We projected ourselves, “manifested” ourselves as together and united, and we were, in many ways, and the “outside world” saw us as that, but we also packed all our individual baggage accumulated up till that time, and brought it to the Farm. The surprising thing is we all got along so well–it WAS that sense of total commitment, which I shared with you and many of the other original founders, and some of those that followed . . . But we tended to forget that we came with personal stories–psychedelics and the way we lived tended to erase boundaries– thus could not necessarily integrate the differences . . . These were revealed, as you properly stated, when times got hard, around the “changeover,” when people started calling in their hedges, those who had them . . . a lot about how we responded to the changeover is explained by our original stories.

We were both united AND individuals.

Well I haven’t read much of Farmola yet, but I look forward to it.

PS: My 1994 effort at telling the/a Farm history from my perspective, entitled “A Short History of the Farm,” has been circulating since then, informally and hopefully soon as a “real” publication. As with yours, my history tells what it looked like from my perspective, as one of the originals–and I lived there from the beginning through 2000. I think the more of us who tell our stories, the better for us and for our kids, and for people in the future who try to make sense of our times and draw some lessons.

Thanks for putting out the energy and caring enough to do this.

Anyhoo, it wasn’t what the Farm was about or Stephen. They were very social and into oral communication (as well) and I was lacking in those skills and didn’t fit in and at the first “up in my thing” I was offended and we moved into a bus with another couple, but of course everyone was doing Stephen’s thing and I decided it was the highway. Because of my ability to imprint, I did imprint on the higher consciousness that was very real there and took that with me.

As to outside forces closing down the old collectivism, I’d say it was more the same forces that shut down Soviet Russia. Collectivism does not work for all people. Some will be motivated by compassion, but others need the prod. And there was not true democracy, which means no person has more authority than anyone else. For whatever reason, I think Stephen did maintain control and that was his mistake. He had no history of management and should have stuck to what he knew, which was being a spiritual teacher.

He really was revolutionary at that and his experiment of confrontation to expose the subconscious was excellent and will prove down the line to be the best way for spiritual aspirants to live together and use that living together itself as sadhana. But it’s the hardest yoga and I think THAT is the main reason really that the Old Farm failed. Plus asking of people to be saints. Pretty intense and extreme. A noble venture and those who failed the test have nothing to be ashamed of.

I had discovered the same stuff Stephen had on my own, from having been in an elite military unit and facing the heavy extreme stuff that was common those years. I had already tossed my life to the wind when I mutinied against going to Washington DC to ‘put down’ the Moratorium in the manner of the later Chinese massacre in Peking. I would have gone to prison for the rest of my life rather than kill people, especially in my own country.

In San Diego in 1972, I ‘researched’ many different LSD inspired ’spiritual’ groups before I finally joined the Farm. They were either flaky to the max or an absolute dictatorship of some guru, and I found the efforts to give acid enlightenment to the masses through audio/visual shows to be pathetic, the other alternative that was big at the time. I saw kids starve themselves to death to ‘purify’ their bodies and become ‘light beings’ and others did even worse things. Mostly I saw ego and bad drugs running rampant throughout the ‘hippie’ culture .

Then the Farm Band put on a show at a local University and I saw people with minds that had experienced what I had, and knew more than I did about the experience. I got the ‘Great Western Tour’ album which was Stephen talking the ’spiritual technology’ he had discovered and found it was exactly the same as I had discovered, only much more thorough. So when Michelle and I decided to tour the country, fixing up an old milk truck into an motor home for a few bucks, and we pulled up to the Gatehouse in Tennessee, I felt the difference immediately and got down and kissed the ground, knowing I was home, at last.

Well, the Farm experience first scraped off the corners of my ego and then stomped it to death, for I didn’t fit into the Farm any more than anywhere else I had ever lived, but at the same time, I loved the Farm more than anywhere else I could have ever imagined. It was exactly the opposite of the military experience of cruelty and horror and intimidation I had experienced before, yet it was not an extreme, but rather the middle of what Humanity could do.It was the stable center between the extremes of Humanity.

My mind does not pay much attention to the immediate here and now, but rather the huge world of here and now, and that is my talent and my curse. I could not ‘hang out’ like others, and that made me a rather uncomfortable person to be around. It also made others uncomfortable, so Michelle and I ended up living alone in a bus by the cemetery. Everyone was nice to us, but we were not particularly welcome. You see, I cannot remember names, even my closest friend’s names. That messes up your life more than anyone would guess. It seems insignificant, but if you are really bad at remembering names, like all extremes, it messes your life up. Still does.

It’s a brain function thing, not an attention deficit thing. It has something to do with that part of my brain not being used like other’s brains do.

But I knew and loved every face on the Farm, every person’s personal spark, and the core information was the purest distillation of Human spirit I had ever experienced. And it still seems evident to me that the Farm collective was disbanded by outside forces, although many would not like to think that. But it won’t be the first nor the last such collective effort to be split and made ineffective through the use of agents and the Equation of Division. And I don’t blame Gaskin either. I don’t even want to know who the agents were. I forgive them.

And believe it or not, I think the world will someday live as we did, not necessarily in the woods or with a poverty vow or any of that, but in communities that know and use that essential spiritual technology that explains so much to me and which made the Farm’s basic layer of agreed upon compassion possible.

BTW, Cliff, I think we met in the West Virgina acid commune a few years before I arrived at the Farm. More than one Farmie lived there for short periods of time like us. I sometimes wonder what happened to that commune.

I am one of the people who was heavily influenced by Farm philosophy and pratices though never made the journey, or the commitment,to joining. A few years younger than most ofthe early settlers (and a good thirty-five years younger than my aunt, who was an original member of the Caravan and early Farm), I too related to being Technicolor Amish in many ways I believed in,a nd lived, karma yoga, compassionate vegetarianism, and simple living, and learned from the Farm’s publications and speaking tours how to make tofu cheesecake and that natural childbirth was a path to getting high in a spiritual way as well as a rite of passage. A modified monasticism fit in with my personality well, and I lived it in my job and community life in California. I had less need to be “entertained” than most of the people around me, including the New Agers.

I wasn’t ready to give up what autonomy I had over how I lived these things though and that’s what kept me an independent hippie semi-peasant instead of a Farmie in the long run. I wanted the freedom to spend my very few extra pennies on organic olive oil and lemons and to eat a Polarity cleansing diet for ten days once or twice a year without Margaret or Stephen telling me that I was being “superstitious” about diet. I wanted to be able to do my own research and to choose whether or not to give my (at that point non-existent) child antibiotics if she developed an ear infection, without getting chewed out by the Clinic Ladies. I wanted to be able to have a dog if I wanted one. And I rather fancied having a supportive mate and sharing the bonding of the sacrament of childbirth with him, but I was unsure of my ability to find one, and the prospect of living an obligate celibate life in a tent full of other single women on the fFarm seemed a bit dicey. And quite honestly I didn’t like the music the Farm band played. Too loud and feedback-y for my folk-bred tastes.

So, in terms of the Big Picture, Stephen and the Farm were my guides. the larger values were shared, and I picked up much of the language and philosophy by long-distance osmosis, and found it preferable to a New Age that was becoming increasingly materialistic like the larger culture.

in the long run, Farmies, what I’m saying is that your history is also my history though I knew far more about you than you could have known about me. I studied you through a sort of one-way glass, imitated you in the ways I could (such is the way of younger siblings) and now that we are all on the same side of the mirror, so to speak., there is much we can learn together.