To begin to write my own opinion or put together some kind of biography for Stephen would be redundant.
He has been and remains to be a constant source of inspiration and 'groundedness' for me--
especially in our 60s and 70s' Hippy Celebration.
I have decided to include an article written by Albert Bates,
who is a historian for the Farm and Stephen's life,
also quotes from Stephen, and background information.

LionHeart
April 2007

'Monday Night Class with Stephen Gaskin'

The Family Dog Hall-San Francisco-Sept.25,1969

Stephen Gaskin's Monday Night Class was going strong in San Francisco.
It had begun as a course in North America White Witchcraft at San Francisco State,
becoming so popular that Stephen moved to a concert hall where he
spoke to almost three thousand people every week from 1968 until 1970.
These were fine, instructive occasions attended by the cream of the hip world.
(Photo by Robert Altman)

Stephen Gaskin:
"Here are two things I do for the sake of sanity.
One of them it to always tell yourself the truth about what you do in the plainest and most unvarnished terms.
It might not make you like your self but it will help keep you from going crazy.

Another important one is to never make any important decisions on the basis of second hand psychic phenomena.
I have seen some stuff and I have heard some stuff, but I never pass on second hand stuff as true.
By second hand, I mean anything other than my own experience.

My middle son Paul was very offended by the story of the prophet Abraham
going to sacrifice his son and the sacrificial goat being found just in time..
He said "Why wasn't that child abuse?"
He said that he would have taken Abraham's knife away and told that old man that he better hope for a goat.
The clean eye of a child noticed that there was another actor besides Abraham,
the goat and God and that the tale acted like the child was not a person.

Every once in a while you hear of some poor deluded soul
who does something truly awful on instructions from god."

Stephen Gaskin:
"Assuming Dogmatic opinions as a young person puts one in the position of having receptors for certain ideas .
When such a person goes into the world, the world that they encounter is pre-conditioned by the idea receptors.
The Dogmatic opinions are the other end of the receptors.
Some young people go into the world bristling with opinions like a porcupine
and promptly get something stuck on each quill.
At this point all learning stops unless there is some great cleansing of mind.
All the opinions having met their mate,
the young mind's learning receptors are stuffed with things
which are after all only extentions of opinions already held.

"America's Communal Religions"

From: Miller and Bates, in America's Communal Religions,
Syracuse Univ. Press, 1995.

"I think each one of us has a non-shirkable obligation to figure out the world on our own as best we can.
The way we behave as a result of that investigation is our real and practiced Religion."

To write the spirituality of some of these experiments off as pop-Aquarianism would be a mistake.
Many hippie religious tenets are quite deep,
as can be seen in the philosophy of The Farm,
a community begun in 1971, near Summertown, Tennessee.

To understand the roots of The Farm, you have to go back to about 1965. Drop City, the first full-blown prototype hip commune, was founded in May of that year. The Grateful Dead were moving into 710 Ashbury, establishing a hip outpost in the tony Panhandle district of San Francisco. Prankster-author Ken Kesey's acid tests began in November. The Diggers emerged as a social movement that winter. 1966 brought the Trips Festival and the Summer of Love. Janis Joplin hitch-hiked in from Texas. Lou Gottlieb opened his Morning Star ranch to all comers. On October 6, 1966, California outlawed LSD-25, but it didn't stop the first Human Be-In, paisleys and flower power, White Rabbit, or the Whole Earth Catalog.

In 1966, a young assistant professor at San Francisco State College began scheduling classes to talk about what was happening outside his window. The classes grew too large for the college halls, so the class moved to a church, a theater, and then, in 1969, to the Family Dog, Chet Helms' rock hall on the coast. Monday Night Class became a weekly pilgrimage of throngs of hippies from up and down the coast, from high schools and university campuses, from army bases and police academies, from mountain communes and Haight Street crash pads. Thousands of people, in various states of consciousness, came with tamborines and diaphanous gowns, love beads and bangles, Dr. Strange cloaks and top hats with feathers. The open-ended discussions ventured into Hermeneutic geometry, Masonic-Rosicrucian mysticism, Ekenkar and the Rolling Stones, but opened with a long, silent meditation and closed with a sense of purpose. At the center of this psychedelic crucible, the professor in the welder's hood, was 31-year-old Stephen Gaskin, known simply to most hippies as "Stephen."

Stephen would say,
"Lets talk about how we're gonna be.
" Not "how we're gonna stop the war"
or
"how we're gonna make it fair,
" but "how we're gonna be."

"Here's the way the class works.
It's open doors and it's free and everybody can come in,
and the way it's always been is that the questions I like best are the ones that start with
"what about" and "what if."

So we've asked those, and I seem to be doing it [chairing the discussion] because
I seem to be the only one that can do it.
I'm quite willing to do it if anybody wants it done.
But other folks can talk.
I lead these discussions.
I guess I can serve a function as a psychedelic fuse.
I can create... I have done enough yoga to be able to handle whatever the juice is."

In 1969, a group of theologians who had come to San Francisco for a convention stumbled into the Dog on a Monday Night and had their minds blown. They urged Stephen to put his eclectic rap on the road and they followed up with a number of invitations to speak at their colleges and churches. In the winter of 1970,
Stephen announced he was planning to adjourn the class and travel across the country in his remodelled school bus.

When he rolled out of San Francisco 20 or 30 buses followed him.
When the caravan returned, a year later, it numbered 60 buses and dozens of step vans, bread trucks,
VW campers and other bright-painted vehicles.
See Hippie Bus Collection

In Dayton, Ohio, Stephen said, "when we got to Yellowstone we found out some of us was on welfare, so we said that everybody that was on welfare had to quit and take care of themselves.... Some folks have been raking leaves, some folks have been painting houses, some have been picking pumpkins... the folks that were on welfare had to start working, because when we're rolling it costs three hundred dollars a day in gasoline to move the caravan all day. We're working and moving the caravan and we're building up the engines and keeping them together and towing buses and accepting new people on top of all that, for no other reason than to go out in the world and say that Spirit is where its at and that God's love is heavier than violence."

The caravan, like the Farm which followed, believed in open membership--your badge was your belly-button. Openness was basic to the hip ethos; hippies tended to have a naive optimism about human nature, a belief that if one could simply be rescued from the nightmare of American culture and placed in a supportive setting, one would respond in kind and contribute to group harmony and achievement.So anyone willing to reject mainstream culture--to drop out, as the argot had it--was welcome.

A second tenet, at the Farm as elsewhere in hip culture, was reverence for sacred drugs. Perhaps the hippies were not the first communal druggies; the Shakers, after all, had been major producers of opium. But by the Seventies most mood-altering substances except alcohol were illegal, and illegality put a new patina on the use of those substances. Stephen Gaskin learned to navigate the LSD ("acid") universe and led others down the pathways he discovered.

Stephen described the journey of his sixth LSD experience:
"I started slipping into myself.... Then I was looking from over a view of a little creek that was very bright yellow, running down over the rocks. I looked at it, and there were bubbles on it. And suddenly I was one of the bubbles on the creek, running down this little golden river. "I bounced around a few times, and then I popped. "My bubble popped, and then I was indistinguishably part of the river."

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For More Information on Stephen, Ina May, and the Farm
Visit my
60s Philosophy Bookstore 2
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In The Beginning...
On the FARM....

"Community, and the Farm in particular, was one of those things which I had no Idea would take over my life
and mind as it did, along with Midwifery and Vegetarianism but it is the case.
Back in San Francisco when a few hippies got together the conversation often turned to dreams of land and community.
Going to the land seemed like the natural progression of the whole hippy movement.

The Farm is not organized according to any a priori Political or Religious philosophy beyond that derived by the Hippies.
We are a community of people who are dedicated to living together in peace
and helping out by example and direct work to bring the world back in balance.

We are three hundred people and three square miles of land that we consider liberated territory.
I think the Farm remains a force after these two decades because we have been generalists (a la Bucky Fuller) and not afraid of change.
The way we work has always involved a lot of talking and arguing through many forms and committees.
We currently have a seven person board that is elected for three year terms.
I am not now and have never been a member of this board."

-Stephen-

Click the cover to acquire

Voices from the Farm: Adventures in Community Living
by Rupert Fike

I don’t believe in capital punishment for humans, but I believe in it for corporations.
The whole tort reform trip is to try to keep it so corporations cannot be sued out of business,
and I thought a corporation that did bad stuff should be sued out of business.

I thought the way capitalism works was,
if you’re out in the jungle and a lion bites off your leg,
then you’re a one-legged capitalist and that’s just the damn way it goes.

-Stephen-

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