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Tim Rhodes's avatar

Well said!

If we mark the 60s through mid-70s a "New Age Great Awakening" it may be useful to also see that as the Boomer Awakening; drawing upon traditions upwelled through the Beats, the Hippies, the Identity Movements and other cultural revolutionaries. Fueled by John Lennon, Tim Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Noam Chomsky, Malcom X, et al.

If so, I think we could also mark another, similar, Awakening in the early 90's: when the end of the Cold War & a liberated Eastern Europe; expansion of the nascent, still freeform Interwebs; the newly acquired cut-n-paste ease of sampling, both in music & art; and a renewed interest psychedelics, with the sudden explosion of new analogies (see: 'PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story" by A. Shulgin & A. Shulgin) that combined delightfully with an inevitable backlash against the Nancy Reagan "Just Say No" & DARE campaigns.

These elements combined into a techno-neo-pagan revival as well, in which all things seemed (for a time) possible thanks to our sudden mastery of chemistry & technology. Or as Terence McKenna framed it, "The Archaic Revival" and consequent apocalypse manifested as "Time Wave Zero" (the Singularity).

Its syncretism nicely documented here, in 1993, with McKenna, Spacetime Continuum (Jonah Sharp) & Stephen Kent's Acid Jazz (itself a hybrid of the historic & novel, techno & aboriginal), and Rose X's visuals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8O6sVbMhdY

(Sadly, this 'revolution' died before the end of that decade. Monetization of the web began fencing off increasing parts those vast, limitless fields of human knowledge and the Dot-Com bust & George W dropped any of the remaining scales from everyone's eyes.)

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