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Thirty-five years after its first publication–in purple type and with no page numbers–Stephen Gaskin's classic guide to tripping, Monday Night Class, and its mandala cover are again on bookstore shelves. This time the ink is black, and page numbers are present, and the book is a Revised & Annotated Edition, with interlinear comments and margin notes from Gaskin's older (he turned 70 this year) and wiser self. He says in this new edition, he "sorted out the stuff that I still believe from the stuff that I don't."
According to Gaskin–counterculture icon, founder of The Farm (the longest-running, largest intentional community in the U.S.), recipient of the first Right Livelihood Award/Alternative Nobel Prize in 1980, Counterculture Hall of Fame inductee in 2004, author of a dozen books, international activist and speaker–Monday Night Class was at the root of all he and his cohorts have accomplished in the past four decades.
"How do you get out of hell? What holds the yin and the yang together? What do you do with a load of extra energy? Where does thought come from?" Most every Monday night for three years, starting in 1967, Gaskin, a former teacher at San Francisco State College, invited–and answered–such questions at meetings that drew 1500 or more spiritual seekers at a time, and which came to be known as Monday Night Class.
"The glue that held us [the Monday Night Class, also known as the 'Astral Continental Congress'] together was a belief in the moral imperative toward altruism that was implied by the telepathic spiritual communion we experienced together," Gaskin writes in the new introduction. "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."
Monday Night Class offers transcripts of some of these encounters, serving up questions and answers on such topics as "love, sex, dope, God, gods, war, peace, enlightenment, mindcop, 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."
According to Gaskin, Monday Night Class is well known as a guide to tripping, but also as a guide to life. "The original sold over 100,000 copies, many to people who recognized it as a guidebook to the 'long, strange trip of life.' The skills needed to be 'a good tripper' are the same whether you're talking psychedelics–or life."
In the book's new introduction, Gaskin says, "We didn't take acid on the classic Farm from 1970 to 1983, and it is still not our policy on the new Farm." He says that he feels both hope and trepidation as he sees LSD making a comeback. While he "recognizes the mind-opening, educational value of psychedelics," he "cannot in good conscience be an advocate for LSD because of the small one and a half or two percent of people who can be damaged in some permanent way."
Gaskin expresses the hope that the Revised & Annotated Monday Night Class will fill the "lack of good contemporary tripping instructions in this renaissance of consciousness expansion." He says that "hundreds, maybe thousands, of people have told me that this book helped them with their head when they were tripping,… helped them know they were not crazy."
In the Revised & Annotated Monday Night Class, Gaskin enhances his
summer of love answers from the perspective of 35 years of added experience.
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