INTO THE MYSTIC
Memoir 3, cont.
Beaches, Deserts & Forests
Iona Miller, 2010
After choosing to reject the urban habitat, my life became defined by seeking Nature: Beaches, Deserts & Forests. Having lived in them all, I found the later my favorite, but any can be a welcomed oasis. In my youth it was the San Gabriel Mountains, then Los Padres National Forest, the Redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the North Cascades of Washington and the Siskiyous of Oregon. I was surrounded by highly creative artists, magicians, scientists -- and Mystics.
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Wheeler Hot Springs, Maricopa Hwy, 1968 residence
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Frame 5 - KROTONA - Esoterics, a Drug-Free Alternative to Altering Consciousness
but another Social Engineering Project: Spiritual Enlightenment & Human Potential
Left, Krotona Library
"To be sensitive to the beauty of something is to perceive the totality of it. The mind that is thinking in terms of a part can never perceive the whole. In the whole the part is contained, but the part will never make up the whole, the total."— Krishnamurti, New Delhi 1960
Metaphysics: It's Not What You Think
***meta- (also met- before a vowel or h) combining form
1 denoting a change of position or condition : metamorphosis | metathesis.
2 denoting position behind, after, or beyond: : metacarpus.
3 denoting something of a higher or second-order kind : metalanguage
METAPHYSICS means neither supernatural nor magical. It means 'beyond physics,' beyond the observables of particles and describes the non-physicality of virtual vacuum field effects, at least in current usage. They are real but inherently non-observable energy dynamics whose EFFECTS are never-the-less observable.
The Esoteric Tradition
I knew about Theosophy from the Theosophical Society in Pasadena, an offshoot of Blavatsky's school of occult science. It split at the turn of the century from rival Katherine Tingley, who had another center headquartered in Point Loma, a wanna be California Utopia. Just like schisms in Christianity, rivalries logically ran counter to the self-professed purpose of Theosophy -- essential Oneness. The word is derived from the Greek theos (god, divinity) and sophia (wisdom). Its philosophy is a contemporary presentation of the perennial wisdom underlying the world's religions, sciences, and philosophies. With a bit of paranormal thrown in.
In 1877, two years after forming the Theosophical Society, Blavatsky published her first major work, Isis Unveiled -- two volumes showing the universality of theosophic ideas in ancient and modern religions, and their basis in nature. The following year Blavatsky and Olcott left America for India, where they worked for recognition of the value of Oriental religions and philosophies, especially among the educated classes who were rejecting their own traditions in favor of modern Western materialistic education.
They also sought to expose religious superstition and dogmatism. At the same time, Blavatsky facilitated the study of Western mystical traditions such as Gnosticism, Kabbala, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism. Her claim that esoteric spiritual knowledge is consistent with new science is considered the first instance of what is now called New Age thinking. In fact, many researchers feel that much of New Age thought started with Blavatsky.
Ojai is only 90 minutes but a world away from LA. I became a Valley Girl -- that is, Ojai Valley. California harbored a number of arcane schools but none exceeds the charms of Krotona, nestled in the artists colony of Ojai Valley like Shangri La. Krotona started in the Hollywood Hills before moving to the Ojai sanctuary. Krotona Colony was a lost Oasis of old LA. The faithful hoped to study philosophy, appreciate nature, celebrate performance and otherwise live a fuller life -- all in the Hollywood Hills would-be utopia.
In 1875, as industrial America rose with avarice, mystic Helena Blavatsky and fellow occultists in New York established the Theosophical Society. Its rituals were a healing blend of clairvoyance, science and Freemasonry, dedicated to charitable works and brotherly love. Twenty-five years later, at Theosophy's international headquarters in Adyar, a town in southern India, activist Annie Besant formed a sect that promoted meditation as a unifying force for human good.
Albert P. Warrington, a lawyer in Virginia, dedicated his life to the Adyar branch and became its American leader in 1912. Warrington picked up 11 acres west of Beachwood Canyon and north of Franklin Avenue, below where the Hollywood sign stands today, to create a Californian Adyar settlement. He called it Krotona after the Greek school founded by Pythagoras, who applied musical theory to harmonize the body, mind and spirit. The Krotona colony was up by 1919. It was an oasis for the faithful, conceived in an unrealized plan by Pasadena architects Arthur S. and Alfred Heineman, with buildings by San Diego's Mead & Requa, Harold Dunn, Elmer C. Andrus and amateur designer and theosophist Marie R. Hotchener. It included the Krotona Court for educational programs; the Moorish-style Grand Temple of the Rosy Cross for ritual performance; the curious Science Building for experiments to verify theosophical mysteries.
Eccentric New Yorker Grace Shaw Duff stayed in one of the bungalows and willas of the true believers. She was the daughter of author and entertainer Henry Wheeler Shaw, known as Josh Billings. After Mark Twain, he was America's most renowned humorist, credited for popularizing "a squeaky wheel gets the grease" and "the one thing money can't buy is the wag of dog's tail," a homily in Disney's "Lady and the Tramp." Duff wrote too, along serious, theosophical lines, and she republished 18th century tracts on early Christian mystics.
Duff's house was the Ternary, designed by Arthur Heineman on land acquired in 1914 adjacent to Warrington's original purchase. Its three wings around a garden court were in a modern Moorish style that blended California Spanish traditions with eastern motifs, just as Theosophy synthesized Asian and western beliefs. Its name, meaning three, reflected Theosophy's way to an enlightened world: Build a community without discrimination; study religion, philosophy and science; explore the inexplicable.
Fundamental to utopian colonies was living with nature. The Ternary was on a landscaped plateau just below Krotona's Italian gardens. From a stadium in this terraced Saranath, an audience watched as the Buddha came to life in theatrical performance that used Duff's house as a mystical set. The hills were alive with prayer and faith until L.A. sprawl crowded Warrington's idyllic retreat. In 1924, he moved his community to Ojai, where the Krotona School of Theosophy continues today. In Hollywood, original Krotona buildings remain, altered for mundane, contemporary life. The Ternary is an apartment house, and the Italian gardens are subdivided.
Reminiscent of the symbolism of Hermetic gardens, Krotona Flight is a monumental staircase located on Vista del Mar Avenue, at the southwestern edge of Beachwood Canyon. Though less famous than the granite staircases of Hollywoodland to the north, it is arguably more fascinating. Like the Hollywoodland stairs, Krotona Flight had its practical and decorative uses but also an equally important symbolic function. Designed by the architectural firm of Mead and Requa, Krotona Flight was built in 1914-1915. The stairs not only provided access to the Knudsen residence to the east but served as the south entrance to the hillside Krotona Colony, the utopian community founded by the Theosophical Society in 1912.
Krotona colonists used the stairs to get to and from the trolley hub at Argyle and Franklin Avenues. Returning from their jobs in Hollywood and Los Angeles, they only had to walk uphill for a couple of blocks–passing land that was then mostly fields–before reaching the stairs. Although the original plans called for a large gateway at the bottom of Krotona Flight, it was never built. Instead, the stairs fulfilled the function of delineating the Colony from the ordinary world.
The fountain on the first landing, though no longer working, makes it plain the stairs were more than functional. Writes the architectural historian Alfred Willis of Krotona Flight: “Simple yet grand, this staircase once symbolized for those who climbed it the ascent into those spiritual realms of which Krotona in Hollywood was a kind of earthly correspondent.” (Architronic v. 8, 1998)
Vatican of the New Age
Probably the only one in the world, Ojai has a street named for Annie Besant in the Theosophical colony. She was a feminist convicted of indecency and sentenced to a three-month prison term for distributing birth-control devices in Victorian England. So diverse were her radical activities that her biographer, Arthur Nethercot, needed two volumes to tell her story, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant, and The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant. During one of her “lives,” she was a member of the same Crotona Fellowship to which Gerald Gardner belonged.
It is the home of the Krishnamurti Foundation, devoted to promoting the thought of the late Jiddu Krishnamurti, a child protégé of Annie Besant, who in 1926 proclaimed him to be the new Messiah. He later repudiated the role but remains renowned among theosophists for his lectures. The Oak Grove School he founded still operates here. In his later days he had a strong friendship with physicist David Bohm with whom he exchanged deep theories of reality.
Scattered across Ojai like seeds in raspberry jam are other theosophical shrines: the Liberal Catholic Church of Our Lady and All Angels, a theosophical-Catholic religious chimera; Meditation Mount, a center of Alice Bailey’s “New Group of World Servers”; the Ecumenical Ministry of the Unity of All Religions; the Symphony of Life Religious Science Church, and tiny World University of America, housed in a former motel, where one can earn a Master’s degree in theosophical philosophy. The community Art Center offers open participation in monthly sessions of the Sufi Dances of Universal Peace.
With its Mediterranean climate Ojai (oh-hi) was full of blossoming orange groves, olives, lush tropical vegetation, and hot springs. It was matched by clean white Mediterranean architecture, the Arcade and a landmark bell tower. It has an ancient feel to it, a primordial air -- a spiritual beauty. In Ojai I acquired a vocabulary for my consciousness expanding experiences. Others had systematically explored the inner terrain.
Ojai is a California Condor sanctuary (Sespe) on the edge of the Los Padres National Forest, which had been set afire by an intoxicated Johnny Cash shortly before I moved there the first time of many. Your heart never leaves "The Nest [or Valley of the Moon]," the meaning of its Chumash Indian name. The valley became the Spanish land grant cattle ranch of Fernando Tico in 1837.
Ojai isn't on the way to anywhere and is a celeb retreat. Less than 8,000 live there now; roughly 3000 families. The whole valley is only 3 miles wide and 10 miles long. The 60s art rock group Spirit comes from there, and sums up the essence of the place, surrounded by the nearly impenetrable backcountry of Sespe Wilderness. That nest gave birth to my higher spirit. It gave me my first husband. We were initially mentored there by Rebecca, who was a dead ringer for Joan Baez.
Shangri La of My Heart
When Hollywood needed a setting for Shangri-La, a mythical paradise of eternal youth, it found what it was looking for in the Ojai Valley. Jagged mountain peaks served as a backdrop for a procession of Tibetan monks; grassy meadows cradled romping lovers; orange groves, flowering shrubs, and ribbons of water flowed into worn stone basins. ''Lost Horizon,'' directed by Frank Capra, was filmed in the 30's, but those in the know had been rejuvenating themselves in Ojai for decades before that. The Topatopa Bluffs turn a radiant golden-pink in the setting sun, enhancing the magic. The ridge looks like a giant recumbent Indian with head-dress is slumbering on the mountaintops. In the 70s, it was the fictional home of the Bionic Woman.
Ojai is a geo-thermal area. Wheeler Hot Springs, a thermal spa in the hills above Ojai (now closed), started as a resort in the 1870's and reached a peak in the giddy days of Prohibition and bootleg barons. The Oaks at Ojai, a rambling, vaguely Spanish-style structure within the town proper, is by comparison a relative newcomer, having drawn guests seeking a Spartan regime in comfortable surroundings since 1977, but the Ojai Valley Inn (1876) was much older. The catch to Shangri-La was that you kept your youth only as long as you stayed there in the oasis of palms, cedars and citrus trees, with its pungent hot waters. The holographic memories of my youth are still stored there.
I rented a cottage up the mountain from Ojai at Wheeler Hot Springs, which had been decimated by a recent flood and so closed to the public at that time, making it a private playground. Matilija Hot Springs further down the road below Matilija Dam hadn't fared much better. One natural sulphur spring-fed tub remained intact. I had grown up enjoying Desert Hot Springs virtually every weekend of SoCal winters, but this water was smellier.
I didn't really need healing waters as much as a sanctuary from LA and immersion in nature. Our whole surf gang intended to move there, and I went in advance with a friend who was a Gypsy guitar-player and plenty of trickster ideas. My OC friends moved directly to Takilma, Oregon instead, but it took me a couple of more years to unknowingly, magnetically wind up in the same place again.
WHS was a real survivor, re-built several times after fires, bombings (by the Costello gang, during Prohibition), etc. Seventy-five miles north of LA, it re-opened in 1973 but closed in 1996. From the 1,486 foot elevation, the road was so steep we could make the 15-minute drive into Ojai coasting in neutral most of the way. WHS had been used for Halloween parties by the Sierra Club. Ripley's certified it as the world's smallest post office. Jack Dempsey used it as a training camp. Art Linkletter owned it for a brief time.
To call Wheelers a town is too generous. It was barely a roadside attraction. We duped the naive owners (Escrow closed just weeks before the devastating flood) into thinking we were married and it became an hippie enclave with a rotating cast of characters hiking across the chapparrel forest. Later I lived other places about the valley -- Meiner's Oaks, in the guest house of the Krotona landscaper, then up near the Thatcher School in the East End. Happy Valley School, counts Aldous Huxley and Jiddu Krishnamurti among its founders. My daughter was born in the tiny Ojai hospital. The valley kept calling me back. I still hear the siren sound. There I learned to peel back the mystic veil over a deeper reality
Zapped by the Violet Ray
The Age of Aquarius arrived early in Ojai, when the Theosophical Society moved a west coast outpost there.
Undoubtedly, each person brings a unique perspective to the study of Theosophy, a unique particular emphasis. One person may be particularly interested in studying the common, esoteric threads uniting the multiplicity of world religions. Or studying other esoteric subjects, such as Gurdjieff's writings or Wilhelm's I Ching.
Another may devote the vast majority of their study to The Secret Doctrine, coming to the fullest possible understanding of the Three Fundamental Propositions. Still others are drawn more to tmystic exts such as The Voice of the Silence or At the Feet of the Master, small but powerfully transformative tomes that illustrate the practical application of high Theosophical ideals to one’s own life. Some find expositions of psychic phenomena fascinating, opening them to a world entirely beyond everyday sense perceptions.
The Secret Doctrine teaches that everything in existence stems ultimately from the ineffable, incomprehensible ground of being described as the Absolute. Anything below this level of being is “maya,” illusion. The Society’s motto, “There is no religion higher than truth,” points to the over-arching search of the seeker -- the search for truth. Distraction by the illusory nature of anything less than Truth itself is to lose sight of the Path.
If the highest Truth is found beyond all form, in this boundless Absolute, then anything containing the characteristics of form, limitation and definition falls short of Truth in some way. The logic in this line of thought is sound, but can lead to the development of a value system that looks down upon an interest in phenomena. How often is this word, “phenomena,” used in a condescending manner to describe interests deemed by the speaker to be inferior? What effect does this have?
The current notion of ethereal "Indigo Children" meme is an offshoot of an offshoot of Theosophy. Alice Bailey's seven ray philosophy was a metaphysical fusion of meditation and spiritual psychology. Like Madame Blavatsky, she held a vision of herself ushering in an impending Aquarian Age, full of disembodied Masters of Wisdom and dubious channels.
Notions of spiritual hierarchy turned into a "spiritual supermarket" full of self-styled, "branded" instant-experts with their hands down your pockets, burning up the lecture circuit and churning out book after rehashed book. Discipleship and service became exploitation, even by unconscious well-meaning "light-workers." Mastership became a confidence game.
Tavistock directed Stanford Research to undertake the work under the direction of Professor Willis Harmon. This work later became known as the "Aquarian Conspiracy". Esalan was the "consciousness growth" prototype of the "hot tub spirituality" that followed -- the psychosynthesis of the California ideology. Even the well-meaning can have toxic EFFECTS, which speak louder than their flowery parroted words. "The Way" became "my way, or the highway" -- the Babel of idiosyncratic models and "churches" with narcissistic high-fallutin degrees that would shame freemasonry even while it copied it. Well, after all, it was the "Me" Generation.
The now ubiquitous Law of Attraction comes from Theosophy. But it is a materialistic magic disguised as spirituality. Still there are more houses, yachts, and vacations on vision boards and in "mind movies" than verities. Even "personal best" can be a narcissistic dream, rather than a vision of true potential. It all depends on who the dreamer is. It ain't no Secret. I say "the method works if you do" at the proper level of pro-active application. Thus, to me, most current New Age thought looks a lot like Psych 101 with old age Theosophy, replete with obsolete 19th century thinking, including hidden racism and nationalism. In other words, what Robert Anton Wilson called a Reality Wormhole to the past. The problem is the -isms, rather than their content -- the way of thinking.
Among Theosophists, I saw the effects of religious schizm that overlapped with pet theories. There I learned about fanatics, projection, cult behavior, zealotry, obsessiveness, delusional and magical thinking and a variety of other aberrations of misplaced energy, dependence and over-compensation. 2012 apocalypticism arose from the same root.
Indigo represents the highest color of aura, the intuitive seer with an open third eye. Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Orange and Indigo or violet are the ascending Theosophical rays, colors of the chakras. The standard Theosophic Sixth Ray of Idealism, Devotion, and True Religion is predominantly the Ray of Alchemical Transmutation -- the violet fire which makes the psychophysical self into a crucible.
Metagifted Indigo adults, gifted sensitives, are imagined as the forerunners of civilization. But maybe they are just the "hopium" for our future. After all, even in science models are only theories. Indigo values include freedom, vision, truth, growth, sensitivity, inclusiveness, holistic-perception and heart-centeredness. Indigos are the "town criers" and societal watchdogs, serving notice and calling attention to injustices and problems of the world.
The Hippie movement of the 1960's could be thought of as a precursor which rose up against the "system" before imploding in the 1970's. Drugs were intrinsic to the Hippie Culture as if it had been engineered. There is credible evidence, in both the greater LA and San Francisco area that the government supplied the drugs. Today is only slightly different. Many of the mind numbing drugs available are sold legally by the big pharmaceutical companies for mood control. But self-centered philosophies [solipsism] can be as mind numbing and distracting from shared reality as drugs.
From a number of different perspectives the highly perceptive are voicing our collective need to re-think our civilization to create a better future for the planet and the human race. Some appear abrasive because they are blunt, easily bored, always ask why, and often do not suffer fools kindly. Viewed in terms of personality types, they are intuitive thinkers or feelers and empaths. Typology doesn't really evolve, so you are either that type or not in your essential nature. Rebellious spirits perceive and fight against outside control in favor of the "authentic self," much as it is described by Maslow, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt and transpersonal psychology.
In 1968 I underwent another paradigm shift "into the mystic." Esoterics offered a holistic drug-free alternative to altering consciousness. It was the first answer to my question: "How do you do it without drugs?" Meditation was the comprehensive answer, often combined with types of magic. The third drug-free alternative is experiential therapy, either with or without a navigational guide. I followed all these paths developing them in conjunction with one another, learning the mysteries of Eastern and Western traditions. Later, this would be recontextualized in my Jungian studies and practice.
I was exposed to the mothership of esoteric memes -- Theosophy, as full immersion experience. I landed in Ojai, California, an artists colony, Theosophical center and home of Krotona, which began as a Utopian oasis in Hollywood. Krotona put a premium on Forbidden Knowledge and extraordinary human potential. It was the esoteric vanguard of "Be All You Can Be," living on as many planes as you can imagine and stabilize. It was essentially a path of self-initiation, even more encouraged by Krishnamurti and his offshoot Foundation.
Let's Play A Game -- GLOBAL ARCHITECTRONICS
Krotona was like Virtual Reality training before VR, developing not only conceptual but experiential self-knowledge on the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels. I grokked the model and never really abandoned it. It came from the syncretism of ancient eras and sustained the best of the past with an eye toward an emergent future -- dubbed the Aquarian Age. It encourage self-reliant spirituality without religious strictures. It was a sort of Jedi warrior training of higher self development. Some of the most useful information came from seeing where others had stalled out in the process and why, and figuring out how to overcome those challenges and adversities.
This theosophical center with its huge library of metaphysics was a virtual Castalia for the impressionable mind. Castaglia was home of the Muses and the abstract realm of the intelligentsia in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (aka "The Glass Bead Game"). Hesse's books were favorites of the sixties and early-seventies turned-on generation, along with those of J.R.R. Tolkien and Carlos Castaneda. Of all these works, the austere Glass Bead Game was the least approachable, yet keenly sought, as it had about it the scent of surpassing wisdom.
It is complex but briefly, there is a game, played with glass beads. Its subject matter is the entire sweep of human civilization. In order to even begin to play it, one must have already become an absolute master of at least one entire branch of human culture, with its many sciences and arts. The game seems to be played by simply stringing beads on a thread. But of course, it isn't so simple, as each bead represents something quite huge about human experience. Putting it together in a good way was tantamount to synthesizing an entire civilization. Who achieves the highest is named Magister Ludi - The Master of the Game.
Turbo-charging the Energy Body or Body of Light
The bead game is played in the 23rd century by members of that society's intellectual elite. The players seem to be extremely intellectual, to a fault. That is why much of the book seems so austere and difficult. And yet, Joseph Knecht, the one who achieves mastery in the course of the book, gradually transcends himself and, at the end, becomes a glowing being who no longer even speaks, but whose radiant presence is sought out by all the others. How did this happen? That is the mystery of the book, never revealed or even discussed, but left for the reader to ponder.
So, how does one set out to become a potentiated HOMO LUMEN? That is the question. My answer to that one became Magick which became my vocation. Then I wondered if that was crazy, and my answer was, no -- look to Jungian Psychology and transpersonal psychologies, which validate such experiences while not literalizing them. For a firm foundation, build on the personality psychologies of Gestalt and Transactional Analysis, and hypnotherapy. Beyond that, pick a spiritual Path and work it diligently with devotion, practice and compassionate service. Learn the distinction between mind and its contents. Become mindful of primordial awareness. Enjoy the inner journey as a natural extension of embodied life. Embody that spirituality -- physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
Since its founding in 1967, the Krotona School of Theosophy has been helping students deepen their understanding of theosophy, the ancient wisdom, in its many forms, and has encouraged them to live a spiritually oriented life. The school emphasizes "transformative education" which focuses on spiritual renewal. Such studies lead students to orient themselves to eternal truths in a changing world. The school, an integral part of the Krotona Institute, supports the work of The Theosophical Society and its three objects, which are concerned with: 1) The unity of all people; 2) The study of comparative religion, philosophy and science; and 3) The investigation of unexplained laws of nature and our latent powers. School programs reflect the peace and special presence that make Krotona the spiritual center it is.
The theosophical Krotona was named after the school founded in Sicily by Pythagoras. Krotona's mission was to educate the whole, full person. Pythagorus invented the Western musical scale and the principle of harmony. But his notion of harmony wasn't confined to music: it underscored education. Krotona aimed at developing rich harmony of body, spirit and mind. His notion of culture included intellectual culture, creativity culture, and physical culture.
Krotona had esoteric classes for everything, just like you find everywhere now, but then it was rare to non-existent. The whole town was like living in a cult, so even the public library was full of wonderful philosophy books - things very rare in those days, including the natural food movement.
It was around that time the Krishnamurti Foundation was established for the "Un-guru." I was lucky enough to see his Oak Grove talks, and had many ‘wise old woman’ mentors who directed my studies and goals, shortcutting my process of shopping the ‘spiritual supermarket’. They also introduced me to a deeper appreciation of art and science, with an eye toward the esoteric and leading edge. Today many embrace this sort of fusion in their worldview.
Those inter-related mystical paths showed me a holistic worldview and that one person could work to make a difference in the world. The "unguru" Krishnamurti was an exemplar role model of human potential. He was a World Citizen and World Teacher, long before the web made that a possibility for the masses -- a realization of Tielhard de Chardin's noosphere. In the 90s, the net became a new Utopia which many imagined would solve the fundamental problems of humanity through communication and education. Cyberspace was an electronic astral plane with a group soul of its own that opened our collective Third Eye and exposed much formerly forbidden knowledge.
Through Theosophy, and the excellent library and teachers there, I learned about various mystic arts and how they were used to damp the chatter of the mind. I was immersed in an alternative worldview far older than our Great Society before I became ingrained with consumer culture. I learned astrology from a former Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church. I learned more than she thought she was teaching since she loved her daily Port. She would get drunk and rave about being “possessed by Koothomi” and ask me to slap her in the face.So, before the vogue for channelling, I learned “don’t go THERE”! But she was a terrific astrologer, named Marion…with many cats.
Of all of the occult arts, magick seemed to be the most intriguing because it had the most depth. Qabala seemed a hobby one could neither exhaust nor conquer. I'm not through with it yet and it isn't letting loose of me. My study ranged far and deep, and of course Crowley was a big part of that. My first real magick book was Regardie’s TREE OF LIFE. I really got into it. Realizing this was not exactly the "norm," I began investigating Jungian psychology, also, to keep a reality check on myself.
Later, I learned transpersonal and personality psychologies doing hypnotherapy and dreamhealing with Dr. Krippner. By the early 70's, I was an avid Jungian.I began writing to crystallize my thoughts on the interface between mysticism and depth psychology. This eventually became THE HOLISTIC QABALA, whose outline came through in one of those blissfully flowing experiences where it all comes together. I also included basics of the psychological/esoteric crossover material in The Modern Alchemist. A continuing interest of mine is the relationship of psyche and matter…that interface where nothing becomes something, or psyche “matters”.
KROTONA BACKSTORY:
In 1875, as industrial America rose and avarice trounced charity, mystic Helena Blavatsky and fellow occultists in New York established the Theosophical Society. Its rituals were a healing blend of clairvoyance, science and Freemasonry, dedicated to charitable works and brotherly love. Twenty-five years later, at Theosophy's international headquarters in Adyar, a town in southern India, activist Annie Besant formed a sect that promoted meditation as a unifying force for human good. Albert P. Warrington, a lawyer in Virginia, dedicated his life to the Adyar branch and became its American leader in 1912.
California, with its cheap land for private paradises, was home to more utopian colonies than any other state. Warrington picked up 11 acres west of Beachwood Canyon and north of Franklin Avenue, below where the Hollywood sign stands today, to create an Adyar settlement. He called it Krotona after the Greek school founded by Pythagoras, who applied musical theory to harmonize the body, mind and spirit.
Proving that faith can move mountains, or at least truck loads of dirt, the Krotona colony was up by 1919. It was a veritable Vegas CityCenter-style oasis for the faithful, conceived in an unrealized plan by Pasadena architects Arthur S. and Alfred Heineman, with buildings by San Diego's Mead & Requa, Harold Dunn, Elmer C. Andrus and amateur designer and theosophist Marie R. Hotchener. It included the Krotona Court for educational programs; the Moorish-style Grand Temple of the Rosy Cross for ritual performance; the curious Science Building for experiments to verify theosophical mysteries; and bungalows and villas of the true believers, who included New Yorker Grace Shaw Duff.
Duff came to her characteristically Victorian eccentricity with star credentials as the daughter of author and entertainer Henry Wheeler Shaw, known as Josh Billings. After Mark Twain, he was America's most renowned humorist, credited for popularizing "a squeaky wheel gets the grease" and "the one thing money can't buy is the wag of dog's tail," a homily in Disney's "Lady and the Tramp." Duff wrote too, along serious, theosophical lines, and she republished 18th century tracts on early Christian mystics.
Duff's house was the Ternary, designed by Arthur Heineman on land acquired in 1914 adjacent to Warrington's original purchase. Its three wings around a garden court were in a modern Moorish style that blended California Spanish traditions with eastern motifs, just as Theosophy synthesized Asian and western beliefs. Its name, meaning three, reflected Theosophy's way to an enlightened world: Build a community without discrimination; study religion, philosophy and science; explore the inexplicable.
Fundamental to utopian colonies was living with nature. The Ternary was on a landscaped plateau just below Krotona's Italian gardens. From a stadium in this terraced Saranath, an audience watched as the Buddha came to life in theatrical performance that used Duff's house as a mystical set.
The hills were alive with prayer and faith until L.A. sprawl crowded Warrington's idyllic retreat. In 1924, he moved his community to Ojai, where the Krotona School of Theosophy continues today. In Hollywood, original Krotona buildings remain, altered for mundane, contemporary life. The Ternary is an apartment house, and the Italian gardens are subdivided.
Oscar Wilde, no stranger to misery, wrote: "A map of the modern world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing." Living now in our Distopia, with global wars, churches in schism, fractious politics and investment bankers doing God's work, it's hard to imagine a 21st century Utopia. But -- all it will take is faith in a better way. http://www.latimes.com/la-hm-lostla6-2010feb06,0,5265456.story
"To be sensitive to the beauty of something is to perceive the totality of it. The mind that is thinking in terms of a part can never perceive the whole. In the whole the part is contained, but the part will never make up the whole, the total."— Krishnamurti, New Delhi 1960
Metaphysics: It's Not What You Think
***meta- (also met- before a vowel or h) combining form
1 denoting a change of position or condition : metamorphosis | metathesis.
2 denoting position behind, after, or beyond: : metacarpus.
3 denoting something of a higher or second-order kind : metalanguage
METAPHYSICS means neither supernatural nor magical. It means 'beyond physics,' beyond the observables of particles and describes the non-physicality of virtual vacuum field effects, at least in current usage. They are real but inherently non-observable energy dynamics whose EFFECTS are never-the-less observable.
The Esoteric Tradition
I knew about Theosophy from the Theosophical Society in Pasadena, an offshoot of Blavatsky's school of occult science. It split at the turn of the century from rival Katherine Tingley, who had another center headquartered in Point Loma, a wanna be California Utopia. Just like schisms in Christianity, rivalries logically ran counter to the self-professed purpose of Theosophy -- essential Oneness. The word is derived from the Greek theos (god, divinity) and sophia (wisdom). Its philosophy is a contemporary presentation of the perennial wisdom underlying the world's religions, sciences, and philosophies. With a bit of paranormal thrown in.
In 1877, two years after forming the Theosophical Society, Blavatsky published her first major work, Isis Unveiled -- two volumes showing the universality of theosophic ideas in ancient and modern religions, and their basis in nature. The following year Blavatsky and Olcott left America for India, where they worked for recognition of the value of Oriental religions and philosophies, especially among the educated classes who were rejecting their own traditions in favor of modern Western materialistic education.
They also sought to expose religious superstition and dogmatism. At the same time, Blavatsky facilitated the study of Western mystical traditions such as Gnosticism, Kabbala, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism. Her claim that esoteric spiritual knowledge is consistent with new science is considered the first instance of what is now called New Age thinking. In fact, many researchers feel that much of New Age thought started with Blavatsky.
Ojai is only 90 minutes but a world away from LA. I became a Valley Girl -- that is, Ojai Valley. California harbored a number of arcane schools but none exceeds the charms of Krotona, nestled in the artists colony of Ojai Valley like Shangri La. Krotona started in the Hollywood Hills before moving to the Ojai sanctuary. Krotona Colony was a lost Oasis of old LA. The faithful hoped to study philosophy, appreciate nature, celebrate performance and otherwise live a fuller life -- all in the Hollywood Hills would-be utopia.
In 1875, as industrial America rose with avarice, mystic Helena Blavatsky and fellow occultists in New York established the Theosophical Society. Its rituals were a healing blend of clairvoyance, science and Freemasonry, dedicated to charitable works and brotherly love. Twenty-five years later, at Theosophy's international headquarters in Adyar, a town in southern India, activist Annie Besant formed a sect that promoted meditation as a unifying force for human good.
Albert P. Warrington, a lawyer in Virginia, dedicated his life to the Adyar branch and became its American leader in 1912. Warrington picked up 11 acres west of Beachwood Canyon and north of Franklin Avenue, below where the Hollywood sign stands today, to create a Californian Adyar settlement. He called it Krotona after the Greek school founded by Pythagoras, who applied musical theory to harmonize the body, mind and spirit. The Krotona colony was up by 1919. It was an oasis for the faithful, conceived in an unrealized plan by Pasadena architects Arthur S. and Alfred Heineman, with buildings by San Diego's Mead & Requa, Harold Dunn, Elmer C. Andrus and amateur designer and theosophist Marie R. Hotchener. It included the Krotona Court for educational programs; the Moorish-style Grand Temple of the Rosy Cross for ritual performance; the curious Science Building for experiments to verify theosophical mysteries.
Eccentric New Yorker Grace Shaw Duff stayed in one of the bungalows and willas of the true believers. She was the daughter of author and entertainer Henry Wheeler Shaw, known as Josh Billings. After Mark Twain, he was America's most renowned humorist, credited for popularizing "a squeaky wheel gets the grease" and "the one thing money can't buy is the wag of dog's tail," a homily in Disney's "Lady and the Tramp." Duff wrote too, along serious, theosophical lines, and she republished 18th century tracts on early Christian mystics.
Duff's house was the Ternary, designed by Arthur Heineman on land acquired in 1914 adjacent to Warrington's original purchase. Its three wings around a garden court were in a modern Moorish style that blended California Spanish traditions with eastern motifs, just as Theosophy synthesized Asian and western beliefs. Its name, meaning three, reflected Theosophy's way to an enlightened world: Build a community without discrimination; study religion, philosophy and science; explore the inexplicable.
Fundamental to utopian colonies was living with nature. The Ternary was on a landscaped plateau just below Krotona's Italian gardens. From a stadium in this terraced Saranath, an audience watched as the Buddha came to life in theatrical performance that used Duff's house as a mystical set. The hills were alive with prayer and faith until L.A. sprawl crowded Warrington's idyllic retreat. In 1924, he moved his community to Ojai, where the Krotona School of Theosophy continues today. In Hollywood, original Krotona buildings remain, altered for mundane, contemporary life. The Ternary is an apartment house, and the Italian gardens are subdivided.
Reminiscent of the symbolism of Hermetic gardens, Krotona Flight is a monumental staircase located on Vista del Mar Avenue, at the southwestern edge of Beachwood Canyon. Though less famous than the granite staircases of Hollywoodland to the north, it is arguably more fascinating. Like the Hollywoodland stairs, Krotona Flight had its practical and decorative uses but also an equally important symbolic function. Designed by the architectural firm of Mead and Requa, Krotona Flight was built in 1914-1915. The stairs not only provided access to the Knudsen residence to the east but served as the south entrance to the hillside Krotona Colony, the utopian community founded by the Theosophical Society in 1912.
Krotona colonists used the stairs to get to and from the trolley hub at Argyle and Franklin Avenues. Returning from their jobs in Hollywood and Los Angeles, they only had to walk uphill for a couple of blocks–passing land that was then mostly fields–before reaching the stairs. Although the original plans called for a large gateway at the bottom of Krotona Flight, it was never built. Instead, the stairs fulfilled the function of delineating the Colony from the ordinary world.
The fountain on the first landing, though no longer working, makes it plain the stairs were more than functional. Writes the architectural historian Alfred Willis of Krotona Flight: “Simple yet grand, this staircase once symbolized for those who climbed it the ascent into those spiritual realms of which Krotona in Hollywood was a kind of earthly correspondent.” (Architronic v. 8, 1998)
Vatican of the New Age
Probably the only one in the world, Ojai has a street named for Annie Besant in the Theosophical colony. She was a feminist convicted of indecency and sentenced to a three-month prison term for distributing birth-control devices in Victorian England. So diverse were her radical activities that her biographer, Arthur Nethercot, needed two volumes to tell her story, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant, and The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant. During one of her “lives,” she was a member of the same Crotona Fellowship to which Gerald Gardner belonged.
It is the home of the Krishnamurti Foundation, devoted to promoting the thought of the late Jiddu Krishnamurti, a child protégé of Annie Besant, who in 1926 proclaimed him to be the new Messiah. He later repudiated the role but remains renowned among theosophists for his lectures. The Oak Grove School he founded still operates here. In his later days he had a strong friendship with physicist David Bohm with whom he exchanged deep theories of reality.
Scattered across Ojai like seeds in raspberry jam are other theosophical shrines: the Liberal Catholic Church of Our Lady and All Angels, a theosophical-Catholic religious chimera; Meditation Mount, a center of Alice Bailey’s “New Group of World Servers”; the Ecumenical Ministry of the Unity of All Religions; the Symphony of Life Religious Science Church, and tiny World University of America, housed in a former motel, where one can earn a Master’s degree in theosophical philosophy. The community Art Center offers open participation in monthly sessions of the Sufi Dances of Universal Peace.
With its Mediterranean climate Ojai (oh-hi) was full of blossoming orange groves, olives, lush tropical vegetation, and hot springs. It was matched by clean white Mediterranean architecture, the Arcade and a landmark bell tower. It has an ancient feel to it, a primordial air -- a spiritual beauty. In Ojai I acquired a vocabulary for my consciousness expanding experiences. Others had systematically explored the inner terrain.
Ojai is a California Condor sanctuary (Sespe) on the edge of the Los Padres National Forest, which had been set afire by an intoxicated Johnny Cash shortly before I moved there the first time of many. Your heart never leaves "The Nest [or Valley of the Moon]," the meaning of its Chumash Indian name. The valley became the Spanish land grant cattle ranch of Fernando Tico in 1837.
Ojai isn't on the way to anywhere and is a celeb retreat. Less than 8,000 live there now; roughly 3000 families. The whole valley is only 3 miles wide and 10 miles long. The 60s art rock group Spirit comes from there, and sums up the essence of the place, surrounded by the nearly impenetrable backcountry of Sespe Wilderness. That nest gave birth to my higher spirit. It gave me my first husband. We were initially mentored there by Rebecca, who was a dead ringer for Joan Baez.
Shangri La of My Heart
When Hollywood needed a setting for Shangri-La, a mythical paradise of eternal youth, it found what it was looking for in the Ojai Valley. Jagged mountain peaks served as a backdrop for a procession of Tibetan monks; grassy meadows cradled romping lovers; orange groves, flowering shrubs, and ribbons of water flowed into worn stone basins. ''Lost Horizon,'' directed by Frank Capra, was filmed in the 30's, but those in the know had been rejuvenating themselves in Ojai for decades before that. The Topatopa Bluffs turn a radiant golden-pink in the setting sun, enhancing the magic. The ridge looks like a giant recumbent Indian with head-dress is slumbering on the mountaintops. In the 70s, it was the fictional home of the Bionic Woman.
Ojai is a geo-thermal area. Wheeler Hot Springs, a thermal spa in the hills above Ojai (now closed), started as a resort in the 1870's and reached a peak in the giddy days of Prohibition and bootleg barons. The Oaks at Ojai, a rambling, vaguely Spanish-style structure within the town proper, is by comparison a relative newcomer, having drawn guests seeking a Spartan regime in comfortable surroundings since 1977, but the Ojai Valley Inn (1876) was much older. The catch to Shangri-La was that you kept your youth only as long as you stayed there in the oasis of palms, cedars and citrus trees, with its pungent hot waters. The holographic memories of my youth are still stored there.
I rented a cottage up the mountain from Ojai at Wheeler Hot Springs, which had been decimated by a recent flood and so closed to the public at that time, making it a private playground. Matilija Hot Springs further down the road below Matilija Dam hadn't fared much better. One natural sulphur spring-fed tub remained intact. I had grown up enjoying Desert Hot Springs virtually every weekend of SoCal winters, but this water was smellier.
I didn't really need healing waters as much as a sanctuary from LA and immersion in nature. Our whole surf gang intended to move there, and I went in advance with a friend who was a Gypsy guitar-player and plenty of trickster ideas. My OC friends moved directly to Takilma, Oregon instead, but it took me a couple of more years to unknowingly, magnetically wind up in the same place again.
WHS was a real survivor, re-built several times after fires, bombings (by the Costello gang, during Prohibition), etc. Seventy-five miles north of LA, it re-opened in 1973 but closed in 1996. From the 1,486 foot elevation, the road was so steep we could make the 15-minute drive into Ojai coasting in neutral most of the way. WHS had been used for Halloween parties by the Sierra Club. Ripley's certified it as the world's smallest post office. Jack Dempsey used it as a training camp. Art Linkletter owned it for a brief time.
To call Wheelers a town is too generous. It was barely a roadside attraction. We duped the naive owners (Escrow closed just weeks before the devastating flood) into thinking we were married and it became an hippie enclave with a rotating cast of characters hiking across the chapparrel forest. Later I lived other places about the valley -- Meiner's Oaks, in the guest house of the Krotona landscaper, then up near the Thatcher School in the East End. Happy Valley School, counts Aldous Huxley and Jiddu Krishnamurti among its founders. My daughter was born in the tiny Ojai hospital. The valley kept calling me back. I still hear the siren sound. There I learned to peel back the mystic veil over a deeper reality
Zapped by the Violet Ray
The Age of Aquarius arrived early in Ojai, when the Theosophical Society moved a west coast outpost there.
Undoubtedly, each person brings a unique perspective to the study of Theosophy, a unique particular emphasis. One person may be particularly interested in studying the common, esoteric threads uniting the multiplicity of world religions. Or studying other esoteric subjects, such as Gurdjieff's writings or Wilhelm's I Ching.
Another may devote the vast majority of their study to The Secret Doctrine, coming to the fullest possible understanding of the Three Fundamental Propositions. Still others are drawn more to tmystic exts such as The Voice of the Silence or At the Feet of the Master, small but powerfully transformative tomes that illustrate the practical application of high Theosophical ideals to one’s own life. Some find expositions of psychic phenomena fascinating, opening them to a world entirely beyond everyday sense perceptions.
The Secret Doctrine teaches that everything in existence stems ultimately from the ineffable, incomprehensible ground of being described as the Absolute. Anything below this level of being is “maya,” illusion. The Society’s motto, “There is no religion higher than truth,” points to the over-arching search of the seeker -- the search for truth. Distraction by the illusory nature of anything less than Truth itself is to lose sight of the Path.
If the highest Truth is found beyond all form, in this boundless Absolute, then anything containing the characteristics of form, limitation and definition falls short of Truth in some way. The logic in this line of thought is sound, but can lead to the development of a value system that looks down upon an interest in phenomena. How often is this word, “phenomena,” used in a condescending manner to describe interests deemed by the speaker to be inferior? What effect does this have?
The current notion of ethereal "Indigo Children" meme is an offshoot of an offshoot of Theosophy. Alice Bailey's seven ray philosophy was a metaphysical fusion of meditation and spiritual psychology. Like Madame Blavatsky, she held a vision of herself ushering in an impending Aquarian Age, full of disembodied Masters of Wisdom and dubious channels.
Notions of spiritual hierarchy turned into a "spiritual supermarket" full of self-styled, "branded" instant-experts with their hands down your pockets, burning up the lecture circuit and churning out book after rehashed book. Discipleship and service became exploitation, even by unconscious well-meaning "light-workers." Mastership became a confidence game.
Tavistock directed Stanford Research to undertake the work under the direction of Professor Willis Harmon. This work later became known as the "Aquarian Conspiracy". Esalan was the "consciousness growth" prototype of the "hot tub spirituality" that followed -- the psychosynthesis of the California ideology. Even the well-meaning can have toxic EFFECTS, which speak louder than their flowery parroted words. "The Way" became "my way, or the highway" -- the Babel of idiosyncratic models and "churches" with narcissistic high-fallutin degrees that would shame freemasonry even while it copied it. Well, after all, it was the "Me" Generation.
The now ubiquitous Law of Attraction comes from Theosophy. But it is a materialistic magic disguised as spirituality. Still there are more houses, yachts, and vacations on vision boards and in "mind movies" than verities. Even "personal best" can be a narcissistic dream, rather than a vision of true potential. It all depends on who the dreamer is. It ain't no Secret. I say "the method works if you do" at the proper level of pro-active application. Thus, to me, most current New Age thought looks a lot like Psych 101 with old age Theosophy, replete with obsolete 19th century thinking, including hidden racism and nationalism. In other words, what Robert Anton Wilson called a Reality Wormhole to the past. The problem is the -isms, rather than their content -- the way of thinking.
Among Theosophists, I saw the effects of religious schizm that overlapped with pet theories. There I learned about fanatics, projection, cult behavior, zealotry, obsessiveness, delusional and magical thinking and a variety of other aberrations of misplaced energy, dependence and over-compensation. 2012 apocalypticism arose from the same root.
Indigo represents the highest color of aura, the intuitive seer with an open third eye. Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Orange and Indigo or violet are the ascending Theosophical rays, colors of the chakras. The standard Theosophic Sixth Ray of Idealism, Devotion, and True Religion is predominantly the Ray of Alchemical Transmutation -- the violet fire which makes the psychophysical self into a crucible.
Metagifted Indigo adults, gifted sensitives, are imagined as the forerunners of civilization. But maybe they are just the "hopium" for our future. After all, even in science models are only theories. Indigo values include freedom, vision, truth, growth, sensitivity, inclusiveness, holistic-perception and heart-centeredness. Indigos are the "town criers" and societal watchdogs, serving notice and calling attention to injustices and problems of the world.
The Hippie movement of the 1960's could be thought of as a precursor which rose up against the "system" before imploding in the 1970's. Drugs were intrinsic to the Hippie Culture as if it had been engineered. There is credible evidence, in both the greater LA and San Francisco area that the government supplied the drugs. Today is only slightly different. Many of the mind numbing drugs available are sold legally by the big pharmaceutical companies for mood control. But self-centered philosophies [solipsism] can be as mind numbing and distracting from shared reality as drugs.
From a number of different perspectives the highly perceptive are voicing our collective need to re-think our civilization to create a better future for the planet and the human race. Some appear abrasive because they are blunt, easily bored, always ask why, and often do not suffer fools kindly. Viewed in terms of personality types, they are intuitive thinkers or feelers and empaths. Typology doesn't really evolve, so you are either that type or not in your essential nature. Rebellious spirits perceive and fight against outside control in favor of the "authentic self," much as it is described by Maslow, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt and transpersonal psychology.
In 1968 I underwent another paradigm shift "into the mystic." Esoterics offered a holistic drug-free alternative to altering consciousness. It was the first answer to my question: "How do you do it without drugs?" Meditation was the comprehensive answer, often combined with types of magic. The third drug-free alternative is experiential therapy, either with or without a navigational guide. I followed all these paths developing them in conjunction with one another, learning the mysteries of Eastern and Western traditions. Later, this would be recontextualized in my Jungian studies and practice.
I was exposed to the mothership of esoteric memes -- Theosophy, as full immersion experience. I landed in Ojai, California, an artists colony, Theosophical center and home of Krotona, which began as a Utopian oasis in Hollywood. Krotona put a premium on Forbidden Knowledge and extraordinary human potential. It was the esoteric vanguard of "Be All You Can Be," living on as many planes as you can imagine and stabilize. It was essentially a path of self-initiation, even more encouraged by Krishnamurti and his offshoot Foundation.
Let's Play A Game -- GLOBAL ARCHITECTRONICS
Krotona was like Virtual Reality training before VR, developing not only conceptual but experiential self-knowledge on the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels. I grokked the model and never really abandoned it. It came from the syncretism of ancient eras and sustained the best of the past with an eye toward an emergent future -- dubbed the Aquarian Age. It encourage self-reliant spirituality without religious strictures. It was a sort of Jedi warrior training of higher self development. Some of the most useful information came from seeing where others had stalled out in the process and why, and figuring out how to overcome those challenges and adversities.
This theosophical center with its huge library of metaphysics was a virtual Castalia for the impressionable mind. Castaglia was home of the Muses and the abstract realm of the intelligentsia in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (aka "The Glass Bead Game"). Hesse's books were favorites of the sixties and early-seventies turned-on generation, along with those of J.R.R. Tolkien and Carlos Castaneda. Of all these works, the austere Glass Bead Game was the least approachable, yet keenly sought, as it had about it the scent of surpassing wisdom.
It is complex but briefly, there is a game, played with glass beads. Its subject matter is the entire sweep of human civilization. In order to even begin to play it, one must have already become an absolute master of at least one entire branch of human culture, with its many sciences and arts. The game seems to be played by simply stringing beads on a thread. But of course, it isn't so simple, as each bead represents something quite huge about human experience. Putting it together in a good way was tantamount to synthesizing an entire civilization. Who achieves the highest is named Magister Ludi - The Master of the Game.
Turbo-charging the Energy Body or Body of Light
The bead game is played in the 23rd century by members of that society's intellectual elite. The players seem to be extremely intellectual, to a fault. That is why much of the book seems so austere and difficult. And yet, Joseph Knecht, the one who achieves mastery in the course of the book, gradually transcends himself and, at the end, becomes a glowing being who no longer even speaks, but whose radiant presence is sought out by all the others. How did this happen? That is the mystery of the book, never revealed or even discussed, but left for the reader to ponder.
So, how does one set out to become a potentiated HOMO LUMEN? That is the question. My answer to that one became Magick which became my vocation. Then I wondered if that was crazy, and my answer was, no -- look to Jungian Psychology and transpersonal psychologies, which validate such experiences while not literalizing them. For a firm foundation, build on the personality psychologies of Gestalt and Transactional Analysis, and hypnotherapy. Beyond that, pick a spiritual Path and work it diligently with devotion, practice and compassionate service. Learn the distinction between mind and its contents. Become mindful of primordial awareness. Enjoy the inner journey as a natural extension of embodied life. Embody that spirituality -- physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
Since its founding in 1967, the Krotona School of Theosophy has been helping students deepen their understanding of theosophy, the ancient wisdom, in its many forms, and has encouraged them to live a spiritually oriented life. The school emphasizes "transformative education" which focuses on spiritual renewal. Such studies lead students to orient themselves to eternal truths in a changing world. The school, an integral part of the Krotona Institute, supports the work of The Theosophical Society and its three objects, which are concerned with: 1) The unity of all people; 2) The study of comparative religion, philosophy and science; and 3) The investigation of unexplained laws of nature and our latent powers. School programs reflect the peace and special presence that make Krotona the spiritual center it is.
The theosophical Krotona was named after the school founded in Sicily by Pythagoras. Krotona's mission was to educate the whole, full person. Pythagorus invented the Western musical scale and the principle of harmony. But his notion of harmony wasn't confined to music: it underscored education. Krotona aimed at developing rich harmony of body, spirit and mind. His notion of culture included intellectual culture, creativity culture, and physical culture.
Krotona had esoteric classes for everything, just like you find everywhere now, but then it was rare to non-existent. The whole town was like living in a cult, so even the public library was full of wonderful philosophy books - things very rare in those days, including the natural food movement.
It was around that time the Krishnamurti Foundation was established for the "Un-guru." I was lucky enough to see his Oak Grove talks, and had many ‘wise old woman’ mentors who directed my studies and goals, shortcutting my process of shopping the ‘spiritual supermarket’. They also introduced me to a deeper appreciation of art and science, with an eye toward the esoteric and leading edge. Today many embrace this sort of fusion in their worldview.
Those inter-related mystical paths showed me a holistic worldview and that one person could work to make a difference in the world. The "unguru" Krishnamurti was an exemplar role model of human potential. He was a World Citizen and World Teacher, long before the web made that a possibility for the masses -- a realization of Tielhard de Chardin's noosphere. In the 90s, the net became a new Utopia which many imagined would solve the fundamental problems of humanity through communication and education. Cyberspace was an electronic astral plane with a group soul of its own that opened our collective Third Eye and exposed much formerly forbidden knowledge.
Through Theosophy, and the excellent library and teachers there, I learned about various mystic arts and how they were used to damp the chatter of the mind. I was immersed in an alternative worldview far older than our Great Society before I became ingrained with consumer culture. I learned astrology from a former Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church. I learned more than she thought she was teaching since she loved her daily Port. She would get drunk and rave about being “possessed by Koothomi” and ask me to slap her in the face.So, before the vogue for channelling, I learned “don’t go THERE”! But she was a terrific astrologer, named Marion…with many cats.
Of all of the occult arts, magick seemed to be the most intriguing because it had the most depth. Qabala seemed a hobby one could neither exhaust nor conquer. I'm not through with it yet and it isn't letting loose of me. My study ranged far and deep, and of course Crowley was a big part of that. My first real magick book was Regardie’s TREE OF LIFE. I really got into it. Realizing this was not exactly the "norm," I began investigating Jungian psychology, also, to keep a reality check on myself.
Later, I learned transpersonal and personality psychologies doing hypnotherapy and dreamhealing with Dr. Krippner. By the early 70's, I was an avid Jungian.I began writing to crystallize my thoughts on the interface between mysticism and depth psychology. This eventually became THE HOLISTIC QABALA, whose outline came through in one of those blissfully flowing experiences where it all comes together. I also included basics of the psychological/esoteric crossover material in The Modern Alchemist. A continuing interest of mine is the relationship of psyche and matter…that interface where nothing becomes something, or psyche “matters”.
KROTONA BACKSTORY:
In 1875, as industrial America rose and avarice trounced charity, mystic Helena Blavatsky and fellow occultists in New York established the Theosophical Society. Its rituals were a healing blend of clairvoyance, science and Freemasonry, dedicated to charitable works and brotherly love. Twenty-five years later, at Theosophy's international headquarters in Adyar, a town in southern India, activist Annie Besant formed a sect that promoted meditation as a unifying force for human good. Albert P. Warrington, a lawyer in Virginia, dedicated his life to the Adyar branch and became its American leader in 1912.
California, with its cheap land for private paradises, was home to more utopian colonies than any other state. Warrington picked up 11 acres west of Beachwood Canyon and north of Franklin Avenue, below where the Hollywood sign stands today, to create an Adyar settlement. He called it Krotona after the Greek school founded by Pythagoras, who applied musical theory to harmonize the body, mind and spirit.
Proving that faith can move mountains, or at least truck loads of dirt, the Krotona colony was up by 1919. It was a veritable Vegas CityCenter-style oasis for the faithful, conceived in an unrealized plan by Pasadena architects Arthur S. and Alfred Heineman, with buildings by San Diego's Mead & Requa, Harold Dunn, Elmer C. Andrus and amateur designer and theosophist Marie R. Hotchener. It included the Krotona Court for educational programs; the Moorish-style Grand Temple of the Rosy Cross for ritual performance; the curious Science Building for experiments to verify theosophical mysteries; and bungalows and villas of the true believers, who included New Yorker Grace Shaw Duff.
Duff came to her characteristically Victorian eccentricity with star credentials as the daughter of author and entertainer Henry Wheeler Shaw, known as Josh Billings. After Mark Twain, he was America's most renowned humorist, credited for popularizing "a squeaky wheel gets the grease" and "the one thing money can't buy is the wag of dog's tail," a homily in Disney's "Lady and the Tramp." Duff wrote too, along serious, theosophical lines, and she republished 18th century tracts on early Christian mystics.
Duff's house was the Ternary, designed by Arthur Heineman on land acquired in 1914 adjacent to Warrington's original purchase. Its three wings around a garden court were in a modern Moorish style that blended California Spanish traditions with eastern motifs, just as Theosophy synthesized Asian and western beliefs. Its name, meaning three, reflected Theosophy's way to an enlightened world: Build a community without discrimination; study religion, philosophy and science; explore the inexplicable.
Fundamental to utopian colonies was living with nature. The Ternary was on a landscaped plateau just below Krotona's Italian gardens. From a stadium in this terraced Saranath, an audience watched as the Buddha came to life in theatrical performance that used Duff's house as a mystical set.
The hills were alive with prayer and faith until L.A. sprawl crowded Warrington's idyllic retreat. In 1924, he moved his community to Ojai, where the Krotona School of Theosophy continues today. In Hollywood, original Krotona buildings remain, altered for mundane, contemporary life. The Ternary is an apartment house, and the Italian gardens are subdivided.
Oscar Wilde, no stranger to misery, wrote: "A map of the modern world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing." Living now in our Distopia, with global wars, churches in schism, fractious politics and investment bankers doing God's work, it's hard to imagine a 21st century Utopia. But -- all it will take is faith in a better way. http://www.latimes.com/la-hm-lostla6-2010feb06,0,5265456.story
Frame 6 - CALIFORNIA IDEOLOGY; California Archipelago
Counter-culture was a vast network of enclaves of subculture, spread out like chains of islands, only known to those fated to visit them. According to my astute friend Mark Stahlman, the California Ideology is actually the English Ideology and he can demonstrate how and why that is so. Mark took AOL public, so he has a front-row seat on the technological edge and new media. Electronics are the treat in the human farm, the reward of the punishment/reward system.
The seed-source of California Ideology goes back to the Tavistock stable of Madison Avenue Madmen and Englishmen who were actively engaged in social engineering, up to and including today's Wired culture. Tavistock cooked up the sex, drugs & rock 'n roll culture, a Whole Earth utopian counter-culture, and then moved into "Cyberia," heading toward the ultimate escape of full immersion. The new Brain Lords are the information elite.
Stahlman points out that, English anthropologist Gregory Bateson had a lifelong commitment to re-program humanity which he deeply despised. In particular, he had an explicit drive to destroy the religious basis of Western civilization by replacing God with Nature. The Whole Earth project was born in this thinking. It was literally the beginning of a new religion with Nature at its center and mankind portrayed as the dangerous ape threatening to destroy it all.
Prominent psychiatrist R.D. Laing was appointed senior registrar at the Tavistock Clinic in 1956, three years after he left the British Army Psychiatric Unit. He began experimenting with LSD in 1960. In 1962 he became a family therapist at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He met Gregory Bateson while visiting the U.S. Bateson had been with the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), and then led the MK-Ultra hallucinogen (LSD) project. Bateson's and Margaret Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, along with New Ager Jean Houston, would later help Hilary Clinton write IT TAKES A VILLAGE. IN 1964 Laing met LSD proponent Timothy Leary in New York and also authored "Transcendental Experience in Relation and Psychosis" (THE PSYCHEDELIC REVIEW, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1964).
Three years later Laing participated in the July 15-30, 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress. In 1964, Fred Emery, who would be a senior member of Tavistock, wrote "Theories of Social Turbulence" which he explained more fully in FUTURES WE ARE IN (1975). According to this theory, individuals or societies faced with a series of crises will attempt to reduce the tension by adaptation and eventually psychological retreat as if anesthetized (similar to Pavlov's "protective inhibition response"). This can lead to social disintegration, which Emery called "segmentation." This is the immediate precursor of SHOCK DOCTRINE, as described by Melanie Klein. It makes the population docile.
Welcome to the Hotel California: Ecology of Mind?
In Brave New World the state controlled and raised the children, to be compliant to their slavery. Chemical, psychological and biological control of scientific dictatorship. Where's the anger and self-respect and determination?
Bateson’s British (and American) intelligence sponsored takeover of the nascent field of cybernetics in the 1950’s from its creator, Norbert Wiener, led directly into Bateson’s LSD-driven experiments on schizophrenia and creativity in Palo Alto, which in turn, were the origins of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their house band, the Grateful Dead. Indeed, Whole Earth editor, Stewart Brand’s own career as a publicist for what was first conceived of as drug and then computer-based techo-utopian revolution owes much to Bateson’s cybernetics guidance. Stahlman notes,
Brand was among the first to recognize that personal computers and computer networks might have even greater potential to re-program the humans who “used” them than the psychedelics which fueled his earlier efforts. Indeed, based on Brand’s success at promoting LSD at his Trips Festivals, he was hired by Doug Englebart to stage the first mass demonstration of the mouse and windows system which Englebart had invented at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
Bateson is the son of the English geneticist, William Bateson, whose attacks precipitated the suicide of his principle Continental rival, Otto Kammerer, (chronicled in Arthur Koestler’s Case of the Mid-Wife Toad). And, if the Englishman Bateson doesn’t satisfy your hunger for a proper genealogy for psychedelic San Francisco, one might consider Captain Al Hubbard (no relation to L. Ron), the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. He was born in Kentucky but by the 1950’s had renounced his U.S. citizenship and sailed to Vancouver, British Columbia, to become a commodore in their very English yacht club.
That’s where he set up the world war-room to target the destruction of Western culture (through San Francisco). From this base he joined forces with Humphrey Osmond (English military psychiatrist, lead English MK-ULTRA researcher and the originator of the term “psychedelic”) and Aldous Huxley (English black-sheep godson of the original techno-utopian, H.G. Wells). They deliberately spread LSD among the intelligentsia to achieve world revolution. To be sure, San Francisco’s cultural scene has long been shaped by its close association with English/Anglophile intellectuals and social engineers.
Marilyn Ferguson used a half-truth to tell a lie. The counterculture is a conspiracy—but not in the half-conscious way Ferguson claims—as she well knows. Ferguson wrote her manifesto under the direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."
The counterculture is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and technological progress. That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. This conspiracy with its small beginnings with Huxley in California victimizes 15 million Americans today. With The Aquarian Conspiracy, the British Opium War against the United States came out into the open.
The high priest for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of British intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime briefing officer of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Toynbee's "theory" of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise and decline of grand imperial dynasties. At the very point that these dynasties—the "thousand year Reich" of the Egyptian pharaohs, the Roman Empire, and the British Empire—succeed in imposing their rule over the entire face of the earth, they tend to decline. Toynbee argued that this decline could be abated if the ruling oligarchy (like that of the British Roundtable) would devote itself to the recruitment and training of an ever-expanding priesthood dedicated to the principles of imperial rule.
Trained at Toynbee's Oxford, Aldous Huxley was one of the initiates in the "Children of the Sun," a Dionysian cult comprised of the children of Britain's Roundtable elite.4 Among the other initiates were T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sir Oswald Mosley, and D.H. Lawrence, Huxley's homosexual lover. It was Huxley, furthermore, who would launch the legal battle in the 1950s to have Lawrence's pornographic novel Lady Chatterley's Lover allowed into the United States on the ground that it was a misunderstood "work of art."
Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British foreign intelligence during World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy. Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what Wells called The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution.
The "Open Conspiracy," Wells wrote, "will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the stages, a mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort of surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible government."
California Archipelaego
What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a "one-world brain" which would function as "a police of the mind." Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the priesthood itself. But Wells's popular writings (Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), were written as "mass appeal" organizing documents on behalf of one-world order. Only in the United States are these "science fiction classics" taught in grade school as attacks against fascism.
Under Wells's tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist circle that developed in Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton—who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War. In 1886, Crowley, William Butler Yeats, and several other Bulwer-Lytton proteges formed the Isis-Urania Temple of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. This Isis Cult was organized around the 1877 manuscript Isis Unveiled by Madame Helena Blavatsky, in which the Russian occultist called for the British aristocracy to organize itself into an Isis priesthood.
The subversive Isis Urania Order of the Golden Dawn is today an international drug ring said to be controlled by the Canadian multi-millionaire, Maurice Strong, who is also a top operative for British Intelligence.
In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained throughout the period of World War II. Through a Los Angeles contact, Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast Christopher Isherwood were employed as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios. Hollywood was already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled and controlled through London. Joseph Kennedy was the frontman for a British consortium that created RKO studios, and "Bugsy" Siegel, the West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner Brothers and MGM.
Huxley founded a nest of Isis cults in southern California and in San Francisco, that consisted exclusively of several hundred deranged worshipers of Isis and other cult gods. Isherwood, during the California period, translated and propagated a number of ancient Zen Buddhist documents, inspiring Zen-mystical cults along the way.
In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas Mann and his daughter Elisabeth Mann Borghese) laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture, by recruiting a core of "initiates" into the Isis cults that Huxley's mentors, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, and Crowley, had constituted while stationed in India. The peak years of LSD wave were 1965-1968, cresting in the 1967 Summer of Love.
NO STONE UNTURNED
Around 1954, Huxley, Gerald Heard, Sidney Cohen and Dr. Oscar Janiger disseminated lots of Sandoz rep Harry Althouse's Sandoz LSD-25 "experimental drug" to the creme de la creme throughout academia, pop culture, politics and religion. At the same time, CIA experimented with its "psychotomimetic" properties. They erroneously thought Sandoz sent 50 million doses to the Soviets.
For a quarter million dollars, CIA tried to buy 100 million doses, 22 pounds, to keep it out of the hands of the Soviets. But in actuality Sandoz only had about less than 1 1/2 ounces. They stepped up production. MKULTRA -- a program to modify a person's behavior by covert means -- was born. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb became a thinly veiled Dr. Strangelove. He set up a Grennwich Village "safehouse" to dupe the unwitting with uninformed administration. Soon Sandoz was producing the substance in "tonnage quantitites." Military Intelligence soon got their hands on it. Edgewood Arsenal stockpiled enormous quantities. "Operation Third Chance" was Army's LSD interrogation program.
Simultaneously, Al Hubbard bought 4000 vials of acid from Sandoz and gave some to Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. Hubbard was the original advocate of "massive doses." Dr. Harold Abrahamson gave the drug to New York intellectuals. Stan Grof observed 3500 trips and developed his taxonomies of inner states and Holotropic Breathwork. In Palo Alto, LSD was studied at Stanford and the Veterans Administration Hospital, model for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where Ken Kesey hijacked his doses for the Acid Tests.
During the Kennedy administration Michael Hollingshead gave some of the magic gram he got from Dr. John Beresford to Tim Leary, Donovan, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and more. By 1962, Jean Houston opened an LSD clinic in Manhattan. Ronald Start bought 35 million doses in Europe, trafficked by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
Pre-dating Tim Leary, Oscar "Oz" Janiger earned his MA in cell physiology at Columbia University and his Osteopathic / MD degree at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. He was one of the first researchers to study LSD's potential for enhancing intellect and creativity. Janiger was particularly interested in the ability of artists to access a state of altered consciousness using this "creativity pill", which he saw as a "marvelous instrument to learn more about the mind."
Working as a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, he gave LSD to an estimated 1,000 volunteers (1954-1962) before it was made illegal. He was interested in LSD for its enhancement of creativity, its creation of a new state of consciousness, and for its potential as a tool in therapy. During the time he worked with it, he incorporated LSD into his therapy and also guided sessions for several notable volunteers including Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson. Janiger's subjects paid $20 for a dose of LSD from Sandoz Pharmaceutical.
Janiger concentrated his studies on creativity and artistic functioning. As with any panacea, the cure is also a poison. In LA, the medicine landed on some more profound people than it may have elsewhere. Huxley and Heard morphed the medical model into a new type of religion and ego-centric culture -- the 'naturalistic' rather than clinical approach. The cult of celebrity led the way to be emulated.
Artists began to pour in. Even though he was a medical missionary, Janiger made the obvious point about trip reports: "Nothing is more boring than an individual's personal account of an LSD experiment." Others claimed a single trip was worth four years in art school. We are only fascinated by our own dreamscapes. Our world was simultaneously sublimated and co-opted.
Star Trek Philosophy
There is a crucial component of the technological and biologically deterministic utopian worldview at the core of Wired’s “content” which must be carefully situated. Wired’s techno-utopianism is merely the modern expression of H.G. Wells’ attempts in the first half of this century to construct a technocratic global empire ruled by a new elite — much like the audience that Wired seeks to rally behind its now digital but still self-consciously revolutionary banner.
In its various forms, following Thomas More’s coining of the term Utopia with the publishing of his book with that title in 1516, utopian writing and, indeed, utopian social experiments tended to be pastoral and, if anything, anti-technology. It was H.G. Wells who changed all that with his 1905 publication of his novel, A Modern Utopia. And, it was Wells who initiated the entire inquiry into a technology-defined future (and, indeed, launched the field now known as futurism) in his seminal 1902 essay, "Anticipations".
Nominal Socialism is Globalism
While Wells is popularly known as the first true science fiction writer, he lived for 50 years after he completed his cycle of four major sci-fi novels in 1897. During this half century, he was very busy designing the future of the British Empire — the Third Rome, or as as Toffler would later put it, the Third Wave). It was a vision of a world knit together by communications and transportation technologies and controlled by a new class of technocrats.
What Wells’ described in volume after volume throughout the rest of his life (both in fictional and essay format) is indistinguishable from the digital revolution Wired hopes to lead. It’s a post-industrial world that has abandoned the nation-state in favor of Wells’ World State, that has scrapped the premises of it’s industrial past, embraced the scarcity of an anti-growth economics and based itself on the emergence of a newly indoctrinated post-civilization humanity.
In 1970, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) of the NEA published TO NURTURE HUMANENESS: COMMITMENT FOR THE '70s, in which Sidney Jourard (Fellow at the Tavistock Clinic and former president of the Association for Humanist Psychology), wrote: "We are in a time of revolt.... The new society will be a fascist state or it will be pluralistic and humanistic." The primary characteristic of the fascist state is increasing control over people's lives by government in league with corporations. Sound like today?
Wells had devoted himself to organizing a world revolution based on technology, synthetic religion and mass mind-control — the same revolution discussed monthly in the pages of Wired. In Wells’ A Modern Utopia, the rulers are called the “New Samurai” and they are a caste of scientist/priests who social-engineer the global society Wells called the “World State.” John Perry Barlow’s Wired-published, Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace would have made Wells very happy, I have no doubt. Yes, that’s Wells’ “World State” lurking in the margins of Barlow’s manifesto despite his waffling on the specifics of future forms of “governance” — except to say that the future of politics will be conveniently (from the social engineer’s standpoint) “post-reason.”
But, aren’t I heading straight into the jaws of an overwhelming and categorical contradiction? Wells was certainly no free-marketeer. He was a professed socialist and Wired appears on its face to be thoroughly free-market capitalist. How could I claim any affinity between the British radical liberals and Wells (and with both and Wired)?
Wells was indeed a very strange socialist. Likewise, when the substance of its arguments are carefully considered, Wired strikes the pose of a very odd sort of capitalist. I’m convinced that they both choose to adopt protective coloring to enhance their stature in their respective times and places but that, just beneath the surface, they are both [Brand and Wells] simply utopian/corporativists — the same ideological impulse which gave rise to Fascism — and not what they may appear to be to the more casual and, too often, more credulous observer.
Both Wired and Wells are, in fact, utopians and elitists with overarching ambitions of leading a world revolution. This revolution is intended to produce radical economic and political transformation which would put their ilk in charge of running a new worldwide empire. From a strategic standpoint — fundamental goals and premises — Wells, Wired (and their common antecedent the anti-human radical Liberals) were/are all fighting for the same new imperial outcome, engineered by the Tavistock agenda.
While there are certainly many tactical twists and turns in this plot over the centuries, this entire grabbag is precisely what I’ve been referring to as the English ideology — the ideology behind a global empire which combines an anything-goes small-scale private life (libertarianism) with rigidly defined large-scale constraints (technocracy). If you would like another description of the same utopian ying-yang, refer to Jaron Lanier’s November 1995 editorial in the Spin magazine issue on the future and his characterization of the Stewards (technocrats) and the Extropians (libertarians) as the post-political poles of discourse.
Wells’ dalliance with the Fabian Society (he tried to take it over by promoting free-love to the wives of its board members) may be one of the sources of confusion leading to Wells’ apparent “socialist” credentials. But, as even a cursory reading of Wells’ quickly demonstrates, their was absolutely no room for working class revolt (or certainly working class leadership) in Wells’ worldview. He was thoroughly convinced that the downtrodden could never lead or even comprehend the revolution he saw coming.
Wells’ life was dedicated to organizing a completely new class of technical and social scientific experts — technocrats — who would assume control of a world driven to collapse and ruin by workers and capitalists alike. Wells wanted to completely re-program humanity — through the creation of a synthetic religion — and, like all utopians, had no affection for the commoner of his time at all. Wells considered socialism, in its various Social Democratic to Marxist manifestations, to be a string of completely anachronistic failures and a throwback to the era of human folly and self-destruction which Wells sought to leap past — much like Toffler dismissing nation-states and representative democracy as “Second Wave.”
In fact, Wells was very clear what sort of corporativist world he wanted when identified the earliest of the multinational corporations as the fledgling model of his ideal economic organization. In his 1920’s novel, The World of William Chissolm, and the companion essay, Imperialism and The Open Conspiracy, Wells cites early multi-nationals as the only kind of globe-spanning (and, therefore, anti-nation-state) economic structures which could embody his revolutionary principles. He chides both government and business leaders who think that any remnant of the still British-nation-centered Empire could survive and calls on the heads of multinationals to join in forming the vanguard of his revolutionary “Open Conspiracy.”
He also published extensively about the inevitable scrapping of democracy and any form of popular rule in his World State. His “New Samurai” were volunteers who pledged their lives to the pure experience of ruling as a new caste of priest/scholars. No elections, no parliament, no hereditary titles and no buying your way in, Wells was clear that his new ruling class would be a religious elite with global reach.
He even predicted that a new field of inquiry, which he termed Social Psychology, would arise and become the “soul of the race” by developing social control techniques which would systematically re-train the masses which he openly despised. And, following WW II, the core of British and American psychological warfare leadership created just such a field to pursue worldwide social engineering. H.G. Wells was a very strange “socialist”, indeed.
Oh, he did call for the abolition of all socially significant private property. But, then so has Wired with their repeated claims that in the Information Age intellectual property will disappear in cyberspace — a posture that has not gone unnoticed in the more orthodox neo-liberal circles as demonstrated by Peter Huber’s scathing critique of Wired in his piece for Slate, Tangled Wires.
Such a call for abolishing property was also featured by the native U.S. fascist movement, Technocracy — which was launched out of the Columbia University Engineering Department with 1932 nationwide radio broadcast. In fact, while Wells rejected the offered allegiance to his “Open Conspiracy” by native British fascist, Oswald Moseley, he did it by pointing out that “what we need is some more liberal fascists.” Being educated as he was, Wells surely understood (and I believe embraced) the philosophical heritage of radical “liberalism.”
As a matter of fact, independent economic sovereignty (the essence of politically effective private property) is what Wells (and all his empire building successors have) objected to. It is the independence of large scale economic forces — particularly those associated with strong nation-states — that both Wells and the radical Liberals both objected to so forcefully. It is only such forces, operating with determination and resolve, that function as a bulwark against empires like Wells’ World State.
Despite their surface appearance of conflict, Wired-style free-marketeering and Wells’ “Open Conspiracy” both lead to the same political-economic outcome — oligarchist/corporativist control of a global economy. This is why the intellectual progenitor of modern libertarianism, Hayek, spent his career at the nominally Fabian socialist London School of Economics alongside Keynes, they were simply two birds of the same feather. Another ying-yang twinned pairing pointing to a common endgame.
While it admittedly flies in the face of conventional categorization, right-wing and left-wing utopian/oligarchists are still fundamentally and most significantly utopian/oligarchists — even if their protective plumage might temporarily succeed in confusing some birdwatchers. They differ merely on the tactics, while presenting a home for confused fellow-travellers of all persuasions, while they thump for the same 1000 year empire and imagine themselves sitting behind the steering wheel. This should be no more confusing than watching Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi, move from active Communist Party membership and factory floor colonization to becoming chief advisors to Newt Gingrich. Tactics may change; the strategy remains unaltered.
What sort of future do the futurists see for us? Despite the sugar-coated promises of wealth and power being held out to those who make the cut and get inducted into the supreme religious cult which gets to play imperial Wizard of Oz, the reality of a Wells/Wired future won’t be nearly so cinematic for most earthlings. As every honest futurist has admitted, the future will be painful and pointless for most who survive. The Information Age will be a Dark Age. It will bring pre-mature death to half or more of the earth’s population and it will represent the deliberate scrapping and then forgetting of humanity’s greatest achievements.
Perhaps, the harsh truth of the Information Age was best described in Michael Vlahos’ January 1995 speech, “ByteCity -or- Life After the Big Change.” Vlahos is a Senior Fellow at Newt Gingrich’s thinktank, the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), and a past geo-political analyst who has led PFF’s exploration of implementing the Toffler/Wells plans. Vlahos presents a terrifying future scenario roughly 20 years in the future in which society has stratified into elites and gangs. In fact, life is so threatening in ByteCity that we spent most of our time in our rooms staring at wall sized vidscreens — if we’re lucky enough to have a room, that is.
Vlahos’ world is run by stateless modern robber-barons, which he terms the “Brain Lords” and which he characterizes as “rampaging not through the landscape but making billions in the ether.” These new aristocrats will come from the merger of telecommunications and entertainment multinational giants and much like in Wells’ formulation, the “Brain Lords” do not inherit their class status and they will burn out from looting at an early age. After 40 they will retire to run the world. They will comprise 5% of the population, he says. They are Wells’ “New Samurai.”
Below them he stratifies in the “Upper Servers” and the “Agents” who comprise another 20% who will spend their lives destroying the value of professional education and association in a vicious “information” driven chase for individual recognition. Below that, roughly 50% of the population lives as service workers slaving 12-15 hours a day in front their living-room vidscreens “servicing” their global clients in a world that respects no time zones.
And the bottom 25%, who, if they are not pacified will provide ample motivation for people to stay indoors to avoid being attacked by roving gangs, are what Vlahos calls “The Lost.” Roughly twice as large a population share as those who were discarded by the Industrial Revolution in Britain according to Vlahos, “The Lost” are those that will never become a functioning part of “ByteCity.” Sustained by modern “Victorians” who know the threat posed by the poor, “The Lost” are merely the most wretched of the wretches. Life all the way up the line from “lost” to “lord” will entail such radical disruption of personal safety and well-being that, in effect, Vlahos has turned dystopian cyberpunk literature into a policy statement. Naturally, expecting to rise to the top, Vlahos appears to feverishly await the “Big Change.”
No less chilling is the scenarios planning exercise that Wired’s wizards-behind-the-curtain perform on their multi-national clients. From General Motors to AT&T, the Global Business Network (GBN) charges hefty sums to show the yellow-brick-road towards “ByteCity” to strategic planners and top corporate brass. In one recent and rare public discussion of the results, GM’s top planning team defined the three “alternative futures” which emerged after years of GBN counciling. The first is just like our world and, so by definition, is not very interesting.
The second is an eco-fascist regime in which car designs are completely “Green” and the companies can only follow orders. The third is the fun one, however. This is the world in which armed gangs roam the streets and surface travel is a series of car chases. This scenario has already been anticipated with a Cadillac that includes armored protection and a “panic” button installed in the middle of the dashboard. The car has a satellite tracking system built in and it can call the local authorities (presumably your multi-national’s private swat-team) and get help when you get trapped by the natives.
Vlahos/PFF/Gingrich and Wired/GBN/Brand and Wells/Toffler/”Open Conspiracy”. What ideology is being expressed by all these 20th century New Dark Age “revolutionaries”? Is this ideology “Californian”? Or, does it have another historical context and another tribal association? I merely suggest that accuracy, intellectual faithfulness and international solidarity require us to pin the tail on the real (Benthamite) donkey. This is the English ideology and, as usual, it’s hell-bent on ruling the world — over our dead bodies. (Mark Stahlman)
Relevant to this, in October 1997 the Tavistock Institute (and Manchester University) completed a final report (under Contract ERB-SOE2-CT-96-2011) for the European Commission, and described in a report summary was that there will be "partnerships between government, industry, and representatives of worker organizations." The report summary also described "the relevancy of Goals 2000, SCANS (U.S. Department of Labor SECRETARY'S COMMISSION ON ACHIEVING NECESSARY SKILLS) typology with its profound implications for the curriculum and training changes that this will require," valid skills standards and portable credentials "benchmarked to international standards such as those promulgated by the International Standards Organization (ISO)." The report summary went on to say that "there is increasing attention being focused on developing global skill standards and accreditation agreements."
In the 1990s, the Tavistock Institute not only began a new journal titled EVALUATION in 1995, but the Institute and the European Commission also worked on a feasibility study to research the effect of using "Smart Cards" in competence accreditation. The study was carried out in the U.S. and parts of Europe. The project involved assessing and validating students' skills, with information placed on personal skills Smart Cards which "become real passports to employment." The implication, of course, is that without this "real passport," one will not be employed.
[2] there is nothing that occurs in total space time, or that can be consciously experienced, which is NOT based on material substantiality of individual particle/waves of one degree of mass/energy density or another. Such particle/waves are elements of fractal involved, harmonically resonant, electro-gravitation al energy fields at frequencies extending between zero and infinite ... Whether such fields are labeled physical or metaphysical, spiritual, mental, astral, material, etc.
The basic misunderstanding is the assumption that "metaphysical" *** means supernatural or magical. Another, is that the word "physical" cannot be used in several different ways, such as when referring to the "physical body" or any ponderable material forms, and also when referring to the overall or total space-time electro-gravitation al field – which includes both the higher (frequency phase) order "metaphysical" EM energy fields (spiritual, mental, astral light particle/waves) and the lower order "physical" EM energy fields (photonic light, radio, X-ray, Gamma ray particle/waves, etc.). The highest order metaphysical fields surrounding all physical fields are linked to the invisible sub-sub-quantum "virtual" particles in the Planck volume closest to their ZPE radiative source (which could account for some of the "dark matter/energy" presumed by the cosmologists, as well as the holographic nature of total reality).
Nothing supernatural or mystical/magical is referred to by any of this... Since the physics and chemistry of all such fields are analogous and corresponding, as they are based on and governed by the same fundamental laws of cycles inherent in the angular spin momentum of their common ZPE source. Obviously, all chemistry must be fundamentally based in the interaction between electromagnetic fields, and all chemical bonds are electrical in nature.
The seed-source of California Ideology goes back to the Tavistock stable of Madison Avenue Madmen and Englishmen who were actively engaged in social engineering, up to and including today's Wired culture. Tavistock cooked up the sex, drugs & rock 'n roll culture, a Whole Earth utopian counter-culture, and then moved into "Cyberia," heading toward the ultimate escape of full immersion. The new Brain Lords are the information elite.
Stahlman points out that, English anthropologist Gregory Bateson had a lifelong commitment to re-program humanity which he deeply despised. In particular, he had an explicit drive to destroy the religious basis of Western civilization by replacing God with Nature. The Whole Earth project was born in this thinking. It was literally the beginning of a new religion with Nature at its center and mankind portrayed as the dangerous ape threatening to destroy it all.
Prominent psychiatrist R.D. Laing was appointed senior registrar at the Tavistock Clinic in 1956, three years after he left the British Army Psychiatric Unit. He began experimenting with LSD in 1960. In 1962 he became a family therapist at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He met Gregory Bateson while visiting the U.S. Bateson had been with the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), and then led the MK-Ultra hallucinogen (LSD) project. Bateson's and Margaret Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, along with New Ager Jean Houston, would later help Hilary Clinton write IT TAKES A VILLAGE. IN 1964 Laing met LSD proponent Timothy Leary in New York and also authored "Transcendental Experience in Relation and Psychosis" (THE PSYCHEDELIC REVIEW, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1964).
Three years later Laing participated in the July 15-30, 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress. In 1964, Fred Emery, who would be a senior member of Tavistock, wrote "Theories of Social Turbulence" which he explained more fully in FUTURES WE ARE IN (1975). According to this theory, individuals or societies faced with a series of crises will attempt to reduce the tension by adaptation and eventually psychological retreat as if anesthetized (similar to Pavlov's "protective inhibition response"). This can lead to social disintegration, which Emery called "segmentation." This is the immediate precursor of SHOCK DOCTRINE, as described by Melanie Klein. It makes the population docile.
Welcome to the Hotel California: Ecology of Mind?
In Brave New World the state controlled and raised the children, to be compliant to their slavery. Chemical, psychological and biological control of scientific dictatorship. Where's the anger and self-respect and determination?
Bateson’s British (and American) intelligence sponsored takeover of the nascent field of cybernetics in the 1950’s from its creator, Norbert Wiener, led directly into Bateson’s LSD-driven experiments on schizophrenia and creativity in Palo Alto, which in turn, were the origins of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their house band, the Grateful Dead. Indeed, Whole Earth editor, Stewart Brand’s own career as a publicist for what was first conceived of as drug and then computer-based techo-utopian revolution owes much to Bateson’s cybernetics guidance. Stahlman notes,
Brand was among the first to recognize that personal computers and computer networks might have even greater potential to re-program the humans who “used” them than the psychedelics which fueled his earlier efforts. Indeed, based on Brand’s success at promoting LSD at his Trips Festivals, he was hired by Doug Englebart to stage the first mass demonstration of the mouse and windows system which Englebart had invented at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
Bateson is the son of the English geneticist, William Bateson, whose attacks precipitated the suicide of his principle Continental rival, Otto Kammerer, (chronicled in Arthur Koestler’s Case of the Mid-Wife Toad). And, if the Englishman Bateson doesn’t satisfy your hunger for a proper genealogy for psychedelic San Francisco, one might consider Captain Al Hubbard (no relation to L. Ron), the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. He was born in Kentucky but by the 1950’s had renounced his U.S. citizenship and sailed to Vancouver, British Columbia, to become a commodore in their very English yacht club.
That’s where he set up the world war-room to target the destruction of Western culture (through San Francisco). From this base he joined forces with Humphrey Osmond (English military psychiatrist, lead English MK-ULTRA researcher and the originator of the term “psychedelic”) and Aldous Huxley (English black-sheep godson of the original techno-utopian, H.G. Wells). They deliberately spread LSD among the intelligentsia to achieve world revolution. To be sure, San Francisco’s cultural scene has long been shaped by its close association with English/Anglophile intellectuals and social engineers.
Marilyn Ferguson used a half-truth to tell a lie. The counterculture is a conspiracy—but not in the half-conscious way Ferguson claims—as she well knows. Ferguson wrote her manifesto under the direction of Willis Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the United States into Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."
The counterculture is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and technological progress. That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. This conspiracy with its small beginnings with Huxley in California victimizes 15 million Americans today. With The Aquarian Conspiracy, the British Opium War against the United States came out into the open.
The high priest for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of British intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime briefing officer of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Toynbee's "theory" of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise and decline of grand imperial dynasties. At the very point that these dynasties—the "thousand year Reich" of the Egyptian pharaohs, the Roman Empire, and the British Empire—succeed in imposing their rule over the entire face of the earth, they tend to decline. Toynbee argued that this decline could be abated if the ruling oligarchy (like that of the British Roundtable) would devote itself to the recruitment and training of an ever-expanding priesthood dedicated to the principles of imperial rule.
Trained at Toynbee's Oxford, Aldous Huxley was one of the initiates in the "Children of the Sun," a Dionysian cult comprised of the children of Britain's Roundtable elite.4 Among the other initiates were T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sir Oswald Mosley, and D.H. Lawrence, Huxley's homosexual lover. It was Huxley, furthermore, who would launch the legal battle in the 1950s to have Lawrence's pornographic novel Lady Chatterley's Lover allowed into the United States on the ground that it was a misunderstood "work of art."
Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British foreign intelligence during World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy. Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what Wells called The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution.
The "Open Conspiracy," Wells wrote, "will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the stages, a mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort of surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible government."
California Archipelaego
What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a "one-world brain" which would function as "a police of the mind." Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the priesthood itself. But Wells's popular writings (Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm), were written as "mass appeal" organizing documents on behalf of one-world order. Only in the United States are these "science fiction classics" taught in grade school as attacks against fascism.
Under Wells's tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist circle that developed in Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton—who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War. In 1886, Crowley, William Butler Yeats, and several other Bulwer-Lytton proteges formed the Isis-Urania Temple of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. This Isis Cult was organized around the 1877 manuscript Isis Unveiled by Madame Helena Blavatsky, in which the Russian occultist called for the British aristocracy to organize itself into an Isis priesthood.
The subversive Isis Urania Order of the Golden Dawn is today an international drug ring said to be controlled by the Canadian multi-millionaire, Maurice Strong, who is also a top operative for British Intelligence.
In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained throughout the period of World War II. Through a Los Angeles contact, Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast Christopher Isherwood were employed as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios. Hollywood was already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled and controlled through London. Joseph Kennedy was the frontman for a British consortium that created RKO studios, and "Bugsy" Siegel, the West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner Brothers and MGM.
Huxley founded a nest of Isis cults in southern California and in San Francisco, that consisted exclusively of several hundred deranged worshipers of Isis and other cult gods. Isherwood, during the California period, translated and propagated a number of ancient Zen Buddhist documents, inspiring Zen-mystical cults along the way.
In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas Mann and his daughter Elisabeth Mann Borghese) laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture, by recruiting a core of "initiates" into the Isis cults that Huxley's mentors, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, and Crowley, had constituted while stationed in India. The peak years of LSD wave were 1965-1968, cresting in the 1967 Summer of Love.
NO STONE UNTURNED
Around 1954, Huxley, Gerald Heard, Sidney Cohen and Dr. Oscar Janiger disseminated lots of Sandoz rep Harry Althouse's Sandoz LSD-25 "experimental drug" to the creme de la creme throughout academia, pop culture, politics and religion. At the same time, CIA experimented with its "psychotomimetic" properties. They erroneously thought Sandoz sent 50 million doses to the Soviets.
For a quarter million dollars, CIA tried to buy 100 million doses, 22 pounds, to keep it out of the hands of the Soviets. But in actuality Sandoz only had about less than 1 1/2 ounces. They stepped up production. MKULTRA -- a program to modify a person's behavior by covert means -- was born. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb became a thinly veiled Dr. Strangelove. He set up a Grennwich Village "safehouse" to dupe the unwitting with uninformed administration. Soon Sandoz was producing the substance in "tonnage quantitites." Military Intelligence soon got their hands on it. Edgewood Arsenal stockpiled enormous quantities. "Operation Third Chance" was Army's LSD interrogation program.
Simultaneously, Al Hubbard bought 4000 vials of acid from Sandoz and gave some to Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. Hubbard was the original advocate of "massive doses." Dr. Harold Abrahamson gave the drug to New York intellectuals. Stan Grof observed 3500 trips and developed his taxonomies of inner states and Holotropic Breathwork. In Palo Alto, LSD was studied at Stanford and the Veterans Administration Hospital, model for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where Ken Kesey hijacked his doses for the Acid Tests.
During the Kennedy administration Michael Hollingshead gave some of the magic gram he got from Dr. John Beresford to Tim Leary, Donovan, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and more. By 1962, Jean Houston opened an LSD clinic in Manhattan. Ronald Start bought 35 million doses in Europe, trafficked by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
Pre-dating Tim Leary, Oscar "Oz" Janiger earned his MA in cell physiology at Columbia University and his Osteopathic / MD degree at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. He was one of the first researchers to study LSD's potential for enhancing intellect and creativity. Janiger was particularly interested in the ability of artists to access a state of altered consciousness using this "creativity pill", which he saw as a "marvelous instrument to learn more about the mind."
Working as a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, he gave LSD to an estimated 1,000 volunteers (1954-1962) before it was made illegal. He was interested in LSD for its enhancement of creativity, its creation of a new state of consciousness, and for its potential as a tool in therapy. During the time he worked with it, he incorporated LSD into his therapy and also guided sessions for several notable volunteers including Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson. Janiger's subjects paid $20 for a dose of LSD from Sandoz Pharmaceutical.
Janiger concentrated his studies on creativity and artistic functioning. As with any panacea, the cure is also a poison. In LA, the medicine landed on some more profound people than it may have elsewhere. Huxley and Heard morphed the medical model into a new type of religion and ego-centric culture -- the 'naturalistic' rather than clinical approach. The cult of celebrity led the way to be emulated.
Artists began to pour in. Even though he was a medical missionary, Janiger made the obvious point about trip reports: "Nothing is more boring than an individual's personal account of an LSD experiment." Others claimed a single trip was worth four years in art school. We are only fascinated by our own dreamscapes. Our world was simultaneously sublimated and co-opted.
Star Trek Philosophy
There is a crucial component of the technological and biologically deterministic utopian worldview at the core of Wired’s “content” which must be carefully situated. Wired’s techno-utopianism is merely the modern expression of H.G. Wells’ attempts in the first half of this century to construct a technocratic global empire ruled by a new elite — much like the audience that Wired seeks to rally behind its now digital but still self-consciously revolutionary banner.
In its various forms, following Thomas More’s coining of the term Utopia with the publishing of his book with that title in 1516, utopian writing and, indeed, utopian social experiments tended to be pastoral and, if anything, anti-technology. It was H.G. Wells who changed all that with his 1905 publication of his novel, A Modern Utopia. And, it was Wells who initiated the entire inquiry into a technology-defined future (and, indeed, launched the field now known as futurism) in his seminal 1902 essay, "Anticipations".
Nominal Socialism is Globalism
While Wells is popularly known as the first true science fiction writer, he lived for 50 years after he completed his cycle of four major sci-fi novels in 1897. During this half century, he was very busy designing the future of the British Empire — the Third Rome, or as as Toffler would later put it, the Third Wave). It was a vision of a world knit together by communications and transportation technologies and controlled by a new class of technocrats.
What Wells’ described in volume after volume throughout the rest of his life (both in fictional and essay format) is indistinguishable from the digital revolution Wired hopes to lead. It’s a post-industrial world that has abandoned the nation-state in favor of Wells’ World State, that has scrapped the premises of it’s industrial past, embraced the scarcity of an anti-growth economics and based itself on the emergence of a newly indoctrinated post-civilization humanity.
In 1970, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) of the NEA published TO NURTURE HUMANENESS: COMMITMENT FOR THE '70s, in which Sidney Jourard (Fellow at the Tavistock Clinic and former president of the Association for Humanist Psychology), wrote: "We are in a time of revolt.... The new society will be a fascist state or it will be pluralistic and humanistic." The primary characteristic of the fascist state is increasing control over people's lives by government in league with corporations. Sound like today?
Wells had devoted himself to organizing a world revolution based on technology, synthetic religion and mass mind-control — the same revolution discussed monthly in the pages of Wired. In Wells’ A Modern Utopia, the rulers are called the “New Samurai” and they are a caste of scientist/priests who social-engineer the global society Wells called the “World State.” John Perry Barlow’s Wired-published, Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace would have made Wells very happy, I have no doubt. Yes, that’s Wells’ “World State” lurking in the margins of Barlow’s manifesto despite his waffling on the specifics of future forms of “governance” — except to say that the future of politics will be conveniently (from the social engineer’s standpoint) “post-reason.”
But, aren’t I heading straight into the jaws of an overwhelming and categorical contradiction? Wells was certainly no free-marketeer. He was a professed socialist and Wired appears on its face to be thoroughly free-market capitalist. How could I claim any affinity between the British radical liberals and Wells (and with both and Wired)?
Wells was indeed a very strange socialist. Likewise, when the substance of its arguments are carefully considered, Wired strikes the pose of a very odd sort of capitalist. I’m convinced that they both choose to adopt protective coloring to enhance their stature in their respective times and places but that, just beneath the surface, they are both [Brand and Wells] simply utopian/corporativists — the same ideological impulse which gave rise to Fascism — and not what they may appear to be to the more casual and, too often, more credulous observer.
Both Wired and Wells are, in fact, utopians and elitists with overarching ambitions of leading a world revolution. This revolution is intended to produce radical economic and political transformation which would put their ilk in charge of running a new worldwide empire. From a strategic standpoint — fundamental goals and premises — Wells, Wired (and their common antecedent the anti-human radical Liberals) were/are all fighting for the same new imperial outcome, engineered by the Tavistock agenda.
While there are certainly many tactical twists and turns in this plot over the centuries, this entire grabbag is precisely what I’ve been referring to as the English ideology — the ideology behind a global empire which combines an anything-goes small-scale private life (libertarianism) with rigidly defined large-scale constraints (technocracy). If you would like another description of the same utopian ying-yang, refer to Jaron Lanier’s November 1995 editorial in the Spin magazine issue on the future and his characterization of the Stewards (technocrats) and the Extropians (libertarians) as the post-political poles of discourse.
Wells’ dalliance with the Fabian Society (he tried to take it over by promoting free-love to the wives of its board members) may be one of the sources of confusion leading to Wells’ apparent “socialist” credentials. But, as even a cursory reading of Wells’ quickly demonstrates, their was absolutely no room for working class revolt (or certainly working class leadership) in Wells’ worldview. He was thoroughly convinced that the downtrodden could never lead or even comprehend the revolution he saw coming.
Wells’ life was dedicated to organizing a completely new class of technical and social scientific experts — technocrats — who would assume control of a world driven to collapse and ruin by workers and capitalists alike. Wells wanted to completely re-program humanity — through the creation of a synthetic religion — and, like all utopians, had no affection for the commoner of his time at all. Wells considered socialism, in its various Social Democratic to Marxist manifestations, to be a string of completely anachronistic failures and a throwback to the era of human folly and self-destruction which Wells sought to leap past — much like Toffler dismissing nation-states and representative democracy as “Second Wave.”
In fact, Wells was very clear what sort of corporativist world he wanted when identified the earliest of the multinational corporations as the fledgling model of his ideal economic organization. In his 1920’s novel, The World of William Chissolm, and the companion essay, Imperialism and The Open Conspiracy, Wells cites early multi-nationals as the only kind of globe-spanning (and, therefore, anti-nation-state) economic structures which could embody his revolutionary principles. He chides both government and business leaders who think that any remnant of the still British-nation-centered Empire could survive and calls on the heads of multinationals to join in forming the vanguard of his revolutionary “Open Conspiracy.”
He also published extensively about the inevitable scrapping of democracy and any form of popular rule in his World State. His “New Samurai” were volunteers who pledged their lives to the pure experience of ruling as a new caste of priest/scholars. No elections, no parliament, no hereditary titles and no buying your way in, Wells was clear that his new ruling class would be a religious elite with global reach.
He even predicted that a new field of inquiry, which he termed Social Psychology, would arise and become the “soul of the race” by developing social control techniques which would systematically re-train the masses which he openly despised. And, following WW II, the core of British and American psychological warfare leadership created just such a field to pursue worldwide social engineering. H.G. Wells was a very strange “socialist”, indeed.
Oh, he did call for the abolition of all socially significant private property. But, then so has Wired with their repeated claims that in the Information Age intellectual property will disappear in cyberspace — a posture that has not gone unnoticed in the more orthodox neo-liberal circles as demonstrated by Peter Huber’s scathing critique of Wired in his piece for Slate, Tangled Wires.
Such a call for abolishing property was also featured by the native U.S. fascist movement, Technocracy — which was launched out of the Columbia University Engineering Department with 1932 nationwide radio broadcast. In fact, while Wells rejected the offered allegiance to his “Open Conspiracy” by native British fascist, Oswald Moseley, he did it by pointing out that “what we need is some more liberal fascists.” Being educated as he was, Wells surely understood (and I believe embraced) the philosophical heritage of radical “liberalism.”
As a matter of fact, independent economic sovereignty (the essence of politically effective private property) is what Wells (and all his empire building successors have) objected to. It is the independence of large scale economic forces — particularly those associated with strong nation-states — that both Wells and the radical Liberals both objected to so forcefully. It is only such forces, operating with determination and resolve, that function as a bulwark against empires like Wells’ World State.
Despite their surface appearance of conflict, Wired-style free-marketeering and Wells’ “Open Conspiracy” both lead to the same political-economic outcome — oligarchist/corporativist control of a global economy. This is why the intellectual progenitor of modern libertarianism, Hayek, spent his career at the nominally Fabian socialist London School of Economics alongside Keynes, they were simply two birds of the same feather. Another ying-yang twinned pairing pointing to a common endgame.
While it admittedly flies in the face of conventional categorization, right-wing and left-wing utopian/oligarchists are still fundamentally and most significantly utopian/oligarchists — even if their protective plumage might temporarily succeed in confusing some birdwatchers. They differ merely on the tactics, while presenting a home for confused fellow-travellers of all persuasions, while they thump for the same 1000 year empire and imagine themselves sitting behind the steering wheel. This should be no more confusing than watching Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi, move from active Communist Party membership and factory floor colonization to becoming chief advisors to Newt Gingrich. Tactics may change; the strategy remains unaltered.
What sort of future do the futurists see for us? Despite the sugar-coated promises of wealth and power being held out to those who make the cut and get inducted into the supreme religious cult which gets to play imperial Wizard of Oz, the reality of a Wells/Wired future won’t be nearly so cinematic for most earthlings. As every honest futurist has admitted, the future will be painful and pointless for most who survive. The Information Age will be a Dark Age. It will bring pre-mature death to half or more of the earth’s population and it will represent the deliberate scrapping and then forgetting of humanity’s greatest achievements.
Perhaps, the harsh truth of the Information Age was best described in Michael Vlahos’ January 1995 speech, “ByteCity -or- Life After the Big Change.” Vlahos is a Senior Fellow at Newt Gingrich’s thinktank, the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), and a past geo-political analyst who has led PFF’s exploration of implementing the Toffler/Wells plans. Vlahos presents a terrifying future scenario roughly 20 years in the future in which society has stratified into elites and gangs. In fact, life is so threatening in ByteCity that we spent most of our time in our rooms staring at wall sized vidscreens — if we’re lucky enough to have a room, that is.
Vlahos’ world is run by stateless modern robber-barons, which he terms the “Brain Lords” and which he characterizes as “rampaging not through the landscape but making billions in the ether.” These new aristocrats will come from the merger of telecommunications and entertainment multinational giants and much like in Wells’ formulation, the “Brain Lords” do not inherit their class status and they will burn out from looting at an early age. After 40 they will retire to run the world. They will comprise 5% of the population, he says. They are Wells’ “New Samurai.”
Below them he stratifies in the “Upper Servers” and the “Agents” who comprise another 20% who will spend their lives destroying the value of professional education and association in a vicious “information” driven chase for individual recognition. Below that, roughly 50% of the population lives as service workers slaving 12-15 hours a day in front their living-room vidscreens “servicing” their global clients in a world that respects no time zones.
And the bottom 25%, who, if they are not pacified will provide ample motivation for people to stay indoors to avoid being attacked by roving gangs, are what Vlahos calls “The Lost.” Roughly twice as large a population share as those who were discarded by the Industrial Revolution in Britain according to Vlahos, “The Lost” are those that will never become a functioning part of “ByteCity.” Sustained by modern “Victorians” who know the threat posed by the poor, “The Lost” are merely the most wretched of the wretches. Life all the way up the line from “lost” to “lord” will entail such radical disruption of personal safety and well-being that, in effect, Vlahos has turned dystopian cyberpunk literature into a policy statement. Naturally, expecting to rise to the top, Vlahos appears to feverishly await the “Big Change.”
No less chilling is the scenarios planning exercise that Wired’s wizards-behind-the-curtain perform on their multi-national clients. From General Motors to AT&T, the Global Business Network (GBN) charges hefty sums to show the yellow-brick-road towards “ByteCity” to strategic planners and top corporate brass. In one recent and rare public discussion of the results, GM’s top planning team defined the three “alternative futures” which emerged after years of GBN counciling. The first is just like our world and, so by definition, is not very interesting.
The second is an eco-fascist regime in which car designs are completely “Green” and the companies can only follow orders. The third is the fun one, however. This is the world in which armed gangs roam the streets and surface travel is a series of car chases. This scenario has already been anticipated with a Cadillac that includes armored protection and a “panic” button installed in the middle of the dashboard. The car has a satellite tracking system built in and it can call the local authorities (presumably your multi-national’s private swat-team) and get help when you get trapped by the natives.
Vlahos/PFF/Gingrich and Wired/GBN/Brand and Wells/Toffler/”Open Conspiracy”. What ideology is being expressed by all these 20th century New Dark Age “revolutionaries”? Is this ideology “Californian”? Or, does it have another historical context and another tribal association? I merely suggest that accuracy, intellectual faithfulness and international solidarity require us to pin the tail on the real (Benthamite) donkey. This is the English ideology and, as usual, it’s hell-bent on ruling the world — over our dead bodies. (Mark Stahlman)
Relevant to this, in October 1997 the Tavistock Institute (and Manchester University) completed a final report (under Contract ERB-SOE2-CT-96-2011) for the European Commission, and described in a report summary was that there will be "partnerships between government, industry, and representatives of worker organizations." The report summary also described "the relevancy of Goals 2000, SCANS (U.S. Department of Labor SECRETARY'S COMMISSION ON ACHIEVING NECESSARY SKILLS) typology with its profound implications for the curriculum and training changes that this will require," valid skills standards and portable credentials "benchmarked to international standards such as those promulgated by the International Standards Organization (ISO)." The report summary went on to say that "there is increasing attention being focused on developing global skill standards and accreditation agreements."
In the 1990s, the Tavistock Institute not only began a new journal titled EVALUATION in 1995, but the Institute and the European Commission also worked on a feasibility study to research the effect of using "Smart Cards" in competence accreditation. The study was carried out in the U.S. and parts of Europe. The project involved assessing and validating students' skills, with information placed on personal skills Smart Cards which "become real passports to employment." The implication, of course, is that without this "real passport," one will not be employed.
[2] there is nothing that occurs in total space time, or that can be consciously experienced, which is NOT based on material substantiality of individual particle/waves of one degree of mass/energy density or another. Such particle/waves are elements of fractal involved, harmonically resonant, electro-gravitation al energy fields at frequencies extending between zero and infinite ... Whether such fields are labeled physical or metaphysical, spiritual, mental, astral, material, etc.
The basic misunderstanding is the assumption that "metaphysical" *** means supernatural or magical. Another, is that the word "physical" cannot be used in several different ways, such as when referring to the "physical body" or any ponderable material forms, and also when referring to the overall or total space-time electro-gravitation al field – which includes both the higher (frequency phase) order "metaphysical" EM energy fields (spiritual, mental, astral light particle/waves) and the lower order "physical" EM energy fields (photonic light, radio, X-ray, Gamma ray particle/waves, etc.). The highest order metaphysical fields surrounding all physical fields are linked to the invisible sub-sub-quantum "virtual" particles in the Planck volume closest to their ZPE radiative source (which could account for some of the "dark matter/energy" presumed by the cosmologists, as well as the holographic nature of total reality).
Nothing supernatural or mystical/magical is referred to by any of this... Since the physics and chemistry of all such fields are analogous and corresponding, as they are based on and governed by the same fundamental laws of cycles inherent in the angular spin momentum of their common ZPE source. Obviously, all chemistry must be fundamentally based in the interaction between electromagnetic fields, and all chemical bonds are electrical in nature.
Into the Redwoods
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/03.14.01/clubzayante-0111.html
The spring and summer of 1970 wasn’t lacking for controversy. President Richard Nixon ordered the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, after pledging to withdraw from Vietnam. Four students were shot to death at Kent State in Ohio during a protest that May. College students across the country unleashed a fury of protest. California Gov. Ronald Reagan ordered the state’s campuses closed for a four-day "cooling off" period as unrest spread in the Golden State.
I had never seen so many taxidermied stuffed animals in my life - both the Trout Farm and Zayante Club had stuffed deerheads behind the bars, and roommate artist Jim Green had our house full of deer, ducks and anything else he found dead in a stream he could stuff before he moved out and into a teepee, then went on to join Sun Bear.
On a road barely navigable for two cars, the best vehicle was a VW Bug; that's what we had for Valley View and The Bat Cave on Zayante Dr. up behind the Zayante Club. Club Zayante was a strange and wonderful place hidden in the depths of the magical and mystic Santa Cruz Mountains, just outside Felton. Such a place could truly not have existed anywhere except in Santa Cruz County. The club was a small wood frame building set back off the narrow road near Zayante Creek. At the start of its varied life, the building had been a clubhouse complete with swimming pool for the middle class homeowners who came to the area each summer in the fifties, seeking refuge from the bustling masses of the cities, and finding solace amongst the tall redwoods.
By the end of the sixties, the middle class homeowners were mostly gone and the area had been resettled on a year-round basis by the hippie crowd, campus radicals seeking refuge from the bustling masses of Berkeley and similar places. The clubhouse had then been converted into its now present incarnation – a lounge catering to the blues, revolution, and swimming au natural.
Since that time the few older, straight residents who were left in the area had fought the 'unwholesome' changes quite actively. Twice in three years the place had been firebombed. But it was never put out of business for long. The hippies who called Zayante home were nothing if not quite industrious. The front of the bldg was a dirt path led up from the road to the porch. To the left, on the side of the building was painted an enormous portrait of George Washington as he appeared on the dollar bill, and below it the name of the club. In front of that were the stumps of several trees which had been cut down for firewood. To the right was the part of the building that served as a small kitchen and then farther was the fenced-in enclosure of the famed swimming pool, now dry for the winter. We walked through the door.
The inside of the place was unique. On one side near the door, there was a wood-burning stove which with another at the far end, were the sole sources of heat. They gave a rustic and primitive atmosphere to the place, the faint odor of wood smoke perfuming the air. Light was provided mostly by candles placed on the tables and in other strategic places. Directly across from the door was a small bar tended by a bearded man with long hair swept back of his shoulders, whittling on a piece of wood with a Buck knife. In back of the bar on the wall was a deer head, the deer wearing sunglasses, and someone had stuck something that looked like a joint in the deer's mouth. Next to it was a sign stating that the 'Smoking of Illegal Drugs Is Prohibited' in the club and was 'Punishable By Death,' with an arrow drawn in pointing up towards the deer head.
Things We Lost in the Fire Santa Cruz music luminaries reunite for one last night at Club Zayante By Paul Davis
Santa Cruz County lost an irreplaceable piece of its history on Oct. 26, when the building that once housed the uniquely freewheeling, ramshackle '70s venue Club Zayante burned to the ground. Though the days when the club played host to then up-and-coming talent such as Clifton Chenier and Albert Collins were far behind the venue, owner Tom Louagie still lived in the building, along with a number of tenants who lost countless possessions in the fire.
"I got up in the morning and went out and looked at the wood stove fire like I've been doing for 37 years and came back in my room and got on my computer and heard the noise and it was the smoke alarm," Louagie explains. "I ran out into the living room and tried to stomp out the flame but that's when I got burned, and that's when I realized I had about two seconds to get out of there alive! That's what I did--I first warned everybody, running down the hall telling people to get out. I'm more concerned for them than me right now for the benefit--one of them lost a car, three of them lost computers."
Though the residents got out safely, Louagie suffered burns on his hands and face, and also lost priceless art pieces and a manuscript he had been working on for a book about the heyday of Zayante, which may have been his greatest physical loss. "Obviously I feel sadness," he says. "It wasn't just the physical place up there, it was all of the artwork. People have been telling me over the years, 'You ought to write a book, Tom, about all the things that happened at that place,' and I had been. I didn't tell anybody but I was pretty well along and it was in my computer, and it disappeared in the fire."
People who frequented Zayante don't need a book to remember the anything-goes spirit of a club where you could have an avocado burger or go skinny-dipping in the pool while the likes of John Lee Hooker and Ron Thompson tore up the stage. The fire signaled the final act for a place that represented much of what has been lost since Santa Cruz was transformed from a unique free-spirited outpost to a hot housing market. And even though it has been 23 years since Zayante closed its doors to the public, the musicians and customers who once populated the little bar in the mountains have rallied around Louagie, coming from far and wide to perform at a benefit for him and the other victims of the fire. The benefit, to be held at Don Quixote's on Jan. 13, will feature Zayante alumni such as slide guitar maestro Bob Brozman, Lacy J. Dalton, bluesman Ron Thompson, the Dirty Butter Jug Band and many more. For Brozman and the other players, organizing the benefit was a no-brainer.
"I have to say, in the course of my 52-year-old life and traveling all over the world," Brozman says, "Tom is really one of the greatest people I've known in my life. He's had various unfortunate circumstances happen to him over the years and it's really not fair." History of Zayante Both Brozman and country siren Dalton feel that they have Zayante to thank for jump-starting their careers. "Lacy J. Dalton would not exist if it were not for Club Zayante," enthuses Dalton, who performed as Jill Croston at the time. "If it hadn't been for Tom I wouldn't be an artist today." Brozman, who has lived in the area for the past 30 years, moved to town on the strength of a weekly gig at "Club Z" offered to him by Louagie. "I moved to Santa Cruz County on the promise of a music job at Club Zayante--it was my first job in California, and it started a long career," he says. "I came through Santa Cruz as a college student--every summer a couple of friends and I would buy a $100 car and travel around as street musicians--of course, in those days you could actually survive.
"In 1973 we happened on Club Zayante and played there, came back the following summer and the summer after that, and Tom promised me a job playing one night a week. And on the strength of that, I moved out here in 1976." To Brozman, the Santa Cruz lifestyle of Club Zayante came as a culture shock to his East Coast sensibilities, a shock that profoundly changed his life. He remembers those early days of Zayante with reverence, saying, "You have to imagine growing up in New York and going to school at the University of Missouri, and coming out here and sort of happening on this magical place out in the redwoods with avocado sandwiches and nude swimming--it was like some sort of magical world."
For many who remember Zayante, the place has taken on this near-mythic stature, without falling victim to the typical nostalgic line that it was a relic of a simpler or more idealized time. For those whose world orbited around Zayante, it was the place itself that held this mythic quality. Brozman notes, "I know the summer of love went bad very quickly, but it didn't seem to around Club Zayante." And while many institutions boast for decades about a single brush with fame, larger-than-life figures regularly took up extended residencies at the unassuming nightclub in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Dalton remembers when Shel Silverstein came to play the club and stayed in town far longer than expected.
"At one point Shel Silverstein came out to play with Fred Koller and I at Club Zayante, and he and Fred stayed at my house for about two weeks," she explains. "The whole time they were there--I don't know what they were on--they were writing songs. I watched their process over and over again and that's how I learned to write songs. Shel spent the whole time there wrapped in an Indian bedspread, like a toga, and was chasing my roommates around the whole time." While an appearance by the legendary author and songwriter Silverstein might provide another club with enough juice to fuel its entire nostalgic half-life, in the case of Zayante, such events were common and came and went without much note. "Those are the kind of people that were at Club Zayante," Dalton says, "and a lot of people might not know they were at Club Zayante--Tom may not even know they were there!"
For all her fond memories, the always-spunky Dalton has a warts-and-all appreciation for the club. "The fact that it has burned down and will be no more is very sad to me, but it probably really needed to happen 'cause the building was just a wreck," she chuckles. "It was a wreck when we first started going there 30 years ago, I can't imagine what it was like 30 years later. You had to be there--we were probably suffering from mold problems and didn't know it!" Indeed, Zayante wasn't the most upscale joint, but that only added to its appeal.
"You have to understand that this was the funkiest place on Earth," she says. "For a long time Tom had a pair of rubber boots by the women's bathroom, the place flooded so often. I remember playing a show with the creek running in the back door, filling the place up with about a foot of water, and everybody came anyway and we did the show. That's the kind of place it was! They had a swimming pool, and Tom always cooked, and you knew if you played there you would only get ten bucks, but you would get a turkey dinner and whatever you wanted to drink."
Louagie Looks to the Future In the two decades since Zayante closed as a public venue, it has become a symbol of a Santa Cruz long lost, representing an idyllic time of freedom and optimism. And while the folks interviewed for this piece have long accepted the passing of what Zayante once represented, it's hard to miss a sense of resignation and regret from the individuals as the fire completely and irrevocably puts the that era far behind them.
Musing that Zayante represents a "sense of freedom" that has been lost from not only the Santa Cruz community but also the music world as a whole, Brozman notes that "live music in Santa Cruz has become much more difficult" since Zayante closed its doors. "Santa Cruz used to be known as somewhat of a live-music place, and is somewhat less known as that now--however I can't fully blame Santa Cruz for that because the whole atmosphere of the USA has been working against live music for a long time."
Dalton echoes Brozman's sentiments. "Places like that really don't exist anymore," she says. "It's so hard to find a club where people care so much about the music that they just do not worry about the money. Tom never worried about the money--he couldn't pay much, but he sure did make you feel welcome." Louagie has little time to dwell on what has been lost. With the burns he suffered in the fire almost entirely healed, he spends his days "up there throwing burnt wood around and all that shit," he says. Meanwhile, he's decided to fold the stories he has been able to recollect into a collaborative website or blog on which the people who frequented Club Zayante can post their stories and memories of the venue.
"I ran it as hostel for four or five years and I had all these young folks coming in from all over the world and people would come by and tell them, 'Oh, this is what happened,' and get into these bullshit sessions. And I thought, 'Well, I'm writing this book and now I know how to use the Internet, so maybe I should put up a blog or a website and I could put chapters I was writing and have people that were there tell me the stories they told me in person over the years,'" he explains. "There are so many crazy stories that came out of there that I'm thinking if I open a website that even if folks weren't around at the time, they can still be a part of Club Zayante. Before this there was no one who could really experience the place other than me and the people who lived there--it was sort of lost to the public--so in a way this is a way that I can bring them back in, the people who were there and the people who wished they were there."
While Louagie plans this project, he is also mulling over his options to rebuild on the lot, all while preserving the freewheeling spirit of Zayante. Those plans remain much more vague. "I don't know what to do next [with the land]," he says, "but I know whatever it is, it's going to be a green project, and it's not going to turn into a rich person's mansion with a big wall around it. Somebody will come along with an idea, like 'Why don't we have a free school,' and that'll be it." As Louagie picks up the pieces of his life and the charred remains of what was once Zayante, his future is uncertain. But there's one thing he's steadfast about--he will be keeping the land Zayante was on, not selling out to the highest bidder who will build one of those "rich mansions." "We all think we live at the center of the universe, but Jill [Dalton] says there's something special about that physical place," he says. "It's holding me there--I don't want to leave it, I'm not going to sell it. People ask me, 'Why don't you sell it, you could make half a million on the bare land that's there,' but I don't want to. I want to stay there."
LOMPICO Club - Town & Country
In his youth, Jerry Garcia cut off his finger there. At the age of four, Jerry had his right middle finger chopped off by his brother. He and Tiff were at the family's Lompico country house in the Santa Cruz mountains. Tiff was chopping wood, and Jerry may have been fooling around when he failed to move his finger fast enough from the descending axe blade. Jerry mostly remembers the shock of a buzzing sound vibrating in his ears during a long drive to the doctor's. Reattachment, common today, was apparently not an option, since Jerry was surprised to discover he had lost two thirds of his middle finger when the bandages came off in the bathtub sometime later. "We'd been given a chore to do...he'd hold the wood and I'd chop it...he was [messing] around and I was just constantly chopping."
Janis Joplin lived at the end of the road on Lompico.
The spring and summer of 1970 wasn’t lacking for controversy. President Richard Nixon ordered the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, after pledging to withdraw from Vietnam. Four students were shot to death at Kent State in Ohio during a protest that May. College students across the country unleashed a fury of protest. California Gov. Ronald Reagan ordered the state’s campuses closed for a four-day "cooling off" period as unrest spread in the Golden State.
I had never seen so many taxidermied stuffed animals in my life - both the Trout Farm and Zayante Club had stuffed deerheads behind the bars, and roommate artist Jim Green had our house full of deer, ducks and anything else he found dead in a stream he could stuff before he moved out and into a teepee, then went on to join Sun Bear.
On a road barely navigable for two cars, the best vehicle was a VW Bug; that's what we had for Valley View and The Bat Cave on Zayante Dr. up behind the Zayante Club. Club Zayante was a strange and wonderful place hidden in the depths of the magical and mystic Santa Cruz Mountains, just outside Felton. Such a place could truly not have existed anywhere except in Santa Cruz County. The club was a small wood frame building set back off the narrow road near Zayante Creek. At the start of its varied life, the building had been a clubhouse complete with swimming pool for the middle class homeowners who came to the area each summer in the fifties, seeking refuge from the bustling masses of the cities, and finding solace amongst the tall redwoods.
By the end of the sixties, the middle class homeowners were mostly gone and the area had been resettled on a year-round basis by the hippie crowd, campus radicals seeking refuge from the bustling masses of Berkeley and similar places. The clubhouse had then been converted into its now present incarnation – a lounge catering to the blues, revolution, and swimming au natural.
Since that time the few older, straight residents who were left in the area had fought the 'unwholesome' changes quite actively. Twice in three years the place had been firebombed. But it was never put out of business for long. The hippies who called Zayante home were nothing if not quite industrious. The front of the bldg was a dirt path led up from the road to the porch. To the left, on the side of the building was painted an enormous portrait of George Washington as he appeared on the dollar bill, and below it the name of the club. In front of that were the stumps of several trees which had been cut down for firewood. To the right was the part of the building that served as a small kitchen and then farther was the fenced-in enclosure of the famed swimming pool, now dry for the winter. We walked through the door.
The inside of the place was unique. On one side near the door, there was a wood-burning stove which with another at the far end, were the sole sources of heat. They gave a rustic and primitive atmosphere to the place, the faint odor of wood smoke perfuming the air. Light was provided mostly by candles placed on the tables and in other strategic places. Directly across from the door was a small bar tended by a bearded man with long hair swept back of his shoulders, whittling on a piece of wood with a Buck knife. In back of the bar on the wall was a deer head, the deer wearing sunglasses, and someone had stuck something that looked like a joint in the deer's mouth. Next to it was a sign stating that the 'Smoking of Illegal Drugs Is Prohibited' in the club and was 'Punishable By Death,' with an arrow drawn in pointing up towards the deer head.
Things We Lost in the Fire Santa Cruz music luminaries reunite for one last night at Club Zayante By Paul Davis
Santa Cruz County lost an irreplaceable piece of its history on Oct. 26, when the building that once housed the uniquely freewheeling, ramshackle '70s venue Club Zayante burned to the ground. Though the days when the club played host to then up-and-coming talent such as Clifton Chenier and Albert Collins were far behind the venue, owner Tom Louagie still lived in the building, along with a number of tenants who lost countless possessions in the fire.
"I got up in the morning and went out and looked at the wood stove fire like I've been doing for 37 years and came back in my room and got on my computer and heard the noise and it was the smoke alarm," Louagie explains. "I ran out into the living room and tried to stomp out the flame but that's when I got burned, and that's when I realized I had about two seconds to get out of there alive! That's what I did--I first warned everybody, running down the hall telling people to get out. I'm more concerned for them than me right now for the benefit--one of them lost a car, three of them lost computers."
Though the residents got out safely, Louagie suffered burns on his hands and face, and also lost priceless art pieces and a manuscript he had been working on for a book about the heyday of Zayante, which may have been his greatest physical loss. "Obviously I feel sadness," he says. "It wasn't just the physical place up there, it was all of the artwork. People have been telling me over the years, 'You ought to write a book, Tom, about all the things that happened at that place,' and I had been. I didn't tell anybody but I was pretty well along and it was in my computer, and it disappeared in the fire."
People who frequented Zayante don't need a book to remember the anything-goes spirit of a club where you could have an avocado burger or go skinny-dipping in the pool while the likes of John Lee Hooker and Ron Thompson tore up the stage. The fire signaled the final act for a place that represented much of what has been lost since Santa Cruz was transformed from a unique free-spirited outpost to a hot housing market. And even though it has been 23 years since Zayante closed its doors to the public, the musicians and customers who once populated the little bar in the mountains have rallied around Louagie, coming from far and wide to perform at a benefit for him and the other victims of the fire. The benefit, to be held at Don Quixote's on Jan. 13, will feature Zayante alumni such as slide guitar maestro Bob Brozman, Lacy J. Dalton, bluesman Ron Thompson, the Dirty Butter Jug Band and many more. For Brozman and the other players, organizing the benefit was a no-brainer.
"I have to say, in the course of my 52-year-old life and traveling all over the world," Brozman says, "Tom is really one of the greatest people I've known in my life. He's had various unfortunate circumstances happen to him over the years and it's really not fair." History of Zayante Both Brozman and country siren Dalton feel that they have Zayante to thank for jump-starting their careers. "Lacy J. Dalton would not exist if it were not for Club Zayante," enthuses Dalton, who performed as Jill Croston at the time. "If it hadn't been for Tom I wouldn't be an artist today." Brozman, who has lived in the area for the past 30 years, moved to town on the strength of a weekly gig at "Club Z" offered to him by Louagie. "I moved to Santa Cruz County on the promise of a music job at Club Zayante--it was my first job in California, and it started a long career," he says. "I came through Santa Cruz as a college student--every summer a couple of friends and I would buy a $100 car and travel around as street musicians--of course, in those days you could actually survive.
"In 1973 we happened on Club Zayante and played there, came back the following summer and the summer after that, and Tom promised me a job playing one night a week. And on the strength of that, I moved out here in 1976." To Brozman, the Santa Cruz lifestyle of Club Zayante came as a culture shock to his East Coast sensibilities, a shock that profoundly changed his life. He remembers those early days of Zayante with reverence, saying, "You have to imagine growing up in New York and going to school at the University of Missouri, and coming out here and sort of happening on this magical place out in the redwoods with avocado sandwiches and nude swimming--it was like some sort of magical world."
For many who remember Zayante, the place has taken on this near-mythic stature, without falling victim to the typical nostalgic line that it was a relic of a simpler or more idealized time. For those whose world orbited around Zayante, it was the place itself that held this mythic quality. Brozman notes, "I know the summer of love went bad very quickly, but it didn't seem to around Club Zayante." And while many institutions boast for decades about a single brush with fame, larger-than-life figures regularly took up extended residencies at the unassuming nightclub in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Dalton remembers when Shel Silverstein came to play the club and stayed in town far longer than expected.
"At one point Shel Silverstein came out to play with Fred Koller and I at Club Zayante, and he and Fred stayed at my house for about two weeks," she explains. "The whole time they were there--I don't know what they were on--they were writing songs. I watched their process over and over again and that's how I learned to write songs. Shel spent the whole time there wrapped in an Indian bedspread, like a toga, and was chasing my roommates around the whole time." While an appearance by the legendary author and songwriter Silverstein might provide another club with enough juice to fuel its entire nostalgic half-life, in the case of Zayante, such events were common and came and went without much note. "Those are the kind of people that were at Club Zayante," Dalton says, "and a lot of people might not know they were at Club Zayante--Tom may not even know they were there!"
For all her fond memories, the always-spunky Dalton has a warts-and-all appreciation for the club. "The fact that it has burned down and will be no more is very sad to me, but it probably really needed to happen 'cause the building was just a wreck," she chuckles. "It was a wreck when we first started going there 30 years ago, I can't imagine what it was like 30 years later. You had to be there--we were probably suffering from mold problems and didn't know it!" Indeed, Zayante wasn't the most upscale joint, but that only added to its appeal.
"You have to understand that this was the funkiest place on Earth," she says. "For a long time Tom had a pair of rubber boots by the women's bathroom, the place flooded so often. I remember playing a show with the creek running in the back door, filling the place up with about a foot of water, and everybody came anyway and we did the show. That's the kind of place it was! They had a swimming pool, and Tom always cooked, and you knew if you played there you would only get ten bucks, but you would get a turkey dinner and whatever you wanted to drink."
Louagie Looks to the Future In the two decades since Zayante closed as a public venue, it has become a symbol of a Santa Cruz long lost, representing an idyllic time of freedom and optimism. And while the folks interviewed for this piece have long accepted the passing of what Zayante once represented, it's hard to miss a sense of resignation and regret from the individuals as the fire completely and irrevocably puts the that era far behind them.
Musing that Zayante represents a "sense of freedom" that has been lost from not only the Santa Cruz community but also the music world as a whole, Brozman notes that "live music in Santa Cruz has become much more difficult" since Zayante closed its doors. "Santa Cruz used to be known as somewhat of a live-music place, and is somewhat less known as that now--however I can't fully blame Santa Cruz for that because the whole atmosphere of the USA has been working against live music for a long time."
Dalton echoes Brozman's sentiments. "Places like that really don't exist anymore," she says. "It's so hard to find a club where people care so much about the music that they just do not worry about the money. Tom never worried about the money--he couldn't pay much, but he sure did make you feel welcome." Louagie has little time to dwell on what has been lost. With the burns he suffered in the fire almost entirely healed, he spends his days "up there throwing burnt wood around and all that shit," he says. Meanwhile, he's decided to fold the stories he has been able to recollect into a collaborative website or blog on which the people who frequented Club Zayante can post their stories and memories of the venue.
"I ran it as hostel for four or five years and I had all these young folks coming in from all over the world and people would come by and tell them, 'Oh, this is what happened,' and get into these bullshit sessions. And I thought, 'Well, I'm writing this book and now I know how to use the Internet, so maybe I should put up a blog or a website and I could put chapters I was writing and have people that were there tell me the stories they told me in person over the years,'" he explains. "There are so many crazy stories that came out of there that I'm thinking if I open a website that even if folks weren't around at the time, they can still be a part of Club Zayante. Before this there was no one who could really experience the place other than me and the people who lived there--it was sort of lost to the public--so in a way this is a way that I can bring them back in, the people who were there and the people who wished they were there."
While Louagie plans this project, he is also mulling over his options to rebuild on the lot, all while preserving the freewheeling spirit of Zayante. Those plans remain much more vague. "I don't know what to do next [with the land]," he says, "but I know whatever it is, it's going to be a green project, and it's not going to turn into a rich person's mansion with a big wall around it. Somebody will come along with an idea, like 'Why don't we have a free school,' and that'll be it." As Louagie picks up the pieces of his life and the charred remains of what was once Zayante, his future is uncertain. But there's one thing he's steadfast about--he will be keeping the land Zayante was on, not selling out to the highest bidder who will build one of those "rich mansions." "We all think we live at the center of the universe, but Jill [Dalton] says there's something special about that physical place," he says. "It's holding me there--I don't want to leave it, I'm not going to sell it. People ask me, 'Why don't you sell it, you could make half a million on the bare land that's there,' but I don't want to. I want to stay there."
LOMPICO Club - Town & Country
In his youth, Jerry Garcia cut off his finger there. At the age of four, Jerry had his right middle finger chopped off by his brother. He and Tiff were at the family's Lompico country house in the Santa Cruz mountains. Tiff was chopping wood, and Jerry may have been fooling around when he failed to move his finger fast enough from the descending axe blade. Jerry mostly remembers the shock of a buzzing sound vibrating in his ears during a long drive to the doctor's. Reattachment, common today, was apparently not an option, since Jerry was surprised to discover he had lost two thirds of his middle finger when the bandages came off in the bathtub sometime later. "We'd been given a chore to do...he'd hold the wood and I'd chop it...he was [messing] around and I was just constantly chopping."
Janis Joplin lived at the end of the road on Lompico.
Southern Oregon: Wonder, Wilderville, IV, Experiential Therapies; Dreamhealing
Lithia Park, mid-70s
