03-28-2020, 09:49 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-29-2020, 04:55 AM by Eric the Green.)
Another whole thread could be written about the turn of the 20th century Awakening and its reverberations since then. The Renaissance had reached its end, as the last classical music and art masters before the chaos of modernism portrayed their civilization falling off a cliff, most spectacularly in Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony of 1893, and in Munch's painting "The Scream" in the same year. But this new era of civilization which we are still in was rising up at the same time, most spectacularly in the arts of Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin and the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Friederich Nietzsche. The various kinds of organic and mind-expanding art nouveau styles helped to inspire the next awakening and help indicate the connections from awakening to awakening. It was to be an age in which the growing power of science led into strange new visions of the world that overthrew the classical views, through quantum theory and relativity as well as depth psychology, also to climax in the next awakening era, and into inventions that have reshaped the world we live in forever, such as cars, planes, electronic media and skyscrapers. The defeat of the old nationalist colonial imperialism in the world wars opened up the possibility of a globalizing era of increasing peace, and a prosperity distributed more widely as proclaimed by socialism and the social gospel. Neptune aligned with Pluto in the 1892-93 era sounded the death knell of the old renaissance/enlightenment era measured in mechanical proportions and dominated by aristocrats and empires begun at the previous such conjunction in circa 1400, followed by Uranus oppositions to Pluto in 1901 and Neptune in 1908-10.
The two remaining Awakenings I will describe from the lifetimes of the older folks among us like me may seem smaller than these great and momentous epochs of the past that have shaped our lives so tremendously and continuously. I must say though it might also be hard to find too many other periods in which all the planets aligned in such powerful formations as they did on these two occasions, besides those I have mentioned, although there have been some.
The sixties Awakening is of course a mainstay of The Fourth Turning book. It emerged out of the Kennedy years and his exhortations to the young to work for change, and the civil rights movement that challenged the leftover repressions from the South's response to its defeat in the Civil War 4T and Reconstruction, new movements which formed the tail end of the first turning and a time of renewed humanitarian generosity and altrusim. After JFK's death this emergent movement became an Awakening in 1964, with more powerful and disrupting features. As Uranus approached Pluto for its conjunction in 1965-1966, LBJ passed Kennedy's programs and established Medicare and a war on poverty. This ambitious drive was called The Great Society.
But his ambition also impelled him to bring the Cold War to its awesome and deadly climax in Vietnam. The young generation whom Kennedy had inspired to question the status quo, in many cases rejected the less-charimatic LBJ's call to join an American invasion of another country seeking self-determination on the pretext to contain communism. In February 1966 Saturn, Mars and Mercury opposed Uranus and Pluto in a tight formation. Kennedy's brother Robert came out against the war that month, and Senator Fulbright began hearings. The peace movement grew out of this experience, and still reverberates, leading us toward a world without war. And what a sign in the sky echoed this new movement! On November 12 all the planets formed a peace symbol in the sky during a total solar eclipse. The blacks and other repressed groups in society asserted their rights and identity, sometimes in more militant ways, and these movements continue as well. In this era, industry had grown to such an extent that it threatened life on Earth with pollution and climate change, so environmentalism arose to restrain it and, with help of the new computer fields then taking off, lead us toward a post-industrial information-age society. It reverberates today in the Green New Deal proposal. The people-power methods pioneered by the sixties activists continues to be deployed in movements for freedom and justice all over the world.
Of course, counter-awakenings arose too to promote the kind of traditional religious revival common in past Awakenings and to oppose these new movements. This counter-revolution continues among the Republican proponents of Reaganomics, the anti-welfare and free-market policies named after the actor turned governor in 1966 and president in 1980.
I claim that the psychedelic revolution of 1966 tore a whole in the psyche of normal consciousness and introduced us to altered states to an extent that is covered up but can't ever be filled again. LSD was part of a new development in medicine that had great promise to help people psychologically to see past their illusions and emotional reactions and reconnect with the divine self. It opened sensibilities to such an extent that love was the only response and impressed those who took it as the foremost principle of life. It is no small thing that art was employed to represent these altered states, even though as this article points out the drugs were used as an excuse to diminish this art.
https://www.widewalls.ch/psychedelic-art/
https://artlark.org/2019/07/15/lsd-and-t...-movement/
The art of Wes Wilson was a great source of psychedelic art.
http://www.wes-wilson.com/
On my way back from witnessing the Great American Solar Eclipse on Aug.21, 2017, I went to the 50-year anniversary of the Summer of Love exhibit at the San Francisco DeYoung museum, and wish I had bought their big book, but I saw the works of the artists, mostly born around 1940, who created the wonderful art renaissance of that time.
https://deyoung.famsf.org/summer-love-ar...-rock-roll
Some of the articles above note that this art has been very influential on popular culture, and emerged in new forms in the next awakening period as I will describe later.
Psychedelic art was an enormous explosion in 1966, and so was psychedelic music, as developed by great musical artists and thousands of garage bands springing up all over the land and across the seas in that year. But what I experienced, not having taken these drugs, was not only a sort of contact high and spiritual awakening of my own, but reports of many people I knew who experienced powerful spiritual awakenings without drugs at the very same moment I did in the early summer of 1966. I said at the time that I felt "something in the air." Perhaps Bob Dylan anticipated my statement in his most famous song in 1962-63. 4 years later in 1970 a song by Thunderclap Newman stated it explicitly, as heard in this video that also shows the emerging counter-culture and other fun delights of the times.
Pete Townshend of The Who wrote this song, and he as well as anyone put the spirit of this Awakening in his music, including this one in which he sang "Let's See Action, Let's See People, Let's see freedom in the air!"
https://youtu.be/vP_1FJRnHHw
As I enjoy the best music from electronica, rock, folk and ambient genres from all of the years since, I feel that they express the spirit of that original awakening in our lifetimes in 1966. All the musicians since have been influenced by that moment, and the inspiration they express in the music is as much a continuation of it, as was the romantic music further variation on La Marseillaise. The legacy of the counter-culture and the psychedelic opening is not for us all to take psychedelics, but is our ability to take classes, listen to music, read books or practice methods that take us beyond ordinary consciousness, usually all wrapped up as it is in our various anxieties, and bring us back into the fullness of NOW which includes all of time. As two of the most significant psychedelic songs of 1966 put it, it is the end before the beginning.
https://youtu.be/D5XuMWRHGU8
https://youtu.be/pHNbHn3i9S4
Disillusion is a featured legacy of this revolutionary awakening as it has been in many others, especially that first Revolution for Liberty in circa 1792. Kenneth Clark used the Leonore Overture #3 from Fidelio by Beethoven to illustrate his story of the awakening and its disillusion called The Fallacies of Hope, embedded above. Pete Townshend and The Who created in 1971 what I claim is the best of all rock music pieces, probably influenced by this documentary (after all it was British and was released just two years before), as well as by John Lennon's famous "Revolution" song on the flip side of one of the Beatles greatest hits in 1968, and it could have acted as the perfect soundtrack and lyric background for Clark's program. And in fact, with two dominant notes added, the theme of this greatest rock song in history begins with the same motif as Beethoven's Leonore Overture's main theme does. By tones, it goes 1-3-5 (5) (5)-6. "And the parting on the left, is now parting on the right, and the beards have all grown longer overnight.... meet the new boss, same as the old boss" And no song embodies the creative genius of this era better. We have been fooled again and again, but still, the spirit of liberation and awakening continues on.
The two remaining Awakenings I will describe from the lifetimes of the older folks among us like me may seem smaller than these great and momentous epochs of the past that have shaped our lives so tremendously and continuously. I must say though it might also be hard to find too many other periods in which all the planets aligned in such powerful formations as they did on these two occasions, besides those I have mentioned, although there have been some.
The sixties Awakening is of course a mainstay of The Fourth Turning book. It emerged out of the Kennedy years and his exhortations to the young to work for change, and the civil rights movement that challenged the leftover repressions from the South's response to its defeat in the Civil War 4T and Reconstruction, new movements which formed the tail end of the first turning and a time of renewed humanitarian generosity and altrusim. After JFK's death this emergent movement became an Awakening in 1964, with more powerful and disrupting features. As Uranus approached Pluto for its conjunction in 1965-1966, LBJ passed Kennedy's programs and established Medicare and a war on poverty. This ambitious drive was called The Great Society.
But his ambition also impelled him to bring the Cold War to its awesome and deadly climax in Vietnam. The young generation whom Kennedy had inspired to question the status quo, in many cases rejected the less-charimatic LBJ's call to join an American invasion of another country seeking self-determination on the pretext to contain communism. In February 1966 Saturn, Mars and Mercury opposed Uranus and Pluto in a tight formation. Kennedy's brother Robert came out against the war that month, and Senator Fulbright began hearings. The peace movement grew out of this experience, and still reverberates, leading us toward a world without war. And what a sign in the sky echoed this new movement! On November 12 all the planets formed a peace symbol in the sky during a total solar eclipse. The blacks and other repressed groups in society asserted their rights and identity, sometimes in more militant ways, and these movements continue as well. In this era, industry had grown to such an extent that it threatened life on Earth with pollution and climate change, so environmentalism arose to restrain it and, with help of the new computer fields then taking off, lead us toward a post-industrial information-age society. It reverberates today in the Green New Deal proposal. The people-power methods pioneered by the sixties activists continues to be deployed in movements for freedom and justice all over the world.
Of course, counter-awakenings arose too to promote the kind of traditional religious revival common in past Awakenings and to oppose these new movements. This counter-revolution continues among the Republican proponents of Reaganomics, the anti-welfare and free-market policies named after the actor turned governor in 1966 and president in 1980.
I claim that the psychedelic revolution of 1966 tore a whole in the psyche of normal consciousness and introduced us to altered states to an extent that is covered up but can't ever be filled again. LSD was part of a new development in medicine that had great promise to help people psychologically to see past their illusions and emotional reactions and reconnect with the divine self. It opened sensibilities to such an extent that love was the only response and impressed those who took it as the foremost principle of life. It is no small thing that art was employed to represent these altered states, even though as this article points out the drugs were used as an excuse to diminish this art.
https://www.widewalls.ch/psychedelic-art/
https://artlark.org/2019/07/15/lsd-and-t...-movement/
The art of Wes Wilson was a great source of psychedelic art.
http://www.wes-wilson.com/
On my way back from witnessing the Great American Solar Eclipse on Aug.21, 2017, I went to the 50-year anniversary of the Summer of Love exhibit at the San Francisco DeYoung museum, and wish I had bought their big book, but I saw the works of the artists, mostly born around 1940, who created the wonderful art renaissance of that time.
https://deyoung.famsf.org/summer-love-ar...-rock-roll
Some of the articles above note that this art has been very influential on popular culture, and emerged in new forms in the next awakening period as I will describe later.
Psychedelic art was an enormous explosion in 1966, and so was psychedelic music, as developed by great musical artists and thousands of garage bands springing up all over the land and across the seas in that year. But what I experienced, not having taken these drugs, was not only a sort of contact high and spiritual awakening of my own, but reports of many people I knew who experienced powerful spiritual awakenings without drugs at the very same moment I did in the early summer of 1966. I said at the time that I felt "something in the air." Perhaps Bob Dylan anticipated my statement in his most famous song in 1962-63. 4 years later in 1970 a song by Thunderclap Newman stated it explicitly, as heard in this video that also shows the emerging counter-culture and other fun delights of the times.
Pete Townshend of The Who wrote this song, and he as well as anyone put the spirit of this Awakening in his music, including this one in which he sang "Let's See Action, Let's See People, Let's see freedom in the air!"
https://youtu.be/vP_1FJRnHHw
As I enjoy the best music from electronica, rock, folk and ambient genres from all of the years since, I feel that they express the spirit of that original awakening in our lifetimes in 1966. All the musicians since have been influenced by that moment, and the inspiration they express in the music is as much a continuation of it, as was the romantic music further variation on La Marseillaise. The legacy of the counter-culture and the psychedelic opening is not for us all to take psychedelics, but is our ability to take classes, listen to music, read books or practice methods that take us beyond ordinary consciousness, usually all wrapped up as it is in our various anxieties, and bring us back into the fullness of NOW which includes all of time. As two of the most significant psychedelic songs of 1966 put it, it is the end before the beginning.
https://youtu.be/D5XuMWRHGU8
https://youtu.be/pHNbHn3i9S4
Quote:Norman gosney
5 months ago
We got the album on the day it came out. Several of us had dropped acid in the previous months, not that day, but our expectations were high. The day was beautiful, and we gathered in a flat off Holland Park, elegant with high ceilings and big windows, but we closed them so we would be able to hear it without any outside noises, and drew the curtains.
We'd all smoked a little. Gary put the record on, and except for having to flip it midway, we were transfixed, not a word spoken...it was as if the Beatles were speaking for us, our small group, this blossoming culture that felt we were part of, so new and maybe important...and by the time Tomorrow Never Knows had finished, several of us were in tears, so blown away that our visions and dreams had all been voiced. I think we listened to it constantly for days...does this still happen, do friends still gather for this kind of experience?
Give it a try...not here on YouTube, but a vinyl copy on a decent stereo...get yer mates round... make an event of it...close the curtains, close your eyes, light some candles,.....get some kind of high.....taste that unique time and feelings....fuck, it still works, there's still a little magic to be had......
Disillusion is a featured legacy of this revolutionary awakening as it has been in many others, especially that first Revolution for Liberty in circa 1792. Kenneth Clark used the Leonore Overture #3 from Fidelio by Beethoven to illustrate his story of the awakening and its disillusion called The Fallacies of Hope, embedded above. Pete Townshend and The Who created in 1971 what I claim is the best of all rock music pieces, probably influenced by this documentary (after all it was British and was released just two years before), as well as by John Lennon's famous "Revolution" song on the flip side of one of the Beatles greatest hits in 1968, and it could have acted as the perfect soundtrack and lyric background for Clark's program. And in fact, with two dominant notes added, the theme of this greatest rock song in history begins with the same motif as Beethoven's Leonore Overture's main theme does. By tones, it goes 1-3-5 (5) (5)-6. "And the parting on the left, is now parting on the right, and the beards have all grown longer overnight.... meet the new boss, same as the old boss" And no song embodies the creative genius of this era better. We have been fooled again and again, but still, the spirit of liberation and awakening continues on.