Stephen Gaskin Monday Night Class

In 1971, buses full of self professed hippies from San Francisco arrived just outside of an impoverished town in Tennessee. They were led by Stephen Gaskin, a former professor at San Francisco State College. In 1968, he began a class on psychedelic experiences and world religions called Monday Night Class. Soon, this class was attracting over a thousand people a week. In 1970, ministers and theologians from the American Academy of Religion attended a Monday Night Class, and asked Stephen Gaskin to speak to their churches across the country. He agreed, and two hundred regular class attendees decided to accompany him. They traveled from church to church in a group of 60 buses known as “The Caravan.” On this trip, the regular attendees began to see themselves as a community and decided to pool their
This class was a type of “pilgrimage” where concerned spirits would come to discuss what was happening outside their door: recreational drug use as a spiritual, religious experience. They talked about “hermeneutic geometry, Masonic-Rosicrucian mysticism, Eckankar and the Rolling Stones” in between an opening meditation and a closing moment full of purpose (CITE). Stephen Gatskin, who was known as simply Stephen, believed his class was an important part of this new movement coming out of San Francisco. When describing the class, Stephen said, “Here’s the way the class works. It’s open doors and it’s free and everybody can come in, and the way it's always been is that the questions I like best are the ones that start with ‘what about’ and ‘what if’”(CITE). Monday Night Class was the way to handle the dangerous and challenging world of the sixties, and to determine which normative values the group felt could remedy the situation. A natural sense of community grew between the regular attendees which was solidified on the Caravan trip across the