Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

Excerpted fromThe Covert War Against Rock, by Alex Constantine:

...At the dawn of the counter culture, CIA personnel mingled with drug dealers in San Francisco's swelling hippie district. Scientists with Agency credentials moved to the Haight and set up "monitoring" stations, among them Louis J. West of UCLA, formerly Jack Ruby's psychiatrist. (Dr. West testified that Ruby had an epileptic fit and accidentally shot Lee Harvey Oswald as a result of his involuntary twitchings). West also went on to the chair of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute and oversaw the illicit mind control experiments of Drs. Jose Delgado, author of Physical Control of the Mind (1969), and Ross Adey, a veteran of Operation Paperclip. Dr. Margaret Singer, currently an advisory board member of the CIA-anchored "False Memory Syndrome Foundation," also participated in the study of LSD as a politically-destabilizing weapon.

Pete Townshend, guitar thrasher for The Who, was one of the few popular musicians who shunned the drug, found it politically and spiritually useless. He let that particular bandwagon roll by. "When you trip, you love yourself. You don't realize you were better off as you were," he said. "The trips are just a side street, and before you know it you're back where you were. Each trip is more disturbing than the one that follows until eventually the side street becomes a dead end. Not only spiritually, which is the most important, but it can actually stop you thinking." Townsend tried a hit of LSD given to him by Berkeley chemist Owsley Stanley III at the Monterey Pop Festival in June, 1967. It would be 18 years before he gave the drug another try. "It was incredibly powerful," Townshend recalled. "Owsley must have had the most extraordinary liver" [14] By the time he got to Woodstock, Townshend was completely put off by the CIA's mind control drug. As a "cynical" English culturatum, he "walked through it all and felt like spitting at the lot of them and shaking them, trying to make them realize nothing had changed and nothing was going to change." The alternative society that blossomed In the mid-1960s was already rapidly disintegrating. Townshend blamed Woodstock, "a field full of six-foot-deep mud laced with LSD. If that was the world they wanted to live in, then fuck the lot of them." [15]

Rock historian Charles Kaiser also considers LSD a weapon, and not a tool of spiritual revelation as the guinea pigs were led to believe. "One CIA memo called the drug a 'potential new agent for unconventional warfare."' Potential? "That was certainly what many people hoped it would be for the swarms of hippies who descended on the Haight in the summer of 1967. Vastly more powerful than marijuana or hash, LSD was the drug that took you, instead of the other way around. In 1966 Leary had founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, explaining, 'Like every great religion of the past, we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and worship of God' ... But to the disappointment of the left, there never was any direct correlation between drug use (or promiscuity) and politics. This was one aspect of the deeper dichotomy between recreations of the sixties and their political content. Worshiping under the banner of sex, drug, and rock 'n' roll, millions of young Americans smoked marijuana, tripped on acid, sped through the decade on superfluous amphetamines, dressed wildly, danced violently, and seduced one another assiduously. Then in roughly the same proportion as their parents, they continued to vote Republican." [16]

"Dropping out," ditching the corporate warfare state, was postulated by the emerging leadership of the anti-war subculture. And the philosophical direction of the swelling drop-out class was influenced by metaphysical, counter-cultural spokesmen with CIA support, each talking a blue streak about self, transcendence, consciousness expansion and equally high-minded, apolitical flights of mental expatriation.

On the East Coast, Ira Einhorn, an eclectic new-age quack, and his friend Andrija Puharich, inventor of the tooth implant and a CIA-Army mind control researcher, lectured the counter-culture on drug reveling and "alien" visitations. Among the business sponsors of Ira Einhorn (currently a fugitive living in France, wanted for the alleged murder of his girlfriend Holly Maddox), the Bronfman family of Seagram's fame; Russell Byers, a HUD director; John Haas, president of Rohm and Haas chemical conglomerate; Bill Cashel, Jr., a former Marine and president of Bell Pennsylvania. Einhorn wrote a chapter for a book edited by Humphrey Osmond, the infamous LSD chemist [sic], Tim Leary and Alan Watts. His attorney was Arlen "Magic Bullet" Spector. [17]

Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand was the prototypical drop-out ... or was he? Brand was born in 1938, a native of Rockford, Illinois. He attended elite Phillips Exeter Academy, graduated with a degree in biology from Stanford University in 1960. Between 1960 and 1962, Brand was assigned to active duty as a US Army officer. He qualified for Airborne, taught basic infantry and worked as a Pentagon photojournalist. In 1968 he founded the original Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of tools for alternative living.

"Brand organized one of the key events of the LSD era," writes Benjamin Woolley in Virtual Worlds (1992) -- the 1966 'Trips Festival' in San Francisco. It was to be the grand finale of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, a blissful "state of collective psychic intimacy that caused individual minds to melt into one single, seamless consciousness." Stewart Brand saw in the Acid Test a glitzy public gathering to rival a rock concert for spectacle. "Hard though it may now be to believe, [he] set about attracting business sponsors. Brand's commercial pragmatism and boy scout enthusiasm resulted in a sort of huge village fete, one that attracted an estimated 10,000 people and perhaps, though this goes unrecorded, a profit. It was so successful that a New York promoter reportedly wanted to book the acid test for Madison Square Garden."

In September 1967, precisely as CHAOS was launched by the CIA and the White House, Dr. Timothy Leary, tossed out of the Army for erratic behavior, abandoned experimenting with LSD on prisoners for the CIA in upstate New York, dropped a reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and donned the robes of designated LSD media prelate.

"In addition to this long mainstream tradition of far-out Sufi gnostic experimentation," Leary told religious historian Rick Fields in 1983, "there was another branch of drug research." [18] While still at Harvard, Leary was approached by Henry Murray, chief of psychological operations for William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services during WWII (and after the war a mind control researcher at Harvard who enlisted as a subject of experimentation one Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber [19)]. At the 1950 spy trial of Alger Hiss, Murray openly testified: "The whole nature of the functions of OSS were particularly inviting to psychopathic characters; it involved sensation, intrigue, the idea of being a mysterious man with secret knowledge." [20] And so Leary was fascinated with psychedelic compounds, "like most intelligence men," he added, and volunteered early on for the psilocybin trials, surreptitiously sponsored by the Company.

Kesey and Allen Ginsburg, among many others, first tasted LSD by signing onto Agency-funded research programs.

"Hundreds of Harvard students had been tripped out by answering ads in the Crimson," Leary explained to Smith. "So when I got here, I must tell you, I was the square on the block. We shared these drugs as novices, as amateurs, hesitantly moving into a field that had no signposts or guidelines. There was simply no language in western psychology to describe altered states of consciousness or ecstasies or visions or terrors. The psychiatrists said these were 'psychomimetic' experiences."

Dr. Leary's CIA resume has roots in 1954, with his promotion to director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California. At Kaiser, Dr. Leary developed a personality test, "The Leary" -- administered to Leary himself in 1970, in prison [21] -- adopted by the Agency to test applicants.

Dr. Leary was the bosom ally of Frank Barron, a former grad school classmate and CIA acid head. [22] Barron was employed by the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research -- Leary later admitted that the Institute was "staffed by OSS-CIA psychologists." In 1966, Barron founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Mark Riebling, a Leary biographer, writes "Leary follows Barron to Harvard and becomes a lecturer in psychology. After Barron administers to him some CIA psilocybin and LSD, Leary begins tripping regularly. He also studies the effects of psychedelics on others in controlled experiments. He later admits to knowing, at the time, that 'some powerful people in Washington have sponsored all this drug research.' In addition to Barron, Leary's associates and assistants during this period include former OSS chief psychologist Murray, who had monitored military experiments on truth-drug brainwashing and interrogation, and Dr Martin Orne, a researcher receiving funds from CIA." [23] (Orne, with the late Dr. West and Dr. Singer, was a guiding light of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, an organization that specializes in discrediting ritually-abused, mind-controlled children and their therapists.)

Leary swapped hallucinatory epiphanies with Aldous Huxley, a visiting professor at Harvard University. Huxley convinced Leary to form a "secret society," writes Riebling, "to launch and lead a psychedelic conspiracy to brainwash influential people for the purposes of human betterment. 'That's how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on.'" Huxley suggested that he initiated "artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans. And they'll educate the intelligent rich."

In 1962, Mary Pinchot Meyer (gunned down on a Potomac towpath, October 12, 1964), divorced from Cord Meyer, her CIA official husband visited Leary at Harvard. "Leary will later recall her as 'amused, arrogant, aristocratic."' Meyer informs Leary that the government is "studying ways to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing." She asks that he "teach us how to run [LSD] sessions, use drugs to do good. Leary agrees. He provides her with drug samples and 'session' reports, and is in touch with her every few weeks, advising her on how to be a 'brainwasher.' She swears him to secrecy." One day after the assassination of John Kennedy, she phoned him, Leary recalled, and she was overcome with fear and grief. "They couldn't control [Kennedy] anymore," she told Leary. "He was learning too much ... They'll cover everything up." [24]

Leary was a magnet for espionage agents. He was constantly surrounded by operatives of the intelligence agencies. In the end, he paired up with G. Gordon Liddy in a traveling radio road show. Liddy was a CHAOS veteran. [25]

On September 12, 1970, Tim Leary escaped from prison, aided, according to Benjamin Woolly, "by the Weather Underground ... apparently funded by [CIA runamuck] Ronald Stark and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love." Leary's famed flight to Switzerland was facilitated by CIA contractees. "May 1971," writes Riebling, "Leary and his wife escape to Switzerland with the assistance, according to Leary, of an 'Algerian bureaucrat named Ali,' who 'made no bones about his connection to the CIA ... and [Leary says] 'that's the best mafia you can deal with in the twentieth century."'

The prison escape was financed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and the LSD distributed by the Brotherhood was provided by convicted CIA terrorist Ron Stark. Profits from the sale of the LSD were deposited in Castle Bank, a CIA hot money cooler legally represented by Paul Helliwell, a business promoter for Meyer Lansky and the CIA's chief launderer of heroin proceeds.

.

[American Dream]

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.c ... style.html

Bleak House: A Case of Nazi-Style Experimental Psychiatry in Canada

By Steve Smith and Alex Constantine




Foreword

"These people are like the movie Brazil if you have seen it - they don't want anything to land on their desk that looks like it might stick to them." - Steve Smith

After 20 years of frustrated efforts to do much of anything about the nightmarish "treatment" Steve Smith received in a Canadian mental institution, the paperwork began to trickle in.

In 1991, Smith requested his clinical records from the archive of the Oak Ridge Mental Hospital and received a grand total of 15 pages. Predicated on these, Smith filed a complaint with the College of Physicians and Surgeons about an illicit, sadistic experimental regimen of psychiatric "treatment" euphemized by his handlers as "Defense Disrupting Therapy." The College investigated and denied that Oak Ridge had ever conducted experimental studies on Smith or anyone else.

Smith appealed to Canada's Health Professions Board and submitted the hospital records to support his complaint. The Board ordered the College of Physicians and Surgeons to reopen the investigation. In a 19-page letter, the Health Board demanded a thorough investigation. "I have copies of the correspondence between the Board and the College," Smith says, "and they have become quite critical, applying to the former such terms as 'not serving the public interest.'"

It can only serve the public interest to relay Smith's freefall into a horrifying world of brutal psychiatric experimentation and the men who presided over it, particularly Dr. Elliot T. Barker, the psychiatrist who supervised Smith's "treatment" at Oak Ridge. The selection of experimental psychiatric subjects is often arbitrary when sanctions are handed around by secret bureaucracies, and Smith suspects the involvement of CIA mind control personnel. Illicit experimentation on human subjects is ongoing. Like Smith, many subjects may struggle for decades to assemble a case documenting their exploitation. His account is not unique. Anyone is a prospective subject to a scientific underground based on absolute disregard for human rights.

- Alex Constantine

In the winter of 1968 I left high school, and no one seemed bothered by that.

An adolescent urge to wander set me on the road to California. At that time I was learning to drive and getting a drivers license was the most important thing in my life. I'd sometimes swipe my mothers keys and drive around the back streets of my neighborhood. My parents were divorced when I was ten. My brother and I lived with my father in Sudbury, Ontario. My mother ran off with a tough good-looking bartender, and my father's life was rapidly overcome by alcohol and self-destruction. My brother and I were left to fend for ourselves in a house that was neglected and often without food. The decimation of my father took about a year, and we were sent to live with my mother and Bill. These were years of physical and emotional abuse. We were all victims of Bill's drunken rages. He committed suicide in 1987. My mother lives out the declining years of her life alone with her dogs and cats. I do not blame her for any of this. Once ruled by her great beauty, my mother's vanity slowly eroded and was a lonely desert when that beauty faded.

After a few brushes with the Sault Ste. Marie police, and a system of justice that dealt heavy-handedly with the local counter-culture, I headed for the west coast.

My friend Ben and I hit the road in the dead of winter, no funds, no plans. The first hitch took us to WaWa, Ontario. We spent the night in the basement of a church. The next morning was freezing cold and hitching a ride was punishment. We hitched on to White River, the "coldest spot in Canada."

Our choices were to walk or die. We reached Marathon sometime in the night, desperately cold. Everything in town was closed. There was no point in looking for an open restaurant. We didn't have enough money between us for a cup of coffee. Ben and I found a small used car lot on the outskirts of town and stole a car. We drove to the next town and arrived just before dawn, abandoned the car at a service station. As we were climbing out, the police pulled in behind us. Five minutes earlier or later, and the course of my life would have been entirely different.

A child of the times, I had in my shirt pocket two tablets of LSD I'd planned on taking when we reached Vancouver. The tabs were about the size of a match head. The trip to Vancouver was ended by our arrest, so I swallowed the tablets and thus began my trip into hell that was to last eight months and haunt me the rest of my life.

My recollection of the next 24 hours is fuzzy, but much is unforgettable:

I am in a black steel cell covered with lurid graffiti, handcuffed, standing in front of a doctor. The floor is rolling like a wave.

In a hospital emergency room large men hold me down, dodging and maneuvering to insert a plastic tube in my nose. I am struggling.... A glass of what looks like red wine. I drink and within seconds I'm violently throwing-up. I am overdosing, very sick, more frightened than I have ever been in my life.

The next several hours are a blank. I remember standing in a court Room full of skeletons in black robes. The judge took one glance at me and I was bundled off to 30 days of observation at the local psychiatric hospital.

The first day I was confined to bed with little or no contact with anyone. The next week was uneventful. I was interviewed a few times but I don't remember if I told anyone about the LSD. I had the impression they either believed me to be faking or drugged. Within a short time I was given my clothes and permitted to wander about the hospital. I was not locked in, and I suppose I could have walked out. I met a girl from another ward and she invited me to a dance that evening. I was leaving my ward for this rendévouz when I was stopped by an attendant who objected to the way I was dressed, very 1960s counter-culture, beads, the usual accouterments. The attendant was hostile. He pushed me against the wall and pawed at my jeans, blustering something about proper dress.

I made another big mistake. I fought back. He dragged me to the floor in short order. Reinforcements came running, and in an instant my pants were around my ankles and I was injected with something painful. I was dragged down the hall, tossed into an empty room and locked inside. I was furious. The girl was waiting for me and here I was, naked, locked in this little room. I pounded on the door and screamed until my lungs were aching.

There is an entry in my clinical record, dated April 26, 1968, a few days after this incident: Steve Smith "... tends to become resentful, hostile and uncooperative when he is not able to have his own way...." Of course, I didn't realize how dangerous an outburst of defiance could be. Never get mad in a mad house. The next day I was informed that I was to be sent to Penetang Hospital for the criminally insane. I have no words to express the fear that swept over me at that moment. Penetang was notorious. It's the end of the line, you never get out. I was in big trouble, but not INSANE! I think it was the next day that I was dragged onto a train in handcuffs by two burly guards who made it clear that they would take no nonsense from me. They showed me a billy club and a large syringe. We traveled in a private berth. Neither of my traveling companions shifted their gaze from me.

We reached Midland, Ontario. There was a car waiting for us. A short drive later, I was at the front gate of Oak Ridge Hospital, which resembled a prison. The iron gate rang behind me and I was not to see the outside world again for eight months. I was struck by the size of the guards. I have never in my life seen such a collection of oversized homo-simians. As far as I knew, no one knew that I was there. I had disappeared off the face of the earth. I'd never felt more alone and helpless. No one said a word to me. I was treated like a slab of meat. Stripped naked. My hair, mouth and armpits were probed for concealed weapons or contraband. My head was shaved. I was sprayed with a disinfectant that burned, given a heavy canvas gown and locked in a cement cell with nothing but a blanket. Not a word from anyone. The door slammed shut.

I don't know how many days passed. It occurred to me that I could be incarcerated for the remainder of my life. If there was anything in that cell I could have used to kill myself, I believe I would have done so. The light was on 24 hours a day. I ate from paper plates. No utensils, not even a plastic spoon. The only escape was sleep, and I forced myself to do as much it as possible. Men strolled past my cell dressed in street cloths. I thought they were doctors or hospital staff. I tried to talk to them, find out what the hell is going to happen to me. No one even looked my way. I was completely ignored. I don't know how many days this went on.

One day the door slid open and a Dr. Elliot T. Barker entered. He was charming, soothing, smiling, his arm around my shoulder. He addressed me by my first name. It seemed I'd never known contact with another human being. I fell for it, not knowing what this man had in store for me, the torture and degradation I was to suffer.

"Do you think you are mentally ill?"

"No I do not."

He grinned, his arm around my shoulder.

"Why do you think you are here?"

"I don't know."

"Well, I'll tell you. You are a very sick boy," Barker told me. "I think you are a very slick psychopath, and I want you to know that there are people just like you in here who have been locked up more than 20 years. But we have a program here that can help you get over your illness. If you volunteer for this treatment, it will improve your chances of release - but you must cooperate with the program."

He told me that being a psychopath was essentially an inability to communicate with others, and that beneath the reinforced surface was a deeply rooted psychosis. What he proposed to do, through the use of LSD, methedrine and other drugs, was to bring out this "hidden psychosis" and treat it. In other words, to cure you I must first drive you mad.

I was locked in a cold, brightly-lit cell, numb with cold, clutching a blanket. Anything would be better than this. I agreed to cooperate.

I was released from my cell, given a shower, khaki pants and shirt, escorted to the "Sun Room," an unfurnished vestibule occupied by six or seven men (boys) about the same age as myself. They had all been in this room for a week or more. Dr. Barker informed me that he was locking me in with them without prior "conditioning" to "shake things up a bit." I watched them for a few days without saying much. Nothing they did was rational. They seemed to be playing some kind of psychotic game, talking like doctors. When their attention shifted to me, I was forced by ringleaders to concede that I was mentally ill. The pressure was intense, unrelenting. Here I was imprisoned in this snake pit of a hospital, encircled by rapists and killers determined to convince me that I was insane.

I was the only one in this equation who wasn't deluded.

My sole possession in the world at this stage was my sanity, and I wasn't about to give it up. I was soon to discover that these mental patients had more resources at their command than group pressure. After a few days of primarily silent resistance, the other patients decided that I needed some drugs to "loosen" me up - the patients prescribed them. They recommended I be given methamphetamines. Dr. Barker signed his approval. Two attendants and a nurse entered and chased me around the room until I was cornered and dragged to the floor. I put up a good fight but they finally managed to slip the needle into my arm. The drug hit me within seconds. I lived for that drug for the next five years. I would do anything to get it.

Dr. Barker's program was run by the inmates. The staff observed and approved their decisions. What followed was a systematic bombardment of drugs intended to break my resistance and to bring out the so-called "hidden psychosis." I suggest that these potent drugs did not reveal something that was already there, but in fact created a drug-induced psychotic state. In his published papers, Dr. Barker describes the drugs he used and the results that he hoped to obtain, but he says nothing about the horrors suffered by the victims of these experiments.

I will try to relate some of the effects of the drugs forced on me over a sustained period. During the drug treatments, it was standard practice to handcuff patients together with seatbelts and padlocks. It was also common for any patient resisting the injections to be choked into unconsciousness by twisting a towel around his neck. This was done to me a few times before I realized that I was more likely to stay alive if I submitted to the drugs. I remember a direction that I was to be an "observer," that I must stay awake all night to watch the other patients sleep. To aid me in this task I was given as much Benzedrine as I wanted. I was equipped with a log book and a pencil stub and told to record everything that happened. Everyone slept. I wrote all night.

The hallucinations began after a few days of sleep deprivation, smoke at the edge of my peripheral vision and eventually thousands of bugs crawling on my skin. I tried to show these bugs to other patients and the attendant who arrived with our meals. Everyone would take a close look and start laughing. Two attendants came in and without a word put me in handcuffs and leg restraints.

Then paranoia, not the generalized anxiety that is so common in current language, but the real thing, full-blown psychotic paranoia. I thought everyone just out of my range of hearing was conspiring to kill me. I remember laying on a mattress on the floor with a blanket pulled over my head. I assumed the two patients next to me were prying a staple out of the log book to impale my eye.

I lifted a corner of my mattress. The floor was seething with bugs and worms. That was it! I jumped up in a panic, attacked the two patients next to me. I tried to wrench my arm around one of them, and with the seatbelt straps locked around my wrists strangle him before anyone could stop me. This outburst was the result of chemical torture and sleep deprivation, otherwise known as "Defense Disrupting Therapy."

A series of drugs was forced on me. I remember something called scopolamine, a so-called truth serum. I was told that it was used by the Nazis as an effective means of chemical interrogation. The effects of this drug are so overwhelmingly horrifying that I am at a loss to describe them. It was administered in three injections, about an hour apart. After the first, my mouth dried up completely. The throat constricts to the size of a pinhole. When you try to swallow you hear a dry, clicking sound. One side-effect is a very high pulse-rate (160 sitting down) and a sense of suffocation and anxiety. After the second injection you begin to slip in and out of delirium. Time sense and continuity are disrupted. The third injection is followed by an 8-to-12 hour period of complete delirium, incoherence, restlessness, hyperventilating.

Patients undergoing this study of medieval degradation were handcuffed to two other patients throughout the ordeal. It was the job of these observers to stop the subject from bashing himself into walls, and stop him from hyperventilating himself to death. No training was provided for this. The life of another patient could be in the hands of people who themselves were on the same drugs a few days before. Both sides of this experiment were extremely stressful. I think I was given scopolamine three times during my stay in the "sun room" and a continuous diet of "speed" and "goofballs".

I don't recall much about the months that followed. I slipped further into a drug-soaked existence, punctuated by incidents of extreme brutality. Dr. Barker came into the sun room with a small can of something. He flipped it from one hand to the other, and described a wonderful new invention he called "mace." With no justification but a test of its effectiveness, he let loose with this spray and blasted us all to the floor. That's the kind of man he was: very curious and always willing to try a little hands-on experiment. I think I was in the sun room for about two weeks when Barker moved me into the regular program.

At this point I was resisting everything, and fought Dr. Barker's attempts to morph my mind with drugs so he could reshape it to his own idea of normalcy. I was moved to a cell with a real bed and my own sink and toilet.

Shortly thereafter, a patient-teacher came to my cell with a stack of psychological tests and insisted I do them. He was dressed in street cloths and conducted himself like hospital staff. I'd had enough of this. I told him to take his tests and shove off. He came back with two attendants who strangled me with a towel and injected me. My clothes were peeled off. I was thrust into an empty cell.

The patient-teacher returned with the tests and said with a smile, "are you ready to do this or do you need a little more prompting." I was so drugged I could not keep my eyes open. I started to do the tests. I fell asleep face down on the paper. I woke up with someone squeezing a nerve point on the back of my heel. I started to write again. It was impossible to concentrate. Math questions, logic questions. What's wrong with this picture? I fell asleep again and came to under an ice-cold shower, locked in place by attendants at each arm. This was torture and I screamed. Back into the cell, dripping wet and turning blue.

Do the tests or submit to torture. I did the tests.

Hospital records claim that my IQ is roughly equivalent to my shoe size. I don't remember completing these tests, but eventually I was allowed to sleep.

The next day a formal brainwashing program got underway. Every minute of the day was structured. The basic idea was to force patients to memorize long papers dealing with defense mechanisms and some kind of twisted logic. A rule of silence was strictly enforced. Inmates were not permitted to talk to one another outside the groups. No warnings were given. Any breach of the rules was met with immediate punishment. This could be anything from having your cell stripped, leaving nothing but a blanket on the floor, to strapped incarceration and drugging that went on for days. An infraction of the rules could be something as simple as turning your eyes to the ceiling in a gesture of disbelief. After a week of this discipline, I was a whipped animal, docile and cooperative. I followed Dr. Barker's dictates like a robot.

We were forced to perform military exercises three times a day. When the whistle blew, we dropped for push-ups. Put your heart into it or take punishment. I never knew what the next phase was going to be, but throughout the ordeal of drugs, handcuffs and humiliation came the authoritarian obligato. I gave the answer expected when asked if I was mentally ill.

I suppose I had truly been driven mad. I saw LSD used in massive doses on selected patients. There were beatings and murders. I remember the names Matt Lamb, Peter Woodcock and others.

All of this under the direct control of inmates. This in itself makes this story all the more difficult to write. It sounds so absurd. That's how it was. And I couldn't request a review of my case by hospital administrators - it required the approval of a panel of mental patients.

Dr. Barker's treatment program was devised to drive young men into a drug-induced psychosis, and through fear and discipline from within the group create a self-sustaining system of docile mental patients. How any doctor could view this as a benefit to the mentally ill is beyond me.

But in light of what I have since learned of CIA-sponsored LSD experiments, and the part that Canada played in the Agency's MK-ULTRA program, my story is placed in a context that is far from outrageous. Much of what occurred in Oak Ridge was comprehensible only after I began to fit it with pieces of a mind control puzzle.

For example: the cutthroat world of covert operations lurks in the subtext of this report from the Toronto Globe & Mail on the premature release and death of the homicidal Matt Lamb, a "rehabilitated" Oak Ridge patient:

Army clash with guerrillas Killed two in Ontario, Canadian slain in Rhodesia

A Windsor man who spent seven years in an Ontario mental hospital after killing two people has been slain in action with the Rhodesian army. Lance Corporal Matthew Charles Lamb, 28, died in a clash with black nationalist guerrillas seeking to oust Rhodesia's white minority government. Dr. Elliott Barker, a psychiatrist who treated Lamb for several years in hospital and befriended him, said he was not recruited but traveled to Rhodesia about two years ago with the purpose of joining the army. Lamb was released in 1973 from the maximum security section of the Penetanguishene Mental Health Center, where he had been sent after the shotgun slaying of two young people walking with friends on a Windsor street. Lamb visited relatives and went to see Dr. Barker at his farm near Penetanguishene while on leave last summer. "He knew when he went back he probably would be killed," Dr. Barker said yesterday.

A communiqué issued by the Rhodesian security forces yesterday said that the Canadian and eight blacks identified as guerrillas were killed in clashes during the past 48 hours. Dr. Barker said he was advised that lamb was killed on Sunday.

Last month another Canadian serving with the Rhodesian forces, Trooper Michael McKeown of Dartmouth, N.S., was sentenced to a year in prison for refusing to fight. He said he was recruited in Canada. Lamb was 19 in January, 1967 when he was found not guilty by reason of insanity on a charge of murdering 20 year old Edith Chaykoski. She was in a group of young people walking toward a bus stop when a man stepped out from behind a tree and began shooting. Three other people were wounded, and one of them a 21 year old man, died later.

During court proceedings in his case, Lamb made two unsuccessful attempts to escape.

In 1965, when he was 16, Lamb served 14 months in penitentiary after he robbed a suburban store and exchanged shots with a policeman. After his 1967 committal to Penetanguishene, Lamb was treated by Barker, who was then head of the therapeutic unit at the hospital's maximum-security division.

He was released in 1973 by order of the Ontario Cabinet, acting on a recommendation of an advisory review board. "He was given a clean bill of health," Dr. Barker said in an interview. "The advisory review board felt he was no longer dangerous. He had been sick and he was no longer sick.

During his two to three years in the hospital, he was one of the patient therapists, and they looked up to him."

After he was freed, Lamb lived with Dr. Barker and the psychiatrist's family for a year on their 200-acre farm near the hospital, earning his keep as a laborer....


Fortunately for me, the laws governing committal to hospitals were changed during my stay at Oak Ridge. A review board was created to give patients an avenue of appeal.

I remember sitting in a chair before five or six bureaucrats. They were my last chance at reclaiming my life. The interview lasted less than half an hour, and in the end they told me that I would be released as soon as arrangements could be made. It was out of Barker's hands. Within days I was on a bus to Toronto. It ended as suddenly as it began, but the consequences of my months as Dr. Barker's guinea pig were to affect the direction of my life for years to come. I had tried LSD twice, and the second time precipitated my downfall. Like most people my age in the 1960s, I experimented with drugs. But after Oak Ridge I was addicted to amphetamines. My slide into self-destruction, revisiting my father's decline.

Before Oak Ridge, the thought of sticking a needle into my arm was repulsive. But when you want amphetamine, the quickest way is the only way. It came to living in the back of an abandoned car, using a refill from a ball-point pen for a fix. Barker left me shipwrecked upon the shore.

But there came a time when I was able to reclaim control of my life and determine my own direction, because that's who I am. Today I have my own business. I have a little sailboat and I go skiing when I can.

Many others were left incurably injured. I have found some of them. Dr. Barker completely desiccated our lives. I saw murder in Oak Ridge. I saw torture that one would only expect to see in the most squalid Third World country. I have been over this for years, and it seems that every question inevitably leads to more questions. I want answers from Oak Ridge and Dr. Barker.

http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/v/smith.htm

[American Dream]

Excerpted from: MK-ULTRA SubProject 130: Personality Theory (ACIM, Unity Church, MK-OPRAH)

Dr. William Thetford, along with David Saunders, headed CIA MK-ULTRA SubProject 130: Personality Theory, while at Columbia University between 1971-1978.

Dr. Thetford’s Professional Vita (also available on the A Course in Miracles web site) makes reference to his involvement in a Personality Theory Research Project while Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University, though the information does not specifically cite this as a CIA MK- ULTRA SubProject. (The information might have recently been altered to reflect involvement in MK-ULTRA.)

Dr. William Thetford also directly assisted Dr. Helen Schucman as a so-called ‘scribe’ in the initial transcription (or ‘channeling’) of the A Course in Miracles book originally published in 1975 by an organization called The Foundation for the Investigation of Para Sensory Phenomena.

Dr. Thetford was working for the CIA conducting Personality Theory experiments under MK-ULTRA at the same time the A Course in Miracles book was published in 1975.

A Course in Miracles is commonly known as “the Bible of the New Age.”

The Foundation for the Investigation of Para Sensory Phenomena may have been funded by members involved with or employed by the Stanford Research Institute(SRI), Menlo Park, California, as Remote Viewers at the time. One of the individuals with connections to SRI was Judith Skutch, the president and founder of The Foundation for the Investigation of Para Sensory Phenomena, which, once again, originally published A Course in Miracles in 1975.

Other researchers in this area have speculated that Judith Skutch’s Foundation for the Investigation of Para Sensory Phenomena may have even been an outright front organization for the CIA. The publishing of A Course in Miracles may have been a CIA operation from the beginning.

It has also been claimed Skutch funded many of the early experiments by Israeli telepath Uri Geller. Geller worked for SRI during this same time period.

A Course in Miracles legal documents have revealed that Skutch met with David Hurt (an engineer associated with SRI), Russell Targ, Thetford and Schucman at a luncheon in 1974. Russell Targ was co-founder of the Stanford Research Institute´s CIA funded Remote Viewing program at SRI during this same time period. Targ´s collegue at SRI was chief researcher Dr. Harold Puthoff. Puthoff was a high ranking ‘Operating Thetan’ for the Church of Scientology and was also working under the auspices of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program along with Targ when this meeting took place. As previously stated, William Thetford, the so-called co-’scribe‘ of ACIM, was also under the payroll of the CIA during the same period, conducting research under MK-ULTRA SubProject 130: Personality Theory at Columbia University.

In 1998 Russell Targ wrote a book entitled Miracles of Space. Targ and Scientology claim Targ was never a member of L. Ron Hubbard´s so-called ´church.´

According to the Washington Post of August 7, 1977, high-level ‘Operating Thetans‘ (Harold Puthoff, Pat Price, Ingo Swann) from the Church of Scientology were in charge of all Remote Viewing and other related CIA mind control operations at Stanford Research Institute under the auspices of CIA MK-ULTRA during this time period, which began sometime in 1973. (See the Washington Post article of August 7, 1977, Psychic Spying? by John L. Wilhelm regarding the connection between the Stanford Research Institute, CIA mind control operations via MK-ULTRA and the Church of Scientology.)

MK-ULTRA was ‘investigated’ by the US Congress’ Church Committee and the group appointed by President Ford known as the Rockefeller Commission in 1975. MK-ULTRA is now obviously a matter of public record. As you stated, all of the scanned CIA MK-ULTRA documents are available to the public from the CIA itself on CD-ROM format.

Fast forwarding to the present: Unity Church, a ‘Christian New Age’ tax exempt organization, with locations in numerous communities across the United States, hosts many A Course In Miracles seminars on a weekly basis, and includes the information contained in the book as part of their regular ‘church services.’

I spoke with a woman named ‘Mxxxx’ at the Unity Church in Eugene, Oregon, via telephone on Friday, May 25, 2007, and she stated Unity Church holds seminars in A Course In Miracles twice a week. I requested documentation from her to this effect via regular mail. She claimed that she would comply with this request. And, I might add, she seemed quite ‘happy’ and ‘joyful’ to mail any and all material made available from the church.

Unity Church also sponsors or hosts UFO seminars with titles like: ´UFOs: Earth’s Cosmic Watergate´ and ´Flying Saucers ARE Real.’ These seminars espouse a ‘spirituality’ similar to those found in UFO cults such as the former Heaven’s Gate in San Diego, California and the Church of Scientology. Usually, the ‘information’ disseminated at these UFO seminars claims that a giant, invisible UFO mother ship – containing the spirits of deceased humans, famous leaders from history and supernatural beings such as angels or even Jesus Christ himself – is hovering just above the earth’s atmosphere.

The Scientology UFO ‘religious’ belief system is very similar, though much more detailed, complicated and multifaceted. Part of Scientology’s ‘creation mythos’ advocates passive acceptance of what basically constitutes ‘galactic genocide’ as part of its cult programming. Indeed, from the limited contact I have had with people who have been programmed by these and other similar types of off shoot UFO cult groups such as those found at Unity Church, advocacy of euthanasia or suicide are causally incorporated into their belief systems; even in their interpersonal relationships with others and are completely devoid of any critical analysis as to the larger implications of upholding such philosophies. Briefly, in this respect, similarities to Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World (1932) have come to mind.

Scientology is considered to be a destructive, totalitarian cult by the German government and other European countries and is highly regulated there.

Unity Church and A Course In Miracles are ultimately all about forgiveness and prayer; yet this forgiveness exists in a spiritual construct devoid of basic human social justice.

This construct basically constitutes the same old, repacked and regurgitated snake oil peddled by ‘confidence men’ since the days of PT Barnum. The mantra goes something like this: ‘God will take care of everything and God will forgive everything;’ and therefore, accountability, responsibility, and oversight are not necessary. Thus, the organized crooks, mass murderers, torturers, destroyers of culture, various two bit thugs and other assorted sub humans are allowed to continue perpetuating their endless cycle of banal criminality at the expense of the innocent and the powerless. As a result, human justice and even human memory itself has now, for all intents and purposes, been eviscerated. This is the literal apotheosis of what the authors Gore Vidal and Studs Terkel have each separately called: ‘The United States of Amnesia‘ and ‘The United States of Alzheimer’s.‘

For example, in 2004, the A Course in Miracles website had an very interesting article regarding the Abu Graib Prisoner Abuse Scandal, in which it stated the following:

Let us, then, take a closer look at the Iraq prison scandal from the perspective A Course in Miracles gives us. We will be looking at the monstrous acts of other people, but the point is not to pass judgment on these people, but to use their example to illuminate ego dynamics common to all of us. I’m reminded of what Jesus once said to Helen [Dr. Helen Schucman] before giving an account of the ego lapses she and Bill [Dr. William Thetford] had fallen into on a particular day: “There is nothing of special interest about the events described below, except their typical nature” (Absence from Felicity, by Ken Wapnick, p. 260). The “monster” revealed by the Iraq prison scandal is all too typical, but if we are willing to look at it calmly, we will put ourselves in a position to let it go through forgiveness.

([url=http://www.circleofa.org/articles/IraqPrison.php]What the Iraq Prison Abuse Scandal Reveals: Looking Calmly at the Monster and Letting It Go[/url ]by Greg Mackie. Circle of Atonement, P.O. Box 4238, W. Sedona, AZ 86340. http://www.circlofa.org. info@circleofa.org, 1-928-282-0790.)

This is an excellent example of what many other commentators, researchers, and authors have coined New Age Fascism(also see: From UFO’s to Yoga) and this particular type of mind control programming perfectly compliments the fascism promoted by the Christian and Religious Right or Right Wing Christian Evangelical movements in the United States. I fail to see the fundamental difference between the views espoused by Mr. Mackie above and the opinions communicated by Rush Limbaugh on his talk show. They are both essentially being apologists for the Bush Administration’s use of torture in conducting the so-called ‘War on Terror.‘

‘Students’ in A Course in Miracles programs (which evidently includes devotion to Oprah Winfrey – who has avidly and enthusiastically promoted the book on her television show) might also be involved in an experimental trauma healing treatment program called See Morg Matrix, which includes hypnosis and the evisceration (or ‘clearing’) of memories. Other research in this area has referred to these techniques as ‘pseudo-therapies’.

Involvement in the Unity Church mind control and UFO cult usually comes about through association with some form of unlicensed ‘therapist,’ healer or guru type figure. Possibly even ‘ordained ministers’ in Unity Church serve dual functions as ‘counselors’ or ‘therapists.’ In other words, possible involvement with Unity religion manifests itself as a result of someone seeking some form of psychotherapy, usually to heal childhood or adult trauma and abuse.

An unfortunate possible result and side effect of an individual being involved in this network of healing programs and therapies (and there are many more which I have not mentioned in this brief overview) can be the apparent disability of higher brain functions, including a basic inability to think clearly and engage in basic relationship psychodynamics. The book utilizes hypnotic, mantra-like repetition of concepts which are, more often than not, logically incoherent and are meant to brainwash and control the thoughts of the ‘student.’

.

[American Dream]

The piece below is excerpted from Rob Breszny's book

*PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA*

http://bit.ly/Pronoia


FLIP-FLOP THE TRAUMATIC IMPRINT

Beauty and Truth Lab researcher Artemisia had just begun menstruating,
and was suffering from debilitating cramps. Massive doses of ibuprofen
were not relieving the distress, so she went to her regular acupuncturist,
Dr. Lily Ming, to get relief.

Dr. Ming had Artemisia lie down on the table and proceeded to insert 10
needles in her belly and hand and ear. Then Dr. Ming introduced a
treatment that Artemisia was unfamiliar with: She lightly pounded the nail
of Artemisia's left big toe with a small silver hammer for a few minutes.

"Why are you doing that?" Artemisia asked.

"It is good for the uterus," the doctor replied.

Indeed, Artemisia's cramps diminished as the doctor thumped, and in the
days to come they did not recur.

After the session, as Artemisia prepared to leave, the usually taciturn
Ming started up a conversation. Artemisia was surprised, but listened
attentively as Dr. Ming made a series of revelations. The most surprising
was Dr. Ming's description of a traumatic event from her own childhood.

During the military occupation of her native Manchuria, a province of
China, she was forced to witness Japanese soldiers torturing people she
loved. Their primary atrocity was using hammers to drive bamboo shoots
through their victims' big toes.

The moral of the story: Dr. Ming has accomplished the heroic feat of
reversing the meaning of her most traumatic imprint. She has turned a
symbol of pain into a symbol of healing.

[Searcher08]

..."turning symbols of pain into symbols of healing".

What a brilliant, powerful story - Thank You, A_D

[American Dream]

http://articles.sfgate.com/2000-12-19/n ... -hallinan/

LSD Trafficking Suspect Has Intriguing Backers
D.A. Terence Hallinan and British aristocrats

Seth Rosenfeld, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 19, 00

The Bay Area man accused of running a huge LSD lab at a decommissioned nuclear weapons silo in Kansas is a nonsmoking, marathon-running vegetarian, a Harvard graduate and deputy director of a University of California program that tracked illegal drugs. And he won support from San Francisco's district attorney. After William Leonard Pickard Jr.'s arrest in what the Drug Enforcement Administration calls one of the nation's biggest LSD cases, Pickard produced letters backing his release on bail from District Attorney Terence Hallinan on official letterhead and from a British lord and lady known for trepanation -- having holes drilled in their skulls to expand consciousness.

Pickard, 55, of Mill Valley and his alleged accomplice, Clyde Apperson, 45, a Mountain View computer consultant, are charged with conspiracy to distribute LSD. A DEA affidavit says the two had enough raw material to produce 10 million or more doses monthly.

Pickard evaded hounds, helicopters with infrared searchlights and more than 50 law enforcement officials for 18 hours after he sprinted into the thick Kansas woods when police stopped his rented van Nov. 7, said Pottawatomie County Sheriff Anthony Metcalf.

Officers went door to door to check some 250 homes, said Metcalf, but a farmer found Pickard resting in a truck and turned him in.

D.A. BACKS PICKARD

Hallinan's letter was one of several recommending Pickard's release on bail.

The entire letter said:

"When I was in private practice I represented Leonard Pickard on some legal matters. I always found him to be an honorable person who kept his word."

In one of those matters, Pickard admitted that in 1985 he applied for a passport under a false name. In another, he admitted that in 1988 he was involved with an LSD lab in Mountain View.

Hallinan's use of office stationery for a private matter apparently conflicts with ethics rules recommended by the California District Attorney's Association, which say: "Using official stationery for personal objectives is improper."

Rod Leonard, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who specializes in professional responsibility, declined to comment on any specific case but said his office policy states: "Letterhead should not be used for matters not related to office business." Governmental stationery implies an official message, he said.

Hallinan said he saw no conflict between his role as San Francisco's top prosecutor and using office stationery to vouch for Pickard. His office has no rule on the use of letterhead, he said.

"There's no way you could imply that letter was the official position of the D.A.'s office. It was like a personal reference by me," Hallinan said. "I am confident that if he (Pickard) is released on bail he will show up. He was a conscientious guy and made his court appearances on time."

Holes in their heads

Lord James and Lady Amanda Neidpath of Beckley Park, Oxford, also vowed Pickard was trustworthy. They are renowned for having undergone trepanation, a centuries-old practice of drilling holes in the head that gained a small following in the 1960s. Proponents say it decreases depression and boosts creativity; the medical establishment calls it nonsense.

Lord Neidpath, the second son of the Earl of Wemyss, was an Oxford professor who taught international relations to Bill Clinton. Lord Neidpath told the Washington Post in 1998 that the hole in his head "seemed to be very beneficial."

Lady Neidpath ran for Parliament in the 1970s on a platform of "Trepanation for the National Health." She told London's Express that the bloody procedure - - which she administered herself and recorded on film -- left her feeling permanently "drunk on sherry."

The Neidpaths' letter to the court said Pickard had helped them plan conferences on "Drugs and Society" at Queen Elizabeth's Windsor Castle.

"We find it difficult to believe . . . he can be involved in anything criminal," it said. "He has always been kindly, reliable and extremely helpful.

He is also well known in the academic community."

For the past two years, Pickard has been deputy director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he helped track the emergence of new street drugs in Russia, said director Mark Kleiman. Pickard's salary came from a private grant that ran out this summer, said Kleiman, and he was not on UCLA's payroll when arrested.

"He had contacts in the (Russian) health ministry and the security agency and with some of the bad guys," said Kleiman. "He'd hang out in the nightclubs.

He also had social contacts with some of the elite users. He knew what drugs the millionaires were doing in St. Petersburg."

Despite the credentials, U.S. District Judge Richard D. Rogers ordered Pickard held without bail, ruling that he might flee or endanger the community.

Rogers released Apperson after he posted $200,000 bond.

Pickard and Apperson have pleaded not guilty. A hearing on pretrial motions is set for tomorrow.

The alleged clandestine chemists set up an LSD lab inside an old Atlas missile silo, the DEA affidavit says. The silo had been sold as government surplus to a Tulsa man who was arrested in another LSD case and became a government informant, according to the affidavit. The silo had its own wells, a filtered air system and was remodeled with a Jacuzzi, Italian marble tile and $85,000 audio speakers, said the sheriff and another man who had been inside.

William Rork, Pickard's Topeka lawyer, said that his client was framed and "the evidence will show there was never an LSD lab in operation there." Mark L.

Bennett Jr., Apperson's lawyer, did not return a phone call seeking comment.

LSD is the most powerful hallucinogen known. Northern California has long been a center of LSD production and distribution, the DEA says, mostly by small groups that have evaded police for years.

To be sure, Pickard researched the international underworld of drug trafficking. But whether he crossed the line in Kansas from observer to participant -- and whether he participated as cop or criminal -- will be decided in court.

In interviews with past and present associates, Pickard emerges as a kind of flashback to San Francisco's 1960s hippie scene. Tall and thin, he has long gray hair. He doesn't smoke, drink or eat meat.

Pickard runs marathons, meditates and practices yoga, and several years ago lived at the San Francisco Zen Center on Page Street. "He was polite and somewhat reserved," said center director Jeffrey Schneider.

"He always had an air of mystery," said Kleiman. "He was a character out of a Pynchon novel."

Pickard has played several roles in the world of mind-altering molecules, according to his resume, associates and court records.

In the early 1970s, he studied social drugs at San Francisco State University, according to his professor, the well-known psychedelic researcher Alexander Shulgin.

Previous lsd arrest

In 1976, Pickard was busted by the San Mateo County Sheriff's Department for making LSD. A few months later, while a San Jose State University chemistry student, he was convicted of setting up a drug lab and served 18 months in custody. And in 1980, he was arrested in Florida for selling MDA, a hallucinogenic like Ecstasy.

In the 1985 false passport case, a federal judge in San Francisco sentenced him to six months in jail and five years' probation.

In 1988, Pickard was picked up as he left a Mountain View warehouse used as an LSD lab. He faced 20 years in prison if convicted, but the drug charge was dropped because he had been an informant, the affidavit says.

By 1993, Pickard was at University of California at Berkeley, studying advanced neurobiology under professor David E. Presti, who also teaches on the treatment of drug addiction.

Pickard helped identify "new drugs of abuse," said Presti in a letter to the Kansas court. "This work is profoundly useful to society and to the development of government policy in this area."

Presti and Pickard were co-authors of a poster summarizing their research on the rise of a new street drug. The poster was presented at the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, a professional group of scientists from government, industry and academia, Presti said.

In 1994, Pickard began work as a research associate in Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School's Division on Addictions. In 1997, he got a master's in public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Pickard's paper was on emerging drug problems in Russia, said Kleiman. Pickard saw Russia as ripe for trafficking in new psychotropics because of its impoverished chemists.

Kleiman gave the paper to Robert S. Gelbard, then assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. Gelbard was impressed, Kleiman said, which helped Pickard win a 1994 Harvard fellowship to study drug policy and addiction.

"The guy is obviously a superbrilliant chemist," Kleiman said. "People at Harvard were pretty impressed."

Pickard told the Kansas judge that his research at the Kennedy School was "sponsored by the State Department."

Harvard representatives confirmed that Pickard was a research associate and got a master's degree, but they said they found no information on such sponsorship of his work. Neither Gelbard, now U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, nor State Department officials returned calls asking for comment.

Last year, Pickard's academic career peaked when he became deputy director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program, at UCLA's School of Public Policy and Social Research. He continued his research on drugs in Russia, said program director Kleiman, and took several trips there.

Pickard himself told the Kansas court he had been a DEA informant since 1973 and had had periodic contact with senior DEA officials on "international cases" since 1992.

If released on bail, Pickard promised, "I would immediately proceed to report to the federal building, (and) cooperate even aggressively with DEA in any matters that they wish."

DEA officials declined to comment on Pickard. But Lord and Lady Neidpath said he had been key to arranging conferences on drug policy that featured British Home Secretary Jack Straw and British Drug Czar Keith Hellawell.

"He could not have been more helpful, putting us in contact with the top experts in the field in the United States," their letter said.

"He has always shown himself to be reliable . . . and we have all grown very fond of him."

[American Dream]

http://articles.sfgate.com/2001-06-10/n ... ch-program

William Pickard's long, strange trip

Suspected LSD trail leads from the Bay Area's psychedelics era to a
missile silo in Kansas

Seth Rosenfeld, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, June 10, 2001


Wamego, Kan. -- - On a cold afternoon last November, federal drug
agents staked out a decommissioned nuclear missile silo in the gently
rolling fields and watched as a tall, thin San Francisco man in black
clothing and long silver hair tried to get in.

Oblivious to the trap, William L. Pickard Jr., a University of
California at Los Angeles researcher who studies psychoactive drugs of
the future, took several aluminum canisters from a silo shed, put them
in his rented Buick and merged into traffic.

Minutes later, red lights and sirens pulsing, Kansas Highway Patrol
officers stopped Pickard and a friend following him in a van. Clyde
Apperson, a Mountain View business consultant, was arrested. But
Pickard bolted from his Buick, which rolled into a ditch as the
marathon-running vegetarian vanished into the heartland dusk.

Inside the vehicles, agents found sophisticated laboratory equipment
and what they allege is enough raw material to make 16 million doses
of LSD. Pickard, they say, was poised to use the missile base, built
during the Cold War to defend the American way of life, to make the
drug that helped launch the 1960s counterculture and inspired Timothy
Leary's exhortations to "turn on, tune in and drop out."

This is the story about the life and times of Pickard, a brilliant
chemist who was deputy director of UCLA's Drug Policy Research
Program, and how he came to be accused of conspiring to run one of the
nation's largest LSD labs.

The tale unfolds amid a budding psychedelic renaissance rooted in the
Bay Area. Hallucinogens have turned up at raves where they are used to
party, at psychiatrists' offices where they have been part of therapy
and at universities where scientists are conducting the first
authorized human tests on them in decades.

The case highlights law enforcement suspicions that since the hippie
era, Northern California has been a haven for elusive, close-knit
groups who supply most of the nation's "acid" in the belief that it
fosters enlightenment.

The Chronicle has learned that the Drug Enforcement Administration has
investigated whether a surreal assortment of other people played a
part in the alleged conspiracy - including women from a San Francisco
strip joint, a Harvard psychiatrist, and a Manhattan financier who is
a trustee of the American Ballet Theatre.

The DEA also has probed claims that Pickard funneled hundreds of
thousands of dollars in LSD profits to fund his own position at UCLA
and to support ostensibly legitimate drug researchers at Harvard and
the Heffter Research Institute, a Santa Fe, N.M., group leading the
push for more studies of psychedelics. Heffter's lawyer denied the
claim.

Pickard, 55, and Apperson, 46, have denied charges of possessing LSD
and conspiracy, and face a June 21 hearing in Topeka.

Pickard's lawyers, William Rork of Topeka, and William Osterhoudt of
San Francisco, contend their client was framed by an Oklahoma con man
who owned the missile silo and became an informant to avoid his own
charges of making LSD.

In a phone call from Leavenworth federal prison, where he is being
held without bail, Pickard said he opposes drug abuse and is
straighter than most narcs.

"I'm not a drug user at all," he said softly. "Nor do I synthesize
controlled substances or distribute them. I don't even drink. A big
drug experience to me would be a cup of coffee."

It was 1974 and Pickard went to San Francisco's federal building to
pay his respects.

Tim Scully was on trial for making huge batches of LSD in a Sonoma
County farmhouse. Scully believed the drug could raise people's
consciousness and had bluntly told the court he had wanted to "turn on
the world."

"There was a break, and I walked out into the hall, and he introduced
himself as a fellow chemist," recalled Scully, once an "apprentice" to
Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the most infamous psychedelic sorcerer of
the '60s.

Pickard smiled and handed Scully a U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Group
pin with a flask and test tube design.

"He was trying to express some brotherhood of underground chemists,"
said Scully, noting that many acid chemists felt "we were doing a
public service."

Later, Pickard paid $5,000 for a print by Dutch artist M.C. Escher,
"Heaven and Hell," that Scully sold to pay legal fees. It showed
angels and devils and seemed to reflect the LSD experience.

Nowhere was that experience more concentrated than the Haight in the
sixties, which became a world center of a counterculture electrified
by LSD.

The most potent hallucinogen known, LSD can produce kaleidoscopic
hallucinations, profoundly alter perceptions and cause experiences
ranging from transcendent to terrifying.

Used initially to study personality disorders, LSD had seeped into the
mainstream before the government banned it in 1966. Then clandestine
chemists like Scully filled the void.

Pickard, a bright young man who had had trouble with authority and a
special interest in chemistry, was among the throngs drawn to the Bay
Area in 1967.

"No one had quite seen anything like it," Pickard said, "so many
people stepping out of line . . . discussing theology and philosophy,
seeking explanations, exploring their place in life."

Pickard was raised in a Baptist family in the Atlanta suburbs. His
father was a lawyer, and his mother was a fungal disease expert at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In high school, he was an honors student, played basketball and was
named "most intellectual." But in 1965, he was arrested for driving a
stolen car.

Pickard still won a scholarship to Princeton University. But he cut
class to hang out in Greenwich Village jazz clubs and withdrew after
one term, he said.

By 1971, he had landed work as a research manager at UC Berkeley's
Department of Bacteriology and Immunology, a job he held until 1974,
when his academic resume begins a 20-year gap.

Public records show he studied chemistry at San Jose State and
Stanford universities. And at San Francisco State University, he took
a course on social drugs taught by Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, whose
pioneering research on the hallucinogenic amphetamine MDMA has earned
him renown as the "Godfather of Ecstacy."

"He was a very interested student," recalled Shulgin.

In 1976, San Mateo County Sheriff's deputies arrested Pickard for
possessing hallucinogenic peyote cactus. In 1977, they raided his
Portola Valley home, seizing a small Ecstacy lab. He served six
months.

On his release, he faded into the background, favoring inconspicuous
cars and clothes.

"He looked like a guy on his way to a golf course," said Mark Dowie, a
former Mother Jones editor who met him in the 1980s. "He was, in a
way, part of the love generation. He really believed LSD and its
derivatives could produce a better culture."

And he could be dramatically romantic, a friend recalled, and once
hired Stanford University Band members to serenade a woman friend.

By the early 1980s, Scully was out of prison and home near Mendocino.
Pickard dropped by.

"He wanted to compare and contrast methods of making acid," said Scully.

Pickard said his interest was purely academic, but the elder chemist
declined. He had quit the psychedelic scene.

Pickard left after an hour, said Scully, now a computer engineer.

"All I could do is be friendly and offer him a cup of tea."

In December 1988, a neighbor noticed an odd chemical odor emanating
from the architectural shop at a Mountain View industrial park and
phoned police.

Agents found a lab and seized more than 200,000 doses of LSD,
including blotter paper featuring Grateful Dead album covers.

When officers shined a black light around the lab, the surfaces glowed
eerily with LSD dust. While taking the lab apart, one agent became so
heavily dosed he collapsed in convulsions.

Pickard was charged with making LSD, pleaded guilty and served about
five years. Later, officials revealed that Pickard "had been an
informant" for state and federal drug agents.

Pickard said he helped police investigate people supplying equipment
to make methamphetamine, which like heroin and cocaine is addictive.
He seemed to see psychedelic drugs as beneficial, but eyed addictive
drugs as a blight: "I agree with (hippie leader) Wavy Gravy. There's
blood on heroin and cocaine."

At a hearing related to his LSD bust, U.S. District Court Judge
Marilyn Hall Patel warned the then-44-year-old Pickard:

"I hope that the . . . years in the federal penitentiary will be spent
wisely. You don't have much time left to straighten out your life."
Released from Terminal Island prison near Los Angeles in August 1992,
Pickard went straight to the San Francisco Zen Center.

In prison, he had become a vegetarian and learned to meditate. He
would later be ordained as a Buddhist priest.

Pickard lived at the center two years. Each morning, he would ring the
temple bell, calling people to 5 a.m. meditation.

And after sweeping the sidewalks outside the center, Pickard went off
to classes at UC Berkeley.

To journalist Dowie, Pickard seemed "set on his science and doing
something with his life."

Occasionally, Pickard attended potluck dinners that brought together
some of the leading thinkers on altered states of consciousness.

The psychonauts, as many of them called themselves, met monthly at the
Marin County home of John Weir Perry, a Harvard-trained
psychotherapist who died in 1998. Perry had studied with Carl Jung.

Shulgin, who had taught Pickard 20 years earlier, was among the
resident elders. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, computer engineers,
scientists, writers and artists also dropped in, the Shulgins said.

The talk lasted into the wee hours and covered consciousness, drugs
and policy. Ann Shulgin noted drug use was forbidden.

Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at Harvard who had dined
with the psychonauts, said Pickard was seen as a "superbrilliant
chemist."

In 1994, Pickard enrolled at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government,
where he became personally and professionally close with research
fellow Deborah Harlow. They wed, had a daughter, but later separated.

Harlow was a Bay Area therapist who helped pioneer the use of MDMA -
before it became illegal in 1985 - as a tool to help clients become
more emotionally open. She also worked on a federally funded study of
MDMA users.

Over the next few years, Pickard co-wrote a series of brief papers,
including a 1994 study on 12 raves that found LSD more common at New
York raves and MDMA more common at California raves.

He focused on drug abuse in the former Soviet Union, theorizing that
the booming black market and many unemployed chemists could flood the
drug market.

As part of the school program, some of Pickard's Russian research was
reviewed by Robert S. Gelbard, a Harvard graduate and then-Assistant
Secretary of State for International Matters and Law Enforcement
Affairs. Gelbard's involvement helped Pickard meet top Russian drug
officials, Pickard said. Gelbard did not return calls seeking comment.

The research resulted in a paper, "What can the State Department do
about drug problems in Russia?"

But according to DEA records, Pickard himself was about to resume work
as an underground acid chemist.

On a spring day in 1995, Pickard showed up at the New Mexico home of
Al Savinelli, a subject in the first authorized test of psychedelics
on humans since the 1970s.

Savinelli had been given successive doses of a powerful hallucinogen
called DMT at the University of New Mexico. The experiment drew
attention from drug researchers including Pickard, who that day met
one of his more prominent colleagues at Savinelli's house.

John Halpern, a psychiatric resident at Harvard University Medical
School, had a strong interest in psychoactive drugs. He had recently
published a study finding "the illicit use of hallucinogenic drugs is
a re-emerging public health problem, especially among well-educated
adults and teenagers."

But that day in Taos, Halpern himself was using ayahuasca, a
potentially dangerous hallucinogenic tea made from rain forest plants.
He was having a bad trip.

He was lost in thoughts of despair and death, he later told the DEA,
and Pickard calmed him.

Pickard confided that he had taken "more LSD than anyone on the
planet," said Halpern. And as the two Harvard researchers discussed
mutual interests over the following months, Pickard became a father
figure.

According to a statement Halpern gave the DEA, Halpern told Pickard he
was financially strapped and might have to stop his research to take a
better- paying job.

Pickard replied that he had more than $1 million in cash from an
inheritance - and other money from "the old days," which Halpern
figured meant his 1988 LSD operation.

But when Halpern returned to Taos in 1996, Savinelli suggested another
source of the money: He said he'd helped Pickard set up an LSD lab.

Halpern claimed he didn't know whether Pickard was doing anything
illegal. But he told the DEA that, within a year, Pickard said he was
generating lots of cash and wanted to invest it.

Halpern set up a meeting between Pickard and an old friend and
financial adviser, Stefan Wathne, 31, who lives in Manhattan and is a
trustee of the American Ballet Theatre.

In return for the introduction, Pickard offered Halpern a 10 percent
commission on any deals with Wathne. Both Pickard and Wathne later
told Halpern that none materialized.

But in January 1998, Pickard handed Halpern a cigar box containing $100,000,
Halpern said, which was followed by another $199,000 in cash.

The DEA has investigated whether Wathne laundered LSD profits for
Pickard, records show, and whether Savinelli helped set up LSD labs.

Halpern and Wathne both refused to comment. Pickard denied giving
either man drug money. Savinelli denied wrongdoing.

Pickard had said he was not making LSD, Halpern told the DEA, and that
he was working for the FBI, the DEA and American spy agencies.

That, he said, might explain his "sometimes bizarre and secretive behavior."
Pickard had other means of moving money, an informant told the DEA.

He may have shipped $1.2 million to Los Angeles with help from three
exotic dancers who worked at San Francisco's Mitchell Brothers'
O'Farrell Theatre, the informant said.

But the women denied the claims, telling the DEA that they knew
Pickard only as a frequent customer of the theater who sometimes dined
with them.

And in 1998, the informant said, Pickard used Federal Express to send
$97, 700 in LSD profits to Heffter Research Institute, which supports
medical studies of psychedelics.

The institute is financing federally approved human experiments with
psilocybin at the University of Arizona, and funds studies at Harvard
and universities in Switzerland and Russia.

Founded partly out of frustration with what it sees as inadequate
government support for such research, Heffter has raised funds from
Laurence S.Rockefeller and includes respected scientists at the University of
California and other schools. Halpern is a consultant; Shulgin is an
adviser.

Jerry Patchen, Heffter's lawyer, said in a letter to The Chronicle
that the institute had received no money from Pickard, has complied
with all laws and was not the subject of any investigation.

David Nichols, Heffter's president and a professor of pharmacology at
Purdue University, said he's seen growing interest in the scientific
study of psychedelics.

"I'd like to think its the beginning of a renaissance," he said.
By 1999, Pickard's academic career was peaking.

Kleiman had left his Harvard post to head UCLA's Drug Policy Analysis
Program, and named Pickard assistant director.

Funding for Pickard's post mysteriously materialized.

"I got a letter one day from some guy I didn't know," said Kleiman,
followed by two checks totaling about $140,000.

Pickard used LSD profits to fund his own post, but disguised its
origin by sending it through financial adviser Wathne, the informant
said. Pickard denies this.

While at UCLA, Pickard did research in Russia, learning about a plan
to make a synthetic opiate and told former DEA head Robert Bonner. "I
referred him to a DEA official," Bonner said.

Pickard's main focus at UCLA was the Future and Emerging Drugs Study (FEDS),
a proposal for an international group of experts to monitor new drugs
that could have "novel effects upon personality, memory and learning,
addictive behavior, and human performance."

Despite Pickard's academic achievement, Kleiman said, Pickard was
rarely around the office and produced few finished papers.

"That was making me nervous," he said.

It was at the Palace of Fine Arts, at a 1997 conference on
entheobotany, the study of hallucinogenic plants, that Pickard
encountered an eccentric Oklahoma man with an interest in psychedelics
and a history of legal trouble.

Gordon Todd Skinner, 36, had lots of cash, Porsches and a missile silo
near Topeka, in Wamego.

He bought the Atlas E silo in 1996, lavishly remodeling it and turning
the silo grounds into a menagerie of Clydesdale horses, llamas and
rare rabbits.

In 1989, he was arrested in New Jersey on charges of selling a large
quantity of marijuana. To avoid a stiff sentence he offered to sell
three people 30 pounds of pot, then turned them in. The case was
dismissed in 1995 after a court said the suspects were illegally
wiretapped and "the credibility and character of Skinner was . . .
questionable."

Last month, he was arrested for involuntary manslaughter in connection
with a 1999 incident in which a man overdosed on depressants at the
silo. Skinner has denied the charge.

Skinner also found himself facing potential charges of bank fraud and
manufacturing LSD.

Last October, he met with DEA agents and in return for immunity
admitted he had laundered LSD profits, delivered thousands of doses
and secured lab sites. He claimed Pickard was a longtime LSD chemist,
had laundered money through Wathne and sent profits to Heffter. He
offered to help ensnare Pickard. Skinner and his lawyer could not be
reached for comment.

In recorded calls, Skinner asked Pickard to help move a piano and some
boxes from the silo, Pickard said.

In early November, he met Skinner at the silo grounds and discovered
that the boxes held an illegal drug lab, Pickard said in court. He
said he wanted to call the DEA immediately, but Skinner refused and
drove off.

On Nov. 6, Pickard loaded the boxes with plans to destroy the lab, he said.

But when he tried to enter the silo, DEA agents hidden inside held the
door shut, as if it was locked.

Then Skinner called on a cell phone, telling Pickard to go to the shed
and take some aluminum canisters - allegedly containing the raw
material for LSD.

When the officers stopped his Buick, Pickard said, he panicked and
fled into the fields.

The next day, a farmer found him in his barn and phoned police.

Again Pickard ran - but the squad car chased him through the mud until
he stopped.

"You've got me," he said.

[American Dream]

Link Between A Course in Miracles and the Stanford Research Institute

Remote Perception at Stanford Research Institute

...

Our observation of the phenomena leads us to conclude that experiments in the area of so-called paranormal phenomena can be scientifically conducted, and it is our hope that other laboratories will initiate additional research to attempt to replicate these findings.

This research was sponsored by The Foundation for Parasensory Investigation, New York City. We thank Mrs. Judith Skutch, Dr. Edgar D. Mitchell of the Institute of Noetic Sciences - as well as our SRI associates, Mr. Bonnar Cox, Mr. Earle Jones and Dr. Dean Brown - for support and encouragement. Constructive suggestions by Mrs. Jean Mayo, Dr. Charles Tart, University of California, and Dr. Robert Ornstein and Dr. David Galin of the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute are acknowledged.

Russell Targ
Harold Puthoff
Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory,
Stanford Research Institute,
Menlo Park, California 94025

http://www.urigeller.com/sria.htm

The publisher of the Course was the Foundation for the Investigation of Para Sensory Phenomena. Some observers wonder whether this may have been funded by members involved with or employed by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Menlo Park, California, which at the time was home to the Remote Viewing project - itself sponsored by the CIA. One of the people with connections to SRI was Judith Skutch, the president and founder of the foundation.


In 1973, Skutch was one of Uri Geller's first supporters. According to Andrew Tobias, most of Geller's private demonstrations were done in Skutch's apartment and it was this foundation that put up $60,000 to pay for SRI's further study of Geller. As it is now known that funding for such experiments also came from the CIA, we can of course wonder whether the Foundation was a front for the CIA... which would mean that it was the CIA itself who published "A Course in Miracles" in 1975. That would mean that the Course was from beginning to end a CIA affair.

[American Dream]

http://ce399.typepad.com/weblog/2008/09 ... enics.html

01 September 2008

Unity Church, Indigo Children, Implants, ET's and Eugenics


"INDIGO: THE MOVIE"—THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

Under cover, tonight I joined several hundred others to squeeze into a spacious Unity Church in Boulder for the much-publicized premiere screening of "Indigo," the latest release in the genre of independent "spiritual" films to be promoted through grassroots support (a la "What the Bleep Do We Know?").

Singer-songwriter-emissary-scriptwriter James Twyman has teamed up with director Stephen Simon (producer of "What Dreams May Come") and Conversations with God author Neale Donald Walsch to roll out the welcome mat for "a new generation of psychic and gifted 'Indigo' children" and (not coincidentally) to publicize their Spiritual Film Circle.

This low-budget feature has all the appearance of a made-for-TV feel-good film (think "Hallmark Hall of Fame"). The acting is unconvincing (Walsch is the main character), the make-up is a little tacky, the dialogue is frequently awkward, the kid is miscast, and the flashback transitions are surprisingly amateurish. Overall, I'd give this film maybe two stars (out of five). Nevertheless, the audience seemed to love this movie (it's Boulder, after all).

However, I was astonished when, as the credits rolled, people simply got up and left. I was certain that there would be some sort of discussion after the show (which was advertised), as if this was an event worth talking about. In fact, I was looking forward to hearing people's reactions. But no, people just left. Maybe they had been pleasantly entertained, had their hearts warmed, and that's all there was to it. Maybe it's just life in the spiritual suburbs…

In a 15-minute pre-film warmup, Twyman, Simon and Walsch discuss the reasons for developing this movie. For them, it's apparently all about making us humans "feel a little bit better about ourselves." Yes, you read that right. The film demonstrates "We're not so bad," Simon proclaims.

The Extraterrestrial Connection

But just who are the Indigo children? The film's press release refers to Lee Carroll and Jan Tober (authors of The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived, Hay House 1999) as "internationally known experts on Indigo children" (actually, Carroll is better known as the channel for an entity known as Kyron), who blandly describe Indigos as "children who display a new and unusual set of psychological attributes" (see more here). [Note: Kyron, incredibly, encourages people to pray to be able to receive special implants that will enhance their healing/transformation/enlightenment process.]

But there's much more going on behind the scenes. Here's the quick intel rundown:

Neale Donald Walsch is possibly the biggest-selling new age author of the last 20 years, driving tiny Hampton Roads to an unprecedented level of success. Walsch's presence in the "consciousness raising" movement is ubiquitous, the influence of his books and tapes is enormous.

Given the quantity of "friendly-ET" material that HR has put out into the world in the last five years or so, it could be said that they are the Collectives' favorite publisher.

Walsch has conspicuously endorsed another Hampton Roads offering, Lisette Larkins' Talking to Extraterrestrials: Communicating with Enlightened Beings, where he writes, "Whether or not we are being communicated with from outer space is no longer the question. That question has been answered long ago. The current question is, what are we being told? What wisdom are we being given? What assistance are we being provided? What insight are we being offered and what answers are we being supplied?" Larkins' ETs have the answers, he says. (Who is the "God" that Walsch has been in conversation with? Could this be an extraterrestrial force, rather than spiritual? Would he be able to discern the difference? Would we?)

Indigos are aging (now considered to be from age 8-26), and may represent only the first wave of hybrids. Other researchers have pointed to children who exhibit even more advanced psychic skills without the Indigos' usual emotional problems. These second-wave "Crystal Children" are now generally ages 0-8, and are much more striking in appearance and demeanor (see Doreen Virtue's frequently-quoted article). Indigos are generally described as merely "psychic," while Crystals are usually referred to as "telepathic."

An entire cottage industry has grown up around the care and feeding of Indigos and Crystals (and the support of their baffled and often stressed-out parents). Just do a Google search on "Crystal Children" and note the sponsored links; my favorite is HolisticMunchkins.com.

Some alternative schools are apparently beginning to cater specifically to Indigos. The film's press release states, "Many schools throughout the world such as the Waldorf, Montessori and Rainbow Kids Integral School (founded in September, 2002 in the Miramar area of San Diego, California) are now developing curriculum to cater towards the special gifts of these Indigo Children." While this may be somewhat of an exaggeration, it is true that parents are recommending Waldorf Schools as a good place for Indigos.

A variety of intel reports indicate it is highly likely that many of the Indigo and Crystal Children are human-ET hybrids in the process of being groomed for leadership roles in our society (as Collective loyalists). Twyman, Walsch and Simon will never mention this possibility, of course.

Richard Boylan is the most outspoken advocate of the idea that these unusual children have an extraterrestrial connection, although the makers of "Indigo" would probably never endorse his work. Boylan focuses on Star Kids, who he defines as children of "non-ordinary heritage" who are "the offspring of 'experiencers'—those who have been taken or influenced in some way by extraterrestrials." These children have received "a further upgrade in human genetics" from the "Star Visitors," says Boylan, and he claims that such Star Kids "have a unique and crucial role to play in our world" (see "Star Kids: Our Future Hope" for more).

Descriptions of the Star Kids and the Indigo/Crystal children are closely aligned. There is much to suggest that we are looking at a single phenomenon here.

Boylan further defines a Star Kid "a child with both human and extraterrestrial origin; the extraterrestrial contribution may come from reproductive material, from genetic engineering, from biomedical technology, and from telepathic consciousness linking, as well as from direct incarnation of a Star Visitor into a human body." The plot thickens…

Soon Boylan will be publishing his book on this subject (Star Kids: The Emerging Cosmic Generation, Blue Star Productions, Spring 2005). He has already launched a ten-year strategic plan that includes "multiple Star Kids Workshops across the United States and in strategic regions of Canada, Europe, Mexico, and Turkey," plus "establishing a Star Kids residential school, a mentor program, and a graduate curriculum, as well as training for faculty."

Why is Boylan so dedicated to Star Kids? "They are the future," he says. "If I can help as many as possible get properly launched, it will greatly benefit the societies that they're going to help shape as they come of age. Many of these special kids are now only a couple of years away from adult lives and careers that will include positions of great responsibility and increasing influence.

...

We can reasonably conclude that it is highly likely that "Indigo: The Movie"—along with the work of Walsch, Twyman and Simon—is part of an overarching strategy to welcome, support and integrate ET-human hybrids into our society.

This is precisely what abduction researchers like David Jacobs, Budd Hopkins and others have been predicting would be the result of what appears to be an aggressive alien hybridization program. In The Allies of Humanity, Marshall Summers has outlined the far-reaching purpose of this effort. Accordingly, "Indigo" can be seen as confirmation that this hybridization program is well under way, the long-range goal of which is nothing less than the installation of a new leadership over humanity under the firm but invisible and unacknowledged control of the extraterrestrial Collectives.

"In my research (described in The Threat) abductees have indicated to me that aliens and hybrids plan a possible integration or colonization of human society... I think that the problem of the 21st century will be the problem of the alien presence. This, above all, will define and drive human society and activity. I reported that abductees felt that the aliens will begin their integration program into the society within the next forty years. I still think that this is the case."—David Jacobs

http://www.cosmicintel.com/reviews/indigo.htm

.

[American Dream]

MAY BE TRIGGERING TO SURVIVORS OF EXTREME ABUSE

Cult-Related Abuse: "Non-Choices" and the "Double Bind "




Cult-Related Abuse

Cult-related abuse is ritualistic abuse in the form of complex rituals taking place within an organized group.

Perhaps the problem with the word "cult" and the notion of cult-related abuse is that we're all too familiar with it. Probably all of us have been exposed to a variety of meanings for the word. Most of us, upon hearing it used, have an immediate negative reaction. Without necessarily being given clarification as to what particular meaning is being applied at the time, just hearing "cult" sends us into a bit of a shudder.

The most common use of the word "cult" is to describe pejoratively a group of people with beliefs or a lifestyle of which we do not approve. With one four letter word we can not only dismiss an entire group of people, but we can also send out a warning to others we would like to influence. We don't have to go into detail, nor in most cases do we have to qualify the term. Someone need only say, "Watch out for them, I hear they're a cult," and everyone listening will think they know what is meant. But it would be more helpful to suspend the notion that cult-related abuse is about people who adhere to "bad" belief systems. cult-related offenders do not commit sexual and other crimes against people because of deep belief in a philosophy or dogma. All the characteristics that apply to incest and ritualistic offenders apply to cult-related offenders as well, and these include a primary motivation of power and control over others.

There are rare occasions where organized cults kidnap someone for the sole purpose of murdering them. Under such circumstances, the victim may not have had a history of either incest or ritualistic abuse. (See Chapter Three, "Recognizing The Reality")

Cult-related offenders, in addition to these other characteristics, are a part of, make plans in accordance with, and have a strong allegiance to a group of other cult-related offenders.

Another common characteristic of cult-connected abusers is that they are involved in at least one criminal activity beyond the crimes committed directly againstlhe victim. These may involve pornography, illegal drug activity, prostitution, political manipulation, kidnapping, or murder. Victims and survivors may or may not be aware of any criminal activity apart from their own abuse. (And specific memories of that may even be vague at best.)

The size of a particular group of such criminals is immaterial, as is the nature and extent of the additional criminal activity. Such cults come in all sizes. They may be as small as two or three people who are neighbors, coworkers, or good friends; or, they may be as large as hundreds of people with powerful international dealings and connections. The criminal activity beyond victimization of individuals has an equally broad range of possibilities. It could be small scale "sex-ring" activities or highly profitable child pornography and prostitution. A victim's experience could be at the hands of a few local folks who have friends over for a night of sex with children, or who video-tape their own sexual assaults with young people and then distribute the tapes to friends and acquaintances. It might also be that someone has been victimized by countless individuals in a highly organized fashion, bringing them to many different countries and using them for long-term prostitution.

The Purpose of Cult-Related Abuse

The purpose of this type of abuse is twofold. With the individual victim, the aim is to maintain complete, day-to-day power and control over the victim's entire life. The intended result is to prevent the victim from having access to true individuality, independence, choice, or freedom.

The ultimate purpose of cult-related abuse is to use the individual victims as a front for larger criminal activity that supplies offenders with far-reaching social power and control. The horror of the crimes committed against cult-related victims is often, in fact, a protective mechanism to keep other criminal activities in place. The most obvious examples of criminal benefits for cult-related offenders are the child prostitution and pornography industries. Long- term and sophisticated abuse literally prepares children for the behavior demanded of them when they are being used as prostitutes. The filming of such horror is an international, big-time money maker.

How Cult-Related Abuse Offenders Get Away With It

In order to understand how both small and enormous groups of abusers can get away with such crimes, we must review the protections discussed under incest and ritualistic abuse. All of the security and protections that aid incest and ritualistic abuse offenders serve cult-related offenders as well. In addition, these offenders use highly sophisticated brainwashing methods in a full attack on the victim's sense of free will. Like the ritualistic abuse offender, cult-related abusers set up situations in which their victims are given "non-choices." This is what many survivors come to refer to as the "double bind." However, because of the greater level of sophistication available to and used by the cult-related offender, here the double- bind method is even more effective in making victims feel responsible for the abuse.

The cult-related offender uses very violent and torturous means to convince victims they "asked for" the abuse, and that any choice they make will result in some kind of horror. This type of offender is likely to say something like: "You will either stick this rabbit's paw up your rectum and tell us you love it, or we will kill these other three rabbits and stuff their guts down your throat." This type of technique is extraordinarily effective in keeping cult-related victims under the offenders' control. This is especially due to the fact that the abuse is enacted in ritual fashion, with similar scenarios being played out over and over again.

Another way cult-related offenders are able to continue committing such crimes without detection is through the forced identification of the victim with the offender. This identification of victims and survivors with the people who abuse them exists in incest and ritualistic abuse as well as in cult-related abuse. When we are faced with having to take action against these crimes, we are often dealing with criminals who are loved and depended on by their victims. This is one of the problems facing our society and child-protection organizations when determining what the appropriate actions and reactions should be. It is also one of the reasons victims and survivors have such a difficult time breaking free of the hold their abusers have on them. They initially feel a natural identification with their abusers because they are related to them or because those abusers have an important, ongoing role in the lives of those they victimize. And, beyond that, this identification is used by offenders for their own protection.

Many incest survivors feel a special burden because they look like the person who abused them. Or they talk about how they were often compared to their offender. Or the abuser herself encouraged the identification by saying, "We're so much alike. That's why I need your love. You're the only person who ever really understood me."

Identification with the offender of ritualistic abuse works in much the same way, with the addition of no-choice set-ups that convince victims and survivors they were culpable in creating the abuse to begin with.

Cult-related offenders add to this by committing an ultimate victimization: one they perpetrate in addition to the long-term, repetitive, carefully planned torture revolving around their victims' sexuality and very sense of themselves. It takes the form of forcing victims to commit the same sorts of atrocities that are being committed against them. This becomes the core of what protects offenders, making it nearly impossible for victims and survivors to break free.

Finally, the security and protection of cult-related offenders is found in a source beyond the individual victim, in the society in which we all live. This social and cultural assistance emerges when society's general moral, spiritual, religious, and political belief systems are used against the victims themselves.

We are surrounded by and inundated with symbolic and ritualized belief systems that are often institutionalized. The most obvious of these are our religious institutions, but established groups of all kinds utilize ritual, metaphor, symbolism, and dogma to propagate their purposes. These widespread structures designed for effective teaching of any variety of things are easily vulnerable to distortion at the hands of cult-related offenders.

Woodsum, Gayle M
The Ultimate Challenge
Chapter One: Looking at Incest, Ritualistic, and Cult-Related Abuse on a Continuum

(excerpt - no longer available online?)

http://www.ra-info.org/library/books/fav_books.shtml

[American Dream]

Corporate America, Mind Control and New Age Cult Groups (NY Times 1986)


Jack Rafferty (L) and Werner Erhart (aka "Jack" Rosenberg) - Erhart Seminars Training (est)


Representatives of some of the nation's largest corporations, including I.B.M., A.T.&T., and General Motors, met in New Mexico in July to discuss how meta-physics, the occult, and Hindu mysticism might help executives compete in the world marketplace.

Here in San Francisco, a politically conservative research center foresees an eventual alliance of conservatives, leftists of the 1960's, and Americans with interests ranging from eastern mysticism and the occult to holistic medicine.

And this November, ABC-TV plans a five-hour miniseries, based on an auto-biography by the actress Shirley McLaine that delves deeply and seriously into reincarnation and the supernatural. These are strands in a thread of alternative thought that scholars say is working its way increasingly into the nation's cultural, religious, social, economic, and political life.

On one level, they say, it is evidenced by a surge in interest in new meta- physical religions, mediums, the occult, reincarnation, psychic healing, satanism, "spirit guides," and other aspects of supernatural belief.

At another level, the scholars site the spreading influence of psychological self-help and "human potential groups" that operate under names such as The Forum, Insight, Actualizations, Silva Mind Control, and Lifespring. These groups' programs for corporate employees attract millions of dollars a year.

Borrowing some spiritual concepts from asian religions, the programs try to transform clients' thought processes and make them better, more creative people.

On both levels, leaders contend they are ushering in what they call a New Age of understanding and intellectual ferment, as significant as the Renaissance. But critics of these groups that many are nothing more than cults, and that others subject unwitting participants to mind control.

Professor Rashky, a critic of the trend, describes it as a "most powerful social force in the country today. I think its as much a political movement as a religious movement," he says, "and its spreading into Business Management Theory and alot of other areas. If you look at it carefully you see it represents a complete rejection of judeo-christian and bedrock American values."

Some who have evaluated the trend attribute it partly to a loss of confidence in traditional western ideas and conventional ways of doing things, and to a willingness to try out anything new in search of a replacement.

"Why is business rushing in to look at everything from EST to firewalking?" asks Robert S. Callodson, a business consultant who is a retired Vice President of the Champion International Corporation. "The old ways of doing business aren't working anymore, and even the most intelligent of people feel that something's broke."

Although precepts vary from group to group, many argue that western man, partly because of scientific discoveries of recent centuries, has become disillusioned with the spiritual concepts he inherited. Many groups are also critical of the world's current economic and social systems, saying they have ravaged the planet.

Most argue that mankind is at the threshold of "a great evolutionary leap of consciousness to new beliefs about many things" and that there is an energy or force in the universe that will lead to a happy, peaceful, perhaps united, new world (the sort of "force" at work in George Lucas' Star Wars films.)

The purpose of many of the groups is to transform the society to prepare for this "New Age." To get there, it is argued, men and women must first alter conventional ways of thinking and begin using areas of their minds they do not normally use. They must enter "an altered state of consciousness" through the use of such types of psychological techniques as meditation, hypnosis, chanting, biofeedback, prolonged isolation, and the intervention of "spirit guides," or ghosts.

Psychologists who have studied the process say that while participants are in this "altered state," leaders of the groups are able to implant new ideas and alter their thinking processes.

Participants in various new age groups say they often experience euphoria in the altered states and cited this as one reason for their popularity. "The drug of the 60's was LSD and marijuana," said Carrie Klinger, a 29-year old resident of Washington State, who belonged to several New Age groups before becoming disillusioned. "I think the drug of the 80's is cosmic consciousness."

Reginald Alev, Executive Director of the Cult Awareness Network, a Chicago- based clearinghouse of information about cults, said "it's very sad what's going on. Most of the people who get involved in these New Age groups which are growing all over the place are intelligent, altruistic, idealistic. They want to know the meaning of life, and someone comes along and tells them they have the answer. Then they're told they are the master of their own destiny, sort of an eastern version of Norman Vincent Peale, but they don't know they are being subjected to mind control."

Richard Wattring, Personnel Director of the Budget Rent-A-Car Corporation in Chicago, is seeking to arouse concern among his peers over how quickly Corporate America is embracing "pseudo-therapy programs." "I really think you're going down the wrong path in business when you deal with a person's spiritual being and attempt to manipulate his mind," he said.

Graduates of such programs and former cult members are often psychically scarred says Dr. Edwin Morse, a former member of the University of Wisconson's psychology faculty who now counsels such people in Madison. "These groups are using hypnotic procedures and people are not being told about it." Not only do leaders of some groups convince clients that they should sign up for expensive new seminars or workshops, it is asserted, many also use the hypnotic state to plant beliefs in their mind they are unaware of.

One concept commonly transmitted in these sessions by "human potential groups" is that because man is a deity equal to God he can do wrong, thus there is no sin, no reason for guilt in life.

The Ford Motor Company, Westinghouse, and the Calvin Klein Fashion House are among scores of major companies that have sent employees for training, according to "human potential organizations" such as Transformation Technologies, Lifespring, and Actualizations, all of which include techniques modelled to a greater or lesser extent after the techniques started by Werner Erhart, the founder of EST. "We teach new patterns of thinking," said Stuart Emory, chairman of Actualizations.

Kevin Garby, an author and researcher on New Age topics in Carlyle, Pennsylvania, cites an army recruiting slogan "Be All That You Can Be" as evidence of what he contends has been the significant influence of EST, Lifespring, and other New Age programs in certain quarters of the military. In the early 1980's, he said, officers at the Army War College in Carlyle, some of whom were graduates of EST, and were former members of The Radical Students For A Democratic Society, conducted a study aimed at creating a "New Age Army." The slogan, a derivative of the "You Create Your Own Reality" orthodoxy of New Age groups, grew out of this work.

The study, according to participants, also envisaged training soldiers in meditation, developing skills in extrasensory perception, magic, and in "neurolinguistic training," a hypnosis technique. Army officials say the program has been cancelled and its principle leaders have left the army. Mr. Garvy, however, contends that EST and Lifespring graduates continue to have influence in the army and other government agencies.

Politically, many in the New Age movement have said they tend to gravitate toward democrats like Edmund G. Brown, Jr., the former governer of California, and Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, but A. Lawrence Chickering, editorial director of the Institute For Contemporary Studies here, a conservative research organization, whose alumni include Attorney General Edwin Meese, and Defense Secretary Casper W. Weinberger, forsees the evolution of a New Age Right.

Mr. Chickering attributes the "rediscovery of conservatism" during the 1970's in part to the Esalen Institute, "because what they are trying to do is rediscover principles of order within a context of freedom." In time, he said, he expected the New Age Right to form an alliance with "some of the components of the New Left of the 1960's and others in the New Age movement."

[American Dream]

Madness was made possible by all that milieu that repressed in man of his animal nature...madness then became the other side of progress. By multiplying mediations, civilisation offered men ever increasing means to become insane.

- Michel Foucault. History of Madness. Pg. 374

The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.

- Dr. Jose Delgado, Director of Neuropsychiatry Yale University Medical School - Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974

The term designer babies is by and large just emblematic of the idea that genetic technology can do more than merely correct the frail aspects of human existence. It can redress nature's essential randomness. Purely elective changes are in the offing. The industry argues over the details, but many assure that within our decade, depending upon the family and the circumstances, height, weight and even eye color will become elective. Gender selection has been a fact of birth for years with a success rate of up to 91 percent for those who use it....

It goes much further than designer babies. Mass social engineering is still being advocated by eminent voices in the genetics community. Celebrated geneticist James Watson, codiscoverer of the double helix and president of Cold Springs Harbor Laboratories, told a British film crew in 2003, "If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease. The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 percent." For the first half of the twentieth century, Cold Spring Harbor focused on the "submerged tenth"; apparently, the passion has not completely dissipated.

Following in the footsteps of Galton, who once amused himself by plotting the geographic distribution of pretty women in England, Watson also told the film crew," People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great." Watson gave no indication of what the standard for beauty would be.

- War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. By Edwin Black. Pg. 442-443

Though [John B.] Watson's work was the beginning of mans attempts to control human actions, the real work was done by, B.F. Skinner, the high priest of the behaviorists movement. The key to Skinner's work was the concept of operant conditioning, which relied on the notion of reinforcement, all behavior which is learned is rooted in either a positive or negative response to that action. There are two corollaries of operant conditioning Aversion therapy and desensitization.

Aversion therapy uses unpleasant reinforcement to a response which is undesirable. This can take the form of electric shock, exposing the subject to fear producing situations, and the infliction of pain in general. It has been used as a way of "curing" homosexuality, alcoholism and stuttering. Desensitization involves forcing the subject to view disturbing images over and over again until they no longer produce any anxiety, then moving on to more extreme images, and repeating the process over again until no anxiety is produced. Eventually, the subject becomes immune to even the most extreme images. This technique is typically used to treat people's phobias. Thus, the violence shown on T.V. could be said to have the unsystematic and unintended effect of desensitization.

Skinnerian behaviorism has been accused of attempting to deprive man of his free will, his dignity and his autonomy. It is said to be intolerant of uncertainty in human behavior, and refuses to recognize the private, the ineffable, and the unpredictable. It sees the individual merely as a medical, chemical and mechanistic entity which has no comprehension of its real interests.

Skinner believed that people are going to be manipulated. "I just want them to be manipulated effectively," he said. He measured his success by the absence of resistance and counter control on the part of the person he was manipulating. He thought that his techniques could be perfected to the point that the subject would not even suspect that he was being manipulated.

Dr. James V. McConnell, head of the Department of Mental Health Research at the University of Michigan, said, "The day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with the use of drugs, hypnosis, and the astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost absolute control over an individual's behavior. We want to reshape our society drastically."

-Mind Control by Harry V. Martin and David Caul/ Napa Sentinel August/September/October/November 1991

[American Dream]

Excerpted fromThe Covert War Against Rock, by Alex Constantine:

...At the dawn of the counter culture, CIA personnel mingled with drug dealers in San Francisco's swelling hippie district. Scientists with Agency credentials moved to the Haight and set up "monitoring" stations, among them Louis J. West of UCLA, formerly Jack Ruby's psychiatrist. (Dr. West testified that Ruby had an epileptic fit and accidentally shot Lee Harvey Oswald as a result of his involuntary twitchings). West also went on to the chair of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute and oversaw the illicit mind control experiments of Drs. Jose Delgado, author of Physical Control of the Mind (1969), and Ross Adey, a veteran of Operation Paperclip. Dr. Margaret Singer, currently an advisory board member of the CIA-anchored "False Memory Syndrome Foundation," also participated in the study of LSD as a politically-destabilizing weapon.

Pete Townshend, guitar thrasher for The Who, was one of the few popular musicians who shunned the drug, found it politically and spiritually useless. He let that particular bandwagon roll by. "When you trip, you love yourself. You don't realize you were better off as you were," he said. "The trips are just a side street, and before you know it you're back where you were. Each trip is more disturbing than the one that follows until eventually the side street becomes a dead end. Not only spiritually, which is the most important, but it can actually stop you thinking." Townsend tried a hit of LSD given to him by Berkeley chemist Owsley Stanley III at the Monterey Pop Festival in June, 1967. It would be 18 years before he gave the drug another try. "It was incredibly powerful," Townshend recalled. "Owsley must have had the most extraordinary liver" [14] By the time he got to Woodstock, Townshend was completely put off by the CIA's mind control drug...

.

[American Dream]

http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/craw ... e-mac.html

August 5, 2011

By Dinky Dawson

My Life Is the Road: Owsley “The Bear” Stanley Was a Friend of the Mac




On Monday, December 8, 1969, Fleetwood Mac began a four-night engagement at Steve Paul’s Scene in New York City. After the sound check, Teddy Slatus, the club’s manager, came into the green room looking for Peter Green.

“There’re some, uh, guests outside asking for you. I can’t let ‘em in without you.”

“Okay. So, who are they?” asked Peter.

“You need to come out front and see,” Teddy replied mysteriously. “I’ve never seen ‘em in the City before.”

Peter shrugged and quietly followed Teddy out the door. My curiosity aroused, I followed them through the club, up the stairs, and to the entrance. Looking outside, I couldn’t miss the three muscular men in heavy black leather and denim jackets with cut-out sleeves standing impatiently on the sidewalk. A short distance down the street, another behemoth waited silently with crossed arms, guarding a clutch of gleaming Harley-Davidsons angled up to the curb. Clouds of biker breath fogged the December air, rising around long, straggly hair and beards laced deeply with ice crystals that could only have formed from hours of riding in the wintery weather. Worn leather gloves and steel-toed boots completed the outfits. Footsteps fell heavily on the slushy concrete as the trio paced back and forth, dwarfing the two nervous doormen.

In a quavering voice, our bandleader introduced himself. “Uh… Hello, I’m Peter Green,” he ventured with a half-smile, nervously extending his hand.

I found myself wondering if the guitarist had lost some outrageous wager with someone during Fleetwood Mac’s first US tour, and this deadly looking bunch had come to collect on it. An old and dusty movie reel from one of those classic gangster movies replayed insanely in my mind—“You better pay up, see, or I’ll have your legs broken, see.” But the three impenetrable scowls brightened immediately once Peter introduced himself. The largest giant even smiled as he spoke so quietly that only we could hear.

“Owsley sent us. Got a room we can talk in?”

Peter’s eyes sparkled oddly, and he became quite excited, replying curtly, “To our dressing room. Follow me.”

To those in the closely knit psychedelic underground, the name Owsley held a magical aura. Skilled as a San Francisco chemist, since 1965 Owsley Stanley had been synthesizing what many acidheads considered the finest, purest LSD in the world. The West Coast psychedelic scene grew up fondly around his chemical contributions, with music from the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service providing the trippy soundtrack. Owsley, or “Bear” as he was sometimes referred to, often provided the “electric Kool-Aid” that sent entire roomfuls of people off on eight-hour hallucinogenic journeys of discovery.

Obviously, Peter had encountered this scene when the Mac first toured the States, because he instantly realized the significance of Owsley’s name while I remained ignorant of just what was going on. However, I did recognize the famous logo sewn into the backs of the trio’s jackets. A hard-drinking motorcycle gang that operated barely within the limits of the law, the Hell’s Angels had always been part of the West Coast psychedelic scene, partying alongside the bands and their growing audiences. Could it be that we had representatives of that fabled and much-feared clan in our midst?

The modern horsemen turned to follow Peter down the stairs and directly past the front of the stage, since that was the only path to Fleetwood Mac’s semi-private hallway. A few patrons nervously glanced at the looming mammoths following the guitarist, but in true New York fashion, they quickly returned to minding their own business. The Angels maneuvered with difficulty as they entered the crowded, stale beer-smelling hall, their leather gear scrunching loudly and mingling with the laughter and conversation of band members. In an instant, all discussion died as the bikers commanded everyone’s attention without a word.

After an uncomfortable moment, the largest Angel smiled widely, exposing a grill of gold and silver before announcing solemnly, “The Bear welcomes you to America.” As he handed Peter a book-sized package, the giant continued, “He gave us this to bring to you and is looking forward to seeing you all in San Francisco.”

Peter accepted the gift with thanks, then asked the trio where they were from. The largest merely turned around to expose the logo on the back of his jacket, which read “Hell’s Angels” with a smaller “San Francisco” beneath.

“You mean to tell us that you drove your bikes all the way from California to give us this?” Peter asked incredulously, pointing at the package. The bikers simply nodded as if it was something they did every week.

“The Bear and the Angels welcome Fleetwood Mac to America. You have fun with that stuff. We’ll see you at the Fillmore [West].” That was it; they turned to go. The whole encounter had taken less than five minutes.

“Wait,” Peter said. As the largest rider looked back, the guitarist continued. “Please thank Owsley. I hope to see him in San Francisco. We’ll go out for a drink in his town.” The Angel nodded and Peter added, “Tell your friends the same applies to them. We’ll be in San Francisco in five weeks.” Now the giant smiled, exposing the metalwork in his mouth again, before turning to follow his companions as they pushed through the narrow space between the stage and front row of tables.

While touring Europe in late March 1970, Green binged on LSD at a party at a commune in Munich—an incident cited by Fleetwood Mac manager Clifford Davis as the crucial point in his mental decline...in 1973, Green succumbed to mental illness, drug use and professional obscurity from which he only began to emerge in 1979. During this period he sold his signature 1959 Gibson Les Paul sunburst guitar to Northern Irish guitarist Gary Moore... By this time Green had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and he spent time in psychiatric hospitals undergoing electroconvulsive therapy during the mid 1970s. Many sources attest to his lethargic, trancelike state during this period. In 1977, he was arrested for threatening his accountant, Clifford Davis, with a shotgun, but the exact circumstances are the subject of much speculation, the most popular being that Green wanted Davis to stop sending money to him. After this incident he was sent to a psychiatric institution in London...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Green_(musician)

[eyeno]

I have not been following this thread. But this seems to fit the theme. Just throwing it in to the mix.

Meditation is Not What You Think
However you try to define meditation, it’s not that. -- Swami Brahmananda

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Ed & Deb Shapiro
Activist Post

Through many years of being involved with meditation we have seen how easily people miss the point, mainly because they take the practice and themselves too seriously. Many ‘try’ to meditate but their minds are so busy they get frustrated and quickly believe they are no good at it. Others turn into die-hard advocates of a particular method or technique and become like a salesperson trying to sell their produce.

Just like Yoga, people want to own meditation and to believe that their technique is the best one. They give it a name: TM or Vipassana or Mindfulness and sometimes make outrageous claims of what can be achieved, but that is not the point. Meditation is not a technique – being quiet happens by itself, not because of following the breath in and out, reciting a specific mantra or creating a visualization.

Teachers, through their compassion, created the many methods and techniques in order to help their students to concentrate and focus their minds, to be one-pointed. No one technique is better than another; they equally give our monkey minds something to do other than drive us bananas. Many of the practices known as meditation are actually concentration; they bring the mental energy together so the mind is less fragmented. But this is not meditation.

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Meditation invites us to stop, just stop, breathe and be. Just as with a musician playing or an artist painting, when we stop trying to make it happen something occurs, like the radiant sun that suddenly emerges in a cloudy sky. But because we try so hard, we identify more with the technique instead of allowing the meditation to reveal itself.

The practice of meditation easily gets put in a box: “I will practice now, at this time, at this place and in this posture, and I will do this particular method.” But a method is simply an aide; it is not the experience itself. A hammer can help build a house but it is not the house. There is no doubt that through practice we can release stress and feel wonderfully peaceful, but genuine meditation is about waking up, where the mind is clear and free of obscuration.

This is not a mental process but an experiential one as meditation is an opening, a release of ego identity when all attempts to meditate, all striving, all doing stops, when there is no past or future, just radiant emptiness. It is being present – fully aware and present in every moment — and we can do that whatever we are doing and wherever we are. It is the freedom to be fully oneself without limitations or ideologies – there is just this.

Deb’s father, Richard, was on a Zen retreat where he was taught to temper his sensuality, not to give in to his senses or think of sensual things but to stay focused and single minded. While walking in the garden he then came across a pond laden with happily fornicating frogs. We think meditation has to be something special but true meditation is opening and expanding our perception, as if seeing with new eyes.

The technique becomes redundant when meditation becomes our natural state. It doesn’t matter what the technique is — when we drive to Rome the car is necessary but when we get there it is immaterial – what matters is the attitude and awareness that we bring to practice. The teacher is also more important than the technique. They must be skillful, peaceful and clear, regardless of the method or tradition they are teaching.

The moon trusts that the world will continue to go round on its axis, birds trust there will be berries and seeds to eat, trees trust the seasons will follow in the right order. Until we trust that things will unfold naturally then we are slaves to our doubts, fears and neurosis, to the constant chatter in our heads that says we are useless and don’t know anything. But we don’t make the sun to rise or set. The planet is in orbit and neither we nor Jesus or Buddha or any of the wise ones run the show. Our job is simply to surrender to the moment.

See Ed & Deb's award-winning book: BE THE CHANGE, How Meditation Can Transform You and the World, forewords by the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman, with contributors Jack Kornfield, Jane Fonda, Father Thomas Keating, Marianne Williamson, Ram Dass, and many others.

Our 3 meditation CD’s: Metta—Loving kindness and Forgiveness; Samadhi–Breath Awareness and Insight; and Yoga Nidra–Inner Conscious Relaxation, are available at: http://www.EdandDebShapiro.com