Living Word Fellowship (LWF) was a millenarian Pentecostal Christian group based in the San Francisco Bay area, founded in 1970 by Bobbi Morris. It encouraged its members to "Get high on Jesus." Most of its members were young adults who had been involved in the counterculture of the 1960s and had used marijuana and psychedelic drugs, and about one-third of them had participated in radical political protests. In LWF, they replaced their counterculture lifestyles with a culture characterized by moral authoritarianism and Pentecostal worship practices such as speaking in tongues. [1]
The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed first in the United Kingdom (UK) and then the United States (US) before spreading throughout much of the Western world between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, with London, New York City, and San Francisco being hotbeds of early countercultural activity. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the Civil Rights Movement continued to grow, and would later become revolutionary with the expansion of the US government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam. As the 1960s progressed, widespread social tensions also developed concerning other issues, and tended to flow along generational lines regarding human sexuality, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, experimentation with psychoactive drugs, and differing interpretations of the American Dream. Many key movements related to these issues were born or advanced within the counterculture of the 1960s.
Psychedelics are a class of drug whose primary action is to trigger psychedelic experiences via serotonin receptor agonism, causing thought and visual/auditory changes, and altered state of consciousness. Major psychedelic drugs include mescaline, LSD, psilocybin, and DMT. Studies show that psychedelics are physiologically safe and do not lead to addiction. Studies conducted using psilocybin in a psychotheraputic setting reveal that psychedelic drugs may assist with treating alcohol and nicotine addiction.
In the 1982 book Getting Saved From the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change, Steven Tipton, a sociologist of religion, profiled LWF, a Zen Buddhist meditation center, and Werner Erhard's est as representing three different styles of response to the experience of cultural change in the 1960s. [2]
Religion is a cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. However, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.
Werner Hans Erhard is an American author and lecturer known for founding "est", which operated from 1971 to 1984. He has written and lectured widely on critical thinking, transformational models and applications, integrity, performance, leadership and individual and organizational transformation. Harvard University, Stanford University, Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Southern California, University of Rochester, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Oxford Union, UNESCO, Geneva, and the US Air Force Academy.</ref>
Erhard Seminars Training was an organization founded by Werner Erhard in 1971 that offered a two-weekend (60-hour) course known officially as "The est Standard Training". This seminar aimed "to transform one's ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself". An est site claims that it "brought to the forefront the ideas of transformation, personal responsibility, accountability, and possibility".
