Awakening to Spiritual Social Action

Unlike the highly visible counter cultural movement or political and social justice coalitions of the 1960s and 1970s, a spiritually inspired "positive future movement" has yet to come into recognizable form, one that can be made visible to large numbers of people. At present, it is dispersed across thousands of groups and inspired individuals throughout the world. Many of those who initiated these groups did so out of personal exploration and their own awakening experiences; others came to it as they sought to create meaningful solutions to social or environmental problems. As a potentially coordinated movement to speak with a coherent voice, they have yet to adopt a common set of unifying principles and strategies. Humanity is "waiting" to be made aware of viable future-present alternatives to conflict, suffering, and corruption – including viable leaders at all levels of society. Such alternatives, to be truly viable, will also have to embrace and encourage a large and encompassing spirituality as well.

Just as during the "First Great Awakening" in America where spiritual seekers mainly left the population centers to focus on their exploration of connecting to higher consciousness and forming new types of community, the spiritual seekers from the 1960s and 1970s were also more inclined to avoid the distractions of the chaotic milieu of society. Even when spiritual groups were represented in coalition meetings, their counsel was often subordinated to the understandable outrage people felt about the injustices in American society and the war in Southeast Asia.

Many of the individuals who were the early seekers of the essence of Christian spirituality during the 1960s and 1970s also had to form their own support enclaves by leaving the cities for rural communalism or by forming support groups within population centers. Some of these later became formalized into strict religious communities with hierarchies and rigid doctrinal interpretations of the Bible. Many of these in turn formed the basis for a number of the Christian fundamentalist organizations today. This is not unlike what happened to many of the experimental communities formed during the 1700s in America. Those people, who were more focused on the injustices in American society, also tended to be non-religious and often anti-religious. Any form of spiritual expression that bore a similarity to a western religion was generally rejected. Eastern religions, especially mysticism, provided an alternative to western religions for spiritual exploration. The use of psychoactive substances provided yet another avenue through which to explore mysticism and spirituality.