December 10-12, 2004
Stephen Gaskin is one of the great talkers of our age. In the late 60s his Monday Night Class in San Francisco drew as many as 1500 people. In 1970, 350 drove off in 50 buses, the one in the lead announcing the destination: Out To Save The World. Six months later they founded The Farm in Tennessee.
Invited to come to Rowe, Stephen wrote: “It is time to take counsel with our friends and cohorts and see what we can do to save the world. I’ve never seen our country in worse condition. The unholy alliance is making a full court press to reverse what we think of as the gains in civilization that we, as a world, have made in the last hundred years. I will lead an exploration into the condition of the mind, body, and spirit of the current inhabitants of Gaia. The situation is dire, and we’re the ones who must make the save. No one who values freedom can ignore the witchhunting atmosphere the fundamentalists are huffing up. I want to get into the dynamics of cultivation of spirit and community cooperative action as revolutionary and healing acts and how they serve as personal and collective practice. The recent D-Day, Ronald Reagan celebrations and Republican, patriotic, death-cult orgies didn’t get me moist (he said dryly). Reagan presided over the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in history, but it’s gotten worse since. Can we freakin’ talk, please?”
“I want to do a spiritual meeting as well. I want to talk about the personal practice that we do to stay strong and healthy in our souls while being powerful activists in a world of corruption and ignorance. I call it How To Handle Yourself, meant in the same sense an athlete might say it. We need to learn how to use love and intelligence and strength to keep our balance in a heavily propagandized world. Attention is energy. What you put your attention into, you get more of.”
Together we’ll explore some of these themes: enlightenment is ordinary reality, gentle rituals, cleaning the terminals, natural ceremonies, good loving, staying straight with kids, and the politics of spirituality.
Stephen Gaskin, a marine who saw combat in Korea, calls his politics Beatnik and his religion Hippy. For a few years he taught Creative Writing and Semantics at San Francisco State, where he began teaching a course in North America White Witchcraft that didn’t stop when the semester ended. It grew into the Monday Night Class, lasting from 1967-70. Politics, religion, acid, sex, and love were discussed openly, but “going back to the land” seemed like the natural progression of the whole hippy movement, so the caravan took off in 50 buses. Six months later they landed in Summertown, Tennessee, to be “a demonstration project for a nonviolent eco-friendly cooperative community of pioneers ushering in a new age.” Midwifery and vegetarianism were two pillars of the Farm. Later Stephen founded Plenty International that helped rebuild 1200 houses and put in 27 miles of water pipe in Guatemala and won the first Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) in 1980. The first eight of his books were edited transcripts of his talks, include Monday Night Class, The Caravan, Hey Beatnik!, This Season’s People, Amazing Dope Tales, Cannibas Spirituality, Sunday Morning Services on The Farm, Mind At Play, and Rendered Infamous. Rowe is honored to welcome the return of the Gaskins.