Beyond The Hundredth Monkey

Beyond The Hundredth Monkey

This is the script of the paper which I wrote for my presentation of the title above on Wed 16th March 2016

The publicity blurb was as follows on the Headingley LitFest site and in their booklet.
http://www.headingleylitfest.org.uk/

Video of the talk may be found some way down the text. 

After Claire Rae Randall published Waking The Monkey! last year new information began to emerge of a previously unrealised back story of intrigues from which the Hundredth Monkey event that the book describes was seeded.  Roots of the New Age movement dating as far back as the 1950s involving the CIA, the '60s counter culture, military intelligence and psychological operations aimed at long term social engineering became apparent.  Claire will also explore how this relates to more recent material about '90s channelling, the 2012 phenomenon and contemporary political trends.

Claire Rae Randall has previously presented The Tolkien Trail and Tolkien's Beowulf and The Hobbit at Headingley Litfest.

       Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Headingley LitFest.  May I thank Richard Wilcocks of the Litfest and Carol Downing of Leeds Combined Arts for making all the arrangements and inviting me to speak here tonight.

The title of my talk is ‘Beyond The Hundredth Monkey’.  Some of you here tonight will know already a little about my book ‘Waking The Monkey’ so I shan’t be going on overlong about that, but will be adding historical context and back story most of which I have only discovered since I published the book last May.

Now those of the audience here tonight who have read the book may be surprised to hear some of what I have to talk about here. However I would ask you to suspend judgement until the end when hopefully there will be a bigger picture and overview.

But first, I do need to say a little about it before I build that larger view.

The Hundredth Monkey camps of the mid to late nineties were, as their organiser Palden Jenkins put it, ‘an experiment in consciousness’. The intention was to seek to work with what Rupert Sheldrake has dubbed ‘Morphogenetic field resonance’, the same phenomenon that Lyall Watson popularised in his seventies best seller ‘Supernature’, based on the work of Ken Keyes, a researcher into animal behaviour who had noticed how a new adaptive behaviour had originated in a troupe of monkeys on an island off the coast of Japan.  He had observed how first this behaviour spread throughout the colony, and then, unexpectedly had appeared in the troupe on a nearby island.  Some form of psychic transmission was postulated which was later formalised by Sheldrake in his Morphogenetic field theory who argued from his own experimental evidence, that by a mechanism of resonance, behaviour which had occurred in one place was more likely to occur again, elsewhere, than it had been before. 

Sheldrake’s initial work has been criticised quite harshly by some, but his more recent ‘Dogs that know when their masters are coming home’ work has demonstrated what many dog owners and animal lovers have long known, that these animals do seem to have some kind of psychic connection with their humans, and therefore there must be some mechanism or means whereby this is effected.  It has been postulated that there is a consciousness ‘field’ in which we all partake, and through which this acts.  I would argue for a more differentiated model since clearly some conscious beings are more connected in this way than others.  I shall return to this when I consider the ‘We Are All One’ movement which has gained some popularity in recent times.

This hypothesis of morphic resonance was to be, if not exactly put to the test, nonetheless acted upon in the Hundredth Monkey project.  The basic process we engaged in was to meditate on current world issues, discuss all the feelings, ideas and interactions between us in our expression of these and seek to come to some collective group understanding or sense of the situation which had been put under the microscope.

It was hoped that mutual understanding between people who might find themselves representing diverse viewpoints could be reached and that this would send out a ‘Morphic Resonance’ into the world which would be of assistance to those participating in the conflicts.  A kind of psychic conflict resolution. 

If this all seems a bit ‘Woo-woo’, we can remind ourselves that in the couple of decades or so prior to the camps the CIA had been engaging in ‘Remote Viewing’ research in the hope that it might have intelligence applicability.  The true results of this research, I dare say, are not likely to be published for a long time, so we cannot say whether it was successful in its aim, but it is well documented so can be sure that it did actually happen.  It has certainly been claimed that these trials produced better than chance results.

Research at least as far back as the seventies had been carried out by the Maharishi International Foundation* which claimed to show that hidden groups of meditators would depress crime rates in high crime areas when they would sit, based on statistical analysis of police records.  I actually saw a report on this in a local newspaper when I was in America around Christmas 1981.

Our own process was somewhat different, in that it involved rather a lot of ‘wearing away of rough edges’ as one might say, between ourselves, but it was hoped that the end result would achieve the aim, when resolution had been achieved in our little microverse, sending out waves, perhaps like the gravity wave ripples that have so recently been detected.

Suffice it to say that my own process at the first camp in 1995 was far from smooth!  But it left me feeling that I had dealt with much limitation and negativity within myself, so that my dealings with the world would be more functional and fruitful than before, and it gave me so much material to think about that I eventually wrote my book about the camp and what I consider to have been a shamanic rite of passage of sorts through which I was to pass.

I have now begun on the sequel to ‘Waking’, since there was much further to travel down this path on which I had embarked.  I will not detail here too much about the highs and lows of the next two years, of which there were an abundance, but merely suggest that the outcomes of the camps were influenced by human limitation and weakness.

Strange synchronicities abounded along this track, such as the bizarre coincidence that during our meditation on the Bosnian war situation and the Siege of Sarajevo on the morning of the 28^th August 1995, a bread queue there was shelled, killing many and leading to the Nato involvement which ultimately brought the war to an end.  This is further complicated by the strong possibility that this was a false flag attack designed to elicit sympathy.  The war had not been ended through mutual understanding and compromise as we had hoped.  I would not intend to suggest that our meditation, or some rogue element within the group had ‘caused’ this event to happen for many reasons, but to refer to Carl Jung’s discussion of synchronicity in his paper of the same name, synchronous events share something about the quality of that same moment.

My own path through the three camps was for me one of being continually challenged, but hopefully of meeting those challenges, which were primarily characterised by facing the limits or preconceptions about my own capabilities and empowerment.  Thus it is that my own position about the usefulness of meditating for world peace is that we must first deal with our own internal issues and blockages, and that by doing so we improve the world,.  The Hundredth Monkey camps were a roller coaster of new, exciting and challenging ideas and experiences, but I believe that the outcomes were not perhaps as intended. 

It is sometimes said ‘The experiment failed.’  But from the position of the scientific method, an experiment only fails if it does not produce any results or its methodology is flawed so that the results are not reliable.  So long as the methodology is sound, then the results must be taken as they are, whether they confirm the hypothesis that was to be tested or not.  Should they not confirm it, then consideration has to be given to alternate hypotheses.

Now I hope that those of my audience who have read my book will have noticed that while I work within the parameters and assumptions of the ‘experiment in consciousness’, which clearly one has to do for any experiment, nonetheless, I did not accept the whole thing uncritically and without any analysis or critique.  I examine the concept of ‘channelling’, the modern term for mediumship, considering psychological mechanisms behind it; and the entire concept of the camp, although I didn’t go into it in great detail, also rests on these assumptions and is by extension subject to the same critique.  It is the back story behind this that I shall shortly be exploring.

In the latter stages of completion of the book I began to get intimations that there was a much bigger picture behind all this of which I had previously been blithely unaware.  But the intention of my book had always been to give an account of my own stream of consciousness as I went through the various experiences during the week.  An initiate of a mystery school does not need to fully understand how the scenery of the stage has been set up ~ their principle task is to negotiate the gauntlet, face their own inner demons and conflicts, and thereby achieve some greater mastery of Self.  Only when that has been achieved and the acolyte become a true Initiate have they achieved the necessary level of consciousness required to make sense of the theatre through which they have passed, and thereby achieve a greater insight into the motivations by which they are surrounded.

When I wrote ‘Waking The Monkey!’ I only intended the first part of this, and it was only when it was done that I able to realise the second.  And certainly I was aware of none of this at the time of the camp, engaged as I was in my own inner struggles in dealing with the challenges that arose, both intentional and unintended.  So it was that having retraced my footsteps and both relived and reinterpreted them, I was ready to go to the next stage.  New material that fitted the suggestive fragments which I had not previously comprehended began to fill in the gaps and make a new image. 

There are several threads upon which I shall draw, and whilst we may appear to be diving deep into the realms of conspiracy theory, everything which I shall detail is fully documented.  I shall be drawing quite a wide net, and some of these threads may seem obscure, but they will all be drawn together with a common theme by the end.

The story goes back at least to the nineteen fifties, and there are indications that it can be traced further to the beginning of the twentieth century, or even further.  The personalities involved begin with Andrija Puharich, a gifted polymath who worked for military intelligence, designed miniature hearing aids and tooth radios, which we will see implicated later, had a lifelong interest in psychism and clairvoyance, besides having a finger in the pie of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s.  During the late nineteen fifties Puharich had connections with Gordon Wasson, an enigmatic figure who was ostensibly an academic anthropologist and amateur mycologist, and who was responsible for the introduction of psilocybin ‘Magic Mushrooms’ to the population of the United States with his 1957 article in Life magazine on the subject.  It should also come as no surprise that Wasson was acquainted with Aldous Huxley, another early advocate of the psychedelic experience at the time.

Next we have Gregory Bateson, an associate of Wasson who carried out the famous, or perhaps infamous, experiments with LSD at the Marin County Veteran’s Hospital in 1960 and ’61, on the outskirts of San Francisco.  This was the precursor to the SF scene of the sixties from which the hippie movement emerged.  Notable figures such as Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) and Robert Hunter, later to become the principle lyricist for the Grateful Dead in his co-writing partnership with Jerry Garcia, whom he introduced to LSD in the early sixties were subjects in these experiments.

I shall deal with this nexus before I move on.  Wasson and Bateson have tried to portray themselves as responsible researchers, but a closer examination shows this to be not quite such a benign scenario as they would like us to believe.  Wasson’s article in Life magazine led to an explosion of interest, especially in the Beat culture popularised by Jack Kerouac, which was the seed bed for later developments in SF and California generally.  (The spelling of the name of the Beatles is a reference to this subculture.) This is not surprising, coming as it did around the same time as Huxley’s Doors of Perception in which he eloquently described his experience with mescaline, another psychotropic hallucinogen similar to the psilocybin of the magic mushrooms.  However, a better and more responsible anthropologist would have done more to prevent the blowback which followed.  The Mixchec Indian village where he had encountered the magic mushrooms and garnered his material was soon invaded by Beats, the shaman who had introduced Wasson to it all was cast out of the village, and basically the entire local culture was pretty much destroyed.  Wasson claimed that he had not intended this, but did little of nothing to mitigate the harm, and left the poor Mexicans to pick up the pieces.  Very irresponsible behaviour for an anthropologist.

Andrija Puharich had had an interest in psychism since at least 1952, and probably earlier, when he had an encounter with a gentleman from India by the name of Dr Vinod, who had acted as a conduit for an entity, or entities that called themselves ‘The Nine’.  The way that this entity described itself was very similar to how the beings who had spoken through Alice Bailey in the inter-war period.  Bailey was a prominent member of the Theosophical Society whose second husband was a Freemason, and her ‘contacts’ were responsible for an extensive series of volumes on ‘Occult Psychology’ and the spiritual realms which were published by the Lucifer Trust, later renamed the ‘Lucis Trust’, perhaps for obvious reasons.

Again I will need to make a little aside on this.  We shall soon be diving deep into the realms of ‘psychically channelled entities’ and for those of my audience who have a sceptical bent towards such matters, let me assuage your reserve by stating firstly, that I regard it as entirely possible that such manifestations could be the outpourings of material or projections from the unconscious mind, such as unconscious dissociated personalities as in the phenomenon of ‘hearing voices’.  It is also possible that they originate from elsewhere, a point I shall come to shortly.

Puharich spent many years trying to re-establish contact with this entity, ‘The Nine’, using several psychics over the years, including Uri Geller for a couple of years in the early seventies, who himself has had association with Mossad, the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service, but who broke contact for reasons never fully explained.

I should point out to members of the audience who have not read my book that ‘The Nine’ is the entity which claimed to have given the material that was compiled into ‘The Only Planet of Choice’, purporting to be messages from ‘Deep Space’, and the editor of the first edition was Palden Jenkins, the organiser of the Hundredth Monkey camps.  In the book I took no particular view on the reality or veracity of their existence, or their claim to be a manifestation of the Ennead of the Ancient Egyptians, the nine gods of that culture including Atum (cognate with Atom, indivisible) and the other aspects including Isis, Osiris and Set.  It was perhaps a little surprising that very little mention of this was made at the camp by the organising team, but I was so taken up with my own personal gauntlet that I paid this little attention at the time.

It was claimed by Puharich that on many occasions ‘The Nine’ gave mathematical data which ostensibly demonstrated their reality.  We should be careful to be aware that proof of their existence is not proof that they are what they say they are.

Perhaps the fact that Puharich had trained to an advanced level as a hypnotist, but used these skills irresponsibly might have had something to do with Geller’s dissociation from him.  In The Stargate Conspiracy by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince it is detailed how Puharich would repeatedly suggest material to his hypnotised subjects.  For instance, having got the subject into a trance and apparently contacting some other being or intelligence, he would ask questions such as ‘Are you The Nine’, clearly leading the witness on as one might say in a court of law, rather than simply enquiring ‘Who are you?’ or ‘What is your name?’

Puharich eventually found a psychic medium who would work with him in the long term, Phyllis Schlemmer, through whom all the material in ‘Planet’ came.

Perhaps this is the point at which to mention again Puharich’s design of miniature hearing aids and earphone devices which would be of immense use in the intelligence and surveillance field of his masters.  It is also quite probable that he was aware of the ‘Neurophone’ a device which through the use of modulated microwaves can beam sounds, including human voices, into the head of an unsuspecting subject.  This device was invented in the early 1960s, and promptly sequestered by the CIA which took the patent out of circulation until quite recently.

I heard not long ago of how this is now actually used for advertising and there are a small number of select locations where members of the public may find themselves targetted such that when they stand on a particular spot in the street they can hear the beamed voice, which disappears when they move away from there.

It does not require an immensely active imagination to see how this could well be of use in the faking of ‘channelled’ or ‘psychic’ messages.

Puharich was also interested in the psychotropic drugs, and their effects, which his associates Wasson and Bateson had been exploring.  All three had a mix of acknowledged and shadowy involvements with the CIA over several decades.

One might have thought that after the sad consequences of his irresponsible treatment of the Mixchec village, Wasson would have been ultra cautious about further propagation of these powerful substances in society.  But entirely the opposite happened.  Not long afterward his associate Bateson was to be found carrying out the Veteran’s Hospital experiments with LSD, an even more powerful psychotropic than  the psilocybin of the magic mushrooms or the peyote mescaline.  And this close to the epicentre of the Beat culture in San Francisco.  Coincidence?

Furthermore, anecdotes abound concerning how the fridge door was left unlocked overnight when Ken Kesey, employed as the janitor, had the opportunity to liberate a few vials of pure high potency Sandoz LSD to spread around amongst his friends.

It wasn’t long before word was out and soon Owsley Stanley III, a wealthy genius inclined towards the Beat culture had acquired the recipe and was turning out his own supply of the stuff in large quantities.  Kesey’s trip across the States in the summer of 1964 on the ‘Furthur’ bus was perhaps the seminal moment for this social movement, meeting Tim Leary and spreading the acid, which was still legal, all around.  The fabled ‘Acid Tests’ at which the Grateful Dead were the house band followed the next year, and so the Psychedelic Revolution was born.

I mention this in some detail because this forms something of the background and context to my book, while at the same time being linked with the seedbed that produced the New Age movement and the Channelling phenomenon, which I did not properly understand at the time.  The fact that I arrived at the camp with a guitar and thirty five Grateful Dead songs a couple of weeks after the death of Jerry Garcia, the band’s most well known member, seemed at the time just part of the colour of the event, a snapshot of that moment in the mid-nineties.  But it is a strange thing to me that my long interest in the Grateful Dead, which had begun as early as 1971, should lead back to the same place from where the Hundredth Monkey camp had its own deep source, the machinations of the CIA in their infamous MK Ultra project.

MK Ultra was an umbrella project of the CIA in the fifties and sixties intended as research for psychological warfare.  MK stands for Mind Control and you can find quite a lot about it now on YouTube videos.  There were a wide ranging variety of experiments carried out on people from the consensual to the definitely not.  Psychotropic drugs, Electro-Convulsive Therapy, and trauma based brain washing techniques were used, and on patients in psychiatric institutions who could not refuse these ‘treatments’.  [Sirhan S.] 

 The Marin County trials were one of the more ‘arm’s length’ cases of MK Ultra.  The leakage and spread of interest in LSD must have been anticipated and it is little surprise that what I would refer to as a ‘wild culture’ developed.  Wasson and Bateson were highly educated in subjects such as Anthropology, and they must have both anticipated that something of this nature would be likely to emerge, and been interested to study its development as a social phenomenon.

The appearance of the Los Angeles wave of bands in the mid sixties who all lived in Laurel Canyon has been observed by a number of researchers, and attention has been drawn to the fact that nearly all of them had fathers in military or the intelligence services.  The strong implication is that these were at least encouraged, probably covertly, by the intelligence agencies, with some reference to MK Ultra experience, to spread the psychedelic counter culture as a distraction or diversion from the growing anti-Vietnam war movement.  This is possible, although some might suggest that the psychedelic movement fuelled the anti-war protests.  What seems more probable to me is that this was a rather more controlled version of the ‘Wild Culture’ that was developed by Bateson in San Francisco in the early sixties.  The bands and culture which San Francisco produced, such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were just not controllable.  That city still had an element of the City at the End of the World about it and was a great place to throw out wild cards, but LA was far more suited to a managed scenario.  I would suggest that the ends envisaged were larger, but less definite.

In 1972, the Stanford Research Institute, formerly a department within Stanford University, but by now an entirely autonomous agency largely carrying out work for military clients, published a document examining the changes that had taken place in American society since the 1950s.  Its conclusion was that nothing could be done to restore that lost world and that in consequence it considered that the direction of change should be managed and controlled.  Some of the developments of the sixties might have been worth keeping, but the incendiary state of affairs in the early seventies were surely not desirable, and it is curious that they did not apparently consider the option to stabilise and slow down the rate of change so that the outcomes were more controllable, but rather seemed to be suggesting that increased rates of change should be sought, and that in so doing, certain parties might seize the initiative whilst others would be left behind.

A line from Robert Hunter seems apposite ‘When you learn the rules they change the game.’

Perhaps I should confess here that in the seventies I tried out some of these psychedelic potions, and very interesting they are too, but they should not be approached without a great deal of caution.  Those of a robust mindset may revel in their ecstasies, but many a casualty has fallen by the wayside, burnt out with the searing intensity of their fire.  The legendary Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd, and Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac spring to mind.  And perhaps the thing which most attracted them to such gentlemen was that they can sometimes dissolve, and at other times more fiercely tear away the protective layers of personality that we all need, and lay bare our consciousness, naked and vulnerable, but also receptive and suggestible.

And this highly suggestible state was, I believe, what the manipulators in the intelligence agencies wished to exploit.

 

One of the biggest influences on my writing over the last decade or so has been the work of Frank Herbert, principally his magnum opus Dune, which is not only the best selling science fiction novel of all time, but is also a superb work of literature.  Herbert tapped into an immense number of themes and ideas, many of which are perhaps even more important today than when he wrote this work in the early sixties, although they curiously may seem to reflect themes that were being developed by others I have mentioned at the time he wrote.  Perhaps one of the more obscure, but certainly not of the least importance, is the Missionaria Protectiva, a psychological operation carried out by the Bene Gesserit sisterhood to implant religious myths and prophecies on backward planets in order to ‘engineer’ superstitions and belief systems that could be made use of by them at a later date.

The series of Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda are a text book example of this.  A book was published in the late eighties demonstrating by Richard de Mille demonstrating that there were conflicting dates in the timelines of different books, besides which UCLA Library records showed he had been accessing archive material on this very subject on the dates he was supposed to be with Don Juan Matus.  I don’t have any information indicating that he was working for the CIA, but if one man working alone can create such a popular mythology, we may guess that an intelligence network could do a great deal more.

It was with some surprise that I began to realise recently that there appeared to have been some element of this in the deep back story that led to the beliefs and intentions from which the Hundredth Monkey camps arose.

The Puharich thread I have already detailed, and there is much more which the constraints of time prevent me from exploring.  It is difficult to pin down exactly where he stood.  Obviously interested enough to believe that there was some underlying substance to the ‘channelling’ phenomena that he witnessed over many years, but at the same time he seems to have taken liberties with the scientific method, and introduced his own suggestions into the minds of the ‘channels’.  Perhaps it was just the case that like so many spiritualists before him he couldn’t resist interfering with the process so as to produce the desired results.

Either way we should bear in mind that he was only one intelligence operative, occasionally working with others such as Wasson on their shared ideas, and often pursuing his interests independently over many years.  The larger picture into which he fits is surely one in which the agencies of government and the military are seeking methods of social control.  Huxley had explored this as early as the 1931 with his Brave New World, and now his associates of the next generation were stepping into his shoes.  It is my belief that they did not really know what they were doing with their social experiments and mind control, and they left moraines of social debris in the wake of their bludgeoning path.  But in the end it is all about belief systems and how they can be turned to advantage.

Almost as if on cue following the Stanford document in 1972 there was published a book which was to become immensely influential in the nascent ‘New Age’ movement.  This was Helen Shucman’s A Course In Miracles often known as ACIM.  This book astonishingly claimed to have been dictated through Shucman by none other than Jesus Christ himself, despite the fact that Shucman herself was not a Christian, but was in fact Jewish.  It is quite remarkable to me how little scrutiny the claims for this piece has been given by the many hundreds of thousands, even millions who have read and followed its instructions, which I understand frequently are in contradiction to the actual known teachings of Jesus, but claim to be corrections.

One point which needs to be remarked upon is the fact that her co-worker Bill Thetford was, by a strange coincidence, employed by the CIA at this time.   ACIM was not something I ever paid any attention to myself, but in the mid nineties I knew several people in the Hundredth Monkey camps who were following it and would sometimes talk about it.  It had clearly become embedded in the new folklore of the New Age over the intervening decades.  However, when in my researches I discovered that Shucman had spent the last two years of her life in a ‘psychotic depression’, cursing the book. I felt this confirmed my strong sense that she was a fake.  Had she genuinely received messages from Jesus Christ over many years it is simply inconceivable to me that she would have ended up like this.  A rather more obvious explanation is that she was a fraud and was tormented by a guilty conscience.

Those decades had not passed by Andrija Puharich in idleness.  After Geller had dropped him he eventually found another medium who could channel ‘The Nine’, Phyllis Schlemmer, who produced reams of material which were eventually compiled into ‘The Only Planet of Choice’, the book from which the Hundredth Monkey was conceptually seeded.

Puharich has already shown himself to be an unreliable scientist with his poor methodology of suggestion to hypnotised subjects and his long history of association with the CIA and their agents so we should subject him to close scrutiny.

I should say at this point that there are multiple hypotheses as to the provenance of these ‘channellings’ which we should properly distinguish.

1.     That these are simple fakes and that Schlemmer is a fraud.

2.     That she was sincere, but deluded, suffering schizophrenic voices, multiple personalities or suchlike.

3.     That she was sincere, but manipulated by Puharich with hypnotic suggestion or covert technology such as the Neurophone.

4.     That she was sincere but was opening up her mind to either her own unconscious material or that from the postulated Jungian Collective Unconscious.

5.     That there was some genuine ‘Extra-Terrestrial’ intelligence (ET) behind this.

Even allowing for number 5 we are still not able to ascertain the veracity of the claims by whatever source this is as to its true nature or identity.  In the world of scientific methodology an accurate prediction is considered to support an hypothesis, and a prediction which is not confirmed is treated as evidence against.  Thus when it comes to our attention that claims originating from this group that there would be ‘mass landings’ of ETs in the late nineteen seventies failed to be confirmed, we should surely start to reconsider the situation.

I would like to show a brief video clip at this stage.  Some in the audience may be aware of the work of Dr Paul Ekman on body language.  He has established over many years that lying is almost always accompanied by some kind of ‘displacement activity’, a nervous gesture, such as in this clip, where, when Puharich speaks of The Nine, he covers his mouth, and even seems to be sniggering.  I would suggest that while this may not be conclusive evidence that he is lying, it is, as we used to say back in the seventies, dead suss! 

Beliefs are much easier to engineer if there are underlying dynamics which can be directed rather than manufacturing them from whole cloth.  One of the most influential books on my intellectual development whilst in the sixth form was ‘The Pursuit of the Millennium’ by Norman Cohn, a book published at just the time when Herbert was beginning Dune, a tantalising possible influence, with the wonderful subtitle ‘Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists in the Middle Ages’.

The subject of this book is the waves of Millenarianism which swept through Europe in the Middle Ages, especially after events such as the Black Death, when it was thought by many that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent.  I should distinguish here between Millennialism and Millenarianism.  Although clearly related concepts, it should be understood that the first is based on the idea of some sort of cosmic change or cycle happening upon the Millennium, coming from Zoroastrian beliefs, while the latter relates to the Thousand Year Reign of Christ prophesied in the Book of Revelation, which is supposed to come after great tribulations.

Clearly these two notions can be intertwined in the imagination, and with an actual Millennium coming up a few decades away we should not be too surprised that those who might seek to take on the role of a ‘Missionaria Protectiva’ could set about creating religious or spiritual belief systems which might build on existing traditions, while at the same time seeking to push them in new directions.

Marilyn Ferguson’s Aquarian Conspiracy was something of a revelation to me in this respect.  Published in 1980, some here may recall it as being of tremendous influence in the following decade.  In retrospect I would say that it seems to be a hopeful mixture of science and speculation.  The ‘Human Potential’ movement was taking off, especially on the West Coast of the US, and networks of people who wanted to actualise their own potential were growing.  This arose from the work of psychologists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, and in many ways was a positive development. 

Although at a slight distance from the psychedelic movement, the ‘Human Potential’ movement was clearly a close relative.  John C. Lilley’s book ‘The Centre of the Cyclone’ is probably the most obvious example, in which he applies various ideas and techniques associated with Humanistic Psychology to the work of himself and his team with LSD.  A great deal more informal interaction was clearly taking place in the hothouse of California in the sixties.

This was the milieu in which Ferguson’s Aquarian Conspiracy was dropped, a work which admitted that it was promoting an entirely new way of looking at the world.

Today many ‘Success’ and ‘Life Coach’ tutors are to be found and many of them are quite good.  I have benefited from some of their teaching myself.  But that is the practical, mundane level of this area.

There is no doubt to my mind in reading Ferguson’s work that the assumptions have been tainted with dubious concepts and wishful thinking which can only have arisen somewhere along the timeline of the previous decade or two, such as the concept that ‘Other’ should not be seen as a threat, and that the world as we know it has ‘No Borders’.

It is not clear to me why Ferguson felt so confident as to promote these absolutely radical ideas which are essentially political ideas which are projected onto the external world in contradiction to the evidence.

Wild beasts and strangers are the first examples of ‘Other’ that come to mind, and living organisms are made up of cells with boundary walls, skin and so forth, while nature has shorelines, rivers, oceans, mountains, different ecosystems and so forth.  The Ten Thousand Things are as they are because they each have their own place, and limitations.  The human mind, and probably all life, are designed to distinguish between ‘me’ and varying degrees of ‘Other’, and most life needs a defined territory which it inhabits.

These new concepts might have been created by a psychological weapons designer.

These concepts were entirely new to a wider public, although this ‘One World’ had its origins at the beginning of the twentieth century with on the one hand the Fabian Society, and on the other, the Theosophical Society and the OTO.

It is astonishing to realise that these memes which we are now experiencing as powerful social beliefs originated or were nurtured in the hothouse of Californian culture three or four decades ago.

So I am prepared to suggest that this is all part of what Frank Herbert would have described in his Dune mythos as ‘Religious Engineering’, and the mythologies such as ‘The Nine’ are reworkings of existing ideas from the ‘Panoplia Propheticus’, their archive of sources and belief systems.

I said at the beginning that those who have read my book may find some of this surprising, and so I am now prepared to explain how I believe this fits together.  I am now fairly convinced that ‘The Nine’ who supposedly dictated the messages to Phyllis Schlemmer are at best not to be trusted, even if they are actually ETs and are not the creations of herself of Puharich.

What seems to be the case to me now is that the Hundredth Monkey was an example of the Missionaria Protectiva, a spontaneous outgrowth of the outrageous ideas which had been seeded by CIA agents over several decades, using source material from earlier times, whether from the occult revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or the ancient world for the big stuff such as ‘The Nine’, and drawing on the more recent energy generated by the explosion of psychedelics in especially California.

Intelligence agencies like to remain hidden, and they like to manipulate people to do things which they think they have chosen to do for themselves.  In such a model, the organiser of the Hundredth Monkey, Palden Jenkins, is required to have no inside knowledge, but merely an interest in the subject and existing political motivation.  A struggling freelance writer and editor such as he must have jumped at the opportunity to edit such a high profile work as The Only Planet of Choice.  He had already had major involvement in the Glastonbury camps of the eighties, and so the Hundredth Monkey was merely a joining of these two existing interests.  It did not have to be instigated by Puharich or Schlemmer, although they may well have been interested to see such a new, apparently autonomous development.  It was always a part of Puharich’s technique to suggest things to people so that they thought they had come up with them themselves.

Thus one may be forgiven for suggesting that, as with so many of these New Age beliefs, that the Hundredth Monkey was in reality a cult, even though no-one involved may have even realised it at the time.  The purpose it would serve for intelligence agencies would be to dead end those who might pursue more genuine political or spiritual paths, or simply to mess with their heads and see what happens.

And so what of my own experiences which I detail in my book?

Fortunately my experiences and the rite of passage I went through did not rely on my belief in the reality of these metaphysical or extra terrestrial beings.  Had it done so, the book would be a mere fancy, without foundation.

However, the context and frame in which all this passed was a second or third generation effect of the original ‘Missionaria Protectiva’ seeding from the ‘Panoplia Propheticus’, and so it is most probably the case that no-one at the camps even knew about this CIA operation.  Certainly ACIM was being studied by some at the camps, and others had read Alice Bailey and so forth previously.

Clearly mental set and belief systems which fully buy into the proposed system are necessary for the best methodology.  Had the organisers known that this belief system was an MK Ultra operation they would either have tainted the outcomes, given away their covert intentions or refused to carry it out in the first place.

One might suggest that the belief system got out of the test tube and spread as another ‘wild’ culture.

I would say that there was much to be learnt by the kind of meditations and deliberations carried out at the Hundredth Monkey camp but that an unnecessary emphasis and demand was put on the need for agreement and consensus, as if we had to reach some final position for all time.  Utopias are elusive creatures, because life is a dynamic tension of a multitude of influences, of ebb and flow, not something that can ever be static or complete.  And so like some law of the quantum vacuum, an attempt at complete agreement must draw to itself its opposite, someone who simply cannot fit in or agree!  And while that person may be rattled around inside the cogs, they come out with a deeper understanding of the machine.  Absolute agreement can never be reached because it is the nature of the world for cogs and levers to work against each other.  Without friction, without traction and opposition, nothing could move.

This desire to create a world of absolute agreement is the creation of the social engineers and Masonic manipulators who wish to see a world that is easily manipulated into conformity.  In the ancient world, the hero struggled against primal forces and monstrous demons.  In today’s world, we are faced with their apparent opposites, bland conformity and fear of being different, so in these circumstances the hero must speak their truth and be their unique self.

We should see attempts at the creation of religions, if such was the intention somewhere back up the track, as more than mere snares set by those who would seek to control us, but as obstacle courses which we may traverse and thereby gain a greater sense of empowerment by overcoming.

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You can purchase a paper or e-book version of my account of my rite of passage at The Hundredth Monkey Camp ‘Waking The Monkey! ~ Becoming the Hundredth Monkey’ (A Book for Spiritual Warriors) at

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