To My Flower Children
The Paraclete Shri Mataji “What are you searching? Why are you aimlessly and listlessly running about? The joy that you have searched in material gains, the joy that you are looking for in power, the joy that disappeared in the words of books—the so-called knowledge—is all lost in yourself, and you are still searching and seeking! You can pay attention to everything outside yourself. You are lost in your thoughts, like babes in the wood.
But there is great hope that you can rise into the Heaven of thoughtless awareness, which we call Self-realization. I invite you to this feast of Divine Bliss, which is pouring around you, even in this Kali Yuga, in these God-forsaken modern times. I hope you will come and enjoy the spiritual experience of the life eternal.”
The Paraclete Shri Mataji
The letter above and poem below was written by Shri Mataji in 1972 during Her first trip to America to give public programs.
To My Flower Children
You are angry with life
Like small children
Whose mother is lost in darkness.
You sulk expressing despair
At the fruitless end of your journey.
You wear ugliness to discover Beauty.
You name everything false in the name of Truth.
You drain out emotions to fill the cup of Love.
My sweet children, my darling
How can you get peace by waging war
With yourself, with your being, with joy itself.
Enough are your efforts of renunciation.
The artificial mask of consolation.
Now rest in the petals of the lotus flower
In the lap of your gracious Mother.
I will adorn your life with beautiful blossoms
And fill your moments with joyful fragrance.
I will anoint your head with Divine Love
For I cannot bear your torture anymore.
Let me engulf you in the Ocean of Joy,
So you lose your being in the Greater One
Who is smiling in your calyx of Self
Secretly hidden to tease you all the while.
Be aware and you will find Him (Jesus)
Vibrating your every fibre with blissful Joy
Covering the whole Universe with Light.
The Paraclete Shri Mataji
“One of the chief features of the primitive Christian understanding of the Spirit is that the gift of the pneuma is an eschatological gift and its working in the community is an eschatological event. The Spirit's work on believers is not just an external, invisible, and incomprehensible field of force. The Spirit is given to them as a gift. Here lies the special nature of its function relative to the salvation event. The gift of the Spirit has a soteriological function as an anticipation of the eschatological outpouring of the Spirit and is defined as a gift by the fact that Jesus Christ has given it to believers, the eschatological future of salvation having dawned already in his own person and history, so that he or she is aware that the Spirit he or she has received is the Spirit of Jesus Christ (Phil 1:19; cf. Rom 8:9).” (Varkey 2011 Kindle 5840)
*Flower Child
“Flower child originated as a synonym for the children of Billy Ray Williams and his then wife Hazel Payne Williams who made and sold paper flowers while living on Haight Street, starting in the early 1960's. The 2 older daughters, Charlotte and Victoria, wore flowers in their hair while selling the paper flowers to tourists visiting the Haight Ashbury neighborhood. It eventually became a synonym for the idealistic young people who gathered in San Francisco and environs during the 1967 Summer of Love. It was the custom of 'flower children' to wear and distribute flowers or floral-themed decorations to symbolize altruistic ideals of universal brotherhood, peace and love. The mass media picked up on the term and used it to refer in a broad sense to any hippie. Flower children were also associated with the flower power political movement, which originated in ideas written by Allen Ginsberg in 1965.
Scott McKenzie's rendition of the song 'San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)' was released in May 1967. The song was written by John Phillips to promote the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, and it urged visitors to San Francisco to 'wear some flowers in your hair', in keeping with the festival's billing as 'three days of music, love, and flowers':
If you're going to San Francisco,
be sure to wear some flowers in your hair...
If you come to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there.
'San Francisco' became an instant hit (#4 in the United States, #1 in the U.K.) and quickly transcended its original purpose.”
Summer of Love
After the January 14 Human Be-In organized by artist Michael Bowen (among other things, announcements told participants to bring flowers), as many as 100,000 young people from all over the world flocked to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Berkeley, and other Bay Area cities during the Summer of Love in search of different value systems and experiences. The Summer of Love became a watershed event in the development of a worldwide 1960s counterculture when newly-recruited Flower Children returned home at the end of the summer, taking with them new styles, ideas, and behaviors and introducing them in all major U.S. and Western European cities.
Hippie trail
One travel experience, undertaken by hundreds of thousands of hippies between 1969 and 1971, was the Hippie trail overland route to India. Carrying little or no luggage, and with small amounts of cash, almost all followed the same route, hitch-hiking across Europe to Athens and on to Istanbul, then by train through central Turkey via Erzurum, continuing by bus into Iran, via Tabriz and Tehran to Mashhad, across the Afghan border into Herat, through southern Afghanistan via Kandahar to Kabul, over the Khyber Pass into Pakistan, via Rawalpindi and Lahore to the Indian frontier. Once in India, hippies went to many different destinations but gathered in large numbers on the beaches of Goa and Kovalam in Trivandrum(Kerala), or crossed the border into Nepal to spend months in Kathmandu. In Kathmandu, most of the hippies hung out in tranquil surrounding of a place called Freak Street (Nepal Bhasa: Jhoo Chhen) which still exists near Kathmandu Durbar Square.
Spirituality and religion
Many hippies rejected mainstream organized religion in favor of a more personal spiritual experience, often drawing on indigenous and folk beliefs. If they adhered to mainstream faiths, hippies were likely to embrace Buddhism, Hinduism and the restorationist Christianity of the Jesus Movement. Some hippies embraced neo-paganism, especially Wicca.
In his 1991 book," Hippies and American Values" Timothy Miller describes the hippie ethos as essentially a "religious movement" whose goal was to transcend the limitations of mainstream religious institutions. "Like many dissenting religions, the hippies were enormously hostile to the religious institutions of the dominant culture, and they tried to find new and adequate ways to do the tasks the dominant religions failed to perform.” In his seminal contemporaneous work "The Hippie Trip," author Lewis Yablonsky notes that those who were most respected in hippie settings were the spiritual leaders, the so-called "high priests" who emerged during that era.
One such hippie "high priest" was San Francisco State University Professor Stephen Gaskin. Beginning in 1966, Gaskin's "Monday Night Class" eventually outgrew the lecture hall and attracted 1,500 hippie followers in an open discussion of spiritual values drawing from Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu teachings. In 1970, Gaskin founded a Tennessee community called The Farm, and he still lists his religion as "Hippie.”— Wikipedia, 26 May 2012
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