psychedelic era was the time of social, musical and artistic change influenced by psychedelic drugs, occurring from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. The era was defined by the proliferation of LSD and its following influence in the development of psychedelic music and psychedelic film in the Western world.

Albert Hofmann, a chemist working for Sandoz Pharmaceutical, synthesized1 LSD for the first time in 1938, in Basel, Switzerland, while looking for a blood stimulant. However, its hallucinogenic effects were unknown until 1943 when Hofmann accidentally consumed some LSD. It was later found that an oral dose of as little as 25 micrograms (equal in weight to a few grains of salt) is capable of producing vivid hallucinations.

Because of its similarity to a chemical present in the brain and its similarity in effects to certain aspects of psychosis, LSD was used in experiments by psychiatrists through the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. While the researchers failed to discover any medical use for the drug, the free samples supplied by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals for the experiments were distributed broadly, leading to wide use of this substance.

LSD was popularized in the 1960s by individuals such as psychologist Timothy Leary, who encouraged American students to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” This created an entire counterculture of drug abuse and spread the drug from America to the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. Even today, use of LSD in the United Kingdom is significantly higher than in other parts of the world.

While the ‘60s counterculture used the drug to escape the problems of society, the Western intelligence community and the military saw it as a potential chemical weapon. In 1951, these organizations began a series of experiments. US researchers noted that LSD “is capable of rendering whole groups of people, including military forces, indifferent to their surroundings and situations, interfering with planning and judgment, and even creating apprehension, uncontrollable confusion and terror.”

Experiments in the possible use of LSD to change the personalities of intelligence targets, and to control whole populations, continued until the United States officially banned the drug in 1967.

Use of LSD declined in the 1980s, but picked up again in the 1990s. For a few years after 1998 LSD had become more widely used at dance clubs and all-night raves by older teens and young adults. Use dropped significantly in 2000 or so.

Psychedelic Rock: The History and Sound of Psychedelic Rock The psychedelic rock genre formed out of the hippie culture of San Francisco in the late 1960s and quickly spread across the globe, giving rise to some of the greatest rock bands of all time.

What Is Psychedelic Rock?
Psychedelic rock, also called psychedelia, is a style of rock music that materialized in the late 1960s that was influenced by (and intended to enhance) the experience of taking hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. Psychedelic rock incorporated elements of blues and folk rock and eventually contributed to the evolution of hard rock and progressive rock.

4 Characteristics of Psychedelic Rock
Psychedelic rock musicians typically use the following effects and techniques.

1. Sound effects: Psychedelic rock often includes trippy studio effects like reverb, phasing, distortion, and reversed sound.

2. Inventive use of instruments: The sound of electric guitar with feedback and a wah-wah pedal is emblematic of the genre. Psychedelic rock musicians also incorporated Indian instruments, like the sitar and tambura, into their sound, along with keyboard instruments like the Mellotron (an analog sampler), harpsichord, and electronic organ.

3. Improvisation: Lengthy improvised guitar solos are a focal point of many psychedelic rock songs.

4. Abstract lyrics: Psychedelic rocks songs often include surreal and abstract lyrics that may allude to hallucinogenic drug use.
A Brief History of Psychedelic Rock
The psychedelic rock era was a relatively short time period in rock music history, existing only from 1965 to 1971.

1. Beginnings: Psychedelic rock originated on the American West coast out of the hippie movement of the mid-to-late 1960s. First taking root in the San Francisco Bay area, psychedelic rock's popularity quickly spread throughout America and to Europe. The first known band to categorize their music as psychedelic rock was Austin, Texas-based rock band The 13th Floor Elevators. The band, led by singer and guitarist Roky Erickson, even named their 1966 debut album The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators.

2. Psychedelic rock bands define the sound: Notable early West Coast psychedelic bands included the Grateful Dead, the Doors, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Moby Grape, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Iron Butterfly and Jefferson Airplane. Jefferson Airplane's 1967 hit “White Rabbit”—inspired by the trippy imagery in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—reached number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

3. Rock 'n' roll turns psychedelic: Around this time, influential rock bands began to incorporate psychedelia into their music, as seen in albums like the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (1966), the Byrds' Fifth Dimension (1966), the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), and the Yardbirds' Shape of Things (1971). For the Beatles, experimentation with the drug LSD led to albums like Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and Magical Mystery Tour (1967), all of which had a psychedelic sound.

4. British pioneers: New psychedelic rock icons began to spring up in England. In general, British psychedelic rock was less aggressive and more surreal than the edgier American style. Donovan's 1966 Sunshine Superman was one of the first obvious psych-pop albums, while Cream's Disraeli Gears (1967) and the Who's Tommy (1969) firmly established the groups on the psychedelia scene.

5. The rise of Pink Floyd: While the Beatles' popularity never waned, Pink Floyd emerged to become the new star of the British psychedelic music scene. On Pink Floyd's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), songwriter Syd Barrett composed a slew of groundbreaking and hypnotic acid rock tracks that instantly made the album a classic of the times. A few months before the album's release, Pink Floyd headlined a massive counterculture fundraiser concert in London called the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream. British avant-garde psychedelic band Soft Machine and counterculture luminaries like Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and John Lennon also appeared at the concert.

6. Decline: In the last years of the ’60s, both the United States and the United Kingdom outlawed LSD, the genre's most influential drug. The 1969 Woodstock music festival marked one of the last notable performances in the psychedelic era and featured sets by Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. That same year, Charles Manson and his followers claimed the Beatles' song “Helter Skelter” inspired them to commit murder, which only added to the growing anti-hippie sentiment. Psychedelic legends Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison all died of drug overdoses between 1970 and 1971. Most bands who were still together at this time transitioned away from psychedelic rock and towards hard or progressive rock.

The Ultimate Generation Gap of the 1960s 1960s: A Time of Youth Rebellion
It would be interesting to conduct a study on the history of adolescence. I suspect that the stereotype of the sullen, rebellious, troublemaking teenager is a fairly modern concept. In a world where eighteen-year-olds are no longer viewed as adults, it is not surprising that they have a tendency to rebel against the authority figures “holding them down.” Still, I would not be surprised if ancient Egyptian parents were often complaining about their teenagers. Ancient teenagers, after all, just like the modern versions, had raging hormones and brains without a fully developed ability to utilize common sense.

The ultimate example of modern youth rebellion, however, would have to be the counterculture of the 1960s. And to a certain degree, this is simply the classic story of young people lashing out against the values and goals of their parents—only, in this case, the behaviors of these hippies were, to put it lightly, a bit more extreme. So why did this pot-smoking, “free-love”-engaging, psychedelic-rock-listening youth generation appear at this particular point in American history?

Where Did Those Hippies Come From?
If this started off as essentially a rebellion of young people against their parents, then the place to begin would be the typical parent/child relationship in post-World War II America. Parents having large numbers of children during the initial “Baby Boom” period of the late 1940s and early 1950s were typically children of the Depression. Many grew up in tough times, with their economic situation often not improving until the beginning of World War II, the worst war in human history and a conflict in which many of these new parents had seen combat.

Needless to say, the first 20–30 years of their lives were filled with trauma, insecurity, and possibly horrific violence. And due to various levels of post-traumatic stress, they may not have exactly been in touch with their emotions. Like Don Draper in the television series Mad Men, there were certain experiences and emotions that they preferred to shove under the rug, limiting their ability to connect emotionally with anyone.

Their kids, of course, often had entirely different experiences. The United States, after World War II, became the wealthiest nation in human history, and the middle-class suburbanites, who for decades had been a privileged minority, were now the norm. Unprecedented numbers of Americans, through the combination of the economic boom, cheap housing, and government aid through the GI Bill, had the opportunity to live the so-called American Dream.

These children of the Depression, seeking in these suburbs the security that they often lacked as children, now had the opportunity to buy their children happiness. And in these cookie-cutter neighborhoods, surrounded preferably by people just like them, they could also shield their kids from the dangers of the outside world.

It turns out, of course, that material prosperity and safety do not guarantee happiness. One of the blessings of prosperity, in fact, is the opportunity to seek more out of life than survival. And these kids born and raised in the suburbs were unable to appreciate fully how blessed their life really was. So as these kids grew up, they inevitably began to experience the “crises” familiar to anyone who has ever been a middle-class child: nasty cases of acne, a romantic crush that does not quite go the way you would like, a mean teacher, a lost friendship, not making the basketball team, or other “life-threatening” scenarios.

But if these kids shared their feelings about these issues with their parents, then mom or dad – especially dad – might break off into one of their typical sermons: “When I was a kid, I barely had enough to eat, and you are complaining about a few pimples”; “I was working to support my family when I was twelve, and you can’t even keep up your grades”; or “I was walking to school in the snow –uphill, both ways - when I was your age, so get over it.”

Needless to say, parents who had lived through some difficult times and had trouble facing up to their own emotions might not be particularly empathetic when it came to their kids’ childhood problems. An even larger than usual generation gap was inevitable, which may have played a significant part in feeding an unusually intense youth rebellion when these kids reached their teenage years beginning in the early 1960s.

How the Generation Gap of the ’60s Played Out
This generation gap, however, also played out on a more societal and political level. As they grew up in their suburban, relatively sheltered “bubble world,” they were generally taught in their schools and by their parents that the United States was the greatest country on earth. We were the earth’s shining example of freedom, liberty, and equality, engaged in a global struggle against the godless, totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union. And like all children raised by parents seeking to shield them from some of the ugly realities of the world, they initially accepted what they were taught without question.

At some point, however, we all have to grow up, and as these kids came of age in the era of television, the Civil Rights Movement, and eventually, the Vietnam War, they began to see the disconnect between the ideas embedded into them as kids and the reality of life in the United States and around the world. If the United States was a shining example of freedom and equality, then why were African-Americans forced to struggle so hard for the right to go to certain schools, drink out of certain drinking fountains, or even cast a vote? Is this global struggle versus communism worth the cost of shipping young people halfway around the world to kill and be killed in a country few Americans knew much of anything about?

Apparently, this country, created by old people, was not all it was cracked up to be. And if their parents and educators were full of it when they sang the praises of America, then maybe they were full of it about everything else. So now, this unusually large number of young people coming of age in the 1960s was going to create a new and better culture and nation based on the principles of universal brotherhood, peace, personal freedom, individuality, self-expression, and spiritual fulfillment.

They were not going to be constrained by the culture of their parents, a culture based on emotional repression, conformity, inequality, materialism, and order through force. When you look at the ideas and lifestyle of the 1960’s counterculture, it was, not surprisingly, the polar opposite of the mainstream culture of 1950s suburbia.

As protest movements go, this was an odd group of protestors. Generally, protest movements are initiated by people experiencing some form of injustice or oppression. But especially in those early years when the counterculture was largely a movement of college students, these were protests led by the most privileged and prosperous generation in history.

By the mid-1960s, however, as the Vietnam War escalated, the “hippy” movement became almost fully intertwined with the anti-war movement. The realization by all young men that they may be sent to fight and die galvanized people from all ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds. So when people flashed a peace sign, everyone knew what was meant. The Vietnam War, more than anything else, turned what was largely a middle-class suburbanite movement into a mass movement that transcended traditional barriers.

Some would argue that many of the people in this so-called counterculture were not in it to change the world. They were just a bunch of spoiled kids looking for a chance to get high, get laid, and run away from any kind of responsibility. In some cases, this may have been true. It’s hard to imagine a counterculture of this magnitude emerging during less prosperous times when people had no choice but to focus on survival.

Ironically enough, many of these “hippies” – assuming they survived the 1960s – “grew up,” got jobs, raised families, and became as “square” and materialistic as their parents had been. If anything, these “yuppies” may have been even more into wealth and success than their parents, indicating that all of their “hippy” talk in the past was just an idealistic fantasy reflecting the foolishness of youth.

Is There a Generation Gap Today?
For parents today who are roughly my age, there is not, in general, such a wide generation gap between themselves and their kids. Since I was raised middle class in a suburb, just as my kids have been, I cannot (honestly) tell them stories about how much I suffered in my youth and of how they “have opportunities that I never had.”

At best, I can tell them tragic stories about coping with cassette tapes, landlines, and “Pacman” instead of having an iPod, smartphone, and Wii. But in spite of these technological blessings, they may actually face a situation a bit more difficult than I (or even my parents) did as a child. It’s not easy to get a suburban home in Orange County, California, today, and in our world of constant technological change, the prospects of settling into a stable career for life may be lower than ever before.

My kids are growing up in a world very different from the one that I knew, but I don’t see in their generation a burning desire to create a planet free from all of the problems created by old people. Either they don’t think it is possible to solve these problems or they are too busy texting each other to try.

Flower power was a slogan used during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a symbol of passive resistance and nonviolence. It originated in Berkeley, California, as a symbolic action of protest against the Vietnam War. The expression was coined by Allen Ginsberg in 1965 as a means to transform war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles. Hippies embraced the symbolism by dressing in clothing with embroidered flowers and vibrant colors, wearing flowers in their hair, and distributing flowers to the public, becoming known as flower children. Today, flower power is most closely associated with acid-tripping hippies. The flower child refers to a subgroup of the counterculture that began in the United States during the early 1960s, becoming an established social group by 1965, and expanding to other countries before declining in the mid-1970s.

Flower Power
Make love, not war. Don't trust anyone over 30. Turn on, tune in, and drop out. I am a human being — please do not fold, bend spindle, or mutilate.

These and many more became slogans for emerging youth culture — a COUNTERCULTURE — in the 1960s. The baby boom was entering its teen years, and in sheer numbers they represented a larger force than any prior generation in the history of the United States. As more and more children of middle-class Americans entered college, many rejected the suburban conformity designed by their parents.

Never more than a minority movement, the so-called "HIPPIE" lifestyle became synonymous with American youth of the 1960s. Displaying frank new attitudes about drugs and sex, communal lifestyles, and innovations in food, fashion, and music, the counterculture youth of America broke profoundly with almost all values their parents held dear.

The sexual revolution was in full swing on American college campuses. Birth control and a rejection of traditional views of sexuality led to a more casual attitude toward sex. Displays of public nudity became commonplace. Living together outside marriage shattered old norms.

In addition to changes in sexual attitudes, many youths experimented with drugs. Marijuana and LSD were used most commonly, but experimentation with mushrooms and pills was common as well. A Harvard professor named TIMOTHY LEARY made headlines by openly promoting the use of LSD. There was a price to be paid for these new attitudes. With the new freedom came an upsurge of venereal diseases, bad trips, and drug addictions.

Like the UTOPIAN SOCIETIES of the 1840s, over 2000 rural communes formed during these turbulent times. Completely rejecting the capitalist system, many communes rotated duties, made their own laws, and elected their own leaders. Some were philosophically based, but others were influenced by new religions. Earth-centered religions, astrological beliefs, and Eastern faiths proliferated across American campuses. Some scholars labeled this trend as the THIRD GREAT AWAKENING.

Most communes, however, faced fates similar to their 19th century forebears. A charismatic leader would leave or the funds would become exhausted, and the commune would gradually dissolve.

One lasting change from the countercultural movement was in American diet. Health food stores sold wheat germ, yogurt, and granola, products completely foreign to the 1950s America. Vegetarianism became popular among many youths. Changes in fashion proved more fleeting. Long hair on young men was standard, as were Afros. Women often wore flowers in their hair. Ethnic or peasant clothing was celebrated.. Beads, bellbottom jeans, and tie-dyed shirts became the rage, as each person tried to celebrate his or her own sense of individuality.

The common bond among many youths of the time was music. Centered in the HAIGHT-ASHBURY section of San Francisco, a new wave of psychedelic rock and roll became the music of choice. Bands like the GRATEFUL DEAD, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, and the DOORS created new sounds with electrically enhanced guitars, subversive lyrics, and association with drugs.

Folk music was fused with rock, embodied by the best-known solo artist of the decade, BOB DYLAN. When the popular BEATLES went psychedelic with their landmark album SGT PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, counterculture music became mainstream.

It is important to note that the counterculture was probably no more than ten percent of the American youth population. Contrary to common belief, most young Americans sought careers and lifestyles similar to their parents. Young educated people actually supported the war in Vietnam in greater numbers than older, uneducated Americans. The counterculture was simply so outrageous that the media made their numbers seem larger than in reality. Nevertheless, this lifestyle made an indelible cultural impact on America for decades to come.

What happened to the ideals of the counterculture? Why weren't they able to sustain their utopian views? In part there views were subsumed by the greater culture. Moreover, it's one thing to say you want a revolution, quite another to try to affect one.

As blue jeans, beards, body adornments, natural foods, legal marijuana, gay marriage, and single parenthood have gained acceptance in mainstream American society in recent years, it is now clear that the hippies won the culture wars that were launched nearly fifty years ago. It was in the mid-1960s that one of America’s oddest social movements, the hippies, suddenly appeared. This counterculture of psychedelic drugs, rock music, and casual sex had its roots in the gargantuan size of the baby boomer generation, in youth’s churning hormones, and in the arrival of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD or “acid”). The Sixties counterculture, its beliefs and practices, its odyssey into the Seventies, and its many legacies as it became integrated into mainstream culture help explain the United States today.

Hippies, almost all of whom were white and middle-class, owed a lot to the Beat Generation. In the Fifties the writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg promoted an alternative lifestyle outside the middle-class “rat race.” Like the Beats, hippies smoked marijuana, grew beards, indulged in a lot of sex, and rejected mainstream values, but the new generation also marked itself as distinct. Taking LSD in prodigious quantities, freaks preferred rock to jazz and wore bright-colored clothes. Far more numerous than the Beats, hippies dominated entire urban neighborhoods, such as the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and the East Village in New York. Unlike the gloomy Beats, hippies were exuberant. Large numbers made these youthful rebels optimistic that the entire society would eventually join the counterculture, and in a way it did.

At the heart, the counterculture was about three things: a search for authenticity, an insistence upon individualism, and a desire for community. Although hippies disagreed about many things, they shared a desire to be authentic. Being true to one’s self meant rejecting middle-class culture in order to “do your own thing.” A spiritual search was often part of the quest. Deeply suspicious of both society and government, freaks embraced individualism as a true expression of authenticity. However, this attitude left hippies feeling isolated and lonely, which explains why the love generation sought community. In the mid-Sixties communes popped up in cities. By the early Seventies rising rents, racial tensions, and crime drove hippies “back to the land.” Self-sufficient agriculture was a hard transition for children of the suburban middle class. Most communes failed when trust funds, parental checks, or welfare payments ran out. Hippie women bore a lot of children. Rural communes did enable residents to sort out their lives.

Psychedelic drugs and rock music were accompanied by the explosion of easy sex. More casual sexual mores, however, had been going on in American society for a hundred years, as evidenced by the growing divorce rate. Hippies merely accelerated the process. They declared their parents to be hypocrites for preaching traditional values while having many affairs. Free love would not have happened without the birth control pill. First sold in 1960, it took several years before single young women gained access. Once the risk of an unwanted pregnancy plummeted, the double standard ended. Hippie men declared that everyone should have sex with whomever they wanted whenever they wanted. In practice, this turned out to mean that hippie men indulged themselves, while women ended up discarded, heart-broken, and depressed. Eventually, many hippie women came to see free love as a male sexual fantasy that did not meet women’s needs. Some hippie women became feminists.

Most freaks were heterosexuals, but the attitude that sex was “no big deal” allowed homosexual hippies to indulge in gay sex without coming out of the closet. In that way, the counterculture liberated gay men and lesbians, but this novel situation also produced anxiety. While hippie openness about sex invited homosexuals to leave the closet, many hesitated to do so because of harsh penalties that might be imposed by authorities. This ambiguous environment took a sudden turn toward gay liberation in 1969 when police busted the Stonewall Tavern, a well-known gay bar in New York’s East Village. Homosexuals astonished both the cops and themselves by fighting back. The counterculture’s freer attitude about sex had a lot to do with emerging homosexual openness.

The hippie relation to politics is a curious one. The fact that longhairs emerged just as the United States enlarged the Vietnam War in 1965 is probably not an accident, and the counterculture all but disappeared when Saigon fell in 1975. Freaks frequently shared the same views as radical activists. Both groups dressed alike, listened to the same rock music, and indulged in free sex. Hippies, however, were deeply suspicious of all authority and did not share the radical desire for bigger government. Freaks also thought that protests were a waste of time. Some had become disillusioned after participating in demonstrations. Of course, long hair mocked a war in which the military insisted that soldiers wear short hair. Refusing to consume mass-produced goods sneered at society.

Although the counterculture disappeared, it produced a cultural revolution over the long term. In the Seventies hippie communards developed the first solar panels to make electricity to run stereos off the grid. Another innovation was natural food. Communes produced pesticide-free fruits and vegetables, and urban co-op groceries, another hippie innovation, often stocked only natural foods. Finally, there is the strange legacy of the personal computer, which freaks conceptualized and invented. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wanted to put a computer on every desk to undercut IBM and other giant corporations that had a computer monopoly in the Sixties. The first Apple was built in a computer hobby club in Menlo Park, California just a couple of blocks from where Jerry Garcia had lived only a few years earlier when he had created the Grateful Dead. It is not an accident that San Francisco gave birth both to LSD space cadets and to the high tech wizardry of Silicon Valley. At times the past must be cast aside to see the future clearly. The Sixties proved to be just such a decade in America’s long-term cultural transformation.

Be the Flower in the Gun: The Story Behind the Historic Photograph "Flower Power" in 1967 Flower Power is a historic photograph taken by American photographer Bernie Boston for the now-defunct Washington Star newspaper. It was nominated for the 1967 Pulitzer Prize. Taken on October 21, 1967, during the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam's March on the Pentagon, the iconic photo shows a Vietnam War protestor placing a carnation into the barrel of a rifle held by a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion.

The rioting in the U.S. city of Minneapolis after the death of a black man in police custody is just the latest incident of racially charged mayhem to mark the United States since the 1960s.

1965: Los Angeles

An identity check by police on two black men in a car sparks the Watts riots, August 11-17, 1965, in Los Angeles, which leave 34 dead and tens of millions of dollars' worth of damage.

The trouble starts when Marquette Frye and his half brother are stopped by police and taken in for questioning. Several thousand blacks surround the police station and, after a week of arson and looting, the Watts neighborhood is all but destroyed.

1967: Newark

Two white police officers arrest and beat up a black taxi driver for a minor traffic violation, setting off rioting July 12-17 in Newark, New Jersey. For five days, in stifling summer heat, rioters wreck the district, leaving 26 dead and 1,500 injured.

1967: Detroit

Race riots in Detroit, Michigan, July 23-27, 1967, kill 43 and leave more than 2,000 injured. Trouble spreads to Illinois, North Carolina, Tennessee and Maryland.

1968: King assassination

After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, violence erupts in 125 cities April 4-11, 1968, leaving at least 46 dead and 2,600 injured. In Washington, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson sends in the 82nd Airborne Division to quell riots.

The Kent State shootings (also known as the May 4 massacre and the Kent State massacre) resulted in the killing of four and wounding of nine unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard, on the Kent State University campus. The shootings took place on May 4, 1970, during a rally opposing the expanding involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia by United States military forces as well as protesting the National Guard presence on campus.

California as well as the rest of the United States became a hot bed of racial revolt in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s as African Americans fought to become equal in the eyes of the law. Segregation and inequality of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness fueled the fire that eventually erupted in race riots throughout the country.

Civil rights advocates demanded an end to segregation, equal opportunities in education, housing, and employment at the end of the 1950’s. The protests were mostly peaceful which included the protests in San Francisco where picketer protested unjust hiring practices. However, the protests in California became more treacherous following President John F. Kennedy’s (1963) and Malcolm X’s (1965) assassinations. After years of police brutality and social discrimination the African American community exploded into violence in Watts in Los Angeles County. The Watts riots involving over ten thousand people, lasted seven days and lead to 34 deaths. At the time, the Watts riot, was that most destructive riot in Unites States history. After Watts was destroyed the city banned together to rebuild and grow.

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland California in 1966. The Black Panther Party, a militant organization, originally set out to patrol the streets in black neighborhoods and protect the African American families from police brutality. Unfortunately, the Black Panther Party developed into a Marxist Revolutionary Organization of 2,000 members that wanted to arm all African American citizens. On April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and because of this a new subject called “Negro History” began being taught in schools.

On the heels of the racial riots, racial consciousness emerged. African Americans and Hispanics began to understand the uniqueness of their own race in regards to physical characteristics, history, culture, and traditions. Although Hispanics were originally classifies as white, they did not receive the same security as other racial minorities. Not until a federal court ruled in 1970 that Mexican Americans constituted an "identifiable ethnic minority with patterns of discrimination." As a movement of racial pride, the Mexican culture consisting of a complex family bond, feelings, food, music, history and social mannerisms that are accepted as “Mexican.”

Generation X is a demographic cohort that follows the Baby Boomers and precedes Millennials.0
It is generally defined as people born between 1965 and 1980, although some sources use slightly different ranges. According to the U.S. Census data, there are 65.2 million Gen Xers in the United States as of 2019. Most of Gen X are the children of the Silent Generation and early Baby Boomers, and they are often the parents of Millennials and Generation Z. Technology, particularly the rapid evolution of how people communicate and interact, is another generation-shaping consideration. Baby Boomers grew up as television expanded dramatically, changing their lifestyles and connection to the world in fundamental ways, while Generation X grew up as the computer revolution was taking hold, and Millennials came of age during the internet explosion.

The 1960s in the United States of America witnessed the rise of a counterculture that rejected and opposed conventional norms. It was a decade of political and cultural mass protest and activism. A revisionist wave resisted American interventionist foreign policy – protesting American military involvement in Vietnam. This would represent the birth of the Antiwar Movement – the first mass-protest movement that defied and disapproved warfare in American history. Indeed, popular opposition to the Vietnam War was unprecedented. Never before had so many Americans affiliated with diverse organizations to openly demonstrate against the government’s policies in times of war. In this article we will examine the Antiwar Movement in the U.S.- Its agenda, tactics, and achievements, and how it can inspire us today.

What is the Antiwar movement?
During the Cold War, the U.S. shifted the focus of its foreign policy towards stopping the spread of Communism. This was known as the containment strategy. It focused primarily on the containment of what the U.S. perceived as the ‘Communist threat’ wherever it existed. American policy makers believed that North Vietnam was under Communist influence. This situation made the U.S. keen on intervening to contain this influence. Such intervention occurred in the form of military involvement and large-scale warfare strategies. Thereafter, the Vietnam War began in 1954 and lasted until 1975.

American military intervention in Vietnam resulted in the emergence of the Antiwar Movement in the 1960s. This movement originated from the Student Movement, more precisely the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It was among students that opposition to the Vietnam War developed. Students also remained the most vocal and active group rejecting the notion of American military interventionism in Vietnam. Simply put, this Movement was a resistance to, and non-cooperation with, military interventionist policies imposed by the American government.

Agenda
The Antiwar Movement’s agenda revolved around promoting pacifism and demanding an end to military intervention in Vietnam. SDS members refused to be drafted into the military and opposed the idea of military induction. The military draft resulted in mandatory enrollment in the American Army. Therefore, Antiwar proponents pushed for the immediate release of anyone who was convicted of resisting mandatory conscription. The Movement further criticized the legitimacy of sending American young men to fight a war that they did not want to fight in, thousands of miles away.

Another objective of the Antiwar Movement was nuclear disarmament. The prospect of nuclear warfare led to the creation of the National Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy in 1957 and the Student Peace Union (SPU) in 1959. These organizations opposed nuclear armament and promoted peace activism. They also criticized the curtailment of social programs in favor of increasing military expenses. They advocated for the protection of civil liberties and demanded an end to the fear tactics used by the government to scare the people into supporting warfare policies.

In May 1970, four students were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard while attending an Antiwar protest. The Kent State shooting shocked the protestors and triggered a national strike that resulted in the closure of hundreds of colleges and universities. Thereafter, protestors demanded the protection of free speech on college campuses. Proponents of the Antiwar Movement viewed the American policies, at home and abroad, as corrupt and repressive. They sought to establish a participatory democracy that can maintain justice and accountability. They supported the Civil Rights Movement, sought to end white supremacy, and rejected any escalation that could potentially result in violence.

Tactics
The Antiwar Movement initially adopted peaceful approaches such as marches, teach-ins, demonstrations, and alternative media. The SDS organized marches in several places. They marched to Oakland Army Terminal where troops departed for Southeast Asia, and to Washington to protest against the bombing in Vietnam. Faculty members all over the country organized teach-ins at numerous campuses. They aimed at raising awareness and scrutinizing the moral values of American policies. The participants of teach-ins – also called seminarians – wrote to the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, expressing their opposition to the war in Vietnam based on moral grounds. In addition, different student groups from various campuses around the country expressed opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam by publicly burning draft cards and chanting slogans such as “Hey, hey LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson], how many kids did you kill today?”.

An equally important approach was the creation of alternative media networks such as the Underground Press Syndicate (1966) and the Liberation News Service (1967). These networks served to spread information and raise awareness in relation to the Vietnam War. The Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) propagated the Antiwar agenda through five newspapers: The East Village Other (NYC), the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, the Fifth Estate (Detroit), and The Paper (Michigan).

The Movement leaders expanded their approaches to include conferences, debates, and symposiums. In October 1965, a symposium was held at Berkeley under the name “Vietnam Day” drawing remarkable numbers of people to discuss the moral legitimacy of the Vietnam War. Antiwar activists also employed art as a mechanism of opposition. Artists confronted the War in Vietnam through cultural expression and artistic resistance. They converted their messages into slogans and expressed themselves through images and paintings.

Achievements
The Antiwar Movement succeeded in impacting American culture through changing attitudes towards military intervention, constraining war efforts, and lowering the voting age.

Antiwar protests succeeded at reframing and reforming mainstream discourse in regards to the Vietnam War. In fact, protestors ignited mutual aggression between policymakers. They influenced government officials such as Undersecretary of State George Ball and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who ultimately doubted the moral justification of the war. This resulted in internal dissent and impacted policymaking.

More importantly, the Antiwar Movement noted that the draft resulted in the average age of the U.S. soldier in Vietnam being 19. They argued that it makes no sense that a 19-year-old was able to fight a war but unable to vote. This played a role in the introduction of the 26th Amendment which lowered the voting age to 18 year. In fact, it can be valid to attribute the removal of the military draft to the Antiwar Movement.

The Antiwar Movement participated in changing perceptions of military involvement. It succeeded in making people more sensitive and more aware in regards to the atrocities of war. It also made more young people politically informed as it impacted policymakers and public opinion. The 60s generation went on to rally behind women’s and African Americans’ rights, as well as the opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This movement left a legacy of youth activism that would impact college campuses across the world.

Psych-Out 1968 A Real Summer Of Love And Is A Psychedelia Master Peace Movie

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The Summer of Love 1967 was a social phenomenon that occurred in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where as many as 100,000 young people, mostly wearing hippie fashions, converged. The term "Summer of Love" originated with the formation of the Council for the Summer of Love, composed of the Family Dog hippie commune, The Straight Theatre, The Diggers, The San Francisco Oracle, and approximately 25 other people, who sought to alleviate some of the problems anticipated from the influx of young people expected during the summer. The Summer of Love encompassed the hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war, and free-love scene throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City. New forms of rock 'n' roll pulsed through the airwaves, psychedelic drugs were plentiful, and free love was embraced. The Summer of Love was a blast of glamour, ecstasy, and Utopianism that divided American culture into a Before and After unparalleled since World War II. The Summer of Love was billed as the Summer of Love, and its creators did not employ a single publicist or craft More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed the hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war, and free-love scene throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City.

Countercultural disdain toward the media was complicated by another countercultural trend that participants in the counterculture were developing: guerrilla theatre. During the Summer of Love, the San Francisco Mime Troupe used street theatre to make political points. The group was known for putting on thought-provoking (and just generally provoking) theatre meant to make social and political critiques. The theatre and opinions of leaders in the mime troupe, like R.G. Davis and Peter Berg, appeared regularly in underground papers.

Movie PsychOut 1968 Psychedelic Music in the Flower Power 1965 Thru 1969 Era

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The Electric Prunes - Mass in F Minor - Om is the Primordial Sound of the Universe

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Om is the seed of transcendental sound, and it is through transcendental sound one can transform the mind and the senses. By chanting Om, the mind becomes aligned with the breath, which enables a person to get into an elevated state of consciousness called samadhi. So Rock Mass in F Minor is this Transcendental Sound of your Real Mind.

Flower Power Full LP In the Garden of Eden or In the Garden of Life by Iron Butterfly

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This is a story about “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”, a truly classic song, and the folklore around the mysterious meaning of the song. Simply put the words “In A Gadda Da Vida” were intended to be “In the Garden of Eden” however the true translation of “Vida” is “Life” putting the mistaken translation to “In the Garden of Life”.

Moody Blues' song "Om" features the chanting of the word "Om," which represents Aum, a sacred mantra in Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist religions.

https://youtu.be/2gsqrqsNsf8 - On a Threshold of a Dream

https://youtu.be/uZCzH8q1hcY - Days of Future Passed

https://youtu.be/26YzvbkbSDU - Question Of Balance

Samadhi is the highest state of mental concentration that people can achieve while still bound to the body and which unites them with the highest reality.

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