The Farm

To write the spirituality of some of these experiments off as pop-Aquarianism would be a mistake. Many hippie religious tenets are quite deep, as can be seen in the philosophy of The Farm, a community begun in 1971, near Summertown, Tennessee.

To understand the roots of The Farm, you have to go back to about 1965. Drop City, the first full-blown prototype hip commune, was founded in May of that year. The Grateful Dead were moving into 710 Ashbury, establishing a hip outpost in the tony Panhandle district of San Francisco. Prankster-author Ken Kesey's acid tests began in November. The Diggers emerged as a social movement that winter. 1966 brought the Trips Festival and the Summer of Love. Janis Joplin hitch-hiked in from Texas. Lou Gottlieb opened his Morning Star ranch to all comers. On October 6, 1966, California outlawed LSD-25, but it didn't stop the first Human Be-In, paisleys and flower power, White Rabbit, or the Whole Earth Catalog.

In 1966, a young assistant professor at San Francisco State College began scheduling classes to talk about what was happening outside his window. The classes grew too large for the college halls, so the class moved to a church, a theater, and then, in 1969, to the Family Dog, Chet Helms' rock hall on the coast. Monday Night Class became a weekly pilgrimage of throngs of hippies from up and down the coast, from high schools and university campuses, from army bases and police academies, from mountain communes and Haight Street crash pads. Thousands of people, in various states of consciousness, came with tamborines and diaphanous gowns, love beads and bangles, Dr. Strange cloaks and top hats with feathers. The open-ended discussions ventured into Hermeneutic geometry, Masonic-Rosicrucian mysticism, Ekenkar and the Rolling Stones, but opened with a long, silent meditation and closed with a sense of purpose. At the center of this psychedelic crucible, the professor in the welder's hood, was 31-year-old Stephen Gaskin, known simply to most hippies as "Stephen."

Stephen would say, "Lets talk about how we're gonna be." Not "how we're gonna stop the war" or "how we're gonna make it fair," but "how we're gonna be."