The Way Of The Hippy

 The Way of the Hippy
…maybe it's the time of year. Yes, and maybe it's the time of man.  
And I don't know who I am. But life is for learning. 
Joni Mitchell/CS&N (Woodstock)
What’s a hippie? What’s the difference between an old hippie and a new hippie?  Once a hippie, always a hippie? These and similar questions are the source of much debate today.  New subcategories like web-hippies,cyber-hippies, even zippies have become fashionable.  But what is a hippie and are you one?
To answer this question, let’s see what defines a hippie. Some say it’s the way people dress, and behave, a lifestyle. Others classify drug users and rock and roll fans or those with certain radical political views as hippies. The dictionary defines a hippie as one who doesn’t conform to society’s standardsand advocates a liberal attitude and lifestyle. Can all these definitions be right? 
It seems to me that these definitions miss the point. By focusing on the most visible behavioral traits these limited descriptions fail to reveal what lies in the hippie heart that motivates such behavior. To understand The Way of the Hippy, we must look at those circumstances that preceded the birth of thehippy movement, the important events that changed our lives, our resulting frustration with society, and the philosophy that came from our spiritual maturation. This book will examine these developments and put them in the context of humanity's ongoing social evolution. 
Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot,beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.  
Timothy Leary The Politics of Ecstasy
My view is that being a hippie is a matter of accepting a universal belief system that transcends the social, political, and moral norms of any establishedstructure, be it a class, church, or government. Each of these powerful institutions has it's own agenda for controlling, even enslaving people. Each has to defend itself when threatened by real or imagined enemies. So we see though history a parade of endless conflicts with country vs. country, religion vs. religion, class vs. class. After millennia of war and strife, in which uncounted millionshave suffered, we have yet to rise above our petty differences. 
The way of the hippie is antithetical to all repressive hierarchical power structures since they are adverse to the hippie goals of peace, love and freedom. This is why the "Establishment" feared and suppressed the hippie movement of the '60s, as it was a revolution against the established order. It is also the reason why the hippieswere unable to unite and overthrow the system since they refused to build their own power base. Hippies don't impose their beliefs on others. Instead, hippies seek to change the world through reason and by living what they believe.
Imagine no possesions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world.  
John Lennon (Imagine)To be a hippie you must believe in peace as the way to resolve differences among peoples, ideologies and religions. The way to peace is through love and tolerance. Loving means accepting others as they are, giving them freedom to express themselves and not judging them based on appearances. This is the core of the hippie philosophy. 
…see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers,Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, …all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young...