Bioregion: Counterculture, Flow, Ecstasy

In a way, counterculture, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, asked what culture, tradition, and norms, as well as socioeconomic processes, were generating - both personally and societally - especially in terms of their limitations, and questioned these processes to explore creatively freedom.

There was a widespread, fundamental questioning of many received patterns, especially concerning politics, spirituality, sexuality, art, race, science, the academy, and ideas, as well as in terms of vision. A great many individuals gave rise to an amazing variety of great understandings and visions, and collectively, too. There were widespread protests against all kinds of wrong doing, often by governments, like war, in every city in the West. A language and literature emerged. People experimented with marijuana, psychedelics, and drugs. Music, especially rock and roll, became far out, and contributed profoundly to counterculture and this vision. People returned to the land, started communes, and became environmentally conscious and activist, for example. Organic farms and the organic farming movement spread grew.


How did this happen?

So, for example, a student might bring an interesting book to other students at UC Berkeley, sitting on the grass talking, that completely re-envisions 'reality' as they knew it before - for example, the Upanishads or "Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience." Other students would begin to explore this, and new cultural practices emerge.


Here Csikszentmihalyi characterizes 'flow' in a TED talk on ecstasy:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html


So, out of this, for example, David Rains Wallace writes "The Klamath Knot" (Sierra Club 1983 / University of California Press 2004) combining questions of evolutionary history (40 million years of relatively unbroken history in these northern California / southern Oregon Klamath / Siskiyou mountain ranges) with the experience of living in these wilderness areas, in beautifully written essays. He also helps to characterize 'bioregions' in essay form.


How to elicit 'loving bliss' counterculturally in far-reaching ways, and at Harbin?

To begin, I've found it has something to do with easing, the relaxation response and 'coming home, '~ a kind of oneness.


Heading to the Harbin pools shortly . . . :)