For those interested in Cassiopaea, Laura K-J

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Postby populistindependent » Sun Nov 18, 2007 5:15 pm

LilyPatToo wrote:Any belief system that can be used to make followers more passive and less likely to become involved in political activism is suspect to me.

The effect of this is so pervasive in modern culture, and so few people talk about it. People are just wed to remaining docile and passive, and all political issues are framed in a very confusing and mystical way that makes it almost impossible to talk about pragmatic and constructive action. Making politics into an effort of changing people spiritually as a pre-requisite for any social change not only paralyzes people, it also breaks down community and leads people to obsessively focus inward. It is also hard to tell where peaceful, loving, enlightened thoughts end and laziness, self-centeredness, and cavern cowardice begin.

The various New Age (for want of a better term) and alternative spiritual pursuits represent a vastly more powerful force for political suppression than the worst of fundamentalist Abrahamic religion ever did in our culture. Since these new spiritual pursuits are driven by happy and good ideas, rather than fear, they seem benign and neutral. This lulls people into ignoring the political and social ramifications of the pursuits. They feel good, they seem right, they come with no obvious drawbacks, or penalty.
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Postby vigilant » Sun Nov 18, 2007 7:21 pm

Incredibly interesting about Thetford's affiliation with Laura. I read the entire Wave Series about a year ago and found it fascinating. I was dubious as I read it, but I still found it fascinating. So...do you suspect Laura was getting played by Thetford or agencies he has been affiliated with?

on edit, I read previous posts again, and I'm not sure if you are implying that she was affiliated with Thetford...was she?
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Postby LilyPatToo » Sun Nov 18, 2007 7:36 pm

Oops! No, I'm sorry--the confusion is due to my posting about what I think might be a related case--A Course In Miracles/Schucman/Thetford

I don't know of any connections to Laura or Ark that might be "dirty" but if anyone else does, I'd be interested in hearing about them.

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Postby Fat Lady Singing » Sun Nov 18, 2007 7:40 pm

Hi LilyPatToo, all-- You wrote:

Re: Thetford's influence on the Course is detailed here--once you become aware of his MKULTRA involvement, it takes on a whole new significance. If you go to this page and scroll down to the bottom of Box #4, you'll find his name on Subproject 130 of MKULTRA (the source of the documents is the National Security Archive, donated by John Marks). I wish that Dream's End hadn't taken down his blog, because he wrote about this, but there's an article at a conspiracy site about it that does a good job of covering the basics of Thetford's involvement with The Course and with the CIA.


Awesome! Thanks so much! You guys always impress me with the knowledge you have at hand!

As for Laura and her group's use of a planchette, I suspect that there are methods of previously planting information in the subconscious minds of one or both people who were going to be touching that planchette. I don't of course know that this was done, but I've found evidence in my own life of powerful post-hypnotic suggestions and I can imagine how such a thing could be accomplished.


Oh, no doubt there are many ways of manipulating such events. I didn't know how far you'd gotten with Laura's story--just wanted to make clear that she wasn't hearing voices. And her methods changed over time, too; as I recall, she started off with literally a kid's Ouija board, then what's his name, the author, he encouraged her to try some different meditative techniques and equipment.

Any belief system that can be used to make followers more passive and less likely to become involved in political activism is suspect to me. Did you notice yourself becoming less likely to get involved that way while you were part of their group?


Oh, most definitely. Whenever I'd want to talk politics, most people on the list either just plain old didn't care or would outright discourage it. I think a lot of people felt that it would be inviting trouble, somehow. Besides, they were too busy worrying about preparing themselves for when the big transformation comes (something along the lines of the Mayan 2012 prediction). I think the solution for Laura and Ark in particular was to move to France, which happened after I left the group.

BTW, LilyPatToo, you mentioned that you know some "survivors of the Cass wars," which intrigued me... could you elaborate?
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Postby chiggerbit » Sun Nov 18, 2007 8:46 pm

Edti: I hope I didn't scramble therese, DE's links mentioning Thetford and others (sorry, it's all cache):


Part one here:
http://tinyurl.com/ysfjt9

Part two here:
http://tinyurl.com/2f3tso


Part three here:
http://tinyurl.com/yusxkm

Part four here:
http://tinyurl.com/29qcz2
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Postby theeKultleeder » Sun Nov 18, 2007 9:40 pm

populistindependent wrote:The effect of this is so pervasive in modern culture, and so few people talk about it. People are just wed to remaining docile and passive, and all political issues are framed in a very confusing and mystical way that makes it almost impossible to talk about pragmatic and constructive action. Making politics into an effort of changing people spiritually as a pre-requisite for any social change not only paralyzes people, it also breaks down community and leads people to obsessively focus inward. It is also hard to tell where peaceful, loving, enlightened thoughts end and laziness, self-centeredness, and cavern cowardice begin.

The various New Age (for want of a better term)...


You should be honest and transparent and come out of the closet as a Marxist Materialist.

What you mischaracterize as "New Age" may be more properly labeled "post-Christian monopoly in the West." The MASH UP has been happening for a century and a half, but now the speed of the mix is quickening, and new communication mediums are breaking barriers that no one ever thought would be broken.

Again, the thoughts you speak are not your own. Craven cowardice is your mode of being. Come out from behind your discipleship and shake the brainwash to think for yourself.
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Postby vigilant » Sun Nov 18, 2007 9:45 pm

chiggerbit wrote:Edti: I hope I didn't scramble therese, DE's links mentioning Thetford and others (sorry, it's all cache):


Part one here:
http://tinyurl.com/ysfjt9

Part two here:
http://tinyurl.com/2f3tso


Part three here:
http://tinyurl.com/yusxkm

Part four here:
http://tinyurl.com/29qcz2



Part one was a fascinating read Chig, link two is busted, got another, or can ya fix it?
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Postby chiggerbit » Sun Nov 18, 2007 9:50 pm

Are you sure it doesn't work? Here (although it reads easier in the original, what with quotes and all):

In part one, we had a look at who SRI actually is. To sum up: they are a research institution at the very heart of the military/industrial complex. There’s nothing warm and fuzzy about it, and that fact that they want to guide us gently into the New Age should provide comfort to exactly no one.

Now I’d like to have a look at what’s “wrong” with our society’s “image of man” and why these images are not considered helpful for our future. But first, a little more on methodology. In short, the SRI methodology would have to be said to be a few footnotes shy of scholarly. Here’s what they say in the introduction to the 1982 reprint:

First, we attempted to identify and assess the plausibility of a truly vast number of future possibilities for society. We next followed a method of analysis that determined which sequences of possible futures (that is, which “alternate future histories”) appeared to be the most plausible in light of human history and to most usefully serve the needs of policy research and development. (p. xvii)

What method of analysis, you might ask? You might ask, but they didn’t say. It wasn’t till recently that one of the studies authors, O.W. Markley, revealed their…ahem… novel approach. (I’m shamelessly cribbing from the article at skilluminati.)

Guided cognitive imagery is described as an appropriate technology of choice for intuition-based exploring, learning and teaching about alternative futures—especially suitable for futures involving cultural transformation. Two methodological approaches with case examples are described: (a) a virtual time travel method for visionary futures exploration and for experiencing the needs of future generations and (b) a set of depth- intuition methods for need finding, transforming perceived needs into opportunities, choosing between policy options, and transcendental exploration.

Although these “visionary futures” methods extend well beyond the conventional paradigm of the behavioral sciences, they are consistent with the cannons of science in that they are trainable and can be replicated. Moreover, they can readily be used to help integrate the methodologies of social action research, futures research and political activism—a task which urgently needs to be done. link

In case you thought maybe Markley just stumbled onto “remote viewing” of the future sometime AFTER his tenure at SRI or that this was not, in fact, the methodology used in Changing Images of Man, think again (from the linked article above):

The pivotal event was this: In 1970, after about 18 months of intensive research to generate as many internally and sequentially plausible alternative future histories as we could derive from the existing literature of utopias, dystopias, science fiction scenarios, etc. and from our own unique qualitative modeling method (Harman, Markley and Rhyne, 1973), our first major results indicated that of some fifty of the most highly plausible alternative future histories for society, only a handful were by any stretch of the imagination desirable, and most of them involved deep-seated transformations of underlying attitudes, images and policies in response to problems involving over-population, resource depletion, pollution, dangerous weapons build-ups, etc. All of which Harman (1969; 1979) dubbed, “The World Macroproblem.”

A search of the literature and professional practices of cognitive, humanistic and transpersonal psychologists and workshop leaders, as well as those of other practitioners using tools and processes for accessing intuition led to the conclusion that the most appropriate technology for this purpose was that of visual thinking and guided cognitive imagery . Early research studies at SRI actually using this approach as a formal technique include the pioneering SRI studies of “Contemporary Societal Problems” (Markley & Curry, 1971), and “Societal Consequences of Changing Images of Man” (Campbell, et al, 1974; Markley & Harman, , 1982 based on Campbell et al’s work), the first known study to formally attempt the use of Kuhnian “paradigm” concepts in connection with the whole human society, not just scientific communities

There is a reason that these methods were not spelled out in the original book. As Markham mentions in a footnote:

As a professional side note, it is perhaps now appropriate to point out that we chose not to include an explicit mention of the more visionary methods in our statement of methodology because we considered them too far from the dominant paradigm of the social and behavioral sciences at that time to be credible as a formal research technique. Whether this omission was ethically appropriate is now posed as a question for both students and professionals in relevant disciplines.

Oh, thanks for posing the question, O.W. Here, let me pose an answer. The answer is, “no,” it wasn’t ethical. Where’s MY government grant? Meanwhile, let me summarize. They looked at a bunch of comic books and sci-fi novels to get a list of fifty possible futures. Then they magically flew into the future to figure out which ones looked nice. That about got it? We’ll have a closer look at remote viewing later in an article tentatively titled: “Why Do Famous Remote Viewers Suck at Remote Viewing?”


So, one danger of “remote viewing” the future, in that light, is that remote viewing the future doesn’t work. But even if it did, the dangers of subjective expectations impinging on whatever information was brought back are obvious. If you think the world is going to hell then when you remote view the future, hell is exactly what you’ll find.

The introduction goes on to tell us that out of the fifty “possible futures” only a “handful” looked any good to them. And equally distressingly, they inform us: “an essential requirement for realizing any of the more desirable alternative future paths would likely require fundamental changes in the way our industrial culture is organized. Laws, attitudes, ethics–may require reform…” (p. xviii) (Don’t bother looking for the actual list of the possible futures. You won’t find it. Very hush hush, you know.)

Oh, but what luck! Say the authors:

About this time the Charles F. Kettering Foundation was looking for “high leverage” ideas–possibly risky approaches to social policy research and development in which a relatively small amount of support might, if successful, lead to a beneficial effect on society that is relatively large. (p. xviii)

So just after they realized we are all doomed if we don’t jump on the Deepok Chopra love train, funding comes through to leverage our asses right into Nirvana. Handy, that.

Before moving on, I just wanted to toss this little sentence in from left field, which is apparently where it lives, because it came out of left field in the 1982 introduction as well. In discussing what the authors might like to have done differently as they look back at this landmark study, they mention two regrets. One is that they were a bit too earnest, in their approach. A bit preachy. The second regret is a little…different:

Another change would have been to explore more deeply the significance that emerging changes in psychosexual norms and premises have for the future society. (p. xviv)

No other explanation is offered. You can just store that one away to ponder at your leisure.

Back to the original storyline. The study concluded through their rather unorthodox methods that we are up shit’s creek but that THEY have the paddle. The paddle, of course, is a complete paradigm shift, courtesy of SRI. A change in the “Image of Man” itself. The idea is that the way society views humankind shapes the way society organizes itself. I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t asked about how our society should organize itself when the society-organizing took place. So I would argue that our social structures themselves are the primary influences on a society’s myths and self-understanding, not the other way around. I think a number of sociologists would agree with me. Like, maybe, all of them. But then again, we know sociologists are all a bunch of raving Marxists.

But SRI wants to go all Hegelian on us and suggest that societies have some ingrained ideal that drives the way we organize ourselves. After awhile, we outgrow that ideal and a new one emerges, leading society to new structure. They even have a graph to prove it. In fact, you’ve never seen a book so filled with vague and pointless graphs. So, rather than argue the point, let’s grant that images and mythology do have influence on society and move on from there.

So what will this new paradigm look like? Not so fast, there partner. You can’t just rush into paradigm building. These things take time. And I’d like to take just a bit of time to point out a couple of the many clues in this little book that suggest that, despite some popular accounts of SRI as “liberal”, their ideological underpinnings are a tad further to the right. Exhibit A, of course, is that they do most of their research for military and intelligence agencies. But chapter one begins with a couple of quotes at the top. I won’t even bother to reproduce the quotes themselves, it’s WHOM they chose to quote that is of interest.

Person One is Robert Jay Lifton. Lifton is a hard fellow for me to pin down. He’s often doing interviews in progressive media, and his most famous work is “The Nazi Doctors” which is about…well, Nazi doctors. Yet his earliest known work was a study of alleged communist brainwashing techniques. This study was undertaken with the folks who would eventually create the “Human Ecology Fund”, a CIA conduit for studies on mind control techniques. I’ve seen Lifton referred to as one of the founders of HEF but I can’t find any verification of that. The Fund was run secretly out of Cornell University and officially went away in 1965. Eric Olson, who has collaborated with Lifton and whose military-scientist father Frank was dosed with LSD and defenestrated for going off the reservation, so to speak, says that Sidney Gottlieb personally told him he’d funded Lifton’s early work on brainwashing. You should take some time perusing his website. Oh, and for some reason not explained by Olson, he or one of his siblings decided to “decorate” their dad’s obituary with a crayon drawing. Here is what they drew:



And no, I’m not going there right now.

These days, Lifton spends time denouncing torture at Abu Ghraib and that sort of thing. And that’s good, because torture is bad. Way to go, Robert! But curiously, he also seems to be rather thick with…well, do I have to tell you? Alien abduction researchers. Lifton was a friend and colleague of the late Harvard abduction-promoter John Mack, with whom he co-founded the “Center for Psychology and Social Change” in 1983. The Center received a hefty grant of nearly $200,000 from Laurance Rockefeller which was used to start Mack’s “Program for Exceptional Experience Research” which focused on the abductee experience. (all this from Phillip Coppens, here) Just before he died, Mack, like Lifton, was beginning to research after-death communications and was focusing on Elizabeth Targ, the daughter of remote viewing researcher Russell Targ.

In addition, Lifton lived, at least for some time, with abduction researcher Budd Hopkins.

And the aliens, are evidently telling us the exact same thing that Changing Images of Man is telling us we need to believe. Or at least the experiences are being spun that way. Personally, I find the aliens abusive and creepy and discern no “we are all in this together” message behind their activities. So right off the bat, even though Lifton is not one of the authors of this study, we get some hints about what’s really going on.

Meanwhile, the second quote to introduce Chapter One is from Mircea Eliade, avowed and openly fascist scholar of mythology. Don’t believe me about the fascism part? Hit the Wiki

Eliade was a big fan of Theosophy, too. So were the SRI authors, but more on that later. For now, suffice it to say that much of the New Age mythology being offered by SRI is not really that new after all, and has its roots at least as far back as Nazi occultism.

And we’ll have to leave it at that for now. Next up, we’ll have a look at all the smorgasbord of human religions the wizards at SRI had to pick and choose from and notice which bits they kept and which bets hit the cutting room floor. I’ll give you a hint: the Semites don’t fare too well in the new paradigm department.

Mircea Eliade would be proud.
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Postby chiggerbit » Sun Nov 18, 2007 9:56 pm

Actually, my heart was a bit broken when I read this about Lifton. Lifton is probably one of the the first authors to write about brainwashing, and later about cults. He's the one who wrote about the eight characteristics of cults.
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Postby theeKultleeder » Sun Nov 18, 2007 10:08 pm

I looked up Eliade on the Wiki, as Mr. End suggests, and found a highly complex and nuanced biographical narrative. Scarcely anything of the bad-attitude smoking gun rhetoric of Mr. End was found.



[edited for bad English]

[Edited again for meanness.]
Last edited by theeKultleeder on Mon Nov 19, 2007 1:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby chiggerbit » Sun Nov 18, 2007 11:11 pm

I don't have time to reply to your criticism, TKL, as I'm working on a truly important problem: WTF DID ABC DO WITH DESPERATE hOUSEWIVES AND BROTHERS AND SISTERS TONIGHT??????
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Postby chiggerbit » Sun Nov 18, 2007 11:13 pm

Oops, sorry, didn't mean to be off-topic.
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Postby vigilant » Sun Nov 18, 2007 11:37 pm

I have noticed that R.I. has several people that are familiar with Dreams End. What is the consensus opinion? Are the writings mostly well connected and on point, or are they vague disconnected wandering speculation?
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Postby chiggerbit » Sun Nov 18, 2007 11:47 pm

Best to make up your own mind on that, vigilant, especially if a person has a slant towards anti-semitism.
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Postby theeKultleeder » Mon Nov 19, 2007 1:57 am

I edited my previous post for meanness. I'm trying to cut back.

Are you saying that Eliade is an anti-semite? I'll read the wiki again. Is his scholarship anti-semitic? I don't know if I've read him, but I have certainly heard the name.

I picked up on this

The early years in Eliade's public career show him to have been highly tolerant of Jews in general, and of the Jewish minority in Romania in particular. His early condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitic policies was accompanied by his caution and moderation in regard to Nae Ionescu's various anti-Jewish attacks


And this


Eliade's other Romanian disciple, Andrei Oişteanu, noted that, in the years following Eliade's death, conversations with various people who had known the scholar had made Culianu less certain of his earlier stances, and had led him to declare: "Mr. Eliade was never antisemitic, a member of the Iron Guard, or pro-Nazi. But, in any case, I am led to believe that he was closer to the Iron Guard than I would have liked to believe."[207]


But I don't know what the Iron Guard is or any of the other pertinent history. A deeper reading is in order in any case, for someone who is interested.

The Evola guy, yes, a European "tantric" fascist who unfortunately, along with Italian fascist Giuseppe Tucci lend a bad aura to things Tibetan and tantric.
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