This August I ventured out to the Essene Monastery and Garden of Peace in the mountains west of Eugene, OR to experience the 16th Annual National Essene Gathering. Coming just a few days removed from another intense adventure in which I had walked over 100 miles across swaths of the Northwest with the Trinity to Trident Interfaith Peace Walk for a Nuclear-Free Future — led by drumming, chanting monks from the Nipponzan Myohoji order of Japanese Buddhism, who are best known in the West for their tradition of Peace Pagodas — I secretly hoped that this Essene Gathering would provide an opportunity for rest and relaxation. Boy, was I in for a surprise!

With herb and nature walks, yoga, meditation, singing, dancing, fascinating lectures and workshops, delicious organic vegetarian meals featuring an abundance of local and homegrown foods, people to meet from around the country and world, and a late-night campfire followed by an excursion the next day to a wild and serene Oregon beach, this Gathering was filled with activity! Yet it all made me feel pleasantly invigorated, as if I had finally awakened for the first time (in a long time) from the super-stressed, fast-charged, over-polluted highways and cities of America into a slower, simpler, more magical rural fantasy-land where the bold and imperfect dreams of sustainable, spiritual livelihood are not just possible but are being actively realized and strengthened day by day. I was hungry for more, and so I stayed at the Essene Monastery three more days after the Gathering, pulling weeds and cultivating crops in their Garden of Peace. (More on this, with pretty Garden pictures, further below.)

So what is Essene spirituality, anyway? As a learning organic farmer and mostly healthy eater who aspires to grow the best possible food for the spirit, soul, mind and body of people (and animals), I first heard about the Essenes from the awesome book “Spiritual Nutrition” by Gabriel Cousens, a “New Age” Jewish rabbi who masterfully fuses Ayurveda, Kabbalah, Live Foods and cutting-edge science in his writings as well as at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center that he founded in Patagonia, Arizona. Cousens extracts two basic Essene guidelines about food preparation and eating that were the keys to the “great Essene teachings.” The first, he says, “is that their diet was raw, living, whole, natural foods.” The second is that “there was a minimal time lapse between when the food was harvested and when it was eaten.” The Essenes did not store, process, freeze, dry, can or irradiate their foods, but ate their full, vital forms, always in season. This is because they knew, says Cousens, that “live food contains a vital force from its environmental context of the earthly, solar, and cosmic energies, but over time and through processing, this vital force dissipates.” (p. 301)

Historically, the Essenes were a pre-Christian Jewish sect centered in Palestine during the eras of Greek and Roman conquest from approximately 200 BCE to the 1st century AD. In those ancient times, the Essenes were reknowned as a breed of highly spiritual healers and (often, but not always) celibate men, who lived close to the Earth in egalitarian communities. Unlike other branches of Judaism, they practiced a vegetarian diet, shunned money, lived communally and shared all possessions in common, and (with humility) believed themselves to be living embodiments of the esoteric wisdom and truly pious lifestyle that had been passed down through “the elect” since the furthest reaches of antiquity. In the eyes of the Essenes, while the mainstream institutions of Jewish religion had lost and corrupted the pure Spirit of the Divine through their practices of ritual animal sacrifice, worldly political compromise, and frequent acquiescence to the unholy gods of foreign rulers, the Essenes were keepin’ it real.

Especially interesting to me is the historic Essene connection to agriculture. The ancient historian Josephus declared that the Essenes “employed themselves solely to the labor of agriculture.” While this statement is surely an exaggeration — Essenes were also known to be skilled crafters and weavers, while rejecting all violent, exploitative, enslaving and war-waging occupations — it points to the centrality of agriculture within the Essene way of life. Although we have no detailed description today of the Essene mode of agriculture, it is believed that they were experts in the art of dryland farming, and taking a historical leap of faith might help clear the picture: After the Roman defeat of repeated Jewish rebellions and destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, and the later Roman Catholic persecution of surviving Essene Christian (more on this development in a moment) communities in Palestine, the remnants of Essene agricultural landscapes were likely settled and cultivated by other peoples. After Muslim Arabs spread and inspired mass conversion throughout the Middle East, native agriculture continued to thrive in Palestine, in full force, throughout the Middle Ages and into the Ottoman Empire.

What did this agriculture look like, long before the British occupation and the modern industrial-era Jewish re-colonization of Palestine transformed so much of the country into a sprawling matrix of cities, suburbs, factories, monocrops, roads, and military bases, now punctuated in the West Bank by hilltop fortress “settlements” and the behemoth Apartheid-like “Separation Wall”?

Maybe it looked like this. In 1840, a traveler named Dr. Clarke, one of the earliest American citizens to visit the “Holy Land,” proceeded from Tiberias in the direction of Nablus, and from there to Jerusalem. On this latter portion of his journey he remarked: “The road was mountainous, rocky, and full of loose stones; yet the cultivation was everywhere marvelous: it afforded one of the most striking pictures of human industry which it is possible to behold. The limestone rocks and stony valleys of Judea were entirely covered with plantations of figs, vines, and olive-trees; not a single spot seemed to be neglected. The hills, from their bases to their upmost summits were even spread with gardens, all of which were free from weeds, and in the highest state of cultivation. Even the sides of the most barren mountains had been rendered fertile by being divided into terraces, like steps, rising one above the other, upon which soil had been accumulated with astonishing labour. Among the standing crops we noticed millet, cotton, linseed, and tobacco, and occasionally small fields of barley. A sight of this territory can alone convey an idea of its surprising produce. It is truly the EDEN of the East, rejoicing in the abundance of its wealth. Under a wise and benificent government, the produce of the Holy Land would exceed all calculation. Its perennial harvest – the salubrity of its air, – its limpid springs, – its rivers, lakes and matchless plains, – all these, added to the serenity of its climate, prove this land to be indeed “a field which the Lord hath blessed. God hath given it the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine.” (p. ccxciii, “Palestine: The Physical Geography and Natural History of the Holy Land,” John Kitto, 1841)

The Palestinian Garden of Eden … circa 1840?!? If wholly cultivated eco-agricultural landscapes continued to exist in the Middle East into such recent times, and were indeed cared for by Arab Muslims and Chistians, what does this tell us about the normative meaning of our inherited biblical “Garden of Eden” parable, a surface-level reading of which declares that humanity was forever expelled from Paradise? Mystical Jewish consciousness has taught that upholding secret laws of Divine Presence is the key to re-entering the mythic Garden, but ancient Jewish Essenes are rumored to have told an entirely different “Garden of Eden” story … in which humanity’s “original sin” was not eating forbidden fruit from the “Tree of Knowledge” but rather falling from vegetarian grace by beginning to kill animals and consume their flesh! By this account, it was just an incremental descent further to the seeming omnipresence of war and fratricide among the peoples of the world.

In fact, many contemporary scholars of Judeo-Christian religious history today argue that Jesus Christ himself was a Jewish Essene master teacher, who was raised as a child within Essene communities and maintained a close connection with them during his adult ministry. Whether Yahshua, as folks then would have called him in their native tongue of Aramaic Hebrew, was simply a phenomenal “Teacher of Righteousness” (moreh tzedek) with roots in the Essene mystical tradition — or if he was the Messiah and only begotten Son of God who rose from the dead and washed away our sins — I will let the dear reader decide. Suffice it to say that historic evidence strongly suggests that the first and most passionate adherents and disciples to the Jesus sect in Jerusalem and Palestine after his crucifixition were vegetarian Jewish Essenes, while the non-Essene and non-vegetarian apostle Paul led the establishment of messianic Christian branches throughout the rest of the Roman Empire.

And so … it is to this Essene Christian spiritual tradition that the organizers of the National Essene Gathering and the residents of the Essene Monastery and Garden of Peace, who congregate as the “Essene Church of Christ,” subscribe. Moreover, they uphold a direct lineage to Yahshua’s radical, eco-centric and feminist original teachings that subsequent patriarchal, meat-loving Christian theologians censored and suppressed. They claim to have received this lineage via both oral transmission from an unbroken underground Middle Eastern Essene Order which sent a sage to train disciples in the USA in the 1960s and from ancient sacred Essene texts that they repute to have recovered and translated. In addition to vegetarianism, two of the main doctrines that these Essenes maintain Jesus taught and later Christians suppressed are reincarnation and the feminine aspect of God. If you’re interested in learning more about Essene beliefs, the Essene Church of Christ website includes a detailed introduction and articles; and another website maintained by the Essene Nazarean Church of Mt. Carmel, an “Esoteric Spiritual Order,” is home to translations of a great many Essene texts. For the best concise introduction to Yashua’s Essene teachings, I recommend Edmund Bordeaux Szkeley’s translation of the “gnostic” Essene Gospel of Peace.

The National Essene Gathering itself brought together about 50 people, some of whom are active members and initiates in the Essene Church, along with many, like me, who are more or less completely new to this particular spiritual path. As a non-practicing Jew with intermediate knowledge of Hebrew and an intellectual interest in Kabbalah mysticism, I appreciated that this Essene Church represents basic Hebrew-language Essene teachings alongside more comprehensive English translations, which helped me grasp more of the primal meaning behind the doctrines than English alone would allow. For example, they follow a menorah-shaped horizontal “Tree of Life” as a practical guide to humanity’s spiritual universe, with seven roots and seven branches, that is visually and symbolically distinct from the vertical-shaped Kabbalist “Tree of Life” that Judaism today teaches. Each root and branch corresponds to a Hebrew-named “Angel” of various Earthly and Heavenly spiritual forces. One of the central Essene spiritual practices is praying to these Angels with a sequence of 14 meditations, or “Communions,” that are recited in the morning or evening of each day. These Communions have three objectives: (1) to make people conscious of the activities of the different forces and forms of energy which surround us and perpetually flow toward us from nature and the cosmos; (2) to make us aware of the organs and centers of our body through which we can receive these currents of energy; and (3) to establish a connection between these body organs and centers and their corresponding natural and cosmic forces so as to absorb, control and utilize each current of energy. Here is an English guide to the Communions.

At the Gathering, one of the most meaningful exercises for me was establishing a deeper connection with the Sun. Ancient Essenes were known to practice healing through “laying on of hands,” and this continues today as “Essene Reiki.” Day Owens, who founded and leads the modern Essene Church with a definite quasi-pagan white-bearded “Green Wizard” persona, taught us that practitioners of healing massage and Reiki should — if time and weather permit — raise our hands upward to the Sun prior to beginning bodywork on another person, in order to absorb into ourselves the Sun’s refined healing powers of solar energy. He further taught that while the ancient Essene mystics did not worship the Sun per se, they were highly conscious of and attuned to the hidden spiritual potencies that the Sun perpetually radiates. He then led us in a meditation where we each raised our hands up to the noontime Sun and, finally, advised us all to — every now and then or as much as possible — bare our solar chakras to the Sun!

The Gathering was filled with this kind of deep natural wisdom, much of which emanates from the beautiful land of the Essene Monastery and Garden of Peace, located in a valley amidst densely forested mountains one hour west of Eugene, Oregon. While the Essenes slaughter no animals, this Monastery takes good care of chickens for their eggs, goats for their milk and cheese, sheep for their wool, and horses for the sheer joy of riding them! They cultivate groves of fruit trees and scores of wild blackberry bushes. Their sizable gardens and greenhouse, richly fertilized with rabbit, chicken and horse manure, are home to lushly growing produce like tomatoes, squash, and salad greens, plus countless medicinal and kitchen herbs, including some rare and endangered varieties such as osha. Best of all, they have a perennial mountain spring of drinkable water that nourishes, through gravity, the garden!

After the Gathering, I stayed at the Monastery for three days to get my hands dirty in the Garden of Peace. I pulled thousands of pigweeds and thistles, careful to preserve any of the delicious and super-nutritious purslane weeds that I saw growing close to the ground. I pulled weeds growing at the base of a row of fruit trees. I saved the seeds of pea plants that had expired, and I harvested a bulk of potatoes whose time had come. I helped catch a few sheep for their annual shearing. I picked batches of kale, chard, mustard, lettuce and herbs for salad every night, and I made plum-tomato and plum-blackberry salad dressings with fruits that I also picked. I watered the garden, pulled more weeds, and greatly enjoyed working with such fine soil!

Yet despite this visceral joy and the apparent happiness of all of the creatures who reside in the Garden of Peace, all is not well and peaceful within the surrounding countryside. While ordinary citizens live and labor in the valleys, the forested mountaintops are owned by timber companies, and the sound of clear-cutting pierced the summer air. One clearcut was visible on the mountain across from the garden, and others were happening in the vicinity, including one on the mountain above the Monastery. In addition, the corporations had in the past sprayed Monsanto pesticides on their timber plantations, in the process poisoning local citizens. In protest, Essene Church founder Day Owens was organizing a peaceful rally outside the federal building in downtown Eugene to expose these evil doings of the “eco-terrorist, earth-raping corporations and the government agencies who they own” to the wrath of public opposition. The protest went down on August 29. I was not there, but I have heard that, in accord with ancient Essene custom, it was a righteous circle.