Extract from my paper on which I based my talk at New Horizons, St Anne's, in October 2016.
If you would like to receive a free download of the full 26 page paper in a pdf file please go to this address and sign up on my mailing list here Waking The Monkey mailing sign up [Some of the images from the pdf version are missing from this text. To see them all, get the full pdf)
......The Truth movement has been wearing away at the world
of corporate power and corruption since the early days of the
internet and 9/11, building a solid, but regrettably still small,
core of awakened souls who have sought to expose the dark
underbellyof our enemy.
But in the last couple of years things have begun to move,
and not just from the work of the Truth movement.
It is my firm conviction that the core process should be
seen as a battle between evolutionary drives and the attempted
social conditioning and control of the globalist elites. The
evolutionary drives must win or we are lost.
In the nineties I was involved in a project known as the
Hundredth Monkey Camps. These were a series of three
meditation camps held over consecutive years seeking to build a
‘morphic field’ of international co-operation and reciprocity.
You are probably familiar with the ‘Hundredth Monkey’
concept, the idea that when a certain critical number of people
with an idea or understanding is reached, that this idea will
spread through the collective unconscious and others in distant
parts will pick it up. ‘Nothing can stop an idea whose time has
come’ sums up the aspiration of this concept, if I may
paraphrase Victor Hugo, although it is perhaps not so simple.
My book ‘Waking The Monkey! ~ Becoming The
Hundredth Monkey (A Book for Spiritual Warriors)’ details my
experience of the first camp of 1995 in a stream of
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 28th 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 thanthe 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
My original blog with full 2014 Leeds Trolleybus Public Enquiry online audio recording links and reportage from most days at the Enquiry and other material.
