Monday Night Class

by Stephen Gaskin

Monday Night Class-a weekly event in San Francisco conducted by Stephen Gaskin during the heyday of the hippies-attracted over 2,000 people each week. This new edition is a collection of the original transcripts from these historic meetings, with new commentary by Stephen from today's perspective. In these transcripts Stephen explores the laws that govern the spiritual plane, drawing on sources as varied as the Bible, Zen Buddhism, and the daily newspapers, interpreting the visions of the '60s generation with humor and affection. Includes photographs from Monday Night Class in San Francisco.

Genres: Philosophy, Counter Culture

192 pages, paper

First published November 30, 1969

About the author

Stephen Gaskin was an American counterculture Hippie icon best known for his presence in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 1960s and for co-founding "The Farm", a famous spiritual intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee.

Reviews

[Dr. Carl Ludwig Dorsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Following these comments is an extended excerpt from the book. While the passage selected is neither the most useful nor the most profound, nor even particularly representative – Gaskin is rarely more than anecdotally autobiographical in the volume – it does give some sense of both Gaskin himself and of the “classes”.

Toward the end of Monday Night Class (page 165) Gaskin mentions that “I have about 300 pages of transcripts from these meetings at the Family Dog. We’re going to edit them and put them out as a book. The cover’s going to have Michael Kelley’s mandala poster on the front. The back cover will be a picture of the class.” The 2005 format still holds to that promise.

A dozen pages later, in a 2005 note prefacing the last 10 pages of the text, Gaskin remarks relative to those pages:

This meeting was the day the students were shot at Kent State in Ohio. There was also, in San Francisco not long previously, a bombing at the Park Street Police Station in which a policeman was killed. During the break, the discussion in the patio turned a little noisy as people expressed their anger and sorrow about the killings in Ohio. Some people thought we should arm ourselves in self-defense. Other people spoke up for retaliatory violence.

Those last 10 pages have a tenor unlike the previous 170. Part of that difference may have been the drama of the day’s news (or that, as Gaskin also notes for the 2005 edition, he had been given “about 500 gamma of LSD on some candy during the break”), but it also reinforces the impression one gets throughout the text that these “classes” were often much more than question and answer sessions – that they regularly veered off into more open give and take, into multiple voices. I would like to have had more of that non-Gaskin side of the gatherings included – even if it might have often consisted, as I fear it might, of the group’s concerns with, as the existing queries suggest, the particulars of auras, astrological determinism, etc., etc.

Gaskin’s response to the issues of retaliatory violence and self-defense, by the way, might be characterized as “Only do groovy things, you know.” and that “Love is a stronger vibration…” He was tripping, of course.

And that, to some extent, is what I see the business of these “classes” seeming to be about: about how to take the psychedelic experience – not merely the lessons learned, or insights gained – but the actual active experience, into the daily world, individually and communally. The notion seems to be that the state of psychedelic consciousness is, or should be, the new default, and the better part of these “classes” seems to me to be dedicated to working through the problems involved in negotiating, socially as well as personally, the existing world in that psychedelic state.

You can’t spend the rest of your life tripping? The official line is that LSD was not used at The Farm, the commune in Tennessee that Gaskin and others later founded (the book itself is published by The Farm’s ‘Book Publishing Company’), though I expect it and other psychedelics often were. Marijuana, which Gaskin used, sanctioned and promoted till his death earlier this year, certainly was, to the extent that, I believe, at least for a time, it was regularly rationed out, like sugar, salt, and flour – like everything in fact – in that little island of righteous stoned American communism.

Monday Night Class (2005 edition), pages 146-150:

Q: Is Satori to the mind what orgasm is to the body?

Not necessarily, although you can achieve Satori through orgasm. Satori is specifically the clean, wide-open and honest telepathic communication between two open minds. You've heard lots of stories about how heavy Satori is, well that clean, honest, open communication between two human minds is that heavy thing that you've all heard those stories about. Because when two human beings really come together, the first thing they realize is, if everything I know now is true, and if I just got into communication with this cat, and he knows all that, and all that's true – then it's all true, man, way out there. Bang, flash – you know? White light, Samadhi, and Satori are sort of sometimes the same on some levels, and sometimes not – that’s why you’re asking the question, obviously. Samadhi is the Vedantic term for Satori. In Christian terms, Adoration is a two-way telepathic communion just like Samadhi, and Samadhi is the superconscious, and it's always telepathic in the superconscious. Samadhi is where you get to that place where you can open up to another human being when you want to. Samadhi can be the kind you first get when you're sitting cross-legged, and you've been meditating for twenty years, or when you get stoned, it goes ram-bam, and does that thing to you.

But then you get to another kind, where you can walk around with it on, look around, and pay attention. You don't have to like sit there and hang on to it that way, because you become loose, and you become free, and when you become free then nothing hangs you up too much, you can always say it's all part of the action and it's okay. Then, that particular kind of Samadhi, the walk-around-with-it-on kind, is what they call Nirvakalpa Samadhi.

And, let's see, white light is, in our terms, I would say, over-amped, man, just flat over-amped, more juice than you can handle, bang. Like it's the place where it starts coming on heavy, and you say, I'm heavy, I can hold the circuit-load, and you sit there and you hang in behind the vibe, and you're going to heavy on out, you know, and it gets more and more psychedelic, and you say, I can handle it, man, and it gets heavier, and you say, I'm sure I can do it, and then it just turns on heavy, man, and you have to let go, let go and say, Far out. Then it just goes into white mind, white bod, white tongue, white toes, white nervous system, white ear, all blown, because every cell is over-amped then. And that blows your mind and expands your circuits, and expands your consciousness, and when your consciousness gets expanded then you know more because you take in more, and it just goes on out like that.

He says, "All at once or bits and pieces?" Both. Like some of it started a long time ago, and I didn't know it until recently. Like, when I was in junior college I was twenty years old, I'd just gotten out of the Marine Corps and I was in a funny place – I was like a wolf in the fold, because everybody else in junior college had just got out of high school, and I'd just come back from Korea, and I felt heavy behind it. So I started "wolfing" a little at that level, you know. And one time a girl came up to me, who I didn't recognize. And who said I'd done something to her, and I didn't know what I had done.

Well, she stopped in front of me and said, "You think you're smart, and you think you can cut people good, and you think it's cute to do that, and you don't think anybody cares. Well, I care."

Some years later I looked back at her, and I realized, that was a guru. You're really lucky when you run into one of those, because it's God talking to you out of the nearest person. So there's that kind of stuff happened and helped out a lot.

I tried a bunch of kinds of things, because people told me that was where it was at, like education. If there's nothing else going on, I thought, I can get a lot of degrees, and do that kind of trip. And I used to teach in a university, and I enjoyed the people; I dug being with the kids. But I couldn't relate to the grown-ups. I was one of the kids. I could put on a Brooks Brothers suit, but I couldn't make myself believe it. I was kind of a beatnik before I went to school, too. And then I got done being in school and taught, and I found out that I’d rather be a beatnik.

Then I started getting into psychedelics. And when I got into psychedelics I found out what was wrong with what I was doing. So I quit doing it, and went out just to find out something to do. And so I was on a path. There's bits and pieces, bits and pieces, going along. I took a psychedelic about twenty-five times and sometimes I saw some pretty colors, and sometimes nothing much happened, and sometimes I was just confused and didn't know what was going on.

And then I went away out of the country for about a year or less, and then I came back and took some psychedelics. And when I came on to it – Bang. That was the heavy flash for me. I'd had white light earlier, but I didn't know anything, I'd just had white light, a-a-ah-h-h, for a while, and I came back sort of saying, "Wow what was that?" It was undeniably heavy; it was the heaviest thing that had ever happened to me, but there wasn't much content in it. But on this trip I saw so much that I was boggled for weeks – you know, just walked around boggling, I could barely pay attention to the material plane, because my head was running over all this stuff that I'd seen and thought and been and felt and places that I'd realized things.

I'd read a lot of religion when I was a kid, but I hadn't been able to make it work, because it didn't have any juice. I'd never seen anybody with any juice. I'd heard there was supposed to be heavy people, but I'd never seen one. I thought maybe they'd died out a couple thousand years ago or something, and we just weren't in that strain anymore. Then when I got high that time, I found out that there were a lot of heavy folks, because I found myself face to face with a whole mess of 'em all at once.

I'd go out and I'd try to tell somebody about what I knew, and I'd get my head copped. Then I'd go home and say, "How'd that happen? I was feeling really heavy a minute ago, and then, wham!" Because I couldn't keep my energy. I'd drop my chi every time anybody would thump me. The main thing is, I found out that it's easy to get high; it's harder to stay high. The way you stay high is with truth. Then it's only been like for this year that I've felt like I've had an actual commitment to truth. Like I used to say, "Well, I'll just ignore some of this, because it's none of my business." But I don't do that anymore. Everything is my business, and I don't ignore anything unless that's what I'm supposed to be doing to it. And if I'm supposed to ignore it, then I will, and it's hard to get my attention to it. But I'm involved with everything that's going on around me, because I'm on this trip, you know; I dig it. And I'm going to do everything I can to make it groove, and encourage what other monkeys I can that want to do that.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't get me wrong -- this is an enjoyable book. I just didn't find it especially useful or informative. I think Gaskin makes some decent points here and there, but this is ultimately the ramblings of someone who has tripped way too much. I could get comparably enlightened from half of my Facebook feed. That said, it was cool to get a glimpse of the actual hippie movement as it first occurred, and the annotations are often funny. Don't let this review put you off from reading it if you're considering it -- I'm glad I did, I just wouldn't recommend it to someone who didn't already have interest.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Gaskin and his bus caravan appeared at Grinnell College out of the night en route from California to what became The Farm in Tennessee. There being little to do in the middle of the Iowa cornfields, I went to Darby Gymnasium to hear his presentation and receive a copy of this book. They were giving them out for free.

The book, while a little too much out there for my tastes, was pretty good, combining, as it did, Eastern religio-philosophical concepts with psychedelic experience within a socially conscious and activist context. At this point in my life religion, but not Christianity, was starting to make experiential sense. I was reading a lot of stuff inspired by Chinese, Japanese and Chinese traditions, beginning to study depth psychology and taking a lot of LSD, cactus and mushrooms. What was missing generally was attention to how to put these insights into practice on more than just a person-to-person level, to actually begin a peaceful revolution to end the causes of unnecessary human suffering. Gaskin addressed these concerns in his book and I appreciated it.

There was a poignant footnote to this encounter--poignant for me. I'd recently met two female roommates, one of whom, name now forgotten, was, as they say, hot, the other of whom, while a little plump and not notably sexy, had impressed me with her kind and considerate character. Her name, Aletheia, Greek meaning "truth", I do remember. I'd been drawn to their room by the former, but it was Aletheia who kept me there, my interest in her growing through our conversations while my interest in the other declined. This wasn't unusual, this free-floating erotic obsessiveness ranging from lust to ethical aspiration. Aletheia inspired the latter with which I was more comfortable in any case, just having lost my virginity in less than ideal circumstances, and was becoming daily more beautiful in my eyes.
Ironically, however, the very characteristics that made her so attractive to me made the caravan attractive to her. She left with them.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd heard of The Farm due to it being the inspiration behind Lauren Groff's novel, Arcadia, so it was interesting to read some original source material from the Farm's founder himself. If you're a student of Buddhism or a 'head, you won't find much new information here, though I did enjoy some of Gaskin's insightful metaphors for attention and karma.

[Al West · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Gaskin former English teacher met Suzuki Roshi and turned to help people who were struggling with much of what the establishment in the united states was doing. Monday Night Class was the first big step. Set in a time of Whole Earth Catalogues hippies in Berkley, the Haight and North Beach - Steven held gatherings which calmed the wild energy with thoughtful zen and meditation. With ken Kesey and the pranksters bussing around USA, Steven began his bus odessy part two - The Farm a free commune in the Tennesee Valley.

Monday Night Class brought zen down to the stoned level "the monkey has already done LSD" so that the street could groove on a higher thought level...