On Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, Professor Michael Lenz hosted The Revival of The Hippie Counterculture in the Half Moon Room on Arapahoe Comunity College’s main campus. With nearly 50 students and faculty in attendance, the event featured passionate discussions of the hippie movements’ resurgence and the long lasting influence of 1960’s counter culture on our society. This event dicussed the evidences of the revival, which included: eco-awareness, growth of “back to the land of communes”, anti-establishment beliefs and liberalization of marijuana laws.

Lenz addressed Google’s definition of a hippie: a person of unconventional appearance, typically having long hair, associated with a subculture involving a rejection of conventional values and the taking of hallucinogenic drugs. With this definition, he opened the room to talk about what was wrong with it.

Samuel DeVries, the Dean of Mathematics and Sciences, stood up, puts an American flag bandana on and eagerly expressed his problem with the derogatory Google definition. DeVries described his experience as a hippie youth and how being a hippie was to receive all and to transform consciousness. “It was not to reject, or start a war, it was this non-war and non-violent thing. It was about unity.”

The popularization of psychedelics was also discussed because people find incredible insights. People are finding more inner peace and enlightenment while taking psychedelics.

It has a much higher purpose than recreational use, in 2017, NYU John Hopkins college did a study on the medical benefits of psychedelics, a first of it’s kind since the 70’s. The study included terminally ill cancer patients who took small amounts of psychedelics and found that their depression rates lowered after one dose. Some took a second dose and ended feeling comfortable with their own deaths.

Very rarely do we focus on what’s happening now, “How many of you regret things that have happened in the past. Or how many of you worry about the future and or the past?” asks Lenz. When we focus on what is happening now that is when the magic of the moment is revealed. When the deepest truths about our being in the present, not in the future, not in the past, but now.

The Revival of The Hippie Counterculture could mean different things to different people, Lenz breaks it down to,  “Finding inner peace and to spread that peace with the rest of world as one interconnected world.”