Sixties icon and self-styled “nonviolent social revolutionary” Stephen Gaskin died this past July at the age of seventy-nine. Gaskin was a prominent figure on the countercultural scene in San Francisco in the late sixties and went on to found the long-running intentional community the Farm, which is still thriving in rural Tennessee.

In 1967 Gaskin, a former Marine turned hippie pacifist, was teaching English and creative writing at San Francisco State College when the administration decided not to renew his contract. (“I’d gotten too weird to rehire,” he said.) He came up with an idea for an unusual sort of learning experience that focused on current affairs. The country was in flux, and many young adults were asking questions about the ongoing war in Vietnam and domestic issues related to civil rights, poverty, and inequality. Gaskin decided to start a public conversation about those topics and other, more esoteric ones, from Eastern spirituality to telepathic communication. And since he’d recently been experimenting with LSD, he also “wanted to compare notes with other trippers about tripping and the whole psychic and psychedelic world.”