Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... o-loved-me

The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa-funded project that went wrong

In the 1960s, Margaret Lovatt was part of a Nasa-funded project to communicate with dolphins. Soon she was living with 'Peter' 24 hours a day in a converted house. Christopher Riley reports on an experiment that went tragically wrong

Christopher Riley
The Observer, Saturday 7 June 2014


Marine girl: Margaret Lovatt at the Dolphin House on St Thomas
Photograph: courtesy Lilly Estate

Like most children, Margaret Howe Lovatt grew up with stories of talking animals. "There was this book that my mother gave to me called Miss Kelly," she remembers with a twinkle in her eye. "It was a story about a cat who could talk and understand humans and it just stuck with me that maybe there is this possibility."

Unlike most children, Lovatt didn't leave these tales of talking animals behind her as she grew up. In her early 20s, living on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, they took on a new significance. During Christmas 1963, her brother-in-law mentioned a secret laboratory at the eastern end of the island where they were working with dolphins. She decided to pay the lab a visit early the following year. "I was curious," Lovatt recalls. "I drove out there, down a muddy hill, and at the bottom was a cliff with a big white building."

Lovatt was met by a tall man with tousled hair, wearing an open shirt and smoking a cigarette. His name was Gregory Bateson, a great intellectual of the 20th century and the director of the lab. "Why did you come here?" he asked Lovatt.

"Well, I heard you had dolphins," she replied, "and I thought I'd come and see if there was anything I could do or any way I could help…" Unused to unannounced visitors and impressed by her bravado, Bateson invited her to meet the animals and asked her to watch them for a while and write down what she saw. Despite her lack of scientific training, Lovatt turned out to be an intuitive observer of animal behaviour and Bateson told her she could come back whenever she wanted.

"There were three dolphins," remembers Lovatt. "Peter, Pamela and Sissy. Sissy was the biggest. Pushy, loud, she sort of ran the show. Pamela was very shy and fearful. And Peter was a young guy. He was sexually coming of age and a bit naughty."

The lab's upper floors overhung a sea pool that housed the animals. It was cleaned by the tide through openings at each end. The facility had been designed to bring humans and dolphins into closer proximity and was the brainchild of an American neuroscientist, Dr John Lilly. Here, Lilly hoped to commune with the creatures, nurturing their ability to make human-like sounds through their blow holes.

Lilly had been interested in connecting with cetaceans since coming face to face with a beached pilot whale on the coast near his home in Massachusetts in 1949. The young medic couldn't quite believe the size of the animal's brain – and began to imagine just how intelligent the creature must have been, explains Graham Burnett, professor of the history of science at Princeton and author of The Sounding of the Whale. "You are talking about a time in science when everybody's thinking about a correlation between brain size and what the brain can do. And in this period, researchers were like: 'Whoa… big brain huh… cool!'"


Tripper and flipper: Dr John Lilly, who started experimenting with LSD during the project.
Photograph: Lilly Estate

At every opportunity in the years that followed, John Lilly and his first wife, Mary, would charter sailboats and cruise the Caribbean, looking for other big-brained marine mammals to observe. It was on just such a trip in the late 1950s that the Lillys came across Marine Studios in Miami – the first place to keep the bottlenose dolphin in captivity.

Up until this time, fishermen on America's east coast, who were in direct competition with dolphins for fish, had considered the animals vermin. "They were know as 'herring hogs' in most of the seafaring towns in the US," says Burnett. But here, in the tanks of Marine Studios, the dolphins' playful nature was endearingly on show and their ability to learn tricks quickly made it hard to dislike them.

Here, for the first time, Lilly had the chance to study the brains of live dolphins, mapping their cerebral cortex using fine probes, which he'd first developed for his work on the brains of rhesus monkeys. Unable to sedate dolphins, as they stop breathing under anaesthetic, the brain-mapping work wasn't easy for either animals or scientists, and the research didn't always end well for the marine mammals. But on one occasion in 1957, the research would take a different course which would change his and Mary's lives for ever.

Now aged 97, Mary still remembers the day very clearly. "I came in at the top of the operating theatre and heard John talking and the dolphin would go: 'Wuh… wuh… wuh' like John, and then Alice, his assistant, would reply in a high tone of voice and the dolphin would imitate her voice. I went down to where they were operating and told them that this was going on and they were quite startled."

Perhaps, John reasoned, this behaviour indicated an ambition on the dolphins' part to communicate with the humans around them. If so, here were exciting new opportunities for interspecies communication. Lilly published his theory in a book in 1961 called Man and Dolphin. The idea of talking dolphins, eager to tell us something, captured the public's imagination and the book became a bestseller.

Man and Dolphin extrapolated Mary Lilly's initial observations of dolphins mimicking human voices, right through to teaching them to speak English and on ultimately to a Cetacean Chair at the United Nations, where all marine mammals would have an enlightening input into world affairs, widening our perspectives on everything from science to history, economics and current affairs.

Lilly's theory had special significance for another group of scientists – astronomers. "I'd read his book and was very impressed," says Frank Drake, who had just completed the first experiment to detect signals from extraterrestrial civilisations using a radio telescope at Green Bank in West Virginia. "It was a very exciting book because it had these new ideas about creatures as intelligent and sophisticated as us and yet living in a far different milieu." He immediately saw parallels with Lilly's work, "because we [both] wanted to understand as much as we could about the challenges of communicating with other intelligent species." This interest helped Lilly win financial backing from Nasa and other government agencies, and Lilly opened his new lab in the Caribbean in 1963, with the aim of nurturing closer relationships between man and dolphin.

A few months LATER, in early 1964, Lovatt arrived. Through her naturally empathetic nature she quickly connected with the three animals and, eager to embrace John Lilly's vision for building an interspecies communication bridge, she threw herself into his work, spending as much time as possible with the dolphins and carrying out a programme of daily lessons to encourage them to make human-like sounds. While the lab's director, Gregory Bateson, concentrated on animal-to-animal communication, Lovatt was left alone to pursue Lilly's dream to teach the dolphins to speak English. But even at a state-of-the-art facility like the Dolphin House, barriers remained. "Every night we would all get in our cars and pull the garage door down and drive away," remembers Lovatt. "And I thought: 'Well there's this big brain floating around all night.' It amazed me that everybody kept leaving and I just thought it was wrong."

Lovatt reasoned that if she could live with a dolphin around the clock, nurturing its interest in making human-like sounds, like a mother teaching a child to speak, they'd have more success. "Maybe it was because I was living so close to the lab. It just seemed so simple. Why let the water get in the way?" she says. "So I said to John Lilly: 'I want to plaster everything and fill this place with water. I want to live here.'"

The radical nature of Lovatt's idea appealed to Lilly and he went for it. She began completely waterproofing the upper floors of the lab, so that she could actually flood the indoor rooms and an outdoor balcony with a couple of feet of water. This would allow a dolphin to live comfortably in the building with her for three months.

Lovatt selected the young male dolphin called Peter for her live-in experiment. "I chose to work with Peter because he had not had any human-like sound training and the other two had," she explains. Lovatt would attempt to live in isolation with him six days a week, sleeping on a makeshift bed on the elevator platform in the middle of the room and doing her paperwork on a desk suspended from the ceiling and hanging over the water. On the seventh day Peter would return to the sea pool downstairs to spend time with the two female dolphins at the lab – Pamela and Sissy.


'If I was sitting with my legs in the water, he'd come up and look at the back of my knee for a long time':
Margaret with Peter. Photograph: courtesy Lilly Estate

By the summer of 1965, Lovatt's domestic dolphinarium was ready for use. Lying in bed, surrounded by water that first night and listening to the pumps gurgling away, she remembers questioning what she was doing. "Human people were out there having dinner or whatever and here I am. There's moonlight reflecting on the water, this fin and this bright eye looking at you and I thought: 'Wow, why am I here?' But then you get back into it and it never occurred to me not to do it. What I was doing there was trying to find out what Peter was doing there and what we could do together. That was the whole point and nobody had done that."

Audio recordings of Lovatt's progress, meticulously archived on quarter-inch tapes at the time, capture the energy that Lovatt brought to the experiment – doggedly documenting Peter's progress with her twice-daily lessons and repeatedly encouraging him to greet her with the phrase 'Hello Margaret'. "'M' was very difficult," she remembers. "My name. Hello 'M'argaret. I worked on the 'M' sound and he eventually rolled over to bubble it through the water. That 'M', he worked on so hard."

For Lovatt, though, it often wasn't these formal speech lessons that were the most productive. It was just being together which taught her the most about what made Peter tick. "When we had nothing to do was when we did the most," she reflects. "He was very, very interested in my anatomy. If I was sitting here and my legs were in the water, he would come up and look at the back of my knee for a long time. He wanted to know how that thing worked and I was so charmed by it."

Carl Sagan, one of the young astronomers at Green Bank, paid a visit to report back on progress to Frank Drake. "We thought that it was important to have the dolphins teach us 'Dolphinese', if there is such a thing," recalls Drake. "For example we suggested two dolphins in each tank not able to see each other – and he should teach one dolphin a procedure to obtain food – and then see if it could tell the other dolphin how to do the same thing in its tank. That was really the prime experiment to be done, but Lilly never seemed able to do it."

Instead, he encouraged Lovatt to press on with teaching Peter English. But there was something getting in the way of the lessons. "Dolphins get sexual urges," says the vet Andy Williamson, who looked after the animals' health at Dolphin House. "I'm sure Peter had plenty of thoughts along those lines."

"Peter liked to be with me," explains Lovatt. "He would rub himself on my knee, or my foot, or my hand. And at first I would put him downstairs with the girls," she says. But transporting Peter downstairs proved so disruptive to the lessons that, faced with his frequent arousals, it just seemed easier for Lovatt to relieve his urges herself manually.

"I allowed that," she says. "I wasn't uncomfortable with it, as long as it wasn't rough. It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch – just get rid of it, scratch it and move on. And that's how it seemed to work out. It wasn't private. People could observe it."

For Lovatt it was a precious thing, which was always carried out with great respect. "Peter was right there and he knew that I was right there," she continues. "It wasn't sexual on my part. Sensuous perhaps. It seemed to me that it made the bond closer. Not because of the sexual activity, but because of the lack of having to keep breaking. And that's really all it was. I was there to get to know Peter. That was part of Peter."

Innocent as they were, Lovatt's sexual encounters with Peter would ultimately overshadow the whole experiment when a story about them appeared in Hustler magazine in the late 1970s. "I'd never even heard ofHustler," says Lovatt. "I think there were two magazine stores on the island at the time. And I went to one and looked and I found this story with my name and Peter, and a drawing."


Sexploitation: Hustler magazine's take on the story in the late 1970s.
Photograph: Lilly Estate

Lovatt bought up all the copies she could find, but the story was out there and continues to circulate to this day on the web. "It's a bit uncomfortable," she acknowledges. "The worst experiment in the world, I've read somewhere, was me and Peter. That's fine, I don't mind. But that was not the point of it, nor the result of it. So I just ignore it."

Something else began to interrupt the study. Lilly had been researching the mind-altering powers of the drug LSD since the early 1960s. The wife of Ivan Tors, the producer of the dolphin movie Flipper, had first introduced him to it at a party in Hollywood. "John and Ivan Tors were really good friends," says Ric O'Barry of the Dolphin Project (an organisation that aims to stop dolphin slaughter and exploitation around the world) and a friend of Lilly's at the time. "Ivan was financing some of the work on St Thomas. I saw John go from a scientist with a white coat to a full blown hippy," he remembers.

For the actor Jeff Bridges, who was introduced to Lilly by his father Lloyd, Lilly's self-experimentation with LSD was just part of who he was. "John Lilly was above all an explorer of the brain and the mind, and all those drugs that expand our consciousness," reflects Bridges. "There weren't too many people with his expertise and his scientific background doing that kind of work."

In the 1960s a small selection of neuroscientists like John Lilly were licensed to research LSD by the American government, convinced that the drug had medicinal qualities that could be used to treat mental-health patients. As part of this research, the drug was sometimes injected into animals and Lilly had been using it on his dolphins since 1964, curious about the effect it would have on them.


Margaret Lovatt today. Photograph: Matt Pinner/BBC

Much to Lilly's annoyance, nothing happened. Despite his various attempts to get the dolphins to respond to the drug, it didn't seem to have any effect on them, remembers Lovatt. "Different species react to different pharmaceuticals in different ways," explains the vet, Andy Williamson. "A tranquilliser made for horses might induce a state of excitement in a dog. Playing with pharmaceuticals is a tricky business to say the least."

Injecting the dolphins with LSD was not something Lovatt was in favour of and she insisted that the drug was not given to Peter, which Lilly agreed to. But it was his lab, and they were his animals, she recalls. And as a young woman in her 20s she felt powerless to stop him giving LSD to the other two dolphins.

While Lilly's experimentation with the drug continued, Lovatt persevered with Peter's vocalisation lessons and grew steadily closer to him. "That relationship of having to be together sort of turned into really enjoying being together, and wanting to be together, and missing him when he wasn't there," she reflects. "I did have a very close encounter with – I can't even say a dolphin again – with Peter."

By autumn 1966, Lilly's interest in the speaking-dolphin experiment was dwindling. "It didn't have the zing to it that LSD did at that time," recalls Lovatt of Lilly's attitude towards her progress with Peter. "And in the end the zing won."


The dolphinarium on St Thomas. Photograph: Lilly Estate

Lilly's cavalier attitude to the dolphins' welfare would eventually be his downfall, driving away the lab's director, Gregory Bateson, and eventually causing the funding to be cut. Just as Lovatt and Peter's six-month live-in experiment was concluding, it was announced that the lab would be closed.

Without funding, the fate of the dolphins was in question. "I couldn't keep Peter," says Lovatt, wistfully. "If he'd been a cat or a dog, then maybe. But not a dolphin." Lovatt's new job soon became the decommissioning of the lab and she prepared to ship the dolphins away to Lilly's other lab, in a disused bank building in Miami. It was a far cry from the relative freedom and comfortable surroundings of Dolphin House.

At the Miami lab, held captive in smaller tanks with little or no sunlight, Peter quickly deteriorated, and after a few weeks Lovatt received news.

"I got that phone call from John Lilly," she recalls. "John called me himself to tell me. He said Peter had committed suicide."

Ric O'Barry corroborates the use of this word. "Dolphins are not automatic air-breathers like we are," he explains. "Every breath is a conscious effort. If life becomes too unbearable, the dolphins just take a breath and they sink to the bottom. They don't take the next breath." Andy Williamson puts Peter's death down to a broken heart, brought on by a separation from Lovatt that he didn't understand. "Margaret could rationalise it, but when she left, could Peter? Here's the love of his life gone."

"I wasn't terribly unhappy about it," explains Lovatt, 50 years on. "I was more unhappy about him being in those conditions [at the Miami lab] than not being at all. Nobody was going to bother Peter, he wasn't going to hurt, he wasn't going to be unhappy, he was just gone. And that was OK. Odd, but that's how it was."

In the decades which followed, John Lilly continued to study dolphin-human communications, exploring other ways of trying to talk to them – some of it bizarrely mystical, employing telepathy, and some of it more scientific, using musical tones. No one else ever tried to teach dolphins to speak English again.

Instead, research has shifted to better understanding other species' own languages. At the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, founded by Frank Drake to continue his work on life beyond Earth, Drake's colleague Laurance Doyle has attempted to quantify the complexity of animal language here on our home planet.

"There is still this prejudice that humans have a language which is far and away above any other species' qualitatively," says Doyle. "But by looking at the complexity of the relationship of dolphin signals to each other, we've discovered that they definitely have a very high communication intelligence. I think Lilly's big insight was how intelligent dolphins really are."

Margaret Howe Lovatt stayed on the island, marrying the photographer who'd captured pictures of the experiment. Together they moved back into Dolphin House, eventually converting it into a family home where they brought up three daughters. "It was a good place," she remembers. "There was good feeling in that building all the time."

In the years that followed the house has fallen into disrepair, but the ambition of what went on there is still remembered. "Over the years I have received letters from people who are working with dolphins themselves," she recalls. "They often say things like: 'When I was seven I read about you living with a dolphin, and that's what started it all for me.'"

Peter is their "Miss Kelly", she explains, remembering her own childhood book about talking animals. "Miss Kelly inspired me. And in turn the idea of my living with a dolphin inspired others. That's fun. I like that."


Christopher Riley is the producer and director of The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins, which will premiere at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival on 11 June, and is on BBC4 on 17 June at 9pm

[American Dream]

http://www.alexanderwild.com/Insects/In ... -vpVGSxF/A

[American Dream]

http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2014/06 ... -mind.html

THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2014

Book Review - Surviving Evil: CIA Mind Control Experiments in Vermont

While the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind control research, and associated experimental programs concerned with interrogation, torture, and use of incapacitating agents and lethal weapons, involved many dozens, if not hundreds of top U.S. researchers, and cost many millions of dollars, actual testimony from its victims is extremely difficult to find.

Publishers, news agencies, and mainstream bloggers have shunned such stories, while most victims have been either too psychologically and physically damaged, or too frightened, to come forward. Others have been written off as "crazy." Indeed, CIA stories about "mind control" have sometimes brought out persecutory delusions in the purely mentally ill.

An Involuntary Experimental Subject

But this is not one of those stories. This victim of CIA mind control research will not be dismissed, and her book, Surviving Evil - CIA Mind Control Experiments in Vermont, is largely the tale of how she documents what happened to her.

While former MK-ULTRA subject Karen Wetmore was made an involuntary subject of CIA experiments from the age of 13, and suffered from ongoing psychiatric breakdowns over the years, involving major depression, PTSD, serious dissociation (including dissociative identity disorder), autoimmune disorders and psychotic episodes, her journey from powerless victim to intrepid researcher, whistleblower, and champion of historical truth is admirable.

Wetmore used FOIA, wide-ranging research, and a dogged determination, to gather materials that would document what happened to her. In the course of her journey -- meant to reconstruct her both her life and her sense of unified self -- she discovered that the story was bigger than just her own life and experience. By luck or circumstance, she was trapped inside a tremendously large, bureaucratic, inhumane, covert program in mind control and interrogation research, run by the CIA and the Department of Defense, with tentacles spread throughout the government, academia, and medical and pharmaceutical companies and associations.

Surviving Evil is published by Manitou Comunications, a small firm owned by Colin A. Ross, M.D, who himself published an important book on the doctors who worked for the CIA in MK-ULTRA, and to whom Wetmore turned for advice and counsel during her journey. In the end, Ross helped her publish her memoir.

The book has all the strengths and a few of the weaknesses of a personal document and testimony. It is first of all an amazing story of Wetmore's recovery from psychiatric illness and trauma, made all the more impressive when you realize that she was not only combatting her own psychic demons but also government agents who did not want her to tell her story, or even know what had happened to her. Just as frustrating is the lack of help or interest in those to who she repeatedly reached out for assistance, documentation, and just plain human empathy.

Luckily for Karen, at crucial times she found people who were supportive or sympathetic. None of these were probably more important than Kathy Judge, the therapist that guided her out of the hell that is Dissociative Identity Disorder. It worth noting that while the Vermont native was horribly abused by many doctors and other medical personnel -- whose crime in many cases was silence in the face of unethical and illegal behavior -- she finds some doctors and nurses to praise for their humanity, kindness, and assistance.

Karen Wetmore was psychiatrically hospitalized at Vermont State Hospital (VSH) in the 1960s and early 1970s, and spent years there and in other psychiatric facilities. She was given powerful antipsychotic and tranquilizing drugs (and also likely hallucinogens like LSD), massive electroshock therapy, metrazol chemically-induced shock, was straightjacketed for months, probably hypnotized, and also likely sexually abused.

Recovering a History

Wetmore has searched diligently for records of her treatment, but was told they were destroyed. Yet by persistence and possibly luck -- including at one point a hint from an otherwise unhelpful CIA FOIA office -- she was able to put together some of the story, finally finding a link between psychological testing she was given at VSH and the CIA's MK-ULTRA testing psychologist, John Gittinger of Psychological Assessment Associates. (Gittinger's story was recounted in John Marks' classic book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate.)

Before she's done, Wetmore impressively linked her abuse to the operations of top CIA researcher, Dr. Robert Hyde, and others who occupied powerful medical and academic positions in the 1950s-1970s. An earlier version of her story was published in an important newspaper investigation at the Rutland Herald in November 2008. Journalist Louis Porter concentrated on following the links between Hyde and VSH. It's a rare instance of investigative journalism into the nationwide scandal that was MKULTRA (and associated programs), all-too-unique as for the most part researchers over the past 15 years have ignored the scandal. One major exception is H.P. Albarelli, who wrote an encyclopedic work on the subject, centered around the death of CIA-DoD researcher Frank Olson.

At one point in her book, Karen confronts Dr. Frederick Curlin, who had been Assistant Superintendent at VSH during part of her stay there. Her account of her conversation with the doctor is chilling. After telling Wetmore to look into his eyes, and telling her he will buy a plane or bus ticket so she can leave Vermont, Karen confronts Curlin:

"... Did you know that VSH was conducting CIA experiments?"

"Call me Doc. I love you Karen."

"Are you CIA, Dr. Curlin?"

"Not every good Indian is a dead Indian. I do love you."(p. 35)

The book is an exciting read, almost like a detective story, as Wetmore tries to put together the truth of what happened to her. At times the story rambles, and the book could sorely use an index. But in the end, her narrative holds together. When I looked up obscure references that relied on documentary evidence -- like the very little known Rockland Project, or the matter involved in MK-ULTRA subproject 8 -- the facts always checked out. Karen Wetmore has done her homework, and paid in blood and tears for having had to do it.

The narrative is often heart-breaking, and even the occasional repetitiveness works to help the reader understand how Karen's story was revealed to her over long periods of time, with sporadic new pieces of information or memories added after many iterations. The intrusive and often partial memories are like the heavy, persistent, if sometimes halting music played by PTSD, that can't be escaped.

Standing Witness

In the end, I can't review this as I would any book, for it's not just any book. It is an historical document, and the voice within is authentic. Wetmore can be plaintive, angry, sometimes confused, but more often authoritative. In my mind, she is a hero. She opens new avenues for researchers.

The best example of this is her research into deaths at VSH during the period it was presumably a CIA research facility. Wetmore documents inpatient death rates at the hospital of 11-15% per year from 1953-1972. While I could not find what normal death rates in hospitals were during that period, a CDC document I found states that normal hospital inpatient death rates from 2000-2010 were 2-2.5%. I believe that rates from thirty years earlier could not have been much more. In any case, this is a prime example of work still yet to be done.

Surviving Evil is the testimony of a witness and must be respected. We all owe Karen Wetmore a debt of gratitude. I know the impulse is to turn away from such evil as she reports, but we owe it to her, and to ourselves, not to do that. The people who did terrible things to Karen, and hundreds or thousands of others, were never held to account for it. Now a new generation practices their dark arts at CIA black sites, Guantanamo, and who knows where else. The archives remain mostly closed. Thousands of documents have been destroyed. Some few voices are still trying to speak out. Here's one. Listen.

http://archive.truthout.org/the-hidden- ... ldren62208

The Hidden Tragedy of the CIA's Experiments on Children
Wednesday 11 August 2010
by: H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Dr. Jeffrey S. Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report

[American Dream]

http://earthrites.tumblr.com/post/89478820003

[American Dream]

http://earthrites.tumblr.com/post/89530844153

[American Dream]

Funny parody of famous Dragnet "Blue Boy" episode

[American Dream]

Wavy Gravy, Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner at Woodstock.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

The proto-hippy nature boys of Southern California

http://boingboing.net/2014/06/25/the-pr ... ys-of.html



Hippies can be traced back to a late 19th century German naturmenschen countercultural movement that embraced nudity, paganism, and natural foods. (Gordon Kennedy wrote a good photo-filled book about the movement called Children of the Sun. Here's an article he co-wrote with a lot of the same info and photos.)

The movement spread to California in the early 1900s, where a few young men grew long hair and beards and lived in primitive cabins in the Palm Springs area. The most famous of them was William Pester, the “Hermit of Palm Springs.” (Both photos of Pester shown here were taken in 1917.)



Over at Harp Guitars, Gregg Miner has written a lengthy and fascinating article about Pester and his influence on the "California Nature Boys" who lived in Los Angeles in the 1940s.

Kennedy summed up Pester thusly: “The many photos of Pester clearly reveal the strong link between the 19th century German reformers and the flower children of the 1960s…long hair and beards, bare feet or sandals, guitars, love of nature, draft dodger, living simple and an aversion to rigid political structure. Undoubtedly Bill Pester introduced a new human type to California and was a mentor for many of the American Nature Boys.”

The “California Nature Boys,” as they were soon dubbed, were young Americans who hung out at Eutropheon, a health food store on Laurel Canyon Blvd in Los Angeles, adopting owner John Richter’s “transcendentalist philosophy, wearing long hair and beards and eating only raw fruits and vegetables.” Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road that he saw “an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals” while passing through L.A. in 1947. Soon, one of these “Nature Boys” – eden ahbez – would become quite famous after writing a song based on this name.

eden abhez (right) wrote the song "Nature Boy," (a Nat King Cole hit) and also made his own album, called Eden's Island, which I love. You can listen to the whole album on YouTube.

[American Dream]

http://boingboing.net/2014/06/27/visito ... on-cr.html

Visitor from Planet Zoltron crushes police car




Calquan Burr, 20, of Planet Zoltron, was arrested late last Sunday after charging a police cruiser, leaping onto the hood and cracking the windshield.

Alarmed locals in Dalton Township, Michigan, had summoned law enforcement after seeing a man armed with a four-foot metal pole "casing" the neighborhood.

When officers rounded the corner of Blue Lake and Duff roads, however, Burr sprung from the shadows toward their vehicle—a manoever caught on dashcam.

"There was no time to avoid him," Lt. Shane Brown of the Muskegon County Sheriff's Department told ABC News.

Once arrested, Burr, reportedly uninjured, told deputies that he was from Planet Zoltron and intended to crush their car. He was later charged with aggravated assault against a police officer.

Police say they suspect Burr was "under the influence of mind-altering drugs."

[American Dream]

http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/ ... ndfulness/

The PBG and The False Promise of Mindfulness

Posted by: Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey



Within a week of coming out of my recent 6 month silent vipassana retreat, I found myself pulled back into the tumbling vortex of daily life. Within two weeks I had broken out in shingles, my doctors warning me that I could lose vision in my left eye if I wasn’t careful.

“Are you stressed?” the ophthalmologist asked. “Maybe you should try meditation.”

The experience of a vipassana retreat isn’t very well-represented by the stylized images of meditation we regularly come across in the media: people with perfect posture keeping their thumb and index fingers touching oh-so-lightly for a frozen eternity. These images of cool-looking yogis are largely informed by and perpetuate powerful misconceptions about the nature of “mindfulness” in our contemporary era. In reality, the longer the meditation retreat, the deeper, generally, is the drop into the uncool. Practitioners often come back to the wider world acting like people who have buried below the earth for a thousand years: squinting at the sun, flinching at every sudden noise, and taking every chance we can to hide in the bathroom until we adjust to so-called “real life” after a few days. You can make it look cool in a magazine. But it’s pretty hard to make it feel cool.

While mindfulness-based meditation is powerfully liberating on its own turf, the mind/heart, the results are less predictably useful in the broader society whose foundational values are often at odds with the qualities of understanding and kindness a yogi seeks to cultivate. Meditation practice can have very real benefits outside of oneself but these effects are beyond predictability and the road toward them is meandering and mysterious.

I was acutely aware of this as I nursed my fragile, stinging eye. While noting “stabbing, stabbing, aversion” during my convalescence, I came across an online article that began dubiously: “It may have started as a trend among Silicon Valley tech companies, but mindfulness seems to be here to stay for all of us.” The piece proceeded to layout “13 Things Mindful People do Differently Every Day,” such as “take walks,” “seek out new experiences,”and “let their minds wander.” Being a recent yogi myself, I wondered why “smash their computers on the floor” didn’t come up. Maybe if the list had gone to 15 it would be there; right after “floss their teeth every night” or “pay their bills on time.”

What has happened to traditional Yoga since it came into contact with “the West” has now happened to the core tool of Buddhist practice: it has been reformulated to make sense within the bounds of what we understand, value, and hope to become; a God in our own image, as it were. The aspiration to attain worldly success through devotion is not at all new to Asian Buddhism but mindfulness-based meditation as an expression of it is new and seems to have parallel life throughout contemporary Asia as well. Thus, it is appears that this new phenomenon is not simply a cultural desalination program in the West that has turned the ocean of the Buddha’s teaching into vast warehouses of bottled water: It’s also a historical process of political economy, specifically, what Karl Marx termed the bourgeois relations of production.

From this perspective, the newfound popularity of mindfulness might be understood as something of a “petty-bourgeoisification” of the Buddha’s teaching. The “Petty Bourgeoisie” (from here on, let’s just call them “the PBG”) is essentially the middle and upper-middle class: people who don’t have to sell their labor power for wages (the proletariat) but who aren’t involved in large-scale capital accumulation and appropriation (the “big” bourgeoisie) either. They are store owners, managers, lawyers, doctors, and educated professionals of all stripes. I’m using “PBG” because the term “petty-bourgeoisie” has become rather toxic: the result of a century of Communists around the world using the phrase to condemn anything and anyone that questioned or challenged the orthodoxy or party-line; sometimes to humiliation, sometimes to death. Marx himself had a much more nuanced view of “The Notorious PBG”: he understood its tenuous position to be the non-personal result of an historical process from which their complicated class interests and actions were an unavoidable result.

Marx was well aware that many PBG are sympathetic to the hardships facing the working class, but they generally restrain from revolutionary solidarity with them. Why? Because the PBG identify with bourgeois success and often have a vested interest in capitalism and the society it has created. The liberal PBG want to expand the benefits of capitalism without acknowledging the negative social conditions that it necessarily creates. Therefore, they are more inclined to tinker with legal structure of bourgeois society rather than overthrow it: a reformist rather than revolutionary approach. While discussing the history of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état in France, Marx polemicizes against the social-democratic movement of the PBG,

The peculiar character of social-democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonisms and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. [1]

So it is with the PBG approach to mindfulness: people often do not want to escalate the antagonism between delusion and wisdom, they want to transform it harmoniously. Many people love the Dalai Lama but few are inclined to seriously take on the radical struggle against greed, hatred, and delusion themselves. They are seduced by the notion that mindfulness will help them achieve higher worldly aspirations by increasing their mental capacity or by softening the emotional edges of capitalist alienation. Mindfulness appears to be that secret ingredient that promises to smooth over life’s rough patches and give us the winning edge in whatever game we are playing. With a little meditation in the morning we will be more successful parents, athletes, investors, students, soldiers, activists, prisoners, wardens, guards, and executioners. But just as Marx did not call for harmony between classes as a response to the antagonisms at the root of bourgeois society, the Buddha did not call for a smoothing out of the rough edges of suffering or a negotiated peace with greed, hatred, and ignorance. He called for their complete usurpation, abolition, and annihilation by the forces of love and wisdom. He posited mindfulness as one essential tool for a process of disenchantment that illuminates the profoundly unstable, undependable, and disappointing nature of everything in existence: a revolutionary rather than reformist approach. In one classic refrain, he states,

Bhikkhus, on one occasion I was dwelling at Uruvelā on the bank of the river Nerañjarā under the Goatherd’s Banyan Tree just after I became fully enlightened. Then, while I was alone in seclusion, a reflection arose in my mind thus: ‘This is the one-way path for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the passing away of pain and displeasure, for the achievement of the method, for the realization of Nibbāna, that is, the four-establishments of mindfulness.’ (SN 47.43, The Path) [2]

He continues elsewhere,

What four? Here a bhikkhu dwells contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. He dwells contemplating feelings in feelings… mind in mind… phenomena in phenomena, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. This is the one way path for the purification of beings… that is, the four establishments of mindfulness. (SN 47.18, Brahma) [3]

Given our contemporary social foundation, it is unsurprising that the character of many new mindfulness programs reflects the persistence of “covetousness… in regard to the world” in the form of desires to be more capable of success within the parameters that many people understand and value. Nevertheless, one can see that this approach explicitly contradicts the Buddha’s design for his method of liberation.

.

The temptation of Buddha by Mara. The Buddha used mindfulness as a tool to conquer greed, hatred, and delusion, rather than chasing worldly success.

In Marx’s analysis, the mechanics of Capitalism eventually put intense downward class pressure on the PBG. This pressure is generally resisted and agonized over by the PBG until the inevitability of their proletarianization is fathomed and the spark of revolution may be glimpsed in their minds. The ensuing alliance with the proletariat has been at times a critical factor in the success or failure of a revolutionary moment. It is resonant with the classical insight experience of dissolution that confronts a yogi as they deepen in their practice. The experience, in which the profound instability of all phenomena is fathomed, can be one that inspires the meditator to go deeper and find liberation within this truth or that pulls them back from further progress out of fear. For the Buddha, the broader process of revolutionary disenchantment, of which this experience is a part, could take eons,

For a long time, bhikkhus, you have experienced the death of a father… the death of a brother… the death of a sister… the death of a son… the death of a daughter… the loss of relatives… the loss of wealth… loss through illness; as you have experienced this, weeping and wailing because of being united with the disagreeable and separated from the agreeable, the stream of tears you have shed is more than the water in the four great oceans… It is enough to experience revulsion towards all formations, enough to become dispassionate toward them, enough to be liberated from them. (SN 15.3, Tears) [4]

Some critics characterize the middle class’ newfound interest in meditation as escapism or evidence of their anti-social self-absorption. Perhaps it is actually a sign of what Marx predicted: that the PBG is feeling stressed by downward economic pressure and is seeking ways to manage that deep disenchantment. When their class-slippage becomes apparent, the PBG is more likely to grasp at their class identity with increasing desperation until the stabilizing revolutionary qualities have properly been cultivated. Similarly, a yogi must go through the process of loss again and again before they are able to turn their energies away from any investment in conditioned phenomena.

Marx believed strongly that the proletariat needed to engage in non-revolutionary political, social, and economic organizing in order to build the organizational and educational capacity needed for revolutionary leadership, action, and institutionalization, and to succeed in their revolutionary mission when conditions were ripe. Some “more radical” contemporaries of Marx disagreed, believing that workers should mobilize solely for revolutionary action, regardless of social conditions, and criticized Marx himself as being a reformist. Perhaps, then, these reformist approaches to mindfulness are necessary entry points that can begin a longer process of spiritual radicalization.

Most dedicated Buddhists around the world take a very very long view of the process of liberation, recognizing that the inner revolution is not simply a matter of will-power but of committed ethical integrity, rigorous mind training, and deepening sensitivity to reality. Indeed, they often commit over many, many lifetimes, to cultivating wholesome mental qualities that will support them in the eventual overthrow of greed, hatred, and delusion. This long view doesn’t make people less dedicated or their approach less “revolutionary,” it means they have fathomed the magnitude of the project and are pacing themselves appropriately; cultivating both patience and determination. Essential to this view is the understanding that the humility, kindness, and wisdom that come from this path are rewards of the practice in and of themselves and to look beyond them for our motivation, to external markers that satisfy our unexamined personal and social delusions, is folly. Keeping the north star of complete liberation always ahead of us is a fundamental part of staying on the path with integrity.

Any entry point into a sincere meditation practice is wonderful, indeed it is priceless, and any mental or physical suffering that is alleviated therefrom is extremely valuable. I know many people whose starting place in meditation practice was a world away from where they ended up in their quest for “stress-reduction”. On the other hand, I was relieved to hear about the new systematic review and meta-analysis: “Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being.” The study surveyed 47 different studies on the efficacy of meditation practice on a variety of mental phenomena. It showed “modest” or no evidence of improved anxiety, depression, pain, mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, and weight among the 3515 participants. It also found “no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment (ie, drugs, exercise, and other behavioral therapies).” As more and more people make more and more money from the mindfulness movement, it probably won’t matter much what future research proves. Most likely is that we begin the absolute bourgeoisification of mindfulness where the owning class and the bourgeois state try to use it as a tool for the reification of class dominance and imperialism.

If this sounds over-dramatic, consider another recent essay, “The Militarization of Mindfulness,” which highlighted a $4.3 million grant the U.S. Army and Department of Defense has provided University of Miami researchers for a so-called “Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training” for pre-deployment soldiers as well as $31 million for a “positive psychology” program that will include mindfulness education for 1.1 million soldiers. The Dalai Lama himself gave his approval of the program. I can only imagine that His Holiness has such profound faith in revolutionary nature of mindfulness that he is unconcerned with the utterly dubious ethics associated with training soldiers to be more mindful killers. If so, he is obviously taking the longest of long views.

While the Buddha and Marx have deeply divergent perspectives on the nature of human suffering and emancipation, in many ways they thought very similarly about these very different things. There are places where their perspectives function as imperfect mirrors of each other, of the inner and the outer revolution. These reflections and refractions can help us see that much more is at stake in this contemporary mindfulness phenomenon than merely the lifestyle whims of the PBG. Mindfulness as taught by the Buddha is not merely a pacification of stress but one important aspect of a deep engagement with suffering that has a revolutionary nature, distinct from but in some ways complementary to that of the social revolution. Appreciating mindfulness for its revolutionary potential is not simply respectful of the Buddha’s teaching, it may be the only thing mindfulness is actually good for.

My shingles eventually went away on its own and my eye seems to have made it through the turmoil unscathed. I’m not sure my meditation practice helped at all but thanks to mindfulness, I had truly accepted the possibility of my loss of vision in a way that I never would have otherwise been able to do. It teaches me every moment about the undependability of things and this has powerfully developed my heart toward a natural response of peace and compassion in the face of suffering. Part of me longs for the day when a study proves, once and for all, that mindfulness is entirely useless for anything beside the development of wisdom and kindness. If it can’t make us beautiful or successful, if it won’t heal the world, if it won’t help us lose weight or win the game, maybe it will get tossed aside by the big money-makers and those seeking to affirm, achieve, and fortify the bourgeois relations of production through contemporary spirituality. Then, those who are interested in liberating their minds from the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion can get back to work without feeling like they are missing the boat on the “mindfulness revolution” just because their lives aren’t magically and blissfully transformed through meditation. Until then, it would be good, at the very least, if people didn’t go around thinking that it all started in Silicon Valley.

[1] Marx, Karl. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, International Publishers, 1963) p50.

[2] Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya, (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2000), p1661.

[3] Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, p1647.

[4] Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, p652.

Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey is a teacher of Vipassana (Insight) meditation and other practices from the Theravada Buddhist tradition. He is a student of Michele McDonald in the lineage of Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma and is the resident teacher for Vipassana Hawai’i. His teaching aims to inspire the skills, determination, and faith necessary to realize the deepest human freedom.

Jesse was a co-founder of The Stone House, a center for spiritual life and social justice in Mebane, NC and was a Board member for BPF for several years. He is currently writing a book about the Buddha, Karl Marx, and his dad.

[American Dream]

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/i ... mtha-Riled

Ramtha Riled

By Susy Buchanan

YELM, Wash. — It’s March 2011 at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment (RSE) in this rapidly growing town just outside of Olympia. Hundreds of truth seekers pack into a converted horse arena to hear a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior speak the wisdom of the ages. The crowd is yearning for super-consciousness and enlightenment; what they get is drunken ramblings peppered with curse words. There’s no Kool-Aid served, just red wine, bottles and bottles of it. Wine ceremonies, which have been going on at RSE since 1996, are significant because students believe wine grapes were brought to Earth by extraterrestrials 450,000 years ago.

The blonde on stage is J.Z. (for Judith Zebra) Knight, a 65-year-old former rodeo queen and cable TV saleswoman. The words coming from her mouth aren’t hers, the assembled crowd believes, but rather those of the ethereal being she channels, Ramtha the Enlightened One. Knight goes back and forth between herself and the supposedly channeled Ramtha.


COURTESY OF RAMTHA SCHOOL OF ENLIGHTENMENT

During the 16 or so hours the students spend in a spiritual drinking game (students must drink every time Ramtha/Knight does), Knight will disparage Catholics, gay people, Mexicans, organic farmers, and Jews.

“Fuck God’s chosen people! I think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamned gas chambers by now,” she says as members of the audience snicker. There are also titters when she declares Mexicans “breed like rabbits” and are “poison,” that all gay men were once Catholic priests, and that organic farmers have questionable hygiene.

These are not the kind of cosmic revelations that have drawn students to Knight for 38 years. For the most part, RSE students are thoughtful and well-educated, not apt to embrace a bigoted guru. For decades, the message had been more about finding the god within than disparaging minorities, and the blend of science and New Age Gnosticism made J.Z. Knight millions well before the drunken homophobic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic racist rants began to make their way into her preachings.

What happened at RSE would have stayed at RSE had it not been for the Internet. In 2012, livestreamed videos of Ramtha’s hate speech were posted to the Web, first by ex-students Virginia Coverdale and David McCarthy, then by a libertarian-leaning think tank called the Freedom Foundation that is based in Olympia. The excerpts from that wine ceremony left Thurston County residents shocked and wondering if there was a more sinister side to their kooky neighborhood cult.

Was there a hate group lurking in “The Pride of the Prairie,” as Yelm calls itself? Knight blamed Coverdale, who had slept with Knight’s boyfriend, as a spurned lover, and the libertarian-leaning think tank, the Freedom Foundation, as politically motivated.

But the scandal caused by the videos embarrassed Democratic candidates who had taken a total of $70,000 in campaign donations from Knight. “I am appalled by Ms. Knight’s outrageous anti-Mexican, anti-Catholic raging,” said Thurston County (Wash.) Commissioner Sandra Romero. “These vile, racist, and divisive comments against responsible and caring people have no place in Thurston County, or anywhere else.” Romero ended up giving Knight’s donation to nonprofits benefitting Latinos.

Through it all, Knight has ignored requests for a retraction and maintained that the videos were maliciously edited and taken out of context.

Melissa and Steve Genson, farmers and restaurateurs who also operate an online newspaper, were equally outraged, and Melissa, a CPA and fraud investigator by training, began an intense investigation into activities at RSE. “JZ Knight shrieks abuse and ridicule at her followers, and hate speech against Catholics, Jews, gays, and others — all welcomed with audience cheers,” Melissa wrote in one of a series of critical articles on RSE for the South Thurston Journal.

Raising Ramtha
J.Z. Knight was born Judith Darlene Hampton in 1946 in Roswell, N.M., one of eight children in a family of migrant farm workers. In her autobiography, 1987’s A State of Mind: My Story, she says a Yaqui Indian woman told her mother that baby Judith would one day see what no one else could. In 1977, that prediction came true, as Knight tells it. She and her first husband heard about “Pyramid Power” — the belief that pyramids modeled on those in Egypt could sharpen razor blades and preserve food through mummification — and spent a rather manic weekend constructing paper pyramids and placing various objects (cheese, dog food) inside.

“My kitchen was looking more like a wholesale warehouse than a kitchen, but it was worth it,” Knight wrote. “We retired at three a.m., exhausted.”

The following day, Knight jokingly grabbed one of the paper pyramids, placed it on her head, and Ramtha, a seven-foot-tall apparition of golden glitter clad in a purple robe, appeared in her kitchen. “I am Ramtha the Enlightened One. I have come to help you over the ditch,” she says he told her, and shortly thereafter Knight was in business.

She began channeling Ramtha in public in 1979, presenting his wisdom nationally and internationally through workshops and retreats called “Ramtha Dialogues.” Early students included Shirley MacLaine (who broke off contact with Knight 30 years ago, a spokesman for the actress and author said), and, RSE officials say, actors Richard Chamberlain and Mike Farrell. Actress Salma Hayek and former “Dynasty” star Linda Evans are current students, they add.

That same year, she purchased an 80-acre ranch in Yelm, where she would breed Arabian horses for a time, build herself a 12,800-square-foot chateau, subsequently sell the horses, remodel the 15,000-square-foot horse arena, and open what would become RSE in 1989.



Based in Yelm, Wash., J.Z. Knight has spent the years since 1979 travelling the globe and channeling “Ramtha the Enlightened One.” It has made her a millionaire. COURTESY OF RAMTHA SCHOOL OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The location has significance that goes beyond cheap land. The region, according to RSE, was actually part of ancient Lemuria during Ramtha’s lifetime, before he migrated to Atlantis and freed his people from tyranny at the age of 14, then went on to conquer two-thirds of the world at the head of an army of 2.5 million. After being run through with a sword during battle, Ramtha sat on a rock and meditated for seven years, became enlightened, taught his body to vibrate at a high frequency and ascended, like Jesus, RSE’s website explains.

“Since the school was founded in 1989, more than 86,000 people worldwide have attended RSE events including about 7,500 in Washington State,” Knight’s Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based PR firm told the Intelligence Report. About 2,000 students live near Yelm, which has a total population of close to 7,000. The students are drawn in by the four tenets of Ramtha’s philosophy: the statement, ‘You are god’; the mandate to make known the unknown; the concept that consciousness and energy create the nature of reality; the challenge to conquer yourself.

The Nazis Cheer
But Knight also teaches students to be sovereign, to hoard gold and prepare food and supplies to survive for two years after one of the natural disasters that she often predicts will hit the earth. Knight as Ramtha is also quoted on the neo-Nazi Web forum Stormfront, where her writings on the “New World Order” are much appreciated and quoted under headings such as “Jews were responsible for causing WW1 & 2.”

“It took a lot to get this country into the First World War, because no one wanted to get into it. And so the Graymen, owning most of the media ... do you know what the media is? I have learned that term!” wrote “Ramtha” in 1999’s Ramtha: The White Book (which also carries an introduction by Knight). “The Graymen own them all; you know, the papers you read, the box you watch, the magazines you thumb through, the radio waves you listen to.”

In 2004, RSE students produced an infomercial for the school disguised as a documentary called “What the Bleep do we Know!?” The film grossed $10 million in the United States but was panned by critics. “New Age hooey disguised as a scientific documentary about quantum physics,” is how Jack Garner of the Rochester [N.Y.] Democrat and Chronicle summed it up.

Appearing in the film is Irishman Míceál Ledwith, a former monsignor in the Catholic Church, adviser to the pope, and president at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, an Irish seminary dating back to 1518.

Ledwith resigned abruptly in 1994 after allegations of pedophilia, which were later settled out of court, and was defrocked by the Vatican in 2005.

Ledwith, who is part of Knight’s inner circle and has been a student at RSE since 1989, can be seen in the full-length, 16-hour video of the 2011 wine ceremony, where he takes the stage with Knight about seven hours in, propping himself up on Ramtha’s ornate throne.

“Fuck Jehovah,” Knight proclaims, speaking in Ramtha’s voice and outing Jesus as a fellow alien who came to this planet to basically teach the same things. From the same stage, Ledwith denounces the biblical God as “fickle, capricious, psychotic, neurotic, and insecure, and we are supposed to believe that he is the creator God.” Knight adds that God is a “psychotic, insecure son of a bitch,” which draws a chuckle from the former priest. Then they dance.

Of Orbs and Soap Bubbles
Promoting Ramtha is serious business. Knight oversees 80 employees. In the past, students have paid $1,000 or more to participate in events where crowds often reached a thousand people or more. The school currently holds about 50 events a year, has published more than 600 books, CDs and videos, and has material translated into 18 languages.

Knight is fiercely protective of her kingdom. When a woman in Berlin, Germany, Judith Ravell, claimed that she was also channeling Ramtha, Knight took her to court and won the copyright to Ramtha’s teachings. Later, after another woman, Whitewind Weaver, who had attended a dozen events at RSE, imparted Ramtha’s teachings in an event of her own, Knight sued her as well, and was awarded $10,000 in 2008.

Currently, Knight is involved in legal action against those who released the hate-filled video clips to the Internet in 2012. The efforts of both Coverdale of Yelm and McCarthy of New Zealand to expose the darker side of the Enlightened One have landed them in a courtroom facing Knight. They are supported by a growing online community of ex-RSE students critical of Knight, who they describe as a dangerous cult leader. Coverdale is appealing a $600,000 judgment against her for releasing the videos, while McCarthy has a court date in May.

“The whole idea of Ramtha seemed absolute nonsense. But the RSE students I met were idealistic, intelligent, well educated and very caring, hardly the sort cult members typify, and besides I could just walk away anytime. I was convinced to just give it a try,” says McCarthy, who left the school in 1995 after seven years.

“Most people who attend the RSE flowery love bomb introductory events will be drawn in by very appealing concepts and promises. The promoters will appear smart, happy and very supportive. Nothing like typical cult behavior and recruitment techniques would be recognizable,” he adds. “The trap is set by J.Z. Knight, and those attending are clueless to the cult persuasion techniques they could fall prey to.”

It’s early March 2014, and about 30 students have come to Yelm for a “Beginner’s Event” at a cost of $450 apiece. They’ve brought sleeping bags and pillows, and are sprawled out on the floor waiting for instruction. It begins, as always, with a blast of upbeat pop music, which means the students are to assemble and dance. The schedule is rigorous, from dawn until well past dusk. Most of them sleep in the arena or camp on the compound. There are live lectures from some of the seven RSE teachers anointed by Knight, video lessons from Knight, and a number of spiritual exercises designed to expand the mind.

The music builds to a crescendo as students sit in the lotus position doing “C&E,” a meditative breathing technique which involves clenching the buttocks and thighs followed by forced breaths that make the arena sound like a pit of snakes all hissing in unison. Some students tremble and shout with ecstasy. After about 15 minutes, they don their rubber boots and rain jackets, collect two different cards with drawings of objects or concepts they covet, and proceed to a two-acre fenced paddock. They pin their cards to various places around the paddock, don their blindfolds, spin around and then attempt to find their own cards using only their minds to guide them.

The previous evening, the small class of initiates was joined by an international crowd of around 400 local students — including many young children — who filled the arena, dancing together with joyful abandon as the music throbbed at what was undoubtedly the most happening night spot in the entire county.

During the five-day retreat they’ll learn about orbs, that cabbages scream when you cut them, that the spirit looks like a soap bubble, and that Ramtha has the ability to conjure up spirits such as “Mothman” (along with photographic proof).

They’ll see photos of grinning “ramsters,” as the townies call them, holding up checks for various amounts from Ramtha-inspired wins in the lottery or at the nearby casino, and be lectured on quantum physics. There’s not a whisper of hate, Ramtha is not in attendance (although staff tell students he is always here), and toasts are made with water glasses.



Several times a year, up to 1,000 students flock to the 80-acre Ramtha School of Enlightenment, where they live in tents and receive doses of cosmic wisdom they believe are imparted by an ancient “Lemurian warrior.” JEFF ADAMS


Satire or Simply Slurs?
To this day, there have been no apologies or retractions of the hate speech that has caused RSE such embarrassment. One is not needed, her defenders insist, pointing out that Knight employs lapsed Catholics, former Jews, a lesbian and a Mexican-born man as part of her inner circle. They say her remarks were taken out of context, invoking the example of satirist Steven Colbert telling his audience that the poor should be euthanized. One RSE teacher, Jaime Leal-Anaya, Mexican by birth, explains that Jesus was also taken out of context in the early days of Christianity, and that people mistook his followers for cannibals when Jesus told them to eat of his body, and drink of his blood.

Knight herself consents to answer questions by telephone on day four of the Beginner’s Event. Although she’s at home in the mansion next door, a recent channeling session in Mexico and the death of a beloved pet have left her bedridden.

Unlike her staff, Knight maintains that the offending videos were heavily edited. “We have a very sophisticated videography streaming department. We know what edited looks like,” she says, claiming she would never go through a “multimillion dollar lawsuit” if there were any truth to the clips. Her litigiousness, she explains, stems from trying to protect her business and company secrets. “We are a revered school around the world, I was part of the president’s re-election committee, we are proactive in education, and this is not who we are.”

Knight dismisses Coverdale as a woman who “couldn’t keep the man she was after for more than three weeks and hated me for it for the rest of her life. I never had a conversation with her. She’s somebody who wants to be famous and is a very jealous and envious, controlling person that thought they could make some money off of me,” she claims. “People who say those things, we are taught by the Ram, are really speaking about themselves, it’s the Jung concept of the shadow.”

Knight vehemently objects to her school being labeled as a cult, which she considers another four-letter word. She says she’s tired after 38 years of channeling Ramtha, and plans to retire from the business side of things and write books.

By all appearances, that doesn’t mean she’s planning to go easy on Coverdale and McCarthy. “Those tapes were illegal from the get-go, and that they were distributed, edited and chopped to make us look like bigots and hateful people when nothing could be further from the truth, nothing!” she charges. “I will not let other people rewrite our history!”

Coverdale, for her part, is not backing down. “Although admittedly, as a rule, the cult does not have as one of its ideologies hating Mexicans or Jewish people or gay people or Catholics, J.Z. Knight herself is proving she does as her [drinking] increases and she is unable to keep up the love act she had going in the ’80s. It is beyond hate speech,” Coverdale says.

“In America, there are many First Amendment rights I agree with, even if I disagree with what is being said. Where I get concerned is when you have a large group of people that believe they are hearing from a powerful enlightened entity, creating an ‘us versus them’ situation.”

[American Dream]

"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"

(Goya)

[American Dream]

Earthlight

“Earthlight is the partial illumination of the dark portion of the moon’s surface by light reflected from the Earth and from the Earth’s airglow. It is also known as Earthshine [or] Planetshine, the Moon’s ashen glow, or the old Moon in the new Moon’s arms.”

http://lesbianspaceprincex.tumblr.com/p ... he-partial

[American Dream]

My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult



http://gawker.com/my-life-with-the-thri ... 1445204953