Stephen Gaskin Interview
- Stephen Gaskin Interview
Stephen Gaskin (1935—) is an important figure in the American countercultural movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He came to national prominence with the publication of his book The Caravan (1971), which largely consisted of his public talks and conversations during a cross-country pilgrimage with numerous busloads of fellow hippies. Gaskin and the group subsequently founded an intentional community known as "The Farm," which still exists today in Tennessee. Morgan Shipley and Arthur Versluis travelled to Tennessee and visited Gaskin in his home on The Farm, where they spoke with him at length about his reminiscences and perspectives on the 1960s and their aftermath.
We're sitting here with Stephen Gaskin in his kitchen. We thought we would ask a few questions, starting with your background and how you started out. What within your family would you see as influential?
My father was from a very square Indiana family, and he had bad asthma. He went at 91 pounds to Idaho to get over his asthma, and he stayed in Idaho until he became a cowboy, among other things. He used to do mail work, the kind of mail clerk that has a badge and a gun. He raised me through the Southwest. I got raised in Santa Fe and Denver, Phoenix, San Bernardino, and like that. And then a couple of other places I was raised—we were commercial fishermen fishing out of Newport Harbor in California for [End Page 141] a while. My father taught me to read when I was four, sitting on his lap, and by the time I was in first grade, I always got in trouble for reading ahead in the book. I'd been to so many different places, I had to learn how to make friends on purpose.
Was there any religious dimension to that background that would lead to where you've gone?
No. We used to say, "We are so grateful to you, Dad, for getting us out of the church."
[Laughter]
That's kind of what we wondered about.
I never was religious in the sense like that, but I was interested in stuff from other countries. I knew a Zen master; I was never a Buddhist, but one of the best people I met was a Zen master. In hippie times in San Francisco I knew Buddhists and Jains and Hindus and whatever, all different kinds of folks like that. The thing is, we were not going to San Francisco and converting to religions; we were ransacking religions for goodies.
One of the questions we had was about that time in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Could you tell us about your life in San Francisco before the Monday Night Classes and before you became a public figure? You're talking just now about ransacking the world's religions for goodies—was that going on before the Monday Night Classes?
Yeah, everybody in San Francisco—acid heads, stoned people—were into stuff that you usually can't see that can [with drugs] be seen. Some people took that to mean that whatever religion was in their youth, to quit, stop practicing it. We used to say if you took all the world's religions like old IBM cards and stacked them up, some of the holes would go clear through. And that's what we always said we were looking for—the holes that go clear through. And another thing that I said in one of the books is that I love the psychedelic testimony of the saints, but I don't believe in anybody's dogma. [End Page 142] The Pope just had to apologize to Galileo not very long ago, six or seven hundred years too late, but they're beginning to notice stuff like that. The trouble with those guys is that is they've had such a bad material plane of education that they haven't been taught the gear shift to get yourself shifted out into really big places. They don't know what you mean when you say...
