Deep Background: SRI, LSD, Changing Images of Man, & The Aquarian Conspiracy

Yesterday, before talking to Gefunden for part two of the mother.strangled interview, I started to re-read the section on Strieber from Peter Levenda’s Sinister Forces (Part Three: The Manson Secret). I came on this passage (p 270-71). Bear in mind that Levenda is talking about the early days of the UFO phenomenon, the late 40s and 50s:
“On the one hand you had the Pentagon and the CIA monitoring UFO reports and massaging data, and on the other hand you had the same agencies racing to dominate inner space, as well. If the UFO phenomena partakes of both the scientific (space flight, faster-than-light travel, alien visitation) and the psychological (hallucinations, visions, spiritual encounters and illumination), then the US government had all the bases covered. . . The civilian would have had one of the most profound experiences of his or her life, and be unable to put it into any kind of context. [They] would have no knowledge of how to interpret the event, and would thus be left in the dark having received no input from either the government or the scientists . . . or the church.”
At least, they hadn’t yet.
It’s worth noting that Levenda begins this chapter of his book on Strieber, UFOs, and intelligence psi-ops, with a discussion of Christianity and the formation of a new religion.
This morning, I received a bunch of quotes and links from my research assistant. I had hoped to be able to read up on all this, as well as Ty Brown’s “10,000 Heroes—SRI and the Manufacturing of the New Age,” which I still haven’t got to, and incorporate it into my next batch of postings. Instead, I’m going to post the quotes whole and hope they provide  a coherent picture in themselves, offering this up as the deep background to this latest stage of the Strieber investigation. (Now it’s impersonal, Whitley.)
And yes, believe it or not, this is all gradually leading us back into the next layer of the Autism Enigma.
First off, exhibit A comes from Skilluminati’s old blog, 2007 (same year Ty Brown was doing his “Nazis from Outer Space,” Strieber, and SRI piece), quoting Jim Keith’s Mind Control, World Control, Chapter 12, which discusses the spread of LSD and the role of OSS/CIA agent Al Hubbard:
“One associate of Hubbard’s was New World Order theorist Willis Harman at the Stanford Research Institute. SRI had earlier received grants from the US Army to research chemical incapacitants. When visited by a representative of the underground press at SRI, Harman told the man, ‘There’s a war going on between your side and mine. And my side is not going to lose.”’
From Todd Brendan Fahey’s classic article on Hubbard, “The Original Captain Trips”:
“Hubbard was specifically assigned to the Alternative Futures Project, which performed future-oriented strategic planning for corporations and government agencies. Harman and Hubbard shared a goal ‘to provide the [LSD] experience to political and intellectual leaders around the world.’ Harman acknowledges that ‘Al’s job was to run the special sessions for us.’”
[Skilluminati continues:] “For what it’s worth, the folks at SRI were very much out there. Changing Images of Man co-author O.W. Markley left behind a very curious paper entitled “Visionary Futures” that outlines some other SRI ‘alternative methodologies”—including ‘channeled material in the book Seth Speaks, by Jane Roberts (1972).’ This is the same SRI who employed top Scientologists, Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann, to develop their Remote Viewing program. Channeled material, after all, is mainstream today. (Witness the bestseller success of the ‘Conversations with God’ series.)”
And now for something completely similar, from RI.
“Willis Harman, the late Stanford futurist, professor of Engineering Economic Systems and president of Edgar Mitchell’s Institute of Noetic Science (which has been used as cover for some of the CIA’s esoterica, such as remote viewing) . . . believed humanity is embarking on a period of ‘global mind change,’ and that people could reorder the world ‘by deliberately changing their internal image of reality.’
“Harman based his book Global Mind Change upon the Stanford report. In this interview, apparently from the mid-90s, he elaborates on his thoughts on shifting worldviews and our ‘remarkable point in history’:
“’Whether its psychic phenomena, mystical experiences, communications with the dead . . . whatever it is, you’re implying that reality is different from the way they taught you in school. Sooner or later we’re going to say ‘Well if all of that’s so, then our emphases in business and economics have to be different, as well as our emphases in politics, education and healthcare.’
“How to anticipate and capitalize upon the revolution in worldviews in the dawning post-industrial era is the question Harman’s SRI team set to answer. In The Stargate Conspiracy, Picknett and Prince quote the following passage from Changing Images of Man, perhaps the most important book almost no one has read, which suggests how this may be accomplished:
“’Of special interest to the Western world is that Freemasonry tradition which played such a significant role in the birth of the United States of America, attested to by the symbolism of the Great Seal. . . . Thus this has the potentiality of reactivating the American symbols, reinterpreting the work ethic, supporting the basic concepts of a free-enterprise democratic society, and providing new meaning for the technological-industrial thrust.’
“Symbols and myth are not the accents of a society, they are its engines. Something to think about before they run us over.”
According to this site Marilyn Ferguson’s Aquarian Conspiracy was written:
“under the direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. . . . The May 1974 report that provided the basis for Ferguson’s work . . . is entitled Changing Images of Man, Contract Number URH (489~215O, Policy Research Report No. 414.74, prepared by the Stanford Research Institute Center for the Study of Social Policy, Willis Harman, director. The 319-page mimeographed report was prepared by a team of fourteen researchers and supervised by a panel of twenty-three controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B.F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence.
“The aim of the study, the authors state, is to change the image of mankind from that of industrial progress to one of ‘spiritualism.’”
!! (Yep, my emphasis)
And then there’s this, from The Brainsturbator:
“Few realize that Willis W. Harman could be called the ‘Father of Workplace Spirituality.’ Willis Harman was one of a group of scholars and policy analysts who helped write The Changing Images of Man, a landmark study prepared for the Charles Kettering Foundation by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) Center for the Study of Social Policy. Willis Harman was the director of this Center.
From The Aquarian Conspiracy:
“Changing Images of Man, the now classic report issued by SRI… described a new transcendental social and business ethic characterized by self-determination, concern for the quality of life, appropriate technology, entrepreneurship, decentralization, an ecological ethic, and spirituality. The report urged a rapid corporate understanding of this emergent order, ‘probably the most important observation of our time.’”
“In the new paradigm, work is a vehicle for transformation.” (p. 342)
And finally (?) from the same source, this:
“Joseph Campbell advanced that understanding tremendously and his abstracted technical essence of myth was used to pattern a powerful new myth that fused science with a sense of transcendent mysticism: Star Wars (where ‘Star Trek,’ on the other hand was an outgrowth of the more Humanist side of things). As close friends with George Lucas and a stated major influence of his work, Campbell via Lucas helped create an international myth to contain all the societal changes and upheavals that has gone on in the past two decades with the explosion of the consciousness movements and the New Age. It is no wonder than that Joseph Campbell is also listed as an author of a pivotal 1973 document, Changing Images of Man, allegedly funded by the US government, written by the Stanford Research Institute, and credited with inspiring the New Age movement by way of the Marilyn Ferguson book, The Aquarian Conspiracy.
“20 years ago, author Frank White collected, sifted, polished and curated the observations of 30 astronauts and cosmonauts. But these weren’t science observations or notes about the spacecraft hardware. They were reports of this specific, marked psychological shift common to all these space travelers  immediately and profoundly broadening these hard-boiled guys’ perspectives. . . .  Intended mission: maximize opportunities for Earth-dwellers to have individual Overview experiences. Strategy: use art, science, mass media, music, environmental awareness, personal networking and, oh yeah: the Web to spread the opportunity for non-space travelers to understand and possibly experience the Effect.
“After decades of studying this, Ed Mitchell is pretty certain that the feeling of interconnectedness / oneness with the Universe is a consequence of quantum physics. Now Mitchell and the others assembled here want, specifically to induce or produce the Overview Effect in as many of Earth’s citizens as possible.”…
“Barbara Marx Hubbard is convinced this is evolution in action: ‘The sleep of the womb is over,’ she says, ‘We are growing up; becoming fully human.’ Hubbard has worn many hats: disciple of Bucky Fuller, Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, international space advocate, and importantly a mother of five. ‘As we’re born,’ Barbara says: ‘we pass from the Inner Space of our mothers into Outer Space.’”
Returning to Levenda’s Sinister Forces, “Communion” chapter (p. 272):
“At some point, the exploration of outer space extends into an exploration of inner space.”
That last struck me as somewhat ironic. The trajectory of this blog, that is, my recent shift of focus from autism to aliens, has been the exact reverse of that.