High Times and the Timeless

With A Bow to Stephen Gaskin

 

"There is a plane of experience, other than the three dimensional plane, which can be felt by a human being...If people never get above the merely signal level of communication, and don't become telepathic, they haven't explored their full human birthright."

-- Stephen Gaskin

"We are all parts of God.  Each one of us has an electrical body field that surrounds us, and a mind field that goes on to infinity."

--Stephen Gaskin

Stephen Gaskin (February 16, 1935 - July 1, 2014) and his wife, Ina May

In meditation, the subjective nature of Time passing becomes obvious. 

Sometimes, an hour zips by.  At other times, I've felt like a dazed prizefighter hanging onto the ropes of a painful existence waiting forever for the bell to ring.

Although modern science creates a "benchmark" for one second of objective time tied to the decay of a cesium atom, Einstein's theory of relativity already pointed out that it "ain't that simple."  

No shit, Sherlock. 

As I get older, it becomes increasingly impossible to grasp the nature of concepts like a second, a day, a decade.  In fact, at this stage of the journey, it's easier, at times, to directly sense the mysterious nature of the Timeless glowing in the boundless expanse of each moment.  I blame that on jumping heart first into Bodhisattva Practice years ago.  

I first came across the Bodhisattva Vow as it was expressed by Stephen Gaskin in Hey Beatnik!  The words resonated with something in my heart of hearts.  I was hooked. At that moment the vow took me. 

So, did Stephen Gaskin and the Farm.

Although I only had three conversations with him -- spread over a dozen years -- Stephen was a major influence in my life.  I'm not surprised that he came to mind for the first time in a long time during a conversation with an old friend a couple of days ago.  It was that time of year.  Gaskin passed away twelve years ago on July 1. 

In some traditions, the anniversary of a guru's passing is a high holy day.  I don't usually put a lot of weight on the "spooky" stuff.  Yet, Gaskin's "Mahasamadhi" brought about his mysterious "appearance" in my life twelve years ago -- a few days after he died.

As was my practice in those days, I would compose a blog post each week and send out an email "tickler" announcement.  (I'll do that for this post as well.)   As I sat at my laptop, struggling to write a commemorative post for a man that I revered, the iPhone dinged. 

When I opened the phone, I was amazed to find an announcement for Your MMM Courtesy Call: "Lighten Up!" -- with a quote from Stephen Gaskin staring me in the face! For some inexplicable reason, Google re-delivered the email announcement I'd sent six months before! (I'd only quoted Gaskin twice before in the epigram of a Your MMM Courtesy Wake Up Call post in hundreds of posts to that point.)  Google had never re-delivered an old email I sent before.  It hasn't done so since.

Wierd!?  Synchronicity? Coincidence?  All I know is that I lightened up.  I  found myself grinning from ear to ear.  I just wrote a brief intro about the experience -- and re-posted "Lighten Up."

Stephen Gaskin and the Farm

Stephen Gaskin always maintained he was more of a beatnik than a hippie.  Yet, wearing tie-dyes til the end, Gaskin was at the epicenter of the burst of spiritual energy that encircled the globe during the 1960's and 70's. A Marine Corp veteran of the Korean War, he was teaching in the English department at San Francisco State College when the hippies of Haight-Ashbury mushroomed into a worldwide counter-cultural phenomenon.  

What Gaskin started as an experimental evening discussion class with six students in 1968 grew into Monday Night Class which drew as many as 1500 people each week at a local rock venue.  They meditated together in silence.  Then Gaskin would deliver and extemporaneous talk on psychedelic spirituality before answering questions.  Within three years, Gaskin and those who considered him to be their spiritual teacher had established an intentional community called the Farm in rural Tennessee.  Their cottage industries included a midwifery clinic, soy diary, publishing company, trucking company, and construction firm.  At it's peak it had about 1600 residents and had generated several satellite communities spread across the country.  On the Farm, continuing in the tradition of Monday Night Class, the community met together for meditation and a talk by Stephen weekly at Sunday Morning Service.

This all, of course, gathered a lot of public attention.   It sure caught mine.  I devoured the books the Farm's publishing company distributed.  I visited it three times during its first 5 years, staying a month at a time twice. (When push came to shove though, I couldn't make the choice to live 700 miles away from my ex's and children.)

High Times -- With or Without Drugs

If the truth be told, I was a lightweight when it came to psychedelics.  Introduced to marijuana in the Spring of 1968, I went on to experience a number of trips on mushrooms, and on what was presented at the time as  "synthetic mescaline." (who knows what it was...)   Yet, as I began to explore Yoga and Meditation, I soon sensed that the drugs weren't the only means to accessing extraordinary qualities of consciousness.  Intrigued by these experiences, I read extensively about spirituality, religion, and mysticism.  I also met regularly with a small group of friends who were actively exploring spirituality in their lives.  (Two of them were being trained as peer support facilitators at a cutting edge psychiatric hospital.) 

Although I continued to pass a joint around once in awhile during those years, I actually avoided LSD out of concern that I wasn't "ready."

It didn't matter!!  

The Collective Consciousness was so energized as the 60's became the 70's, that I was swept up in a set of "paranormal" experiences.  I had a number of compelling out-of-body experiences, saw aura's, encountered ghosts and other "astral beings." I also experienced moments of synchronicity and telepathy that were absolutely mind-boggling -- without drugs in my system at the time!   

Then, in the spring of 1972, I had a direct experience of Perfect Oneness that fulfilled my deepest aspirations for Spiritual Connection at the time -- and dispelled a fear of death.  In those moments, I tasted the Real Deal.  The elements of the Perennial Philosophy were no longer merely conceptual.  I knew, in my bones: There is Sacred Oneness.  We are, individually and collectively, emanations of infinitude.  And as Saint John of Liverpool (and mystics through the ages) proclaimed, we all shine on!
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Lighten Up -- Again!

 

"Get your mind unbound and free; and then from the loosest, highest, best place you have, with the fastest and most humorous mind you can get together, you can reach 

out and make a try at understanding Spirit."

---Stephen Gaskin, This Season's People

 

 

Stephen Gaskin (February 16, 1935 - July 1, 2014)

Sometimes the Universe really lays one on you.  The utterly inexplicable walks right up to you and whispers in your ear "There's magic afoot" -- and invites you to dance.  

 

At those times, the One Love that permeates and transcends each moment lets you know that there is much more to Reality than our rational mind can actually deliver.  That processing channel gets too bogged down in distinctions to grasp the bigger picture.

 

Of course, having Sat Still Doing Nothing (and Everything) for a good chunk of time most every morning for decades, I am often, at least momentarily, aware of the Presence of a dimension of being where magic, miracles, and mystery exist.  

 

Nowadays, even off the zafu, this dimension is more noticeable. It is embedded in the fabric of daily life.  A sense of wonder often emerges amidst the ordinary moments of ordinary days.  

 

In fact, when I'm truly Present, washing the dishes and taking out the trash are as much Ritual Connections to the Sacred as lighting incense, bowing, and taking my seat in meditation. When I'm on my game, the world glows. (When I'm not, Migdalia busts me for the glasses I washed that don't sparkle. LOL)  

 

As best I can tell, Life is just as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote years ago:

"Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” 

 

Yet, for sure, within and beyond the ongoing miracle, there are extra special moments.  There are times that the Grand Synchronicity turns up the volume. This happened ten years ago this month.  The Extraordinary concocted up an experience that still defies any attempt to rationally understand what had happened. 

 

As I sat staring at the blank screen of this very same, now much older MacBook Pro that day, a ringtone on my iPhone may just as well have been Gabriel's trumpet.  At that moment, Stephen Gaskin, who had passed away 11 days before, the worldwide web, and Google conspired to proclaim the existence of a dimension where magic, miracles, and mystery will always have the last laugh!

 

The memory still brings a grin to my face and a glow to my heart.

 

With another deep bow to Stephen -- and to this Most Amazing Universe -- I want to share the post from that day.   It's encouragement to "lighten up" bears repeating.

Lighten Up!   
Originally Posted July 12, 2014

A couple of night's ago, unable to get back to sleep after a nocturnal "nature call,"I had tried to write a memorial piece on Hippie Spiritual Teacher Stephen Gaskin, whose Life -- and recent Death -- touched me deeply.   I got nowhere.  After struggling with it for a while, I gave up and read a bit of a Tenzing Norbu Mystery before finally stretching out to meditate into sleep once again.

Still on the mend from the events of the past month, I've been mostly laying low these days, staying away from the computer and cell phone as much as possible, allowing myself to Heal.  A couple of false starts had showed me quite clearly how energy depleting my addiction to these devices can be.  

 

Scrolling for the next dopamine hit takes its toll.

This morning, I was quaffing my first cup of coffee in a couple of days (another addiction under modification) watching bubbles of confusion and angst float through my awareness.  I wasn't quite sure what to do about this week's commitment to Your MMM Courtesy Wake Up Call.  My attempt to express the profound impact that Stephen had had on my life was going nowhere.  I'd made a few false starts. but the back space key had wiped the slate clean each time.

 

I was first introduced to Stephen when a friend handed me a copy of Monday Night Class, a collection of his talks, questions, and answers delivered to the thousand or so hippies that gathered weekly at the Family Dog to meditate and compare notes on the community spiritual exploration that had emerged and mushroomed in San Francisco in the 1960's.  That book propelled me on a journey that included a daily meditation practice, a couple of extended visits to the Farm, my own attempts at a communal "back to the land" lifestyle -- and a number of conversations with Stephen over the course of a couple of decades. 

Sitting here at a picnic table outside my favorite local farm store on a brilliant, blue-skied morning, I continued to stare at a blank screen.  Then, (probably with a furrowed brow), I reached for my cell phone to check my email -- then, perhaps, just fall back and select an old post to republish this week.

At that very moment the phone "dinged"with an incoming email. Peering down I read the notification

"Your MMM Courtesy Wake Up Call:

 Lighten Up! 

Posted 18 January 2014"

WTF!!!???

I have no idea what strange permutation of the space time cyber continuum at that moment could have possibly have had Google generate and deliver to me an email version of a post I'd written six months ago.  This had never happened before.  (and still hasn't happened again ten years later! -- L.)

How could I not lighten up?  

I broke into a bemused grin as I clicked it open.  The Serendipity of receiving this unsolicited and inexplicably"cosmic" reprint of a blog piece at that moment was magic enough. The decision was made for me.  I'd just read and tinker with it bit, write an introduction describing what had happened and re-pubish it.

 
Then, I began reading the post...

It got even more mind blowing!

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High Times and the Timeless

With A Bow to Stephen Gaskin

 

"There is a plane of experience, other than the three dimensional plane, which can be felt by a human being...If people never get above the merely signal level of communication, and don't become telepathic, they haven't explored their full human birthright."

-- Stephen Gaskin

"We are all parts of God.  Each one of us has an electrical body field that surrounds us, and a mind field that goes on to infinity."

--Stephen Gaskin

Stephen Gaskin (February 16, 1935 - July 1, 2014) and his wife, Ina May

In meditation, the subjective nature of Time becomes obvious. 

Sometimes, an hour zips by.  At other times, I've felt like a dazed prizefighter hanging onto the ropes of a painful existence waiting forever for the bell to ring.

And that's only one hour.

As I get older, it becomes increasingly impossible to grasp the nature of concepts like a week, an month, a year, a decade.  At this stage of the journey, it's easier, at times, to directly sense the mysterious nature of the Timeless glowing in the boundless expanse of each moment.  I blame that on jumping heart  first into Bodhisattva Practice years ago.  

I first came across the Bodhisattva Vow as it was expressed by Stephen Gaskin in Hey Beatnik!  I was hooked. At that moment the vow took me. 

So, did Stephen Gaskin and the Farm.

Although I only had three conversations with him in my life, Stephen was a major influence my life.  I'm not surprised that he came to mind for the first time in a long, long time during a conversation with an old friend recently.  It was time.  Gaskin passed away ninth years ago on July 1. 

In some traditions, the anniversary of a guru's passing is a high holy day.  Although I don't usually put a lot of weight on the "spooky" stuff.  Gaskin's "Mahasamadhi" brought about his mysterious "appearance" in my life eight years ago during the first week of July.

For some inexplicable reason, Google re-delivered an email  I'd sent six months before, announcing the week's blog post.  (As usual, I'd sent that email to myself and a .bcc to a list of others at the time.)  As I sat at the laptop, struggling to write a commemorative post on the first anniversary of Gaskin's death, the iPhone dinged.  When I opened the phone, I was amazed to find a quote from Stephen staring me in the face!  (I'd only quoted Gaskin twice before in the epigram of a Your MMM Courtesy Wake Up Call post in hundreds of posts to that point.)  Google had never re-delivered an old email I sent before -- or since.  Wierd!?  Synchronicity? Coincidence? 

All I know is that I found myself grinning from ear to ear. 

Stephen Gaskin and the Farm

Stephen Gaskin always maintained he was more of a beatnik than a hippie.  Yet, wearing tie-dyes til the end, Gaskin was a central figure in the burst of spiritual energy that encircled the globe during the 1960's and 70's. A Marine Corp veteran of the Korean War, he was teaching in the English department at San Francisco State College when the hippies of Haight-Ashbury mushroomed into a worldwide counter-cultural phenomenon.  He became known in some circles as The Acid Guru.

What Gaskin started as an experimental evening discussion class with six students in 1968 grew into Monday Night Class which drew as many as 1500 people to meditate together in silence, then listen to a extemporaneous talk on psychedelic spirituality before engaging in questions, answers and informal discussions. Within three years, Gaskin and those who considered him to be their spiritual teacher had established an intentional community called the Farm in rural Tennessee.  At it's peak it had about 1600 residents.

This, of course, gathered a lot of public attention.   It sure caught mine.  I devoured the books the Farm's publishing company distributed.  I visited it three times during its first 5 years, staying a month at a time twice. (When push came to shove though, I couldn't make the choice to live 700 miles away from my ex's and children.)

High Times -- With or Without Drugs

If the truth be told, I was a lightweight when it came to psychedelics.  Introduced to marijuana in the Spring of 1968, I went on to experience a number of trips on mushrooms, and on what was presented at the time as  "synthetic mescaline." (who knows what it was...)   Yet, as I began to explore Yoga and Meditation, I soon sensed that the drugs weren't the only means to accessing transcendental forms of consciousness.  Intrigued, I read extensively about spirituality, religion, and mysticism.  I met regularly with a small group of friends involved in the peer counseling and human potential movement.  At one point, we even began to form a small intentional community.    

Although I continued to pass a joint around once in awhile during those years, I actually avoided LSD out of concern that I wasn't "ready"-- until I took a few trips in 1979.

It didn't matter!!  

The Collective Consciousness was so energized as the 60's became the 70's, that I had a number of compelling out-of-body experiences, saw aura's, and experienced moments of synchronicity and telepathy that were absolutely mind-boggling -- even without drugs in my system at the time!  Then, in the spring of 1972, I had an experience of Perfect Oneness that fulfilled my deepest aspirations for Spiritual Connection and dispelled a fear of death.  I knew, as did St John of Liverpool, we all shine on!
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Mission Impossible

"May the frightened cease to be afraid
And those bound be freed;
May the powerless find power,
And may the people think of benefiting one another”
― Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva

 

"Taking the bodhisattva vow implies that instead of holding our own individual territory and defending it tooth and nail, we become open to the world that we are living in. It means we are willing to take on greater responsibility."

-- Chögyam Trungpa

 

Although the teachings of Pema Chodron have had a profound influence in my own practice for the past fifteen years, I'd have to say that Stephen Gaskin is my "root guru."

I came of age in the late sixties.  The Spirit was on the land.  More than anyone else, Stephen Gaskin seemed to capture the essence of the Collective Kensho that occurred during era.  A marine veteran of the Korean War who went on to become  an English instructor at San Francisco State, he transformed the energy of tripping with friends in Haight-Ashbury into a bustling community in Tennessee that at one point included about 1700 people.    (He also was a central part of an inexplicable occurrence that touched my life the week after he died in 2014.  (See Your Courtesy Wake Up Call: Lighten Up!, July 12, 2014)

When I first saw"Out to Save the World"boldly displayed in the destination window of Gaskin's Greyhound Scenicruiser, it brought a grin to my face -- and stirred something deep in my heart.  I thought, "Of course.  What else is there to do?"

As I reflect on it here at age 74, I sense that I had already been propelled in that direction by a series of events in my youth.  In the midst of the trauma and pain of a chaotic childhood, I had been touched deeply by the kindness and courage of "strangers" more than once.  There was a type of energy in those interactions that was palpable.  I felt it.

Then, one day in eighth grade during recess, I discovered something about the nature of reality that still rings true.  Standing alone, once again the new kid in school (I had gone to ten different schools by then), I was watching the schoolyard interactions on a surrealistically gorgeous autumn day.  A dance of color and sound, Life played out in front of me like a movie.  Some kids were being kind.  Others were not.  Some kids appeared to be having fun.  Others were not.  At a certain point  -- Zap!  I got it.  It was obvious.  Through our attitudes and actions, we humanoids are individually and collectively creating the world we experience each moment!

Seeing that clearly, the key to life seemed like a no-brainer.  What Jesus was preaching in the Bible was just plain, common sense.  (It would be another ten years before I read that Buddha had a similar take on things.) As you sew, so shall you reap.  If we would just get our act together and love one another, the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.  

Easier Said Than Done

Of course, I quickly learned that a lot of folks hadn't quite seen that yet -- or, if they had, they were afraid to break with the pack.  I also saw that consistently being kind and caring was not all that easy.  Fear and doubt and confusion were powerful forces. It was going to take some serious work to pull it off.  It would take a real commitment. 

Stephen Gaskin brought that point home as I discovered his teachings in my mid-20's. Although I'd read about the ideal of the Bodhisattva in Mahayana Buddhism, I hadn't actually seen the four fold Bodhisattva Vows until I read Gaskin's rendering of it in Hey Beatnik*:

Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all.

The deluding passions are inexhaustible, I vow to extinguish them all.

The way of the Dharma is impossible to expound, I vow to expound it.

It is impossible to attain the way of the Buddha, I vow to attain it.

I got goosebumps when I read that.

Although I was a couple years away from sitting with my first embodied Zen teacher, those four lines seemed to capture the essence of what I felt my life to be about, and it pointed out the work to be done.  A few years later, when I discovered the Mahayana Buddhist teaching that there could be no final and perfect enlightenment until everyone was enlightened, I broke into tears.  It just made sense.  Like many of us back in the day, I'd already peaked out (even without LSD) to experience our Essential Oneness.  It just made sense that a Bodhisattva wouldn't punch out and go home to Buddhahood until everyone was covered. 

Rather than me taking the Bodhisattva Vow at that point, the Vow took me.  Looking at the condition of the world around me, I couldn't see anything more worth doing then to get my act together and try to help out.  Now, fifty some odd years later, it seems even more important as our species continues to careen toward disaster.
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