Douglas Mercer
November 3 2024
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world and the paragon of animals—Shakespeare
Become who you are—Pindar
In the 1960s and 1970s a constellation of New Age movements suddenly appeared on the American cultural scene including Encounter Groups (also known at T Groups or Sensitivity Training Groups, or Human Relation groups) in which a group of people meet face to face and converse using feedback, role playing, and problem solving, Carl Rogers called Encounter Groups the most significant social invention of the century and these groups which were seen to be a form of psychodrama therapy sprung from the National Training Laboratories which had been created by the Office Of Naval Research (note: Psychodrama is an action method, often used as a psychotherapy in which clients use spontaneous dramatization, role playing and dramatic self presentation to investigate and gain insight into their lives); EST was a series of seminars founded by Werner Erhard a former Mind Dynamics Employee, the seminars had the goals of freeing the participants from the negative patterns of the past, some accused EST of engaging in mind control and creating an authoritarian army, or of being a cult; Scientology is an organization dedicated to the beliefs and practices of science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard in which the participants audit (ie, process) themselves with an end goal state which they call clear; the Process Church Of The Final Judgment (formerly Compulsion Analysis) was a British based organization dedicated to a neo-Gnostic philosophy which believed there was a single Creator and focused on issues of processing or auditing (note: the German word for trial is prozess), the word process has become a therapeutic buzz word for working out an in issue within one’s own mind; primal scream therapy was created by Arthur Janov in the 1970s and encouraged participants to purge trauma and negative memories though crying and screaming; in 1970 American theosophist David Spangler moved to the Findhorn Foundation, where he developed the fundamental idea of the New Age movement. He believed that the release of new waves of spiritual energy, signaled by certain astrological changes (e.g., the movement of the Earth into a new cycle known as the Age of Aquarius), had initiated the coming of the New Age. He further suggested that people use this new energy to make manifest the New Age; the 100th-monkey idea led to a series of mass gatherings beginning with the Harmonic Convergence, which was a set of coordinated gatherings of people at various places around the world on August 16–17, 1987 that was designed to bring about a leap in human consciousness; The hundredth monkey effect was popularized in the mid-to-late 1970s by Lyall Watson specifying that it is an esoteric idea claiming that a new behavior or idea is spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behavior or acknowledge the new idea. The behavior was said to propagate even to groups that are physically separated and have no apparent means of communicating with each other.
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behavior of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road,
Likewise in the 1970s William Pierce founded his church called Cosmotheism which was dedicated to the proposition that the Aryan Race was on a special path upwards to the stars, and that the creator’s purpose was the Aryan Race's purpose, which was to assist the creator in the process of its self-completion, and so become gods ourselves.
Sometime in the 1960s Timothy Leary encouraged participants to operate their own brain even though there was no user’s manual; Orgone energy as Dr. Reich discovered was synonymous with life energy, long postulated by scientists and accepted as fact by ordinary people around the world. Orgone energy could be gathered in its free form directly from the atmosphere using a device he later called The Orgone Accumulator or Orgone Box—some psychotherapists and psychologists practicing various kind of body psychotherapy or somatic psychology have continued to use this proposal of emotional-release and character analysis ideas; a Skinner Box or isolation chamber is a box with a button which studies behavior in compressed time frames: commentators have drawn parallels between the Skinner box and modern advertising and game design, citing their addictive qualities and systematized rewards; brainwashing techniques became an obsession of the United States government after hostage videos emanated from Korea in the 1950s: the Macy Conferences were a series of interdisciplinary meeting held in New York City between 1941 and 1960 and were sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation, the conference were aimed to lay a new groundwork for the then emerging domain or space of cybernetics, cyber is a Greek for for helmsman or steerer or pilot or controller.
Pelgagius was an ascetic philosopher from England (355AD to 420AD) who rejected the notion of original sin and who held that man was born blameless, that nothing was impossible, that man had free will and could act in accordance with this will to lead impeccable and unimpeachable lives approaching perfection.
Pico de la Mirandola (1463 1469) was a philosopher who wrote a treatise called the Oration On The Dignity of Man which emphasized man’s infinite ability and the possibility for great achievements through hard work and diligence; Pico's Oration attempted to create the human landscape to center all attention on human capacity and human perspective. Arriving in a place near Florence, he taught the amazing capacity of human achievement. Pico himself had a massive intellect and studied everything there was to be studied in the university curriculum of the Renaissance; the Oration in part is meant to be a preface to a massive compendium of all the intellectual achievements of humanity, a compendium that never appeared because of Pico's early death. It is supposed that Shakespeare cribbed from Pico in Hamlet’s speech about man being a piece of work. Joyce references Pico when he has Stephen musing to himself on the beach use the word Mirandola-like as a subrefernce to his name being Dedalus. Pico’s belief in the perfectibility of man has always been deemed heresy by the church of Jesus Christ (see The Heart Of Nature, White Biocentrism, September 25 2024).
Man is the measure of all things.
The Esalen Institute, commonly called Esalen, is a non-profit American retreat center and intentional community in Big Sur, California which focuses on humanistic alternative education. The institute played a key role in the human potential movement beginning in the 1960s. Its innovative use of encounter groups, a focus on the mind-body connection, and their ongoing experimentation in personal awareness introduced many ideas that later became mainstream in the United States. Esalen was founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962. Their intention was to support alternative methods for exploring human consciousness, what Aldous Huxley described as human potentialities. Over the next few years Esalen became the center of beliefs which taken together would form the world-view of the New Age Movement, from Eastern philosophy and religions to alternative medicine, mind-body interventions ranging the gamut from transpersonal therapy to Gestalt practice. As of today Esalen touts itself by saying that since its inception in 1962, the institute has been a destination and laboratory for leading-edge artists, intellectuals, and seekers to explore human potential, foster personal growth, and integrate a variety of spiritual, psychological, and somatic ideas and theories. As such, there are some truly excellent stories to be told about past discoveries, present explorations, and future ambitions. These legacies serve as a testament to the positive influence Esalen has had and will continue to have in the present and for generations to come. We tell stories because we are human but we are also made more human because we tell stories.
The University Of California at Santa Cruz has a program called the History Of Consciousness which offers a Ph.D. that operates at the intersection of established and emergent disciplines and fields, acquainting students with leading intellectual trends in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Intellectual projects are problem based and draw upon diverse theoretical approaches. he program was started in 1965, during the first year of the Santa Cruz campus, in a rather informal manner.
The first chapter of every introductory book in psychology will be titled Memory and Learning.
Learning is a relatively permanent change in a behavioral potentiality that that occurs as a result of reinforced practice.
Neurophysiologist and educator Dr. Carla Hannaford brings the latest insights from scientific research to questions that affect learners of all ages. Examining the body's role in learning, from infancy through adulthood she presents the mounting scientific evidence that movement is crucial to learning. Dr. Hannaford offers clear alternatives and remedies that people can put into practice right away to make a real difference in their ability to learn. She advocates more enlightened educational practices for homes and schools including: a more holistic view of each learner; less emphasis on rote learning; more experiential, active instruction.
Creativity is the ability to form novel and valuable ideas or works using your imagination. Products of creativity may be intangible (e.g., an idea, a scientific theory, a literary work, or a musical composition). Creativity may also describe the ability to find new solutions to problems, or new methods of performing a task or reaching a goal. Creativity, therefore, enables people to solve problems in new or innovative ways.
A flow state is defined as mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in the activity, is hyper conscious but with no self-consciousness, as when you are on the road and you end up in your driveway with no recollection of the drive but there you are safe and sound. Athletes speak of being in the zone, when a basketball player makes shot after shot he is said to be out or off his head, having shot the eyes out of the basket. Flow states involve total absorption in and concentration on the activity one is undergoing with the result of a lack of self awareness and a distortion of time. The concept comes from field research in the field of positive psychology.
The Human Potential Movement (HPM) arose out of the counterculture of the 1960s and formed around the concept of an extra an extraordinary potential that its advocates believed to lie largely untapped in human beings. The movement takes as its premise the belief that the development of their human potential can contribute to a life of increased creativity and fulfillment and as a result such people will be more likely to unfold or realize their potential. Adherents believe that the collective effect of individuals cultivating their own potential will be positive change in the world.
The Human Potential Movement has much in common with the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow worked out at mid century including the latter’s notion of self-realization or self-actualizing.
When a brainwashed subject is triggered for his moment he is said to be activated.
During the course of his research, Leonard met Michael Murphy the co-founder of nascent Esalen Institue (established in 1962) that at the time was running educational programs for adults on the topic of human potentialities. Leonard and Murphy became close friends and together put forth the idea that there should be a human potential movement. Esalen founded in 1962 primarily as a center for the study and development of human potential, and some people continue to regard Esalen as the geographical center of the movement today. Aldous Huxley gave lectures on the Human Potential at Esalen in the early 1960s. His writings and lectures on the mystical dimensions of psychedelics and on what he called the perennial philosophy were foundational. Moreover, his call for an institution that could teach the development of the human potentialities functioned as the working mission statement of early Esalen.
We know what we are but not what we may be.
In the movie The German Doctor the actor playing Josef Mengele shows his young charge the mysteries of blood. He says that the mixing of blood impairs memory and that we need to recall who we were so can be who we are or anything we want to be. The young girls asks him who we were and he says with a solemnity befitting the occasion the single word: sonnenmenschen.
Sonnenmenschen were solar humans living in Hyperborea who were revered and cultivated by the Thule Society.
Man walks a tightrope between nature and eternity.
Imagination is the process of producing images. Visualization is the belief that one can create images in the mind’s eye and so manifest them in reality, as if reality were an interactive game. Carl Jung believed that the history of the world could be altered in the future if someone wanted it badly enough and had an excess of emotion, as if one were to focus so exclusively on one’s star that eventually it would burst forth in the world’s sky.
Norman Vincent Peale put forth the notion of the power of positive thinking, that no sooner could a thing be thought of than had.
It is a bromide of human relations posters that the only limit is one’s imagination but this is putting the cart before the horse; plenty of people have taken LSD-25 and in the mistaken idea that they are golden gods have leapt from rooftops in order to fly; generally it takes less than a second to disabuse them of this odd notion.
The brain is a machine with an infinite clearing capacity; as such human potential is likewise infinite. That is we have a nature but the point of learning is to leave nature behind into our known density; this will happen when one is mature (nature/mature 155/156).
What is man but the quintessence of dust?
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Notes:
We believe that the future is what we make it. We believe that we, as free and conscious agents, have an absolute responsibility for all those elements of the world around us over which we are capable of exercising control: for the structure of our society and its institutions; for the beauty and cleanliness of both our natural and man-made environments; for the cultural and moral climate in which we live and work; for the military and geo-political status of our nation relative to the other nations of the earth; and, most of all, for the racial quality of the coming generations of our people--William Pierce
Human Potential
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Douglas Mercer
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