10,000 Heroes - SRI and the Manufacturing of the New Age

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Not sure if this post will have much interest depending on how far one has gone down these deep dark rabbit holes much like a labyrinth of endless mirrors, but here goes and the thread (essay) title will make sense (maybe) further down...

Back when Marilyn Ferguson's only published book was "Champagne living on a beer budget: How to buy the best for less", she still managed to...



Who better than acid trippin IFAS/SRI alum Dr. James Fadiman to help edit her "Brain/Mind" newsletter.

IFAS = International Foundation for Advanced Study.

Can LSD make you a billionaire? This was the title of a TV show transmitted by CNN Money on January 2015. After a retrospective of the psychologist James Fadiman and the engineer Willis Harman’s 1966 research on the potential of “psychedelic agents in enhancing creative problem-solving,” the audience could hear of Steve Jobs’ LSD experiences. Link

That might be a good place to start peeling back the layers and seeing where the whole 80's New Age, Inc. thing came from.

The Aquarian Conspiracy was hailed by many commentators as a keynote speech for the Eighties. The Aquarian Conspiracy went on to win the Book-of-the-Year Award from Renewal in 1980.

At its peak in the 1980s the publication had a worldwide base of some 10,000 subscribers, ranging from academics and intellectuals to schoolteachers and storekeepers, and helped to popularize the ideas of such notables as Prigogine, neuroscientists Karl Pribram and Candace Pert, physicists Fritjof Capra and David Bohm, psychologist Jean Houston and many others.

Ferguson was a founding member of the Association of Humanistic Psychology, earned numerous honorary degrees, and served on the board of directors of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Among those influenced by her was senator and vice-president Al Gore, who was partially inspired by Ferguson in the creation of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future and later met with her in the White House in 1993.
Marilyn Ferguson

In the early 1970s, Ferguson, by this point living in Los Angeles, began exploring burgeoning research into Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) and parapsychology. Her findings resulted in a book-length report on the field, the 1973 The Brain Revolution: The Frontier of Mind Research (“Just how vast is the potential of the human brain?” asked a full-page ad for the book that ran in the New York Times). She also began editing the Brain/Mind Bulletin, a journal about neuroscience and human behavior that developed a small but passionate following.

In 1977, Ferguson polled 210 diverse respondents on their feelings about a broad set of spiritual and consciousness-based trends that went beyond the established bounds of science. The results surprised her. She found that 96% of her respondents expressed belief in telepathy, 94% in psychic healing, 89% in precognition, 88% in clairvoyance, and 76% in consciousness surviving bodily death.

Ferguson showed the findings to Jeremy Tarcher, a maverick Los Angeles publisher who had once written for the original Star Trek television series and was known for publishing books on yoga and neuroscience.

Tarcher later recounted to the New York Times his initial astonishment at seeing the results: “I called Mrs. Ferguson because I was interested in her Brain/Mind Bulletin newsletter, and we went to lunch. She gave me a folder of material. I started to read it and I started to cry. It expressed all the things most important to my heart.”

Ferguson and Tarcher set to work synthesizing her findings and the most compelling information from Brain/Mind to create a paean to an emerging “New Age.”

Ferguson argued that the growing pains of contemporary America–militarism, class divisions, consumerism – were peeling away amid the new focus on the spiritual she chronicled through Brain/Mind and her survey. “The symbolic power of the pervasive dream in our culture: that after a dark, violent age, the Piscean, we are entering a millennium of love and light – in the words of the popular song, ‘The Age of Aquarius,’ the time of the mind’s true liberation,” Ferguson wrote.

Ferguson was particularly excited about the effect of New Age communications methods – more honest dialogue about emotions, more space for awe, more openness about the potential to use technology to foster connection between professionals and social acquaintances alike. Much of the book was a breathless and enthusiastic survey of the research Ferguson’s colleagues had conducted in communication and consciousness studies.

The book not only covered the emergent transition from the Piscean Age to the so-called Aquarian Age of the New Wave, but also wove an ambitious historical web that suggested the paradigm shift was long in coming. Ferguson linked the Transcendentalists, John Muir’s environmentalism, and concepts from figures as diverse as Gandhi, Buckminster Fuller, and Saul Bellow to the arrival of her heralded Aquarian Age.

...

LaRouche’s contention was that Ferguson’s book was actually a government-backed psyop, orchestrated through a labyrinthine web of think tanks led by England’s Tavistock Institute, NATO, and Stanford’s powerful Social Research Institute (SRI). LaRouche even contended that SRI’s well-connected director, Willis Harman, had effectively fed the text to Ferguson.

While fellow Futurists saw Ferguson as too rosy and spiritual, Carl A. Raschke, a University of Denver Religious Studies professor, argued that The Aquarian Conspiracy was chipping away at traditional American values. Raschke, interviewed for a 1986 New York Times piece exploring broader New Age criticism, said, “I think it’s as much a political movement as a religious movement, and it’s spreading into business management theory and a lot of other areas. If you look at it carefully you see it represents a complete rejection of Judeo-Christian and bedrock American values.”

Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy and the New Age Era

The Larouchies even picked up that there was some kind of social control experiment coming out of Esalen/SRI:


KGB's futurists meet to take U.S. back to the Dark Ages (PDF)

But, they of course thought Esalen was a KGB front which in retrospect feels like a "so dumb it has to be disinfo." Which shows how effective the hippie flake / New Age / paranormal activity cover stories had become by 1980.

Ferguson's "Aquarian Conspiracy" purports to describe the infiltration of New Age / counterculture beliefs into the corporate establishment. And we know the techno billionaires and some of the echelons in the mil-intel circles and their charlatan assets have very strange occult beliefs/rituals.

But its historical context of this trend was the instrumentalization of those practices to achieve social control. Silicon Valley is an engineered high-entropy "decentralized" incubator encapsulated from the imperial command economy which funds it.

"Aquarian Conspiracy" was part of the process of transitioning America's high tech industry from centralized military command and control systems to decentralized social control based on media + marketing systems deployed through consumer technology.

If you made it this far, do not skip this essay...

10,000 Heroes - SRI and the Manufacturing of the New Age: Part One

First few para's of the 21 pages:

In 1968 the U.S. Office of Education commissioned Stanford Research Institute (later called SRI) to have a look into the future and report what they’d found there. SRI took it one step further and spelled out what “changes in the conceptual premises underlying Western society would lead to a desirable future.” (Changing Images of Man, xvii)

The results were made into a book called “Changing Images of Man”, edited by O.W. Markley and Willis W. Harman. You can download a copy of the 1982 reprint here, courtesy of Skilluminati Research. This book is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. It is nothing less than a blueprint for a vast social engineering project undertaken by the very highest levels of the military/industrial complex. The project, as we’ll see, was already well underway by the time this study was commissioned, but in the late sixties and early seventies, thanks in part to this project, SRI was at the hub of just about every major development in the evolving “New Age” community.

Conspiracy theorists within the Christian right see this book, now almost mythical in status, as evidence of a very longrunning project, indeed, comprised of a Satanic plot to rule the world. But we, especially those on the political left who would completely ignore such theories, will need learn to step out of our own ivory towers from which we scorn those “ignorant fundies” and re-examine how the elites in our society operate.

"10000 Heroes" does a good Marxist analysis of how New Age was a created by SRI to serve capitalism. Highly recommended reading as it might open some neuron blockage or open some doors that were long lost.



SRI's 1968 study on the counterculture was published as the book "Changing Images of Man" which the author provides a free link to the otherwise overpriced print edition. The study was commissioned by the Department of Education.

One more data point: Gene Roddenberry's Deep Space Nine was inspired by seances he had with a psychic named Phyllis Schlemmer who worked on Star Gate with Andrija Puharich and claims to have been visited by a Council of Nine from "Deep Space". Reference: The Only Planet of Choice

Sir John Whitmore also wrote the foreword to and is extensively quoted in a book called Nine: Briefing from Deep Space which was published in 2005. The book is based upon interviews with extraterrestrial beings which a group of people including Whitmore, as well as Phyllis Schlemmer and Uri Geller, claimed to have had over a number of years. The book and Whitmore himself have been quoted and spoken about on a number of websites which explore such claims. During the 1970s, Whitmore commissioned Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry to write a script for a movie that he was intending to fund called The Nine, but the deal fell through.

This blog misses the SRI context (perhaps in later post?), but has a good read on Egyptian-gods allegory in Star Trek.

Ok, one more data point even though I'm kind of just throwing pasta against the wall - in the 1970's Puharich takes a group of "gifted" children (which he calls "Gellerlings" after the Israeli paranormal con artist Uri Geller, whose career he launched) to a compound in upstate NY called the "Turkey Farm" where they're supposed to research the children's psychic abilities. After a few years the Turkey Farm is destroyed by mysterious arson (of course) and Puharich goes into hiding. Meanwhile, one of the successes reported in remote viewing is discovering a shipment of chemical weapons to Libya - since the Pentagon was supposedly willing to use any means it could to find out where Libyans were hiding their WMD's. In 2004, supposedly in reaction to the invasion of Iraq, Ghadafi destroyed his chemical weapons stockpile. As the State Dept tells it did this spontaneously to not get the Saddam treatment. Location of his WMD's? A turkey farm.

Tenuous connection, but my gut tells me that this "turkey farm" codename was lingering in the back of some disinfo officer's mind.

Libya was a "disarmament model" according to Asst Secretary of State Paula De Sutter in 2004.

Some really crazy high octane conspiracy nuggets that can make one go mad. However, all you gotta do is take one look at our global leadership class or the UFO circus clowns or the Mil-Industrial-Intel-Congressional complex or the Biden Administration.

The pillars of the Globo-Corporatist techno-dictatorship project are starting to crumble all at once. Hollywood, which bled out a mind-shredding half-trillion dollars last year is one canary in the coalmine. The collapse of the mainstream media propaganda mills (lay-off bonanza) is another and the endless hits from the charlatan's on Youtube & 1001 podcast channels keep flowing, and none of it is new. Just repackaged/rebranded BS for your consumption so you don't notice what is really going on.



Had to borrow those fitting banners! And regardless how nutty speculative you may think I am, some of the above is undeniable and/or at least has some truth. And you know the old adage, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

I could add a lot more, but will only spiral off into the outer limits.