FULL CIRCLE
A Psychoretrocognitive Socio-Political Memoir
How I stumbled from One Intelligence Beta Test Into Another
by Iona Miller, 2010
"American education has evolved in such a way that it will be the undoing of the society…” --Buckminster Fuller, 1988
"American education has evolved in such a way that it will be the undoing of the society…” --Buckminster Fuller, 1988
FRAME 1 - Alphabetized: I Was a Beta-Test for Intelligence
Maybe You Were, Too
BETA TEST: Second level, external pilot-test of a product (usually a software) before commercial quantity production. At the beta test stage, the product has already passed through the first-level, internal pilot-test (alpha test) and glaring defects have been removed. But (since the product may still have some minor problems that require user participation) it is released to selected customers for testing under normal, everyday conditions of use to spot the remaining flaws.
In The Drama of the Gifted Child: the Search for the True Self, Alice Miller seeks the truth about her own childhood experiences and in so doing defines the model that has become widely accepted in psychotherapeutic circles, such as the Tavistock Institute. She addresses the two reactions to the loss of love in childhood, depression and grandiosity; the inner prison, the vicious circle of contempt, repressed memories, the etiology of depression, and how childhood trauma manifests itself in the adult.
Tavistock Beta Test: Context Dependent California Dreamin'
I was born at Ground Zero. The past is constantly determining our present actions. LA was a kaleidoscope of amusements for a youth-oriented culture. The flipside was our childhoods were spent in a revolving cycle of disaster drills interspersed with what passed at the time for education. There were so many -- fire, mudslide and flashflood drills, earthquake drills, and atomic bomb 'duck and cover' drills that it was hard to keep track of which remedy went with which disaster. About all we lacked was a volcano. But at least we had smog.
In 1942, the city even claimed to be attacked by UFOs in the "Battle of Los Angeles." Searchlights that scanned for the enemy in WWII now advertised glamorous events nightly by sweeping across smoggy skies. A more recent trip back to the OC by Disneyland for a nanotech conference felt oddly familiar, when the hotel got a bomb scare and we had to go through the whole drill, displaced from our rooms for hours, evacuated to the parking lot and the tender mercies and vittles of Joe's Crab Shack, Anaheim -- "Peace, Love & Crabs." I guess some things don't change.
Thus, we were inculcated with "disaster preparedness" -- the psychosensory notion that the sky could come crashing down at any moment in the blink of an eye. It peaked with the Cuban Missile Crisis standoff. If the bomb came, surely it would target LA. If that isn't enough to make you somewhat paranoid, no one is home in the cranium. Imminent disaster possibly for the whole human race seemed a certainty, even if it came in slow motion, stealing your soul like a thief in the night.
Existential angst was a given. Who wouldn't be depressed; why not be grandiose? My solution to "disaster preparedness" was to live life backward, and retire in my youth, the real Golden Years. Now, I'd be content to continue with my present work as long as possible, since work and play are synonymous. I prefer to get my drama from accomplishment not uproar. I don't claim to be the smartest or most successful person, but I was part of a social experiment that went mainstream. I was self-aware at all stages of that process.
Qualitatively Different
From the 1920s to the 40s, California had the most aggressive eugenics program in the US, which became a program of social hygiene. At the same time the world was poised at the brink of nuclear disaster, I was a precocious unwitting subject of "California Project Talent," a forerunner of the MGM program (Mentally Gifted Minors), which began in 1963. Lewis Madison Terman created the Stanford-Binet IQ test, from the work of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon.
Terman was a prominent eugenicist and member of the Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena (1929), which later became associated with Caltech. While they condemned German eugenics theory ("racial integrity" was not their interest), their biological science approach to human welfare amounted to human farming. They thought selected parents would have better offspring. Such research continues now in human genetic engineering, alteration of an individual's genotype with the aim of choosing the phenotype of a newborn or changing the existing phenotype of a child or adult. Human germline engineering remains controversial.
Their stated intention was "to foster and aid constructive and educational forces for the protection and betterment of the human family in body, mind, character, and citizenship." It advocated compulsory sterilization of those judged mentally defective. Increasing social control was among the stated aims of the California eugenics movement. Terman was a pioneer of longitudinal methods of study and his research on gifted children laid the foundation for further work in the field.
Eugenics is highly active in America as an unconscious political power source, operating in stealth mode. This intellectual blindness has been programmed. The only way to understand eugenics as a sophisticated "crowd control" device is to view the big picture. The big picture tells us that powerful Mind Control is all around us and even runs through us. This is no passive development. Like usury, eugenics is a major "crowd control" and Mind Control device employed by the elite against the non-elite which has been deliberately made invisible by your own belief system. It's top-down programming has been manipulated secretly. By "de-patterning" our minds, beginning in childhood, Tavistock and their American allies serve a broader agenda of psychological warfare against the democratic mind.
All these ideas originated at Tavistock Clinic in Britain where extensive experiments in child psychotherapy were conducted on children and gifted children. I started Kindergarten a year early and was still usually the brightest bulb in the class. We were tested up the wazoo from the beginning. I was enriched, accelerated, counseled and recruited for arts and science extracurricular activity. I was drilled in Creative Cognition and auditioned for and taken to TV shows.
There was some prejudice. The gifted are in many ways different from the non-gifted. They have abilities that the non-gifted don't have, and some non-gifted people resent it, particularly the intellectually gifted. The gifted sometimes try to hide who they are in an attempt to fit in. Gifted children in school, for example, "dumb down," purposely not doing as well as they could, but like the wizards, not all are successful at hiding who they are. Sometimes there are power struggles with teachers and authority figures because they trust their own framing and evaluations. Gifted kids tend to want reasons and they can be quite vocal and persistent in trying to get them. Will power comes with intellectual strength.
Perhaps to relieve my classroom boredom, they worked on me and put me to work -- doing what I thought was their work. I was rarely in class, so much was added to my Jr. High activities, including extra assignments. It continued in voluntary summer school and camps. I know pilot programs ran in San Diego, LA and San Francisco. Maybe there were others. It was a global education, involving learning by doing. But the gifted aren't just smart; they are distinct. Gifted children are sensitive, alert and have many 'antennae.' I always thought mine resided in my long hair, like Sampson.
Diet, Injections, Injunctions - Dejection
Mostly treatment was individualized, not yet institutionalized, but classes were segregated -- the brightest teachers got the brightest students and mentored them in writing and drama. I was overloaded with stimulation and exciting field trips. They had me catalog and mark books with a hot iron tool until I learned the Dewey Decimal System in the school district library. I never saw another child there. That library was my turf, my personal playground with the Swiss Family Robinson, the world of myth, and a host of biographical characters. Biographies were my favorite reading and inspired me to overcome challenges and adversity.
I had to make public speeches to civic groups, played 3 instruments in the band and conducted, acted in plays, edited the yearbook and numerous other activities. They had me tutor slower children. Maybe it was an attempt to modulate person/role conflict. I was frequently tested, taken from school and home, then taught forensics -- to debate any side of an argument, dramatic interpretation, and extemporaneous speaking. I had private tutors for that. I had both a singing and vocal coach, even though I was laughed at by other children for that. I questioned authority and asked all the impertinent questions about incongruities in The Bible. I waited in vain to be Born Again in my "closet."
We were guided by upper classmates and sent to State with them to observe their performances. We socialized with them; we liked what they liked, and that was liberal politics, horn-rimmed glasses and the folk scene, at the time. I guess we were meant to identify with the best and brightest. We were expected to excel and/or rebel, being divergent thinkers. I figured why not do both? Joan Baez and Dylan became my "spiritual parents." In many ways they still are. They revealed that the Game was rigged and we were all pawns in it. I slid from an alpha to a beta through an alternative gap in the continuum. The concrete foundation split; nature and my new nature bubbled out. It was a quantum leap in worldview. I was an Alpha Beta. The "map" of my life changed as I headed for Terra Incognita - "Here there be Dragons." I learned it was possible to escape social destiny. That theme continued in my psychological pursuits.
Stranger in a Strange Land
Like many, I was an avid reader of scifi as a child, and at 11 in 1961, I got a real dose of Magick in fictional form, when Robert Heinlein deviated from his juvenile formula of space operas to produce a culture classic only matched later by the Dune and Star Wars series. It planted seed ideas in my mind that I continue to pursue throughout my life. It presaged psychedelic culture -- counterculture.
I didn't know it but I was still on the Alpha program, dutifully consuming my transformative predictive programming. Stranger in a Strange Land became yet another Beta Test, following closely on the heels of Brave New World and 1984.
Does grokking the gnosis of Stranger cause a level of cognition that results in a radical evolution in thought and expression? Yes. It described what a truly free individual who actualized their full potential might be like. That was an intriguing notion.
The Sexual and Consciousness Revolutions were typified by the major themes of Heinlein (and Crowley). The motto was, "Do your own thing!" The questions were: "Who is in charge of my life, my body, my soul, my world? Who says they're in charge? Who'll be my role model, now that my role model is gone?" In the book, Jubal is Baphomet, the 'source of all wisdom', the All-Father.
This was probably my first exposure to Theosopical ideas. Astrologer character, Madame Alexandria Vesant clearly references the Theosophical Society and Krishnamurti movement co-founder Annie Besant. To grok the Vesant/Besant isomorph, remember that the letters B and V are qabalically equal (from the Hebrew letter Beth -- the letter symbolizing magick -- which is pronounced either B or V depending on the addition of a dot in its center). There is a solid link between Thelema and Stranger, and Heinlein and Thelema. Though Hubbard never joined OTO, the text of Stranger meets the criteria for allegory and is loaded with puzzles which clearly reference magickal and Thelemic themes. It was a virtual Pilgrim's Progress for the 60s.
Stranger foreshadowed many coming events in my own life and heralded a Dionysian cultural shift. It was the first time I heard about Crowley. Robert Heinlein published Stranger in a Strange Land largely because of his exposure to Aleister Crowley's Thelemic philosophy. In 1946 in Pasadena, next to my hometown, the infamous Babylon working took place with rocket-scientist Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology and others, who later became my magical mentors -- Phyllis Seckler and Helen Parsons Smith. Wilfried T. Smith, Parsons' first magickal mentor, headed the Agape Lodge before Parsons was appointed Magister Templi by Crowley.
The premise is that Heinlein wrote Stranger as an allegorical recapitulation of Thelema. The word Thelema is Greek for "Great Will" and refers to the body of philosophy and magickal practices codified by the late Aleister Crowley and continued by many. Heinlein concealed his Thelemic messages in symbols that only a fellow Thelemite would understand, as such.
Desperately Seeking Stranger
This idea is expanded in "Whence Came the Stranger: Tracking the Metapattern of Stranger in a Strange Land" by Adam Walks Between Worlds, (c)1993 in Green Egg Magazine, for which I also write today (Issues 150, 151):
Heinlein wrote Stranger with the intent of initiating a Thelemic 'whole systems transition' in human thought and expression. This means that Stranger cannot be regarded merely as the work of a master storyteller, the product of a literary genius. Rather, Stranger is much better understood as a consciously wrought, carefully considered and brilliantly successful casting -- a talismanic spell in itself, still dynamic, with its direct purpose being to spark human evolution along Thelemic lines. There is an astonishing similarity to the content and forms of the nest and the philosophy and practice of Thelema.
In 1961 Robert Anson Heinlein published a novel about a young Martian named Valentine Michael Smith. The book, Stranger in a Strange Land burst from its modest initial reception in science fiction circles to become one of the most influential works of the 20th century. Its concepts molded the critical thinking of many important social movements and paved the way for that astonishing period of social, religious, and sexual reclamation that is misleadingly dubbed "the 60s."
Arriving, as it did, at a nadir of American free thought and at a peak of media censorship, Stranger's publication was a minor miracle and its later mainstream success has always been considered a first class fluke. It became the first science novel to penetrate public consciousness since the days of Verne and Wells and initiated an unprecedented era of respectability for science fiction that opened the door for the Star Trek, 2001 and Star Wars. Stranger also marked a radical departure of form, not only for the author, but for American thought and expression in general. Stranger was the quintessence that transformed the nation's repressively conformist, post-war paranoia into the overtly sensual, erudite, cynical optimism that epitomized the years preceding the Reagan administration.
Entire volumes could be devoted to the influence of Stranger on fields as diverse (or convergent) as religion, physics, computer science, philosophy, government, anthropology, ecology and the occult. Movies, songs, and books quickly reflected its major themes. Grok, Heinlein's Martian neologism for deep understanding, became a household word. Every form of media, art, and science paid its respects to Heinlein's creation. The Church of All Worlds and the Covenant of The Mithril Star were two of many groups that formed around Stranger's principles and inspiration. As a part of its enormous cultural contribution, Stranger afforded a vision of the future that has proved astonishingly accurate. Stranger accurately predicted many of the scientific, social and political changes that mark our times from waterbeds, faxes and teleconferencing to genetic engineering's effect on probate laws to the First Lady's private consultation with an astrologer to the rise of frightening religious fundamentalisms. Indeed, almost every major prediction of Heinlein's has been fulfilled. http://firehead.org/~pturing/occult/grok/thelema.htm
Un-arrested Development
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention. - Aldous Huxley
ABSTRACT: Developmental theory helps us gain a concept of what unblocked or free flowing developmental process looks like in terms of the fulfillment of human potential. The integrative developmental framework emphasizes the continuing evolution of the whole person; ultimately it is a spiritual process. The results of the stimulus of forward development and progression that is provided by the normative crisis of midlife, with its adjustments to aging and mortality, is examined in respect to the Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP). The goal of treatment is elimination of blocks to the still-evolving personality and to the course of current and future development.
The adult experiences a constant process of dynamic change and flux, and is always in a state of “becoming” or “finding the way.” We present seven hypotheses about development in adulthood, and identify phase-specific issues and challenges, including typical adult rites of passage and the developmental phenomena of middle and later life as well. Erickson’s eight stages of life are used to outline the developmental continuum through the illuminative phase of potential transpersonal experience. Process therapy often leads to spontaneous initiatory spiritual experiences.
The evolution of the authentic self in adulthood is a dynamic process which is part of the lifelong shaping of identity and self-image. The attainment of authenticity is a central, dynamic task of adulthood achieved through restructuring of the self. Confronting the quintessential adult-human experience can lead to integration of the highest order and produce profound awareness of what it means to be human. A number of factors, some unique to adult experience, build on the self constructed from earlier phases of life and develop it further. Some of the most important include: (1) the body, (2) object ties, (3) time and death, and (4) work, creativity, and mentorship. --Iona Miller, "An Integrative View of Normal Adult Development", Chaosophy (2000)
In The Drama of the Gifted Child: the Search for the True Self, Alice Miller seeks the truth about her own childhood experiences and in so doing defines the model that has become widely accepted in psychotherapeutic circles, such as the Tavistock Institute. She addresses the two reactions to the loss of love in childhood, depression and grandiosity; the inner prison, the vicious circle of contempt, repressed memories, the etiology of depression, and how childhood trauma manifests itself in the adult.
Tavistock Beta Test: Context Dependent California Dreamin'
I was born at Ground Zero. The past is constantly determining our present actions. LA was a kaleidoscope of amusements for a youth-oriented culture. The flipside was our childhoods were spent in a revolving cycle of disaster drills interspersed with what passed at the time for education. There were so many -- fire, mudslide and flashflood drills, earthquake drills, and atomic bomb 'duck and cover' drills that it was hard to keep track of which remedy went with which disaster. About all we lacked was a volcano. But at least we had smog.
In 1942, the city even claimed to be attacked by UFOs in the "Battle of Los Angeles." Searchlights that scanned for the enemy in WWII now advertised glamorous events nightly by sweeping across smoggy skies. A more recent trip back to the OC by Disneyland for a nanotech conference felt oddly familiar, when the hotel got a bomb scare and we had to go through the whole drill, displaced from our rooms for hours, evacuated to the parking lot and the tender mercies and vittles of Joe's Crab Shack, Anaheim -- "Peace, Love & Crabs." I guess some things don't change.
Thus, we were inculcated with "disaster preparedness" -- the psychosensory notion that the sky could come crashing down at any moment in the blink of an eye. It peaked with the Cuban Missile Crisis standoff. If the bomb came, surely it would target LA. If that isn't enough to make you somewhat paranoid, no one is home in the cranium. Imminent disaster possibly for the whole human race seemed a certainty, even if it came in slow motion, stealing your soul like a thief in the night.
Existential angst was a given. Who wouldn't be depressed; why not be grandiose? My solution to "disaster preparedness" was to live life backward, and retire in my youth, the real Golden Years. Now, I'd be content to continue with my present work as long as possible, since work and play are synonymous. I prefer to get my drama from accomplishment not uproar. I don't claim to be the smartest or most successful person, but I was part of a social experiment that went mainstream. I was self-aware at all stages of that process.
Qualitatively Different
From the 1920s to the 40s, California had the most aggressive eugenics program in the US, which became a program of social hygiene. At the same time the world was poised at the brink of nuclear disaster, I was a precocious unwitting subject of "California Project Talent," a forerunner of the MGM program (Mentally Gifted Minors), which began in 1963. Lewis Madison Terman created the Stanford-Binet IQ test, from the work of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon.
Terman was a prominent eugenicist and member of the Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena (1929), which later became associated with Caltech. While they condemned German eugenics theory ("racial integrity" was not their interest), their biological science approach to human welfare amounted to human farming. They thought selected parents would have better offspring. Such research continues now in human genetic engineering, alteration of an individual's genotype with the aim of choosing the phenotype of a newborn or changing the existing phenotype of a child or adult. Human germline engineering remains controversial.
Their stated intention was "to foster and aid constructive and educational forces for the protection and betterment of the human family in body, mind, character, and citizenship." It advocated compulsory sterilization of those judged mentally defective. Increasing social control was among the stated aims of the California eugenics movement. Terman was a pioneer of longitudinal methods of study and his research on gifted children laid the foundation for further work in the field.
Eugenics is highly active in America as an unconscious political power source, operating in stealth mode. This intellectual blindness has been programmed. The only way to understand eugenics as a sophisticated "crowd control" device is to view the big picture. The big picture tells us that powerful Mind Control is all around us and even runs through us. This is no passive development. Like usury, eugenics is a major "crowd control" and Mind Control device employed by the elite against the non-elite which has been deliberately made invisible by your own belief system. It's top-down programming has been manipulated secretly. By "de-patterning" our minds, beginning in childhood, Tavistock and their American allies serve a broader agenda of psychological warfare against the democratic mind.
All these ideas originated at Tavistock Clinic in Britain where extensive experiments in child psychotherapy were conducted on children and gifted children. I started Kindergarten a year early and was still usually the brightest bulb in the class. We were tested up the wazoo from the beginning. I was enriched, accelerated, counseled and recruited for arts and science extracurricular activity. I was drilled in Creative Cognition and auditioned for and taken to TV shows.
There was some prejudice. The gifted are in many ways different from the non-gifted. They have abilities that the non-gifted don't have, and some non-gifted people resent it, particularly the intellectually gifted. The gifted sometimes try to hide who they are in an attempt to fit in. Gifted children in school, for example, "dumb down," purposely not doing as well as they could, but like the wizards, not all are successful at hiding who they are. Sometimes there are power struggles with teachers and authority figures because they trust their own framing and evaluations. Gifted kids tend to want reasons and they can be quite vocal and persistent in trying to get them. Will power comes with intellectual strength.
Perhaps to relieve my classroom boredom, they worked on me and put me to work -- doing what I thought was their work. I was rarely in class, so much was added to my Jr. High activities, including extra assignments. It continued in voluntary summer school and camps. I know pilot programs ran in San Diego, LA and San Francisco. Maybe there were others. It was a global education, involving learning by doing. But the gifted aren't just smart; they are distinct. Gifted children are sensitive, alert and have many 'antennae.' I always thought mine resided in my long hair, like Sampson.
Diet, Injections, Injunctions - Dejection
Mostly treatment was individualized, not yet institutionalized, but classes were segregated -- the brightest teachers got the brightest students and mentored them in writing and drama. I was overloaded with stimulation and exciting field trips. They had me catalog and mark books with a hot iron tool until I learned the Dewey Decimal System in the school district library. I never saw another child there. That library was my turf, my personal playground with the Swiss Family Robinson, the world of myth, and a host of biographical characters. Biographies were my favorite reading and inspired me to overcome challenges and adversity.
I had to make public speeches to civic groups, played 3 instruments in the band and conducted, acted in plays, edited the yearbook and numerous other activities. They had me tutor slower children. Maybe it was an attempt to modulate person/role conflict. I was frequently tested, taken from school and home, then taught forensics -- to debate any side of an argument, dramatic interpretation, and extemporaneous speaking. I had private tutors for that. I had both a singing and vocal coach, even though I was laughed at by other children for that. I questioned authority and asked all the impertinent questions about incongruities in The Bible. I waited in vain to be Born Again in my "closet."
We were guided by upper classmates and sent to State with them to observe their performances. We socialized with them; we liked what they liked, and that was liberal politics, horn-rimmed glasses and the folk scene, at the time. I guess we were meant to identify with the best and brightest. We were expected to excel and/or rebel, being divergent thinkers. I figured why not do both? Joan Baez and Dylan became my "spiritual parents." In many ways they still are. They revealed that the Game was rigged and we were all pawns in it. I slid from an alpha to a beta through an alternative gap in the continuum. The concrete foundation split; nature and my new nature bubbled out. It was a quantum leap in worldview. I was an Alpha Beta. The "map" of my life changed as I headed for Terra Incognita - "Here there be Dragons." I learned it was possible to escape social destiny. That theme continued in my psychological pursuits.
Stranger in a Strange Land
Like many, I was an avid reader of scifi as a child, and at 11 in 1961, I got a real dose of Magick in fictional form, when Robert Heinlein deviated from his juvenile formula of space operas to produce a culture classic only matched later by the Dune and Star Wars series. It planted seed ideas in my mind that I continue to pursue throughout my life. It presaged psychedelic culture -- counterculture.
I didn't know it but I was still on the Alpha program, dutifully consuming my transformative predictive programming. Stranger in a Strange Land became yet another Beta Test, following closely on the heels of Brave New World and 1984.
Does grokking the gnosis of Stranger cause a level of cognition that results in a radical evolution in thought and expression? Yes. It described what a truly free individual who actualized their full potential might be like. That was an intriguing notion.
The Sexual and Consciousness Revolutions were typified by the major themes of Heinlein (and Crowley). The motto was, "Do your own thing!" The questions were: "Who is in charge of my life, my body, my soul, my world? Who says they're in charge? Who'll be my role model, now that my role model is gone?" In the book, Jubal is Baphomet, the 'source of all wisdom', the All-Father.
This was probably my first exposure to Theosopical ideas. Astrologer character, Madame Alexandria Vesant clearly references the Theosophical Society and Krishnamurti movement co-founder Annie Besant. To grok the Vesant/Besant isomorph, remember that the letters B and V are qabalically equal (from the Hebrew letter Beth -- the letter symbolizing magick -- which is pronounced either B or V depending on the addition of a dot in its center). There is a solid link between Thelema and Stranger, and Heinlein and Thelema. Though Hubbard never joined OTO, the text of Stranger meets the criteria for allegory and is loaded with puzzles which clearly reference magickal and Thelemic themes. It was a virtual Pilgrim's Progress for the 60s.
Stranger foreshadowed many coming events in my own life and heralded a Dionysian cultural shift. It was the first time I heard about Crowley. Robert Heinlein published Stranger in a Strange Land largely because of his exposure to Aleister Crowley's Thelemic philosophy. In 1946 in Pasadena, next to my hometown, the infamous Babylon working took place with rocket-scientist Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology and others, who later became my magical mentors -- Phyllis Seckler and Helen Parsons Smith. Wilfried T. Smith, Parsons' first magickal mentor, headed the Agape Lodge before Parsons was appointed Magister Templi by Crowley.
The premise is that Heinlein wrote Stranger as an allegorical recapitulation of Thelema. The word Thelema is Greek for "Great Will" and refers to the body of philosophy and magickal practices codified by the late Aleister Crowley and continued by many. Heinlein concealed his Thelemic messages in symbols that only a fellow Thelemite would understand, as such.
Desperately Seeking Stranger
This idea is expanded in "Whence Came the Stranger: Tracking the Metapattern of Stranger in a Strange Land" by Adam Walks Between Worlds, (c)1993 in Green Egg Magazine, for which I also write today (Issues 150, 151):
Heinlein wrote Stranger with the intent of initiating a Thelemic 'whole systems transition' in human thought and expression. This means that Stranger cannot be regarded merely as the work of a master storyteller, the product of a literary genius. Rather, Stranger is much better understood as a consciously wrought, carefully considered and brilliantly successful casting -- a talismanic spell in itself, still dynamic, with its direct purpose being to spark human evolution along Thelemic lines. There is an astonishing similarity to the content and forms of the nest and the philosophy and practice of Thelema.
In 1961 Robert Anson Heinlein published a novel about a young Martian named Valentine Michael Smith. The book, Stranger in a Strange Land burst from its modest initial reception in science fiction circles to become one of the most influential works of the 20th century. Its concepts molded the critical thinking of many important social movements and paved the way for that astonishing period of social, religious, and sexual reclamation that is misleadingly dubbed "the 60s."
Arriving, as it did, at a nadir of American free thought and at a peak of media censorship, Stranger's publication was a minor miracle and its later mainstream success has always been considered a first class fluke. It became the first science novel to penetrate public consciousness since the days of Verne and Wells and initiated an unprecedented era of respectability for science fiction that opened the door for the Star Trek, 2001 and Star Wars. Stranger also marked a radical departure of form, not only for the author, but for American thought and expression in general. Stranger was the quintessence that transformed the nation's repressively conformist, post-war paranoia into the overtly sensual, erudite, cynical optimism that epitomized the years preceding the Reagan administration.
Entire volumes could be devoted to the influence of Stranger on fields as diverse (or convergent) as religion, physics, computer science, philosophy, government, anthropology, ecology and the occult. Movies, songs, and books quickly reflected its major themes. Grok, Heinlein's Martian neologism for deep understanding, became a household word. Every form of media, art, and science paid its respects to Heinlein's creation. The Church of All Worlds and the Covenant of The Mithril Star were two of many groups that formed around Stranger's principles and inspiration. As a part of its enormous cultural contribution, Stranger afforded a vision of the future that has proved astonishingly accurate. Stranger accurately predicted many of the scientific, social and political changes that mark our times from waterbeds, faxes and teleconferencing to genetic engineering's effect on probate laws to the First Lady's private consultation with an astrologer to the rise of frightening religious fundamentalisms. Indeed, almost every major prediction of Heinlein's has been fulfilled. http://firehead.org/~pturing/occult/grok/thelema.htm
Un-arrested Development
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention. - Aldous Huxley
ABSTRACT: Developmental theory helps us gain a concept of what unblocked or free flowing developmental process looks like in terms of the fulfillment of human potential. The integrative developmental framework emphasizes the continuing evolution of the whole person; ultimately it is a spiritual process. The results of the stimulus of forward development and progression that is provided by the normative crisis of midlife, with its adjustments to aging and mortality, is examined in respect to the Consciousness Restructuring Process (CRP). The goal of treatment is elimination of blocks to the still-evolving personality and to the course of current and future development.
The adult experiences a constant process of dynamic change and flux, and is always in a state of “becoming” or “finding the way.” We present seven hypotheses about development in adulthood, and identify phase-specific issues and challenges, including typical adult rites of passage and the developmental phenomena of middle and later life as well. Erickson’s eight stages of life are used to outline the developmental continuum through the illuminative phase of potential transpersonal experience. Process therapy often leads to spontaneous initiatory spiritual experiences.
The evolution of the authentic self in adulthood is a dynamic process which is part of the lifelong shaping of identity and self-image. The attainment of authenticity is a central, dynamic task of adulthood achieved through restructuring of the self. Confronting the quintessential adult-human experience can lead to integration of the highest order and produce profound awareness of what it means to be human. A number of factors, some unique to adult experience, build on the self constructed from earlier phases of life and develop it further. Some of the most important include: (1) the body, (2) object ties, (3) time and death, and (4) work, creativity, and mentorship. --Iona Miller, "An Integrative View of Normal Adult Development", Chaosophy (2000)
FRAME 2 - Potentialization
Sioux Thunder Being Shield - Rotten Belly Society – this society was composed of “Contraries”.
We were infused with the value of our potential. Creativity has frequently been treated as a form of self-expression or a way of understanding or coping with life that is intimately connected with personal dignity, expression of one's inner being, self-actualization, and the like (e.g., Maslow, 1973; May, 1976; Rogers, 1961). Moustakis (1977) summarized the individualistic approach to creativity by seeing it as the pathway to living your own life your own way.
Barton (1969) even concluded that creativity requires resistance to socialization and Burkhardt (1985) took the theme of the individual against society further by arguing that the creative individual must fight against society's pathological desire for sameness. Sternberg and Lubart (1995) called this fight "defying the crowd," and labeled the tendency of certain creative individuals to resist society's pressure to conform "contrarianism." I was hardwired like that, being left-handed. No one ever tried to change that. No one ever pushed me. At least I did not perceive it as such.
Maybe the contrarian essence spoke subconsciously to my Sioux blood, because they also had Contrairies, a specified social role for clowns and misfits, who were magicians and healers. My paternal Grandmother was a half-breed Sioux twin. I look just like her. She was also a direct descendant of Stephen Hopkins, the oldest contrary to sign the Declaration of Independence with his contrary friends, the Founding Fathers. The combination gave me a 10,000 year old sense of rootedness as an American.
Contraries did everything backwards, but a clown is really performing a therapeutic spiritual ceremony for the tribe -- opening them to laughter and immediate experience, much like the symbolic Fool in the Tarot. The Sioux equally applied the name and concept Heyoka to their Clowns as well as their Contraries.
The Contraries were individuals devoted to an extraordinary lifestyle in which they consistently and continually did the opposite of what others normally do. They turned all conventions to their opposites. While the Clowns represented ceremonial figures and their performances were restricted to rituals, dances and ceremonies, the Contraries practiced their contrary lifestyle day and night. On a certain level the Contrary acted as an antagonist to his own people.
There is a clue to the potential terror of clowning in the visionary experience of the Plains clown. Black Elk, a Sioux Holy Man explained why: "When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the west, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm."
The same sort of imagery comes up in metaphor therapy, because it is experiential. The historical content is secondary or irrelevant compared to the felt-sense which is transformative. Change the attitudes and you change the feelings and the symbolic mindscape. But thing usually get worse -- "stormy" -- before they get better in catharsis and re-framing.
A person who had this experience and became a heyoka, a visionary clown, could from then on strut before the lightning of his fear. Among the Cheyenne, as among the Sioux, men and women who had such a vision had to act it out by clowning before the entire tribe. These people, called “Contraries,” put up a contrary lodge with its covering inside out, the lodge poles on the outside, and the smoke hole turned in the wrong direction.
Dressed in rags, they backed in and out of the lodge, and sat against it upside down -- with head and body on the ground and legs against the wall -- while all the people laughed at them. They did many other foolish things, such as run around wildly and pull weeds backwards, backing up to them and pulling them from between their legs.
They were said to act like lightning in a storm, thus becoming one with the sacred power they most feared. The entire counterculture took on much the same role in the 60s. More of us have lived in teepees at one time or another than not. The clown's mystical liberation from ultimate cosmic fears brings with it a liberation from conventional notions of what is dangerous or sacred in spiritual ceremonies. That liberation comes through psychological ego death and rebirth after confronting one's fear and pain and surviving the transformative ordeal.
Those weren't bad genes for a budding shaman/therapist and dreamhealer steeped in the Human Potential Movement. We learned to portray ourselves in a new way that honored the ancient future. Heyok'a dreamers and the Sioux "contrary cult" stand in ambiguous relationship to the healing arts. On one hand, their activities are directed at the protection of the community and the heyok'a dances are performed "for the health and safety of all the people." On the other hand, individual heyok'a are said to have the power to reverse the healing effects of any ritual, regimen, or remedy, and medical treatment should be deferred when they are present.
The heyok'a is an ancient, loosely organized, at least partly secret society. The members have specific magical powers pertaining to war, the hunt, and healing. The heyok'a, or contraries, are an integral part of the religious and ceremonial system, and heyok'a individuals have a well-defined role in Oglala daily life as well. By systematically breaking the customs and prohibitions of the community the contrary achieves a personal mysteriousness that translates into the magical and the sacred.
In Sioux society a puritanical moral code and pressure for conformity to social values are channeled into character development by ridicule and shaming. When, for example, the tensions of this process become intolerable, the heyok'a is an incarnation of relief. His presence is a counterbalance to conformity. He is simultaneously useful and dangerous, his origins are mysterious, and his functions are enigmatic. He is a Trickster. Becoming heyok'a is involuntary and unavoidable. Traditionally, dream or vision quest images demand it.
I naturally did things backward and looked at things from both sides now. I was soon to embark on my own vision quest or trial by fire. I had come Full Circle on the Medicine Wheel. Like healing, self-actualization is a nonlinear process that mobilizes natural forces such as the placebo effect, self talk and our primordial self-image, not our persona or social mask, which is superficial.
All healing processes involve passing through each of the four directions of the wheel, and each direction represents a principle, with its guide and totem, that applies to life in general, as well as healing. Each of the four directions also represents a cardinal compass point. The East is the keen-sighted eagle or seeing the nature of the problem. The South is the snake who outgrows and sheds his brittle skin in a mini-death of "letting go". The West is the bear or wolf, symbolizing the unbound self, creatively emerging from chaos. The North is the wise owl, the renewed sense of self.
So, the process is one of initiation, letting go, new vision and actualization or embodiment. Native American teachings state that one constantly travels around this circle and in so doing attains harmony and balance, and comes full circle. This cycle exists in potential in all dis-eases, providing an evolutionary opportunity for an individual to evolve.
We were infused with the value of our potential. Creativity has frequently been treated as a form of self-expression or a way of understanding or coping with life that is intimately connected with personal dignity, expression of one's inner being, self-actualization, and the like (e.g., Maslow, 1973; May, 1976; Rogers, 1961). Moustakis (1977) summarized the individualistic approach to creativity by seeing it as the pathway to living your own life your own way.
Barton (1969) even concluded that creativity requires resistance to socialization and Burkhardt (1985) took the theme of the individual against society further by arguing that the creative individual must fight against society's pathological desire for sameness. Sternberg and Lubart (1995) called this fight "defying the crowd," and labeled the tendency of certain creative individuals to resist society's pressure to conform "contrarianism." I was hardwired like that, being left-handed. No one ever tried to change that. No one ever pushed me. At least I did not perceive it as such.
Maybe the contrarian essence spoke subconsciously to my Sioux blood, because they also had Contrairies, a specified social role for clowns and misfits, who were magicians and healers. My paternal Grandmother was a half-breed Sioux twin. I look just like her. She was also a direct descendant of Stephen Hopkins, the oldest contrary to sign the Declaration of Independence with his contrary friends, the Founding Fathers. The combination gave me a 10,000 year old sense of rootedness as an American.
Contraries did everything backwards, but a clown is really performing a therapeutic spiritual ceremony for the tribe -- opening them to laughter and immediate experience, much like the symbolic Fool in the Tarot. The Sioux equally applied the name and concept Heyoka to their Clowns as well as their Contraries.
The Contraries were individuals devoted to an extraordinary lifestyle in which they consistently and continually did the opposite of what others normally do. They turned all conventions to their opposites. While the Clowns represented ceremonial figures and their performances were restricted to rituals, dances and ceremonies, the Contraries practiced their contrary lifestyle day and night. On a certain level the Contrary acted as an antagonist to his own people.
There is a clue to the potential terror of clowning in the visionary experience of the Plains clown. Black Elk, a Sioux Holy Man explained why: "When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the west, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm."
The same sort of imagery comes up in metaphor therapy, because it is experiential. The historical content is secondary or irrelevant compared to the felt-sense which is transformative. Change the attitudes and you change the feelings and the symbolic mindscape. But thing usually get worse -- "stormy" -- before they get better in catharsis and re-framing.
A person who had this experience and became a heyoka, a visionary clown, could from then on strut before the lightning of his fear. Among the Cheyenne, as among the Sioux, men and women who had such a vision had to act it out by clowning before the entire tribe. These people, called “Contraries,” put up a contrary lodge with its covering inside out, the lodge poles on the outside, and the smoke hole turned in the wrong direction.
Dressed in rags, they backed in and out of the lodge, and sat against it upside down -- with head and body on the ground and legs against the wall -- while all the people laughed at them. They did many other foolish things, such as run around wildly and pull weeds backwards, backing up to them and pulling them from between their legs.
They were said to act like lightning in a storm, thus becoming one with the sacred power they most feared. The entire counterculture took on much the same role in the 60s. More of us have lived in teepees at one time or another than not. The clown's mystical liberation from ultimate cosmic fears brings with it a liberation from conventional notions of what is dangerous or sacred in spiritual ceremonies. That liberation comes through psychological ego death and rebirth after confronting one's fear and pain and surviving the transformative ordeal.
Those weren't bad genes for a budding shaman/therapist and dreamhealer steeped in the Human Potential Movement. We learned to portray ourselves in a new way that honored the ancient future. Heyok'a dreamers and the Sioux "contrary cult" stand in ambiguous relationship to the healing arts. On one hand, their activities are directed at the protection of the community and the heyok'a dances are performed "for the health and safety of all the people." On the other hand, individual heyok'a are said to have the power to reverse the healing effects of any ritual, regimen, or remedy, and medical treatment should be deferred when they are present.
The heyok'a is an ancient, loosely organized, at least partly secret society. The members have specific magical powers pertaining to war, the hunt, and healing. The heyok'a, or contraries, are an integral part of the religious and ceremonial system, and heyok'a individuals have a well-defined role in Oglala daily life as well. By systematically breaking the customs and prohibitions of the community the contrary achieves a personal mysteriousness that translates into the magical and the sacred.
In Sioux society a puritanical moral code and pressure for conformity to social values are channeled into character development by ridicule and shaming. When, for example, the tensions of this process become intolerable, the heyok'a is an incarnation of relief. His presence is a counterbalance to conformity. He is simultaneously useful and dangerous, his origins are mysterious, and his functions are enigmatic. He is a Trickster. Becoming heyok'a is involuntary and unavoidable. Traditionally, dream or vision quest images demand it.
I naturally did things backward and looked at things from both sides now. I was soon to embark on my own vision quest or trial by fire. I had come Full Circle on the Medicine Wheel. Like healing, self-actualization is a nonlinear process that mobilizes natural forces such as the placebo effect, self talk and our primordial self-image, not our persona or social mask, which is superficial.
All healing processes involve passing through each of the four directions of the wheel, and each direction represents a principle, with its guide and totem, that applies to life in general, as well as healing. Each of the four directions also represents a cardinal compass point. The East is the keen-sighted eagle or seeing the nature of the problem. The South is the snake who outgrows and sheds his brittle skin in a mini-death of "letting go". The West is the bear or wolf, symbolizing the unbound self, creatively emerging from chaos. The North is the wise owl, the renewed sense of self.
So, the process is one of initiation, letting go, new vision and actualization or embodiment. Native American teachings state that one constantly travels around this circle and in so doing attains harmony and balance, and comes full circle. This cycle exists in potential in all dis-eases, providing an evolutionary opportunity for an individual to evolve.
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FRAME 3 - Rebel, Rebel: When Jupiter Aligned with Mars in the SoCal Summer of Love
CIA Beta Tests
In this same era, CIA had a program for calling gifted students at home to encourage them into science. Naturally, they didn't say, "Hello, this is the CIA calling." They watched student science fairs for clever kids and ideas. The metagifted have more than one talent or expressive outlet. There was a state master plan for the mentally gifted, but I figured out how to derail that. I quit doing the mandatory extra credit current events reports and quit playing the game when it bored me. I was tired of doing the teachers' jobs. I jumped off the treadmill around 16. I was tired of being a guinea pig. I was still excited about learning -- what I wanted. That included experiential self-knowledge.
A lovin' spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. Many of us graduated straight from the sugar cubes for polio vaccines to more hyperdimensional sugar cubes. Vaccination was another beta test forced on us. The polio vaccine used in the United States from 1955 to 1963 has long been known to have been contaminated with a cancer-causing monkey virus. File this beta test under "Mass Murder."
While researching the mysterious death of Dr. Mary Sherman, Haslam discovered that polio vaccines created in the 1950's had been tainted with a cancer-causing virus. This Simian Virus-40 contamination, he said, was detected after half of the doses, a staggering 100 million vaccines, had been administered to an unwitting public. Allegedly, the creators of the vaccine were afraid to admit the error and subsequently distributed the remaining half of the "medicine" as well. Having studied data on cancer diagnoses,
Haslam noted that a "massive epidemic" of soft tissue cancers "erupts in the years following the polio vaccines." Making matters worse, he said, the cancer-causing virus could be transmitted sexually and has even appeared in grandchildren of people who received the compromised vaccine. See the book Dr. Mary's Monkey. Minced rhesus monkey kidney cells that were used to manufacture the polio vaccine. Soft tissue cancers were almost unknown before the introduction of the polio vaccine. It was a bio-weapon and in psyops there are no accidents. The sowing of cancer was not accidental, no more than the faked incident that started Viet Nam. Both were Boomer population control remedies.
The US government actively weaponized cancer for Boomers. The monkey viruses were radiated by a linear particular accelerator to alter the genetic components in the virus. The monkey viruses would then be injected into mice to study the developing tumors. In 1964, Dr. Mary Sherman was found brutally murdered in her apartment (she had been stabbed multiple times and her right arm and rib cage had been burnt away). This caused the medical establishment to begin looking for cancer cures right away, which were going to be needed once the recipients of the polio vaccines came of age.
Richard Nixon declared war on cancer and huge funds were made available to combat what was expected to be a future [profitable] cancer epidemic. Once the cancer causing monkey viruses were discovered via the polio vaccine, they then became objects of study by weapons makers, involved in a vendetta against the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Great efforts were made by many people in the government and the medical industry in New Orleans, Louisiana, to mutate these cancer causing monkey viruses with radiation, so that they could be used as a malignant weapon against Castro.
I didn't know I had made a lateral move from Huxley's dystopian Brave New World to his pseudo-Utopia Island, narcotized by soma. No one voted me off the Island. Unwittingly, I leapt from one psyops beta test to another, because even our rebellions were orchestrated and channelled. The ideas that became Island (1962) are revealed in a foreword he wrote in 1946 to a new edition of Brave New World:
If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and politics co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Ultilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"
I started an anonymous underground gossip sheet, The Prestige, for which I was inevitably called on the carpet of the principal's office. I don't think my cohort Anita was caught. I didn't rat her out. We wrote as Private I and Secret A. I wrote Horoscopes, or more accurately kitchy "horrorscopes." I loved reporting gossip framed by my divergent point of view. Maybe I just loved writing. I never was caught doing psychological experiments on fellow students. So I didn't stop that. Perhaps I'd crossed some victim/victimizer line.
My creativity was independent of producing useful products. I was more interested in the creative process and lifestyle. I still am. I was encouraged to go beyond the rules; deviance was accepted. Privileges come to the metagifted because of their naturally turbocharged inquisitiveness. Being psychically gifted doesn't mean you talk to dead people, but that the mindscape of your psyche is as palpably real as the external world. Most notably, there is a drive to seek meaning.
We Boomers came from varying degrees of privilege and self-indulgence with a sense of entitlement that later spawned the reactionary materialistic yuppie culture. The social pendulum was swinging as wildly as the Foucault Pendulum that greets visitors at Griffith Observatory during an LA quake. We wanted what we wanted when we wanted it, and mostly we got it -- from entertainment to consumer goods.
The Paradox of Our Times
We weren't quite sure what we were entitled to, except that the abject fear of the Cold War, the disillusionment of the Kennedy Assassination[s] and the failure of the Great Society left no compelling alternatives to living for the moment. Self-concepts were shifting at warp-speed. Guess that's what happens when Disneyland is your babysitter, a convenient place to be dropped off for hours. I proudly wore my favorite button, "Have You Been to The Paradox?" It was one of our hang outs, but a suitable sentiment. The Paradox was a 1968 folk jazz coffee house in Orange on Tustin Ave., just south of Chapman, where Steve Martin, Hoyt Axton, Jackson Browne, Jose Feliciano and other entertainers appeared.
Steve Martin’s memoir, “Born Standing Up,” describes his early days at the Bird Cage in Knott’s Berry Farm and how he turned his magic act into a comedy routine. He also played several folk music coffee houses in Orange County during the 1960s including Prison of Socrates on Balboa Island, the Mecca (another favorite haunt) in Buena Park, The Paradox in Orange, and Rouge et Noir in Seal Beach. The Golden Bear in Huntington Beach was another. No longer just folk, you could see Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young and Stephen Stills, the Doors, the Byrds, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Lenny Bruce or Janis Joplin’s acne up real close. Across the street, the Pavalon Ballroom was still rockin’.
What and where was the Paradox? You might well ask.The Paradox, which opened in 1968 gave many Orange County musicians their start. Steve Noonan, Greg Copeland, and Jackson Browne, all from Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, interned there. Jackson had already been playing Four Muses since 1966. My cousin/sister went to high school at Sunny Hills. We lived together and Jackson drove her home everyday while he was dating one of her neighborhood friends.
I went to Sunny Hills HS with Jackson Browne, '66; the late Chuck Estes, '64; Steve Noonan, '64, and Greg Copeland, '64. By coincidence, those last 2 guys have just released brand new CDs in October 2008. The best music places then were the Paradox in Orange, where these guys began. Harmony Lane was a ballroom in Anaheim, and Retail Clerk's Union Hall in Buena Park -- both used for guitar bands and dancing. Dick Dale, the Ventures and Duane Eddy dominated teen music here until 1963 or so when the Beach Boys became so famous. We'd already liked the Everly Brothers, with Bobby Hatfield from Anaheim Union High School and Bill Medley from Santa Ana HS. There was a swinging place in Newport whose name I've forgotten. In Long Beach we had Mon Ami, owned by Noonan's dad. By 1964 or 1965, we went to the Ash Grove on Melrose in LA, and while it lasted, Pandora's Box in the middle of Sunset Boulevard at Crescent Heights. Of course there were Gazzari's, the Whiskey and other places on the Sunset Strip, just west of there. Most towns then had a little coffee house where music was played and sung. Probably the finest performing musician from Sunny Hills HS in the 1960s is Greg Weisz, '67, a slide guitar and pedal steel player who's recorded with over 100 top bands and artists, and often plays on Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion". Greg is a friend of Jackson, Steve and Greg, and plays on Greg's new CD. In the 1960s, Jennifer Warne was also performing on the scene in Orange County, as well as Pamela Polland. Jackson left for New York City not too long after graduating, soon met Andy Warhol and his troupe, and soon had the chops and the songs to put out his first album, "Jackson Browne" with the famous old automobile water bag on the cover with the words, Saturate Before Using. He'd begun earlier in Los Angeles -- Echo Park, actually -- with neighbors and friends who would soon become the Eagles, and other musicians and singers. Jackson had spent the summer before his senior year in high school living with his older sister in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco. He paid his dues for almost 10 years before achieving national fame and recognition.
As both a performer at the venue and an emcee at the club’s hootenanny nights, Noonan worked with Tim Buckley, Penny Nichols, Mary McCaslin, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Jennifer Warnes, Kathy Smith, and Jimmie Spheeris as they were launching their careers.
Earl Scruggs, probably the best banjo player who ever lived, was another Paradox alumnus. He invented (or at least popularized) the threefinger picking style used in bluegrass music. He also wrote what is probably the second-most-famous banjo tune ever, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which was featured in the Bonnie and Clyde movie. He also wrote and performed the theme for The Beverly Hillbillies TV show, and appeared as a guest star on the show a number of times.
“The comedian Pat Paulson lived only a few blocks away and used to drop by regularly just to hang out. It was during this time that he became a regular on the Smothers Brothers TV Show and his fame spread far and wide as he became a perennial candidate for president. “Another regular who would stop by from time to time to just jam with other regulars after closing was Jose Feliciano. Other popular entertainers who also appeared at that time were Hoyt Axton, Brownie McGee and Sunny Terry, The New Lost City Ramblers, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, The Pair Extraordinare, Jimmy Fielder, Tony Duecy and Steve Gillette. We saw them all there, with Road Runner cartoons as the opening act. We learned to love the Paradox.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band gave its first performance at the Paradox before going on to bigger and better things including the Johnny Carson show. Some 40 years later in 2007 they received a Grammy Award. We also saw the Dirt Band at Melodyland where we were often backstage with our actress cousin, who dated some celebs. We got to meet acts like Trini Lopez, Rowan & Martin, and more. We also ran up the 405 to Hollywood all the time. Acts like Linda Ronstadt, Bobby Boris Pickett and the Righteous Brothers played award assemblies and basketball games at our high schools. It was easy to get tickets to Hollywood tapings and see The Ventures, Bobby Darin or Chuck Berry. Dick Dale was always at the Rendezvous.
Other mid-county clubs included the Plush Teen Beat Club, the Cinnamon Cinder and the Dance Mod. You’d even find rock nights, with light shows, at the Orange YMCA. The next day we'd roll boxfulls of stolen oranges down the hills at the love-in at Hillcrest Park — or, as the Register reported it, “Communist Dupe Negroes Invade Park”—or rock the whole Laguna scene of midnight concerts and the Mystic Arts. There were folk standbys: Ash Grove, Troubadour in West Hollywood and Ice House in Pasadena; also the country Palamino Club in the Valley. Like Jackie DeShannon, folk-rock was our manifesto for change.
Normal Maladjustment
In 1964, a married pair of psychologists named Snell and Gail Putney published a book called "The Adjusted American". Borrowing from a selection of previous psychologists and philosophers, the Putneys wrote that people grow and develop through candid association. They say we need one another as mirrors. We test ourselves as we express our beliefs, our feelings, our talents and skills. And in doing so, we take back, in part, the responses from our friends, even our rivals.
It's how we grow. So they said. Their son was a neighbor. Everyone knew the parents had tested all their theories on him and his sister and they were more warped than any of us. The autocrat of a local commune, he was a hot mess. The Putney's innoculated their children with their ideas. So much for the fantasies of psychologists, yet some of their basics described the common situation. The authors state:
“Thus, he imposes on himself a constant concern with what he thinks other people think he should be doing, or how other people evaluate what he has done. Such misplaced concern underlies his sense of an endless striving leading nowhere – which is approximately where his efforts do lead. No matter how hard he works at it, he will never arrive at self-acceptance by doing things to impress other people.”
Stress comes from the feeling of being under pressure from others, rather than the amount to be done. Putney and Putney extend this idea by pointing out that:
“Moreover, so long as he expends his energy in this fruitless quest, he will remain unsatisfied and tense. The American is prone to misinterpret this tension – which arises from his unfulfilled needs – and to regard it as anger, anxiety and pressure. Believing that what he wants is success, high status, popularity or prestige, he pursues these things, but the pressure never eases.” Concluding their discussion on pressure, the authors state:
“The adjusted American has learned to interpret most of his own drive as if it were external pressure, and the result is that he feels under pressure most of the time. He may defy what he believes to be pressure from others. But even if he complies with it he is likely to put up a good deal of resistance, and his enjoyment and efficiency both ebb. The things he believes are expected of him seem to stretch endlessly before him, and he may become so dispirited as to believe that he requires external pressure to accomplish anything.
With much of his energy diverted to a struggle against his own drive, he has a sense of running as hard as he can but with little progress to show for his effort. Considering the amount of internal resistance he has to overcome before he moves, perhaps it is remarkable that there is any progress at all. The autonomous alternative is to move beyond pressure by recognizing that any sense of insistent pressure is one’s own projected drive. The man who recognizes that what he feels is his own drive will neither resent nor resist the pressure; he will act.”
“The adjusted American has learned to expect intimacy only in exceptional friendships. He thus finds it only occasionally. The rest of his association is reduced to role playing in which he seeks to conceal much of himself. Even much of his intimate association is twisted toward misdirected ends as he seeks a supportive relationship rather than the open, candid relationship which could contribute to insight and self-acceptance." (Putney & Putney)
If you were lucky, like me, your parents didn't add to your futureshock overburden with personal abuse. Later in my therapeutic practice, I learned awful things I could never imagine parents can do. Now deceased, they are my family saints for what they didn't do to me as much as for what they did for me. With an eye toward a better solution, my Dad ran his Cadillacs on butane when gas was still pennies a gallon. He knew it was cleaner in the 50s and he acted on it, inventively. He organized our town's parade for Kennedy's burial and commanded the Color Guard for the grand opening of Dodger Stadium. His was a pragmatic model of common sense and service. They came from what we call the Greatest Generation, having survived The Depression and two World Wars.
Kennedy was shot when I entered high school. Months later, the Beatles hit New York like a hormonal tsunami. I was among the lucky few at the Hollywood Bowl to see but not hear them. It was deafening. The Vietnam War draft and watching our fellows' lives cut short before they began reinforced the notion of societal betrayal. No one knew what they were supposed to be fighting for except a better spot at the rock concert.
What we had been taught to expect did not materialize, except for an advancing array of suspect electronic gadgets like the "radar range," none of which actually simplified our lives or produced more free time as predicted. We hallucinated that our demographic numbers would grant us political currency. We didn't count on the undertow of conventionality on many of our peers. At least we did manage to lower the voting age to 18. You were allowed to die before you could drink. I didn't want to do either.
For the psychonauts, the natural explorers, society had failed us utterly and we escaped in the hypersphere in a quasi-spiritual quest led by a Rogue's Gallery of elder Bohemian advisers, rock stars and artists. Love, Truth & Beauty were often-elusive ideals. We all had adolescent fantasies of becoming one with Nature. We worshiped a non-existent or Hollywood-generated model of the "noble savage." We were the Savages of the Brave New World. We lived in naked awareness, spending most our time in the "snatch patch" of tiny bikinis. We instinctively knew who each other were.
We sought our survival answers in the tribal societies of the past or the East without realizing their inherent shortcomings. It's a difficult graft without the matrix of community. So, in the meanwhile, we settled for cliques and crews and drive in movies, Rendezvous Ballroom, Balboa, Newport Beach and cruising to Wolfman Jack on endless trips to the beach with smoked salmon from seaside kiosks, Melodyland, the Strip and Disneyland. You could ride a blimp, go skiing at Big Bear or skate at the Ice Palace and stay for the folk music. You could spend a day at POP or ride the Cyclone Racer at the Pike till you lost your cotton candy or go to Griffith Observatory. Or sail to Catalina overnight for abalone diving. Just watch out for the damn wild pigs.
We copied all the latest London fashions, making our own psychedelic and Indian print dresses, Russian collars, and restyling regular clothes. We also cruised the second and third hand stores in Pasadena as well as top drawer boutiques and import stores. We went on the bargain hunt in our sports cars. I was the first Flower Child in my high school, but not the first psychonaut in my family. When I got fed up with jocks uselessly asking me where to get drugs, I began offering fakes to my classmates, making experiments in the placebo effect. Surprisingly, they worked. It may have presaged my later interests in psychology and shifting realities. Or maybe I was just bored. I craved Mystery.
In some sense Life was a Wonderland. We had world-class fireworks every night. They competed with the promotional searchlights that continuously swept the skies. For all we knew a fleet of scifi UFOs could have been up there. All of LA/OC was our amusement park from the glittering Sunset Strip to Tijuana. We didn't think of it as such but Surf and then Flower Power were subcultures that shaped a California generation. California wasn't really crowded. It's just that everyone was at the beach, or in the off season, Palm Springs and The River.
The Haves and Have Knott's
Already well-traveled, when I graduated, my parents ran away from home, leaving me in the much less strict care of other family members. They hit the road, built a boat in Texas and sailed up the Mississippi. I wasn't unhappy with that situation; I preferred it. My parents knew more about life than I might have imagined at the time, so their instincts about temptations was good. Their high standards failed to mess me up emotionally, but I rebelled against their dated mores.
I was conceived in Hollywood and raised in LA's first suburb, Alhambra, next to Pasadena, a mixed bag of influences from media and the occult to the Huntington Library. As a child, I presumed Santa Claus lived in Hollywood like the rest of the celebs. But you cannot live in LA without experiencing the kind of "enrichment" small towners can only imagine. Aside from burning hills and mudslides and concrete rivers it wasn't so bad. Waking in a 4.0 earthquake was so common, it required no comment.
I graduated in the Summer of Love, and it was. We spent our time, like local Jackson Browne, "runnin' up 101" in a seemingly Endless Summer. Before we could drive, we rode the train to San Clemente for beach parties. The only bummer was the ubiquitous CHP and LAPD, about as fascist as they come. They were the "brain police." We had a jump start on the cultural revolution that rivaled the San Francisco scene. Laurel Canyon music and its connections with intelligence and shadowy characters is a story well-told in "Inside the LC: The Strange But Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation."
California's Riviera
To say we had a rich fantasy life is a gross understatement. The older we got the further we ranged until the hotbed centers merged in a drug-swapping orgy of chaotic ecstasy and disorganized crime that derailed the Peace Movement of the Folk era which gave rise to it. Maybe it all changed when Dylan plugged in his guitar. The details of the cultural revolution are oft-told tales.
Little did we know it was orchestrated long ago and far away by Fabian Socialists from Tavistock Institute who infiltrated US academia, corporations and government. We thought we were free to be our individual selves and that the ideas originated from within. That is, until we were later confronted with the haunting specter of Charlie Manson and his malignant mind control. The dream of Woodstock Nation and flower power wilted on the vine. If the 60's had not been orchestrated, surely they would have emerged anyway, because it was the Zeitgeist of the times. With society in a State of Criticality, the cultural avalanche was bound to happen.
The dream changed to that of a psychosocial "bunker" and hunkering down with roots in the "back to the earth" movement. That was spearheaded by Stuart Brand with the Whole Earth Catalog. We didn't want to be Communists, maybe cummunists, we sought collective identity and intentional community which included communal living and child rearing. We wanted to share our dream, at least, if you were under 30. Trusting anyone over 30 or in the Establishment was out of the question. They were "The Man." That didn't mean we were all trust-worthy by a long shot. The Me-Generation is still notoriously narcissistic, with a range from non-toxic, to toxic, pathological and malignant.
My first exposure to metaphysics was in the 60's. When I was a teenager for the fun of it we used to go see many of the mystics and psychics in California, land of fruits and nuts. Roadside psychics, card-readers, hypnotists and channels peppered the SoCal dreamscape. There was everything from a budding Scientology and Eckankar to a variety of personality cults and mystic schools, such as BOTA, Brotherhood of Light, and SRF. There were also the UFO buffs who either welcomed or feared the Space Brothers. We were warned every weekend at the matinee about the perils of Aliens, a thinly-veiled metaphor of Communist threat.
PARAdena
Occult celebrities cross-pollinated one another, like professional psychic Hans Holzer and master perfumer Lady Sara Cunningham-Carter, life long secretary to diva Yma Sumac. She is widely known for magical perfume and incense blends and as founder of "Church of the Eternal Source" (Egyptian Mysteries) and "First Church of Tiphareth" (Holy Qabalah) in Pasadena. She was friend and student of Israel Regardie. Her help was invaluable to me on The Magickal & Ritual Use of Perfumes. Her oil of Abramelin is a knockout. Lady Sara is also a professional psychic and has taught alchemy, creative visualization, subliminal programming and vibrational therapy. Here artwork and jewelry is sold under the Rainbow Shaman brand.
Israel Regardie, Golden Dawn magician, was personal secretary of Aleister Crowley. He was a Reichian naturopath and practiced his healing arts in LA. The notorious Bablyon Working of the OTO Agape Lodge only stopped when rocket scientist Jack Parsons mysteriously blew himself up in his lab. L. Ron Hubbard got his ideas for a personality cult from Crowley's shenanigans combined with his own scifi fantasies. Hollywood and Pasadena were hotbeds of such cults. Rosicrucians and Manly Palmer Hall are among the more widely known influences.
Somewhere between Disneyland and a CIA plot my brainwashing began. Unconventional seed ideas took root in my fertile mind and never left. Later, I would have the dubious distinction of personal encounters with many of these occulture personalities as I "Forest Gumped" my way through the decades of my life.
Like the 'Hotel California,' "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave." ...that is, at least until you become vegetarian.
[1] Terman’s views on eugenics, his support of sterilization of the unintelligent, and his advocacy of the reducing of the quotas for immigrants from eastern Europe, were …controversial. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Lewis_Terman
Category: Organizations established in 1946:
Mensa International
Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry
Harvard Department of Social Relations
Commission on Population and Development
RAND Corporation
Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
Stanford Research Institute, later SRI International is founded by Society for Psychical Research member Leland Stanford. SRI's focus areas will include communications and networks, computing, energy and the environment, pharmaceuticals and health sciences, homeland security and national defense.
SRI's DARPA-funded work was essentially making the university part of the military-industrial complex. SRI conducted studies in extraordinary human potential, remote viewing for CIA, and parapsychological research in ESP and related phenomena. In 1952, the CIA began an extensive search for, and development of exceptionally-gifted persons exhibiting perfect ESP performance.
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations is a British charity concerned with group behaviour and organisational behaviour. It was launched in 1946, when it separated from the Tavistock Clinic. The Institute was founded in 1946 by a group of key figures at the Tavistock Clinic and was funded by a grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation. Key Figure: Kurt Zadek Lewin (pronounced leVEEN) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology. Lewin is often recognized as the "founder of social psychology" and was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, commonly referred to then as the Tavistock Clinic, which was founded in 1920 in Tavistock Square in London.Tavistock's pioneer work in behavioral science along Sigmund Freudian lines of "controlling" humans established it as the world center of foundation ideology. Its network now extends from the University of Sussex to the U.S. through the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Esalen (-> George Schulz, Bechtel), MIT, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown, where State Dept. personal are trained, US Air Force Intelligence, and the Rand and Mitre corporations.
A network of secret groups, the Mont Pelerin Society, Trilateral Commission, Ditchley Foundation, and the Club of Rome is conduit for instructions to the Tavistock network. Many of the founding members of the Tavistock Institute went on to play major roles in world affairs. Brigadier John Rawlings Rees became psychiatrist to Rudolph Hess, Adolf Hitler's deputy.Ronald Hargreaves became deputy director of the World Health Organization (WHO). Tavistock Institute developed the mass brain-washing techniques which were first used experimentally on American prisoners of war in Korea. Its experiments in crowd control methods have been also widely used on the American public. Also the entire OSS program, as well as the CIA has always worked on guidelines set up by the Tavistock Institute. Included in the OSS program is also Nazi technology, later officially used for the Atomic Bomb and the NASA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Organizations_established_in_1946
Tavistock Clinic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock_Clinic
Mensa International
Roland Berrill, an Australian barrister, and Dr. Lancelot Ware, a British scientist and lawyer, founded Mensa in Oxford, United Kingdom in 1946.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International
The Odd Way Mensa Began
By Victor Serebriakoff, Hon. Pres.
Buckminster Fuller, the second Mensa President
http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~sander/mensa/serebr1.html
In this same era, CIA had a program for calling gifted students at home to encourage them into science. Naturally, they didn't say, "Hello, this is the CIA calling." They watched student science fairs for clever kids and ideas. The metagifted have more than one talent or expressive outlet. There was a state master plan for the mentally gifted, but I figured out how to derail that. I quit doing the mandatory extra credit current events reports and quit playing the game when it bored me. I was tired of doing the teachers' jobs. I jumped off the treadmill around 16. I was tired of being a guinea pig. I was still excited about learning -- what I wanted. That included experiential self-knowledge.
A lovin' spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. Many of us graduated straight from the sugar cubes for polio vaccines to more hyperdimensional sugar cubes. Vaccination was another beta test forced on us. The polio vaccine used in the United States from 1955 to 1963 has long been known to have been contaminated with a cancer-causing monkey virus. File this beta test under "Mass Murder."
While researching the mysterious death of Dr. Mary Sherman, Haslam discovered that polio vaccines created in the 1950's had been tainted with a cancer-causing virus. This Simian Virus-40 contamination, he said, was detected after half of the doses, a staggering 100 million vaccines, had been administered to an unwitting public. Allegedly, the creators of the vaccine were afraid to admit the error and subsequently distributed the remaining half of the "medicine" as well. Having studied data on cancer diagnoses,
Haslam noted that a "massive epidemic" of soft tissue cancers "erupts in the years following the polio vaccines." Making matters worse, he said, the cancer-causing virus could be transmitted sexually and has even appeared in grandchildren of people who received the compromised vaccine. See the book Dr. Mary's Monkey. Minced rhesus monkey kidney cells that were used to manufacture the polio vaccine. Soft tissue cancers were almost unknown before the introduction of the polio vaccine. It was a bio-weapon and in psyops there are no accidents. The sowing of cancer was not accidental, no more than the faked incident that started Viet Nam. Both were Boomer population control remedies.
The US government actively weaponized cancer for Boomers. The monkey viruses were radiated by a linear particular accelerator to alter the genetic components in the virus. The monkey viruses would then be injected into mice to study the developing tumors. In 1964, Dr. Mary Sherman was found brutally murdered in her apartment (she had been stabbed multiple times and her right arm and rib cage had been burnt away). This caused the medical establishment to begin looking for cancer cures right away, which were going to be needed once the recipients of the polio vaccines came of age.
Richard Nixon declared war on cancer and huge funds were made available to combat what was expected to be a future [profitable] cancer epidemic. Once the cancer causing monkey viruses were discovered via the polio vaccine, they then became objects of study by weapons makers, involved in a vendetta against the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Great efforts were made by many people in the government and the medical industry in New Orleans, Louisiana, to mutate these cancer causing monkey viruses with radiation, so that they could be used as a malignant weapon against Castro.
I didn't know I had made a lateral move from Huxley's dystopian Brave New World to his pseudo-Utopia Island, narcotized by soma. No one voted me off the Island. Unwittingly, I leapt from one psyops beta test to another, because even our rebellions were orchestrated and channelled. The ideas that became Island (1962) are revealed in a foreword he wrote in 1946 to a new edition of Brave New World:
If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and politics co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Ultilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"
I started an anonymous underground gossip sheet, The Prestige, for which I was inevitably called on the carpet of the principal's office. I don't think my cohort Anita was caught. I didn't rat her out. We wrote as Private I and Secret A. I wrote Horoscopes, or more accurately kitchy "horrorscopes." I loved reporting gossip framed by my divergent point of view. Maybe I just loved writing. I never was caught doing psychological experiments on fellow students. So I didn't stop that. Perhaps I'd crossed some victim/victimizer line.
My creativity was independent of producing useful products. I was more interested in the creative process and lifestyle. I still am. I was encouraged to go beyond the rules; deviance was accepted. Privileges come to the metagifted because of their naturally turbocharged inquisitiveness. Being psychically gifted doesn't mean you talk to dead people, but that the mindscape of your psyche is as palpably real as the external world. Most notably, there is a drive to seek meaning.
We Boomers came from varying degrees of privilege and self-indulgence with a sense of entitlement that later spawned the reactionary materialistic yuppie culture. The social pendulum was swinging as wildly as the Foucault Pendulum that greets visitors at Griffith Observatory during an LA quake. We wanted what we wanted when we wanted it, and mostly we got it -- from entertainment to consumer goods.
The Paradox of Our Times
We weren't quite sure what we were entitled to, except that the abject fear of the Cold War, the disillusionment of the Kennedy Assassination[s] and the failure of the Great Society left no compelling alternatives to living for the moment. Self-concepts were shifting at warp-speed. Guess that's what happens when Disneyland is your babysitter, a convenient place to be dropped off for hours. I proudly wore my favorite button, "Have You Been to The Paradox?" It was one of our hang outs, but a suitable sentiment. The Paradox was a 1968 folk jazz coffee house in Orange on Tustin Ave., just south of Chapman, where Steve Martin, Hoyt Axton, Jackson Browne, Jose Feliciano and other entertainers appeared.
Steve Martin’s memoir, “Born Standing Up,” describes his early days at the Bird Cage in Knott’s Berry Farm and how he turned his magic act into a comedy routine. He also played several folk music coffee houses in Orange County during the 1960s including Prison of Socrates on Balboa Island, the Mecca (another favorite haunt) in Buena Park, The Paradox in Orange, and Rouge et Noir in Seal Beach. The Golden Bear in Huntington Beach was another. No longer just folk, you could see Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young and Stephen Stills, the Doors, the Byrds, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Lenny Bruce or Janis Joplin’s acne up real close. Across the street, the Pavalon Ballroom was still rockin’.
What and where was the Paradox? You might well ask.The Paradox, which opened in 1968 gave many Orange County musicians their start. Steve Noonan, Greg Copeland, and Jackson Browne, all from Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, interned there. Jackson had already been playing Four Muses since 1966. My cousin/sister went to high school at Sunny Hills. We lived together and Jackson drove her home everyday while he was dating one of her neighborhood friends.
I went to Sunny Hills HS with Jackson Browne, '66; the late Chuck Estes, '64; Steve Noonan, '64, and Greg Copeland, '64. By coincidence, those last 2 guys have just released brand new CDs in October 2008. The best music places then were the Paradox in Orange, where these guys began. Harmony Lane was a ballroom in Anaheim, and Retail Clerk's Union Hall in Buena Park -- both used for guitar bands and dancing. Dick Dale, the Ventures and Duane Eddy dominated teen music here until 1963 or so when the Beach Boys became so famous. We'd already liked the Everly Brothers, with Bobby Hatfield from Anaheim Union High School and Bill Medley from Santa Ana HS. There was a swinging place in Newport whose name I've forgotten. In Long Beach we had Mon Ami, owned by Noonan's dad. By 1964 or 1965, we went to the Ash Grove on Melrose in LA, and while it lasted, Pandora's Box in the middle of Sunset Boulevard at Crescent Heights. Of course there were Gazzari's, the Whiskey and other places on the Sunset Strip, just west of there. Most towns then had a little coffee house where music was played and sung. Probably the finest performing musician from Sunny Hills HS in the 1960s is Greg Weisz, '67, a slide guitar and pedal steel player who's recorded with over 100 top bands and artists, and often plays on Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion". Greg is a friend of Jackson, Steve and Greg, and plays on Greg's new CD. In the 1960s, Jennifer Warne was also performing on the scene in Orange County, as well as Pamela Polland. Jackson left for New York City not too long after graduating, soon met Andy Warhol and his troupe, and soon had the chops and the songs to put out his first album, "Jackson Browne" with the famous old automobile water bag on the cover with the words, Saturate Before Using. He'd begun earlier in Los Angeles -- Echo Park, actually -- with neighbors and friends who would soon become the Eagles, and other musicians and singers. Jackson had spent the summer before his senior year in high school living with his older sister in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco. He paid his dues for almost 10 years before achieving national fame and recognition.
As both a performer at the venue and an emcee at the club’s hootenanny nights, Noonan worked with Tim Buckley, Penny Nichols, Mary McCaslin, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Jennifer Warnes, Kathy Smith, and Jimmie Spheeris as they were launching their careers.
Earl Scruggs, probably the best banjo player who ever lived, was another Paradox alumnus. He invented (or at least popularized) the threefinger picking style used in bluegrass music. He also wrote what is probably the second-most-famous banjo tune ever, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which was featured in the Bonnie and Clyde movie. He also wrote and performed the theme for The Beverly Hillbillies TV show, and appeared as a guest star on the show a number of times.
“The comedian Pat Paulson lived only a few blocks away and used to drop by regularly just to hang out. It was during this time that he became a regular on the Smothers Brothers TV Show and his fame spread far and wide as he became a perennial candidate for president. “Another regular who would stop by from time to time to just jam with other regulars after closing was Jose Feliciano. Other popular entertainers who also appeared at that time were Hoyt Axton, Brownie McGee and Sunny Terry, The New Lost City Ramblers, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, The Pair Extraordinare, Jimmy Fielder, Tony Duecy and Steve Gillette. We saw them all there, with Road Runner cartoons as the opening act. We learned to love the Paradox.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band gave its first performance at the Paradox before going on to bigger and better things including the Johnny Carson show. Some 40 years later in 2007 they received a Grammy Award. We also saw the Dirt Band at Melodyland where we were often backstage with our actress cousin, who dated some celebs. We got to meet acts like Trini Lopez, Rowan & Martin, and more. We also ran up the 405 to Hollywood all the time. Acts like Linda Ronstadt, Bobby Boris Pickett and the Righteous Brothers played award assemblies and basketball games at our high schools. It was easy to get tickets to Hollywood tapings and see The Ventures, Bobby Darin or Chuck Berry. Dick Dale was always at the Rendezvous.
Other mid-county clubs included the Plush Teen Beat Club, the Cinnamon Cinder and the Dance Mod. You’d even find rock nights, with light shows, at the Orange YMCA. The next day we'd roll boxfulls of stolen oranges down the hills at the love-in at Hillcrest Park — or, as the Register reported it, “Communist Dupe Negroes Invade Park”—or rock the whole Laguna scene of midnight concerts and the Mystic Arts. There were folk standbys: Ash Grove, Troubadour in West Hollywood and Ice House in Pasadena; also the country Palamino Club in the Valley. Like Jackie DeShannon, folk-rock was our manifesto for change.
Normal Maladjustment
In 1964, a married pair of psychologists named Snell and Gail Putney published a book called "The Adjusted American". Borrowing from a selection of previous psychologists and philosophers, the Putneys wrote that people grow and develop through candid association. They say we need one another as mirrors. We test ourselves as we express our beliefs, our feelings, our talents and skills. And in doing so, we take back, in part, the responses from our friends, even our rivals.
It's how we grow. So they said. Their son was a neighbor. Everyone knew the parents had tested all their theories on him and his sister and they were more warped than any of us. The autocrat of a local commune, he was a hot mess. The Putney's innoculated their children with their ideas. So much for the fantasies of psychologists, yet some of their basics described the common situation. The authors state:
“Thus, he imposes on himself a constant concern with what he thinks other people think he should be doing, or how other people evaluate what he has done. Such misplaced concern underlies his sense of an endless striving leading nowhere – which is approximately where his efforts do lead. No matter how hard he works at it, he will never arrive at self-acceptance by doing things to impress other people.”
Stress comes from the feeling of being under pressure from others, rather than the amount to be done. Putney and Putney extend this idea by pointing out that:
“Moreover, so long as he expends his energy in this fruitless quest, he will remain unsatisfied and tense. The American is prone to misinterpret this tension – which arises from his unfulfilled needs – and to regard it as anger, anxiety and pressure. Believing that what he wants is success, high status, popularity or prestige, he pursues these things, but the pressure never eases.” Concluding their discussion on pressure, the authors state:
“The adjusted American has learned to interpret most of his own drive as if it were external pressure, and the result is that he feels under pressure most of the time. He may defy what he believes to be pressure from others. But even if he complies with it he is likely to put up a good deal of resistance, and his enjoyment and efficiency both ebb. The things he believes are expected of him seem to stretch endlessly before him, and he may become so dispirited as to believe that he requires external pressure to accomplish anything.
With much of his energy diverted to a struggle against his own drive, he has a sense of running as hard as he can but with little progress to show for his effort. Considering the amount of internal resistance he has to overcome before he moves, perhaps it is remarkable that there is any progress at all. The autonomous alternative is to move beyond pressure by recognizing that any sense of insistent pressure is one’s own projected drive. The man who recognizes that what he feels is his own drive will neither resent nor resist the pressure; he will act.”
“The adjusted American has learned to expect intimacy only in exceptional friendships. He thus finds it only occasionally. The rest of his association is reduced to role playing in which he seeks to conceal much of himself. Even much of his intimate association is twisted toward misdirected ends as he seeks a supportive relationship rather than the open, candid relationship which could contribute to insight and self-acceptance." (Putney & Putney)
If you were lucky, like me, your parents didn't add to your futureshock overburden with personal abuse. Later in my therapeutic practice, I learned awful things I could never imagine parents can do. Now deceased, they are my family saints for what they didn't do to me as much as for what they did for me. With an eye toward a better solution, my Dad ran his Cadillacs on butane when gas was still pennies a gallon. He knew it was cleaner in the 50s and he acted on it, inventively. He organized our town's parade for Kennedy's burial and commanded the Color Guard for the grand opening of Dodger Stadium. His was a pragmatic model of common sense and service. They came from what we call the Greatest Generation, having survived The Depression and two World Wars.
Kennedy was shot when I entered high school. Months later, the Beatles hit New York like a hormonal tsunami. I was among the lucky few at the Hollywood Bowl to see but not hear them. It was deafening. The Vietnam War draft and watching our fellows' lives cut short before they began reinforced the notion of societal betrayal. No one knew what they were supposed to be fighting for except a better spot at the rock concert.
What we had been taught to expect did not materialize, except for an advancing array of suspect electronic gadgets like the "radar range," none of which actually simplified our lives or produced more free time as predicted. We hallucinated that our demographic numbers would grant us political currency. We didn't count on the undertow of conventionality on many of our peers. At least we did manage to lower the voting age to 18. You were allowed to die before you could drink. I didn't want to do either.
For the psychonauts, the natural explorers, society had failed us utterly and we escaped in the hypersphere in a quasi-spiritual quest led by a Rogue's Gallery of elder Bohemian advisers, rock stars and artists. Love, Truth & Beauty were often-elusive ideals. We all had adolescent fantasies of becoming one with Nature. We worshiped a non-existent or Hollywood-generated model of the "noble savage." We were the Savages of the Brave New World. We lived in naked awareness, spending most our time in the "snatch patch" of tiny bikinis. We instinctively knew who each other were.
We sought our survival answers in the tribal societies of the past or the East without realizing their inherent shortcomings. It's a difficult graft without the matrix of community. So, in the meanwhile, we settled for cliques and crews and drive in movies, Rendezvous Ballroom, Balboa, Newport Beach and cruising to Wolfman Jack on endless trips to the beach with smoked salmon from seaside kiosks, Melodyland, the Strip and Disneyland. You could ride a blimp, go skiing at Big Bear or skate at the Ice Palace and stay for the folk music. You could spend a day at POP or ride the Cyclone Racer at the Pike till you lost your cotton candy or go to Griffith Observatory. Or sail to Catalina overnight for abalone diving. Just watch out for the damn wild pigs.
We copied all the latest London fashions, making our own psychedelic and Indian print dresses, Russian collars, and restyling regular clothes. We also cruised the second and third hand stores in Pasadena as well as top drawer boutiques and import stores. We went on the bargain hunt in our sports cars. I was the first Flower Child in my high school, but not the first psychonaut in my family. When I got fed up with jocks uselessly asking me where to get drugs, I began offering fakes to my classmates, making experiments in the placebo effect. Surprisingly, they worked. It may have presaged my later interests in psychology and shifting realities. Or maybe I was just bored. I craved Mystery.
In some sense Life was a Wonderland. We had world-class fireworks every night. They competed with the promotional searchlights that continuously swept the skies. For all we knew a fleet of scifi UFOs could have been up there. All of LA/OC was our amusement park from the glittering Sunset Strip to Tijuana. We didn't think of it as such but Surf and then Flower Power were subcultures that shaped a California generation. California wasn't really crowded. It's just that everyone was at the beach, or in the off season, Palm Springs and The River.
The Haves and Have Knott's
Already well-traveled, when I graduated, my parents ran away from home, leaving me in the much less strict care of other family members. They hit the road, built a boat in Texas and sailed up the Mississippi. I wasn't unhappy with that situation; I preferred it. My parents knew more about life than I might have imagined at the time, so their instincts about temptations was good. Their high standards failed to mess me up emotionally, but I rebelled against their dated mores.
I was conceived in Hollywood and raised in LA's first suburb, Alhambra, next to Pasadena, a mixed bag of influences from media and the occult to the Huntington Library. As a child, I presumed Santa Claus lived in Hollywood like the rest of the celebs. But you cannot live in LA without experiencing the kind of "enrichment" small towners can only imagine. Aside from burning hills and mudslides and concrete rivers it wasn't so bad. Waking in a 4.0 earthquake was so common, it required no comment.
I graduated in the Summer of Love, and it was. We spent our time, like local Jackson Browne, "runnin' up 101" in a seemingly Endless Summer. Before we could drive, we rode the train to San Clemente for beach parties. The only bummer was the ubiquitous CHP and LAPD, about as fascist as they come. They were the "brain police." We had a jump start on the cultural revolution that rivaled the San Francisco scene. Laurel Canyon music and its connections with intelligence and shadowy characters is a story well-told in "Inside the LC: The Strange But Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation."
California's Riviera
To say we had a rich fantasy life is a gross understatement. The older we got the further we ranged until the hotbed centers merged in a drug-swapping orgy of chaotic ecstasy and disorganized crime that derailed the Peace Movement of the Folk era which gave rise to it. Maybe it all changed when Dylan plugged in his guitar. The details of the cultural revolution are oft-told tales.
Little did we know it was orchestrated long ago and far away by Fabian Socialists from Tavistock Institute who infiltrated US academia, corporations and government. We thought we were free to be our individual selves and that the ideas originated from within. That is, until we were later confronted with the haunting specter of Charlie Manson and his malignant mind control. The dream of Woodstock Nation and flower power wilted on the vine. If the 60's had not been orchestrated, surely they would have emerged anyway, because it was the Zeitgeist of the times. With society in a State of Criticality, the cultural avalanche was bound to happen.
The dream changed to that of a psychosocial "bunker" and hunkering down with roots in the "back to the earth" movement. That was spearheaded by Stuart Brand with the Whole Earth Catalog. We didn't want to be Communists, maybe cummunists, we sought collective identity and intentional community which included communal living and child rearing. We wanted to share our dream, at least, if you were under 30. Trusting anyone over 30 or in the Establishment was out of the question. They were "The Man." That didn't mean we were all trust-worthy by a long shot. The Me-Generation is still notoriously narcissistic, with a range from non-toxic, to toxic, pathological and malignant.
My first exposure to metaphysics was in the 60's. When I was a teenager for the fun of it we used to go see many of the mystics and psychics in California, land of fruits and nuts. Roadside psychics, card-readers, hypnotists and channels peppered the SoCal dreamscape. There was everything from a budding Scientology and Eckankar to a variety of personality cults and mystic schools, such as BOTA, Brotherhood of Light, and SRF. There were also the UFO buffs who either welcomed or feared the Space Brothers. We were warned every weekend at the matinee about the perils of Aliens, a thinly-veiled metaphor of Communist threat.
PARAdena
Occult celebrities cross-pollinated one another, like professional psychic Hans Holzer and master perfumer Lady Sara Cunningham-Carter, life long secretary to diva Yma Sumac. She is widely known for magical perfume and incense blends and as founder of "Church of the Eternal Source" (Egyptian Mysteries) and "First Church of Tiphareth" (Holy Qabalah) in Pasadena. She was friend and student of Israel Regardie. Her help was invaluable to me on The Magickal & Ritual Use of Perfumes. Her oil of Abramelin is a knockout. Lady Sara is also a professional psychic and has taught alchemy, creative visualization, subliminal programming and vibrational therapy. Here artwork and jewelry is sold under the Rainbow Shaman brand.
Israel Regardie, Golden Dawn magician, was personal secretary of Aleister Crowley. He was a Reichian naturopath and practiced his healing arts in LA. The notorious Bablyon Working of the OTO Agape Lodge only stopped when rocket scientist Jack Parsons mysteriously blew himself up in his lab. L. Ron Hubbard got his ideas for a personality cult from Crowley's shenanigans combined with his own scifi fantasies. Hollywood and Pasadena were hotbeds of such cults. Rosicrucians and Manly Palmer Hall are among the more widely known influences.
Somewhere between Disneyland and a CIA plot my brainwashing began. Unconventional seed ideas took root in my fertile mind and never left. Later, I would have the dubious distinction of personal encounters with many of these occulture personalities as I "Forest Gumped" my way through the decades of my life.
Like the 'Hotel California,' "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave." ...that is, at least until you become vegetarian.
[1] Terman’s views on eugenics, his support of sterilization of the unintelligent, and his advocacy of the reducing of the quotas for immigrants from eastern Europe, were …controversial. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Lewis_Terman
Category: Organizations established in 1946:
Mensa International
Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry
Harvard Department of Social Relations
Commission on Population and Development
RAND Corporation
Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
Stanford Research Institute, later SRI International is founded by Society for Psychical Research member Leland Stanford. SRI's focus areas will include communications and networks, computing, energy and the environment, pharmaceuticals and health sciences, homeland security and national defense.
SRI's DARPA-funded work was essentially making the university part of the military-industrial complex. SRI conducted studies in extraordinary human potential, remote viewing for CIA, and parapsychological research in ESP and related phenomena. In 1952, the CIA began an extensive search for, and development of exceptionally-gifted persons exhibiting perfect ESP performance.
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations is a British charity concerned with group behaviour and organisational behaviour. It was launched in 1946, when it separated from the Tavistock Clinic. The Institute was founded in 1946 by a group of key figures at the Tavistock Clinic and was funded by a grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation. Key Figure: Kurt Zadek Lewin (pronounced leVEEN) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology. Lewin is often recognized as the "founder of social psychology" and was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, commonly referred to then as the Tavistock Clinic, which was founded in 1920 in Tavistock Square in London.Tavistock's pioneer work in behavioral science along Sigmund Freudian lines of "controlling" humans established it as the world center of foundation ideology. Its network now extends from the University of Sussex to the U.S. through the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Esalen (-> George Schulz, Bechtel), MIT, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown, where State Dept. personal are trained, US Air Force Intelligence, and the Rand and Mitre corporations.
A network of secret groups, the Mont Pelerin Society, Trilateral Commission, Ditchley Foundation, and the Club of Rome is conduit for instructions to the Tavistock network. Many of the founding members of the Tavistock Institute went on to play major roles in world affairs. Brigadier John Rawlings Rees became psychiatrist to Rudolph Hess, Adolf Hitler's deputy.Ronald Hargreaves became deputy director of the World Health Organization (WHO). Tavistock Institute developed the mass brain-washing techniques which were first used experimentally on American prisoners of war in Korea. Its experiments in crowd control methods have been also widely used on the American public. Also the entire OSS program, as well as the CIA has always worked on guidelines set up by the Tavistock Institute. Included in the OSS program is also Nazi technology, later officially used for the Atomic Bomb and the NASA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Organizations_established_in_1946
Tavistock Clinic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock_Clinic
Mensa International
Roland Berrill, an Australian barrister, and Dr. Lancelot Ware, a British scientist and lawyer, founded Mensa in Oxford, United Kingdom in 1946.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International
The Odd Way Mensa Began
By Victor Serebriakoff, Hon. Pres.
Buckminster Fuller, the second Mensa President
http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~sander/mensa/serebr1.html
