Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

How Empires Globalized New Age Religion

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a key transformation period for the growth of imperialism and alternative religion. This was a time when it became widely possible for individuals to choose their own religion by engaging with it through occult societies and the private sector. This occurred in an environment of growing globalization and fascination with the East. Against this backdrop, occultists drew on the philosophies of the ancient world and Eastern religion to give their doctrines an exotic flare.

In many ways, the only thing new today about New Age religion is the degree to which we have access to commercialized religious products. Now we have quick access alternative religion through television, DVDs, the Internet, and Amazon.com. Most importantly, we should keep in mind that this is a constructed vision of ancient and Eastern religions given to us by the imperial expansionism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

https://imperialglobalexeter.com/2016/0 ... -religion/

[slimmouse]

Thanks for that AD,

Does it ever get more dogmatic than the above?

I mean, how many people even get half of that kind of crap?

[American Dream]

The Theosophical Society and all its offshoots- as well as all those riding the wave of the Occult Revival in that time brought some good things- but lots and lots of detritus came along for the ride...

[American Dream]

HOW LSD WENT FROM RESEARCH TO RELIGION


Timothy Leary, family, and band at the State University of New York at Buffalo during Leary's 1969 lecture tour.


Preliminary studies in recent years have suggested that psychedelic drugs like LSD and the “magic mushroom” derivative psilocybin have potential for treating conditions like PTSD, addiction, and even fear of death. One reason there isn’t more evidence on this is that research on these drugs was almost entirely shut down for decades, partly as a result of the wildly unprofessional behavior of early researchers.

In a 2011 paper from Nova Religio, Devin R. Lander recounts how two of the most famous psychedelic researchers of the 1960s, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, went from teaching at Harvard to acting as spiritual leaders.

[PufPuf93]

I just discovered the techgnosis blog yesterday and there is a wealth of articles and podcasts germane to RI. Erik Davis owner of the blog is not a stranger to me but that was long ago. We were on a Philip K Dick email list that grew out of the ashes of the Philip K Dick Society back in the late 1990s.

http://techgnosis.com/

https://techgnosis.com/the-countercultu ... he-occult/

The Counterculture and the Occult

Perhaps the single most important vector for the popularization of occult spirituality in the twentieth century is the countercultural explosion associated with “the Sixties”—an era whose political and culture dynamics hardly fit within the boundaries of that particular decade. A more useful term was coined by the Berkeley social critic Theodore Roszak, who used the word “counterculture” to describe a mass youth culture whose utopianism and hedonic psycho-social experimentation were wedded to a generalized critique of rationalism, technocracy, and established religious and social institutions. As such, the counterculture significantly overlapped, though also sometimes resisted, the parallel rise of the New Left and its ideological and occasionally violent struggle against more-or-less the same “System.” Within a few short years after its emergence in the middle of the 1960s, the counterculture had transformed social forms, creative production, personal lifestyles, and religious experience across the globe. Though the counterculture was a global phenomenon, its origins and many of its essential dynamics lie in America, which will be the focus of this essay.

Many of the attitudes and practices associated with the counterculture were drawn from earlier and more marginal bohemian scenes. Arguably, the key catalyst for the emergence of a mass counterculture was the widespread availability and use of LSD and other charismatic psychoactive substances. For many, LSD’s extraordinary noetic and emotional affects seemed direct evidence that the individual alteration or expansion of consciousness, coupled with corresponding shifts in the self and its values, could precipitate a new social and cultural order. These experiences were also characterized as early as Aldous Huxley’s foundational 1954 mescaline text The Doors of Perception as having a pronounced mystical or religious dimension. Once people began “turning on” en masse, an amorphous and visionary spiritual counterculture almost inevitably emerged.

In line with Catherine Albanese’s argument that the American metaphysical tradition is essentially recombinant, the new seekers promiscuously and often superficially comingled Vedantic nondualism, tantric yoga, Zen meditation, Theosophy, Native American symbolism, and other religious discourses and practices. This visionary stew included many “profane” elements as well: pulp fiction, parapsychology, ufology, cybernetic social science, and a Reichean hedonism that emphasized the erotic freedom from repression and restraint. Indeed, a primary source for counterculture’s thirst for spirituality was its only apparently paradoxical embrace of the intensified body. Permissive and experimental sexuality, coupled with the ecstatic and drug-fueled collective rituals of live rock shows, helped forge a Dionysian sensibility that readily looked to and absorbed the imaginal and energetic transports of occult phantasmagoria and the protocols of mysticism.

Over time, this explosion of esoteric novelty opened up the space for the crystallization of more defined religious structures and identities, and helps to explain the rise of new religious movements and “cults” in the late 1960s and especially the early 1970s. At the same time, the counterculture also hosted a continuously informal cultic—or “occultic”—milieu that included astrology, witchcraft, the I Ching, Tarot, chakras, reincarnation, Theosophical and ethnopharmacological lore. Though many of these ideas, symbols, and practices already circulated in the metaphysical fringes of twentieth-century America, and by no means exclusively among bohemians, the counterculture brought them more or less onto center stage, so that they helped define what we can authentically call a Zeitgeist. By the early 1970s, when the counterculture had transformed the engines of popular culture, the West found itself hosting a pervasive and commercialized “pop occulture” whose long shadow we still live in today, from the New Age to black metal music to personal growth seminars to rave culture.

Needless to say, “the counterculture,” “spirituality,” and “occultism” are all highly complex and multidimensional concepts that describe domains that also feature a high degree of informality and internal diversity—even contradiction. This makes compressed generalizations about their interaction particularly fraught. One particularly significant issue is the question of Easternization. The dominant language of countercultural mysticism in the 1960s was marked by translated Asian concepts and practices; is it right to think of these as part of “occultism”? Without question, the turn East has been integral to Western occultism since Theosophy and early Crowley; moreover, Tibetan Buddhism, Taoism, yoga, and even Zen have their own forms of “magic.” Still, while Christopher Partridge has helped to define a conception of “occulture” broad enough to embrace Asian ingressions alongside Western esoterica, one must resist collapsing the popular emergence of Western Buddhism and non-ethnic Hinduism in the 1960s into the occult per se. For these reasons, it is perhaps better to consider a broader “spiritual counterculture” within which we can identify Asian traditions as well as overlapping but also more specifically characterized occult currents.

article continues at link, a good read.

[American Dream]

Yes- Erik Davis is a thoughtful, good writer with real knowledge. I think of him in tandem with R.U. Sirius, who I believe were both around Berkeley at the same time, during what I would call a "psychedelic revival". Both are good to me.

[American Dream]

http://www.pineconearchive.com/070427-1.html

Esalen's 'hot tub diplomacy' changed Yeltsin's mind and the world's map

By CHRIS COUNTS

Published: April 27, 2007


FOR MOST Americans, the enduring image of the late Soviet President Boris Yeltsin is him atop a tank in 1991, rallying opposition to a Communist Party coup.

But the free-market ideas of the man who dismantled the Soviet Union were cemented on a trip to the United States two years before — a trip organized by officials from Big Sur’s Esalen Institute.

It may be better known for its hot tubs and New Age seminars, but Esalen’s founders had long been interested in the cause of international cooperation and world peace. It was Esalen’s Soviet-American exchange program that arranged the historic 1989 meetings between Yeltsin and President George H.W. Bush and former President Ronald Reagan.

But as impressive as those summits were, for Yeltsin, they paled in comparison to his visit to a Houston, Texas, supermarket.

Amazed at the store’s dazzling display of produce, Yeltsin wept. Like most Russians, he had been indoctrinated to believe American prosperity was a myth. He reportedly embraced capitalism on the spot.

Surviving on lies

“Seeing all that abundance just overwhelmed him,” recalled Joseph Montville, who once directed an Esalen seminar on the psychology of the U.S./Soviet relationship. “He realized he had been lied to by the Communist Party. He realized the whole system was dishonest, and the state was surviving on a whole structure of lies.”

Now known as “Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy,” the exchange program was established in 1979 to “create alternatives to adversarial relationships between nations by encouraging a broader understanding of human relations and human potential.” The media called the effort, “hot tub diplomacy.”

Once a part of Esalen, the San Francisco-based institute is now a stand-alone nonprofit group. Its current director, Dulce Murphy, remembers those heady days when Yeltsin first came to the United States.

“I was with him when he visited the New York Stock Exchange,” said Murphy, the wife of Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy. “I’d never been on the floor of the exchange, and we were both amazed.”

Yeltsin was an unforgettable personality, Murphy recalled.

“He had extraordinary charisma,” she remembered. “He was such a people person. His ability to work a crowd was just amazing, and Americans would cross the street just to shake his hand. Here was a man, I realized, who was going to make a difference in the world.”

Despite the institute’s sponsorship of his trip, Yeltsin never made it to Esalen’s famed cliffside hot tubs. In fact, according to Murphy, he never even reached the West Coast on that first visit to the United States.

Nevertheless, the trip proved to be a defining event for Yeltsin — whose personal disavowal of Soviet Communism led to the remaking of the map of the world — and Esalen’s exchange program, which received notoriety for breaking down cultural and political barriers.

“In our quiet, unobtrusive way, we helped grease the skids of the Soviet collapse,” commented Montville, who worked for two decades as a diplomat for the U.S. Department of State.

Murphy is also proud of Esalen’s role in Yeltsin’s historic visit, which included stops in New York, Baltimore, Phildelphia, Miami, Indianapolis, Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Washington D.C., Chicago and Rochester, Minn.

Among the people Yeltsin met were Reagan, Bush, Joseph Lieberman, Bill Bradley, James Baker, Cyrus Vance, David Rockefeller, Dan Rather, Jane Pauley and Tom Brokaw.

“If it hadn’t been for Esalen, the visit would not have happened,” Murphy said.

A bumpy road

The first popularly elected leader in Russian history, Yeltsin was president of the Russian Federation from 1991 to 1999.

After successfully suppressing the 1991 coup, he banned the Communist Party. Yeltsin vowed to turn Russia’s tightly controlled communist economy into a free market economy — a transition that hasn’t been easy.

In 1999, after Russia suffered a severe economic crisis, Yeltsin resigned. He was replaced by the man he endorsed, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has undone some of Yeltsin’s reforms.

[American Dream]

How a Famed New Age Retreat Center Helped End the Cold War



Boris Yeltsin strikes a pose in his Moscow office in February, 1989.

“CIA guys would meet KGB guys, and they would have these big emotional dynamite moments,” said Murphy. There, in this special space, they might see and connect with each other as people, and it could be overwhelming to them. Increasingly, though, these sort of transformational experiences were happening for all sorts of participants in the Soviet-American exchange program. “We knew this process of liberation,” says Murphy. In the 1984 movie Moscow on the Hudson, there’s a scene where Robin Williams, who plays a Russian defector, starts freaking out in a grocery store over the many, many brands of coffee he can chose from. “We were having that experience constantly,” says Murphy. “It’s as if they wanted us to torture them with sights of success.”

“You take people who have been enduring Soviet winter in drab Moscow, take them to Esalen and put them in a hot tub with gorgeous men and women, good food and good conversation, and you change people’s lives,” says Jim Garrison, the exchange program’s second director. “You do that with adult apparatchiks, and it has an effect. That was Esalen’s genius.”

And, of all the people who were drawn into this sort of transformation, perhaps the most important was Boris Yeltsin.


Just a few months before Yeltsin arrived in New York City on September 9, 1989, Jim Garrison had received a call from a friend in the Soviet Union, asking if he’d heard of this upstart politician, who had been kicked out of the Politburo, then elected to the newly formed Soviet Congress as a representative from Moscow. Garrison did know of Yeltsin; he had made it his business to stay informed of the people in the highest levels of Soviet power.

Garrison had taken over as director of the Esalen Soviet-American program early in 1985, just a few months before Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, the USSR’s highest position of power. It was an electric moment in Soviet history. All of a sudden, it was clear to people around the world that Gorbachev could change the way his country operated, within and without. Up until that point, the Esalen exchanges had been primarily cultural, but Garrison, more than the others involved, was a political person. Active in the anti-nuclear movement, he had been arrested at the Pentagon; in 1988, he had run in a Silicon Valley district for the Democratic nomination to Congress. His goal, as director of the Esalen Soviet-American program, was to reach into the upper echelons of Gorbachev’s political world.

“My intent was to get as high up as possible into the Soviet hierarchy, to meet people,” he says. “I was after Gorbachev, I was after the Politburo.”


Tevelev Square in Kharkov, USSR (now the Ukraine) circa 1980-1981.

As director, Garrison started to figure out who he could reach on the Communist Party's Central Committee. He found a couple accessible people and began to develop relationships with them. Soon, he had tracked down Abel Aganbegyan, an economist who was advising Gorbachev on perestroika, the restructuring of the Soviet economic system, and invited him on a three-week tour of the U.S. This was to be a mind-boggling encounter, Garrison says, on both sides. Aganbegyan was seeing the American economy firsthand; Americans who met him were hearing directly from a Gorbachev advisor who understood free-market economics.

It wasn’t obvious that Esalen's exchange program should organize a similar trip for Yeltsin, who had never been to the U.S. before. He had been building his reputation as a reformer and, now, a populist critic of Gorbachev and his government; the Esalen Soviet-American exchange team approved of Gorbachev and his reforming work in the Soviet Union. Later, Garrison would help create the Gorbachev Foundation, and Joe Montville believes, as well, that Gorbachev was listening closely to the work going on at Esalen and picking up ideas directly from those meetings.

“We enormously admired Gorbachev, and we used to think there was a direct wire between the big house at Esalen and the Kremlin,” Montville says, and one time, he had the chance to ask Gorbachev if it was true. “He just smiled and pointed at the ceiling. That's the classic indicator of—can't talk now, we're being bugged.”

Esalen worried that hosting Yeltsin could have negative consequences for the exchange program, but finally thought that it would better to say yes to this opportunity and see what happened. After that first call, Garrison flew to Moscow to meet Yeltsin; just a few weeks later, he arrived in America for a two-week tour. A group of nine or so people, Yeltsin and his handlers, Garrison, and other Esalen staff, including at times, Dulce Murphy, traveled in a private jet, leant by an Archer Daniels Midland executive, from New York down the East coast, to Texas, Chicago, and Florida. Yeltsin toured the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, gave speeches, visited former President Reagan in Rochester, where the president in a hospital recovering from neurosurgery, and even met with President George H.W. Bush, in the White House, while drunk.

Drinking, as part of business, was normal in the Soviet Union but Yeltsin took this to an extreme. “Yeltsin was probably the most physically intimidating man I’d ever met,” says Garrison. “He was drunk most of the time, and he was aggressively drunk much of the time.” One morning in Baltimore, while visiting John Hopkins University, Yeltsin became exceedingly, unmanageably drunk, when the call came that the White House would meet with him at noon. “We bundled him in the limo and gave him coffee,” says Garrison. “He was drunk when he went into the White House meeting that included President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Brent Scowcroft.” The Esalen team wasn’t quite sure how to handle their guest’s enormous consumption of alcohol, and they tried to hide it from the reporters who were closely covering the trip. At the same time, Yeltsin displayed an incredible force of personality, irrespective of, or perhaps enhanced by, his drinking. “He was able to hold his own in ways that I found remarkable,” says Garrison.

It was Yeltsin who wanted to make an unscheduled stop at a grocery store, on the outskirts of Houston. The group had just visited the Johnson Space Center and were on the way to the airport, to fly to Miami. The driver pulled over in the next town, a suburban place, with a moderately sized supermarket, where not much had been happening that day before Yeltsin, who was 6'2”, came in with five other Russians and started to careen around the aisles. Among the shelves and shelves of bright produce, packaged food, and products of every sort, each with its own varieties, Yeltsin accosted Garrison.

“You just did this, to trick me,” he said.

“Mr. Yeltsin, we are not tricking you,” Garrison replied. “This is just an average American supermarket.”

Yeltsin did not believe it, at first. He went up to the supermarket employee and asked them, “Were you put up this this? Do you work here?” He gazed at the meat counter—he had never seen so meat in his life, he said, and there was no line; he wanted to know the price per pound; he asked shoppers how much they were spending on food, and the store manager how many items were in stock. Garrison had to convince the supervisor not to call the police, that this was a Soviet official internalizing what it meant to be an American consumer. Then, he remembers, Yeltsin started talking to his own people.

“He said, ‘They’ve been lying to us. The Communist Party has been lying to us, all this time. If these people can have this, this is a better country. No one has this, not even the elite has this.'”

Back in the van, on the way to the airport, Yeltsin was quiet. He held his head in his hands. Only when they had gotten on the airplane did he have anything more to say.

“I’m going to get Gorbachev,” he said, according to Garrison. “These guys are lying to us. Communism needs to be destroyed.”

This trip, this moment, was not the culmination of Esalen’s work in the Soviet Union or with citizen diplomacy. Garrison tried to warn Gorbachev and his allies of the danger Yeltsin posed; later, he brought Gorbachev’s foreign minister and, after that, the Politburo members who had orchestrated Gorbachev’s rise to power on tours of the U.S. (He and Hickman would bring Gorbachev, too, although not until after Yeltsin had ousted him from power.) After Garrison left the program in 1990, Dulce Murphy took over as director, and continued to organize and host exchanges between Russians and Americans, through the next decades. The program eventually expanded its geographic reach, working in other regions in conflict and spinning off from Esalen into an independent organization, now called Track II.

But the Yeltsin moment does stand out as a moment in which Esalen’s theory of personal transformation intersected with “the forces that can change the course of history,” as Garrison puts it. There were many moments, people, decisions, and relationships that led to the end of the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Community Party in Russia. But this one should be counted among the important ones.

“Dick and I, when we started Esalen in 1962, I never thought we would end up so involved with Russia,” says Michael Murphy. “But we were into personal social transformation, and it goes together. It's more than a coincidence that Esalen brokered Yeltsin’s breakthrough. We're good at midwifing these dramatic changes in people’s lives.” And, in this case, one of those changes helped make a dramatic change in world history, too.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ho ... e-cold-war

[American Dream]

On Nov 27, 2007, at 12:32 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

OK See the Sharon Weinberger articles sharonweinberger@gmail.com mentioning me noted on Wikipedia.

On Nov 27, 2007, at 9:34 AM, David Kaiser wrote:

Dear Jack,

Thanks for your quick and helpful reply. I'm glad to continue via email rather than phone; that's easy enough. I am addressing this email just to you and not to the whole group because I wanted to start with some questions about your own trajectory, to fill in some details beyond what I have been able to piece together from your own writings and from newspaper stories (such as the profile of you by Jerry Carroll in the San Fran Chronicle in 1981, or the more recent interview with you in the San Fran Chronicle by Stephen Schwartz in 1997). So this first round of questions is more about people and places; then once I have a chance to digest more of the scientific writings we can dig in to questions of Bell's theorem and signal locality as it was understood at the time and since. Here are some of the things I'm curious about:

1. Why did you decide to leave your faculty job at San Diego State? I talked with Fred Alan Wolf about his decision to leave -- it sounded like a combination of frustration with bureaucracy and cut-backs, plus new enticements in a writing career. Was your experience similar?

1. frustration with bureaucracy? yes

2. cutbacks? no that was not an issue for me and I left a year or two before Fred. Also I brought money to the department with the NSF Summer Schools for College Teachers on Superfluids and Lasers that I did with Herschel Snodgrass.

Both Fred and I got divorced about same time ~ 1971 and we were room mates. I was too young for that job and was bored and wanted adventure which came soon enough from the CIA with the strange events in 1973 at SRI Remote Viewing Project described in my book - 20 years after the strange 1953 encounter - very uncanny - real X-Files sort of Twilight Zone High Strangeness. I had volunteered for CIA in 1963 in wake of the JFK assassination and was interviewed near UCLA in 1963 though I never heard anything explicitly from that interview. My encounter with Dennis Bardens of British Intelligence in 1974

"Dr Sarfatti, it is my duty to inform you of a psychic war raging across the continents between the Soviet Union and your country and you are to be in the thick of it."

- in conjunction with the Uri Geller tests at Birkbeck etc are also clearly relevant as was my working at UKAEA with Marshall Stoneham in 1966. Then going to Trieste at Abdus Salam's invitation in 1973-74 was no accident. Ask Fred Alan Wolf about his visit to me in Trieste with his ending up in Bulgaria in an affair with the daughter of the local KGB police chief there. Both Fred and I were in Croatia for a day at Ljublana Institute for Nuclear Physics then as well. Trieste of course had many physicists from the Soviet Bloc there that I was in daily contact with. See Andrija Puharich in
http://www.stayaerusa.org movie on CIA & SRI. I am in that movie with Uri Geller, Brian Josephson, Colin Wilson, Colonel John Alexander ...

2. You mentioned in your piece in Mishlove's _Roots of Consciousness_ that your Physics/Consciousness Research Group was actually established as a non-profit, tax-exempt corporation. I was curious why you wanted to set it up in that official way; was there much in the way of official business transactions to worry about, rent to pay for office or meeting space, or anything like that?

That was the way Werner Erhard wanted it. His people took care of details. I had free run of Werner's est offices.

Basically I'm wondering why the PCRG was set up with a different structure than the Fundamental Physics Group at LBL, which (as far as I can tell) consisted mostly of an informal gathering of people in a conference room at the lab.

As above. FPG was basically a spin-off of PCRG organized by Elizabeth Rauscher. We had all the money from est and from George Koopman's Insgroup in Huntington Beach a DOD contractor with US Army Tank Command and USAF. Also we had money from UFO advocate Laurance Rockefeller's mistress Jean Lanier (widow of founder of a large engineering company Stone Webster) who set us up on two floors across from the Episcopal Church on top of Nob Hill. There is a SF Chronicle article about Brian Josephson's visit there with his new wife when he went to visit Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI about the remote viewing (i.e. "signal nonlocality" beyond orthodox quantum theory).

3. What sort of activities, discussion groups, seminars, etc., did the PCRG organize or host? I have heard a bunch about the Fundamental Physics Group at LBL; were the PCRG events similar?

The main thing we did was the Esalen Month in Jan 1976 I think that Gary Zukav writes about in Dancing Wu Li Masters. I brought David Finkelstein there and that's how he met Werner Erhard leading to the big est physics conferences described by Lenny Susskind with Feynman, Gell-Mann, Wheeler, Hawking, Coleman, I think Kip Thorne et-al. I had met David at Yeshiva visiting Lenny Susskind. Finkelstein also worked with Ken Shoulders and Hal Puthoff at a company set up by the Fried Chicken guy William Church as a result of the Esalen month.
We had seminars at the facility on Nob Hill with the Rockefeller-Lanier money.

4. When did you first meet Werner Erhard, and how did you and he arrange things like financial support for your work?

I think that's in Destiny Matrix? I was in Paris with Fred Alan Wolf at his flat in Odeon - I think it was where the Marquis de Sade had lived - that was the rumor. Fred dragged me to the Ritz Hotel to meet Werner who I had never heard of. I was restless. I asked Werner in the lobby of the Ritz, he in a silly inappropriate casual outfit, with a woman adorer, what he did. He said "I make people happy." I wanted to run and I said in a strong Brooklyn accent, "I think you're an asshole." Werner got up from his chair a big smile, embraced me warmly and said "I am going to give you money." I had no idea about the message of the est-Training being "You're an asshole." Werner thought I was some kind of Guru I guess. I sat down and Werner told me he wanted to set up PCRG with est-Foundation money and that's how it started. Werner is now living in London under a new name across the street from Parliament according to Fred Wolf.

You note in Destiny Matrix that at one point Fritjof Capra came to you asking for money to help pay for his green card application, and that you were able to get Erhard to pay it; so it sounds like a pretty easy-going flow of cash at the time.

Yes. I gave Fritjof $1500 that he needed to pay his lawyer for a Green Card. I also brought my then room-mate Gary Zukav to Esalen and wrote all of the rough draft of the physics parts of Wu Li Masters for him and helped him with the editing in later drafts.

Were there other people besides Erhard who helped pay for the PCRG activities and/or your research?

As I said George Koopman & Jean Lanier (with Laurance Rockefeller in the background calling our Nob Hill place to talk to Jean who kept a room there. Koopman had apparently been keeper of the Weird Desk at DIA before leaving to set up Insgroup. He came from the NY Times family somehow. Big obit on him in NT Times when he suspiciously was killed in auto "accident" on his way to test a rocket at Edwards AFB. George was a "spook" who managed Tim Leary when Nixon let him out of prison. Leary was sent to PCRG in Esalen right from prison. Note also my connection to a Nixon personal advisor Robert Dickson Crane through his daughter Maiti in 1979-80. Crane involved with Herman Kahn Hudson Institute and Minsky at MIT. Crane also advisor to Saudi Royals and he converted to Islam and became first US Army Muslim Chaplain I think (from Maiti). Crane told me that my "signal nonlocality" corresponded to "Tauhid" in Islam metaphysics.

E.g., Edgar Mitchell and the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which helped support some of the early work by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI on Uri Geller and remote-viewing? (Part of what I'm interested in for the book is how patrons other than the NSF or DOD stepped in to subsidize research in fundamental aspects of theoretical physics in the 1970s.)

Werner may have also financed some of that. I met Edgar of course but we did not get any money from him.

5. Same question for Michael Murphy of Esalen: how did you first meet him, and how did you set up the mid-1970s Esalen workshops on physics and consciousness? Any need for formal arrangements, or did Murphy basically give the group a blank check to proceed as you saw fit?

The latter. Michael and I were close for awhile. He gave me his Telegraph Hill flat on 2 Whiting when he married Dulce. Dan Ellsberg was a frequent visitor when Michael lived there. This was where his character "Jacob Atabet" lived and where I wrote http://qedcorp.com/book/psi/hitweapon.html in one short sitting high on some magic mushroom tea that a woman visitor served me.

6. Saul-Paul Sirag, in his "Contact" essay within Destiny Matrix, writes that at least for a while, you, he, and Fred Alan Wolf actually worked with Erhard's est trainers, to teach them about quantum physics and nonlocality.

Yes, that's correct.

Can you say more about what kind of things you did with the est trainers, what specific things you talked about, what level of detail they seemed to want to know, etc?

It's 30 years ago so I don't recall much. Saul-Paul Sirag probably took notes at the time and he has (had) a photographic memory for details. At that time the "creative tension" between locality and nonlocality was not understood. Bell's theorem was not well-known yet. Nick Herbert tried to use orthodox QM to get signal nonlocality in his FLASH paper. The remote viewing clearly showed signal nonlocality. Unlike the knee-jerk debunkers we assumed this to be an empirical fact and went from there - and still do. Signal locality in orthodox QM rests on shaky ground as Antony Valentini's papers now show and the spooky "Matrix" nature of consensus reality is becoming more apparent with the discovery of dark energy and dark matter and the intensification of UFO activity with more competent scientific observations now coming on line. Now back then in the 70's we were into John Wheeler's observer participator "delayed choice" and "You create reality" that you see in Fred Alan Wolf's books and in the recent alleged remark by President Bush - or was it Karl Rove?

7. The 1981 San Fran Chronicle piece by Jerry Carroll mentions a falling-out between you and Erhard. Can you say more about what happened? It seems to have coincided with Erhard's new conference series on theoretical physics, which Bob Fuller helped to organize with people like Sidney Coleman and Roman Jackiw (starting around 1976).

Yes. est people were getting jealous of my close relation to Werner (like Putzi Sedgwick-Hanfstaengl with Hitler in 1938? ) Maybe it was Bob Fuller? I don't know. Fred Wolf and I were edged out probably because they thought we were too crazy? Finkelstein sort of took over and I was the guy who brought him there in the first place. It was the usual academic shark cut-throat back-stabbing both Fred & I left SDSU for. There was still a back-channel to Werner through his aide Raz Ingrasci who sent Jenny O Conner to me at 2 Whiting after the "falling out" right before she went to Esalen and "channelled The Nine" and allegedly bamboozled the Soviet KGB "Institute for US & Canada" as part of the "Hot Tub Diplomacy" (see Newsweek article that title in mid 80's).

This is a barrage of questions; sorry for dumping them on you all at once. I look forward to chatting more about all these topics --

many thanks -
best,
Dave

http://destinymatrix.blogspot.com/2007/ ... fatti.html

[American Dream]

I give ISGP mixed reviews generally but this contains lots of worthwhile material:

Esalen Institute

Esalen is a large spiritual center where more than 500 workshops per year are held. Many conferences and workshops are public. Others, through its Center for Theory and Research (CTR), private. It was founded in 1962 by Stanford graduates Michael Murphy (a close Laurance Rockefeller friend since around this time) and Dick Price on the Pacific Ocean coast on land owned by Murphy's family. The Anglo-American Establishment-connected writer Aldous Huxley and psychedelic guru and Zen Buddhist Alan Watts aided them in the founding of Esalen and served as spiritual, philosophical and religious mentors. Price and Watts knew each other since the 1950s and Huxley's ideas on integrating Hindu philosophy and spirituality into western culture played a particularly significant role in Esalen's founding principles.

esalen.org/page/esalen-founders (accessed: March 11, 2016): "Michael Murphy is cofounder and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Esalen Institute, and serves as Director of Esalen's Center for Theory & Research (CTR). Born and raised in Salinas, California, Murphy graduated from Stanford University in 1952. He lived for a year and a half at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India before starting Esalen Institute in 1962 with his fellow Stanford graduate, Richard Price. ... Murphy is director of the Center for Theory & Research (CTR), the groundbreaking research center for Esalen Institute. In addition to serving as Director, Murphy leads a number of CTR initiatives, including one that explores the empirical evidence of post-mortem survival, another to explore encompassing visions of evolution that reconcile scientific and mystical perspectives, and one on meditation research. ... Richard Price was co-founder of Esalen Institute with Michael Murphy. From a Chicago family of business men and women, Dick graduated from Stanford University the same year as Michael although the two did not meet at that time. After a year of graduate work at Harvard, Dick left due to the lack of clinical emphasis. He joined the Air Force and was stationed in the San Francisco Bay area where he simultaneous studied at the Academy of Asian Studies with Alan Watts and actively explored eastern practices in the midst of the North Beach Beat scene."

esalen.org/page/lodge (accessed: March 11, 2016): "In the 1950s, the Lodge was a restaurant and gathering place for the Big Sur community including Henry Miller, who lived on Partington Ridge. He'd soak in the baths and then come up to the Lodge to write. In the late 1950s you might have seen Steve McQueen, Joan Baez, or a young Hunter S. Thompson, who the Murphy family hired (briefly!) as a caretaker. In 1962, Michael Murphy and Richard Price started Esalen Institute. Soon, Alan Watts gave a lecture in the Lodge, and the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow stopped in looking for a room. Maslow settled in as a frequent visitor, and regular workshops started to happen in the Lodge."

press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/453699.html: "In June of 1961, Murphy and Price drove down to Santa Monica to visit Gerald Heard, a reclusive visionary British intellectual who had arrived in the States with his partner, Christopher Wood, as well as with Aldous and Maria Huxley, and their son Matthew on April 12, 1937. Hollywood screen writer and novelist Christopher Isherwood would follow not long after. Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood would eventually have a major impact on the American countercultural appropriation of Hinduism. All three would be influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of Swami Prabhavananda, the charismatic head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. All three finally would spend much of their mature years reflecting on what this Indian philosophy could offer the West in a long series of essays, books, and lectures. Quite appropriately, Alan Watts and Felix Greene called them "the British Mystical Expatriates of Southern California." It was Huxley and Heard, however, who would have the most influence on the founding of Esalen. Although Murphy and Price actually met Aldous Huxley only once, in January of 1962 when the author visited them briefly in Big Sur shortly before his death on November 22, 1963 (the same day, it turns out, that JFK was assassinated), his intellectual and personal influence on the place was immense. His second wife, Laura, would become a long-time friend of Esalen, where she would fill any number of roles, including acting as a sitter for one of Murphy's psychedelic sessions. Aldous Huxley's writings on the mystical dimensions of psychedelics and on what he called the perennial philosophy were foundational. Moreover, his call for an institution that could teach the "nonverbal humanities" and the development of the "human potentialities" functioned as the working mission statement of early Esalen. Indeed, the very first Esalen brochures actually bore the Huxley-inspired title, "the human potentiality." This same phrase would later morph in a midnight brainstorming session between Michael Murphy and George Leonard into the now well-known "human potential movement." When developing the early brochures for Esalen, Murphy was searching for a language that could mediate between his own Aurobindonian evolutionary mysticism and the more secular and psychological language of American culture. It was Huxley who helped him to create such a new hybrid language."

esalen.org/person/anne-watts: "Anne Watts was deeply influenced by her father, the pioneering philosopher Alan Watts. She leads workshops on 4 continents, teaching adults to have more loving, fulfilling relationships. Anne has been leading Love, Intimacy and Sexuality workshops since 1985."
Summer 2002, volume 14, number 2, Friends of Esalen newsletter, 'Esalen Institute Turns Forty', pp. 1-2: "It was in the fall of 1962 that Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded Esalen as an alternative educational center devoted to the exploration of what Aldous Huxley called the "human potential," the world of unrealized human capacities that lies beyond the imagination. ... The history of the land is peppered with stories of Native Americans called the Esselen who lived on the land long ago. ... When Esalen opened, Michael and Dick began inviting eminent speakers to Esalen: British historian Arnold Toynbee; double Nobel prize-winner Linus Pauling; Harvard behaviorist B.F. Skinner; distinguished psychologists Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, and Claudio Naranjo; pioneering parapsychologist J.B. Rhine; theologian Paul Tillich; Bishop John Robinson; authors Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Carlos Castaneda; family therapy innovator Virginia Satir; creativity researcher Frank Barron; general semanticist S.I. Hayakawa; mythologist Joseph Campbell; psychedelic researcher Stan Grof; research psychologist Julian Silverman; and anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson. All these and many more came, sometimes traveling over great distances to an unknown institute that offered the most modest of fees. ... Esalen Institute's first catalog was a small brochure that bore the name of Big Sur Hot Springs rather than Esalen. It was issued in the fall of 1962 offering 5 different one- or two-day seminars. Those first workshop titles included Individual Cultural Definitions of Rationality; The Expanding Vision; and Drug-Induced Mysticism."
Early on Esalen founder Michael Murphy was a close friend of Laurance Rockefeller, who provided much of the financing of Esalen over the years. There are also a number of historical and present ties to the Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, Tides Foundation, Packard Foundation (above) and Mellon-linked Roy A. Hunt Foundation:

columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/ archives/rbml/Carnegie/index.html ?ccny3A3.html&1 (Carnegie Corporation of New York Records, 1872-2000): "Series III. Grants III.A. Grant files, ca.1911-1988 (1408 boxes): ... Esalen Institute, 1969-1974 "

esalen.org/air/esalen_initiativesfoldr/esalen_initiatives1.shtml (July 10, 2006: "1967: a Ford Foundation grant led to the creation of the Ford/Esalen Project in Confluent Education, joining affective and cognitive learning. Dr. George Brown, a regular Esalen workshop leader and Professor of Education at UC-Santa Barbara, spearheaded the program. His work was summarized in an Esalen book entitled Human Teaching for Human Learning. and a subsequent book called The Live Education: Innovations Through Confluent Education and Gestalt. This project gave rise to the Confluent Education program at UC-Santa Barbara's School of Education, which has conferred more than 80 doctorates and 300 master's degrees. ... 1970-1973: Esalen implemented a sub-grant from George Brown's Ford Foundation work in which fourteen teachers and principals spent three years training in Esalen techniques and then applied such methods to their work in education."

In the 1970s Esalen Institute founder Michael Murphy entered into a partnership with the billionaire Rockefeller-allied Packard Foundation in the Big Sur Land Trust: December 13, 2001, Monterey County Weekly, 'The Big Sur Land Trust is trying to buy paradise': "In 23 years, the Land Trust has worked similar kinds of deals to protect 20,000 acres of rare ocean views, redwood-forested watersheds and other significant lands. The Land Trust now owns more than 3,600 acres outright. Another 7,000-plus acres have been put into public ownership through Land Trust deals. The Trust has permanently prevented development on another 10,000 acres by purchasing conservation easements, or by implementing other land-law devices. To hear Leavy tell it, the Land Trust had modest beginnings. "A bunch of us, six families, met for about a year, sitting around kitchen tables, and talked about setting up a way to keep Big Sur from being overrun," he says. Then Michael Murphy, the founder of the Esalen Institute, gave the fledgling group a 50-percent ownership interest in 26 acres just north of Esalen. A neighbor''s mother gave a gift of less than $2,000 to seed a land fund, and the Trust for Public Land held it until the BSLT received its blessing from the IRS as a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. A major gift from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which allowed the BSLT to put a conservation easement on 3,000 acres, followed shortly thereafter. "And we never stopped," Leavy says."

Summer 2002, volume 14, number 2, Friends of Esalen newsletter, 'Esalen Institute Turns Forty', pp. 1-2: "We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to the many wonderful Friends of Esalen who generously support our operations and special projects. The following is a list of friends who have given over $500 from 1/1/2002-6/07/2002. We couldn't be here without you!

CENTURY CIRCLE - gifts of $10,000 or more: Anonymous in the name of Anumotana • Lawrence M. Gelb Foundation, Inc. (Richard and Tana Gelb) [of the elite superclass family of Bruce and Leslie Gelb] • Global Business Network • Andrew Hixon and Michelle Martinez-Hixon • Charly and Lisa Kleissner • Social Alliance Marketing (Kevin Bartram and Jeff Klein)
FOUNDERS CIRCLE - gifts of $5,000 to $9,999: Penny Christensen • Ken Dychtwald • Institute of Noetic Sciences • Mary Ellen Klee • Peter Taubkin • Keith VanVliet.
GROUP 2000 - gifts of $2,000 to $4,999: Nancy Bourgeois • Harriett Crosby • ENSAR Group • John McQuown • Charles Olson • Colby Sandlian • Terry Saracino and Paul Strasburg • Daniel Susott • Tides Foundation • The Monterey Fund. ...
SUSTAINING DONORS - gifts of $500 to $999: ... Integral Institute, Inc • ... Schwab Fund for Charitable Giving..."

Tides Foundation annual grants lists:
2004: $100.
2005: $5,000.
2008: $2,000.
2009: $500.
2013: $700.
2014: $500.

2010 edition, Library of Congress Foundation Center, 'Foundation Grants for Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums': "Roy A. Hunt Foundation: ... Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA. $12,000, 2007. For library/archive project, for Center for Theory and Research, and for general operating support.."
Grants lists for years 2015-2016, Roy A. Hunt Foundation (Mellon-linked): "
- Esalen Institute Big Sur CA general operating support $10,000 2016 General Grant.
- Esalen Institute Big Sur CA general operating support $10,000 2016 General Grant.
- Esalen Institute Big Sur CA general operating support $5,000 2015 General Grant.
- Esalen Institute Big Sur CA general operating support $7,500 2015 General Grant."

Laurance Rockefeller has sponsored a number of conferences over the years. Today his daughter, Laura Rockefeller Chasin, is directer of Esalen's CTR program:
2012, Marion Goldman, 'The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege', pp. 143-147: "John Templeton, who developed global mutual funds, and Laurance Rockefeller, an heir to one of America's great fortunes, promoted inclusive religiosity and spiritual innovation through their extensive philanthropy. Rocckefeller and hi Fund for the Enhancement of Human Spirit supplied vital resources for the Institute and projects directly related to it, while Templeton supported different venues, although he occasionally funded specific projects and individuals associated with Esalen. Laurance Rockefeller once informed Michael that there were three living Americans who might be able to transform American culture: the comedian Woody Allen, California governor Jerry Brown, a longstanding friend of the Institute, and Michael himself (Kripal 2007a:421). From the early 1970s until his death, in 2004, Rockefeller donated millions of dollars to Esalen and three related organizations that promote inclusive spirituality and synthesize Asian and Western traditions: the San Francisco Zen Center, the Lindisfarne Association, and the California Institute for Integral Studies. Because of his mother's interest in Zen Buddhism, Rockefeller, an exemplar of spiritual privilege, explored religion and philosophy as a teenager. His curiosity about alternative spirituality and transcendent experience expanded after he became an undergraduate philosophy major at Princeton (Winks and Babitt 1997:52).

Throughout his life, Rockefeller supported endeavors that he believed could reconcile science with the supernatural and demonstrate that God is an ephemeral, albeit powerful essence that permeates all human existence (Kaufman 2004l; Stark 2001:99-113). Investments in profitable start-ups like Eastern Airlines, Intel, and Apple helped Rockefeller multiply his inheritance and made him a billionaire (Kaufman 2004). He was a high-profile advocate for environmentalism and wilderness preservation and donated hundreds of millions of dollars for conservation and environmental research (Winks and Babitt 1997). However, Rockefeller usually downplayed usually downplayed his controversial financial gifts to projects involving alternative spirituality. For example, he rarely discussed his substantial grants in support of Harvard professor John E. Mack's research on earthlings' encounters with interplanetary aliens or the money that he later supplied for Mack's legal defense against allegations of professional misconduct. Several years before Mack received his first Rockefeller grants, he attended a small invitational symposium in Bug Sur that Michael organized in 1987 (Grof 2003). While he never entered the Institute's inner circle, Mack continued to participate in Esalen's loose social networks, and some of those contacts helped him tap Rockefeller's largesse, just as casual social connections that at the Institute have helped many other spiritual entrepreneurs. However, good friends, rather than acquaintances, introduced Michael to Rockefeller in the 1960s, and Michael soon became the billionaire's trusted adviser for different projects to advance personal and spiritual potential. Rockefeller donated millions of dollars to Esalen for renovations and new buildings, invitational conferences, and Michael's book about extraordinary human functionin, The Future of the Body (Murphy 1992:xii). With Rockefeller's support, Michael transferred his personal archive of more than ten thousand documents and case histories about extraordinary human abilities to the Stanford Medical School Library, unintentionally carrying forward Thomas Welton Stanford's early vision of elite universities as sites for research and teaching about the supernatural. Rockefeller also gave millions of dollars to the San Francisco Zen Center from 1971 through 1984, during the years when Richard Baker [Alan Watts asked Baker to do his funeral ceremony two months before his death], one of Michael's closest friends, served as abbot. In the late 1960s, Baker became a nationally known figure when he spearheaded fund-raising for the first American Zen training monastery at Tassajara, another inland hot-springs retreat just over the Santa Lucia Mountains that backed the Institute (Downing 2001:104-107). A few years later, after Baker became abbot in charge of the San Francisco Center and Tassajara, Rockefeller provided money for the Zen Center to buy Green Gulch Farm [organic farming] on a beautiful site twenty miles north of San Francisco. ... During the 1970s, the Zen Center's Bay Area business empire expanded to include an organic produce market, partially stocked by Green Gulch; the alaya Stitchery, which made and sold futons and natural-fiber clothing; a small bookstore; a bakery; and an award-winning vegetarian restaurant that overlooked San Francisco Bay (Downing 2001:32). All but one business closed within a decae... Baker's startups were less about making money than increasing public awareness and democratizing access to Zen (Tipton 1982). Therefore, publicity and fund-raising marked the auspicious beginning of each new venture. Early in 1967, for example, San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom was the site of a huge benefit where the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin raised money for the Tassajara monastery and retreat center (Downing 2001:107). ... Rockefeller's largesse soon eclipsed the sum of all of their [Xerox founder, CEO of Fidelty Mutual Investment and a "well-connected, wealthy East Coast socialite"] generosity. ... During the 1970s and early 1980s, Baker and Michael traveled together to the Netherlands and the Soviet Union... By everyone [who Price and Baker gathered], Michael meant people like California governor Jerry Brown... Rank-and-file Zen Center students never joined their lively conversations... Unless people were very talented or wealthy, they never became part of Baker' or Michael's inner circles, and they rarely met Rockefeller or other major donors. Long after Zen students had forced Richard Baker out because of his various transgressions, including his love of luxuries, Michael defended his friend. ... Baker left the Bay Area in 1984 [and soon] moved to Colorado as founding abbot of Crestone Mountain Zen Center, an isolated retreat high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (Downing 2001:286, 341). At Crestone, Baker continued to spread the message of maximizing human and spiritual possibilities, and he still maintained his close ties to Michael at Esalen. Laurance Rockefeller funded Crestone Mountain Zen Center through the Lindisfarne Foundation, a non-profit organization that began in 1972 with the purpose of investigating the spiritual foundations that are shared by all religions. Esalen inspired its founder, William Thompon, a former MIT professor... Another wealthy Zen Center supporter had introduced Thompson to Rockefeller and the billionaire provided Lindisfarne with significant donations from the 1970s through the 1990s. ... Since Rockefeller stepped back, the Fetzer Institute, founded by a Michigan media entrepreneur, provides most of Lindisfarne's funding."

1992, James Ogilvy, 'Revisioning Philosophy', p. xvi: "With the aid of a generous three-year grant from Laurance Rockefeller, the Esalen Institute Program on Revisioning Philosophy was initiated in 1986."

esalen.org/air/ esalen_initiativesfoldr/ esalen_initiatives1.shtml (accessed: July 10, 2006: "1988: first of three conferences on "The Body and Spirituality," funded by Laurance Rockefeller's Fund for the Enhancement of the Human Spirit... second conference on "The Body and Spirituality" convened by Don Hanlon Johnson. Participants: ... David Griffin, Jean Lanier. "

2012, Esalen Institute, 'Esalen's Half-Century of Pioneering Cultural Initiatives 1962 to 2012': "1992: the Joseph Campbell Foundation Invitational Conference, which [is] the foundation's first year of operation and [when it] planned its future activities, including a major conference... "

jcf.org/new/index.php? categoryid=36 (accessed: March 11, 2016): "Emeritus Associates: Jean Erdman Campbell°, Chair Emeritus ... Sam Keen‡ ... Laurance Rockefeller‡§ ... Erdman-Campbell Award ... Initital recipients: Stewart Brand, writer, editor, futurist, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founder of The WELL..."

blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/ mil/mindcontrol/ hambone/ rockefeller.html (accessed: March 11, 2016): "Reportedly, Rockefeller has stopped funding Mack. He continues to fund PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research), and is a Funding Advisor to the Joseph Campbell Foundation. He also funds the Starlight Coalition, which claims membership of several former government and military personnel who want to end government secrecy on UFOs."
esalen.org/page/ctr-october-2014-participant-biographies (accessed: March 11, 2016): "Laura Chasin [Laura Rockefeller Chasin, daughter of Laurance Rockefeller] After earning an M.A. in government from Harvard University and an M.S.W. in social work from Simmons College, Laura Chasin did extensive post-graduate training in family therapy and psychodrama. Laura brought this diverse intellectual background to launching the Public Conversation Project in 1989. Alter four years of experimenting and action research and a planning grant from the Hewlett Foundation, the Public Conversations Project became a non-profit organization dedicated to using dialogue to transform conflict and foster collaboration among people divided by their core values, identities or world views. ... Priscilla Lewis Priscilla Lewis is a senior advisor to the National Purpose Initiative, a new project being incubated at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. ... She co-founded U.S. in the World during her tenure as program officer for peace and security at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, where she designed and implemented grantmaking strategies..."

Persons involved at one point or another (largely through its invitation-only CTR network):
Alan Watts: Virtual co-founder of Esalen. Close friend of Esalen co-founder Dick Price since the 1950s. Psychedelic pioneer. Had his own program on the Ford Foundation-backed Pacifica Radio. Died in 1973.
Aldous Huxley: Elite-connected author whose family is tied to Darwinism, eugenics and nature conservation. In 1961 his brother Julian Huxley, for example, founded and financed the World Wildlife Fund with Prince Bernhard, Prince Philip and other members of the liberal establishment. Since the late 1930s Aldous was a follower of the Hindu mystery religion based on the Upanishads, mainly through Jiddu Krishnamurti and Swami Prabhavananda. Psychedelic pioneer. Served as chief spiritual/religious inspiration for Esalen founders Michael Murphy and Dick Price. Died in 1963, age 69, a year after the Esalen Institute was founded.
Laura Huxley: As the wife of Aldous Huxley, also closely involved in Esalen and the psychedelic group. Advisory board Albert Hofmann Foundation.
Dr. Timothy Leary: Famous Harvard psychedelic pioneer. Close friend of Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy.
Dr. Richard Alpert/Ram Dass: Famous Harvard psychedelic pioneer turned Hindu guru. Close friend of the above individuals. Advisory board Albert Hofmann Foundation.
Willis Harman: Professor of engineering at Stanford. Led a first 1962 conference at Esalen right after its founding in 1962 titled The Expanding Vision. Still a regular at Esalen in the 1990s. Consultant to the White House's National Goals Research Staff. Vice-president of Myron Stolaroff's International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS) in Menlo Park. Director of the Educational Policy Research Center and then the Center for the Study of Social Policy of SRI International, conducting LSD research. Hired Al Hubbard to SRI. President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Director of the Foundation for Gaia. Advisory board Albert Hofmann Foundation. Participant State of the World Forum in the 1990s.
Hunter Thompson: A young security guard at Esalen who got fired for being too aggressive with squatters. Famous drug/psychedelic abuser.
Myron Stolaroff: MA in electrical engineering from Stanford. Founder and president International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS) in Menlo Park 1960-1970. Conducted clinical studies with mescaline and LSD here. Among the initial batch of Esalen speakers, along with Alan Watts. Advisory board Albert Hofmann Foundation.
Dr. Stanislav Grof: LSD and MDMA research pioneer. Live-in scholar 1973-1987 who organized numerous Esalen conferences. Advisory board Albert Hofmann Foundation.
Rick Doblin: Protege of Grof at Esalen since 1981 and eventually graduated from Harvard. Founder of the Rockefeller and Pritzker-backed Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
Dr. Albert Hofmann: Discoverer of LSD. Synthesized LSD and psilocybin for the Harvard psychedelic group of Timothy Leary and Ram Dass. Co-founder Albert Hofmann Foundation.
Ken Kesey: Psychedelic adventurer/pioneer whose can be tied to the Harvard Psychedelic Project of Timothy Leary and Ram Dass.
Dr. John Lilly: Creator of the isolation tank, dolphin researcher and Ketamine pioneer/abuser. According to his old friend Rick Doblin, Lilly also abused cocaine. Advisory board Albert Hofmann Foundation.
Terence McKenna: Famous but scammy psychedelic adventurer backed by Laurance Rockefeller. Scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Dr. Ralph Metzner: Psychedelic pioneer; founder of the Rockefeller-backed Green Earth Foundation and Heffter Research Institute with Dr. Dennis McKenna, the brother of Terence McKenna.
Dr. Humphry Osmond: Psychedelic research pioneer who invented the term "psychedelics" with Aldous Huxley. Advisory board Albert Hofmann Foundation.
Gordon Wasson: Discoverer of the psychedelic mushroom, from which Albert Hofmann synthesized psilocybin.
Dr. Andrew Weil: Psychedelic researcher who as a student was part of the Timothy Leary's and Ram Dass' Harvard psychedelic project.
Dr. Alexander Shulgin: Harvard and UCLA-educated psychedelic pioneer since the late 1950s. Introduced MDMA to psychologists for psychopharmaceutical use in the late 1970s. Advisory board Albert Hofmann Foundation.
Dr. Rick Strassman: DMT researcher who first came to Esalen in 1985. After DMT research in the mid-1990s, Strassman developed a theory on alien abductions. In 2007 he founded the Cottonwood Research Foundation. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Dr. Hal Puthoff: Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1967. Highest level OT VII in the Church of Scientology by 1971. Came to Esalen around 1970. In 1972 he set up the CIA remote viewing project at SRI, his first recruit being Ingo Swann, whom he heard about through Army Counter-Intelligence Corps and CIA interrogator (and FBI/police interrogation teacher) Cleve Backster, who himself pushed the fraudulent idea that plants can "feel pain" and know when they are about to be "killed". Remained at SRI when the Air Force and DIA took over the remote viewing projects in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.
Dr. John Mack: Famous but scammy alien abduction researcher who became a Rockefeller agent through the Esalen Institute. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: Famous but questionable paranormal researcher who used to work for the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation interests. Advisory board Rhine Research Center. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Joan Baez: Famous musician of the Woodstock era.
Dr. Abraham Maslow: Famous psychologist who was one of the first lecturers at Esalen.
Buckminster Fuller: CIA-tied architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor. Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", "ephemeralization", and "synergetic". Second Mensa president 1974-1983.
B.F. Skinner: Ph.D. from Harvard in 1931. Famous Harvard behaviorist psychologist 1958-1974 who introduced operant conditioning.
J.B. Rhine: Of the Rhine Institute, which supposedly investigates parapsychology, but is a center for con artists. Many persons of the Rhine Research Center today are guests of Coast to Coast AM.
Linus Pauling: Rockefeller-backed scientist who became a major peace activist concerned with the radioactive fall-out of nuclear weapons, including testing. Promoted on Pacifica Radio.
Dr. Carlos Castaneda: Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA; author who claimed to be an initiate into Toltec shamanism/mysticism; on the cover of Time magazine in 1973, after which he retired from public life; became a recluse who lived in a house with three women who severed all ties with their families; resurfaced in the 1990s to promote his Tensegrity set of movement, supposedly based on 25 generations of Toltec shamans..
Deepak Chopra: multimillionaire Indian guru who has been involved in the Institute of Noetic Sciences and has his own Chopra Foundation.
Dr. Sam Keen: Harvard and Princeton-educated professor and philosopher promoted by PBS and the like; 20-year contributing editor at Psychology Today magazine.
Dr. Dean Ornish: Promoter of holistic living and vegetarianism and aided the Clintons with this subject. Promoted by People magazine, Time-Life and PBS. Advisory board Institute of Noetic Sciences. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Arnold J. Toynbee: British historian and international affairs specialist whose uncle and namesake was tied to the Rhodes Secret Society and Milner Group. Director of studies RIIA. Early Esalen participant. Died in 1975.
Laurance Rockefeller: Close friend of Esalen founder Michael Murphy, whom he recruited as his advisor on esoteric matters, and a life-long financial sponsor of the institute.
Laura Rockefeller Chasin: Daughter of Laurance Rockefeller.
Jean Lanier: Close friend of Laurance Rockefeller and deeply involved in Esalen.
Sen. Claiborne Pell: Important manipulator of the UFO field in the 1980s and 1990s whose assistant C. B. Scott Jones also worked for UFO manipulators Laurance Rockefeller and Prince Hans Adam II von Liechtenstein.
Dr. Dean Radin: Paranormal/psi researcher. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Robert McDermott: President of the Laurance Rockefeller-backed California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in the 1990s. Former chair of the Rudolf Steiner Institute.
Dr. Russell Targ: Involved in the remote viewing program at SRI, and also in studying Uri Geller. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Famous astronaut and Moon walker. Involved in the remote viewing program at SRI, and also in studying Uri Geller. Founder Institute of Noetic Sciences, which counts the involvement of new age United Nations elites as Maurice Strong and Desmond Tutu. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Uri Geller: World famous alleged psychic with psychokinetic abilities. Caught using trickery in several cases. Massive ties to the top of the Mossad, Israeli military Intelligence and prime ministers as Golda Meir, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu before he became a public psi performer (see Uri Geller's C2C AM biography for details). After his career went downhill in Israel in 1971, he recruited by Edgar Mitchell delegate Col. Andrija Puharich and brought for "study" to SRI International, to the same lab where the CIA and Mitchell were running the remote viewers of Project Stargate from. Parallel to this a clandestine remote viewing program at SRI was underway, headed by Russell Targ, Hal Puthoff and also to a degree Edgar Mitchell. The SRI group stood at the base of Geller's fame and subsequent notoriety. It appears Puharich's hypnosis sessions convinced Geller that he was an extraterrestrial in touch with a conscious super-computer on a spaceship. Apart from Esalen, IONS and SRI, for some years closely affiliated with Puharich's Round Table Foundation and Lab Nine group.Coast to Coast AM guest.
Dr. Charles Tart: Frequent Esalen Institute conference participant. Consultant to psi research at SRI International. Advisory board Institute of Noetic Sciences. First holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, named after a major UFO subject manipulator. Advisory board Rhine Center and Albert Hofmann Foundation. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Stephan Schwartz: Paranormal researcher; advisory board Rhine Research Center for Parapsychology. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Dr. Jim Tucker: Reinacarnation researcher who continued along the lines of Dr. Ian Stevenson.
Moshe Feldenkrais: Developer of the Feldenkrais method.
Jack Sarfatti: Director of an Esalen physics program in the 1970s. Coast to Coast AM guest.
Fred Alan Wolff: Quantum physicist who back in the 1970s was part of Jack Sarfatti's Fundamental Fysiks Group at Berkeley; Coast to Coast AM guest.
Fritjof Capra: Austrian-born American physicist and another member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. International Council member of Maurice Strong's Earth Charter. Seen as one of the pioneers of the holonomic / holographic universe model.
Karl Pribram: He and David Bohm (to be found at SRI International with the Uri Geller experiments in the early 1970s) helped produced the holographic universe model of perception/consciousness, discussed in detail in the 1991 cult classic The Holographic Model. February 1997, Vol. 2, No. 2a, Jack Sarfatti in MindNet Journal, 'Sarfatti's Illuminati: In the thick of it!': "... [Barbara] Honegger worked with Esalen's first director of the Soviet exchange program Jim Hickman, [Esalen founder] Michael Murphy and [IONS director] Brendan O. Regan. ... Barbara sued Stanford Professor Karl Pribram in an assault case and won."
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: Reincarnation researcher; the notorious Col. John Alexander was one of her students/proteges.
Werner Erhard: Founder of the EST training movement, an outgrowth of the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s.
Barbara Honegger: Old participant in Esalen meetings who after 9/11 became a leading Pentagon-no-planer.
Saul Paul Sirag: Physicist who was Barbara Honegger's partner for some time. Chief assistant of Jack Sarfatti at Esalen. Eventually replaced Sarfatti here.
Sir John Whitmore: March 2008, vol. 1, no. 1, Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 'The evolution of coaching: an interview with Sir John Whitmore': "I had been a professional racing driver, retired, then started a business. [Then] I felt there must be more to life than two competative games (racing and business). I then went to the Esalen Institute..."
Andrija Puharich: Psychedelic and ESP investigator. Originator of "The Nine" Ennead gods of Ancient Egypt at his Round Table Foundation in January 1953. Brought Uri Geller over to SRI from Israel in 1971.
Arthur M. Young: The second-in-command at Andrija Puharich's Round Table Foundation and involved in the channelling of "The Nine". Founder of the California-based Institute for the Study of Consciousness in 1972, together with his wife Ruth Forbes Young of the wealthy Forbes family. Chief inspiration of Robert Temple's (false) theory that the Dogon tribe was visited by space aliens from the Syrius Star System.
Jenny O'Connor: Alleged channeller of "The Nine", or the Egyptian Ennead Gods. Part of Colonel Andrija Puharich's Round Table Foundation and Lab Nine group. As an advisor to Esalen co-leader Dick Price she was very controversial at Esalen in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Ira Einhorn: Student at the University of Pennsylvania who became an environmental and anti-war activist. Financially backed by the Bronfmans. Murdered his ex-girlfriend in 1976, for which he fled to Europe for 20 years. Eventually convicted. The Bronfmans also financed his lawyer when he was a murder suspect. February 1997, Vol. 2, No. 2a, Jack Sarfatti in MindNet Journal, 'Sarfatti's Illuminati: In the thick of it!': "Ira Einhorn had introduced me to [Jacques] Vallee. Einhorn and Vallee were working together on a computer network project that anticipated the Internet. Einhorn originally introduced me to Hazel Henderson, Arthur Young, Stewart Brand and Michael Murphy. Einhorn at Esalen is described by Willian Irwin Thompson in 'The Edge of History'. Congressman Charlie Rose (D. North Carolina) of the House Committee on Intelligence confirmed to me by telephone that Ira was involved in National Security operations. Ira, like O.J. Simpson, always claimed he was framed by "the KGB." It is curious that he was never found. Ira spent weeks at Esalen after he was indicted for the murder of Holly Maddux. Senator Arlen Specter was his defense attorney and one of the Bronfmans from Toronto allegedly paid his legal fees."
Gregory Bateson: OSS during WWII, creating black propaganda and deployed to the Far East. Very pacifist and upset with his wartime experience. Married to Margaret Mead 1936-1950. Involved in the Rockefeller-tied Macy Foundation conferences. Member Laurance Rockefeller-financed Lindisfarne Association. Regent UCLA 1976-1980 (when he died), appointed by California governor and Esalen friend Jerry Brown. Died in 1980 while residing in the guest house of the Laurance Rockefeller-financed San Francisco Zen Center.
Arthur Hastings: Consultant on remote viewing research at SRI International in the 1970s. Important player in the parapsychology community.
Adam Crabtree: esalen.org/ctr/people/adam-crabtree-phd: "Adam Crabtree is a psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in dissociative identity disorder and other dissociative disorders. He is on the faculty of the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy and director of the LingYu psychotherapy training program in Toronto. He is author of Multiple Man: Explorations in Possession and Multiple Personality. He has published the only extensive modern bibliography of mesmerism and its offshoots: Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism and Psychical Research, from 1766-1920, an Annotated Bibliography. His study of the origins of dynamic psychiatry and psychology is titled From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing...."
Jacques Vallee: Reowned UFO investigator who wondered about an interdimensional link. Coast to Coast AM guest.
James Garrison: Ran the Esalen Institute's Soviet-American Exchange Program in the 1980s, allowing him to meet with top Soviet leaders. Brought Yeltsin over to the United States. Founder of the Christic Institute and later the State of the World Forum, both with backing of Rockefeller and allies. Chair of the Gorbachev Foundation and introduced Gorbachev to the Rockefellers and other philantrophists.
John D. Marks: Well-known and critical author on CIA abuses and its MKULTRA programs. In the 1980-1987 he was part of series of Esalen conferences, which in 1982 inspired him to set his elite, Rockefeller/Carnegie-funded Search for Common Ground NGO. Developed additional elite ties.

February 1997, Vol. 2, No. 2a, Jack Sarfatti in MindNet Journal, 'Sarfatti's Illuminati: In the thick of it!': "A partial list of participants in the Esalen Physics-Consciousness Seminars while I was director includes: Werner Erhard, Timothy Leary, Ira Einhorn, Jacques Vallee, Fritjof Capra, Gary Zukav, Fred Wolf, Bob Toben, Jean Lanier, Michael Murphy, George Leonard, the late Richard Price, Dr. John Lilly, Dr. Stan Grof, Dr.Joan Halifax-Grof, Bob Toben, Saul Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert, David Finkelstein, Russell Targ, Henry Dakin, Robert Anton Wilson, Karl Pribram, Brian Josephson, David Finkelstein, Barbara Honegger, Jagdish Mann."

2012, Esalen Institute, 'Esalen's Half-Century of Pioneering Cultural Initiatives 1962 to 2012': "Most of us know Esalen mainly through public workshops advertised in the catalog. But there is another, usually quieter, Esalen that's by invitation only: the hundreds of private initiatives sponsored now by Esalen's Center for Theory and Research (CTR). Though not well publicized, this other Esalen has had a major impact on America and the world at large. ...
1968: Ralph Metzner led a series of dialogues on ecology and psychology at the Esalen San Francisco center. ..
1968: series of workshops and seminars, titled The Value of Psychotic Experience, designed to integrate and extend the theories of John Perry, R. D. Laing, Stanislav Grof, Fritz Perls, Kazimierz Dabrowski, and Julian Silverman. Alan Watts also gave a presentation called "Divine Madness" as part of this series. ...
1969: an interdisciplinary series on religion, supported in part by the National Council of Churches, began at Esalen's San Francisco office with a focus on grounding theological reflection and philosophy in human experience. Leaders included: Sam Keen, ... John Cobb...
1970: Moshe Feldenkrais, creator of the Feldenkrais method, held his first major training in the United States at Esalen. ...
1971: lecture by Alan Watts and Lynn White on the "Ecological Crisis" at the Esalen San Francisco center, a lecture which inaugurated a joint effort by Esalen and Friends of the Earth to develop a psycho-ecological approach to human problems. ...
1970-1971: a number of Esalen group leaders traveled to Arica, Chile to study with the Sufi teacher Oscar Ichazo. Key figures: Claudio Naranjo, John Lilly, Steven Stroud, Jack Downing. This eventually resulted in the proliferation of work on the Enneagram...
1971-1975: summer programs in Berkeley, co-sponsored with the Association of Transpersonal Psychology, on "Human Consciousness: Exploration, Maps, and Models." Core seminars taught by: John Lilly, ... Charles Tart, ... Stanislav Grof, Joan Halifax-Grof...
1973: formation of the Esalen Sports Center... Prominent faculty: Stewart Brand...
1973: San Francisco public conference on "Spiritual and Therapeutic Tyranny: The Willingness to Submit," designed to address cultish problems in human growth arenas. Panel included: ... Stewart Brand, ... Sam Keen, ... Michael Murphy, ...
1974: Esalen's San Francisco office launched a public series of introductory and in-depth seminars on various psychic abilities and phenomena, including presentations and seminars by ... Edgar Mitchell, Robert Monroe, Anne Armstrong, ... and Uri Geller. ...
1970s: As residents at Esalen, Stanislav and Christina Grof coordinated 28 month-long experiential and think-tank seminars that featured such guest faculty as: ... Karl Pribram, Fred Wolf, Gregory Bateson, ... John Lilly, Rupert Sheldrake, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Russell Targ, ... Michael Murphy, Dick Price, ... Humphrey Osmond, Tim Leary, Gordon Wasson, ... Charles Tart, ... Ralph Metzner, ... various Tibetan lamas and Indian spiritual teachers, native American and Mexican shamans, and Christian mystics. ...
1976: month-long seminar for professionals and graduate students entitled "Holistic Medicine and Traditional Healing," [with] Dr. Stanislav Grof [and] John Lilly...
1976: Esalen and the Physics Consciousness Research Group of San Francisco conducted a month-long invited conference... Participants: Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Michael Murphy, Fred Alan Wolf...
1977: month-long seminar for professionals and graduate students on "Shamanism and the Mystic Quest," coordinated by Joan Halifax and featuring the following guest faculty: Joseph Campbell, ... Richard Price, Christine Price, ... Alexander Shulgin...
1982: sponsored a four-week interdisciplinary training program on "Paranormal Intelligence: Explorations of the Limits of Human Capacities." ... Leaders: Christina and Stanislav Grof, Fritjof Capra, Rupert Sheldrake, Russell Targ. ...
1981-1987: seven invitational conferences on "Psychic Research." Participants: Charles Tart, Russell Targ, .... Helmut Schmidt, ... Stephan Schwartz, ... Michael Murphy, ... As a result of the first meeting on Time and Psi, the Parapsychological Association held a symposium on the subject with many of the same participants, providing the nucleus for a ninety-minute BBC television program, "The Case of ESP."...
1987: invitational conference for practicing intuitives to exchange information on personal methodologies such as somatic and visual psychic perception, remote viewing, shamanism, and out-of-body techniques. Participants: ... Anne Armstrong, ... Stephan Schwartz, ... Charles Tart...
1988: first of three conferences on "The Body and Spirituality," funded by Laurance Rockefeller's Fund for the Enhancement of the Human Spirit, convened by Don H. Johnson. ... 1989: second conference on "The Body and Spirituality" convened by Don Hanlon Johnson. Participants: ... David Griffin [David Ray Griffin], ...
1988-1995: seven conferences on "New Directions in Meditation Research," convened by Tom Hurley and co-sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. ...
1993-1998: conference series on "Direct Mental and Healing Interactions," which then became "Distant Mental Influences on Living Systems," convened by Marilyn Schlitz and co-sponsored with the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Participants: ... Dean Radin, ... Helmut Schmidt, Richard Wiseman, ... Elisabeth Targ, ...
1995: conference on "Sustainability Consciousness," designed to forge relationships between activists, journalists, scientists, artists, business people, and educators, to encourage ecological thinking, and to weave together issues of sustainability, spirituality, and systems theory. Participants: ... Terence McKenna [and many others]...
1996: conference convened by Stanislav Grof and David Ray Griffin on the relationship between transpersonal theory and the process philosophy of Alfred N. Whitehead. Themes included: the relationship between matter and mind; the nature of causality and synchronicity; the nature of memory and experiential access to non-physical memories; the transpersonal dimensions of the human psyche; and the origins of psychopathology. Participants: John B. Cobb, ... Christina Grof, Michael Murphy, Robert McDermott, Francis Vaughan, John Mack, ... John Buchanan, and Christopher Bache. ...
2001-2003: three annual conferences on Integral Capitalism and Governance, which addressed how to facilitate the emergence of a green paradigm in corporations and global regulations. Conference chairs: Jay Ogilvy and Amory Lovins. Participants: ... Christine von Weizacker...
2004: 6th annual gathering, focused on: preparations for the forthcoming book, Irreducible Mind; quantum physics in relationship to the survival hypothesis; the nature of the soul in subtle worlds; ... Participants: Michael Murphy, ... Charles Tart, Adam Crabtree, Jim Tucker, ... Dean Radin, Gary Schwartz, and Henry Stapp. [Murphy, Tart, Tucker also present in 2005-2012, except Tucker not listed in 2008]... 2008: 10th annual conference in this series, focused on: the contributions of Jean Gebser to the survival hypothesis; philosophical explanations of the evidence for paranormal phenomena; a critical engagement with David Ray Griffin's Whiteheadian ideas about the survival hypothesis...
2008: beginning of a four-year series of conferences led by Jeff Kripal on supernormal powers in popular culture. ... Significant participants: Michael Murphy, David Hufford, Dean Radin, Jacques Vallee, Russel Targ... [Dean Radin and Jacques Vallee are also present in 2009 and 2010; Russell Targ again in present in 2011, together with Stanislav Grof]..."
1973, Psychic magazine, p. 83 (Google books): "Esalen Institute at Big Sur presents a series of psychic & metaphysical workshops in February '74. Feb. 3-8: THE WORLD OF URI GELLER with Uri Geller, Andrija Puharich & Ira Einhorn."
1985, Stanislav Grof, 'Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy', xvii: "Many of the pioneers of these new ways of thinking in science participated over the years as guest faculty members during the four-week experimental educational programs that my wife Christina and I have been conducting at the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, California. In this context, I have been able to spend formal and informal time [with] Arthur Young, and many others."
2002, Jeffrey T. Richelson, 'The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology', pp. 176-177: "In June 1973, OTS chief John McMahon and Carl Duckett were briefed by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). ... Four years earlier, Puthoff had experienced a number of personal and professional changes. Separation from his wife, a visit to the Esalen Institute, and boredom with teaching in Stanford's electrical engineering department had been followed by his moving over to SRI.... Puthoff joined SRI to assist with a laser-related project, but when funding dwindled, he sought permission from his boss and obtained $10,000 ... to test for the existence of psychic abilities. Puthoff ... had been an active member of the Church of Scientology..."

Esalen's Russian connection (the related State of the World Forum is also key):

2004, Walter Truett Anderson, 'The Upstart Spring: Esalen and the Human Potential Movement', p. 306: "[Michael] Murphy's Russian connection began in 1971, the year he made his first visit to that country. ... Officially, the purpose of this visit was to seek out and evaluate some of the research that had been reported in the popular 1970 book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. Actually, it was a lark. Sukie Miller had thought it up, and then Stuart Miller and Murphy got caught up in her excitement, and off they went. They spent two weeks in Moscow, meeting some of the psychics and scientists who had been mentioned in the book. ... Murphy and his friends did find impressive evidence of Russian interest in psychic research. They met Vladimir Raikov, a psychiatrist who was studying reincarnation, and Genady Sergeyev, a mathematician who was studying the relationship between brain waves and telepathy. In a hotel suite in Moscow, overlooking Red Square, they saw a demonstration of room-to-toom telepathy between Russia's most famous team of psychics. The "receive" in this demonstration, Karl Nikolaiev, agreed to work with Murphy on an experiment in long-distance telepathy. After he returned to California, Murphy got Dr. Charles Tart, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis, to design it."

February 1997, Vol. 2, No. 2a, Jack Sarfatti in MindNet Journal, 'Sarfatti's Illuminati: In the thick of it!': [60] Excerpts from "The Nine, channelled by Jenny O'Conner" at Henry Dakin's laboratory, 3118 Washington St., San Francisco, on Monday, July 30, 1979. Jim Hickman, Saul Paul Sirag, Roger Macdonald, Steve Donovan, Trever Alston, Russell Rae and others participating: Saul Paul asks Jenny "Have you ever interacted with Jacques Vallee?" Jenny says, "We were supposed to. We met Hal Puthoff..I met your friend." Dakin's transcript reads "discussion of Jack Sarfatti, and Jenny's meeting with him." The Nine then intervene speaking through Jenny "Main facilities Houston, Texas."..."

February 1997, Vol. 2, No. 2a, Jack Sarfatti in MindNet Journal, 'Sarfatti's Illuminati: In the thick of it!': "Jenny and The Nine [60] was promptly installed at Esalen for quite some time overlapping with visits by the late physicist Heinz Pagels, Congressman Charlie Rose, Ira Einhorn, and high ranking Russians from Georgy Arbatov's Moscow Institute of US and Canada, which was influential during Gorbachev's watch. Soviet Officials at Esalen in late 70's and early 80's: * Valentin M. Berezhkov [61]. * Yuri A. Zamoshkin [62]. * Andrey A. Kokoshin [63]. * Henrikas Jushkevitshus [64]. * Vladimir M. Kuznetsov. * Victor M. Pogostin [65]. * Vlail P. Kaznacheyev. * Joseph Goldin [66]. This list is not complete. Vladimir Posner is an important fellow in all this according to Schwartz and Tinkerman. The fact remains, the iron post of observation that a bunch of apparently California New Age flakes into UFOs and psychic phenomena, 'including myself', had made their way into the highest levels of the American ruling class and the Soviet Union and today run the Gorbachev Foundation."

May 13, 1992, New York Times, 'Philanthropies Pledge to Help Gorbachev Build a Firm Foundation': "Mikhail S. Gorbachev met yesterday in Manhattan with leaders of some of the nation's most richly endowed private foundations, enlisting their support in setting up his own American-style presidential library, with a goal of $75 million in donations. "I found him to be exuberant and highly animated, just brimming with ideas," said David Rockefeller Jr., chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, after the hourlong meeting, which was held at the Waldorf-Astoria. The foundations included those established by the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Ford and Pew families -- well-endowed institutions with vast experience to offer the former Communist leader on the intricacies of managing the fruits of capitalism in the world of philanthropy. The foundations' representatives decided at the meeting to form a committee to help Mr. Gorbachev, and they discussed long-range endowment strategies. Mr. Gorbachev's plans include a global foundation as well as the library. Mr. Gorbachev's aides expressed confidence that they will realize $3 million in start-up funds from his tour. No direct discussion of financial support came up at the meeting, but it was implicit, Mr. Rockefeller said. He also said Mr. Gorbachev's potential as a figure in the philanthropic realm was considerable, though dependent on how good an organization he eventually set up. "Speaking for myself and not the group," Mr. Rockefeller said, "the reason to consider support for Mr. Gorbachev is that he represents an extraordinary, indeed unique human resource with a perspective, resources and intellect which, unless he finds some institutional framework, will not likely be fully utilized." "He's being reborn," said James A. Garrison, the Gorbachev Foundation's executive director. "In terms of money, things have been going well," he said, with Mr. Gorbachev presenting no direct appeals for financing on the two-week American tour but making a "sensational" impression in private meetings with influential Americans. He said Mr. Gorbachev has met "10 or 12 individuals of high net worth in each city." The 40-year-old Mr. Garrison is an international entrepreneur from San Francisco whose resume seems a summary of the melange of pacific causes and global hopes that attracts crowds to Mr. Gorbachev's speeches. The son of missionaries to China, Mr. Garrison has degrees in religion and international politics from Harvard and Cambridge and executive experience with the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, the onetime home base of the human potential movement and spawning pond for global strategems, where he specialized in Russian issues and exchanges [ran the Esalen Institute's Soviet-American Exchange Program in the 1980s]. Yeltsin Trip Business dealings in Moscow led him to shepherd earlier visitors, like President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia, across America. Mr. Gorbachev's aides eventually sought him out as a specialist."

February 1997, Vol. 2, No. 2a, Jack Sarfatti in MindNet Journal, 'Sarfatti's Illuminati: In the thick of it!': "Bob Toben drove Sharon and me down to Philadelphia. We stayed with my literary agent Ira Einhorn and his doomed girl friend Holly Maddux [13]. Ira took us to the mainline mansion of Arthur Young. Young was the inventor of the Bell Helicopter and was a close friend of Charles Lindbergh. Young's wife was an heiress of the Forbes Steel fortune. Young financed the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley California. He invited me to stay there. Einhorn told me he would introduce me to Stewart Brand, Michael Murphy [14] and George Leonard [15] when I got to San Francisco. He was very concerned about what he called "Soviet breakthroughs in psychotronic weapons of mind control at a distance using ELF and sound waves." He said he had support from the local telephone company and from the Bronfman [16] in Toronto to link up visionary scientists like myself. He also said he was working with Jacques Vallee [17] and Brendan O Regan on a UFO data base. Ira mentioned that he was working with Congressman Charlie Rose (D. North Carolina) of the House Select Committee on Intelligence [18]. Rose confirmed his connection to Einhorn in a telephone conversation with me. Werner was as good as his word and promptly had his EST Foundation write me an initial $5,000 check (Autumn 1974). Einhorn did his job as my literary agent and arranged a meeting at Arthur Young's Institute in Berkeley that included Michael Murphy, Hazel Henderson [19] and another physicist, Saul Paul Sirag [20], who was Barbara Honegger's [21] lover. Werner gave me free run of his organization which I found rather odd. The estoids all seemed to be glassy-eyed and very creepy [22]. One in particular, Raz Ingrasci, talked about Werner as if he were God-incarnate. One day Raz said he would jump out of a high window if Werner ordered him to. One day I noticed a table with a sign that said "Bulgarian Desk" [23]. There were a lot of pretty young women who were easily available since I was known as one of Werner's special friends -- a Prince of the Court. Werner was always very warm with me and invited me to many dinners both at Franklin House and at expensive restaurants. He never carried any money or credit cards. We were always escorted (in a Mercedes) by a security team, who also paid all the bills. A former student of physicist John Wheeler [24], Robert Fuller was head of Werner's Foundation. Fuller had been President of Oberlin College but had suffered a mid-life crisis and had fallen under Werner's influence. Fuller now heads the World Watch Institute in Washington. Fuller [25] was jealous of Werner's fondness for me and that this was a factor precipitating my falling out with Werner. I was worried about the crypto-Nazi feel of the est-org, but I had hoped that Werner would get his intellectual act together and say something of genuine interest in terms of physics and philosophy. I was not at all subservient to Werner in his presence like most of the academics that surrounded and apparently adored him. Some of them called him the "new Heidegger" [26]. Professor Irwin Corey [27] made more sense. There was a lot of talk of Werner running for President one day. Werner said he would appoint me to be head of the National Science Foundation. Werner's brother Nathan Rosenberg was in the Navy as an aide to President Carter's Secretary of Defense Harold Brown [28]. Kevin Garvey [29] told me that Werner had fifteen loyal estoids in the Carter White House. Werner was very active with the training of government people in Washington D.C. Carter [30] had created Project Scanate [31] for remote-viewing of military targets by psychics. Werner used remote-viewing in his training, and he also contributed money to SRI for that project. Sidney was a close friend of the late Bishop Pike. Werner [Erhard] had me meet with several Stanford and U.C. faculty before he set up the Physics Consciousness Research Group at Esalen with me and Michael Murphy as co-directors. Michael arranged for Jean Lanier to supply me with money. Jean was a close friend of Laurance Rockefeller who would telephone the Nob Hill flat looking for her. I attended the EST April Celebrity Training of 1975. The list of trainees included Ellie Coppola, Sterling Hayden [35], Michael Murphy, Buzz Aldrin [36], Ted Ashley [37], the late Jerry Rubin [38], Fred Wolf, Saul Paul Sirag and many others. Sterling Hayden quickly walked out calling Werner a "Nazi" as he pushed away some estoids who tried to block his passage... I was getting suspicious of Werner, especially after I heard the rumor that he said he changed his name from Jack Rosenberg to Werner Erhard to "give up Jewish weakness for German strength." I received a phone call from a man named George Koopman during one of our Esalen seminars in 1976... He provided money through military contracts with the Air Force and the U.S. Army Tank Command funneled through his company Insgroup in Irvine, California... I found out through one of my girlfriends that Koopman succeeded in spying on the Arica organization... Arica was started in Chile by high ranking fugitives from the Third Reich who were masters of the occult. Many of the regulars at Esalen including some of our group like Dr. John Lilly and Claudio Naranjo had been in the first Arica training in Chile. Timothy Leary was released from prison. Leary became part of my group at Esalen. Leary was a close friend of Michael Murphy... My adventures with two more women during this period are worth mentioning... One named Crystal picked me up in the Caffe Trieste. She was a statuesque blonde in a low cut green evening dress. Crystal said she belonged to a Coven of Beautiful Witches who wanted me to be their Warlock. I later found out that Crystal knew another girl friend of mine from Esalen named Betty Andreason. I have since heard of a woman by that name who claims to have been abducted by UFOs... Was Jan telling the truth about the Fourth Reich using Arica to influence the New Age? Brewer was part of the original Esalen group of forty that went to Chile for the first Arica training."

esalen.org/sites/default/files/resource_attachments/esalen-fact-sheet.pdf (accessed: March 20, 2016): "Notable Leaders/Teachers: Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Campbell, Carlos Castenada, Richard Alpert (Ram Das), Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, George Leonard, Marion Woodman, Joan Baez. ... 1960: Abraham Maslow forms Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology. Fritz Perls forms Gestalt Therapy at Esalen... 1964: Ida Rolf creates Structural Integration/Rolfing at Esalen Institute. 1976: Connections between consciousness and quantum physics made at Esalen with Fritjof Capra and Nick Herbert. 70's & 80's: Complementary Medicine and Humanistic Medicine developed and legitimized by Sukie Miller and Wayne Jones, leading to the first federal legislation on Humanistic Medicine. 1980s: Soviet/American relations improved during cold war through spacebridge cosmonaut/astronaut program and Boris Yeltsin visit. ... 1993: Field of Ecopsychology created through a series of Esalen conferences by Theodore Roszak... 2000's: International Abrahamic Network founded in response to the rise of global fundamentalism and terrorism. ... Well-known musicians who have performed at Esalen: Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Simon and Garfunkle, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, George Harrison..."

November 19, 2015, journal.burningman.com, 'Burning Man Takes a Look Inside': "Megan Miller is the director of communications for Burning Man. She is bright and engaging, and she tells us that she first came to Esalen at the age of three with her mom... Larry Harvey and Michael Murphy are sitting on stage in that same cliff-topping tent near the end of Esalen's property where we were welcomed to the four-day summit. Stuart Mangrum is up there too, moderating the exchange between one of Burning Man's founders [Larry Harvey] and the co-founder of Esalen [Michael Murphy]. ... [Murphy] tells us how Hunter S. Thompson would spray the rocky cliffs with gunfire to chase out would-be squatters. The father of gonzo journalism had come to Esalen seeking enlightenment, or maybe just a quiet place to write, and he talked his way into being hired as a groundskeeper. But he took his responsibilities way more serious than was appreciated, and he was soon asked to leave. (Thompson would make a return trip to Esalen in '97 ... but now Thompson found the silence oppressive, and he fled the same night...) ... Dick Nixon taregted the place for dirty tricks, like the time his henchmen tried to convonce the press that Charles Manson ha hatched his murderous plans for Sharon Tate while on retreat here. (For the record, Manson never stayed at Esalen). ... Murphy and Esalen prevailed, though, much as Burning Man has overcome the challenges..."

https://isgp-studies.com/media-liberal- ... opposition

[PufPuf93]

I sure have bought many books from the people listed in that article on Esalen Institute.

I have only been on the Esalen campus once and that was for a soil science professional conference back in the 1980s.

But I did attend two Esalen encounter groups in the period 1968-1970 and learned in this article a connection to Esalen other than what I already was dimly aware: not only did they come into existence at about the same time but that they had funding from the Ford Foundation. I don't think there was any family connection between Dyke Brown, Athenian founder and Ford Foundation VP and George Brown.

From the article:

esalen.org/air/esalen_initiativesfoldr/esalen_initiatives1.shtml (July 10, 2006: "1967: a Ford Foundation grant led to the creation of the Ford/Esalen Project in Confluent Education, joining affective and cognitive learning. Dr. George Brown, a regular Esalen workshop leader and Professor of Education at UC-Santa Barbara, spearheaded the program. His work was summarized in an Esalen book entitled Human Teaching for Human Learning. and a subsequent book called The Live Education: Innovations Through Confluent Education and Gestalt. This project gave rise to the Confluent Education program at UC-Santa Barbara's School of Education, which has conferred more than 80 doctorates and 300 master's degrees. ... 1970-1973: Esalen implemented a sub-grant from George Brown's Ford Foundation work in which fourteen teachers and principals spent three years training in Esalen techniques and then applied such methods to their work in education."

In I think the Yorkshire thread I mentioned going to a very progressive -- actually perhaps more progressive than what the school is now in some ways -- for the time boarding school (actually two but the 2nd one is relevant here) near San Francisco for part of high school. I was there for its 2nd, 3rd, and half of 4th years of existence. It was a founding member (and only USA member at the time) of the Round Square network of schools.

From the current website:

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A Round Square School

As a founding member of Round Square, an international network of more than 100 schools on six continents, Athenian embraces the philosophy that binds the schools. This philosophy is rooted in six main values: international understanding, democracy, environmental stewardship, adventure, leadership, and service. These values are embedded in everything we do at Athenian; as an Athenian student, you will have countless opportunities to experience and explore these themes. Through our membership, Upper and Middle School students have unmatched opportunities to go on exchange, service trips, and international conferences through sister Round Square schools.

History

The Athenian School was founded in 1965 by Dyke Brown, a graduate of Yale Law School, who was then Vice President of the Ford Foundation. Dyke envisioned a school with the goal of Periclean Athens – the full development of each citizen. Intellectual growth, fitness of body and character, commitment to humane values, aesthetic sensitivity, and readiness for adult citizenship and leadership are Athenian’s objectives for each student.

The Athenian School was built on what was then known as the Blackhawk Ranch, at the foot of Mt. Diablo. It was originally a boarding school, grades nine through twelve, creating a 24/7 community of learners in a rural setting. In 1979, the Middle School was added, accepting day students in grades six through eight. The demand for an Athenian education from the local community prompted the School to begin admitting more day students in the 1970s. Today, along with many new facilities and a larger number of day students, Athenian remains a close-knit family of those actively engaged in a thriving learning community.

Far ahead of his time, Dyke realized the importance of service, international understanding, diversity and adventure as integral parts of a strong academic curriculum. Nearly fifty years later, Athenian's ideals have become a model for education in the 21st century.

------------------------------------

There were two sisters at the boarding school whose mother and father were Esalen staff. I have never seen the surname of the girls parents on any Esalen related materials so either they had different last names or the parents were not major players.

Folks from Esalen came on two occasions to the school and put on what were termed "encounter groups". We were not required to attend but could opt in. Essentially we spent two days and one night enclosed together in a room where we did various physical, mental, and emotional exercises together. One occasion several students (unwisely) took lsd and one fell and concussed his head into a large purple welt and did not complete the session. The lsd was never mentioned and I was specifically aware because he lived in the room next door to mine and he is currently a Facebook friend after all these years. I did not combine the encounter group with any drugs. Other than that there were no heavy trips. Alternatively, entering junior year, we were required (not by choice) to participate in a 3 1/2 week Outward Bound program focusing on rock climbing. My junior year was the first year with the program that at the time was affiliated with the NW Outward Bound School. They still have the outdoors program. We had several students and one teacher that did not complete the Outward Bound program because of physical injuries or mental refusal to continue. Outward Bound was far more stressful, physically and mental, than the Esalen encounter, but they shared the goals of team building and intimacy.

[American Dream]

Thanks for all that PufPuf93.

I would have to gather my thoughts and documents on this topic but I came to believe that early Outward Bound overlapped with people known to me as "smoke jumpers" (parachuting forest fire fighters) who may have been recruited for international deployments on sensitive covert operations.

Also, a different thing, but I did reside for a bit on the grounds of an (ex)-alternative high school that overlapped significantly with the early history of the psychedelic underground (Pranksters, Dead, Hog Farm etc.) and besides understanding that a greater network of communes in the region formed a sort of psychedelic "network", have in fact wondered if the students on the high school property might have served as some sort of guinea pigs for the various batches of drugs which did circulate through the area...

[PufPuf93]

Thanks for all that PufPuf93.

I would have to gather my thoughts and documents on this topic but I came to believe that early Outward Bound overlapped with people known to me as "smoke jumpers" (parachuting forest fire fighters) who may have been recruited for international deployments on sensitive covert operations.

Also, a different thing, but I did reside for a bit on the grounds of an (ex)-alternative high school that overlapped significantly with the early history of the psychedelic underground (Pranksters, Dead, Hog Farm etc.) and besides understanding that a greater network of communes in the region formed a sort of psychedelic "network", have in fact wondered if the students on the high school property might have served as some sort of guinea pigs for the various batches of drugs which did circulate through the area...

Hahn the founder of Outward Bound in the UK and also founded a Round Square school in Scotland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outward_Bound
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordonstoun

The connection between the usfs firefighting and international covert ops is Evergreen Helicopter and The Erickson Group.

The Erickson Story

The new Erickson of today is primarily comprised of two Oregon legacy aviation giants—Evergreen Aviation (McMinnville, Oregon) and Erickson Aviation (Central Point/Medford, Oregon). The companies were led and founded by two remarkable Oregonians with memorable personalities, but very different in approach and style.

Jack Erickson founded Erickson in 1971 with a focus on logging that evolved to an eventually much bigger market of firefighting. The Erickson reputation for trustworthiness and toughness was built on the hard work of men and women from southwest Oregon in the Central Point/Medford area and the iconic Sikorsky S-64, a giant in the aircraft industry. The blazing orange “Aircranes” are viewed as beacons of hope in the midst of boiling wildfires, and the Aircrane named “Elvis” is revered in Australia for having saved several firefighters’ lives. Given the heavy lift capabilities of the Aircrane, and the thinking that goes into complex project troubleshooting, Erickson’s earnest employees claim, “If we can’t do it, it can’t be done.”

Del Smith founded Evergreen Aviation in 1960 and earned his stripes establishing a legacy of extensive contacts within the Department of Defense for missions in service to the United States for nearly 50 years. His leadership within the aviation world was broadly recognized and he built a world class aviation and space museum that features iconic aircraft starting with the Wright Brother’s early flight models and the museums draw nearly a million visitors every year. The breadth of his collection is testament to his broad circle of influence in the aerospace industry and devotion to promoting flight. Unfortunately, the company faced struggles with waning contracts and a diminishing reputation, but many of the talented employees and workhorse aircraft were acquired by Erickson Inc. in 2013.

more at: http://ericksoninc.com/about/history/

Evergreen International Aviation

Evergreen International Aviation, Inc. is an Oregon-based aviation company with longstanding ties to the CIA. Its huge Evergreen Maintenance Center in Arizona was bought from the Agency, which offered the property to no-one else.[1] In 1980 an Evergreen plane flew the recently deposed Shah of Iran from Panama to Egypt, hours before the Panamanian government was due to receive an extradition request from the new government in Tehran.[1] Giving rides to dictators is something of a specialty for the company - it also allowed El Salvador's President Duarte to use its helicopter, which was officially in the country to help repair power lines.[1]

And according to a series of articles in The Oregonian in 1988, Evergreen's owner and founder Delford M. Smith "...acknowledged one agreement under which his companies provide occasional jobs and cover to foreign nationals the CIA wants taken out of other countries or brought into the United States. However, neither Smith nor CIA officials would say whether any broader agreement existed."[1]

Evergreen is a member of the International Peace Operations Association. Press releases from the company list as a press contact Nathan Drevna from the major PR firm Hill & Knowlton.

lots more about Evergreen and CIA at: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ev ... ation,_Inc.

Evergreen Helicopter got its first Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane in the early 1970s and in Fall 1972 did the first commercial helicopter logging in the United States about 7 miles from where I sit now and I worked as a teenager just out of high school on the USFS timber sale layout crew that marked and cruised (measured) the timber that was sold and logged.

At the time especially in aviation functions there was a large ex-military presence in the USFS because vets were given hiring preference. Surplus military planes and helicopters were used in firefighting (for dropping retardant and smoke jumpers and fire recon and ferrying firefighters respectively. Most pilots were direct out of the military and were contracted to the USFS by Evergreen (as was maintenance) and the like rather than employees. Many of the smokejumpers were USFS hires under veterans preference. The two large smoke jumper training facilities were in Cave Junction, OR and Missoula, MN but there were other smoke jumper bases such as Redding and Rohnerville in CA. Typically the smokejumpers would have regular jobs out on the various Ranger Districts but would congregate at the air attack bases during times of heavy fire or for training.

I knew professionally a man connected to Evergreen and Erickson and the "deep" state with hindsight. I met him while a grad student at Cal (actually was approached as to my interest on working with him for my Masters project and passed) but had intermittent contact with him for about 8 years. Some of his positions and bio from a proxy filing I just found. I have his resume from an IPO I worked on back in the late 1980s:

Board of Directors Erickson Group and at one time Executive VP
Board of Directors Evergreen International Aviation
Board of Directors Scientific Applications International Corporation SAIC, at one time Senior VP for Corporate Development
Board of Directors Vertdix (associated with Martin Marietta)
Board of Directors Digikon
Board of Directors and Chairman Aerolift Inc. (associated with Helistat project)
Previously employed by Douglass Aircraft Company where Chief of Systems Analysis for the ballistic missile defense program
Previously employed by Research Analysis Corporation (private research company owned by Army)
etc. He is no longer living.

http://sec.edgar-online.com/socrates-te ... tion4.aspx

Clive Whittenbury, has been Director of the Company since 1994. Dr. Whittenbury has substantial senior management, operations, and technical advisory experience. From 1972 to 1979, Dr. Whittenbury was a Senior Vice President and from 1976 to 1986 was a director of Scientific Applications International Corporation, a San Diego, California-based international systems engineering firm. Since 1979, Dr. Whittenbury has been Executive Vice President and then a director of the Erickson Group, Inc., an international diversified products and aircraft services firm. Dr. Whittenbury is a member of the International Advisory Board for the British Columbia Advanced Systems Institute, which manages commercialization programs in technology at the three major Vancouver/Victoria universities, and a member of the Advisory Board of Compass Technology Partners, an investment fund. He is Chairman of the Laser Directorate Advisory Board for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Whittenbury served as an advisor to three U.S. Congressional Committees and with the Grace Commission. Dr. Whittenbury holds a B.S. honors degree in physics (Manchester, England) and a Ph.D. degree (Aeronautical Engineering) from the University of Illinois.

I don't know of any connection between Outward Bound and USFS smoke jumpers.

[American Dream]

I believe that I got onto the possible overlap between smoke jumpers (parachuting forest fire fighters), the Outward Bound wilderness education/adventure program, and covert ops, through looking in to the life of nature mystic Willi Unsoeld, who may have bridged these worlds. As I recall, he was country director for Uncle Sam's Peace Corps in Nepal during the early/mid 60's, at a time when there was a major CIA operation being mobilized against China in the Nepali Mustang region, and in Tibet itself.

One part of the program (which is alluded to in various posts in this thread), involved placing high tech sensors way up in the Himalayas, which could monitor secret atomic bomb testing by the Chinese State in secluded valleys. It may possibly be that Willi Unsoeld had something to do with those operations- he certainly loved to climb mountains- and did so on many, many occasions, including I think on expeditions that included Americans with military ties.

Perhaps I can dig up more on these possibilities later, but your linkages- some of which I had heard something about before like Evergreen Air (which I think "donated" C-130's that became vessels for shipping drugs and guns in covert ops)- did kind of freak my shit out, which is ok...

[PufPuf93]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You may have heard of this somewhere:

U.S. Forest Service airtanker scandal


A C-119C which was operated by Hemet Valley Flying Service as Tanker 82 before being retired, now at the Milestones of Flight Museum, Fox Field, Lancaster, California

Tanker 64, a C-130A, operated by TBM, Inc. and one of the aircraft involved in the exchange program; it now serves as a flight test aircraft at the Mojave Spaceport.

Aero Union P-3A Orion taking off from Fox Field, Lancaster, California


The U.S. Forest Service airtanker scandal involved a scheme, called the Historical Aircraft Exchange Program,[1] in which the agency would acquire retired U.S. Air Force C-130A transport aircraft and U.S. Navy P-3 anti-submarine patrol aircraft, ostensibly for use as firefighting airtankers, but which ended up with the planes' ownership being transferred illegally to private companies and the aircraft themselves being used for other purposes or even sold for a profit. The controversy resulted in two of the involved principals being sentenced to prison and a number of civil lawsuits.

detail at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Fore ... er_scandal

edit to ask question:

By linkages do you mean links I provided or my personal experiences?