(The following is written from the perspective of someone born at the beginning of the post war baby boom. I was born on the East Coast at a time when the urban/suburban middle class was burgeoning in the US, and I was in graduate school as the seventies began.)
When I was in my twenties, back in the seventies, the Human Potential Movement was foremost in my mind. The basic premise was that each person has a lot more potential of soul, talent, and achievement than heretofore realized. It was an invigorating time, as people my age opened themselves to new ways of being that helped us “break out of the box” of who we thought we were.
Humanistic psychology took us out of the “Freudian box.” We went to “encounter groups” where there was (generally speaking) a safe place to explore our deeper identities and repressed emotions. We spoke out against the (Viet Nam) war. We spoke up about civil rights. We worked on causes like voter registration in the South. We joined the Peace Corps and learned about other cultures that were often very different from the ones in which we had been raised. We lived in “communes.” We returned from a war that left many of us in a state of shock, disillusionment and openness to change. We went to schools of “awakening,” where we learned about the “inner work” that loosens up our identification with the personal ego.
After that, roughly in the eighties, there was a period of being “hit by reality.” In the final scene of the Dustin Hoffman movie “The Graduate” (1967), where the two “escapees” sat in the back of the bus– one in a wedding gown– was an act of genius. It conveyed in a nutshell what happens after the sense of euphoria/freedom from the “box” dissipates and “reality” sets in: what next?
Did we just revert to the confines the past?
It may have looked like we “copped out,” as we toned down in our thirties. But something was gestating– something that had matured underground. Something that is again rising to the surface.
Many people, of all ages, in all walks of life, and all over the world, are now realizing that it is true that human potential is indeed vast. Human potential is very individual while at the same time bringing us into a global community. Science is aiding and abetting this, as more studies are performed upon the human DNA. Spirituality is peaking again, with renewed opportunities to “wake up” and enter the Witness state– the state wherein we stand outside of our “small selves” and see things from a much broader perspective.
The worst tribulations of humanity and all life on the surface of our Mother Earth are coming to our collective attention. At the same time, more and more people are experiencing that, indeed, we can be much, much more. They are experiencing the reality of the great teachings of all traditions in their own lives: that we are One and that we are capable of living in a state of expanded awareness, of presence, and, of love. That state includes and transcends all moments, including the weird, wild, wrenching, and wonderful moments of the seventies.