“To me this is the real inner meaning of the Vow of the Bodhisattva:
The deluding passions are inexhaustible, I vow to extinguish them all.
The way of the Buddha is unattainable, I vow to attain it.
Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all.
The truth is impossible to expound, I vow to expound it.
By the time I get this far, I generally lump them
together as,
“I vow to shovel shit against the tide forever.””
— Stephen Gaskin, Cannabis Spirituality, 1996, 1st. Ed.,
High Times Books, New York, pp 6-7
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10946714/Stephen-Gaskin-obituary.html
Stephen Gaskin – obituary
Stephen Gaskin was a teacher who led a caravan of hippies across
America to found a commune built on tradition
04 Jul 2014
Stephen Gaskin, was a self-confessed “professional hippy” who became an
unlikely presidential candidate.
As a proponent of love, peace and harmony, he co-founded “The Farm” – a
spiritual community of like-minded tie-die clad, vegetarian,
pot-smoking pacifists – in Summertown, Tennessee, in 1971. It became
the largest hippy community in the world and an example of an effective
self-sufficient subculture.
As a potential leader of the free world – campaigning in the primary
elections of 2000 – Gaskin was a Green Party hopeful with a mission to
introduce universal health care, reform financial institutions and
legalise marijuana.
Although he failed to win the Green Party ticket for the presidential
poll he fought a frank and funny campaign. “Did you inhale?” he was
asked about his personal experience of marijuana. “I didn’t exhale,” he
answered.
Stephen Gaskin was born on February 16 1935 in Denver, Colorado, and
had a peripatetic, eclectic upbringing that, while atheist, was
inclusive of various cultures. His father was variously a cowboy,
builder, mail clerk and commercial fisherman and Stephen was raised
throughout the south west of America, with periods in Santa Fe,
Phoenix, and San Bernardino. “I’d been to so many different places I
had to learn how to make friends on purpose,” he recalled. He
maintained that his freethinking was hereditary, noting that his
grandmother was a suffragette and his great uncle helped the
longshoreman’s union in San Francisco.
Gaskin served in the US Marine Corps between 1952 and 1955, during
which time he fought in Korea. During the Sixties he lived in San
Francisco, where he taught English, semantics and creative writing at
San Francisco State University, working under the celebrated linguist
and semanticist SI Hayakawa.
Gaskin’s formal teaching grew into a more personal and philosophical
pursuit through his experimental “Monday Night Class” – an open
discussion group involving up to 1,500 students and held in 1969 and
1970 at a huge auditorium in the city’s Bay Area. His classes ranged
from “Group Experiments in Unified Field Theory” to “Magic, Einstein,
and God”. In these gatherings he discussed “consciousness, the
spiritual plane, religion, politics, sex, drugs and current events” –
all viewed through the kaleidoscopic lens of the Sixties counterculture
movement (and its psychedelic pharmaceutical refreshments). Unified by
the hippy sensibility, the classes formed the genesis of the group that
settled at The Farm.
In 1970 Gaskin led 250 people in a caravan of “20 or 30 old buses” from
San Francisco to Tennessee on a four-month lecture tour of churches and
colleges. “The farther we went, the more people there were who joined
the caravan,” he said. “Pretty soon there were three or four hundred of
us and the police were meeting us every time we crossed a state line.”
As a location for a commune their pocket of Tennessee countryside, with
its blackjack oaks and Amish communities, held mixed blessings. Though
the thousand acres of farmland they bought was cheap, it was closer to
the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan than it was to a main road or a
hospital.
The community that Gaskin built was not based on free-love – its core
values included the sanctity of marriage, importance of hard work and
respect for the Tennessee locals: “You can’t jive anybody who’s
teaching you how to run a tractor. It’s something to watch a cat who
was once with the Hell’s Angels being taught to run a tractor by an old
man and being respectful to that old farmer.”
Eventually, applicants to join The Farm required sponsorship by a
resident, a plan for their livelihood, and an explanation of what they
might bring to the community. They then had to pass a probationary
period.
Gaskin’s attitude to drugs also followed a relatively conservative
line. “Don’t lose your head to a fad,” he said. “The idea is that you
want to get open so you can experience other folks, not all closed up
and off on your own trip. So you shouldn’t take speed or smack or coke.
You shouldn’t take barbiturates or tranquillisers. All that kind of
dope really dumbs you out. Don’t take anything that makes you dumb.
It’s hard enough to get smart.”
In 1974, however, Gaskin went to prison for possession of marijuana.
“After we’d been here for a while, we got busted for growing a hundred
pounds of grass in the back,” he said. “And we weren’t sure whether the
neighbours were more uptight with us for doing that or for being so
dumb that we planted it in the deer trails where every hunter who came
through could see it.”
He served one year of a three-year sentence. On his release he
discovered that his voting rights had been rescinded. He sued the
government and after a series of lower court victories won his case, in
1981, at the Tennessee Supreme Court.
Under Gaskin’s guidance The Farm’s ethos extended well beyond its
geographical boundaries. The community supported aid efforts in
Guatemala, Chernobyl, Belize and the Bronx in New York.
Meanwhile, his wife, Ina May, developed a respected free midwifery
service for residents and “outsiders” alike – she turned down an offer
to be privately flown to Hollywood when Demi Moore went into labour.
Other on-site ventures have also flourished, from book publishing to a
soy dairy.
Gaskin was a prolific writer. His books on hippy spirituality include
The Caravan (1971); Hey Beatnik! This is the Farm Book (1974); and
Amazing Dope Tales and Haight Ashbury Flashbacks (1980).
In 2004 Gaskin was inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame,
joining the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and his own wife, Ina May.
While The Farm was home to thousands in its heyday, there are presently
just 200 residents – the majority of whom are over 50. It is, however,
one of the longest running communes in America. When asked in old age
why the community survived, Gaskin emphasised its practical approach.
“We were hippies wanting to live together and we accepted the
discipline it took to do that,” he said. “Utopia means nowhere. The
Farm has a zip code.”
Stephen Gaskin was married and divorced three times before he married
Ina May Middleton. She survives him with their two sons and a daughter,
along with a daughter from his second marriage and a son from a
“non-marital relationship”. Another son predeceased him.
Stephen Gaskin, born February 16 1935, died July 1 2014.
—
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
— Prajna Paramita Sutra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Sutra
—
See also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/03/us/stephen-gaskin-hippie-who-founded-an-enduring-commune-dies-at-79.html?_r=0
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/stephen-f-gaskin-founder-of-the-farm-commune-in-tennessee-dies-at-79/2014/07/03/5bc44a1a-02c0-11e4-b8ff-89afd3fad6bd_story.html
http://www.tennessean.com/story/life/2014/07/01/stephen-gaskin-founder-farm-dies/11934969/
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2014/07/01/the-farm-summertown-timeline/11936383/
http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/stephen-gaskin-1935-2014.html
http://www.thefarm.org/
The Egodeath theory 
