But the Bible taught that the first two rows along the edge of the road were dedicated to passing travelers who in those days of non-frozen or concentrated foods, could not possibly carry enough food for a very long journey, and probably didn’t have any actual money on their persons as they traveled.

These were cultural norms. Some may say that is naive and it was easier then, and there are more people now and times are harder. But two rows alongside the field of a giant complicated farm is virtually insignificant. There are huge quantities of food produced and harvested these days, but two rows could still be done without damage to the industry. It is merely that sharp practices have become “normal”, which is to say not right or acceptable, but done by so many people that the curve describing the frequency of that action is near the norm. — Excerpted from Rendered Infamous, by Stephen Gaskin.

All this talk about gays in the military took me back 47 years to those times. We had several Combat Corpsmen, the Marine Corps name for a Medic, in our company but the most memorable was Mother Heaps.

Mother was about six feet four and handsome with close-cut, black, curly hair, a fine-looking young man who wanted nothing more than to resume his homosexual life back in San Francisco. Our Platoon thought it was pretty slick to have a gay Corpsman. We thought we got good treatment; Mother Heaps was kind and compassionate and we felt we were covered. Mother loved us, and we loved him back by accepting his care. His gentleness was much appreciated in those hard combat situations. To my knowledge, he never “hit on” any of us.

Mother was good on patrols. One time we went out not long after full dark. We entered no-man’s-land through the Panmunjom “Peace Corridor” with its red and white candy-striped guard shack with the guard in his spiffy white gloves, white spats, white duty-belt and chrome helmet. We were quite a contrast in our camouflage and blackened faces. After a few hundred yards we left the peace corridor and turned towards Three Fingers and Horseshoe, Chinese-held hills. We managed to penetrate fairly deeply into Chinese territory without alerting any sentries and, having completed our reconnaissance mission, turned back towards our own lines, looking for the sally gate where we could re-enter U.N. territory.

There was a trench all the way across Korea, roughly at the 38th parallel. First there was a row of trench with fighting holes and machine gun bunkers every few yards, then a thirty-foot-wide strip of tanglefoot barbed wire five feet deep, mined with occasional trip flares. Outside the barbed wire was our mine field. Some of the mines would blow a man up. Some would blow up a tank.

The mine field, for the safety of the U.N. forces, had one strand of barbed wire running down our side of the field with a small red triangle hanging every few feet. On the posts, facing our line, were signs: WARNING, MINE FIELD!
As we hunted the sally gate, we ran up against the one-strand fence, saw the triangles and read the sign, upside down from the wrong side. We had been led across the minefield and were standing in it.

We, of course, wanted to be on the other side of that fence and started to step over when the Sergeant, who had led us into the minefield, said,
“No. We made it this far. We’re going to turn around and retrace our steps through the field, go back and re-enter through the Peace Corridor.”

Opinions flared, whether to cross out of the mine field or go back through it, when suddenly Mother Heaps drew his .45, jacked back the slide and pointed it at the Sergeant.

“Sergeant,” he said, “this appears to me to be a health question. I’m in charge of health and it looks unhealthy to the men to go back through that mine field after we were lucky enough to make it the first time. We’re going to step over the fence and go in through the sally port. You can run me up on charges when we get back to our own company area, but that’s what we are going to do now!”

The Sergeant looked down the barrel of the .45 and reluctantly agreed.
In the morning we all waited on tenterhooks for the Sergeant and Mother Heaps to tell their stories to the Captain. We feared for Mother’s safety. There were dark rumors that people who misbehaved in combat could be stood up against the wall and shot.

When Mother came back down the hill, we were all over him.

“Well, what happened?”

Mother smiled. “Nothing, to me.”

“What happened to the Sergeant?

Mother smiled more broadly. “He was relieved of duty as a squad leader and sent to the rear to be a cook.”

That was one of the best good-sense decisions I ever saw come down through the official channels of the Marine Corps. We all thought,
“Mother takes good care of us!”

But I thought that after the performance she put on, when you see the quality of life force that her chaste life leaves her with, it makes you think that she got more power and juice out of it than the average nun.

It is necessary to expand your mind in at least three ways:  One, you’ve got to expand it in the dimension of space. And to understand that the medieval church could not believe that small thing, the sun, didn’t revolve around the Earth, even after it was known the Earth was round. And now what we call the Milky Way is the galaxy that we live in, edgeways to us, and some of those big bright stars out there are other galaxies bigger than it and farther away. It’s a huge panorama to think against.

And you really need to understand why we know what we know about the dimension of time—you have to be able to understand at least the rudiments of half-life (the amount of time that it takes for a radioactive element to lose half of its mass) and decay of radioactive elements and in particular radio-carbon dating, which tells us how old every campfire we ever find can be—because that carbon can be dated by the radioactive half-life.

So, it’s not a question of somebody saying, “Well, the world’s 5000 years old, and besides who the hell really knows….” It’s not like that. With the extension of intelligence of science, one can reach back past those 5000 years and read the history in the rocks that goes back millions and billions of years.

And in time and space, things have been going on long enough that there is light traveling toward us at 186,000 miles a second that’s been traveling for hundreds and thousands and millions of years, and the star that gave up that light is dead and doesn’t put out light any more and that light isn’t even here yet and by the time that light gets here, that star will be gone, and maybe us as well.

So, to understand evolution, you need to understand a little bit about space and time. You also need to be able to hang together a concept. You have to be able to hang together a matrix of facts and put things together in a reasonable way.

“Intelligent design” to me seems to be looking for it after the fact. And intelligent design is sort of a relative thing, you know.

It’s also necessary to have a proper understanding of what a theory is, and the falsehood that the theory of evolution is something that’s just not really proved if it’s a “theory.”

That’s not how “theory” is used. For instance, in atomic theory, the way that we can tell that it’s true is that atom bombs blow up when we tell them to. It’s more than theory, it’s more than what you think about something, it’s a tentative discussion and investigation into how it actually works.

The idea of evolution is deceptively simple—that which is a good survivor survives, that which is not, does not. Seems simple enough. And that things are changed by mutation of various causes and there will be differences amongst the critters.

Of the ones that have mutations—98 percent of all mutations are lethal and the organism does not survive.  But of that 2 percent that does survive the mutations, some of them are not very good and some of them are better. And the ones that are better will probably procreate better and get more food and have bigger families and last more seasons and reproduce more than the ones that aren’t as fast, aren’t as swift, or didn’t come out as well. And that doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination.

And if you look back to a beginning of when this Earth cooled for millions of years before it became cool enough that anything could live on it. You can see that there is plenty of time for many things to work themselves out.

Now, the snowflake is considered almost miraculous because of all being alike (hexagonal), and different (because they all coalesce on a different particle of dust with different surface characteristics that fractally goes out into making the pattern of the snowflake). And it’s very crisp and precise and deliberate-seeming—a six-sided pattern. What is the miracle of that six-sided pattern? It’s the 60-degree angle structure of the H20 water molecule.

All of the creatures that reproduced and are here have lasted, and the heads/tail equation came up heads for them every time or they wouldn’t be here. But that’s not miraculous except from this end looking back at it, because it’s merely a description of what went down and which elements were reproduced and carried on.

I think life organizes against the entropy. It is our purpose and our function.

I would think it would be silly if science thought it had everything covered and if there were not areas that science did not quite yet understand. They have not yet put together their unified field theory.

Of course, science doesn’t have everything nailed down. But I am quite content for the part that we don’t understand yet to be called “the part we don’t understand yet.” Calling it “God” doesn’t make it be anything else. If you want to call it that and that’s what you want to do, go on right ahead, but it’s the  part we don’t understand yet, whatever that is.

To me, having to fall back on a God who snaps his fingers to bring this stuff into fruition is much, much harder to believe than natural processes working themselves out over truly immense amounts of time.

This assault of “intelligent design” against science is a great sin in itself as far as I’m concerned—an effort to put untrue things into the collective mind of humankind, to make us all a little bit dumber, a little bit slower, and a little bit less able to cope as human beings and as nations.

It is an evil thing to bring down the level of intelligence that we have worked at for all these thousands of years.

Stephen standing by Caravan buses.

Three decades after first publication, we’ve published a revised and annotated edition of Caravan. The book follows me and the Caravan of 50 school buses flowing out of Monday Night Class, as we travel around the United States on a speaking tour arranged by preachers who wanted me to tell them what this hippy thing was all about.

This new edition adds background to the speaking engagements, by sharing the road stories, the scenes behind the scenes—cowboys and cops, birthings and poop, peyote tea and White House security guards. There are dozens of great photos.

Here’s an excerpt I hope you enjoy.

We’re pretty durable, and we need to bump up against the universe a little bit to find out where it’s at. Also we need to bump up against each other a little bit. We shouldn’t think that we’re so fragile that we can’t lean on each other a little bit and interact kind of heavy and still be friends.

Getting away from the small village idea has done a funny thing to the whole country, because in a small village, if a fellow turns up obnoxious one day he’s still going to be living there the next day, and he’s either going to have to straighten up or nobody’s going to talk to him anymore or something. He’s going to get cooled.

But here in the city you can get obnoxious and move to another neighborhood, and get obnoxious and move to another neighborhood … and people get the idea that if you’re going to have to come on heavy to somebody to make them straighten up that they might not like you anymore, and they might move, and you’d never see them again or something. But we should all think that we’re all good enough friends—we’re all kind of like cousins anyway, we’re all the same kind of monkey—that we can say, “Hey, man, how about it,” once in a while, and the other fellow isn’t necessarily going to say, “Well I’m going to go home.”

That’s another part of interacting, getting into that learning experience. We learn how we be by bumping against each other a little bit, and it’s a good deal all the way around to have a learning experience. We’ve really learned a lot on the road too. One thing I learned … I said in my book that the country was so corrupt that it was falling down, which is what it looks like from San Francisco. But it looks a lot solider out here. It looks a lot solider. It looks like these folks would be easier to make friends with than to do anything else.

Q: About compassion and politics … if you go mess up a draft board, is that being compassionate for one’s brother?

No, if you go in and tear up somebody’s thing it’s going to blow their mind and wreck their head, and that means that there’s one more wrecked head that we’ve got to pick up, because we aren’t going to be cool until we pick up all the wrecked heads, it doesn’t matter whose they are. We can’t be cool until we get everybody cool and sane. There’s no final enlightenment until everybody can get off. You can only go so far, and then you’ve got to stop and help everybody get off, and that means everybody. So it’s immoral to mess up folks’ heads—anybody’s. I try to leave everybody’s head a little better than I found it, it doesn’t matter who he be.

I will tell you the best way for your revolution to be successful: You have to run your revolution in such a way that you can win the love of an honest square.

People don’t hurt people that they know well, so just make yourself know everybody well and let them know you well. Be wide open. Don’t hide anything and don’t act like you’re superior to them a little bit or anything. Get right in there with them, and if you do that they’ll have compassion with you, and if they have compassion with you they can’t hurt you; they won’t want to, they won’t want to hurt anybody.

We make a lot of difference: There’s a string of hundreds and hundreds of cops halfway across this continent who are well-disposed toward the next long-hair they meet, because the last two hundred of them they met were a groove. And we’re going all the way around the country doing that—trying to get other folks to do it too, because if we can build enough individual human bonds of love and trust, we can raise the whole love-trust thing for the whole country and for the whole world, and it’s really necessary that it be done.

For a long time, I have studied swamis and yogis and Indian road chiefs and a zen master, and listened to them when they came through, and I have heard scads of psychedelic divas with god knows what chemicals brewing in their bodies. And I have not in my lifetime seen any other person, spiritual teacher, or entertainer put out that power and quality of personal chi (psychic energy). If Susan Boyle had lived in India 150 years ago, they would probably have built a temple around her.

All of us must wonder what is that quality that can be picked up by a microphone and turned into digital bits, sent bouncing off a satellite around the world, beamed to scores of different countries whose people do not speak the language it’s sung in, and nonetheless it had the effect of giving listeners physical chills and thrills and a high psychic awareness and a tendency to break out crying.

Lest somebody think this is just my opinion, I will give you the testimony of Brian Williams of NBC. He said that he had listened to it and had thrills and chills and cried—and he played it five more times and it did it to him every time, at which point he started sending it to his family and friends and business acquaintances.

This effect is so powerful that even in stories about Susan Boyle, when they play a little clip in back just so you’ll know who the story’s about, it gives me chills and makes me cry. And I don’t even listen to show tunes.

She should have been recognized as an immense personal psychic force. With the huge chi of her night with the audience, she should have been guarded like a diamond merchant. And they let the British and international paparazzi, who are famed for lack of taste, rip her off of her justly earned psychic riches. If some material thing of comparable worth and money had been taken from someone in a similar fashion, it would have been called a felony and would be worth years of time in jail.

That she had the nerve to come back and try again after that bad treatment is evidence of her courage, but the evidence of her heart and soul and her sweetness is in that great voice. We owe her. I wish I could have been there to protect her.