Body and spirit in Californian spiritual movements and the internet in the United States (1960s and 2010s)

The Californian spiritual culture of the 1960s popularized yoga and catalyzed the development of digital technology and the internet. This paper attempts to understand the contemporary situation of spiritual practice and meditation through a comparative analysis of Californian spiritual movements in two different eras. In the 1960s, young people felt threatened by the industrial and urban culture of capitalism. They sought to reclaim the unity of body and mind and to escape this world by exploring Asian spiritualism, as was the case with the Esalen Institute and the Whole Earth Catalog. These young people practiced meditation and contributed to the development of new digital technologies as a means of creating virtual communities. However, as of the 2010s, while meditation and the internet are widespread, as seen in the Search Inside Yourself program, young people are neglecting the body and have lost interest in the other world; they only seek to control their bodies in order to adapt them to the world as it is.