More Books by Stephen Gaskin
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This Season's People

Buy This Season's People		 "This is a homespun book of spiritual aphorisms and insights, elaborately illustrated.... The book [is]...the Sermon on the Mount, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Zen of Bodhidharma in a modern package.

"It is a tasteful and non-proselytizing collection of inspiring ideas—a working philosophy, strong enough to guide some idealistic young people to work for the sake of humanity." —Eric Perlman, San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle

Any time something is hard for you to do, bring yourself to bear. Pay attention to it. Concentrate yourself. Come on to it with all your energy focused. That's all karate and breaking bricks is—is having all your attention focused when you hit. You can break bricks if your attention is focused. If your attention is not focused and the swing is the same, you might break your hand.

 
Amazing Dope Tales

Buy Amazing Dope Tales

"And amazing they are, boy. Here are some genuine 'Haight Street Flashbacks' by the self-styled 'unreconstructed hippie,' who went on to found The Farm in rural Tennessee, famous as the largest self-sufficient commune in the world.

"These are the early days, however, the amazing early days, when Stephen was still grokking with his lady Ina May in variously rundown locales and taking in the Summer of Love."—The West Coast Review of Books

Rockin' Jody would always come up and lay something outrageous on me. He would walk up to me and say, "I want you to try some of this dope. This dope was flown across the border by a one-eyed Tehuantepec Indian in a Ford trimotor...."

He opened his bedroom door and asked me to step into his room. I started to step onto this nice green carpet that he had; and then I realized that it was not the green carpet at all: the entire floor was wall-to-wall, edge-to-edge peyote buttons, set out to dry in his bedroom--next to his closet, which was stacked full of kilos.

He was making hundred button tea.
 
Mind at Play

Buy Mind at Play

"Gaskin... is an American original, a folk philosopher/guru whose particular gift is revealing the esoteric essence of what otherwise are peceived and experienced as formalistic religious doctrines. As a religious humanist, well versed in the essentials of the world's wisdom literature, Gaskin ranges in this book over such topics as God's immanence, sin, the Holy Spirit, new age superstition, tantric yoga, forgiveness, communitarianism, karma, ecology, spiritual energy, pacifism, American Indians, the Third World, and the like. Recommended for all libraries."—Choice, Association of College & Research Libraries

It's okay to tell somebody where it's at. What we should do is practice enough loving kindness and brotherhood that when it comes time to tell somebody where it's at, there's a strong enough bond of love that you don't just alienate him and kick him out of the boat. We ought to get to where we can rub against each other hard enough that we can say something to one another.

 
Hey Beatnik

Buy Hey Beatnik

"The book that brought me to The Farm." —Dozens of Farm Members

The thing about anger is to remember that it’s not necessary and that it’s optional. There’s a lot of psychologists these days that say, “Oh, anger is part of the thing, you have to let your anger out or it’ll choke you up,” or something. But it ain’t like that. If you let your anger out it gets you in the habit of letting anger out—it makes you indulgent about letting anger out. And you don’t have to do it, and it don’t hurt you to not do it. It’s good for you to not do it—it builds character, it makes you have a stronger thing. Don’t think you have an ungovernable temper or something. If you’ve blown it at somebody, then you remember, “Oh, I wasn’t going to do that no more.” And then maybe you’re blowing it at somebody and say, “Oh, I wasn’t going to do that no more, and here I am doing it.” But there’ll come a time when you’ll remember you weren’t going to do that before you start. And you remember before the adrenalin rush comes, then you can just back off and don’t do it.
More Books By Stephen Gaskin

 

Some Excerpts from This Season's People:

Your mind thinks in Gestalt flashes. The question is how quickly can you forget all that and go on to the next flash. Rather than figuring it out, and saying, "Is this right?" or "Where would this be in the light of contemporary philosophy?"— that first flash is your best bet. I try to trust myself and trust myself until I can just move on that first flash. If we all moved together in our interaction on that first flash, we would be incredibly fast and smart. If every time you asked a question, the next thing that came back was the answer instead of "Huh?" or if they just said, "I don't know," and let you clear the circuit to do the next thing—if we just all answered honestly and correctly the first time, it would be so easy, so incredibly fast and smart—we would just be fabulous.

The Universe is a vibratory entity. You can affect the vibrations one way or another by what you do. Everything has vibrations. Colors are vibrations, sounds are vibrations; so is concrete. So is thought. So is the Universe, God—all vibrations. And if that's what it's all made out of, then you have a technology for learning how to deal with vibrations. Non-space/time has a clear set of vibrations and rules of its own which are just as real and just as reliable as the fact that something falls 32 feet per second per second. If you behave in certain ways in the material plane, you will resonate with certain of those vibrations from the nonmaterial plane. If you resonate a vibration that is very high—love everybody, willing-to-lay-your-life-on-the-line-for-mankind, we're-all-in-it-together, nobody's-going-to-live- off-of-anybody — you are going to resonate that pure vibration out of the non-space/time place that we call Christ Consciousness, or the Consciousness of the intermediary between God and man.

You are the people. You are this season's people—There are no other people this season. If you blow it, it's blown.

Get your mind unbound and free; and then, from the loosest, highest, best place you have, with the fastest and most humorous mind you can get together, you can reach out and make a try at understanding Spirit. It's so subtle that you have to be quick; you can't have been thinking of yourself. It passes in the blink of an eye.

You can't define God, and you can't contain God. But you can, if you don't look at yourself, be God. The way to keep from looking at yourself is to be so busy doing your best that you don't have anything left over to look with. You can't know the totality of God with your finite mind, because God is infinite, and your material plane intelligence is finite—it cannot contain an infinite thing. But if you aren't pressing about the totality, and just relax and observe what's in front of you, you are knowing God, because that's all there is to know. There is nothing else to know; and the knowledge, the knower, the thing known, and the act of knowing are all one and are all God. You are the eyes with which God looks, and the mind through which God understands itself.

If you but know it, in your highest and your finest and your most honest places in your own heart, God is speaking to you. Even now. All the time, in your highest and finest places.

Here are the keys to heaven: Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself.

And here are the keys to hell: "Well, I know I got to take care of everybody, but I just want to get a little for myself first."

You have to clean your heart. If you want to communicate with people at that level, you can't have an impure thought about them. It muddies it up and makes it so unclear that you can't communicate. We found that you have to really try to be pure in your heart to experience Holiness.

What we expect is to be truthful; to be kind; to try to share; to try to love one another. Some folks don’t recognize that as a discipline: They say, "Oh, that old stuff…." And it may not sound too difficult, unless you’ve ever tried it. But if you ever try it, you’ll know it’s an exacting discipline.

The practice of real love and impeccable correctness and politeness and care among each other is only the beginning stage of the kind of peaceful society in which you may talk seriously about spiritual enlightenment.

One of the highest and Holiest religious experiences that is available to mankind is to get outside your head for a couple of seconds and realize that the sun doesn't rise and set in your armpit.

Contrary to modern psychology, you can know your brother. Psychology teaches that communicating is like taking a rock and wrapping a note around it and throwing it, and the other person catches the rock and unwraps it and reads the note. They say that’s all you can know about somebody—and that’s not true—One person can know another person. You can go to that place where you share souls and you can know somebody, and you are not alienated and you do not live in a box....

We are all really one thing.... and we're all in this together, and no matter how we make it look, we are really and truly going to share fortunes.

Helping man is a good place to start your search for God.

Your religion is how you really get along with folks—not what you may claim your religion is.

Attention is energy. What you put your attention on, you get more of. Each one of us is a fountain of energy, a valve through which universal life energy is metered into the world, and we can each point our self at whatever we want to.... Paying attention to what we choose to pay it to is probably the greatest freedom we have.

We all control what happens in the future by what we pay attention to in the present. If you perceive it to be improving and a groove, it improves and is a groove.

If you see that something should be a way, assume it's going to be that way.

Keep your attention in the here-and-now. Don't past-trip. Putting your attention in the past means that here-and-now is continuing on without you. The more time you spend in the past, the farther and farther out of register you are.

Don't put your attention into the future other than a reasonable amount of plans which you intend to carry out. Putting your attention out into the future is like when a squirrel runs out on a tree limb—when he gets way out into the small limbs, It gets very shaky. When you get out into the thin possibilities, it gets very unlikely and it tends to get you paranoid.

So tripping in the past gets you schizophrenic, and tripping in the future tends to get you paranoid. Hang out in the here-and-now. It is healing. When you're in the here-and-now, accept it as reality. Don't think about it or run it through your mind-filter when it's coming in. Accept it.

A meditative state is pure perception: not being conceptual about the here-and-now. That's what most Zen discipline is about: not past-tripping, not future-tripping, and not being conceptual in the here-and-now.
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