Good Life Project - Summer of Love 2017: Remixed

Episode Date: April 27, 2017

Fifty years ago, in 1967, some 100,000 hippies came together in Haight-Ashbury for the famed Summer of Love. They gathered to celebrate an ethos of love, generosity the pursuit of meaning and expanded consciousness.While psychedelics were a not infrequent part of the culture, the bigger pursuit took the form of a counterculture revolution. It was about changing the dynamics of power, expression and connection. About casting off oppressive norms and rediscovering "freedom."That same exploration, those same questions, are alive and well some 50 years later. Today's short riff is a bit of a "spoken word" piece on the idea that, when it comes to the quest for freedom, what's old is new again.+++ Today's Sponsors +++Today's show is supported by FreshBooks, cloud accounting software that makes it insanely easy for freelancers and professionals to get paid online, track expenses and do more of what you love. Get your 1-month free trial, no credit card required, at FreshBooks.com/goodlife (enter The Good Life Project in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section). Good Life Project is also supported by Camp GLP. $200 Early Bird Discount expires April 30th! Come spend 3 1/2 days with "your people," make amazing friendships, drop the facade, reignite your vitality and learn powerful strategies and breakthrough business ideas. Learn more now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Good Life Project is supported by FreshBooks, cloud accounting software that helps you tackle your paperwork faster so you can spend more time building your business and less time chasing all the other stuff. For your 30-day trial, go to freshbooks.com slash good life and be sure to enter Good Life Project in the how did you hear about us section. So about 50 years ago, the summer of 67, some some hundred thousand hippies converged and hate ashbury in san francisco for what then became known as the summer of love they were coming together to ask bigger questions to buck convention to explore how they wanted to live to challenge authority and constraints.

And what's really kind of fascinating to me is now 50 years later, a half a century later, I think that so many of us are grappling with those same questions, and we are exploring how we want society to look and how we want to relate with others and what matters. So I thought it was an interesting time to reflect on one of the big slogans of that time and also a figure who offered that slogan who is fairly controversial, but the fundamental idea of what happened, I think, is really worthy of revisiting. That's where we're going in today's Good Life Project riff. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. Right now, I want to share a little bit about today's sponsor with you.

So we've learned over the years that so many of you, our listeners, are freelancers or professionals or solopreneurs in some way. So we jumped at the chance to partner with FreshBooks. It's this ridiculously easy to use cloud accounting software. Also has a beautiful app. And it lets you simplify things like invoicing and tracking expenses. And this is super important to getting paid online. So you can spend more time doing the part that you love. And here's one thing I know when it comes to living a good life, doing more of what you love and less of what you don't is a pretty important thing. 10 million people trust FreshBooks to rock their books and get paid with ease, online and on time. So you can claim your month-long free trial with no credit card required.

Just go to freshbooks.com slash good life and be sure to enter Good Life Project in the How Did You Hear About Us section too. On to our show. January 14th, 1967. Counterculture icon Timothy Leary stands before a free-loving gathering of some 30,000 hippies. They've come to San Francisco to attend the legendary Human Bee Inn on a quest to explore a different approach to, well, everything. A few months later, some 100,000 will reconvene in Haight-Ashbury for what will then become known as the famed Summer of Love. But when Leary takes the mic in January, he implores his band of consciousness explorers to, quote, turn on, tune in, drop out. Now, he's offered this same phrase in a talk given in New York City a few months earlier, and even self-titled a philosophical

spoken word album around it. But here in the crowd on that January day, it takes on its own life and it becomes a rally cry for a generation. Mainstream America at the time, fueled by a largely culturally conservative ethos, attacks the phrase, ignoring the deeper exploration of connection and consciousness,

and instead labels it a reckless, valueless call to drugs. In no small part because it's easier to focus on the psychedelics, the long hair, and the weird clothes than the endemic existential unrest that's been fermenting under a gloss of, quote, everything's okay for decades. Everything, in fact, is not okay. And the real energy behind the movement, the bigger provocation, comes from a reckoning of this fact, an awakening to a bigger commitment to step outside the box and explore what it really means to be alive, to make meaning and love, to contribute to society on a level beyond just personal gain. That is what really drove Leary and many others in the counterculture hippie revolution. The psychedelics,

they were a tool for consciousness crusaders and a convenient flashpoint for those who preferred not to have the mainstream cultures boat rocked. Some 15 years later, Leary actually speaks to this misinterpretation in his autobiography, Flashback, where he says, turn on meant to go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. Tune in meant interact harmoniously with the world around you. Externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Dropout suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments.

Dropout meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's were often misinterpreted to mean, get stoned and abandon all constructive activity. End quote. Truth is, I'm actually not all that interested in going too far down the psychedelic wormhole. What does interest me, though, is the bigger idea behind Leary's words. Turn on, tune in, drop out. And I wonder if they're as relevant today as they were then, maybe even more. We live life at a maniacally fast pace, heads down, success-minded, massively reactive, and disconnected. Room to breathe, space to think, and moments to feel, largely the stuff of dreamers and some days.

We are so caught up in leaning in, winding up, and getting ahead that we've lost the grace of stepping back, winding down, and realizing that so much of what we aspire to acquire and become is and has always been right here in front of us. Right here inside of us. Right here beside us. If we'd only pause long enough to see it, to feel it, to be it. This year celebrates the 50th anniversary of the human being and the summer of love. 50 years,

that's my lifetime plus one. In that half century, surely we've progressed. Science, medicine, technology have seen unfathomable discoveries. And in many ways, the world is a better place because of this. But in so many other ways, we're still mired in the very same existential throes of 67. We continue to seek a deeper sense of meaning and connection, both with ourselves and each other. We yearn for purpose and possibility for the time and space to just be a human being. We look for permission, for moments and opportunities to, as Larry invited, turn on our emotional, spiritual, and experiential lives, to tune in to the vastness, the humanity, the beauty and lightness of life, and to drop out of a state of mindless autopilot compliance with norms, rules, expectations, and constraints

that serve not to uplift, expand, create, and connect, but to suppress, contract, consume, and isolate. That very same yearning to create moments that allow us to step outside our everyday life and ask the bigger questions, to surround ourselves with people we cannot get enough of and around whom we cannot feel judged, to feel breathed by purpose, moved by intention, and fueled by expression, to step outside the frenetic disembodied fray long enough to once again feel the beat of our own heart, the wind in our hair, the sun on our skin, and the laughter in our souls. To breathe again, to feel again, to be alive again. So for some four years now, my Good Life Project family and I have been gathering a global community for three and a half days of learning and celebration. And every summer, like clockwork, people get on planes, trains, buses, and cars from literally all over the world to converge on this beautiful oasis 90 minutes from Manhattan.

This year, some 400 plus, quote, Gleepers, as they've come to call themselves, will join us. And I've been asked many times, what exactly is this thing, this thing that you call Camp GLP? It's funny because I've never really had a great answer. It's one of those, you know, you've got to experience it to know it things. But on this 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I think I may have finally figured it out. It's our Summer of Love. Our moment in time, immersed in nature and living and laughing and co-creating and unfolding, embraced by a community defined by generosity,

acceptance, exploration, growth, and joy. Reflecting on what matters. Connecting beyond the facade. Relishing in the moment. Refueling, savoring, expanding, and setting in motion the ideas, relationships, stories, and missions that will forever leave us changed and never again alone. So as yet another of my favorite philosophers, the great Ferris Bueller once offered, life moves pretty fast. If you don't

stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. So when I really think about it, what this gathering is to me, what Camp GLP is, it's our way of stopping to look around, turning back on, tuning back in, and dropping, or maybe more accurately in this case, opting out of mindless pace and into intentional grace. Leaning out so we know better when and why to lean in. And knowing from that moment forward that we no longer travel alone. Something to think about on this beautiful 50th anniversary. How have we changed? How has the world changed? How have the questions that we're asking changed? How are we spending our lives, our days? How are we contributing to the world? And who are we creating our experience of life with? Figured I'd plant that seed. That's

what I'm thinking about today. And of course, if you want to come join us at Camp JLP, love to have you there. You can find a link in the show notes. There's actually a $200 early bird discount that expires in just a couple of days on April 30th. Whether you're there or not, I would still ask you, think about these things. Think about these questions. This stuff matters. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.