28 Gaskin

In mid-July of 1972 I returned to Friend in Reunion where I taught English and was appointed chairman of the department. For the next two years I visited John in Ames several times a year and we corresponded frequently by mail. As best he could, John was practicing the principles of Gaskin and The Farm. John's letters were filled with speculation about world religion, philosophy, and enlightenment. To me the word "enlightenment" meant only the period of European intellectual history between Isaac Newton and Maximilien Robespierre.

That's all I knew.

I had only a dim understanding and no more of the psychomystical event called "enlightenment" in eastern religion. I considered it an oriental superstition. It meant nothing to me. Nirvana I thought was another word for heaven and—like heaven—available only after death. But now enlightenment seemed to be all that John was interested in. His letters were full of it. Gaskin, I was told, had experienced enlightenment.

He was in fact "enlightened."

Yes.

Gaskin himself had said so.

Hm.

In his calls and letters John related the event as he said Gaskin described it.

In the version I remember best Gaskin had been wandering lost in total darkness, John said, until he noticed two tiny pinpoints of bright light like distant stars and warily approached them. Up close they were holes that matched and fit perfectly his own eyes and as if trying on a mask he peered into them. From inside a vast sphere a thousand eyes met his own in one instant of simultaneity:

Awake!

This piqued my curiosity.

"Enlightenment is all I want," John wrote me. "I don't want anything else."

John was no fool.

John was one of the most intelligent persons I had ever met and one of the wittiest and funniest. His was a sharp, quick, brilliant mind, and invariably his speculations on enlightenment and truth John balanced with both ingratiating self-effacement and a sharp and amusing irony. Yet, nevertheless, about enlightenment he was absolutely serious. Truth was all. John was committed still to telling the truth all the time. He also sent me news of The Farm. At a visit to his tiny hovel in Ames in the fall of 1974 I read Monday Night Class by Stephen Gaskin from cover to cover in a single sitting, unable to put it down until I had finished.

"Telling the truth is not easy," Gaskin wrote. "It's easier than the alternative, but it's not easy."

For many people the commitment to truth and their practice of it, Gaskin explained in his book, started or stopped depending on what he called the social difficulty of the truth. You had to become unattached to the whole universe, Gaskin said, so that you really did not care, and at that point you would be unattached even to yourself so that one mind at a time you could change the universe.

"But it means you have got to let go of everything," he explained. "You have got to let go of caring who you are."

This, Gaskin more than implied, he himself had accomplished.

He had let go.

"I am not going to hide anything," Gaskin promised.

Nothing.

"You can look into my head and see everything there is to see."

Everything.

All.

Gaskin would look into you that way, too, he explained, and when both you and he were open and unattached then the two of you would become as one. When you did that, really did it, then—bang—you experienced mystic fusion, the mind's connection to all minds, to big mind, and, yes, if you preferred, to god, and this awakening to awareness and consciousness was enlightenment and realization.

Illumination.

"It comes down absolutely convincing to you, in your terms, answering the questions that you have asked all your life, and giving you every wish that you have ever had, you see, and that is how you know when you see it," Gaskin explained, "you know it because it is your childhood dreams."

But he had nothing to boast about, Gaskin said.

Nothing.

"What came on to me came from God," he wrote, "and I'm just really happy that it came on to me. It answered all my wishes, all my childhood dreams, it gave me everything I wanted."

Everything.

"I lack for nothing," he said. "I lack for nothing at all."

Nothing.

This experience, it seemed, Gaskin credited mainly to telling the truth. Though there were many doors to enlightenment and to god, he explained, he himself had one day simply decided to try to tell the truth always and to aspire always to be honest, and it had been that aspiration, vow, and practice that had opened for him the door to god. Others, too, could pass through, he insisted, and all that was necessary was for them to decide that in fact they did indeed want to do it and for them to start working at it.

"You can change your mind and decide right now to tell the truth," Gaskin wrote.

Hmm.

"Anybody can."

Hmm.