“This Season’s People”: Stephen Gaskin, Psychedelic Religion, and a Community of Social Justice

By their fruits ye shall know them.

—Matthew 7:20

Take care of things, and they will take care of you.

—Shunryu Suzuki

In 1978, spurred by growing awareness of what was described, at the time, as a “Third World country in the middle of the richest city on the planet,” 35 members of a spiritual commune located over 950 miles away arrived in New York City’s South Bronx with the singular desire to help ameliorate the neglected medical conditions of a forgotten people and place.¹ A “20-square-mile area of urban devastation teeming with 600,000 people,” the South Bronx existed at the very periphery of New York’s social services, known incredibly for having the “slowest ambulance response time in the country” (one ambulance per 100,000 residents led to an average response time of 15 minutes citywide, and 30–45 minutes for the South Bronx).² Consisting of 12 men, 8 women, and 15 children, the group operated as a social justice relief program of Plenty International, the not-for-profit organization of The Farm, a commune founded in 1971 seeking “with no apologies” to “Save the World.”³ Based upon the belief that “if the world’s resources were shared equitably, there would be plenty for everyone,” the Plenty Ambulance Service provided free emergency care and transport for South Bronx residents from 1978 to 1984.⁴ The group left the area only after their emergency medical technician (EMT) program had graduated over 200 New York state-licensed EMTs who, in turn, took over emergency care as city employees.

On the surface, what could be more anachronistic—a group of long-haired, psychedelic mystics freshly removed from the rural setting of a back-to-the-land commune in the rolling hills of southern Tennessee set incongruously against a backdrop of urban decay, institutionalized racism, and massive inequality? Yet the service not only worked, but flourished as a result of the religious imperative toward social justice shared by Plenty members. As member Basil Campbell reflects, because “you’re a small piece of a much bigger thing,” “you have to set aside your own wishes and goals in order for the bigger thing to do well.”⁵ A Jefferson Award–winning service that reduced response time from “45 minutes to 7 minutes,” the Plenty Ambulance Service epitomizes the engaged praxis that grew out of The Farm’s guiding spiritual beliefs, a praxis that, as we will explore, extends beyond the internal functionings and failures of The Farm itself.⁶

Rather than a place of escapist utopianism, The Farm developed from the psychedelically inspired mystical teachings of Stephen Gaskin, better known to his students and members of The Farm (often simply called Farmies) as Stephen. Gaskin and The Farm interpreted the oneness of mystical consciousness as a catalyst for local and global engaged activism. Plenty represents, Gaskin recollected in 1987, “a response to a Farm need … when I went on the road people would ask if we were in danger of becoming a ‘quiet’ community. I replied no, we’re involved in the world, and your problems are our problems. Count us in the force. And we had to move to make that real—not just something we said from here in the woods.”⁷ The transition from the libertine scene of late sixties San Francisco to the idyllic remoteness of Summertown, Tennessee was, then, not about going to “get a place to be, it wasn’t to go get a farm, it was,” Gaskin stresses, “to make a difference. After all, we’re just working toward that old hippie dream: Peace and love for the whole world.”⁸ Yet as The Farm and Plenty demonstrate, a peace and love ethos becomes meaningful only when self-sacrifice, in the name of improving others’ lived conditions, emerges as the essential mark of social relations and religious practice.

This belief, inspired originally following Gaskin’s ingestion of psychedelics, became a...