NEW AGE Counterculture

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE COUNTERCULTURE REVOLUTION:
Radical Change & Counterculture: Huxley, Esalen & Human Potential Movement

NARCO-HYPNOSIS / NARCO STATE

The shadow of the social revolution still casts its long shadow back from the future. The 60s were a topsy-turvy time where nearly every aspect of society was converted into its opposite, precisely according to the blueprint of the Tavistock Agenda and the machinations of its allies -- CIA, RAND and SRI. Together they created an ersatz utopia with a heavy dark side much like Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World. It is the forerunner of the New Age and Conspiracy cultures. Counterculture and subculture became new buzzwords which sprung up like Flower Children to describe the morphing social landscape. Human freedom was actually under pharmacological attack, disguised as a quest for chemically-induced happiness.

"...Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World." --From a letter to George Orwell, dated 21 October 1949; from Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith; Harper & Row, 1969. 

Videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1vMWjknRzw

http://wideeyecinema.com/?p=5995

 

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/huxley_aldous.html

The Mike Wallace Interview
Aldous Huxley, 1958

Aldous Huxley, social critic and author of Brave New World, talks to Wallace about threats to freedom in the United States, overpopulation, bureaucracy, propaganda, drugs, advertising, and television.

 

The "Case Officer" for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley. He spearheaded Tavistock's plan for pharmaceutical control with LSD's mindbending results which led to the counterculture, the dialectical response to culture on the way to a totally controlled society. Those who thought they were creating a new society were unwittingly "sleeping with the enemy" by essentially brainwashing themselves and paying for the priviledge with their hearts and minds.

Thus, Tavistock channeled and directed youth dissent and rebellion, and disabled the anti-war movement. Youth culture became distracted and disengaged from practical reality and political activism. The revolution was definitely not televised but it was psychoelectric shock treatment. The movement was induced from the top down via CIA-Tavistock agendas and agents of influence. Socially-engineered 'hippies' dropped out of the sociopolitical loop. Psychotropic warfare came to the homefront in the world's biggest social experiment.

In 1936 Aldous Huxley wrote "Propaganda and Pharmacology" - a more detailed prediction of mind-control drug technology than the "soma" found in his 1932 novel "Brave New World". Huxley predicted: The propagandists of the future will probably be chemists and physiologists as well as writers." Moksha - Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience 1931-1963" Aldous Huxley, Penguin, 1983, p.38

LSD came to America in 1949. Viennese doctor, Otto Kauders traveled to the United States in search of research funds. He gave a conference at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a pioneering mental-health institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He spoke about a new experimental drug called d-lysergic acid diethylamide.

Humphry Osmond was at the cutting edge of psychiatric research in the 1950s. He believed that hallucinogenic drugs might be useful in treating mental illness and he studied the effects of LSD on people with alcohol dependency. His investigations led to his association with the novelist Aldous Huxley and to involvement with the CIA and MI6, which were interested in LSD as a possible “truth drug” to make enemy agents reveal secrets.

Osmond sought a name for the effect that LSD has on the mind, consulting the novelist Aldous Huxley who was interested in these drugs. Osmond and Huxley had become friends and Osmond gave him mescaline in 1953. Huxley suggested “phanerothyme,” from the Greek words for “to show” and “spirit,” and sent a rhyme: “To make this mundane world sublime, Take half a gram of phanerothyme.” Instead, Osmond chose “psychedelic,” from the Greek words psyche (for mind or soul) and deloun (for show), and suggested, “To fathom Hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic.” He announced it at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting in 1957.

Huxley was Tavistock's main propagandist and recruiter. Huxley became a propagandist for hallucinogenic drugs. Huxley first tried LSD in 1955. He got it from "Captain" Al Hubbard, rumored to have connections with CIA's MK Ultra program. In a 1961 handwritten letter from Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary, Huxley mentions meeting Dr. "Jolly" West, a CIA MK-ULTRA operative. Huxley goes on to note that: "You are right about the hopelessness of the "Scientific" approach. These idiots want to be Pavlovians, not Lorenzian Ethnologists. Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The "Scientific" LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychoses."

Timothy Leary consulted the British philosopher who wrote the psychedelic manifesto, The Doors of Perception (from which Jim Morrision would later take name his band). Huxley was at Harvard on a visiting professorship. Look past portrayals of Dr. Leary's glamorous life and the enormous amounts of publicity he received for his studies on and promotion of LSD and you find that what he actually helped put together a fine tuned program to manipulate the public. He was also used wittingly or unwittingly by CIA.

In the mid-1950s Leary worked as director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation and taught at Berkeley University. He developed interpersonal theory. Leary devised a personality test, "The Leary," which is used by CIA to test prospective employees. He  also became a close friend to Frank Barron, a graduate school classmate who was working for the CIA since at least 1953. Barron worked at the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which Leary  later acknowledged was "funded and staffed by OSS-CIA psychologists."

Huxley urged Leary to form a secret order of LSD-Illuminati, to launch and lead a psychedelic conspiracy to brainwash influential people for human betterment. "That's how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on," Huxley tells him. "Initiate artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans. And they'll educate the intelligent rich." Huxley probably had it right about chemical and biowarfare when he proclaimed, ''Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.''

"Soma" became a cultural reality in a variety of hypnotic and narcotizing forms. Drugs became the tecnique of choice for crowd control. For some, psychedelics became gateway drugs to harder drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine. Pharmaceutical soporifics from Ritalin to anti-depressants became the norm for mood and behavior regulation. In the name of "human potential," consciousness was put to sleep. Psychiatric control of consciousness became an authoritarian imperative.

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." --Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961

The counterculture is a conspiracy

The post-1930 promotion and use of cannabis and LSD, was launched from London by the self-described "utopian" circles of followers of the 19th-Century Thomas Huxley—associated with H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Aleister Crowley, and a younger generation including Aldous and Julian Huxley, and George Orwell. The practice of mass-indoctrination in use of cannabis, and LSD, was launched, with a leading role by the British psychological warfare organization known as the London Tavistock Clinic and associated circles. The popularization of cannabinol, LSD, and other strongly psychotropic drugs, including the highly destructive use of Ritalin among primary and secondary students, are intended to replicate the fictional role of "soma" depicted in Aldous Huxley's cult-novel, Brave New World.

The U.S.A. and Canadian use of these practices was pioneered in Los Angeles, Hollywood, and left-wing circles, and in Canada locations, during the 1930s and 1940s-1950s, through circles associated with Aldous Huxley and with the London Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute. During the post-war decades, this work was promoted through the Department of Defense's Special Warfare division, including projects such as "Delta Force." The post-war "Beatniks," and the orchestrated cult of Elvis Presley, are typical of the pilot-projects used to prepare the way for the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" launched, like a rocket, with the appearance of the "Beatles" on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Marilyn Ferguson wrote her Aquarian Conspiracy manifesto under the 
direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular 
version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley's Brave 
New World. The counterculture is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, 
used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and technological progress. 
That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as 
the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. 
We will take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with Huxley in California to 
the victimization of 15 million Americans today. With 'The Aquarian Conspiracy', the British Opium 
War against the United States has come out into the open.
 
The high priest for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a 
founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee 
himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of British 
intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime briefing officer of Prime Minister 
Winston Churchill. Toynbee's "theory" of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western 
civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise and decline of grand imperial dynasties.
 
Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British 
foreign intelligence during World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy. 
Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what Wells called The Open 
Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. The "Open Conspiracy," Wells wrote, "will appear 
first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy 
men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the 
existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the stages, a 
mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort 
of surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all sorts of ways they will be 
influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible government."
 
What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a "one-world brain" which would function 
as " a police of the mind." Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the priesthood itself. But 
Wells's popular writings (Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his 
proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), were written 
as "mass appeal" organizing documents on behalf of one-world order. Only in the United States are 
these "science fiction classics" taught in grade school as attacks against fascism. Under Wells's tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist circle that developed in Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War.
 
In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained throughout the period of World 
War II. Through a Los Angeles contact, Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast Christopher Isherwood 
were employed as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios. Hollywood was 
already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled and controlled through London. Joseph 
Kennedy was the frontman for a British consortium that created RKO studios, and "Bugsy" Siegel, 
the West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner Brothers and MGM.
THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/aquarian.htm ;

In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas Mann and his daughter Elisabeth 
Mann Borghese) laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture, 
by recruiting a core of "initiates" into the Isis cults that Huxley's mentors, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, 
and Crowley, had constituted while stationed in India. 
 
LSD: 'Visitation from the Gods' 
 
"Ironically," writes Ferguson, "the introduction of major psychedelics like LSD, in the 1960s, was 
largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency's investigation into the substances for 
possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code 
names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs. 
Soon they were synthesizing their own 'acid.' "The CIA operation was code named MK-Ultra, its result was not unintentional, and it began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to the United States.

 

Aldous Huxley began the counterculture subversion of the United States thirty years before its consequences became evident to the public. In 1962, Huxley helped found the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which became a mecca for hundreds of Americans to engage in weekends of T-Groups and Training Groups modeled on behavior group therapy, for Zen, Hindu, and Buddhist transcendental meditation, and "out of body" experiences through simulated and actual hallucinogenic drugs. As described in the Esalen Institute Newsletter: "Esalen started in the fall of 1962 as a forum to bring together a wide variety of approaches to enhancement of the human potential . . . including experiential sessions involving encounter groups, sensory awakening, gestalt awareness training, related disciplines. Our latest step is to fan out into the community at large, running programs in cooperation with many different institutions, churches, schools, hospitals, and government."

Several tens of thousands of Americans have passed through Esalen; millions have passed through the programs it has sired throughout the country.

The next leap in Britain's Aquarian Conspiracy against the United States was the May 1974 report that provided the basis for Ferguson's work. The report is entitled "Changing Images of Man," Contract Number URH (489~215O, Policy Research Report No. 414.74, prepared by the Stanford Research Institute Center for the Study of Social Policy, Willis Harman, director. The 319-page mimeographed report was prepared by a team of fourteen researchers and supervised by a panel of twenty-three controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B.F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence.

The aim of the study, the authors state, is to change the image of mankind from that of industrial progress to one of "spiritualism." The study asserts that in our present society, the "image of industrial and technological man" is obsolete and must be "discarded": "Many of our present images appear to have become dangerously obsolete, however . . . Science, technology, and economics have made possible really significant strides toward achieving such basic human goals as physical safety and security, material comfort and better health. But many of these successes have brought with them problems of being too successful -- problems that themselves seem insoluble within the set of societal value-premises that led to their emergence . . . Our highly developed system of technology leads to higher vulnerability and breakdowns. Indeed the range and interconnected impact of societal problems that are now emerging pose a serious threat to our civilization . . . If our predictions of the future prove correct, we can expect the association problems of the trend to become more serious, more universal and to occur more rapidly."

Therefore, SRI concludes, we must change the industrial-technological image of man fast: "Analysis of the nature of contemporary societal problems leads to the conclusion that . . . the images of man that dominated the last two centuries will be inadequate for the post-industrial era."
The counterculture, New Age of the Aquarian Conspiracy was born:

Who provided the drugs that swamped the anti-war movement and the college campuses of the United States in the late 1960s? The organized crime infrastructure which had set up the Peking Connection for the opium trade in 1928 -- provided the same services in the 1960s and 1970s it had provided during Prohibition. This was also the same opium network Huxley had established contact with in Hollywood during the 1930s.

During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic "mind-expanding" drugs are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a Conference on the "Dialectics of Liberation," chaired by Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.

Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of "initiates." All of them -- Leary, Osmund, Watts, Kesey, Alpert -- became the highly publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the cult of "Flower People" in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD, hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late 1960s.

The LSD connection begins with one William "Billy" Mellon Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a graduate of the University of Vienna and a scion of the millionaire Mellon banking family of Pittsburgh. (Andrew Mellon of the same family had been the U.S. Treasury Secretary throughout Prohibition.) In 1963, when Timothy Leary was thrown out of Harvard, Hitchcock rented a fifty-five-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, where the entire Leary-Huxley circle of initiates was housed until its later move back to California.

Esalen Institute is a center for humanistic education, a nonprofit organization devoted to multidisciplinary studies ordinarily neglected by traditional academia. Now in its fifth decade, Esalen offers more than 500 public workshops a year in addition to invitational conferences, residential work-study programs, research initiatives, and internships. Part think-tank for the emerging world culture, part college and lab for transformative practices, and part restorative retreat, Esalen is dedicated to exploring work in the humanities and sciences that furthers the full realization of the human potential.

Esalen Institute was founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962 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. Esalen soon became known for its blend of East/West philosophies, its experiential/didactic workshops, the steady influx of philosophers, psychologists, artists, and religious thinkers, and its breathtaking grounds blessed with natural hot springs. Once home to a Native American tribe known as the Esselen, Esalen is situated on 27 acre of spectacular Big Sur coastline with the Santa Lucia Mountains rising sharply behind.

Past Teachers at Esalen Institute

Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Will Schutz, Richard Feynman, Paul Tillich, Arnold J. Toynbee, B.F. Skinner, Stanislav Grof, Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, Carl Rogers, Linus Pauling, Buckminster Fuller, Rollo May, Joseph Campbell, Susan Sontag, Ray Bradbury, George Leonard, J. B. Rhine, Warren Farrell, Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Gregory Bateson, John C. Lilly, Carlos Castaneda, Claudio Naranjo, Fritjof Capra, Ansel Adams, John Cage, Babatunde Olatunji, Terence McKenna, Joan Baez, Robert Anton Wilson, Andrew Weil, Deepak Chopra, Robert Bly, Marion Woodman, Dean Ornish, Matthew Fox, Andrew Harvey, James Hillman, Gabrielle Roth, Rusty Schweickart, Fred Frith, Spalding Gray, Amory Lovins, Albert Hoffman, Bob Dylan, Daniel Sheehan and Sara Nelson of the Christic Institute and many others have taught, performed and/or presented at the Esalen Institute.

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http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/453699.html

for educational purposes only.Please refer to source page.

An excerpt from

ESALAN: America and the Religion of No Religion

Jeffrey J. Kripal

“Totally on Fire”
The Experience of Founding Esalen

In 1960 Richard Price went to hear Aldous Huxley deliver a lecture called “Human Potentialities” at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. Although “we are pretty much the same as we were twenty thousand years ago,” said Huxley, we have “in the course of these twenty thousand years actualized an immense number of things which at that time for many, many centuries thereafter were wholly potential and latent in man.” He went on to suggest that other potentialities remain hidden in us, and he called on his audience to develop methods and means to actualize them. “The neurologists have shown us,” said Huxley, “that no human being has ever made use of as much as ten percent of all the neurons in his brain. And perhaps, if we set about it in the right way, we might be able to produce extraordinary things out of this strange piece of work that a man is.”

Price was listening. Michael Murphy would soon write Huxley asking for advice on how to go about doing something about that other ninety percent. Murphy and Price asked to visit Huxley in his Hollywood Hills home on their way down to Mexico to return a pick-up truck they had borrowed from one of Price’s friends. Huxley apologized for being away at that time but strongly encouraged them to visit his old friend, Gerald Heard, who lived in Santa Monica. He also suggested that they visit Rancho La Puerta, a burgeoning growth center in Mexico that featured health food, yoga, and various and sundry alternative lifestyles that Huxley thought they would find conducive to their own developing worldviews.

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.

Aldous Huxley, the Perennial Philosophy, and the Tantric Paradise of Pala

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. This should not surprise us, as Huxley had been experimenting for decades on how to translate Indian ideas into Western literary and intellectual culture.

One of the ways he did this was through his notion of perennialism put forward in his 1944 work The Perennial Philosophy. Perennialism referred to a set of mystical experiences and doctrines that he believed lay at the core of all great religions, hence it is a philosophy that “perennially” returns in the history of religions. The book laid the intellectual and comparative foundations for much that would come after it, including Esalen and, a bit later, the American New Age movement. By the 1980s and ’90s, Esalen intellectuals were growing quite weary and deeply suspicious of what was looking more and more like facile ecumenism and an ideological refusal to acknowledge real and important differences among the world’s cultures and religions. But this would take decades of hard thinking and multiple disillusionments. In the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, it was still a radical and deeply subversive thing to assert the deep unity of the world’s religions.

And this is precisely what Huxley was doing. After mistakenly attributing the Latin phrase philosophia perennis to Leibniz, Huxley defines the key concept this way in his very first lines: “PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS . . . the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being—the thing is immemorial and universal.”

In essence, Huxley’s perennial philosophy was a form of what historians of Indian religion call neo-Vedanta, a modern religious movement inspired by the ecstatic visionary experiences of Sri Ramakrishna (1836û1886) and the preaching and writing of Swami Vivekananda (1863û1902), Ramakrishna’s beloved disciple who brought his master’s message about the unity of all religions to the States in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was Huxley who wrote the foreword to this same tradition’s central text in translation, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942). It was within this same spiritual lineage again that Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood found much of their own inspiration and through which a general Hindu perennialism was passed on to early Esalen and American culture.

Such cultural combinations, of course, did not always work. As with all intellectual systems, there were gaps, stress-points, contradictions. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the realm of ethics. Thus, for example, Huxley seems personally puzzled over the strange moral conditions of his hybrid vision, that is, the suppression or destruction of the personality, which the perennial philosophy understands as the “original sin.” But he accepts the textual facts for what they in fact seem to be and then illustrates them with a telling chemical metaphor that we might now recognize as an early traumatic model for the mystical, perhaps best expressed in this story in the mystical life and psychological sufferings of Dick Price. Here is how Huxley put it in 1944:

Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest.

But it was not quite these mystical-ethical dilemmas or this psychology of trauma that Huxley would pass on to Esalen. It was, first, his Hindu-inspired notion of the perennial philosophy; second, his firm belief that psychedelic substances can grant genuine metaphysical insight; and, third, his central notion of the latent and manifest “potentialities.” We will get to the psychedelic soon enough.

Here is how Huxley introduced the concept of potentialities, with a little help from an unacknowledged Freud, in The Perennial Philosophy: “It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities. In the ordinary circumstances of average sensual life these potentialities of the mind remain latent and unmanifested.” A few pages later, Huxley’s writes of “the almost endless potentialities of the human mind” that have “remained for so long unactualized,” foreshadowing the later language and psychology of Abraham Maslow’s notion of self-actualization, another major conceptual influence on the founding of Esalen.

Even more relevant to the history of Esalen—indeed, prophetic of that future story—was Huxley’s very last novel, Island, which appeared in March of 1962, just one month after he had introduced a still unknown Timothy Leary to “the ultimate yoga” of Tantra, and just two months after he met Michael Murphy and Richard Price in Big Sur. The novel’s pragmatic celebration of Tantric eroticism and its harsh criticism of ascetic forms of spirituality (which the novel links to sexual repression, a guilt-ridden homosexuality, and aggressive militarism) marks a significant shift in Huxley’s spiritual worldview, at least as he was expressing it in print. After all, if in 1942 he could write a carefully diplomatic foreword to a book about a Hindu saint who considered all women to be aspects of the Mother Goddess and so would have sex with none of them (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna), now he was suggesting openly in 1962 that “to think of Woman as essentially Holy” was an expression of a conflicted male homosexuality anxious to avoid any and all heterosexual contact. It is much better, the novel now suggests, to think of the erotic union of man and woman as holy, that is, to see the sacred in the sexual and the sexual in the sacred. Hence “the cosmic love-making of Shiva and the Goddess.” Late in life Huxley appears to have been moving away from his earlier ascetic Vedanta, so prominently featured in The Perennial Philosophy, toward a new psychologically inflected Tantra.

Laura Huxley considers Island to be her husband’s final legacy, the place where he put everything he had learned. When I asked her about the novel’s obvious focus on Tantra, she was quick to point out that Aldous was not particularly friendly to traditional religion, and that he considered Tantra to be a technique, not a religion. Everything written in Island, she insisted, had been tried somewhere. The novel thus laid down a real and practical path to follow, not just a dream or another impossible religious claim. The novel was Aldous’s blueprint for a good society, even, Laura pointed out, if that “island” is one’s own home or private inner world. It can be done. That is the point.

The story itself involves a jaded journalist, Will Farnaby, who lands by accident on a forbidden island called Pala. Pala culture had been formed a few generations earlier by two men—a pious Indian adept in Tantric forms of Buddhism and Hinduism and by a scientifically enlightened Scottish doctor. The culture thus embodied both a literal friendship between and a consequent synthesis of Tantric Asia, with its lingams, deities, and yogas, and Western rationalism, with its humanism, psychology and science.

Farnaby quickly learns that Pala’s two principle educational practices involve a contemplative form of sexuality called maithuna (the Tantric term for sexual intercourse) and the ingestion of a psychedelic mushroom the inhabitants called moksha (the traditional Sanskrit word for “spiritual liberation”). The sexual practice, which was also consciously modeled on the Oneida community of nineteenth-century America and its ideal of male continence (a form of extended sexual intercourse without ejaculation), functioned as both a contemplative technique and as an effective means of birth control. The psychedelic practice initiated the young islanders into metaphysical wisdom, that is, into the empirical realization that their true selves could not be identified with their little social egos, which were understood to be necessary but temporary “filters” of a greater cosmic consciousness.

The novel meanders lovingly through and around both this maithuna and this moksha—which are manifestly the real point and deepest story of the novel—as the Rani or Queen Mother of Pala and her sexually repressed homosexual son, Murugan, take the utopian island further and further toward Westernization, industrialization, capitalism, and a finally violent fundamentalism organized around notions of “the Ideal of Purity,” “the Crusade of the Spirit,” and “God’s Avatars” (the Queen liked to capitalize things). The ending is as predictable as it is depressing: the forces of righteousness and religion win out over those of natural sensuality, pantheism, and erotic wisdom.

Strikingly, virtually all the markers of the later Esalen gnosis are present on Huxley’s “imagined” utopian island. Laura Huxley’s observation about her late husband’s rejection of organized religion, for example, are played out in full. “We have no established church,” one of the islanders explains, “and our religion stresses immediate experience and deplores belief in unverifiable dogmas and the emotions which that belief inspires.” Hence the humorous prayer of Pala: “Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.” The islanders even integrated this religion of no religion into their agricultural affairs: the scarecrows in the fields were thus made to look like a Future Buddha and a God the Father, so that the children who manipulated the scarecrow-puppets with strings to scare off the birds could learn that “all gods are homemade, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.” Altered states, of course, were also central to Pala’s culture through the moksha-medicine, and the techniques of Tantra were omnipresent in their sexual lives. Perhaps most strikingly, Huxley saw very clearly that Zen, Taoism, and Tantra were all related expressions of a deeper transcultural gnosis or supertradition—what he called “the new conscious Wisdom.” More astonishingly still, he even linked this supertradition to the scientific insights of Darwinian evolution and proposed that the latter should now be realized through conscious contemplative practice in a way that uncannily foreshadows Murphy’s own “evolutionary Tantra.”

Somehow, Aldous knew what Esalen would come to know. And then he died. An earthquake struck Big Sur that day.

Gerald Heard and the Evolutionary Energies of Lust

Gerald Heard also played a significant role in the founding of Esalen. It was his charismatic presence and advice that finally tipped the scales for Murphy and Price and pushed them to jump in. Heard would also go on to give no less than four separate seminars in the early years. Appropriately, Anderson actually begins his Upstart Spring with Heard and has this to say about the writer’s influence on the two young men: “Huxley had so diffidently advocated a research project, had so hesitantly suggested its revolutionary possibilities. He thought something of that sort might happen. Heard thought it had to happen.”

Murphy has reminisced about his and Price’s first four-hour visit with Heard and its profound effects on him in both a brief essay titled “Totally on Fire” and in various personal communications with me. He described Heard as “archetypally Irish, like a big leprechaun, with red hair and flashing eyes,” and as “tremendously charismatic.” He also spoke of that original meeting with Heard as a real “tipping point” in his life, comparable to those first few class lectures with Spiegelberg. In the essay, moreover, he mentions Heard’s institutional presence in California, particularly his founding of Trabuco College, a small quasi-monastic educational experiment that lasted five years (1942û47) before Heard turned it over to the Vedanta Society of Southern California in 1949, as well as his strong presence in the Sequoia Seminars on the San Francisco peninsula. Both Trabuco and the Sequoia Seminars were clear precedents for Esalen.

So were a number of Heard’s ideas. Murphy was reading Heard’s Pain, Sex and Time and The Human Venture just before he and Price met him in 1961. Murphy is clear that Heard was not a significant intellectual influence on his own thought, but he also points out that the connections were real ones. Hence the Fire. Heard, for example, was very conversant in psychical research. Indeed, he had spent ten years working closely with the Society for Psychical Research in London (1932û42). Like Murphy, he had also lost his Christian faith over the convincing truths of science. Indeed, in his late twenties, he appears to have experienced a nervous breakdown over this intellectual revolution. But like Murphy again, Heard returned to a transformed faith refashioned around a new evolutionary mysticism. Physical evolution of the human species, Heard believes, has ceased, but human consciousness is still evolving; indeed, with the advent of the human species and the awakening of the human psyche through civilization, the evolutionary process has actually quickened and, perhaps most importantly, become conscious of itself. And here Murphy finds connection with Heard’s thought: “Part of his vision that appealed to me was seeing the mystical life in an evolutionary context, which put him squarely on par with Aurobindo.”

Heard had also written about the spiritual potentials of mind-altering drugs (like Huxley), about the complementarity of science and religion, even about UFO phenomena—all topics that would reappear at Esalen. And indeed, his books, rather like the UFOs, seem to swarm with strange and charming speculations, like the utterly preposterous and yet oddly attractive idea that the European witchcraft trials had eliminated a large gene pool of real psychical faculties, but that the centuries had since replaced the pool and we are now on the verge of a new “rare stock” of gifted souls endowed with evolutionary powers. All we need now is a small community, an esoteric subculture, to nurture and protect the gifted. In a talk at Esalen in 1963, he wondered out loud whether Esalen might become such an occult school. Another X-Men scenario.

Whatever one makes of such a claim, one thing seems clear enough: Heard knew what he was saying was heretical. He was aligning himself and his friends, after all, with the genes of witches. He was certainly as hard on religious orthodoxy as Spiegelberg had been. Heard could thus admit that humanity may have once needed its gods to keep in touch with the subconscious (and it was this same subconscious that supplied “the basis and force of the religious conviction” for him). Still, such anthropomorphic religions have now taken on largely “degenerative forms” that are hopelessly out of date with our science and psychology. It is time to move on, to evolve.

Finally, Heard, like his fellow British expatriate and brother Vedantist, Christopher Isherwood, was quite clear about his homosexuality. In other words, two of the three British expatriates (Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood) were self-described homosexuals, even if they chose to express this sexual-spiritual orientation in very different ways. Isherwood wrote openly about his own active homosexuality, his (failed) attempts at celibacy, and his sexuality’s defining effect on his devotional relationship to the tradition’s founding saint, Sri Ramakrishna, who he suspected (correctly) was also homoerotic in both his spiritual and sexual orientations.

Heard chose a different path. In Pain, Sex and Time he wrote about the oddly abundant energies of pain and lust in the human species as reservoirs of evolutionary energy and explored the possibilities of consciously controlling, channeling, and using this energy to cooperate with evolution and so enlarge the aperture of consciousness, to implode through space-time. Interestingly, when Heard turned to a historical sketch of these energetic techniques in the West, he began with Asia and various Tantric techniques of arresting the orgasm to alter consciousness and transcend time. Tantric Asia, in other words, functioned as something of an archetypal model for Heard in his search for a type of asceticism that was not life-denying but consciously erotic, a lifestyle that could embrace the evolutionary energies sparkling in sex, build them up through discipline, and then ride their spontaneous combustions into higher and higher states of consciousness and energy.

These Tantric moments reappear repeatedly throughout his writings. In one of his last books, for example, The Five Ages of Man (his forty-seventh book), he included an appendix: “On the Evidence for an Esoteric Mystery Tradition in the West and Its Postponement of Social Despair.” Once again, he begins a Western historical sketch not with the West, but with Tantra. Tantra, he tells us here, is the esoteric tradition of India that was subsequently persecuted and censored by both a puritan Islam and a prudish Brahmanism. Such a persecution of the mystical as the erotic was even more extreme in the West, where the esoteric often functioned as a kind of spiritual-sexual underground. Hence Heard’s reflections on an already familiar painting, Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights as explored by Wilhelm Fränger. Much like Henry Miller before him, Heard celebrates Fränger. Not that he does not have his own contribution to make: “Here, too,” he writes with reference to the same painting, “are unmistakable Tantra pictures of the rousing of Kundalini.”

He was even more explicit in his private letters. In one letter to W. J. H. Sprott (a gay friend loosely involved with the Bloomsbury group), Heard playfully describes the yogic practices of drawing water up through the anus and penis. He recounts in rather flip terms how the kundalini comes out “through the top of your sutures” (that is, the top of the skull), and then jokes of Tantra’s use of sexual-spiritual double meanings: “Or on the other hand you may take the left hand path and continue talking through your hat instead of getting out of your head.” And that was not all. “You realize,” Heard goes on, “that nearly every Tibetan Saint is a homosexual.” As for Heard himself, his own “pretty theory,” “rather wilder than any before” involved fetishism as the “true way to sublimation.” It was a version of this that he promised Sprott to read someday at the Hares Strip and Fuck Society. Bawdy laughter and real insight are impossible to distinguish in such moments, and it is the private letter, the secret talk, not the published text, that most reveals.

In midlife, probably around 1935, Heard seems to have followed his own speculations about the evolutionary sublimation of erotic energies (just after he began “turning East,” around 1932û33). He quite intentionally chose a celibate lifestyle and lived with his Platonic life-partner and personal secretary Michael Barrie. But he certainly never gave up his belief in the evolutionary potentials of sexual desire and the mystical privileges of homosexuality. Thus in the mid to late 1950s, he wrote, under the pseudonymn of D. B. Vest, about homosexuality as a potent spiritual force that might have some important role in the evolution of human consciousness. Two such essays appeared in One: The Homosexual Magazine as “A Future for the Isophyl” and “Evolution’s Next Step,” and a third would appear in Homophile Studies: One Institute Quarterly as “Is the Isophyl a Biological Variant?” Both the former magazine’s title (“One”) and its Carlyle motto (“a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one”) strongly suggest Heard’s own Vedantic monistic metaphysics and mystical reading of homosexuality.

Heard’s mature homosexuality, however, was also “made sublime,” a kind of homoeroticism alchemically transmuted into a metaphysical force. Those who knew Heard often commented on these related ascetic and charismatic qualities of his personal presence (though seldom on the erotic dimensions that he himself consistently identified). His austerity was as palpable as his charisma. Indeed, Heard’s major differences with Swami Prabhavananda of the Hollywood Vedanta Society involved his strong criticisms of the Swami’s “moral lapses,” such as enjoying an occasional smoke and a nightly drink. Scandalous indeed.

Enter Hunter Thompson (1961)

Murphy and Price had already arrived at Big Sur Hot Springs before they met Heard and decided to found a new institution. When they arrived in their red Jeep pick-up in April of 1961, they found what can only be called a surreal mixture of people and worldviews. Murphy and Price pulled in late, well after dark. It was not a terribly auspicious first night. Murphy reports waking up in the middle of the night in the Big House to an angry young man pointing a gun at him: “Who the hell are you, and what are ya’ doing here?”

Enter Hunter Thompson. Bunny Murphy, Michael Murphy’s grandmother, had hired a young, billy-club-toting Thompson to guard the property and keep order. Unfortunately, she had neglected to tell her zealous guard that her grandson and friend were coming down to stay that night. Thompson, a young aspiring writer still finding his voice, had arrived to seek out the presence and inspiration of Dennis Murphy, Mike’s younger brother, whose literary work he deeply admired. Dennis had published a very successful novel in 1958, The Sergeant (about a homosexual affair in the U.S. Army), which had won the acclaim of John Steinbeck and would eventually be made into a Hollywood movie starring Rod Steiger, for which he would write the screenplay.

In 1967 Hunter Thompson published his first book, Hell’s Angels, and went on to create Gonzo journalism, a new style of American literature. Gary Trudeau immortalized his place in American literary culture as Duke in his Doonesbury series, but this would all happen later. At this point in 1961, Thompson was a young man of twenty-two living in the Big House and making copious notes in the margins of Dennis Murphy’s The Sergeant, learning the art of the pen, the sentence, and the turn of the phrase.

Thompson was hardly the only colorful character on the Murphy property, though. The folksinger Joan Baez lived in one of the cabins, where she often gave small concerts. The guest hotel on the grounds, moreover, was being managed by a certain Mrs. Webb, a fervent Evangelical Christian who had hired her fellow church members from the First Church of God of Prophecy to help her manage the day-to-day running of the place, which they leased from Bunny on a month-to-month basis. The bar, on the other hand, was patronized by what Price and Murphy called the Big Sur Heavies, locals known for their rough manners, their penchant for marijuana (which they grew in the mountains), and their quasi-criminal (or just criminal) tendencies. Then there were the baths, frequented on most weekends by homosexual men who would drive down from San Francisco or up from Los Angeles to gather in the hot waters and explore the limits of sensual pleasure. These men had even developed a kind of simple Morse code to help them manage their sexual activities: on the path leading down to the baths they would post a guard, who would switch on a blinking light at the baths to signal to the bathing lovers the approach of straight people coming down the path. Anderson paints the following humorous picture with his usual verve: “And so it went through the spring and summer of 1961: sodomy in the baths, glossolalia in the lodge, fistfights in the parking lot, folk music in the cabins, meditation in the Big House.”

Bunny had long turned down her grandson’s repeated requests to hand the grounds over to him. She was particularly concerned that Michael would “give it away to the Hindoos.” But things were getting out of hand at Big Sur Hot Springs, and she would soon change her mind after events that have since become legendary. Much of it, unsurprisingly with hindsight, revolved around Hunter Thompson.

Thompson, it turns out, sometimes picked verbal fights with the homosexual bathers. One night, he returned to the property with his girlfriend and two hitchhiking soldiers from Fort Ord (a base just north of Monterey). Thinking it was safe to go down to the baths in such a crowd, Thompson ventured down the dark path. But some of the bathers jumped him, the soldiers and his girlfriend ran away, and Thompson was left alone to slug it out. As the story goes, most of the slugging was done by the bathers. The men beat Thompson up and came very close to throwing him off the cliff that night. Bloodied and bruised, he got back to his room in the Big House, where he spent the next day sulking and shooting his gun out a window, which he never bothered to open.

Not long after this incident, Bunny would read one of Thompson’s early published essays in Rogue magazine, “Big Sur: The Tropic of Henry Miller,” in which he described the folks of Big Sur as “expatriates, ranchers, out-and-out bastards, and genuine deviates.” Such language did not go down well with Bunny. She may have been in her eighties, but she was also tough. According to Anderson, she then “made one of her rare trips down to Big Sur, in her black Cadillac with her Filipino chauffeur, for the specific purpose of firing Thompson.” Exit Hunter Thompson.

The Night of the Dobermans

Then in October came what is known in Esalen legend as the Night of the Dobermans. Thompson may have been gone, but the baths remained in the control of the gay men. Things had gotten so out of control that even Dennis Murphy’s friend Jack Kerouac looked askance. If this veritable archetype of the American Beat scene, so immune to the pettiness and damning comforts of middle-America, could visit and leave the Hot Spring baths disgusted with their moral and fluid state (he saw a dead otter bobbing in the waves and sperm floating in his bath), clearly, something had to be done.

It was not always like this. When Henry Miller wrote about Esalen’s homosexual bathers in the late 1950s, it was with real affection and a certain playful humor. For Miller at least, these were elegant artists and dancers who belonged to that “ancient order of hermaphrodites.” They reminded him of “the valiant Spartans—just before the battle of Thermopylae.” He doubted, though, that “the Slade’s Springs type would be ready to die to the last man. (æIt’s sort of silly, don’t you think?’)” That was in 1957. Things were different now. These men were acting much more like Miller’s imagined Spartans. They were ready to fight.

Murphy and Price began by erecting a gated steel fence around the baths and announcing that they would be closed from now on at 8:00 p.m.—not exactly a popular move. One night they walked down the path to close the gate and encountered a group of men who simply refused to leave. Everyone knew what had happened to Hunter. Murphy and Price returned to the lodge to gather the troops, which in the end amounted to five people, including Joan Baez and three Doberman pinschers. The dogs, it turns out, were the key. As the small band walked down the path, the three dogs began to bark viciously at each other as the owner yelled, “Choke him! Choke him!” It was all the group could do to keep the dogs apart. When the growling and snarling group finally arrived at the baths, the place was completely empty. Cars were starting and lights could be seen in the parking lot as the men made their anxious retreat. Later that evening, as Murphy walked around the property, he noticed a young couple kissing in the moonlight up on the highway. For Murphy, Anderson reports, the young couple synchronistically signaled a shift in the atmosphere and a new day (and night) at Esalen.

The proverbial guard had now literally changed. Mrs. Webb and the charismatic Christians would soon leave. The baths were no longer synonymous with the rowdy gay men of the cities. There was a meditating American yogi and an aspiring Buddhist shaman-healer on the grounds. And Joan was still singing in her cabin. Big Sur Hot Springs was on its way to becoming, as the white wooden sign still says, “Esalen Institute by Reservation Only.”


Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 85-97 of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)


Jeffrey J. Kripal
Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
©2007, 588 pages, 32 halftones, 1 color plate
Cloth $30.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-45369-9 (ISBN-10: 0-226-45369-3)

For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for Esalen.

 

SRI, Marilyn Ferguson and THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY

In the spring of 1980, a book appeared called The Aquarian Conspiracy that put itself forward as a manifesto of the counterculture. Defining the counterculture as the conscious embracing of irrationality -- from rock and drugs to biofeedback, meditation, "consciousness-raising," yoga, mountain climbing, group therapy, and psychodrama. The Aquarian Conspiracy declares that it is now time for the 15 million Americans involved in the counterculture to join in bringing about a "radical change in the United States."

Writes author Marilyn Ferguson: "While outlining a not-yet-titled book about the emerging social alternatives, I thought again about the peculiar form of this movement; its atypical leadership, the patient intensity of its adherents, their unlikely successes. It suddenly struck me that in their sharing of strategies, their linkage, and their recognition of each other by subtle signals, the participants were not merely cooperating with one another. They were in collusion. It -- this movement -- is a conspiracy!"1

Ferguson used a half-truth to tell a lie. The counterculture is a conspiracy -- but not in the half-conscious way Ferguson claim -- as she well knows. Ferguson wrote her manifesto under the direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The counterculture is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and technological progress.

That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. We will take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with Huxley in California to the victimization of 15 million Americans today. With 'The Aquarian Conspiracy', the British Opium War against the United States has come out into the open.

The Model

The British had a precedent for the counterculture they imposed upon the United States: the pagan cult ceremonies of the decadent Egyptian and Roman Empires. The following description of cult ceremonies dating back to the Egyptian Isis priesthood of the third millennium B.C. could just as well be a journalistic account of a "hippy be-in" circa A.D. 1969: "The acts or gestures that accompany the incantations constitute the rite [of Isis). In these dances, the beating of drums and the rhythm of music and repetitive movements were helped by hallucinatory substances like hashish or mescal; these were consumed as adjuvants to create the trance and the hallucinations that were taken to he the visitation of the god. The drugs were sacred, and their knowledge was limited to the initiated . . . Possibly because they have the illusion of satisfied desires, and allowed the innermost feelings to escape, these rites acquired during their execution a frenzied character that is conspicuous in certain spells: "Retreat! Re is piercing thy head, slashing thy face, dividing thy head, crushing it in his hands; thy bones are shattered, thy limbs are cut to pieces!"

The counterculture that was foisted on the 1960s adolescent youth of America is not merely analogous to the ancient cult of Isis. It is a literal resurrection of the cult down to the popularization of the Isis cross (the "peace symbol") as the counterculture's most frequently used symbol.

The High Priesthood

The high priest for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of British intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime briefing officer of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Toynbee's "theory" of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise and decline of grand imperial dynasties. At the very point that these dynasties -- the "thousand year Reich" of the Egyptian pharaohs, the Roman Empire, and the British Empire -- succeed in imposing their rule over the entire face of the earth, they tend to decline. Toynbee argued that this decline could be abated if the ruling oligarchy (like that of the British Roundtable) would devote itself to the recruitment and training of an ever-expanding priesthood dedicated to the principles of imperial rule.3

Trained at Toynbee's Oxford, Aldous Huxley was one of the initiates in the "Children of the Sun," a Dionysian cult comprised of the children of Britain's Roundtable elite.4 Among the other initiates were T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sir Oswald Mosley, and D.H. Lawrence, Huxley's homosexual lover. It was Huxley, furthermore, who would launch the legal battle in the 1950s to have Lawrence's pornographic novel Lady Chatterley's Lover allowed into the United States on the ground that it was a misunderstood "work of art."

Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British foreign intelligence during World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy. Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what Wells called The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. The "Open Conspiracy," Wells wrote, "will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the stages, a mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort of surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible government."

What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a "one-world brain" which would function as " a police of the mind." Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the priesthood itself. But Wells's popular writings (Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), were written as "mass appeal" organizing documents on behalf of one-world order. Only in the United States are these "science fiction classics" taught in grade school as attacks against fascism.

Under Wells's tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist circle that developed in Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War. In 1886, Crowley, William Butler Yeats, and several other Bulwer-Lytton proteges formed the Isis-Urania Temple of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. This Isis Cult was organized around the 1877 manuscript Isis Unveiled by Madame Helena Blavatsky, in which the Russian occultist called for the British aristocracy to organize itself into an Isis priesthood.7

The subversive Isis Urania Order of the Golden Dawn is today an international drug ring said to be controlled by the Canadian multi-millionaire, Maurice Strong, who is also a top operative for British Intelligence.

In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained throughout the period of World War II. Through a Los Angeles contact, Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast Christopher Isherwood were employed as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios. Hollywood was already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled and controlled through London. Joseph Kennedy was the frontman for a British consortium that created RKO studios, and "Bugsy" Siegel, the West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner Brothers and MGM.

Huxley founded a nest of Isis cults in southern California and in San Francisco, that consisted exclusively of several hundred deranged worshipers of Isis and other cult gods. Isherwood, during the California period, translated and propagated a number of ancient Zen Buddhist documents, inspiring Zen-mystical cults along the way.

In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas Mann and his daughter Elisabeth Mann Borghese) laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture, by recruiting a core of "initiates" into the Isis cults that Huxley's mentors, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, and Crowley, had constituted while stationed in India.

LSD: 'Visitation from the Gods'

"Ironically," writes Ferguson, "the introduction of major psychedelics like LSD, in the 1960s, was largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency's investigation into the substances for possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs. Soon they were synthesizing their own 'acid.' "9

The CIA operation was code named MK-Ultra, its result was not unintentional, and it began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to the United States.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was developed in 1943 by Albert Hoffman, a chemist at Sandoz A.B. -- a Swiss pharmaceutical house owned by S.G. Warburg. While precise documentation is unavailable as to the auspices under which the LSD research was commissioned, it can be safely assumed that British intelligence and its subsidiary U.S. Office of Strategic Services were directly involved. Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA when that agency began MK-Ultra, was the OSS station chief in Berne, Switzerland throughout the early Sandoz research. One of his OSS assistants was James Warburg, of the same Warburg family, who was instrumental in the 1963 founding of the Institute for Policy Studies, and worked with both Huxley and Robert Hutchins."


Aldous Huxley returned to the United States from Britain, accompanied by Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the Huxleys' private physician. Osmond had been part of a discussion group Huxley had organized at the National Hospital, Queens Square, London. Along with another seminar participant, J.R. Smythies, Osmond wrote Schizophrenia: A New Approach, in which he asserted that mescaline -- a derivative of the mescal cactus used in ancient Egyptian and Indian pagan rites -- produced a psychotic state identical in all clinical respects to schizophrenia. On this basis, Osmond and Smythies advocated experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs as a means of developing a "cure" for mental disorders.

Osmond was brought in by Allen Dulles to play a prominent role in MK-Ultra. At the same time, Osmond, Huxley, and the University of Chicago's Robert Hutchins held a series of secret planning sessions in 1952 and 1953 for a second, private LSD mescaline project under Ford Foundation funding.11 Hutchins, it will be recalled, was the program director of the Ford Foundation during this period. His LSD proposal incited such rage in Henry Ford II that Hutchins was fired from the foundation the following year.

It was also in 1953 that Osmund gave Huxley a supply of mescaline for his personal consumption. The next year, Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception, the first manifesto of the psychedelic drug cult, which claimed that hallucinogenic drugs "expand consciousness." Although the Ford Foundation rejected the Hutchins-Huxley proposal for private foundation sponsorship of LSD, the proposal was not dropped. Beginning in 1962, the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, California began a four-year experiment in LSD, peyote, and marijuana. The Rand Corporation was established simultaneously with the reorganization of the Ford Foundation during 1949. Rand was an outgrowth of the wartime Strategic Bombing Survey, a "cost analysis" study of the psychological effects of the bombings of German population centers.

According to a 1962 Rand Abstract, W.H. McGlothlin conducted a preparatory study on "The Long-Lasting Effects of LSD on Certain Attitudes in Normals: An Experimental Proposal." The following year, McGlothlin conducted a year-long experiment on thirty human guinea pigs, called "Short-Term Effects of LSD on Anxiety, Attitudes and Performance." The study concluded that LSD improved emotional attitudes and resolved anxiety problems.12

Huxley At Work

Huxley expanded his own LSD-mescaline project in California by recruiting several individuals who had been initially drawn into the cult circles he helped establish during his earlier stay. The two most prominent individuals were Alan Watts and the late Dr. Gregory Bateson (the former husband of Dame Margaret Mead). Watts became a self-styled "guru" of a nationwide Zen Buddhist cult built around his well-publicized books. Bateson, an anthropologist with the OSS, became the director of a hallucinogenic drug experimental clinic at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Under Bateson's auspices, the initiating "cadre" of the LSD cult -- the hippies -- were programmed.

Watts at the same time founded the Pacifica Foundation, which sponsored two radio station WKBW in San Francisco and WBM-FM in New York City. The Pacifica stations were among the first to push the "Liverpool Sound" -- the British-imported hard rock twanging of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Animals. They would later pioneer "acid rock" and eventually the self-avowed psychotic "punk rock."

During the fall of 1960, Huxley was appointed visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Around his stay in that city, Huxley created a circle at Harvard parallel to his West Coast LSD team. The Harvard group included Huxley, Osmund, and Watts (brought in from California), Timothy Leary, and Richard Alpert.

The ostensible topic of the Harvard seminar was "Religion and its Significance in the Modern Age." The seminar was actually a planning session for the "acid rock" counterculture. Huxley established contact during this Harvard period with the president of Sandoz, which at the time was working on a CIA contract to produce large quantities of LSD and psilocybin (another synthetic hallucinogenic drug) for MK-Ultra, the CIA's official chemical warfare experiment. According to recently released CIA documents, Allen Dulles purchased over 100 million doses of LSD -- almost all of which flooded the streets of the United States during the late 1960s. During the same period, Leary began privately purchasing large quantities of LSD from Sandoz as well.

From the discussions of the Harvard seminar, Leary put together the book The Psychedelic Experience, based on the ancient cultist Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was this book that popularized Osmund's previously coined term, "psychedelic mind-expanding."

The Roots of the Flower People

Back in California, Gregory Bateson had maintained the Huxley operation out of the Palo Alto VA hospital. Through LSD experimentation on patients already hospitalized for psychological problems, Bateson established a core of "initiates" into the "psychedelic" Isis Cult.

Foremost among his Palo Alto recruits was Ken Kesey. In 1959, Bateson administered the first dose of "SD to Kesey. By 1962, Kesey had completed a novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which popularized the notion that society is a prison and the only truly "free" people are the insane.


Kesey subsequently organized a circle of "SD initiates called "The Merry Pranksters." They toured the country disseminating SD" (often without forewarning the receiving parties), building up local distribution connections, and establishing the pretext for a high volume of publicity on behalf of the still minuscule "counterculture."

By 1967, the Kesey cult had handed out such quantities of "SD that a sizable drug population had emerged, centered in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Here Huxley collaborator Bateson set up a "free clinic," staffed by **Dr. David Smith -- later a "medical adviser" for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML); **Dr. Ernest Dernberg an active-duty military officer, probably on assignment through MK-UItra; **Roger Smith-a street gang organizer trained by Saul Alinsky. During the Free Clinic period, Roger Smith was the parole officer of the cultist mass murderer Charles Manson; **Dr. Peter Bourne -- formerly President Carter's special assistant on drug abuse. Bourne did his psychiatric residency at the Clinic. He had previously conducted a profiling study of GI heroin addicts in Vietnam.

The Free Clinic paralleled a project at the Tavistock Institute, the psychological warfare agency for the British Secret Intelligence Service.
Tavistock, founded as a clinic in London in the 1920s, had become the Psychiatric Division of the British Army during World War II under its director, Dr. John Rawlings Rees.

During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic "mind-expanding" drugs are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a Conference on the "Dialectics of Liberation," chaired by Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.

Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of "initiates." All of them -- Leary, Osmund, Watts, Kesey, Alpert -- became the highly publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the cult of "Flower People" in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD, hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late 1960s.

cont. http://robertscourt.blogspot.com/2008/06/are-republicans-next-nazi-party-see.html