At a visit to my friend John's 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.

“I am not going to hide anything,” Gaskin promised. “You can look into my head and see everything there is to see.”

Gaskin would look into you that way, too, he explained, and when both you and he were open and unattached then the two 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—

Ho!

“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, he said.

“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. I lack for nothing. I lack for nothing at all.”

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 to decide to start working at it.

“You can change your mind and decide right now to tell the truth,” he wrote.

“Anybody can.”