“Steve’s thing was: we’re all telepathic, so we better start acting like it.” - Kabir Helminski, Sufi Mystic, talking to me about Stephen Gaskin, founder of The Farm.
It might seem too obvious to say: some experiences in life feel better than others. Time spent in a certain place with certain people - summer camp, college dorms, on a kibbutz in Israel's negev, or working on a farm in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana (those are mine) - stick out in memory as times when life simply felt better. It might be tempting to generalize from these memories that time spent in Community (what all those places have in common) is - due perhaps to some innate human need for meaningful socializing, or for some of the reasons previously enumerated in this blog - just better. Yet this does not account for the fact that certain times in Community are remembered as feeling much better than others. They're special. One summer at camp was simply more fun than another. One particular dorm set the superior standard for social interaction over other dorms. One group of people on the kibbutz, or the farm, were somehow just fantastically, harmoniously in tune with each other, and something was lost when the group suddenly changed. The specific reasons for this specialness can be both opaque and plentiful. The weather was better that summer, the design of that dorm was better suited for socializing, the people we were with were somehow better matched to our personalities. Our social temperaments, it would seem, are fickle beings, easily upset by slight changes in those myriad details that float just below perception.
The question for this blog post: How to understand these delicate sensitivities?
Well, Stephen Gaskin has an answer.
Talking to Doug During The Farm Experience Weekend
I arrived at The Farm on a Friday afternoon for The Farm Experience Weekend. This was an organized event led by long-time Farm member, writer, and de-facto Farm historian, Doug. This is something he does once or twice a year in an effort to introduce both Farm novices (like me) and experts - which is to say, people who have been following the history of The Farm and the Gasksins since the early ‘70s - to what life is like in hippie paradise. There were about fifteen of us for the weekend: a few graduate students in education from Nashville, a few couples interested in checking out the midwives, a few people of retirement age investigating the possibility of going through the process of moving to The Farm (and what a process: first comes being sponsored by a current member, then becoming a resident, then a provisional member, and finally a member. This takes at least two years), and a handful of interested, curious folk, in which group I place myself. Over the course of the weekend, Doug gave some excellent presentations on the mythologized history of The Farm: the caravan of buses that followed Stephen and Ina May Gaskin from San Francisco to the middle of Tennessee (on those buses, the first "Farm babies" were born), the vow of poverty everyone took in the early years, the good social work of The Farm's philanthropic arm, Plenty International, especially their help in rebuilding a Guatemalan town after the earthquake of 1976; he took us on a tour of the premises, showing us the different kinds of eco-friendly housing they've been constructing for forty years; and on Sunday morning, explained to us the spiritual philosophy that's the bedrock of The Farm Community.
It was clear from his presentations that Doug felt some nostalgia for the old days. When I asked him about it, he told me that the new people, it seemed to him, weren't coming for the spiritual community so much as the enticements of offish-grid (The Farm is not currently, like Earthaven, entirely off-grid) living, and the prospects of the budding entirely off-grid ecovillage on the property. (My next post will be about this spiritual generational split at The Farm and other places). So I asked him: what about the early days made it so particularly special?
And he gave me a very specific answer. Smiling at the memories, he said: “The vibes back then were just amazing.”
In this place, speaking of “the vibes” is not a platitude. It is not some nebulous sense related obliquely to the vagaries of “moods.” It means something particular, something essential, to The Farm’s spiritual philosophy.
Vibrations: Where Science Meets Spirituality
Let’s start with an object. A pen. What is a pen? Ask a quantum physicist and he/she/they might tell you, "well, it's complicated." Look with an electron microscope and you might see a field of particles, atoms that make up the material of the pen. Get even closer, and you'd see that those atoms are made up of even smaller particles of not matter, but energy: protons and neutrons in the center with electrons darting around them faster than most measurements can glean (gif around here somewhere). Get even closer and, so the best theories go, those protons, neutrons, and electrons are made up of tiny tiny tiny energy particles called quarks. Particles smaller that quarks move into the realm of theory-speculations. Ask physicist Brian Greene, and he might tell you that, way down at the bottom of material existence, there are loops of tiny vibrating strings of energy.
Aha, vibrating energy. It so happened that the heights of hippie and psychedelic mysticism coincided with major advances in the scientific fields of quantum mechanics. And in the fields of quantum mechanics, everything - literally everything - is made up of tiny, ever-reducing, vibrating particles of pure energy.
So now let's move from an object to a thought. That little bundle of words, images, sounds in a mind. It doesn't matter what the thought is, whether it's acted upon, spoken aloud, forgotten, or consciously allowed to roll through the mind unheeded. What matters is that it's there. It exists, objectively. Which means that it too is made up of energy, of vibrating material.
That's right. Your thoughts and feelings emit vibrations. As do mine. As do everyone's. And so, the spiritual theory goes, we experience each other's vibrations. We call them senses, moods, "vibes." If we are conscious enough to take notice, then we can communicate through our vibrations. If we are not conscious enough to take notice, then we are doomed to be at their mercy.
Telepathy, Acclimation, Sensitivity, Imitation
When Gaskin began his teaching, he advanced a similar theory of the Oneness at the mystical heart of all religions as has been expounded upon on this blog. I'm still in the conceptual phase of my understanding of that idea, but for Gaskin this interconnectedness was not just a beautiful idea, not just true in theory, it was scientifically proven. While there is much more to Stephen Gaskin's innovations in spiritual thought than simply vibrations and telepathy, and I'll get to a few more of his ideas in the next post, what's important here is that Gaskin taught his followers and compatriots to cultivate their minds to each other's vibrations. To be telepathic. Both with each other and, indeed, with everyone else in the world. When I hear from Doug that "the vibes were amazing" back in the early days, this is what I imagine he's talking about. Those first groups, the ones that learned directly from Gaskin, simply believed more fully, more openly, in the truth of telepathy, in the scientific fact of vibrations.
I admit, I find all of this pretty interesting, and, in some basic ways, I think it's accurate. Open yourself to the feelings of another person, or even a group of people, and it's possible to get a sense of the moods, temperaments, thoughts of that person or persons. Listen to a fellow human being closely, and you can begin to hear some of what they really mean behind their words.
And yet, I wonder about some of the practical issues at stake. Isn't it taxing to cultivate such intense vulnerability and sensitivity all the time? And does that constant vulnerability, necessary for being attuned to the vibrations, necessitate leaving behind a society where such practice might become unsafe?Perhaps those are defeatist questions. More pertinent: Does it become too easy, when everyone is practicing ultra-sensitivity, for the group to acclimate itself to one simple, possibly dull, vibrating frequency? After a time does such telepathy become an imitation of itself? Everyone acting groovy because they've simply turned off their thoughts under the strain of telepathy's difficulty?
I've written before about Menachem Mendl of Kotzk, the Kotzker Rebbe, who was a member of the founding generation of the spiritual movement known as Hasidism in 18th century Eastern Europe. One of his most famous and difficult teachings was that to live in imitation, even of one's own past self, was to become distant from God. I admit, I'm not always sure what that means, but I believe it is an important challenge, a message of non-complacency, a precursor to Abraham Joshua Heschel's adage that religion ought to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable."
I have no conclusions on these subjects. I suppose they live in the realm of "things to think on." And hey, if we open ourselves, even just a little bit, to the vibrations, maybe we'll hear a few of each other's thoughts.
It might seem too obvious to say: some experiences in life feel better than others. Time spent in a certain place with certain people - summer camp, college dorms, on a kibbutz in Israel's negev, or working on a farm in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana (those are mine) - stick out in memory as times when life simply felt better. It might be tempting to generalize from these memories that time spent in Community (what all those places have in common) is - due perhaps to some innate human need for meaningful socializing, or for some of the reasons previously enumerated in this blog - just better. Yet this does not account for the fact that certain times in Community are remembered as feeling much better than others. They're special. One summer at camp was simply more fun than another. One particular dorm set the superior standard for social interaction over other dorms. One group of people on the kibbutz, or the farm, were somehow just fantastically, harmoniously in tune with each other, and something was lost when the group suddenly changed. The specific reasons for this specialness can be both opaque and plentiful. The weather was better that summer, the design of that dorm was better suited for socializing, the people we were with were somehow better matched to our personalities. Our social temperaments, it would seem, are fickle beings, easily upset by slight changes in those myriad details that float just below perception.
The question for this blog post: How to understand these delicate sensitivities?
Well, Stephen Gaskin has an answer.
Talking to Doug During The Farm Experience Weekend
I arrived at The Farm on a Friday afternoon for The Farm Experience Weekend. This was an organized event led by long-time Farm member, writer, and de-facto Farm historian, Doug. This is something he does once or twice a year in an effort to introduce both Farm novices (like me) and experts - which is to say, people who have been following the history of The Farm and the Gasksins since the early ‘70s - to what life is like in hippie paradise. There were about fifteen of us for the weekend: a few graduate students in education from Nashville, a few couples interested in checking out the midwives, a few people of retirement age investigating the possibility of going through the process of moving to The Farm (and what a process: first comes being sponsored by a current member, then becoming a resident, then a provisional member, and finally a member. This takes at least two years), and a handful of interested, curious folk, in which group I place myself. Over the course of the weekend, Doug gave some excellent presentations on the mythologized history of The Farm: the caravan of buses that followed Stephen and Ina May Gaskin from San Francisco to the middle of Tennessee (on those buses, the first "Farm babies" were born), the vow of poverty everyone took in the early years, the good social work of The Farm's philanthropic arm, Plenty International, especially their help in rebuilding a Guatemalan town after the earthquake of 1976; he took us on a tour of the premises, showing us the different kinds of eco-friendly housing they've been constructing for forty years; and on Sunday morning, explained to us the spiritual philosophy that's the bedrock of The Farm Community.
It was clear from his presentations that Doug felt some nostalgia for the old days. When I asked him about it, he told me that the new people, it seemed to him, weren't coming for the spiritual community so much as the enticements of offish-grid (The Farm is not currently, like Earthaven, entirely off-grid) living, and the prospects of the budding entirely off-grid ecovillage on the property. (My next post will be about this spiritual generational split at The Farm and other places). So I asked him: what about the early days made it so particularly special?
And he gave me a very specific answer. Smiling at the memories, he said: “The vibes back then were just amazing.”
In this place, speaking of “the vibes” is not a platitude. It is not some nebulous sense related obliquely to the vagaries of “moods.” It means something particular, something essential, to The Farm’s spiritual philosophy.
Vibrations: Where Science Meets Spirituality
Let’s start with an object. A pen. What is a pen? Ask a quantum physicist and he/she/they might tell you, "well, it's complicated." Look with an electron microscope and you might see a field of particles, atoms that make up the material of the pen. Get even closer, and you'd see that those atoms are made up of even smaller particles of not matter, but energy: protons and neutrons in the center with electrons darting around them faster than most measurements can glean (gif around here somewhere). Get even closer and, so the best theories go, those protons, neutrons, and electrons are made up of tiny tiny tiny energy particles called quarks. Particles smaller that quarks move into the realm of theory-speculations. Ask physicist Brian Greene, and he might tell you that, way down at the bottom of material existence, there are loops of tiny vibrating strings of energy.
Aha, vibrating energy. It so happened that the heights of hippie and psychedelic mysticism coincided with major advances in the scientific fields of quantum mechanics. And in the fields of quantum mechanics, everything - literally everything - is made up of tiny, ever-reducing, vibrating particles of pure energy.
So now let's move from an object to a thought. That little bundle of words, images, sounds in a mind. It doesn't matter what the thought is, whether it's acted upon, spoken aloud, forgotten, or consciously allowed to roll through the mind unheeded. What matters is that it's there. It exists, objectively. Which means that it too is made up of energy, of vibrating material.
That's right. Your thoughts and feelings emit vibrations. As do mine. As do everyone's. And so, the spiritual theory goes, we experience each other's vibrations. We call them senses, moods, "vibes." If we are conscious enough to take notice, then we can communicate through our vibrations. If we are not conscious enough to take notice, then we are doomed to be at their mercy.
Telepathy, Acclimation, Sensitivity, Imitation
When Gaskin began his teaching, he advanced a similar theory of the Oneness at the mystical heart of all religions as has been expounded upon on this blog. I'm still in the conceptual phase of my understanding of that idea, but for Gaskin this interconnectedness was not just a beautiful idea, not just true in theory, it was scientifically proven. While there is much more to Stephen Gaskin's innovations in spiritual thought than simply vibrations and telepathy, and I'll get to a few more of his ideas in the next post, what's important here is that Gaskin taught his followers and compatriots to cultivate their minds to each other's vibrations. To be telepathic. Both with each other and, indeed, with everyone else in the world. When I hear from Doug that "the vibes were amazing" back in the early days, this is what I imagine he's talking about. Those first groups, the ones that learned directly from Gaskin, simply believed more fully, more openly, in the truth of telepathy, in the scientific fact of vibrations.
I admit, I find all of this pretty interesting, and, in some basic ways, I think it's accurate. Open yourself to the feelings of another person, or even a group of people, and it's possible to get a sense of the moods, temperaments, thoughts of that person or persons. Listen to a fellow human being closely, and you can begin to hear some of what they really mean behind their words.
And yet, I wonder about some of the practical issues at stake. Isn't it taxing to cultivate such intense vulnerability and sensitivity all the time? And does that constant vulnerability, necessary for being attuned to the vibrations, necessitate leaving behind a society where such practice might become unsafe?Perhaps those are defeatist questions. More pertinent: Does it become too easy, when everyone is practicing ultra-sensitivity, for the group to acclimate itself to one simple, possibly dull, vibrating frequency? After a time does such telepathy become an imitation of itself? Everyone acting groovy because they've simply turned off their thoughts under the strain of telepathy's difficulty?
I've written before about Menachem Mendl of Kotzk, the Kotzker Rebbe, who was a member of the founding generation of the spiritual movement known as Hasidism in 18th century Eastern Europe. One of his most famous and difficult teachings was that to live in imitation, even of one's own past self, was to become distant from God. I admit, I'm not always sure what that means, but I believe it is an important challenge, a message of non-complacency, a precursor to Abraham Joshua Heschel's adage that religion ought to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable."
I have no conclusions on these subjects. I suppose they live in the realm of "things to think on." And hey, if we open ourselves, even just a little bit, to the vibrations, maybe we'll hear a few of each other's thoughts.
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