Books by Stephen Gaskin
 
Monday Night Class


New, Revised & Annotated Edition

"The homework for Monday Night Class was to live your alternative. Gaskin has carved out an important cornerstone of countercultural history."—Paul Krassner

Q: What do you do with a load of extra energy?

Here's the thing about energy: You can't store it. We're not batteries. We can handle a lot more energy in motion than we can statically.

One of the nicest things you can do with energy, then, is use it to make your environment and tripping mates as beautiful as possible. You can say, "I'm just going to make everybody around me be really pretty." Make the whole house look really good, and just pull her on. If you've got enough juice to turn the house into the Taj Mahal, crank it up. Go on ahead, because you have to spend the energy anyway. Go ahead and get to it.
 
Cannabis Spirituality

"A sane, sweet, witty look at assisted spirituality."—An Amazon Reviewer

You can't break or ruin your mind by anything you think. Your mind must be able to think anything. It must be able to consider all alternatives, no matter how awful or horrible. Your intellect is a perfect computer. If your mind couldn't consider all the alternatives, that would be something wrong in itself. It does not make you crazy to think a crazy thought. You can look at that crazy thought and say to yourself, "My, what a crazy thought," and go on about your life without having any fear that your mind has been damaged or dirtied in any lasting way by that passing nutty thought. This is the unsulliable nature of the intellect.

 
An Outlaw in My Heart

"If you're curious what it might be like to have a hippie in the White House, check this out."—Reviewer Scott Ryan

I don't believe in the death penalty for people, but I do believe in it for corporations.

A corporation is not a person.

Back just after Lincoln died, the Supreme Court ruled that a corporation was a person... had the rights and privileges of a person. Then later on [about 1910] that was strengthened. In 1978, they said that not only is a corporation a person but it has Constitutionally protected free speech, and its money is its free speech. Which is like sort of a one-man, one-vote idea: There's me, one man, and then there's General Motors. I get to have my vote and it gets to use its money... not even thinking about the fact that it has eternal life and can be many places at once.

And that's an evil thing.
 
Rendered Infamous

"[Rendered Infamous] is not a kiss-and-tell-book. In chapters 22 and 27, Gaskin declines to list the media folk he shared joints with, the cops who told him they smoked pot 'while they were arresting me for smoking marijuana,' and 'all of the counselors and psychologists who told me they smoked marijuana while they were candling my head to see if I was crazy because I smoked marijuana.'" —Dolph Honicker, Tennessean Sunday Bookcase

The small pressures carried into the Visiting Room, where we were written tickets like traffic tickets for touching our loved ones. I got two smooch tickets in one visiting hour once, and had to receive a warning. I saw that behavior mod was a way to break people's souls. I thought, Isn't there some small thing I could leave here that would be of help to the people that come here later? I felt myself like a donkey being pierced with a goad and lured by a carrot. I tried to teach the other prisoners the nature of conditioning. I told them,

"Walk fast enough to avoid the goad. Do not reach for the carrot."
 
More Books By Stephen Gaskin

From the new introduction to Monday Night Class:

The times were outrageous. There were a couple of hundred thousand hippies on the streets in San Francisco. Tripping on LSD was pandemic. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole city smelled of reefer smoke. Grass was $75 a kilo, Acapulco gold was $250 a kilo, acid was $2.50 a hit, and so was a rock and roll ticket. Every circle on the street had a joint circulating around the inside, and the rock halls were jammed with stoned trippers....

When, in the normal course of getting stoned, I wanted to take counsel with my fellow trippers, I went to Ian Grand, who headed the Experimental College. He gave me Monday night in San Francisco State’s Gallery Lounge. This was the founding of Monday Night Class in 1967. The idea was to compare notes with other trippers about tripping and the whole psychic and psychedelic world.

We began as twelve people, dropped to six, and eventually grew into a huge meeting of as many as a thousand to fifteen hundred people. We left the Gallery Lounge and went to the Glide Memorial Church, and then to the Straight Theater on Haight Street, and then to Chet Helms's Family Dog Ballroom on the Great Highway. We discussed love, sex, dope, God, gods, war, peace, enlightenment, mind-cop, free will and what-have-you, all in a stoned, truthful, hippy atmosphere. We studied religions, fairy tales, legends, children's stories, the I Ching, Zen koans—and tripping. It was easy to tell when we were onto something hot—I could see the expressions move across those thousand faces like the wind across a wheat field. It was like being inside a computer with a thousand parallel processors.

For there to be as many as a thousand people coming to Monday Night Class each week meant we were pulling out of a huge pool.  The city was a great spiritual ferment. You could hear a different spiritual teacher every night of the week. One night was Suzuki Roshi from the San Francisco Zen Center, another was Murshid Sam Lewis (known as Sufi Sam); you could chant with the Asoka Fakir, or you could dance with Rabbi Schlomo Carlebach. A very straight elderly woman ran a Spiritualist church and complained about the Acid people messing up the séance.

We used to call Monday Night Class the Astral Continental Congress. When cadaverous guys in long black overcoats and snap-brim hats appeared on Haight Street bringing heroin and crystal meth from the East Coast, addiction was discussed in Monday Night Class. When the students were shot at Kent State, violence was discussed, advocated, and finally refuted in Monday Night Class. When someone crashed hard or got crazy, we talked about it. We agreed on the dangers of hard dope and alcohol. We were aficionados of Spirit. And we were privileged to be on the wings of a great cultural movement.

The most important thing to come out of the Monday Night Class meetings, and the glue that held us together, was a belief in the moral imperative toward altruism that was implied by the telepathic spiritual communion we experienced together. Every decent thing accomplished over the years by the people of Monday Night Class and the Farm (its later incarnation) came from those simple Hippy values. It was the basis for our belief in Spirit, nonviolence, collectivity, and social activism.

In time, meetings were taped and transcribed by William Meyers, then edited by a crew of us. The resulting manuscript became the book called Monday Night Class. It was published by a small cooperative called the Santa Rosa Book Farm, which later grew into The Farm. The first release, in 1970?, was very exciting. We printed 6,000 and they sold out, so we printed 12,000 and they sold out, so we printed 25,000. The front windows of the City Lights bookstore in North Beach and the Tides bookstore in Sausalito were filled wall-to-wall with Monday Night Class.

Monday Night Class eventually sold over a hundred thousand copies, and hundreds, maybe thousands of people wrote me or have told me in person that this book helped them with their head when they were tripping. Most of them said that it helped them know they were not crazy. It is with a profound prayer for that good effect that this edition is issued.

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Website and Contents Copyright 2006 Stephen Gaskin