rigorousintuition.ca

Miss this thread and this type of post at RI.

Earlier in this thread posted about a boarding school I attended in high school for several years. Note I am deliberately not naming the school.

The school still exists but is a day school 1-12 for rich people not a much smaller 9-12 boarding school for mostly rich kids but all "gifted". The school is still considered progressive.

I was one of the scholarship kids, the claim was made that 25% of the students were on scholarship.

The founder of the school had previously been a Ford Foundation VP. The school started the same year as Esalen which also was birthed out of the Ford Foundation. Two of the students had parents who were never famous but then were on staff at Esalen. While I was in attendance, Esalen did two sessions that were optional for the students to attend. Basically, students were isolated together in the Student Lounge building for a weekend doing various touchy-feely exercises (this was in school years 68-69 and 69-70, my sophomore and junior years). One session, a number of the student took lsd which was a bad idea. There was another student there who introduced me to Huxley and Crowley's tarot. Chuck B. had met Huxley who was a friend of his parents.

Aldous Huxley’s Influence on the Esalen Institute

Although Murphy and Price [Michael Murphy and Dick Price, Esalen’s founders] actually met Aldous Huxley only once, in January of 1962 when the author visited them briefly in Big Sur shortly before his death on November 22, 1963 (the same day, it turns out, that JFK was assassinated), his intellectual and personal influence on the place was immense. His second wife, Laura, would become a long-time friend of Esalen, where she would fill any number of roles, including acting as a sitter for one of Murphy’s psychedelic sessions.

Aldous Huxley’s writings on the mystical dimensions of psychedelics and on what he called the perennial philosophy were foundational. Moreover, his call for an institution that could teach the “nonverbal humanities” and the development of the “human potentialities” functioned as the working mission statement of early Esalen. Indeed, the very first Esalen brochures actually bore the Huxley-inspired title, “the human potentiality.” This same phrase would later morph in a midnight brainstorming session between Michael Murphy and George Leonard into the now well-known “human potential movement.” When developing the early brochures for Esalen, Murphy was searching for a language that could mediate between his own Aurobindonian evolutionary mysticism and the more secular and psychological language of American culture. It was Huxley who helped him to create such a new hybrid language. This should not surprise us, as Huxley had been experimenting for decades on how to translate Indian ideas into Western literary and intellectual culture.

—Jeffrey J. Kripal, writing about the founding of New Age retreat and spiritual center the Esalen Institute in his book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. The above excerpt comes from a chapter that has been reprinted on the University of Chicago Press’s website.

https://longreads.com/2015/06/09/aldous ... institute/

semper, good to see you back and thank you for the heads-up on that series.

Read Vice of Kings last year, it is superb, one of the best I read in 2020.

more to the point will the thread author ever swing by - too bad I missed he was crowd-sourcing for the limited edition hardcopies of his last book

https://auticulture.com/maps-of-hell-contents/

No, because you guys were complete and utter dicks to him...

this is a juicy thread. what I signed up for

All the commonwealth nations still have fabian societies affiliated with their labour parties, along with the Jacobins. full of clueless progressive types these days though. . .or maybe that's what they want me to think.

Thanks Semper, I've enjoyed reading through your links. And thanks Puf for the benefit of your experience.

This is the most important thread here right now.

semper occultus » Sat Dec 18, 2021 6:19 am wrote:not sure where to pin this - interesting article series focused on Aldous Huxley ( briefly a Fabian afaik ) & touching on alot of associated RI material

1. Who Will Be Brave in Huxley’s New World?

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/ ... new-world/

2. The War on Science and the 20th Century Descent of Man

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/ ... scent-man/

3. The Origins of the Counterculture Movement: A Gathering of Anarchists, Occultists and Psychoanalysts for a New Age

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/ ... a-new-age/

4. Huxley’s Ultimate Revolution: The Battle for Your Mind and the Relativity of Madness

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/ ... f-madness/

Thanks for posting, semper occultus. There is an interview with Cynthia Chung about the series on SoundCloud >>> https://soundcloud.com/stratpodcast/ald ... episode-41 <<< listen (56 min.)

Strategic Infographics
December 20, 2021
The relevance of the Esalen Institute’s “revisioning of madness” needs to be acknowledged as having been entirely spear-headed by the Tavistock Institute, and clearly, not for our benefit.

It feels similar to the extensive series by David McGowan about Laurel Canyon, only this time it's the human growth potential movement and psychoanalysis being brought to task instead of our favorite music from back in the day.

Many interesting comments following a recent post at off-guardian regarding this topic -

off-guardian

When Force Meets Power: The Inevitable Collapse of the New World Order

Ryan Matters
Dec 26, 2021

When the famous quantum theorist, David Bohm, read Jiddu Krishnamurti’s “The First and Last Freedom”, he was blown away by his insight and knowledge regarding the phenomenon of the observer and the observed. Despite having no university-level training, much less formal education in the sciences, Krishnamurti had, through his philosophical writings, demonstrated a profound understanding of various concepts related to quantum mechanics.

Krishnamurti, an Indian writer, philosopher and speaker, was, at an early age, taken in by the Theosophical Society and groomed to become the new World Teacher. Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, the leaders of the Theosophical society at the time, nurtured Krishnamurti at their headquarters in Madras.

They, along with a few select associates, undertook the task of educating him, guiding him through mystical teachings and generally ‘preparing’ him to become the vehicle for ‘Lord Maitreya’, a highly evolved spiritual being committed to aiding the evolution of mankind.

However, when it came time to ‘unveil’ Krishnamurti to the world as a great teacher and leader of humanity, Krishnamurti broke all ties with the theosophists, denounced all organised belief, denounced the notion of gurus (and the whole teacher-follower relationship), and devoted himself instead to the pursuit of freedom for both himself and humanity at large.

By the time Bohm had read “The First and Last Freedom”, Krishnamurti’s teachings had developed beyond the point of theosophical influence. Bohm recognized that Krishnamurti’s insights were reflected in his own work in quantum theory and felt it urgent to meet with him as soon as possible. Eventually, the two of them did meet face-to-face in London where they exchanged ideas and engaged in rich conversation.

Bohm described his first meeting with Krishnamurti as follows:

I was struck by the great ease of communication with him, which was made possible by the intense energy with which he listened and by the freedom from self-protective reservations and barriers with which he responded to what I had to say.”

Bohm recognized his meeting with Krishnamurti as a meeting of minds not unlike that which he felt when talking to other scientists. In fact, he even compared Krishnamurti to Albert Einstein, stating that the two of them “showed a similar intensity and absence of barrier”.

Bohm and Krishnamurti met each time they were in London and probed deeply into the nature of time, space and mind. The two of them would inevitably hit on the topic of consciousness and this is where Krishnamurti’s insights shined.

Indeed, Bohm felt that Krishnamurti’s most powerful teachings were those concerned with the general disorder and confusion that pervades the consciousness of mankind, for it was he who offered not only an explanation of this problem but a solution to it...

continues... https://off-guardian.org/2021/12/26/whe ... rld-order/


Ryan Matters is a writer and free thinker from South Africa. After a life-changing period of illness, he began to question mainstream medicine, science and the true meaning of what it is to be alive. Some of his writings can be found at newbraveworld.org, you can also follow him on Twitter and Gab.

conniption » Sun Dec 26, 2021 9:52 pm wrote: When the famous quantum theorist, David Bohm, read Jiddu Krishnamurti’s “The First and Last Freedom”, he was blown away by his insight and knowledge regarding the phenomenon of the observer and the observed. Despite having no university-level training, much less formal education in the sciences, Krishnamurti had, through his philosophical writings, demonstrated a profound understanding of various concepts related to quantum mechanics.

The egg hatches and is amazed to find it looks like a hen. How could this be if it had self-determined its own shape from inside a shell? Sounds like Babylonian trickery is afoot. But all is good so long as people don't trust their senses and reality is calculated by mathematicians inside windowless rooms.

But in regards to the article. Nothing actually needs to be done about the new world order. dualist oligarchs always fail because 'all is flux'. In fact, ordering oneself is counterproductive. Be like Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow.

You can get something like fourteen hours of their discussions as a single audio file somewhere, bit busy right now but will post a link later if I can find it. From the article:

And as the experiments of the brilliant Dr. William Tiller show, a conscious observer may “bend reality to his will” by holding a focused intent, the effect of which can be quantified and even amplified if that intent is held by multiple people at the same time.

William A. Tiller, a physicist at Stanford University dedicated over four decades of his life to investigating the effects of human intention on the properties of materials and what we call physical reality. His research discovered that it is possible to effect a significant change to the properties of physical materials simply by holding a clear intention to do so.

I offer the following as an illustration of why I believe the above to be completely true, just one of many odd things which happened at the time and I expect nobody at all to believe it, I certainly wouldn't if I hadn't seen it.

I'd been through a lot at this point, it was probably 2013 and I had a roof over my head for the first time in a long while. I'd been experiencing continual strangeness for some time, in fact I'd been drowning in strangeness for two years by this time. One evening I didn't sleep at all, as was common enough then. It seemed as though I my mind was on fire, actually painful, with my thoughts racing as they often did then. I discovered that I could find momentary relief by turning my head only slightly, then different ideas, impressions, thoughts and feelings would sleet through me, which would ease my turmoil slightly for a few moments, before the general intensity of impressions would increase and I'd be no better off than before. This went on throughout the night. I began chanting silently. Random short phrases, each for a little while. Doing so seemed to calm me slightly.

At some point in the night I could hear a group of maybe twenty youths approaching the top of the road on which I lived. As they came closer I realised they were shouting in unison the very words currently running through my mind. It was extremely curious. Had I begun thinking what they were already chanting or vice versa? It was also a very odd phrase for a group of drunken revellers to be chanting. At that point I had been repeating "Water on Mars."

I chanted a different phrase "Cure For Cancer!" to see what would happen and in complete unison, so did they. It was quite alarming to say the least.

Anyway, by first light I was pacing up and down the driveway in a very agitated state, practically fizzing with energy. I became obsessed by the lushness of the vegetation around me. It had been a hot summer and on my travels I'd noticed how parched everything looked elsewhere. However, for roughly a hundred yards around where I lived, everything seemed verdant and green as though it were still late spring. In my shattered state, I became obsessed with the notion that this was an illusion and that really, everything around me was dying of drought and that I could somehow see through to the truth - to the reality underneath the illusion.

I focussed my thoughts to do so and for a few moments under my gaze, the grass began to whither and die instantly, wherever I looked. I was shocked out of whatever state of mind I'd been in and looked at what had happened. It was as if someone had waved a powerful laser around while pointing it at the expanse of lawn, swirling zig zags of dead grass, wherever my eyes had moved. Whether the effect was purely inside my mind or not is definitely debatable but I could not un-see it. The path of destruction remained that way for some months, at least until the grass grew back and had been cut a few times.

At the very least, the fact that I could not un-see what had apparently happened indicates something profound about the nature of memory, perception, consciousness or reality. I occasionally saw someone studying the pattern as they passed by but at this point I was intensely reluctant to ask them what they saw. I did not want to know, I didn't even want to even think about it.

An admittedly mad little story, but there it is. It matters not to me whether any of this actually happened or was entirely imagined. To this day it is the fact that I was never able to un-imagine what had happened to the grass which still gives me pause.

I'm in no doubt that consciousness and reality are far more strange, wonderful and terrifying than the reductionist paradigm is capable of describing. If we change our minds about what has and is being done to us all, if we change our consciousness, perhaps to become more conscious, then we can change all our worlds for the better. Of that, I'm absolutely certain.

Just search for: The Ending of Time: Fifteen Conversations with David Bohm - Jiddu Krishnamurti

'A History of Orgies' by Burgo Partridge gives an academic history of sexual vice diffused culturally from classical civ through to the modern era. Some interesting details on the 18th century hellfire clubs in there. Which predates a lot of the stuff being explored here. I'll through my notes and add some stuff that may be relevant.

Found this in the comment section of you-know-where... https://off-guardian.org/2021/12/29/the ... ent-467020

Thesis and Anti-Thesis of Axiology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp6rfDRo4xw

Chiron Last
• Dec 21, 2021 •
The ‘house’ that is humanity is now ultimately divided against itself, and is set up to fall, and those who feel that they are insulated from this inevitable reality are stupefied by the mockery in which their lives have been restructured into.