THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY

PERSONAL AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE 1980s

THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY

THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY

BY MARILYN FERGUSON

Foreword by Max Lerner

First published in Great Britain in 1981 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
39 Store Street, London WC1E 7DD and
Broadway House, Newtown Road,
Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 1EN
Printed in Great Britain by
Unwin Bros Ltd, Gresham Press, Old Woking, Surrey
Copyright © 1980 by Marilyn Ferguson
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism
ISBN 0-7100-0829-5

For Eric, Kris, and Lynn

Time, events, or the unaided individual action of the mind will sometimes undermine or destroy an opinion without any outward sign of change. . . . No conspiracy has been formed to make war on it, but its followers one by one noiselessly secede. As its opponents remain mute or only interchange their thoughts by stealth, they are themselves unaware for a long period that a great revolution has actually been effected.

-ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

Foreword

by MAX LERNER

Now, with The Aquarian Conspiracy, she has written a book on the transformation of our consciousness that will itself leave a mark on the consciousness of our time.

Marilyn Ferguson is the best reporter today on the farther reaches of investigation into the life and human sciences. She represents a new kind of investigative journalist—not a sleuth after the corruptions of a politician but one tracking the spoor of a new research idea in all its windings; following it to its sources and its affinities in allied fields, its conclusions, its implications for the whole spectrum of human thought and consciousness.

She has had the courage to undertake this book as a participant-observer of the transformative process. Setting out to shed some light on the riddle of intelligence, she got ensnared by the mysteries and revelations of brain research, reached out to every discipline radiating from it—and was never the same again.

She has proven to be a whirlwind of information, thought, and activity, a whole exploratory "network" in herself.

Houston or Princeton, then back to San Francisco or San Diego. She lives on conferences, programs, and discussions as the rest of us live on protein and carbohydrates. Her observation post is in every auditorium, her garrison on every university campus, her spies in every little consciousness group and every laboratory.

It is news that we are in the midst of a knowledge revolution that shows signs of breakthrough: that researchers in the human sciences are moving independently in converging lines toward common targets; that they are discarding traditional models of the cosmos and ourselves—of the nature of nature and the nature of human nature—and reaching for new ones; that they have been spurred on by recent work on the brain hemispheres, on molecular biology, and biochemistry, on the genetic code, on primatology and ethnology, on biofeedback and altered states of consciousness, on medicine and psychotherapies, on archaelogy and astronomy, on the evolutionary process, on the structure of language and the nature of meaning, on leadership and power, and on the governance of peoples and nations.

A final word about the book's mood. I have for some time

Amidst the prevailing gloom the news the author brings us is of an open human nature in an open universe. Like the work of the people it describes, this is a book drenched in sunlight.

years during an often trying period.

sistant, for her friendship and liaison.

Introduction

In the early 1970s, while researching a book about the brain and consciousness, I was deeply impressed by scientific findings demonstrating human capacities well beyond our idea of "the norm." At that time the social implications of this research were essentially unexamined in science and unknown to the public. The research was specialized, scattered through many disciplines, technically written, and published two or three years after the fact in journals that circulate primarily to specialty libraries.

While science, in its objective fashion, was generating surprising data about human nature and the nature of reality, I saw that hundreds of thousands of individuals were coming upon subjective surprises of their own. Through systematic explorations of conscious experience, using a variety of methods, they were discovering such phenomena of mind as accelerated learning, expanded awareness, the power of internal imagery for healing and problem solving, and the capacity to recover buried memories; insights from these explorations changed their values and relationships. They were reaching out now for any information that would help them make sense of their experiences.

The newsletter was a lightning rod for energy I had greatly underestimated. The immediate response—an avalanche of articles, correspondence, and calls—confirmed that rapidly growing numbers of people were exploring new territory, both in radical science and radical experience. As I traveled around the country, lecturing and covering conferences, I found these pioneers everywhere. And the new perspectives were being put to work. The social activism of the 1960s and the "consciousness revolution" of the early 1970s seemed to be moving toward a historic synthesis: social transformation resulting from personal transformation—change from the inside out.

In January, 1976, I published an editorial, "The Movement

That Has No Name." It said, in part

struck by the indefinable quality of the Zeitgeist.

Within recent history "it" has infected medicine, education, social science, hard science, even government with its implications. It is characterized by fluid organizations reluctant to create hierarchical structures, averse to dogma. It operates on the principle that change can only be facilitated, not decreed. It is short on manifestos. It seems to speak to something very old. And perhaps, by integrating magic and science, art and technology, it will succeed where all the king's horses and all the king's men failed.

Perhaps, I wrote, the indefinable force is an idea whose time has come, and it is robust enough now to be named. Yet how could one characterize this groundswell?

The reader response to the editorial and the requests from other journals for permission to reprint it confirmed that many were sensing and seeing the same forces.

Months later, while outlining a not-yet-titled book about the emerging social alternatives, I thought again about the peculiar form of this movement: its atypical leadership, the patient intensity of its adherents, their unlikely successes. It suddenly struck me that in their sharing of strategies, their linkage, and their recognition of each other by subtle signals, the participants were not merely cooperating with one another. They were in collusion. "It"—this movement—was a conspiracy!

At first I was reluctant to use the term. I didn't want to sensationalize what was happening, and the word conspiracy usually has negative associations. Then I came across a book of spiritual exercises in which the Greek novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis, said he wished to signal his comrades, "like conspirators," that they might unite for the sake of the earth. The next day the Los Angeles Times carried an account of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's speech to the United Nations Habitat Conference in Vancouver; Trudeau quoted from a passage in which the French scientist-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin urged a "conspiracy of love."

addressed correspondence to me "c/o The Aquarian Conspiracy." The label seemed fitting for the solidarity and intrigue of the movement.

As its networks grew, the conspiracy became truer with every passing week. Groups seemed to be organizing spontaneously all over the country and abroad. In their announcements and internal communications, they expressed the same conviction: "We are in the midst of a great transformation..." "In this period of cultural awakening..." Conspirators connected me with other conspirators: politicians, stewards of corporate or private wealth, celebrities, professionals trying to change their professions, and "ordinary" people accomplishing miracles of social change. These, in turn, put me in touch with still others and their networks.

Help came in many forms: research assistance, leads, privately circulated papers, books and articles, expertise, critiques of the manuscript in its various drafts, encouragement, assistance in uncovering the rich history of the transformative vision. Those who helped wanted nothing in the way of recognition; they only wanted others to feel what they have felt, to glimpse our collective potential.

^*The questionnaire is summarized in Appendix A.

-- WALLACE STEVENS

This network is the Aquarian Conspiracy. It is a conspiracy without a political doctrine. Without a manifesto. With conspirators who seek power only to disperse it, and whose strategies are pragmatic, even scientific, but whose perspective sounds so mystical that they hesitate to discuss it. Activists asking different kinds of questions, challenging the establishment from within.

There are legions of conspirators. They are in corporations, universities and hospitals, on the faculties of public schools, in factories and doctors' offices, in state and federal agencies, on city councils and the White House staff, in state legislatures, in volunteer organizations, in virtually all arenas of policy-making in the country.

Whatever their station or sophistication, the conspirators are linked, made kindred by their inner discoveries and earthquakes. You can break through old limits, past inertia and fear, to levels of fulfillment that once seemed impossible...to richness of choice, freedom, human closeness. You can be more productive, confident, comfortable with insecurity. Problems can be experienced as challenges, a chance for renewal, rather than stress. Habitual defensiveness and worry can fall away. It can all be otherwise.

Science, he said, is proving the reality of a "deep cultural vision." The poets and philosophers were right in their intimations of an open, creative universe. Transformation, innovation, evolution—these are the natural responses to crisis.

Teilhard prophesied the phenomenon central to this book: a conspiracy of men and women whose new perspective would trigger a critical contagion of change.

Throughout history virtually all efforts to remake society began by altering its outward form and organization. It was assumed that a rational social structure could produce harmony

"We cannot wait for the world to turn," said philosopher Beatrice Bruteau, "for times to change that we might change with them, for the revolution to come and carry us around in its new course. We ourselves are the future. We are the revolution."

THE PARADIGM SHIFT

plain everything in terms of trajectories, gravity, force. It would close in on the final secrets of a "clockwork universe."

But as scientists worked toward the elusive ultimate answers, bits of data here and there refused to fit into Newton's scheme. This is typical of any paradigm. Eventually, too many puzzling observations pile up outside the old framework of explanation and strain it. Usually at the point of crisis, someone has a great heretical idea. A powerful new insight explains the apparent contradictions. It introduces a new principle...a new perspective. By forcing a more comprehensive theory, the crisis is not destructive but instructive.

Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity formed the new paradigm that superseded Newton's physics. It resolved much unfinished business, anomalies and riddles that would not fit into the old physics. And it was a stunning alternative: The old mechanical rules were not universal; they did not hold at the level of galaxies and electrons. Our understanding of nature shifted from a clockwork paradigm to an uncertainty paradigm, from the absolute to the relative.

Given the superior power and scope of the new idea, we might expect it to prevail rather quickly, but that almost never happens. The problem is that you can't embrace the new paradigm unless you let go of the old. You can't be half-hearted, making the change bit by bit. "Like the gestalt switch," Kuhn said, "it must occur all at once." The new paradigm is not "figured out" but suddenly seen.

The new perspective demands such a switch that established scientists are rarely converted. As Kuhn pointed out, those who worked fruitfully in the old view are emotionally and

By naming a sharply recognizable phenomenon, Kuhn made us conscious of the ways of revolution and resistance. Now that we are beginning to understand the dynamics of revolutionary insights, we can learn to foster our own healthy change and we can cooperate to ease the collective change of mind without waiting for the fever of a crisis. We can do this by asking questions in a new way—by challenging our old assumptions. These assumptions are the air we breathe, our familiar furniture. They are part of the culture. We are all but blind to them, yet they must give way to more fundamental perspectives if we are to discover what doesn't work—and why. Like the koans Zen masters give their novices, most problems cannot be solved at the level at which they are asked. They must be reframed, put into a larger context. And unwarranted assumptions must be dropped.

For example, we ask how we are going to provide adequate national health insurance, given the increasingly high cost of medical treatment. The question automatically equates health with hospitals, doctors, prescription drugs, technology. Instead we should be asking how people get sick in the first place. What is the nature of wellness? Or we argue about the best methods for teaching the curriculum of public schools, yet rarely question whether the curriculum itself is appropriate. Even more rarely have we asked, What is the nature of learning?

ality, the arts, the community, relationships, politics

The Aquarian Conspirators are drawn together by their parallel discoveries, by paradigm shifts that convinced them they had been leading needlessly circumscribed lives.

PERSONAL PARADIGM SHIFTS: SEEING THE HIDDEN PICTURES

The opening up of a new paradigm is humbling and exhilarating; we were not so much wrong as partial, as if we had been seeing with a single eye. It is not more knowledge, but a new knowing.

Both accidentally and deliberately, people have had such experiences throughout history. Deep inner shifts may occur in response to disciplined contemplation, grave illness, wilderness treks, peak emotions, creative effort, spiritual exercises, controlled breathing, techniques for "inhibiting thought," psychedelics, movement, isolation, music, hypnosis, meditation, reverie, and in the wake of intense intellectual struggle.

Quite suddenly, in this decade, these deceptively simple systems and their literature, the riches of many cultures, are available to whole populations, both in their original form and in contemporary adaptations. Drugstore racks and airport newsstands offer the wisdom of the ages in paperback. University extension classes and weekend seminars, adult education courses, and commercial centers are offering techniques that help people connect to new sources of personal energy, integration, harmony.

The widespread adaptation of such techniques and the spread of their use throughout society were predicted in the 1950s by P. W. Martin, when "consciousness" research was first

coming together of broken parts of themselves, a healing and

homecoming.

For many, the reaction of friends and relatives is painfully patronizing, not unlike that of the elders who warn an adolescent against being too naive and idealistic. Explaining oneself is difficult indeed.

We may fear loss of control. We may suspect that we will find in ourselves the dark unconscious forces portrayed by religious teachings and Freud. We may worry that we will stray too far

from family and friends and find ourselves alone.

of counterfeiters.

"We can learn to savor the scars of our remorse," said Theodore Roszak, "until finally we take our whole identity from

Those who worry that the new ideas will shake the culture to its roots are right, he said. Our conformity has been due in part to our fear of ourselves, our doubts about the rightness of our own decisions.

COMMUNICATING AND LINKING

The Aquarian Conspiracy is using its widespread outposts of influence to focus on the dangerous myths and mystiques of the old paradigm, to attack obsolete ideas and practices. The conspirators urge us to reclaim the power we long ago surrendered to custom and authority, to discover, under the clutter of

all our conditioning, the core of integrity that transcends conventions and codes.

Now we can indeed find each other. We can tell each other what we have abandoned, what we now believe. We can conspire against the old, deadly assumptions. We can live against

them.

Those of like mind can join forces as quickly as you can photocopy a letter, quick-print a flyer, dial a telephone, design a bumper sticker, drive across town, form a coalition, paint a poster, fly to a meeting...or simply live openly in accordance with your change of heart.

past-richer, more complex."

ian Conspiracy creates opportunities wherever possible for people to experience shifts of consciousness. Hearts as well as minds must change. Communication must be not only wide but deep.

Agreement can be communicated in many ways, sometimes even in silence, as Roszak pointed out to a large gathering in Vancouver in 1977 at the World Symposium on Humanity:

In our time a secret manifesto is being written. Its language is a longing we read in one another's eyes. It is the longing to know our authentic vocation in the world, to find the work and the way of being that belong to each of us...I speak of the Manifesto of the Person, the declaration of our sovereign right to self-discovery. I cannot say if those who have answered its summons are indeed millions, but I know that its influence moves significantly among us, a subterranean current of our history, that awakens in all those it touches an intoxicating sense of how deep the roots of the self reach, and what strange sources of energy they embrace....

Penetrating to the roots of fears and doubts, we can change radically. Individuals are beginning to sustain social concern and action in ways never accomplished by outer influences: persuasion, propaganda, patriotism, religious injunctions, threats, preachments of brotherhood. A new world, as the mystics have always said, is a new mind.

FROM DESPAIR TO HOPE

ຝຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓ

from leading-edge science, and from grapevine news of successful social experiments occurring all over the world.

As a serious student of the conditions necessary for revolution, Tocqueville tried in the late 1840s to warn the governing powers in France about the possibility of overthrow. He was convinced that the government and the Court had so offended the people that democratic passions would soon overturn the government. On January 27, 1848, Tocqueville, a deputy, rose in the Chamber of Deputies. "They tell me that there is no danger because there are no disturbances," he said. "They say that as there is no visible perturbation on the surface of society, there are no revolutions beneath it. Gentlemen, allow me to say that I think you are wrong. Disturbance is not abroad but it has laid hold of men's minds."

Within four weeks the people revolted, the king fled, and the Second Republic was proclaimed.

In Democracy in America Tocqueville wrote that the hallmark

By definition, revolutions are not linear, one step at a time, event A leading to event B, and so on. Many causes operate on each other at once. Revolutions shift into place suddenly, like the pattern in a kaleidoscope. They do not so much proceed as

crystallize.

We are people who agree on the need to overcome alienation and mutual hostility in society through the strategy of

We will take up the "spiritual adventure" behind the Aquarian Conspiracy, the search for meaning that becomes an end in itself. We will trace the powerful, often disruptive, effect of the transformative process on personal relationships. And, finally, we will consider the evidence for potential worldwide change.

Throughout, specific projects and people will serve as illustrations, although none is cited as proof or authority. Rather, these are bits of a great mosaic, an overwhelming new direction of human effort and the human spirit at this point in history. For many, they will serve as creative inspiration, models of change, options to be adapted by the individual.

certain powerful key ideas that can enrich and expand our lives, ideas that until now were mostly the province of specialists and policymakers.

We will construct bridges between the old and new worlds. When you understand the basic change taking place in any one major area, it is easier to make sense of the others. This discovery of a new pattern transcends explanation. The shift is qualitative, sudden, the result of neurological processes too rapid and complex to be tracked by the conscious mind. Although logical explanations can be laid out up to a point, the seeing of a pattern is not sequential but all-at-once. If a new concept does not click into place for you on first encounter, read on. As you move through the book you will come upon many related ideas, connections, examples, metaphors, analogies, and illustrative stories. In time, patterns will emerge, the shifts will occur. From the new perspective, old questions may seem suddenly irrelevant.

In literature there is a trusted device known as the Black Moment, the point where all seems lost just before the final rescue. Its counterpart in tragedy is the White Moment—a sudden rush of hope, a saving chance, just before the inevitable disaster.

And yet...is there another future worth trying for?

Seen with new eyes, our lives can be transformed from accidents into adventures. We can transcend the old conditioning, the dirt-poor expectations. We have new ways to be born, humane and symbolic ways to die, different ways to be rich,

communities to support us in our myriad journeys, new ways to be human and to discover what we are to each other. After our tragic wars, alienation, and the bruising of the planet, perhaps this is the answer Wallace Stevens meant—after the final No, the Yes on which the future of the world depends.

Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

It started in the morning as I woke. In a dream before waking I heard a beat, a drum, a march from the first Neanderthal shamans through the Vedic seers and all the patriarchs. There was a sense that no one could stop it.

-MICHAEL MURPHY, Jacob Atabet

The central idea was always the same: Only through a new mind can humanity remake itself, and the potential for such a new mind is natural.

These courageous few have been history's radar, a Distant Early Warning System for the planet. As we will see, some of

Those who had premonitions of transformation believed that future generations might detect the invisible laws and forces around us: the vital networks of relationship, the ties among all aspects of life and knowledge, the interweaving of people, the rhythms and harmonies of the universe, the connectedness that captures parts and makes them wholes, the patterns that draw meaning from the web of the world. Humankind, they said, might recognize the subtle veils imposed on seeing; might awaken to the screen of custom, the prison of language and culture, the bonds of circumstance.

We are spiritually free, they said, the stewards of our own evolution. Humankind has a choice. We can awaken to our true nature. Drawing fully from our inner resources we can achieve a new dimension of mind; we can see more.

teenth centuries. The enemy of whole vision, he said, was our reasoning power's divorce from imagination, "closing itself in, as steel." This half-mind was forever making laws and moral judgments and smothering spontaneity, feeling, art. To Blake, his age itself stood as the accuser, characterized by fear, conformity, jealousy, cynicism, the spirit of the machine. Yet this dark force was only a "Spectre," a ghost that could be exorcised from the minds it haunted.

The Transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, along with several dozen others—rebelled against what seemed the dead, dry intellectualism of the day. Something was missing—an invisible dimension of reality they sometimes called the Oversoul. They sought understanding from many sources: experience, intuition, the Quaker idea of the Inner Light, the Bhagavad Gita, the German Romantic philosophers, historian Thomas Carlyle, poet Samuel Coleridge, Swedenborg, the English metaphysical writers of the seventeenth century.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrialism flourished. Widespread social transformation based on

This ultimate connection would be like the linked fibers and nerves of a body, lying within the outer body of society. The networks would move toward that elusive dream, "the finished, free society."

Carpenter also said that the insights of the Eastern religions might be the seed for this great change, enlarging the Western

view of reality.

In Cosmic Consciousness, written in 1901, Richard Bucke, a Canadian physician, described the experience of an electrifying awareness of oneness with all life. Persons who experienced such states of consciousness were becoming more numerous, he said, walking the earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little. "This new race is in the act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth."

can change the outer aspects of their lives."

In the 1920s Jan Christian Smuts, the Boer general who was twice prime minister of South Africa, formulated a brilliant concept that anticipated many scientific breakthroughs of the

In 1927 Nikos Kazantzakis, the great Greek novelist, envisioned a union of such individuals—those who might create for earth a brain and a heart, might "give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle," comrades he might signal "with a password, like conspirators." What we have called God is the evolutionary drive of consciousness in the universe, he believed. "The new earth exists only in the heart of man."

reality as a flux whose context is the mind, rather than something tangible "out there." He tried to articulate remarkable principles in nature which were formally discovered by research generations later.

number of transformed persons working together.

Although many resist the idea that mind evolves, he said, it will gain eventual acceptance. "A truth once seen, even by a single mind, always ends by imposing itself on the totality of human consciousness." Evidence for this evolutionary thrust was issuing from all the sciences, he said, and those who refused to see it were blind. "Evolution is a condition to which all theories must bow, a curve all lines must follow."

The Phenomenon of Man was limited to private circulation during Teilhard's lifetime because the church forbade him to pub-

Historian Arnold Toynbee said in 1935 that a creative minority, "turning to the inner world of the psyche," could summon the vision of a new way of life for our troubled civilization. He also predicted that the most significant development of the age would be the influence of the Eastern spiritual perspective on the West.

In The Wisdom of the Heart, essays published on the eve of World War II, Henry Miller warned of the difficulty of expressing new realities within the limits of language:

We who are affected cannot make ourselves clear. . . . This is the era when apocalyptic visions are to be fulfilled. We are on the brink of a new life, entering a new domain.

In what language can we describe things for which there are as yet no new names? And how describe relations? We can only divine the nature of those to whom we are attracted, the forces to which we willingly yield obedience....

vearning, "the effort toward community."

In a 1940 letter Aldous Huxley said that although he was profoundly pessimistic about collective humanity at the moment, he was "profoundly optimistic about individuals and groups of individuals existing on the margins of society." The British author, living in Los Angeles, was the hub of a kind of pre-Aquarian conspiracy, an international network of intellectuals, artists, and scientists interested in the notion of transcendence and transformation. They disseminated new ideas, supported each other's efforts, and wondered whether anything would ever come of it. Many of Huxley's interests were so advanced that they did not come into their own until the decade after his death. When such ideas were heresies, he was a proponent of consciousness research, decentralization in government and the economy, paranormal healing, the uses of altered awareness, visual retraining, and acupuncture.

system.

In the business-as-usual postwar era, there were those who sensed approaching upheaval, an awakening to our cultural conditioning. Even as he was describing the alienation and conformity of The Lonely Crowd, sociologist David Riesman speculated that the trance might be broken. "Many currents of change in America escape the notice of the reporters of this best-reported nation on earth.... America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious, and its capacity for the humorous or

ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legend-

ary inscrutable Chinese."

In the mid-1950s psychoanalyst Robert Lindner touched off controversy by his prophetic warning that there was an im-

pending "mutiny of the young":

Into them we have bred our fears and insecurities, upon them we have foisted our mistakes and misconceptions. In our stead they are expressing the unrelieved rage, the tension, and the terrible frustration of the world they were born into.... They are imprisoned by the blunders and delusions of their predecessors, and like all prisoners, they are mutineers in their hearts.

The key was enlarged awareness, Lindner said—recognition of how we are crippled by unconscious fears and motives. "I

believe profoundly that the tide can be turned.'

The eminent psychologist Gardner Murphy was predicting in the 1950s that the growing scientific curiosity about consciousness would lead to "new realms of experience." The more we played on "the other side of the mind," the more we exploited these gifts no culture had ever fully exploited, the less likely our old assumptions would hold—not even the ideas of Darwin and Freud. Radically different ideas would emerge, Murphy said, "and we shall fight frantically against them, of course."

Only religion can carry the load of the future, he said, not the religion of churches, but the spiritual dimension that tran-

scends custom and politics.

Even if we believe that the time of our civilization is running out fast, like sugar spilled from a torn bag, we must wait. But while we are waiting, we can try to feel and think and behave as if our society were already beginning to be contained by religion ... as if we were finding our way home again in the universe. We can stop disinheriting ourselves. ... We can challenge the whole de-humanizing, depersonalizing process that is taking the symbolic richness, the dimension of depth out of men's lives, inducing the anesthesia that demands violence, crudely horrible effects, to feel anything at all.

as a composite of practices known to exist in contemporary cultures. In the words of Dr. MacPhail in Island:

To make the best of both worlds, Oriental and European, the ancient and modern—what am I saying? To make the best of all the worlds—the worlds already realized within the various cultures and, beyond them, the worlds of still unrealized potentialities.

Might not the current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?

Introducing "World Perspectives," a series of books published by Harper & Row beginning in the 1960s, Ruth Ananda Ashen wrote of a "new consciousness" that might lift human-kind beyond fear and isolation. We are now contending with

The new series of books was planned to encourage "a renaissance of hope," to help the mind grasp what had eluded it in the past. Having discovered his own nature, man now has new choices "for he is the only creature who is able to say not only 'no' to life but 'yes.'"

Steadily, as increasing numbers of influential thinkers speculated on the possibilities, the transformative vision became more credible.

alization" rapidly gained adherents.

"It is increasingly clear," Maslow wrote, "that a philosophical revolution is under way. A comprehensive system is swiftly developing, like a tree beginning to bear fruit on every branch at the same time." He described a group he thought of as Transcenders, "advance scouts for the race," individuals who far exceeded the traditional criteria for psychological health. He compiled a list of around three hundred creative, intelligent individuals and groups of individuals whose lives were marked by frequent "peak experiences" (a term he coined). This was his Eupsychean Network—literally, "of good soul." Transcenders were irresistibly drawn to each other, he said; two or three such people would find each other in a roomful of a hundred, and they were as likely to be businessmen, engineers, and politicians as poets and priests.

change in the whole evolution of the human race...a kind of cultural shock front."

Erich Fromm, in Revolution of Hope (1968), foresaw a "new front," a movement that would combine the wish for profound social change with a new spiritual perspective; its aim would be the humanization of a technological world.

Such a movement, which could happen within twenty years, would be nonviolent. Its constituency would be Americans already eager for new direction, including old and young, conservatives and radicals, all social classes. "The middle class has begun to listen and to be moved," Fromm said. Neither state nor political parties nor organized religion could provide either an intellectual or spiritual home for this thrust. Institutions were too bureaucratic, too impersonal.

The flags were going up.

Carl Rogers described the Emerging Man; Lewis Mumford, the New Person, the age that would "make the Renaissance look like a still-birth." Jonas Salk said that humankind was moving into a new epoch. Evolution, he said, favors "the survival of the wisest.... Who are they? What must they do? How can they discover themselves and others with whom to work?"

Educator John Holt called for "a radically new kind of human being." Philosopher Lancelot Law Whyte stressed the urgency of a network: "We who already share intimations of this emergent attitude must become aware of one another... collect allies by timely signals."

The only possibility for our time, said Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, in 1968, is "the free association of men and women of like spirit...not a handful but a thousand heroes, ten thousand heroes, who will create a future image of what humankind can be."

In 1969 the noted French political writer Jean-François Revel predicted that the United States was about to experience "the second great world revolution"—an upheaval that would complete the first revolution, the rise of democracy in the West. In Without Marx or Jesus he predicted the emergence of homo novus, a new human being. Revel believed that the undercurrent of spiritual concern in the United States, evident in the burgeoning interest in Eastern religions, presaged profound change in the only country on the planet free enough for bloodless revolution.

Was this what it meant to make the world strange and new

When the revolution went inside, television cameras and newspaper reporters could not cover it. It had become, in many ways invisible

We live at a peculiar moment in history. If we look at the reality of the world from the viewpoint of the industrial era, it is clear that there is no hope.... But there is another way to look at our situation. We can discover the large number of people who have decided to change.... If we do this, it seems equally impossible that we shall fail to solve our problems.

the conventions of the establishment, Bateson said. In his 1970 best-seller, The Greening of America, Charles Reich had focused on the outward symbols of change, especially the change in dress and lifestyle among the young; but Bateson pointed out that it was "not only long-haired professors and long-haired youth" who were thinking differently. Thousands of businessmen and even legislators had begun wishing for such change.

In her book, The Crossing Point (1973), M. C. Richards, artisan

and poet, said:

Distinguished thinkers from many disciplines were describing an imminent transformation. The director of policy research at Stanford Research Institute, Willis Harman, said that if materialism had been the philosophical base for the Old Left, spirituality seemed likely to play that role for the New Left, a matrix of linked beliefs—that we are invisibly joined to one another, that there are dimensions transcending time and space, that individual lives are meaningful, that grace and illumination are real, that it is possible to evolve to ever higher levels of understanding.

Should these new coalitions prevail, Harman said, and some sort of transcendental premise dominate the culture, the result would be a social and historical phenomenon as great and pervasive as the Protestant Reformation.

George Cabot Lodge, statesman and Harvard business professor, said, "The United States is in the midst of a great transformation, comparable to the one that ended medievalism and shook its institutions to the ground.... The old ideas and assumptions that once made our institutions legitimate are being eroded. They are slipping away in the face of a changing real-

ity, being replaced by different ideas as yet ill-formed, contradictory, unsettling."

A Stanford physicist, William Tiller, said that the nameless movement had achieved a state of "critical mass" and could not be stopped. The metaphor of a critical mass was also used by Lewis Thomas, president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, in The Lives of a Cell (1974). Only in this century were we close enough and numerous enough to begin the fusion around the earth, a process that might now move very rapidly. Human thought might be at an evolutionary threshold.

Art historian Jose Arguelles described "a strange disquietude that permeates the psychic atmosphere, an unstable Pax Americana." The revolution of the 1960s had planted the seeds of apocalypse; the psychedelic drugs, however abused, had given a visionary experience of self-transcendence to a sufficient number of individuals, so that they might well determine the future of human development—"not a Utopia, but a collectively altered state of consciousness."

The transformative vision was shared by individuals in many social movements—networks about madness, death and dying, alternative birth, ecology, nutrition. A web of "holistic" doctors, another of medical students and faculty on various campuses, formulated radical ways of thinking about health and disease. Maverick theologians and members of the clergy pondered "the new spirituality" that rose as churches declined. There were networks of innovative, "transpersonal" educators, caucuses of legislators, and a melding of economists-futurists-managers-engineers-systems theorists, all seeking creative, humanistic alternatives. A few captains of industry and finance. Foundation officials and university programmers, artists and musicians, publishers and television producers. A surprising clutch of celebrities. Scions of Old American Wealth. Ex-political radicals, minus their rhetoric, now in positions of influence.

Who dream the dream which all men always declare futile, Edward Carpenter had said, Who dream the hour which is not yet on earth—and lo! it strikes.

Transformation: Brains Changing, Minds Changing

It is necessary; therefore, it is possible.

—G.A. BORGHESE

In the durable Victorian fantasy, Flatland, the characters are assorted geometric shapes living in an exclusively two-dimensional world. As the story opens, the narrator, a middle-aged Square, has a disturbing dream in which he visits a one-dimensional realm, Lineland, whose inhabitants can move only from point to point. With mounting frustration he attempts to explain himself—that he is a Line of Lines, from a domain where you can move not only from point to point but also from side to side. The angry Linelanders are about to attack him when he awakens.

That very night the Square has an extraordinary, lifechanging encounter: a visit from an inhabitant of Spaceland, the realm of Three Dimensions.

disappear because he was moving toward the Square in Space and descending at the same time.

ຝຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓ

There is an irreducible sensory aspect to those experiences sometimes vaguely described as transcendent, transpersonal, spiritual, altered, nonordinary, or peak. These sensations—light, connection, love, timelessness, loss of boundaries—are further complicated by paradoxes that confound logical description. As the hapless Square said, in trying to describe the Third Dimension, "I saw a Line that was no Line."

However futile their efforts, those who have been moved by such extradimensional experiences are forced to try to describe them in the language of space and time. They say they felt

utopian dream . . . or a fragile reality?

Until a few years ago, claims that consciousness can be expanded and transformed rested on subjective evidence. Suddenly, first in the handful of laboratories of a few pioneer scientists, then in thousands of experiments around the world, the

undeniable evidence began coming forth.

to face, not just soft speculation.

It would take an additional book—a library, rather—to fully survey the subject of this chapter and the next: the evidence of change; the triggers, tools, and discoveries of personal transformation; and the experiences of people undergoing the process here and now. In any event, transformations of consciousness are more to be experienced than studied.

of brain and body, of life direction.

We need, first of all, a working definition of transformation if we are to grasp its power over the lives of individuals and the way it generates deep social change. The Aquarian Conspiracy is both cause and effect of such transformation.

TRANSFORMATION: A DEFINITION

The term transformation has interestingly parallel meanings in mathematics, in the physical sciences, and in human change. A transformation is, literally, a forming over, a restructuring. Mathematical transforms, for example, convert a problem into new terms so that it can be solved. As we shall see later, the brain itself functions by complex mathematical transforms. In the physical sciences, a transformed substance has taken on a different nature or character, as when water becomes ice or steam.

And of course, we speak of the transformation of people—specifically the transformation of consciousness. In this context consciousness does not mean simple waking awareness. Here it refers to the state of being conscious of one's consciousness. You are keenly aware that you have awareness. In effect, this is a new perspective that sees other perspectives—a paradigm shift. The poet e.e. cummings once rejoiced that he had found "the eye of my eye . . . the ear of my ear." Seeing Yourself See, one book title put it. This awareness of awareness is another dimension.

Most of us go through our waking hours taking little notice of our thought processes: how the mind moves, what it fears, what it heeds, how it talks to itself, what it brushes aside; the nature of our hunches; the feel of our highs and lows; our misperceptions. For the most part we eat, work, converse, worry, hope, plan, make love, shop—all with minimal thought about how we think.

In mystical tradition, the mind-behind-the-scenes, the part that watches the watcher is called the Witness. Identifying with a wider dimension than our usual fragmented consciousness, this center is freer and better informed. As we'll see, this wider perspective has access to universes of information processed by the brain at an unconscious level, realms we usually can't penetrate because of static or control from the surface mind what Edward Carpenter called "the little, local self."

A mind not aware of itself—ordinary consciousness—is like a passenger strapped into an airplane seat, wearing blinders, ignorant of the nature of transportation, the dimension of the craft, its range, the flight plan, and the proximity of other passengers.

but still vastly freer than the "passenger" mind.

A higher dimension is simply a more inclusive dimension. If, for example, you take a two-dimensional square and extend it vertically so that it becomes a three-dimensional cube, then you may say that the square is included in the cube.... Between the various levels of truth there can be no mutual exclusiveness, no real contradiction, for the higher includes the lower.

CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION

new. At the dawn of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola wrote:

Those who believe in the possibility of impending social transformation are not optimistic about human nature; rather, they trust the transformative process itself. Having experienced positive change in their own lives—more freedom, feelings of kinship and unity, more creativity, more ability to handle stress, a sense of meaning—they concede that others may change, too. And they believe that if enough individuals discover new capacities in themselves they will naturally conspire to create a world hospitable to human imagination, growth, and cooperation.

The proven plasticity of the human brain and human awareness offers the possibility that individual evolution may lead to collective evolution. When one person has unlocked a new capacity its existence is suddenly evident to others, who may then develop the same capacity. Certain skills, arts, and sports, for example, are developed consummately in particular cultures. Even our "natural" abilities must be encouraged. Human beings do not even walk or talk spontaneously. If babies are kept in cribs in institutions with nothing to do but stare at the ceiling, they will walk and talk very late, if ever. These capacities must be released; they evolve in interaction with other human beings and the environment.

in gymnastic feats or discriminate between hundreds of varieties of coffee, so we can perform gymnastics of attention and

subtleties ot interior sensing

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness....

No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

THE WAYS WE CHANGE

There are four basic ways in which we change our minds when we get new and conflicting information. The easiest and most limited of these we might call change by exception. Our old belief system remains intact but allows for a handful of anomalies, the way an old paradigm tolerates a certain number of odd phenomena that hang around its edges before the breakthrough to a larger, more satisfying paradigm. An individual who engages in change by exception may dislike all members of a particular group, except one or two. He may consider psychic phenomena nonsense yet still believe that his greataunt's dreams came true. These are dismissed as "the exceptions that prove the rule" instead of the exceptions that dis-prove the rule.

Incremental change occurs bit by bit, and the individual is not

aware of having changed.

Then there is pendulum change, the abandonment of one

closed and certain system for another. The hawk becomes a dove, the disenchanted religious zealot becomes an atheist, the promiscuous person turns into a prude—and vice versa, all the way around.

Pendulum change fails to integrate what was right with the old and fails to discriminate the value of the new from its overstatements. Pendulum change rejects its own prior experience,

Unless, of course, it can harmonize the ideas into a powerful synthesis. That is paradigm change—transformation. It is the fourth dimension of change: the new perspective, the insight that allows the information to come together in a new form or structure. Paradigm change refines and integrates. Paradigm change attempts to heal the delusion of either-or, of this-orthat.

tations from different perspectives at different times.

Change by exception says, "I'm right, except for _____." Incremental change says, "I was almost right, but now I'm right." Pendulum change says, "I was wrong before, but now I'm right." Paradigm change says, "I was partially right before, and now I'm a bit more partially right." In paradigm change we realize that our previous views were only part of the picture—and that what we know now is only part of what we'll know later. Change is no longer threatening. It absorbs, enlarges, enriches. The unknown is friendly, interesting territory. Each insight widens the road, making the next stage of travel, the next opening, easier.

When we wake up to the flux and alteration of our own awareness we augment change. Synthesis builds on synthesis.

STRESS AND TRANSFORMATION

THE WAY OF AVOIDANCE

At the level of ordinary consciousness, we deny pain and paradox. We doctor them with Valium, dull them with alcohol, or distract them with television.

Denial is a way of life. More accurately, it is a way of diminishing life, of making it seem more manageable. Denial is the alternative to transformation.

We are caught between two different evolutionary mechanisms: denial and transformation. We evolved with the ability to repress pain and to filter out peripheral information. These are useful short-term strategies that allowed our ancestors to shunt aside stimuli that would be too much to bear in an emergency, just as the fight-or-flight syndrome aroused them to cope with physical danger.

The capacity for denial is an example of the body's sometimes short-sighted vision. Some of the body's automatic responses hurt over the long run more than they help. The formation of scar tissue, for example, prevents the nerves in the spine from reconnecting after an accident. In many injuries, swelling causes more damage than the original trauma. And it is the body's hysterical overreaction to a virus, rather than the virus itself, that makes us ill.

For most of a century, psychologists used a bureaucratic model of the mind: Conscious mind on top, commanding officer; Subconscious, like an unreliable first-lieutenant; and the Unconscious, far below, an unruly platoon of erotic energies, archetypes, curiosities. It comes as a shock, then, to learn that a Co-conscious has been operating alongside us—a dimension of awareness that Stanford psychologist Ernest Hilgard has called the Hidden Observer.

We have two essential strategies for coping: the way of avoidance or the way of attention.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. Give yourself to it. It is only your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

The pain is the aversion; the healing magic is attention.

We have the biological capacity to deny our stress—or transform it by paying attention to it. Recent discoveries about the brain help us understand both the psychological and physiological aspects of these two choices, and why the way of attention is a deliberate choice.

The brain's right and left hemispheres interact all the time, but each also has certain functions of its own. These specialized functions of the hemispheres were first observed in the effects of injuries confined to one side of the brain or the other. Later, there were more sophisticated techniques to detect differences. Different pictures would be flashed simultaneously to the left and right visual fields, for example, or the left and right ears would hear different tones at the same time. Postmortem examination of brains showed subtle structural differences between the sides. Eventually research found that brain cells producing certain chemicals were more concentrated on one side than the other.

The hemispheres can operate independently, as two separate centers of consciousness. This was dramatically demonstrated in the 1960s and 1970s when twenty-five patients around the world underwent "split-brain" surgery for the treatment of severe epilepsy. The connections between hemispheres were severed in the hope of confining seizures to one side.

(whose controlling left brain cannot comprehend spatial relationships), the left hand may attempt to finish the task.

We tend to identify the "I" with the verbal left brain and its operations, the part of us that can talk about and analyze experiences. The left hemisphere essentially controls speech. It adds, subtracts, hyphenates, measures, compartmentalizes, organizes, names, pigeonholes, and watches clocks.

Detecting tendencies and patterns is a crucial skill. The more accurately we can get the picture from minimal information, the better equipped we are to survive.

The right hemisphere is richly connected to the ancient limbic brain, the so-called emotional brain. The mysterious limbic structures are involved in memory processing and, when electronically stimulated, produce many of the phenomena of altered states of consciousness.

In the classic sense of "heart and mind," we can think of this right hemisphere-limbic circuit as the heart-brain. If we say, for example, "The heart has its reasons," we are referring to the deeply felt response processed by the "other side of the brain."

searchers have reported, the left brain even takes over those tasks at which the right brain is superior.

Without the benefit of a scalpel, we perform split-brain surgery on ourselves. We isolate heart and mind. Cut off from the fantasy, dreams, intuitions, and holistic processes of the right brain, the left is sterile. And the right brain, cut off from integration with its organizing partner, keeps recycling its emotional charge. Feelings are dammed, perhaps to work private mischief in fatigue, illness, neurosis, a pervasive sense of something wrong, something missing—a kind of cosmic homesickness. This fragmentation costs us our health and our capacity for intimacy. As we'll see in Chapter 9, it also costs us our ability to learn, create, innovate.

KNOWING AND NAMING

The raw stuff of human transformation is around and within us, omnipresent and invisible as oxygen. We are swimming in knowledge we have not claimed, all mediated by the realm of the brain that cannot name what it knows.

Meditation, chanting, and similar techniques increase the coherence and harmony in the brainwave patterns; they bring about greater synchrony between the hemispheres, which suggests that higher order is achieved. On occasion it appears that increasing populations of nerve cells are recruited into the rhythm, until all regions of the brain seem to be throbbing, as if choreographed and orchestrated. The usually dissynchronous patterns in the two sides seem to become entrained to each other. Brainwave activity in older, deeper brain structures may also show an unexpected synchrony with the neocortex.

In effect, they ask it to identify itself. Typically, after half a minute or so, a word or phrase pops into mind. If it is appropriate, the body responds unmistakably. As Gendlin described it:

As these rare words come, one senses a sharpened feeling, or a felt relief, a felt shift, usually before one can say what this shift is. Sometimes such words are not in themselves very impressive or novel, but just these words have an experiential effect, and no others do.²

Research shows that these "felt shifts" are accompanied by a pronounced change in brainwave harmonics. A distinct, complex pattern seems to correlate with this experience of insight. The brain's activity is integrated at a higher level. And when a person reports feeling "stuck" there is a detectable collapse of those same EEG harmonics.

In Greek philosophy, logos ("word") was the divine ordering principle, fitting the new or strange into the scheme of things. Whenever we name things, we structure consciousness. As we look at the great social transformation under way, we will see again and again that naming awakens new perspectives: birth without violence, voluntary simplicity, appropriate technology, paradigm shift.

Given the complexity of the brain, it may be generations before science understands the processes that enable us to know without knowing that we know. But no matter; what counts is that something in us is wiser and better informed than our ordinary consciousness. With such an ally within our selves, why should we go it alone?

FINDING THE CENTER

Then came, out of that extreme and absolute division, a sudden unity. A new kind of consciousness was created in them. Mind and Heart, which had been irreconcilable enemies, became united in the Soul, which loved what it knew. The inward division was healed

chamber in pyramids ("fire in the middle"), the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies. "We sit around in a ring and suppose," wrote Robert Frost, "But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."

The escape from the prison of the two minds—the task of transformation—is the great theme pervading Hesse's novels: Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Glass Bead Game, Demian, and Siddhartha. In 1921 he said that he hoped the spiritual wave from India would offer his culture "a corrective, refreshment from the opposite pole." Europeans unhappy with their overspecialized intellectual climate were not turning so much toward Buddha or Lao-tse, he said, as toward meditation, "a technique whose highest result is pure harmony, a simultaneous and equal cooperation of logical and intuitive thinking." The East contemplated the forest; the West counted the trees. Yet the need for completion emerges as a theme in the myths of all cultures. They wanted it all—and many transcended the split. The mind that knows the trees and the forest is a new mind.

Enumerating the variety of spiritual paths, Aldous Huxley urged "the central door" rather than purely intellectual or purely practical ways. "The best of both worlds... the best of all worlds." There is more to balance, as one Eastern thinker recently remarked, than not falling over.

The thrill of the new perspective cannot be sustained for an indefinite period. Inevitably and often, the individual lapses into old positions, old polarities, old ways. In Mount Analog, René Daumal described the slipping back:

One climbs, one sees, one descends; one sees no longer, but one has seen.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

-DOROTHY

other is relatively safe, directed, available

The intentional triggers of transformative experiences are numberless, yet they have a common quality. They focus awareness on awareness—a critical shift. For all their surface variation, most focus on something too strange, complex, diffuse, or monotonous to be handled by the brain's analytical, intellectual half: on breathing, repetitious physical movement, music, water, a flame, a meaningless sound, a blank wall, a koan, a paradox. The intellectual brain can only dominate awareness by affixing itself to something definite and bounded. If it is captured by a diffuse, monotonous focus, the signals from the other side of the mind can be heard.

Among the triggers of such experiences reported by the individuals who responded to the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire:

• Sensory isolation and sensory overload, because sharply altered input causes a shift in consciousness.

• Biofeedback—the use of machines that feed back tones or visual readouts of body processes like brainwave activity, muscle activity, skin temperature—because learning to control these processes requires an unusually relaxed and alert state.

• Autogenic training, an approach that originated in Europe more than fifty years ago—self-suggestions that the body is becoming relaxed, "breathing itself."

• Hypnosis and self-hypnosis.

• Meditation of every description: Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, chaotic, Transcendental, Christian, Kabbalist, kundalini, raja yoga, tantric yoga, etc. Psychosynthesis, a system that combines imagery and a meditative state.

• Sufi stories, koans, and dervish dancing. Various shamanic and magical techniques, which focus attention.

• Seminars like est, Silva Mind Control, Actualizations, and Lifespring, which attempt to break the cultural trance and open the individual to new choices.

• Dream journals, because dreams are the most available medium for information from beyond the range of ordinary consciousness.

thesize many different mystical traditions and teach techniques for altering awareness.

• Contemporary psychotherapies, like Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy, which involves a search for meaning and the use of "paradoxical intention," the direct confrontation of the source of fear. Primal Therapy and its spin-offs, which summon up experiences of early childhood pain. The Fischer-Hoffman process, a similar reentry into childhood anxieties, followed by an intense use of imagery for reconciliation with and forgiveness of one's parents for any negative early experiences. Gestalt therapy, the gentle forcing through of patterns of recognition, or paradigm shifts.

• Countless body disciplines and therapies: hatha yoga, Reichian, the Bates system for vision improvement, T'ai Chi Ch'uan, aikido, karate, running, dance, Rolfing, bioenergetics, Feldenkrais, Alexander, Applied Kinesiology.

• Intense experiences of personal and collective change at Esalen in Big Sur, sensitivity groups at Washington's National Training Laboratories, encounter groups, informal groups of supportive friends.

• Sport, mountain-climbing, river-running, and similar physically exhilarating activities, which cause a qualitative shift in the sense of being alive. Wilderness retreats or solitary flying or sailing, which foster self-discovery and a sense of timelessness.

Because of the initial advantage or disadvantage in differing nervous systems, it seems at first that the rich get richer and the poor get discouraged. But improvement comes for everyone, just as practice makes us more adept skiers or swimmers, whatever our inherent talent.

another person; transformation is not a spectator sport. And we may even misread what has happened in ourselves, realizing only in retrospect that an important shift has occurred; or we may think we have changed forever in some way only to find ourselves lapsing on occasion into old thought patterns and behaviors.

STAGES OF TRANSFORMATION

No system promises a shift from ordinary human fragmentation to twenty-four-hour-a-day clarity. Transformation is a journey without a final destination. But there are stages in the journey, and they are surprisingly mappable, based on thousands of historical accounts and the proliferating reports of contemporary seekers. Some traps, caves, quicksand, and dangerous crossings are unique to the individual journey, but there are deserts, peaks, and certain strange buttes observed by nearly everyone who persists. Recognizing, then, that the map is not the transformational territory, we will describe the process in terms of four major stages.

The first stage is preliminary, almost happenstance: an entry point. In most cases, the entry point can only be identified in retrospect. Entry can be triggered by anything that shakes up the old understanding of the world, the old priorities. Sometimes it is a token investment, made out of boredom, curiosity, or desperation—a ten-dollar book, a hundred-dollar mantra, a university extension course.

The changes in brain chemistry triggered by psychedelics cause the familiar world to metamorphose. It gives way to rapid imagery, unaccustomed depths of visual perception and hearing, a flood of "new" knowledge that seems at once very old, a poignant primal memory. Unlike the mental states produced by dreaming or drinking, psychedelic awareness is not fuzzy but many times more intense than normal waking consciousness. Only through this intensely altered state did some become fully aware of the role of consciousness in creating their everyday reality.

As one chronicler of the sixties remarked, "LSD gave a whole generation a religious experience." But chemical satori is perishable, its effects too overwhelming to integrate into everyday life. Non-drug psychotechnologies offer a controlled, sustained movement toward that spacious reality. The annals of the Aquarian Conspiracy are full of accounts of passages: LSD to Zen, LSD to India, psilocybin to Psychosynthesis.

The entry-point experience hints that there is a brighter, richer, more meaningful dimension to life. Some are haunted by that glimpse and drawn to see more. Others, less serious, stay near the entry point, playing with the occult, drugs, consciousness-altering games. Some are afraid to go on at all. Confronting the nonrational is unnerving. Here the unfettered mind suffers a kind of agoraphobia, a fear of its own awesome spaces. Those with a strong need to control may be frightened by touching a realm of multiple realities, multiple ways of seeing. They would rather keep to their right/wrong, black/white version of the world. They repress insights that contradict the old belief system.

Some hesitate because they don't know where to turn next. Fear of criticism stops others. They might look foolish, pretentious, even crazy, to family, friends, co-workers. They worry that the journey inward will seem narcissistic or escapist. Indeed those who persist past the entry point have to overcome a pervasive culture bias against introspection. The search for self-knowledge is often equated with self-importance, with a concern for one's own psyche at the expense of social responsibility. The popular criticism of psychotechnologies is typified by the term "the new narcissism," from a Harper's article by Peter Marin, and the "Me Decade," a pejorative introduced by Tom Wolfe in New York magazine.²

The second stage, for those who go on, is exploration—the Yes after the final No. Warily or enthusiastically, having sensed that there is something worth finding, the individual sets out to look for it. The first serious step, however small, is empowering and significant. The quest, as one spiritual teacher put it, is the transformation.

Ironically, we go after transformative experiences in the only way we know how: as consumers, competitors, still operating from the values of the old paradigm. We may compare our experiences to others, wonder if we're "doing it right," getting there fast enough, making progress. We may be trying to replicate one particularly rewarding or moving experience. During this phase some individuals try many techniques and teachers, like comparison shoppers. In an age of supersonic travel and satellite communication, we tend to expect instant gratification, instant feedback, instant news. The process of transformation may be simmering underground like a geyser, but we cannot see it and are impatient for action.

In this false dawn of certainty, there is often eager proselytizing. The would-be evangelists quickly learn that no single system works for everyone. And the methods themselves — by repeated focusing of awareness—eventually lead to the realization that there will be no ultimate answers.

As science fiction writer Ray Bradbury said, "We all go on the same Search, looking to solve the old Mystery. We will not, of course, ever solve it. We will climb all over it. We will, finally, inhabit the Mystery...."

In the third stage, integration, the mystery is inhabited. Although there may be favorite methods or teachers, the individual trusts an inner "guru."

During the earlier stages there was probably some dissonance, sharp conflict between new beliefs and old patterns. Like the troubled society struggling to remake itself with old tools and structures, the individual tries at first to improve the situation rather than change it, to reform rather than transform.

Now there may be oscillation between exhilaration and loneliness because fear centers on the disruptive effect the transformative process may be having on the old itinerary: career direction, relationships, goals, and values. . . . There is a new self in an old culture. But there are new friends, new rewards, new possibilities.

Many explore subjects they had no former interest in or aptitude for in an attempt to learn something about shifts in conscious experience. They may look into philosophy, quantum physics, music, semantics, brain research, psychology. From time to time, the neophyte "scientist" draws back for a period of assimilation. The opening has been immense. Everything matters.

Ironically, while there is less need now for external validation or justification, self-questioning may reach the level of inquisition. Usually the individual emerges from such reevaluation with a new strength and sureness, grounded in purpose.

Earlier, when he was attempting to communicate the ideas of transformation, it was mostly to explain himself or to draw friends and family into the process. Now the great social implications become apparent.

This is a conspiracy to enable transformation—not to impose it on those who are neither ripe nor interested, but to make it possible for those who are hungry for it. Michael Murphy, co-founder of Esalen, suggested that the disciplines themselves conspire for renewal. "Let's make that conspiracy apparent! We can turn our daily common life into the dance the world is meant for."

In the spring of 1974 I was just finishing my master's thesis from a behavioral perspective in psychology.... One evening another graduate student and I decided to experiment with LSD. During the evening I had an experience that I was hard-pressed to explain or describe—the sudden feeling of a vortex opening in my head and ending somewhere above me. I began to follow this with my awareness. As I got further up I began losing control and felt much pressure and noise as well as bodily feelings of floating, zooming, etc. All of a sudden I popped out of the vortex. Whereas before I had been looking around at a not-very attractive married-housing campus complex, there now stood before me the same buildings, incredibly beautiful in ways I still can't describe. There was an order, complexity, and simplicity, as if everything made sense in and of itself with the other elements of the environment. In the core of this experience I had the strong sensation that it was not just the result of taking the drug.

During the days that followed, he asked fellow students and professors about the experience and was "immediately labeled a freak." As he continued questioning, one graduate student urged him several times to read the Don Juan books by Carlos Castaneda. At first he was skeptical. "I considered myself to be very scientific, and this stuff about an Indian sorcerer was too way-out for me." But he was desperate for an answer. He gave up his intellectual protests and entered the next stage, exploration:

I picked up the first book and within pages found that someone knew of the same experiences. I began to read all the books and decided to specialize in this area for my doctoral exams and dissertation. At this point I was not sure what I was going to specialize in as I did not know the name of what I was searching for.

One night he had an extraordinary experience. He meditated before going to sleep and awoke to see a three-dimensional ຝౖ circular pattern pulsing in his visual field. The next day he drew pictures of the design, which he later identified as a yantra, a pattern used for contemplation in Eastern spiritual disciplines. When he learned that Carl Jung had written about the emergence of such patterns from the collective unconscious, he felt even more strongly that he could argue the psychological importance of meditation phenomena, even with the most skeptical professors in his graduate school.

In 1976 he went to work at a state hospital. By 1977 he found

himself in the fourth stage, conspiracy:

I guess the rest of my account at this point is directed toward synthesis and entry into what you're calling the Aquarian Conspiracy. I want to continue my work in transpersonal psychology, meditation, biofeedback, and music meditation, while staying in mainstream clinical psychology.

I have worked consistently toward raising the transpersonal banner at this hospital—slowly, because this state is not in the progressive swing the Bay Area and Los Angeles are in. However, the work with music meditation has progressed to the point where the hospital has given us a grant...I heard yesterday from interested people at an

Ohio institution and today from Washington.

He is now in private clinical practice and is a consultant to a state prison. He also serves on a state board charged with evaluating mental health facilities.

THE DISCOVERIES

The psychotechnologies — picks, pitons, compasses, binoculars — have aided in the rediscovery of inner landmarks variously named across cultures and across time. To understand more about the transformative process, we will look at these vistas. The discoveries, as we shall see, are mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing; they cannot be sharply isolated from each other. They are not sequential, either; some occur simultaneously. They deepen and change as well; none is finished once and for all.

^<sup>3From Journey to Ixtlan: "All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up."

In his famous "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" William Wordsworth described the gradual shutdown of our senses: The glory and the dream fade, the prison-house closes in after childhood, and custom lies on us "heavy as frost."

Again and again, the metaphor for new life is awakening. We

have been dead in the womb, not born.

One of the Aquarian Conspirators, a wealthy real-estate entrepreneur, reported in his questionnaire:

It was at Esalen, my first trip there several years ago. I had just had a Rolfing session, and I walked outdoors.

Redefining the self defuses competition. "The joy of this quest is not in triumph over others," Theodore Roszak said, "but in the search for the qualities we share with them and for our uniqueness, which raises us above all competition."

The self released by the transformative process gathers in aspects that had been disenfranchised. Sometimes this is experienced by a woman as the capacity to act (the masculine principle), by a man as the emergence of nurturant feelings (the feminine principle). The reunion is picturesquely described in Buddhist literature as sahaja, "born together." As the innate nature reasserts itself, emotional turbulence diminishes. Spontaneity, freedom, poise, and harmony seem to increase. "It's like becoming real," said one respondent to the questionnaire.

We have been split at every level, unable to make peace with contradictory thoughts and feelings. Shortly before his suicide, poet John Berryman expressed the universal wish: "Unite my various soul...." When we respect and accept the fragmented identities, there is reunion and rebirth.

If there is rebirth, what dies? The actor, perhaps. And illusions—that one is a victim, or right, or independent, or capable of obtaining all the answers. Illusionectomy can be a painful operation, but there are profound rewards. "You shall know the truth," says a character in Brunner's Shockwave Rider, "and the truth shall make you you."

An editor of a Boston-based magazine wrote that her most

The self is a field within larger fields. When the self joins the Self, there is power. Brotherhood overtakes the individual like an army...not the obligatory ties of family, nation, church, but a living, throbbing connection, the unifying I-Thou of Martin Buber, a spiritual fusion. This discovery transforms strangers into kindred, and we know a new, friendly universe.

There emerges a new and different social consciousness, expressed by one man in terms of hunger and starvation:

The fourth dimension is not another place; it is this place, and it is immanent in us, a process.

We begin to see the ways in which we have postponed life,

A young trainee in a bodywork method called Neurokinesthetics described his own transformation:

We don't need to be uptight. We can be in harmony with the environment, seeing the world from a clear perspective. As our bodies learn to flow, the more freely we can relate to other selves, to other people, to situations.

The body can also be a medium of transformation. In testing our limits in sport, dance, exercise we discover that the physical self is a changing, fluid, plastic bioelectrical system, not a

thing. Like the mind, it harbors astonishing potentials.

One of the sweetest discoveries is freedom — passage to the place described in the Upanishads as "beyond grief and danger."

"Just the fact of being slightly more aware changes the way in which you act," said Joseph Goldstein, a meditation teacher. "Once you've glimpsed what's going on, it's very difficult to get caught up in quite the same old way.... It's like some little voice in the background saying, 'What are you doing?'"

A fifty-five-year-old sociologist described the onset of his

freedom:

One Saturday morning in late September 1972 I was walking onto a tennis court to play for the n-to-the-nth-power time. I suddenly asked myself, "What am I doing this for?"... It was a sudden awareness that the world of conventional activities and socially accepted interpretations of reality was shallow and unrewarding.

stowed on me and in the pursuit of socially sanctioned goals.

Every society, by offering its automatic judgments, limits the vision of its members. From our earliest years we are seduced into a system of beliefs that becomes so inextricably braided into our experience that we cannot tell culture from nature.

cannot finally hold. Nonattachment is the most realistic of attitudes. It is freedom from wishful thinking, from always wanting things to be otherwise.

By making us aware of the futility of this wishful thinking, the psychotechnologies help free us from unhealthy dependencies. We increase our capacity to love without bargaining or expectations, to enjoy without emotional mortgages. At the same time, enhanced awareness adds luster to simple things and everyday events, so that what may seem a turn toward a more austere life is often the discovery of subtler, less perishable riches.

Andre Kostelanetz recalled how Leopold Stokowski radicalized orchestral form by freeing the musicians:

He dispensed with the uniform bowing of the strings, knowing that the strength of each player's wrist varies, and, to achieve the richest string tone, each player should have maximum elasticity. Leopold also encouraged the wind players to breathe as they wished. He didn't care, he said, how they made music as long as it was beautiful.

The bonds of culture are often invisible, and its walls are glass. We may think we are free. We cannot leave the trap until we know we are in it. None but ourselves, as Edward Carpenter observed long ago, are the "warders and jailers." Over and over, mystical literature depicts the human plight as needless imprisonment; it is as if the key were always within reach through the bars, but we never think to look for it.

Another discovery: uncertainty. Not just the uncertainty of the moment, which may pass, but oceanic uncertainty, mystery that washes across our beaches forever. Aldous Huxley said it in The Doors of Perception:

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to

things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

security, only a caricature of it.

Many people have lived comfortably with a sense of mystery all their lives. Others, who have sought certainty as a hunter seeks his quarry, may be shaken to find that reason itself is a boomerang. Not only does everyday life produce unaccountable events, not only do people behave in ways we might term unreasonable, but even the outposts of rational thought—formal logic, formal philosophy, theoretical mathematics, physics—are mined with paradox. A great many of the Aquarian Conspirators said they discovered from their scientific training the limits of rational thought. Typical responses to the question, What major ideas did you have to give up?:

"Scientific proof as the only way to understand."

"That rationalism was it."

"Belief in the purely rational."

"A linear view."

"Material reality."

"Causality."

"I realized that science had limited its way of knowing nature."

Acknowledging our uncertainty encourages us to experiment, and we are transformed by our experiments. We are free not to know the answer, we are free to change our position, we are free not to have a position. And we learn to reframe our problems. Asking the same question again and again without success is like continuing to search for a lost object in the places we have already looked. The answer, like the lost object, lies somewhere else altogether. Once we discover the power of challenging the assumptions in our old questions, we can foster our own paradigm shifts.

Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners...the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear and out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on the superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.

decisions, generating an ever more pervasive sense of flow and rightness.

Closely tied to intuition is vocation—literally, a "calling." As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said of freedom, "There is no liberty except the liberty of someone making his way towards something."

Vocation is the process of making one's way toward something. It is a direction more than a goal. Following a peak experience, one of the conspirators, a housewife who later became a filmmaker, said, "I felt as if I'd been called to serve on somebody's plan for mankind." The conspirators typically say they feel as if they are cooperating with events rather than controlling them or suffering them, much as an aikido master augments his strength by aligning himself with existing forces, even those in opposition.

The individual discovers a new kind of flexible will that helps in the vocation. This will has sometimes been called "intention." It is the opposite of accident, it represents a certain deliberateness, but it doesn't have the iron quality we usually as-

Vocation is a curious blend of the voluntary and the involuntary—choice and surrender. People remark that they feel strongly drawn in a particular direction or to certain tasks, and simultaneously convinced that they were somehow "supposed" to take just those steps. A poet and artist, M. C. Richards, said, "Life lies always at some frontier, making sorties into the unknown. Its path leads always further into truth. We cannot call it trackless waste, because as the path appears it seems to have lain there awaiting the steps . . . thus the surprises, thus the continuity."

put my foot down over an abyss—and something comes up to hit it, just in time."

not understand it. But there are innumerable clues available given the right frame of mind—openness—the availability to synthesize the clues into a whole.

A number of conspirators describe a strong sense of mission. A typical account:

One day in spring 1977, while taking a walk after meditating, I had an electric feeling which lasted about five seconds in which I felt totally integrated with the creative force of the universe. I "saw" what spiritual transformation was trying to do, what my mission in life was, and several alternative ways I might accomplish it. I chose one and am making it happen....

The dream of man's heart, Saul Bellow once said, is that life may complete itself in significant pattern. Vocation gives us such a pattern.

Suddenly I caught a glimpse, brief and shadowy at first, of my "real" self. I hadn't spoken to my parents in weeks; now I realized that, out of stupid pride, I'd needlessly hurt them by prolonging a feud that no longer held any emotional validity. Why hadn't I seen this before?

One est graduate said he reacted to this realization with mixed feelings:

Many mornings I wake up with a cold gray stone of fear in my solar plexus—fear that I really do matter...fear that being afraid won't stop me any more. If the discovery has frightened me, it has also awakened me. It explains me to myself in a way that says I have integrity and dignity. It says not only that I can make a difference, but I am the difference in the world.

Michael Rossman recalls the collective discovery by the organizers of the Free Speech Movement that they did have the power to really change things.

of the puzzle.

In fact, the original meaning of conspiracy is to "breathe together," which expresses exactly what we have in mind. We are together.

So is the conspiracy. As its numbers increase, supportive

friendships become easier, even in stifling institutions and small towns.

The sense of community, the affirmation of mutual discoveries, gird the individual for an otherwise lonely enterprise. The network, as Roszak said, is a vehicle of self-discovery. "We turn to the company of those who share our most intimate and forbidden identity, and there we begin to find ourselves as persons."

Brief meetings are enough for recognition. Those who responded to the survey gave assorted accounts of how they found their allies:

• Through the grapevine, friends of friends: "When you're in such-and-such, look up so-and-so."
• Through synchronicity or "guidance": "They seemed to show up when I needed them."
• Most easily, at conferences, seminars, and other sites where those of similar interests are likely to congregate.

Meet them at the produce bins and these metaphysical friends look like next-door neighbors who'll talk

Sometimes a tiny child has mastered balance but is afraid to walk, and adults will try to tempt him by holding out a desirable toy. In a sense, transformative technologies are devices to get us to try our inner equilibrium. Eventually, trust in these systems becomes self-trust—or, more specifically, confidence in the process of change itself. We learn that fear, like pain, is just a symptom. Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, our fears are a treasurehouse of self-knowledge if we explore them. Sometimes we call our fears by other names. We say we're sick and tired, angry, realistic; we say we "know our limits." Finding out what we are afraid of can break the code of many self-destructive behaviors and beliefs.

Once we experience the transformation of a fear we have trouble recapturing it, as if we have stepped far enough back from the fire to see that the burning buildings are only a part of a stage set or that the wizard is creating smoke from behind the curtain. Fear, it becomes evident, is a "special effect" of our consciousness. We will encounter fears and worries for the rest of our lives, but we now have a tool that makes all the difference.

THE TRANSFORMED LIFE

In the transformative process we become the artists and scientists of our own lives. Enhanced awareness promotes in all of us the traits that abound in the creative person: Whole-seeing. Fresh, childlike perceptions. Playfulness, a sense of flow. Risk-taking. The ability to focus attention in a relaxed way, to become lost in the object of contemplation. The ability to deal with many complex ideas at the same time. Willingness to diverge from the prevailing view. Access to preconscious material. Seeing what is there rather than what is expected or conditioned.

Having done field work in the psychotechnologies, the self is a folk psychologist

Awake now to the imprint of culture on itself, it attempts to

The transformed self is an architect, designing its own environment. It is a visionary, imagining alternative futures.

Those who succeed and do not push on to greater failure are the spiritual middle classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their compromising insignificance. How pretty their dreams must have been!... Only through the unattainable does man achieve a hope worth living and dying for—and so attain himself.

A designer-engineer advised, "Do things in the spirit of design research. Be willing to accept a mistake and redesign. There is no failure."

The survey of Aquarian Conspirators asked for a choice of the four most important instruments for social change from a checklist of fifteen. More often than any other answer, "Personal Example" was checked.

The transformed self is the medium. The transformed life is the message.

During that summer the European press noted the importance of the "American experiment," as the London Sunday Telegraph called it. Had it not been successful, "the idea of individual freedom would never have survived the Twentieth Century." Neu Zurcher Zeitung in Zurich said, "The American Bicentennial celebrates the greatest success story in modern history. The 1776 beacon, rekindled and invigorated in various ways — not least by puritan self-criticism — has endured." Stockholm's Dagens Nyheter observed that Americans are not bound together by social and cultural ties, family, or even language, so much as by the American dream itself.

But then we must ask, whose American dream? The dream is a chameleon; it has changed again and again. For the first immigrants, America was a continent to explore and exploit, a haven for the unwanted and the dissenters—a new beginning. Gradually the dream became an ascetic and idealized image of democracy, bespeaking the age-old hope for justice and self-governance. All too quickly, that dream metamorphosed into an expansionist, materialist, nationalist, and even imperialist vision of wealth and domination—paternalism, Manifest Destiny. Yet even then, there was a competing Transcendentalist vision: excellence, spiritual riches, the unfolding of the latent gifts of the individual.

Like that of the founding fathers and of the American Transcendentalists of the mid-1800s, the dream of the Aquarian Conspiracy in America is a framework for nonmaterialist expansion: autonomy, awakening, creativity—and reconciliation.

THE ORIGINAL DREAM

Hardly anyone expected the American uprising to succeed. Thousands of colonists emigrated to Canada or hid in the woods, certain that the king's armies would tear the colonial regiments to shreds. Nor did a majority of the people support the struggle for independence, even in theory. Historians estimate that one-third favored independence, one-third favored retaining British ties, and one-third were indifferent.

"The American War is over," Benjamin Rush wrote in 1787, "but this is far from the case of the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is over." Not only was the Revolution ongoing, as Rush said; it had preceded the military confrontation. "The war was no part of the revolution," John Adams reflected in 1815, "but only an effect and consequence of it." The revolution was in the minds of the people. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution. Long before the first shot is fired, the revolution begins. Long after truce is declared, it continues to overturn lives.

Because the brotherhood was supposed to transcend national or political loyalties, revolutionary soldiers are said to have carefully returned the lost papers of a British field lodge; and the apparent laxness of some British generals was attributed to their hope for a quick and bloodless settlement so that Mason would not be set against Mason

THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS— EXTENDING THE DREAM

The autonomy of the individual was more important to them than allegiance to any government. If conscience did not concur with the law, Thoreau said, civil disobedience was called for.

ຝຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓ

able. They knew that each of us sees the world through our own eyes, our own perspective. Long before Einstein, they believed all observations to be relative. They sought companions, not disciples. Emerson's charge: Be an opener of doors to those who come after.

They believed that mind and matter are continuous. In contrast to the mechanistic Newtonian ideas prevalent in their day, they saw the universe as organic, open, evolutionary. Form and meaning can be discovered in the universal flux, they believed, if one appealed to intuition—"Transcendental Reason." More than a century before neuroscience confirmed that the brain has a holistic mode of processing, the Transcendentalists described flashes, intuitions, and a kind of simultaneous knowing. Generations before Freud, they acknowledged the existence of the unconscious. "We lie in the lap of immense intelligence," Emerson said.

To support themselves and bring their ideas to a larger public, they helped launch the Lyceum movement, traveling around the country in an early version of the lecture circuit, trying out their ideas in a variety of settings. Their journal, The Dial, edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson (aided by Thoreau), had an impact far beyond its small circulation of one thousand, just as the Transcendentalists themselves had influence out of all proportion to their number.

TRANSFORMATION—AN AMERICAN DREAM

There is a kind of dynamic innocence in the American notion that anyone who really wants to can beat the odds or the elements. Americans have little sense of keeping in their place. The myth of transcendence is perpetuated by a pantheon of wilderness explorers and moon explorers, record breakers in every field of endeavor, heroic figures like Helen Keller and "Lucky" Lindbergh.

Americans take unusual pride in their freedoms and in their constitution, a pride that both impressed and irritated Tocqueville on his visit to the new republic.

Americans express greater self-reliance than Europeans. They are likelier to blame themselves for whatever has gone wrong, Inkeles said. They believe strongly in voluntarism, and they are "joiners." They are trusting, they think they can change the world, they believe that striving brings success, they are innovative and open.

The survey showed Americans to be more anti-authoritarian than Europeans and to have a stronger sense of the "quality" of the self, the importance of the individual.

THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The relative freedom in the United States would make it possible for such a revolution to occur bloodlessly, Revel said. If that happened, and if one political civilization were exchanged for another, as seemed to be happening, the impact might be felt worldwide by osmosis. This radical transformation would need the simultaneous occurrence of smaller revolutions—in politics, society, international and interracial relations, cultural values, and technology and science. "The United States is the only country where these revolutions are simultaneously in progress and organically linked in such a way as to constitute a single revolution."

There also must be an internal critique of injustices, of the management of material and human resources, and of abuses of political power. Above all, there must be criticism of the culture itself: its morality, religion, customs, and arts. And there must be demand for respect of the individual's uniqueness, with the society regarded as the medium for individual development and for brotherhood.

to emerge, rather than a coup d'état, dialogue and debate must occur at the highest levels.

Wave after wave of social protest reflected growing skepticism about authority,³ more sensitivity to contradictions in the society—the juxtaposition of poverty and affluence, scarcity and consumerism. There were marches, lie-ins, sit-ins, be-ins, press conferences, riots. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the Free Speech Movement, the ecology movement. Women's rights and gay rights. The Gray Panthers, antinuclear prayer vigils, taxpayers' revolts, demonstrations for and against abortion. All the groups cribbed strategies from their predecessors, including tactics for making the six o'clock news.

³The growing use of marijuana dealt a blow to authority: medical, legal, and parental. Hundreds of thousands of rural and small-town youths who might never have encountered marijuana in peacetime were introduced to the drug in Vietnam. Ironically, the introduction of major psychedelics, like LSD, in the 1960s was largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency's investigation into the substances for possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs. Soon they were synthesizing their own "acid." By 1973, according to the National Commission on Drug and Marijuana Abuse, nearly 5 percent of all American adults had tried LSD or a similar major psychedelic at least once.

experience. Nothing is working because the solutions lie outside the accepted patterns of thought.

A few individuals, then great numbers, lose their bearings and begin to generate political unrest. As controversy grows, the traditionalists or "nativists," those who have most at stake in the old culture or who are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon the people back to the "old lights." Mistaking symptoms for causes, they sanction or punish the new behaviors. Eventually, however, as McLoughlin described it, "accumulated pressures for change produce such acute personal and social stress that the whole culture must break the crust of custom, crash through the blocks in the mazeways, and find new socially structured avenues."

Our present cultural transformation alarms conservatives and liberals alike with its radical new premises. Whereas conservatives have historically called for a return to civil law and order during periods of social turbulence, now "nativists" at both ends of the political spectrum are calling for a return to a lawful and orderly universe.

Someone is always trying to summon us back to a dead allegiance: Back to God, the simple-minded religion of an earlier day. "Back to the basics," simple-minded education. Back to simple-minded patriotism. And now we are being called back to a simple-minded "rationality" contradicted by personal experience and frontier science.

COMMUNICATIONS—OUR NERVOUS SYSTEM

Just as transformation builds on wider awareness and connection in the individual brain, so our social imagination has been painfully, exquisitely enlivened by a nerve network of electronic sensing. Our awareness is joined in high human drama: political scandals, war and peacemaking, riots, accidents, grief, humor. And just as modern physics and Eastern philosophies are introducing a more integrated worldview to the West, our fluent media nervous system is linking our social brain. "Electronic circuitry," Marshall McLuhan said not long ago, "is Orientalizing the West. The contained, the distinct, the separate, our Western legacy—are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused."

everyday heroism.

Our collective nervous system mirrors our decadence. It arouses our right brains with music, archetypal dramas, startling visual sensations. It keeps our dream journal, taking notes on our fantasies and nightmares to tell us what we most want, what we most fear. If we let it, our technology can shock us out of the sleepwalking of the centuries.

sciousness, he said. "The new awareness movements, the new search for self, may make for cohesion rather than disintegration."

The links in the expanding nervous system are not only the vast networks of commercial television and the daily newspapers and radio, but "other knowing"—innovative public television and small radio stations, small publishers, cooperatives of small magazines. There are newsletters, proliferating journals and magazines, self-published books. Every neighborhood has its quick-print shops, every supermarket and library its copying machines. Ordinary citizens have access to audio and video cassettes, computer time, home computers, cooperative use of national long-distance lines, inexpensive electronic typesetting equipment. Everybody can be a Gutenberg. We communicate by bumper stickers and T-shirts.

And our national penchant for self-questioning and search has turned increasingly inward, not only through the ever-present pop psychology and self-help books, but in original, radical sources: the literature of transformation. The books of Teilhard, forbidden publication in his lifetime, now sell in the millions. Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, Carl Rogers, J. Krishnamurti, Theodore Roszak, and Carlos Castaneda are hot properties on drugstore paper-back racks.

And there are "new-age" publications of all kinds: radio programs and newsletters, directories of organizations, lists of resources, Yellow Pages and handbooks, and new journals about consciousness, myth, transformation, the future. Thousands of spiritual titles roll off the presses in inexpensive editions.

Civilizations decline, Toynbee said, not so much because of invasions or other external forces but because of an internal hardening of ideas. The "elite creative minority" that once gave life to the civilization has been gradually replaced by another minority—still dominant, but no longer creative.

Creativity requires constant transformation, experimentation, flexibility. Cynicism, a chronic state of distrust, is antithetical to the openness necessary for a creative society. To the cynic, experiments are futile...all conclusions are foregone. Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshal "facts." Just as we must let go of dead philosophies, illusions, and old science to confront reality, so a country must keep challenging its traditions if it is to be transformed—if it wants renewal.

"I say the sea is in," said poet Peter Levy. "... the new spirit is bluer than knowledge or history. In our lives, Europe is saying goodnight."

CALIFORNIA—LABORATORY FOR TRANSFORMATION

We protect ourselves from change, even from the hope of change, by our superstitious cynicism. Yet all exploration must

be fueled by hope.

California, named for a mythical island, has been an island of myth in the United States, sanctuary of the endangered dream. "The flashing and golden pageant of California," Walt Whit-

I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years, till now deferred.

. . . .

County alone exceeds the population of forty-one states. A phenomenon that exists "only in California" may be very large indeed.

CALIFORNIA AND THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY

Several people had mentioned a rather mysterious young man named Michael Murphy, who ran a seemingly unclassifiable institute on the wild Big Sur coast of central California. I was told that Murphy, like the hero of Maugham's The Razor's Edge, had gone to India seeking enlightenment, had lived for eighteen months at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.... The institute was supposedly a forum for new ideas, especially those that combined the wisdom of East and West. I heard that Esalen's first brochure flew under the title of a series of 1961 lectures by Aldous Huxley: "Human Potentialities."

After dinner we drove to my house and continued talking for hours. The meeting of minds, of visions, was extraordinary, with each of us bringing just what was needed in the way of background knowledge to dovetail with that of the other. While Murphy had been studying Eastern philosophy and humanistic psychology, I had been studying social and political movements in the United States.

In the spirit of those times, it was natural to think in terms of "movements." Just as the civil rights movement would break down the barriers between the races, and thus other barriers, a human potential movement would help break down the barriers between mind and body, between East-

ern wisdom and Western action, between individual and society, and thus between the limited self and the potential self.

It was a heady time. Will Schutz and Fritz Perls came to live at Esalen. New methods proliferated. The Esalen lodge became a carnival of innovation. . . . In 1967 the institute opened a branch in San Francisco to take on urban problems. I joined forces with the distinguished black psychiatrist Price Cobbs to lead marathon interracial confrontations. Mike Murphy moved to the city. Best yet—oh, glorious, golden days of grace!—all this happened pretty much out of the public eye.

But it remained for a remarkable piece of writing in the December 31, 1967, issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine to open the floodgates.

Esalen did not welcome the publicity. Its policy had been to cooperate with reporters but to discourage coverage whenever possible.

Although only 15 percent of Esalen's programs were encounter groups, Litwak had written about an encounter group, which led other reporters and the public to associate Esalen with them forever. Some reporters, bewildered by the wealth of new ideas at Esalen, finding them hard to categorize, settled for cynicism. Others became true believers, Leonard said, and "helped create false expectations that led to eventual disillusionment."

Inevitably, human-potential centers were springing up around the country. At various times Murphy and Price were approached by individuals wanting to affiliate with Esalen, using the name for their own centers. They refused but actively encouraged all competition.

The Aquarian Conspiracy, needless to say, is nurtured in California. Its "agents" from the Boston-Cambridge area, from New York and Washington, London, Denver, Minneapolis, Houston, Chicago, and hundreds of smaller cities rally in California from time to time for sustenance and courage.

The large "consciousness" conference, a California invention of the early 1970s, was a perfect device for this national crossfertilization. Beginning in 1975, California groups began organizing road shows—conferences and seminars all over the country. In many cities strong local links were then established, and subsequent programs were staged by locals. Conference budgets tried to provide for continuous liaison. Small workshops proved even more flexible strategies for moving people about the country. Through such meetings the conspirators typically pooled the names of friends and contacts, quickly enlarging and linking the networks. Cassette tapes of conference lectures were disseminated by the thousand.

Ironically, while the eastern United States tends to patronize the West Coast as a bizarre relative, Radio Television Belgium sent a team to Los Angeles to film a documentary on how the 1960s counterculture had affected the 1970s, explaining that "what happens in California will eventually happen in Europe."

Each American would be a synthesis of high and low, black and white, city and country, provincial and universal. "If he could live with these contradictions, he would be simply a representative American."

He quoted the Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, who called attention to the adoption of the word desperado in English: "It is despair, and despair alone, that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope." McPherson added:

This movement from a hopeless person to a desperado, he said, is "the only new direction I know."

We begin to feel our tangible and spiritual connection with other cultures. We have awakened our power to learn and to

change.

And we have ideas.

6

Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science

Any truth creates a scandal.

–MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, The Memoirs of Hadrian

The mysteries we will explore in this chapter are not remote from us, like black holes in outer space, but ourselves. Our brains and bodies. The genetic code. The nature of change. The

widening and shrinking of conscious experience. The power of imagination and intention. The plastic nature of intelligence and perception.

If we imagine that we are isolated beings, so many inner tubes afloat on an ocean of indifference, we will lead different lives than if we know a universe of unbroken wholeness. Believing in a world of fixity, we will fight change; knowing a

tragically incomplete.

At a recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (founded to foster interdisciplinary exchange), anthropologists reportedly met in one Philadelphia hotel to hear reports about the probable causes for the extinction of tribes. At the same hour, hundreds of biologists convened in a nearby hotel to discuss the reason for the extinction of species. The two groups—in their separate hotels—came up with the same answer: over-specialization.

Specialization has spawned another problem: technical and

mathematical languages—a Tower of Babel.

In brain science alone, half a million papers are published annually. Neuroscience has become such an esoteric discipline, so narrowly subspecialized, that the researchers have extraordinary difficulty in communicating even among themselves. Only a handful of researchers are trying to make sense of the whole.

It has been said that science replaces common sense with knowledge. Indeed, our most advanced intellectual adventures carry us into wonderlands beyond the boundaries of logical, linear understanding. There is a much-quoted observation of the great biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, that reality is not only stranger than we can conceive but stranger than we can conceive.

There is no bottom line in nature. There is no deepest place where it all makes tidy sense. This can be frightening. It can make us feel as if we are regressing to childhood, when nature seemed immense, mysterious, potent. Later we learned to sort facts from fancy, and mystery was reduced to "explanations." "Facts" about lightning or magnetism or radio waves, for example, led us to think that nature was understood or about to be understood. This mistaken view, held by most scientists in the late-nineteenth century, carried over into popular misunderstanding of the powers of science.

Now, when our most advanced science begins to sound mythic and symbolic—when it relinquishes hope of achieving ultimate certainty—we are disbelieving. It is as if we are being asked to re-create the awe and credulity of early childhood,

before we knew what a rainbow "really" was.

Events in nature have simultaneous multiple causes. Some languages, notably Hopi and Chinese, are structured differently and can express nonlinear ideas with less strain. They can, in effect, "speak physics." Like the ancient Greeks, whose philosophy strongly influenced the left-brained West, we say, "The light flashed." But the light and the flash were one. A Hopi would more accurately say, "Reh-pi!"—"Flash!"

Korzybski warned that we will not grasp the nature of reality until we realize the limitation of words. Language frames our thought, thereby setting up barriers. The map is not the territory. A rose is not a rose is a rose; the apple of August 1 is not the apple of September 10 or the wizened fruit of October 2. Change and complexity always outrun our powers of description.

Ironically, even most scientists do not relate scientific knowledge to everyday life. Peer pressure discourages them from searching for wider meaning or significance "outside their field." They keep what they know compartmentalized and irrelevant, like a religion practiced only on holy days. Only a few have the intellectual rigor and personal courage to try to integrate their science into their lives. Capra remarked that most physicists go home from the laboratory and live their lives as if Newton, not Einstein, were right—as if the world were fragmented and mechanical. "They don't seem to realize the

philosophical, cultural, and spiritual implications of their theories."

SEEING THE NEW WORLD

This chapter will take us through several scientific doorways into that other dimension. Technical terms have been kept to a minimum so that the "story line" can better be followed. Those who want to pursue the data will find technical references at the back of the book.

When the left brain confronts the nonlinear dimension, it keeps circling around, breaking wholes into parts, retracing its

Recall the model of the paradigm shift introduced by Thomas Kuhn: Every important new idea in science sounds strange at first. As the physicist Niels Bohr put it, great innovations inevitably appear muddled, confusing, and incomplete, only half-understood even by their discoverers, and a mystery to everyone else. There is no hope, Bohr said, for any speculation that does not look absurd at first glance. Bohr once remarked of an idea advanced by his famous colleague Werner Heisenberg, "It isn't crazy enough to be true." (As it turned out, it wasn't.¹)

If scientists are slow to accept new information, the public is usually even slower. Erwin Schrödinger, the great physicist, once said that it takes at least fifty years before a major scientific discovery penetrates the public consciousness—half a century before people realize what truly surprising beliefs are held by leading scientists. The human species can no longer afford the luxury of such long double-takes or the leisurely changes of heart of entrenched scientists. The cost is too great: in our ecology, our relationships, our health, our conflict, our threatened collective future. We are duty-bound to search, question, open our minds.

from modern science connect like parts of a puzzle. They support each other; together they form the scaffolding for a wider worldview.

In The Morning of the Magicians Pauwels and Bergier speculated that an open conspiracy exists among scientists who have discovered these metaphysical realities. Many of the Aquarian Conspirators are scientists, a fraternity of paradigm breakers who cross into each other's territory for new insights. Many more have an intense lay interest in the frontiers of research. They draw their models for social change from scientific insights about how nature really, radically works. Other conspirators have become interested in science because they want to understand the physical basis for experiences they have had through the psychotechnologies.²

By supporting programs where scientists from many disciplines can discuss the implications of their work for society and for personal change, the Aquarian Conspiracy plays an important educational role. For example, a fairly typical program staged in New York in late 1978 featured two physicists, Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner and Fritjof Capra; psychologist Jean Houston, a researcher in altered states of consciousness; brain scientist Karl Pribram; and Swami Rama, a yogi who became famous in the early 1970s when the Menninger Foundation and other laboratories verified his remarkable ability to control physiological processes (including virtually stopping his heart). Their topic: "New Dimensions of Consciousness."

The brochure for the conference, also typical, characterized the convergence of science and intuition:

BRAIN AND CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH

Until the 1960s there were relatively few scientists studying the brain and even fewer researching the interaction between the brain and conscious experience. Since then brain and consciousness research has become a thriving industry. The more we know in this field, the more radical our questions become. "There will be no end to this enterprise," said John Eccles, a Nobel-laureate neuroscientist, "not for centuries."

Beginning in the sixties biofeedback research demonstrated that human subjects can control delicate, complex, internal processes long believed to be involuntary. In the laboratory, people were trained to speed up and slow down their heart rate, alter the electrical activity on the surface of the skin, shift from rapid beta-rhythm brainwaves to slower alpha-rhythm. Human subjects learned to "fire" (cause a bioelectrical action in) a single motor nerve cell. A pioneer researcher in biofeedback, Barbara Brown, has remarked that this deep biological awareness reflects the mind's ability to alter every physiological system, every cell in the body.

Although biofeedback subjects knew how these shifts felt, they were helpless to explain how they were achieved. On one level biofeedback seems like a straightforward phenomenon; monitoring bodily information by machine readout, tone cues, or lights one can identify the sensations associated with fluctuations in feedback. But there is a mysterious gap between intention and physiological action. How can one's will select a single cell out of billions and cause it to discharge? Or release a specific chemical? Or limit the flow of gastric juices? Or alter the rhythmic behavior of populations of brain cells? Or dilate capillarios to increase hand to research upon the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and the property and

laries to increase hand temperature?

Awareness is wider and deeper than anyone had guessed; intention, more powerful. Clearly, human beings have not begun to exploit their potential for change.

Biofeedback phenomena sent researchers scurrying back to the handful of scientific reports on yogis reported to have such control—without feedback. Until the phenomenon was verified in biofeedback laboratories, it had been widely assumed that the yogis had somehow tricked the few investigators willing to look at their feats.

During that same period, split-brain research (discussed in Chapter 3) demonstrated that human beings are indeed "of two minds" and that such centers of consciousness can function independently from each other in a single skull. The importance of this research, which opened a related field studying brain-hemisphere specialization, cannot be overstated. It helped us understand the distinctive nature of "holistic" processes; the mysterious knowing that had been insisted upon, disputed, and doubted over the centuries. The phenomenon of "intuition" was now vaguely situated on the neuroanatomical map.

The quantifying brain confirmed the reality of its qualitatively different "minor" hemisphere—an equal, if repressed, partner. Its powers were evident in the amazing performances of biofeedback subjects, the altered physiological processes measured in mediators, the strange double awareness in splitbrain patients. More subtle techniques soon revealed the presence of the "other mind" in general perception. Researchers demonstrated that our attention is exquisitely selective, biased by belief and emotion; we can process information in parallel channels at the same time; we have extraordinary capacities for memory (if not always easy access to our data banks).

The endorphins and the other brain substances of the class known as peptides added a new principle to brain function. The known chemical transmitters in the brain had been tracked; they work in a linear way, from cell to cell. But the new substances are more simultaneous in their action; they seem to modulate the activity of brain cells much as one tunes a radio and adjusts for volume. Some of them "broadcast" messages as well, which led Roger Guillemin, a Nobel-laureate researcher in the field, to suggest the existence of a "new" nervous system comprised of these substances.

Because the peptides are general and powerful in their action, their effects on the body and behavior are often dramatic. The endorphins, for example, have been shown to affect sexuality, appetite, social bonding, pain perception, alertness, learning, reward, seizures, and psychosis. Experiments have implicated the endorphins in the mysterious placebo effect, in which an inactive substance like a sugar pill produces relief because the patient expects it. Patients experiencing placebo relief from postoperative dental discomfort reported a recurrence of pain after they were given a chemical that interferes with the endorphins. Faith, inspired by the placebo, apparently releases endorphins. How it happens is as big a mystery as how intention works in biofeedback.

HOLISM AND SYSTEMS THEORY

Wholeness, Smuts said, is a fundamental characteristic of the universe—the product of nature's drive to synthesize. "Holism is self-creative, and its final structures are more holistic than its initial structures." These wholes — in effect, these unions—are dynamic, evolutionary, creative. They thrust toward ever-higher orders of complexity and integration. "Evolution," Smuts said, "has an ever deepening, inward spiritual character."

General Systems Theory, a related modern concept, says

that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A single variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, or a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy said that General Systems Theory aims to understand the principles of wholeness and selforganization at all levels:

In Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, the mysterious extraterrestrial Overlords, who have controlled Earth for a hundred years, explain that they are only interim protectors of humankind. Despite their greater intellectual powers, the Overlords are in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, whereas humanity has the capability of infinite evolution.

As to the nature of the change, we can tell you very

little...it spreads explosively, like the formation of crystals round the first nucleus in a saturated solution.

Darwin's theory of evolution by chance mutation and survival of the fittest has proven hopelessly inadequate to account for a great many observations in biology. Just as inadequacies in Newton's physics led Einstein to formulate a shocking new theory, so a larger paradigm is emerging to broaden our understanding of evolution.

Darwin insisted that evolution happened very gradually. Steven Jay Gould, a Harvard biologist and geologist, notes that on the eve of the publication of The Origin of Species, T. H. Huxley wrote Darwin, promising to battle on his behalf but warning that he had burdened his argument unnecessarily by this insistence. Darwin's portrayal of glacially slow evolution reflected in part his admiration of Charles Lyell, who promoted the idea of gradualism in geology. Evolution was a stately and orderly process in Darwin's view, Gould noted, "working at a speed so slow that no person could hope to observe it in his lifetime."

And just as Lyell rejected the evidence for cataclysm in geology, Darwin ignored problems in his own evidence. True, there seemed to be great gaps, missing rungs in the ladder of evolution, but he believed these were just imperfections in the geological record. Change only seemed abrupt.

Gould and Eldredge independently proposed a resolution of this problem, a theory that is consistent with the geological record. Soviet paleontologists have proposed a similar theory. Punctuationalism or punctuated equilibrium suggests that the equilibrium of life is "punctuated" from time to time by severe stress. If a small segment of the ancestral population is isolated at the periphery of its accustomed range, it may give way to a

The old paradigm saw evolution as a steady climb up a ladder, whereas Gould and others liken it to a branching out of various limbs of a tree. For instance, anthropologists have discovered in recent years that at one time there were at least three coexisting hominids—creatures that had evolved beyond the ape. Earlier it was believed that these different specimens formed a sequence. Now it is known that one "descendant" was living at the same time as its presumed ancestors. Several different lineages split from the parent stock, the lower primates. Some survived and continued to evolve, while others disappeared. The large-brained Homo appeared quite suddenly.

The new paradigm attributes evolution to periodic leaps by small groups.³ This changing view is significant for at least two reasons: (1) It requires a mechanism for biological change more powerful than chance mutation, and (2) it opens us up to the possibility of rapid evolution in our own time, when the equilibrium of the species is punctuated by stress. Stress in modern society is experienced at the frontiers of our psychological rather than our geographical limits. Pioneering becomes an increasingly psychospiritual venture since our physical frontiers are all but exhausted, short of space exploration.

If gradualism is more a product of Western thought than a fact of nature, then we should consider alternative philosophies of change to enlarge our realm of constraining prejudices. In the Soviet Union, for example, scientists are trained with a very different philosophy of change.... They speak of the "transformation of quantity into quality." This may sound like mumbo jumbo, but it suggests that change occurs in large leaps following a slow accumulation of stresses that a system resists until it reaches the breaking point. Heat water and it eventually reaches a boiling point. Oppress the workers more and more and they suddenly break their chains.

Evolution may be speeded up by certain genetic mechanisms, according to new findings. Genes and segments of DNA have been shown to jump off and onto chromosomes in bacteria and certain other life forms, suggesting that the chromosomes may be modified continuously. Researchers have conjectured that such genetic rewriting may be expected in all forms of life.

Art critic and historian Rudolf Arnheim pointed out that Europe seized upon the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when it was first formulated, to account for everything that seemed to be going wrong. "The sun was getting smaller, the earth colder," and the general decline into entropy was also evident in the lower standards of army discipline, social decadence, falling birth rate, more insanity and tuberculosis, poorer vision.

Biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, discoverer of Vitamin C and a Nobel laureate, proposed that a drive toward greater order may be a fundamental principle of nature. He calls this characteristic syntropy—the opposite of entropy. Living matter has an inherent drive to perfect itself, he believes. Perhaps the cell periphery in a living organism actually feeds information back to the DNA at its core, changing the instructions. "After all," he said, "it was not known until a few years ago how the DNA issues its instructions to the cell in the first place. Some equally elegant process may alter those instructions."

developed by accident?

Evolution involves true transformation, re-forming of the

itated" by the flattid bug does not exist in nature. Furthermore, each batch of eggs laid by the female includes at least one flattid bug with green wings, not coral, and several with wings of in-between shades.

Shortly the twig was still and one beheld again the flower.

THE SCIENCE OF TRANSFORMATION

When the puzzles and paradoxes cry out for resolution, a new

And the theory is immediately relevant to everyday life—to people. It offers a scientific model of transformation at every level. It explains the critical role of stress in transformation—and the impetus toward transformation inherent in nature!

stars, the DNA code, biological clocks, the symmetrical exchanges of energy in the collision of subatomic particles, memory patterns in human minds.

Next, remember that at a deep level of nature, nothing is fixed. These patterns are in constant motion. Even a rock is a dance of electrons.

up. The elements of the old pattern come into contact with each other in new ways and make new connections. The parts reorganize into a new whole. The system escapes into a higher order.

The Zhabotinskii reaction, a dissipative structure in chemistry, caused something of a sensation among chemists in the 1960s. In this dramatic example of nature creating patterns in both space and time, beautiful scroll-like forms unfold in a solution in a laboratory dish while the colors of the solution oscillate, changing from red to blue at regular intervals. Similarly, when certain oils are heated, a complex pattern of hexagons appears on the surface. The higher the heat, the more complex the pattern. These shifts are sudden and nonlinear. Multiple factors act on each other at once.⁶

Human society offers an example of spontaneous selforganization. In a fairly dense society, as individuals become acquainted with others, each soon has more points of contact throughout the system via friends and friends of friends. The greater the instability and mobility of the society, the more interactions occur. This means greater potential for new connections, new organizations, diversification. Much as certain cells or organs in a body specialize during the course of evolution, people with common interests find one another and refine their specialty by mutual stimulation and exchange of ideas.

Cultures are the most coherent and strangest of dissipative structures, Prigogine remarked. A critical number of advocates of change can create "a preferential direction" like the inner

Because of their size and density, modern societies are subject to large internal fluctuations. These can trigger shifts to a higher, richer order. In Prigogine's terms, they can become more pluralistic and diversified.

poets, mystics, and scientist-philosophers like Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. "A deep collective vision," he called it. He believes that the breakdown between the Two Cultures is not as Snow thought, that those in the humanities are not reading enough science and vice-versa.

"One of the basic aspects of the humanities is time—the way things change. The laws of change. As long as we had only these naive views of time in physics and chemistry, science had little to say to art." Now we move from a world of quantities in science to a world of qualities—a world in which we can recognize ourselves, "a human physics." This worldview goes beyond duality and traditional options into a rich, pluralistic cultural outlook, a recognition that higher-order life is not bound by "laws" but is capable of boundless innovation and alternate realities.

We are approaching a new unity—a non-totalitarian science, in which we don't try to reduce one level to another.

THE BRAIN AS A DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURE

The brain seemed a perfect example of a dissipative structure. It is the ultimate in complexity. It is characterized by form and flow, interaction with the environment, abrupt shifts, sensitivitity to being perturbed. It demands the lion's share of the body's energy—with only 2 percent of the body weight, it consumes 20 percent of the available oxygen. The ups and downs of its energy influx are characteristic of the unstable dissipative structure.

At the same session, Vernon Rowland of Case Western Reserve University predicted that this approach to the brain would penetrate the old mystery: the difference that makes a whole more than the sum of its parts. Cooperation seemed to be a key; the more complex a system, the greater its potential for self-transcendence.

Two weeks later Katchalsky was slain by terrorists' bullets in the Lod Airport at Tel Aviv.

He had been hot on the trail of a truly promising connection. Consider the theory of dissipative structures as it may apply to the human brain and consciousness. It helps explain the transformative power of psychotechnologies—why they can break conditioning that is firmly resistant to change in ordinary states of consciousness.

Brainwaves reflect fluctuations of energy. Groups of neurons are experiencing enough electrical activity to show up on the EEG graph. In normal consciousness, small and rapid brainwaves (beta rhythm) dominate the EEG pattern in most people. We are more attentive to the external world than to inner experience in the beta state. Meditation, reverie, relaxation, and other assorted psychotechnologies tend to increase the slower, larger brainwaves known as alpha and theta. Inward attention, in other words, generates a larger fluctuation in the brain. In altered states of consciousness, fluctuations may reach a critical level,

Memories, including deeply entrenched patterns of behavior and thought, are dissipative structures. They are patterns or forms stored in the brain. Remember that small fluctuations in a dissipative structure are suppressed by the existing form; they have no lasting effect. But larger fluctuations of energy cannot be contained in the old structure. They set off ripples throughout the system, creating sudden new connections. Thus, old patterns are likeliest to change when maximally perturbed or shaken—activated in states of consciousness in which there is significant energy flow.

Prigogine's theory helps to account for the dramatic effects sometimes seen in meditation, hypnosis, or guided imagery: the sudden relief of a lifelong phobia or ailment. An individual reliving a traumatic incident in a state of highly-focused inward attention perturbs the pattern of that specific old memory. This triggers a reorganization—a new dissipative structure

The old pattern is broken.

Again and again, the mandates of nature, repeated at all

Molecules and stars, brainwaves and concepts, individuals and societies—all have the potential for transformation.

All wholes transcend their parts by virtue of internal coherence, cooperation, openness to input.

Evolution is a continuous breaking and forming to make new, richer wholes. Even our genetic material is in flux.

If we try to live as closed systems, we are doomed to regress.

PSI: THE UNKNOWN IN PHYSICS AND PARAPSYCHOLOGY

The phone rings and a person I have never heard of identifies himself as a patent examiner in the Swiss National Patent Office. He says that he has heard that I give lectures on electromagnetic theory and that he has developed some ideas which might interest me. "What sort of ideas?" I ask a bit superciliously.

Modern physics, letting itself out further and further into the unknown on that slender thread of connection, has revealed a

In place of a real and solid world, theoretical physics offers us a flickering web of events, relationships, potentialities. Particles make sudden transitions, "quantum leaps," behaving at times like units, yet mysteriously wavelike on other occasions. One current theory sees the universe as a "scattering matrix" in which there are no particles at all but only relationships between events

At its primary level the universe seems to be paradoxically whole and undifferentiated, a seamlessness that somehow generates the intricate tapestry of our experience, a reality we cannot possibly visualize.

But mathematics can go where common sense cannot. Just as Prigogine formulated the mathematics to prove a strange, self-organizing, transcendent force in nature, so another mathematical proof threatens the underpinnings of post-Einsteinian physics, which was already beyond imagining for most of us.

On the surface, the idea appeared absurd. How could two separated particles be thus connected? This challenge, later known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, did not refute quantum theory, as was intended. Instead it called attention to the bizarre nature of the subatomic world.

the world in which we live are profoundly deficient.'

Many great physicists over the years have become deeply absorbed in the role of the mind in constructing reality. Schrödinger, for instance, remarked that exploring the relationship between brain and mind is the only important task of science. He once quoted the Persian mystic Aziz Nasafi:

Niels Bohr, to symbolize his theory of complementarity, designed a coat of arms featuring the yin-yang symbol. The Taoist saying, "The real is empty, and the empty is real," is not unlike physicist Paul Dirac's statement, "All matter is created out of some imperceptible substratum... nothingness, unimaginable and undetectible. But it is a peculiar form of nothingness out of which all matter is created."

The ultimate psi in physics remains unknowable. Reviewing the big bang theory of the origins of the universe, Robert Jastrow, an astrophysicist who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, pointed out that it is not exactly an explanation of cause. "If a scientist really examines the implications, he would be traumatized. As usual, when the mind is faced with trauma, it reacts by ignoring the implications—in science this is called 'refusing to speculate'—or by trivializing the origin of the world by calling it the Big Bang, as if the universe were merely a firecracker."

...It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory. At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation.

Nature has no simple level, Prigogine pointed out. The

nearer we try to approach it, the greater the complexity we confront. In this rich, creative universe, the supposed laws of strict causality are almost caricatures of the true nature of change. There is "a more subtle form of reality, one that involves both laws and games, time and eternity.... Instead of the classical description of the world as an automaton, we return to the ancient Greek paradigm of the world as a work of art."

the phenomena irrefutably occur and that they can be facilitated by the psychotechnologies.

Human intention has been shown to interact with matter at a distance, affecting the particles in a cloud chamber, crystals, the rate of radioactive decay. An intention to "heal" has been demonstrated to alter enzymes, hemoglobin values, and the hydrogen-oxygen bond in water. The mode of transmission is unknown, just as there is a missing link between intention and biofeedback control and between suggestion and the brain chemistry involved in the placebo effect. Every human intention that results in physical action is, in effect, mind over matter. How consciousness and the physical world interact remains a mystery.

Once primarily the province of psychologists and psychiatrists, parapsychology has attracted a number of physicists in recent years. Even so, theories on the mechanism of psi are sketchy, and most theories try instead to understand what helps or hinders the phenomena.

A recent survey of more than seven hundred parapsychological references reviewed a dizzying variety of approaches. Among the factors studied: effects of time and distance, forced choice, impulsivity, motivation, interpersonal factors, the experimenter effect, alterations of consciousness (dreams, hypnosis, biofeedback, drugs), brain correlates (density of alpha brainwaves, hemispheric specialization, brain injuries), personality profiles of low and high scorers (neuroticism, extraversion, creativity, psychosis), sex differences, age differences, birth order, belief, learning, decline effects, short-circuiting the ego, body language, responses in the autonomic nervous sys-

Historically, many great scientists have been drawn to psi. Among the first officers of the Society for Psychical Research in Britain were three Nobel laureates: the discoverer of the electron, J.J. Thompson; the discoverer of argon, Lord Rayleigh (J.W. Strutt); and Charles Richet. William James, usually described as the father of American psychology, co-founded the American Society for Psychical Research. Among the Nobel laureates specifically interested in psi were Alexis Carrel, Max Planck, the Curies, Schrödinger, Charles Sherrington, and Einstein (who wrote the foreword for Upton Sinclair's book on telepathy, Mental Radio). Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel physicist, coauthored a theory about synchronicity. Pierre Janet, a great French scientist of the nineteenth century, actively investigated psi. Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison had a strong interest in the field.

essential unity of all life.

tem (changes in blood volume in capillaries, for example), and the effects of strobe lights.

In all of these scientific breakthroughs we discover qualitative shifts: transformations rather than gradual change. There are jumps—"missing links." For example:

ot consciousness.

The gap between intention and physiological change in biofeedback...and between suggestion and analgesia in the placebo effect.

Quantum jumps in physics.

The transfer of information in psychic phenomena. The shift of a dissipative structure to a higher order

For those willing to listen, science itself is telling thrilling, open-ended mystery stories about a world rich beyond our

imagining. Just as one who makes a clearing in the forest is increasing the periphery of contact with the unknown, we are only becoming wiser about the scope of the territory we have yet to explore.

A HOLOGRAPHIC WORLD

they make sense.

Recently a Stanford neuroscientist, Karl Pribram, proposed an all-encompassing paradigm that marries brain research to theoretical physics; it accounts for normal perception and simultaneously takes the "paranormal" and transcendental experiences out of the supernatural by demonstrating that they

are part of nature.

At one point Lashley said facetiously that his research proved that learning was not possible. Pribram participated in

uted throughout?

Later, when Pribram went to the Center for Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford,8 he was still deeply troubled by the mystery that had drawn him into brain research: How do we remember? In the mid-sixties, he read a Scientific American article describing the first construction of a hologram, a kind of three-dimensional "picture" produced by lensless photography. Dennis Gabor invented holography in principle in 1947, a discovery that later earned him a Nobel prize, but the construction of a hologram had to await the invention of the laser.

If you drop a pebble into a pond, it will produce a series of regular waves that travel outward in concentric circles. Drop two identical pebbles into the pond at different points and you will get two sets of similar waves that move towards each other. Where the waves meet, they will interfere. If the crest of one hits the crest of the other, they will work together and produce a reinforced wave of twice the normal height. If the crest of one coincides with the trough of another, they will cancel each other out and produce an isolated patch of calm water. In fact, all possible combinations of the two occur, and the final result is a complex arrangement of ripples known as an interference pattern.

^<sup>8He worked on his landmark book, Languages of the Brain, in an office next door to Thomas Kuhn, who was writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

will be very complex indeed, but it can still be recorded. The record will be a hologram of the face.

If the hologram is broken, any piece of it will reconstruct the entire

image

But in 1970 or 1971, a distressing and ultimate question began troubling Pribram. If the brain indeed knows by putting together holograms—by mathematically transforming frequencies from "out there"—who in the brain is interpreting the holograms?

entity that uses the brain?

Who does the actual knowing? Or, as Saint Francis of Assisi

once put it, "What we are looking for is what is looking."

Just so, all apparent substance and movement are illusory. They emerge from another, more primary order of the universe. Bohm calls this phenomenon the holomovement.

Ever since Galileo, he says, we have been looking at nature through lenses; our very act of objectifying, as in an electron microscope, alters that which we hope to see. We want to find its edges, to make it sit still for a moment, when its true nature is in another order of reality, another dimension, where there are no things. It is as if we are bringing the "observed" into focus, as you would bring a picture into resolution, but the blur is a more accurate representation. The blur itself is the basic reality.

He suggested that transcendental experiences—mystical states—may allow us occasional direct access to that realm. Certainly, subjective reports from such states often sound like descriptions of quantum reality, a coincidence that has led several physicists to speculate similarly. Bypassing our normal,

constricting perceptual mode—what Aldous Huxley called the reducing valve—we may be attuned to the source or matrix of reality.

And the brain's neural interference patterns, its mathematical processes, may be identical to the primary state of the universe. That is to say, our mental processes are, in effect, made of the same stuff as the organizing principle. Physicists and astronomers had remarked at times that the real nature of the universe is immaterial but orderly. Einstein professed mystical awe in the face of this harmony. Astronomer James Jeans said that the universe is more like a great thought than a great machine, and astronomer Arthur Eddington said, "The stuff of the universe is mind-stuff." More recently, cyberneticist David Foster described "an intelligent universe" whose apparent concreteness is generated by—in effect—cosmic data from an unknowable, organized source.

In a nutshell, the holographic supertheory says that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by interpreting frequencies from a dimension transcending time and space. The brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe.

We are indeed participants in reality, observers who affect what we observe.

In this framework, psychic phenomena are only by-products of the simultaneous-everywhere matrix. Individual brains are bits of the greater hologram. They have access under certain circumstances to all the information in the total cybernetic system. Synchronicity—the web of coincidence that seems to have some higher purpose or connectedness—also fits in with the holographic model. Such meaningful coincidences derive from the purposeful, patterned, organizing nature of the matrix. Psychokinesis, mind affecting matter, may be a natural result of interaction at the primary level. The holographic model resolves one long-standing riddle of psi: the inability of instrumentation to track the apparent energy transfer in telepathy, healing, clairvoyance. If these events occur in a dimension transcending time and space, there is no need for energy to travel from here to there. As one researcher put it, "There isn't any there."

For years those interested in phenomena of the human mind had predicted that a breakthrough theory would emerge; that it would draw on mathematics to establish the supernatural as part of nature.

The holographic model is such an integral theory catching all

Its explanatory power enriches and enlarges many disciplines, making sense of old phenomena and raising urgent new questions. Implicit in the theory is the assumption that harmonious, coherent states of consciousness are more nearly attuned to the primary level of reality, a dimension of order and harmony. Such attunement would be hampered by anger, anxiety, and fear and eased by love and empathy. There are implications for learning, environments, families, the arts, religion and philosophy, healing and self-healing. What fragments us? What makes us whole?

raphy — indicated an underlying radical, patterned order of reality.

Ancient mystics also correctly described the function of the pineal gland centuries before science could confirm it. "How did ideas like this arise centuries before we had the tools to understand them?" Pribram asked. "Maybe in the holographic state—the frequency domain—four thousand years ago is the same as tomorrow."

Similarly, Bergson had said in 1907 that the ultimate reality is an underlying web of connection and that the brain screens out the larger reality. In 1929, Whitehead described nature as a great expanding nexus of occurrences beyond sense perception. We only imagine that matter and mind are different, when, in fact, they are interlocking.

Bergson maintained that artists, like mystics, have access to the élan vital, the underlying creative impulse. T. S. Eliot's poems are full of holographic images: "The still point of the turning world" that is neither flesh nor fleshless, neither arrest nor movement. "And do not call it fixity, where past and future are gathered. Except for the point, the still point/There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

The German mystic Meister Eckhart had said that "God becomes and disbecomes." Rumi, the Sufi mystic, said, "Men's minds perceive second causes, but only prophets perceive the action of the First Cause."

In The Man Who Gave Thunder to the Earth, Nancy Wood's retelling of the Taos stories:

In an ancient sutra of Patanjali, knowledge of "the subtle, the hidden, and the distant" is said to arise by looking with the pravritti—a Sanskrit term meaning "before the wave." This description parallels the idea of an apparently concrete world

How brain processes can be altered to allow direct experience of the frequency domain is still a conjecture. It may involve a known perceptual phenomenon—the "projection" that permits us to experience the full, three-dimensional stereophonic sound as if the sound emanates from a point midway between two speakers instead of coming from two distinct sources. Research has shown that the kinesthetic senses can be similarly affected; tapping on both hands at a particular frequency eventually causes the person to feel a third hand midway between. Pribram has suggested possible involvement of a deep brain region that has been the site of pathological disturbances, of déjà vu, and seems involved in the "consciousness without a

content" of mystical experience. Some alternation of frequency and the phase relationships in these structures may be the open sesame for transcendental states.

There is surely a message in these rapidly converging scientific revolutions: in physics, psi, the interaction of mind and body, the evolutionary thrust, the brain's two ways of knowing and its potential for transcendent awareness.

The more we learn about the nature of reality, the more plainly we see the unnatural aspects of our environment—and our lives. Out of ignorance, out of arrogance, we have been

Not realizing that our species evolved in cooperation, we have opted for competition in work, school, relationships. Not understanding the body's ability to reorganize its internal processes, we have drugged and doctored ourselves into bizarre side effects. Not understanding our societies as great organisms, we have manipulated them into "cures" worse than the ailments.

Novelist Lawrence Durrell said in Justine, "Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?" Perhaps, at last, Science can say yes to Art.

Right Power

—WILLIAM JAMES

In C. P. Cavafy's poem, "Expecting the Barbarians," the populace and emperor are assembled in the public square, awaiting the invasion of the Barbarians. The legislators have abandoned the senate because the Barbarians will make the law when they come. The orators have prepared no speeches because Barbarians don't appreciate fluency and fine phrases.

"experts" and lay people.

ຝ౧ౖ Tocqueville said. The Aquarian Conspiracy assumes that the reverse is also true. A new world—a new perspective on reality—is indispensable to a new politics. "A turning of the mind," Huxley called it. The very sense of reality must be transformed, Theodore Roszak said. It has variously been called a new metaphysic, "the politics of consciousness," "New Age politics," "the politics of transformation."

This chapter is about politics in the broadest sense. It is about the emergence of a new kind of leader, a new definition of power, a dynamic power inherent in networks, and the rapidly growing constituency that can make all the difference.

lonely.

priate power.

POLITICAL CRISIS AND TRANSFORMATION

The new political paradigm is emerging in a growing consensus described by a Canadian social analyst, Ruben Nelson, as "the literature of crisis and transformation." Although this literature expresses the situation in a variety of metaphors and with varying degrees of desperation, its essence is as follows:

working.

The Prescription: We must face our pain and conflict. Until we quit denying our failures and muffling our uneasiness, until we confess our bewilderment and alienation, we can't take the next and necessary steps

More quickly than we can comfortably manage, we are called upon to devise, discover, and refine new alternatives. How much easier it is to calculate the wrong turns we have made

than to spy out truer roads!

AUTARCHY—THE GOVERNING SELF

Autarchy is government by the self. The idea that social harmony springs ultimately from the character of individuals appears throughout history. According to Confucian writings, wise individuals, wanting good government, looked first within, seeking precise words to express their hitherto-unvoiced yearnings, "the tones given off by the heart." Once they were able to verbalize the intelligence of the heart they disciplined themselves. Order within the self led first to harmony within their own households, then the state, and finally the empire.

The discoveries of transformation inevitably alter our perceptions of power. The discovery of freedom, for instance, means little if we are not empowered to act, to be free for something, not just from something. As fear falls away, we are less afraid of power's Siamese twin, responsibility. There is less certainty about what is right for others. With an awareness of multiple realities, we lose our dogmatic attachment to a single point of view. A new sense of connection with others promotes social concern. A more benign view of the world makes others seem less threatening; enemies disappear. There is a commitment to process rather than programs. It matters a great deal how we accomplish our ends. We can now translate intention into action, vision into actuality, without intrigue or manipulation.

Power flows from an inner center, a mysterious sanctuary more secure than money, name, or achievement. In discovering our autonomy, we become very busy for a while, like a newly solvent musician who had hocked his instruments at pawnshops all over town and can't even recall their addresses. We are astonished to find out how freely, even absentmindedly, we had surrendered so much that really matters, and, conversely, how often we trespassed on the autonomy of others. The power over one's life is seen as a birthright, not a luxury. And we wonder how we could ever have thought otherwise.

THE POLITICS OF FEAR AND DENIAL

"Our choice," said Ruben Nelson in Illusions of Urban Man, published by the Canadian government, "is between the painful but confidence-instilling process of coming to know who and where we are... and the immensely appealing but finally empty alternative of continuing to drift, of acting as if we know what we are doing when both the mounting evidence and our most honest fears indicate that we do not.... In government, as in other relationships, we have the capacity to deceive ourselves, to shape the realities by which we live, so that our prime focus is on our comfort rather than the truth...."

us as butchering our own beef. As our agent, the government can bomb and tax. As our agent, it can relieve us of the responsibilities once borne face to face by the community: caring for the young, the war-wounded, the aged, the handicapped. It extends our impersonal benevolence to the world's needy, relieving our collective conscience without uncomfortable first-hand involvement. It takes our power, our responsibility, our consciousness.

chopped down to widen a campus driveway.

He followed the trail of blame: The man who cut the trees worked for a local contractor who was hired by the landscape architect to carry out the design of the landscape architect; the architect worked for the director of planning, whose boss was the head of the physical plant, supervised by the vice-president for management and finance, responsible to the university building committee, which reports to the executive vice-president. "When I called them all together, they numbered twenty, and they were innocents all. All of us. Bureaucracies are beautiful mechanisms for the evasion of responsibility and guilt."

These bureaucracies would create their own gentle tyranny, he warned, one that had never before existed in the world. "The thing itself is new. Since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it." When a great multitude seek largely after pleasures, they act as if their own children and close friends are the whole of mankind. They become strangers to their fellow citizens. No matter how physically close they may be, they do not see or touch those outside their immediate circles. Each citizen then exists in and for himself and his close kindred alone; he has lost his country.

Above the citizens stands an immense, mild, paternal power that keeps them in perpetual childhood. A hundred years before Orwell, Tocqueville foresaw Big Brother:

[It] is the sole agent of happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and the trouble of living?

Thus every day renders the exercise of free agency less useful...it circumscribes the will within a narrower range.

Tocqueville had anticipated the paternal role of government and our other large hierarchical institutions (corporations, churches, hospitals, schools, labor unions). By their very structure, these institutions breed fragmentation, conformity, amorality. They expand their powers while losing sight of their original mandate. Like a great linear half-brain, amputated

and significance from the body politic.

participation.

Sometimes, as George Cabot Lodge said, we also engage in a kind of nostalgic wishful thinking. We pretend to live by our lost myths like competition and Manifest Destiny and frontier individualism and Gross National Product. But on another level, we experience cognitive dissonance. We know desperately well that all nations are interdependent, that self-sufficiency is a hollow threat. We know, too, that corporations have evolved into powerful, semi-regulated little states bearing almost no resemblance to the "free enterprise" we say we cherish. Politicians, labor, and management struggle with economic realities on the one hand and deny them barefaced on the other, like the split-brain patients in the laboratory, caught between two worlds.

POLITICAL PARADIGM SHIFTS

Thinking about the crisis of our institutions in terms of an impending sociopolitical paradigm shift can be reassuring and even illuminating, for it places our current stress and trouble in

The irrational pattern of human behavior repeats itself again and again, individually and collectively. Even when our old forms are failing miserably, even when they cannot handle the problems of the day, they are fiercely defended; those who challenge them are derided.

Generation after generation, humankind fights to preserve the status quo, maintaining "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know," a bit of folk cynicism that assumes the unknown to be dangerous. We use "enemy skills" against change—to borrow Virginia Satir's phrase—failing to see that all growth depends on the capacity to transform. Amidst the flux of the natural world, we cling to the familiar and resist transformation. "Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so," John Kenneth Galbraith said, "most of us get busy on the proof."

tioning of all ideas, even those that seemed most obviously true, like Newton's philosophy! The best safeguard of ideas is "a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded."

He took issue with those who maintained that it did no harm to persecute ideas because—if they were true—nothing could obscure their rightness. Mill pointed out that many important ideas had surfaced several times and their exponents had been persecuted before they were rediscovered in a more tolerant age. Although historically, Europe advanced only when it broke the yoke of old ideas, most people continued to act as if "new truths may have been desirable once, but we have quite enough of them now." These new truths—"heresies"—smoldered among the few, Mill said, rather than blazing into the whole culture. Fear of heresy is more dangerous than heresy, for it deprives a people of "the free and daring speculation which would strengthen and enlarge minds."

Revolutionary thinkers do not believe in single revolutions. They see change as a way of life. Jefferson, Mill, Tocqueville, and many others were concerned about creating an environment hospitable to change within a relatively stable political system. They wanted governments in which healthy unrest would make for continuous renewal, in which freedoms would be continually enlarged and extended. Thoreau, for example, looked for a form of government beyond democracy, one in which individual conscience would be respected by the state as "a higher and different power," the context for all authority.

Society puts its free spirits in prison, he said, when instead it should "cherish its wise minority." But there is a way out: Anyone who discovers a truth becomes a majority of one, a

Satyagraha derives its power from two apparently opposite attributes: fierce autonomy and total compassion. It says, in effect: "I will not coerce you. Neither will I be coerced by you. If you behave unjustly, I will not oppose you by violence (bodyforce) but by the force of truth—the integrity of my beliefs. My integrity is evident in my willingness to suffer, to endanger myself, to go to prison, even to die if necessary. But I will not cooperate with injustice.

Satyagraha, by whatever name, is an attitude that removes politics from the old territory of confrontation, deal-making, seduction, and game-playing, into a new arena of candor, shared humanness, a search for understanding. It transforms conflict at its source, the hearts of the participants. It is an environment of acceptance in which people can change without feeling defeated. Those who use it must be vigilant and flexible, looking for truth even in the position of the opponent. Erik Erikson said of Gandhi that he "could help others discard costly defenses and denials.... Insight and discipline can disarm, or give a power stronger than all arms."

Satyagraha requires an openness to the truth in whatever form it may appear. A brochure of the Alliance for Survival notes that "truth and the sense of justice reside in every person. We are not the incarnation of good while Pacific Gas & Electric Company officials are the incarnation of evil. Just as we

have injustice in us, so they have justice in them.'

need for anything more than love."

Keep in mind that I have a different view of followers than most people do. I don't see followers simply as persons holding a collection of static opinions. I see them as having levels of needs....The effective leader mobilizes new, "higher" needs in his followers.

Historically, leaders have sometimes inspired a surprisingly

high-minded response from constituents. Burns cites as an example the state conventions in the 1780s that ratified the United States Constitution. Despite a poorly educated populace and poor communications, the conventions focused on such issues as the need for a bill of rights, questions of the distribution of power, representation. "That is a superb example of the capacity of leaders and followers to rise above the belly, to the level of the brain or perhaps even the soul," Burns said.

Many revolutions succeeded despite limited popular support in the beginning, he said, "because the leaders engaged their followers so intensely that attitudes were transformed, consciousness was aroused." True leadership not only helps satisfy our present needs....It awakens us to deeper dissatisfactions, hungers. By definition, you can only "raise consciousness" about something that is true. Propaganda, on the other hand, can be a lie. The difference between an authentic leader, making us aware of inarticulate needs and conflicts, and a power wielder is like the difference between a guide and a hard-sell advertiser.

Nor do the most effective leaders take credit for changes they help to elicit. As Lao-tse said, leadership is best when the

As soon as power is localized, as soon as attention centers on an individual, the coherence and energy in a movement is diminished. Sensing when to assume leadership and when to pull back is not easy. Like learning to ride a bicycle, it takes some falling over and a constant readjustment of balance. But people can coalesce into self-organizing groups to powerful effect. And they are devising ways to govern themselves without determining a boss or establishing a clear agenda. Such self-organizing groups are the fabric of the Aquarian Conspiracy. Even individuals accustomed to running large institutions can easily fit into such a format.

They had been invited by a letter that explained that, despite their diverse backgrounds, they had something in common:

We seek the support and comradeship of others of like mind, confident that when minds are joined in common search and purpose, the effect is amplified. We recognize that our country was guided in its initial decades by this kind of joining of minds in common purpose.

After dinner the first evening, the attendees were asked to introduce themselves one by one. What had started as a simple formality became the agenda for that night and part of the following morning; the process became the program. Almost like tribal storytellers around a fire, they told their tales of power and of transformation, intensely personal and moving narratives. Defenseless and matter of fact, they talked about their fears and successes, their despair and disillusionment, the ways in which life's blows had often proved blessings, turning them toward a more rewarding path. Strangers who trusted

each other immediately, they recounted the ways in which the society's most sought-after prizes had failed them. At some point each had experienced a profound shift in perception, often at a time of personal trauma. Each was overtaken by deeper, more intense needs. Life became a spiritual quest, a joyful, mysterious search for meaning, marked in most cases by an accelerating occurrence of coincidences, events that seemed significant in their timing—synchronicities.

must conspire.

Over the next three days they talked about cooperating to a particular end or purpose, but again and again drew back from anything like a "master plan." They knew they could effect changes in the society—action was their forte—but they were concerned about imposing a specific vision, afraid that they might be tempted to "play God" despite their best intentions. There was honest conflict, self-inquiry, resolution. Twos and threes joined for long conversations, long walks. Many hours were spent searching the further reaches of that most difficult of power issues, close personal relationships.

Here and there, without a master plan, the joining of purpose happened. Linkages were formed: friendships, plans for meetings, joint projects, introductions to mutual friends. Four of the participants met afterward on the East and West Coasts to set up a new international foundation for peace. Soon they were presenting small seminars on the new consciousness for generals at the U.S. Army War College and in the offices of the International Communications Agency. Within the month, several in the group mobilized to intervene successfully on behalf of the academic freedom of the dean when his research was judged too controversial by the president of his university. Those who lived in proximity (Washington, New York City, the

Bay Area) pooled their connections and enlarged their networks. The congressman enlisted the aid of participants in his effort to obtain testimony and funding for research into altered states of consciousness.

EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

At first glance, social transformation seems a foolhardy, even perilous ambition for any group to undertake. There is a necessary and critical chain of events. First, profound change in individuals who care deeply about social change, who find each other, and who acquaint themselves with the psychology of change, with insights into our universal fear of the unknown. They must then devise ways to foster paradigm shifts in others; they must perturb, awaken, and recruit. This aligned minority, knowing that changes of heart and not rational argument alone sway people, must find ways of relating to others at the most human and immediate level.

The goal recedes; whether or not the whole of society changes, and however long that process may take, individuals are finding joy, unity, and purpose in their mutual efforts. They are engaged in meaningful, and therefore adventurous, work. They know that the cynics must have their grim world, too. As Thoreau said, the minority need not wait to persuade the majority. And the vision, as we shall see, is self-propagating.

Jerry Rubin, one of the Chicago Eight, who made headlines as a radical social activist in the sixties, later said, "It's the spiritual movement that's truly revolutionary. Without self-awareness, political activism only perpetuates cycles of anger....I couldn't change anybody until I changed myself." Laurel Robertson recalled her years as a student in Berkeley:

I really wanted to help people, to change things for the better. One summer I was involved in a very constructive non-violent education program about the Vietnam war. Everybody who was working on it had selfless motives, but by the end of the summer the whole thing fell apart because we couldn't get along with each other. I had to face the fact that you cannot make the world nonviolent and loving unless you make yourself nonviolent and loving.

The attempt to find and foster wholeness, to be social healers, has given new life to the old concerns. Ex-militants have successfully run for office around the country and have received major political appointments as well. For example, Sam Brown, organizer of the War Moratorium protest against the Vietnam conflict, successfully reformed banking practices as the state treasurer of Colorado and was later appointed by Carter to head the agency that administers VISTA and the Peace Corps. Brown said, "Social change isn't going to come as quickly as any of us would like it to come. Building a community is a more subtle, delicate, long-term process...."

In the 1960s most of the serious social activists disapproved of the easy-going counterculture, with its interest in psychedelics, camaraderie, a spontaneous lifestyle. Writing in 1976 in Focus | Midwest, a radical journal, Harold Baron said:

Initially the activists of the 1960s, like generations of political reformers before them, tried force and persuasion; they wrote, demonstrated, sermonized, scolded, lobbied, proselytized, argued. But they began to realize the truth of Thoreau's injunction: Live your beliefs, and you can turn the world around.

James MacGregor Burns said that greatness in leadership is most likely to arise from "creative local circumstances." Just as the American people, with so much going against them in the 1770s and 1780s, were challenged by their leaders to rise to greatness in the state constitutional conventions, so may we transcend our present crisis. He predicted that the leaders of the future are likely to emerge from those who were involved in the conflicts of the 1960s—"a leadership corps in exile, people now in their thirties and forties who could burst onto the national scene."

I can think of only one long-term alternative, and I still see it coming. What began in the 1960s—a rising demand for a voice in the decisions controlling our lives—will

spread to every sphere....

My point is simple: the '60s created what can be called leadership for the future...a new generation of dedicated and politicized people. In our fathers' time, democracy was threatened from abroad, our own institutions were basically sound, affluence appeared to most to be guaranteed, America was No. 1.

Those who filled the streets in the '60s may yet fill the halls of government in the '80s, and if we do, I don't be-

Who knows, Your Honor, perhaps I will....

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE OLD PARADIGM OF POWER AND POLITICS

Emphasis on programs, issues, platform, manifesto, goals.

Change is imposed by authority.

Institutionalizes help, services.

Impetus toward strong central government.

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Favors reversing trend, decentralizing government wherever feasible; horizontal distribution of power. Small focused central government would serve as clearinghouse.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE OLD PARADIGM OF POWER AND POLITICS

Power for others (care taking) or against them. Win/lose orientation.

Government as monolithic institution

Aggressive leaders, passive followers.

Emphasis on freedom from certain types of interference.

Government to keep people in line (disciplinary role) or as benevolent parent.

Left versus Right.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE NEW PARADIGM OF POWER AND POLITICS

Power with others. Win/win orientation

Government as consensus of individuals, subject to change.

Respect for the autonomy of others.

Paradigm-oriented. Politics determined by worldview, perspective of reality.

Pragmatic and visionary.

Government to foster growth, creativity, cooperation, transformation, synergy.

"Radical Center"—a synthesis of conservative and liberal traditions. Transcendence of old polarities, quarrels.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE OLD PARADIGM OF POWER AND POLITICS

Humankind as conqueror of nature; exploitive view

Emphasis on external, imposed reform.

Entrenched agencies, programs, departments.

Prizes conformity, adjustment.

Compartmentalizes aspects of human experience.

Modeled after Newtonian view of the universe. Mechanistic, atomistic.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE NEW PARADIGM OF POWER AND POLITICS

Emphasis on transformation in individuals as essential to successful reform.

Emphasis on foresight, long-range repercussions, ethics, flexibility.

Refusal to make that choice. Self-interest and community interest reciprocal.

Pluralist, innovative

In flux, the counterpart in politics of modern physics.

A revolution means that power changes hands, of course, but it does not necessarily mean open struggle, a coup, victor and vanquished. Power can be dispersed through the social fabric.

Amplified by electronic communications, freed from the old restraints of family and culture, the network is the antidote to alienation. It generates power enough to remake society. It offers the individual emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and economic support. It is an invisible home, a powerful means of altering the course of institutions, especially government.

Interestingly, H. G. Wells had predicted in his 1928 blueprint for a new society that the Open Conspiracy would have no "ordinary" adherents—no pawns, no cannon fodder. The form of the conspiracy would not be a centralized organization but, rather, small groups of friends and coalitions of such groups. This is a radical idea. For all its claims of grass-roots support, traditional politics has always been applied from the top down; influential political scientists, economists and miscellaneous power brokers decided the issues and passed the word to blocs of voters.

In its rich opportunities for mutual aid and support, the network is reminiscent of its forebear, the kinship system. Yet the "family" in this case has formed on the basis of deeply held values and shared assumptions, bonds thicker than blood.

The network is a matrix for personal exploration and group action, autonomy and relationship. Paradoxically, a network is both intimate and expansive. Unlike vertical organizations, it can maintain its personal or local quality while ever growing. You don't have to choose between involvement on a community or global scale; you can have both.

is generated by dynamic patterns, coalitions of groups of neurons and interaction between groups. Power in the brain is decentralized.

Synergy, the bonus of energy that results from cooperation in natural systems, is there for us, too. As we begin to discover it in relationship with others in our small group, potential benefits for society become evident. As physicist John Platt put it:

Whenever even two people start giving to each other and working for each other, these qualities and rewards immediately appear—greater mutual benefit, greater ease, and greater individual development at the same time. They appear as soon as a couple begins to work together, or a family, or a neighborhood, or a nation. The great creative teams of American scientists exhibit them. The European Common Market exhibits them.

By mutual giving with those around us, we begin to make a kind of local Utopia where the benefits are so obvious.

Power is changing hands, from dying hierarchies to living networks.

works, called them "a dynamic social force in the latter half of the Twentieth Century." This is our healthy response to the remoteness of modern institutions, Katz said. Networks have "a powerful and refreshing impact on social policy....They represent a spontaneous social resistance to massive bureaucratic trends."

should not be underestimated."

Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine, anthropologists who have studied social-protest networks since the 1960s, have christened the contemporary networks SPINs (Segmented Polycentric Integrated Networks). A SPIN gains its energy from coalitions, from the combining and recombining of talents, tools, strategies, numbers, contacts. It is Gandhi's "grouping of unities." Like a brain, the SPIN is capable of simultaneous connection at many points. Its segments are the small groups, which hang together loosely on the basis of shared values. Occasionally, by a kind of friendly fission, the SPIN has a spin-off. The multiplicity of groups strengthens the movement.

tomorrow.

These networks, Gerlach has suggested, produce valuable local mutations. News of successful experiments travels swiftly across the movement linkages, and they are widely adopted.

When the anthropologists first observed the networks, they thought they were leaderless. In reality, Gerlach said, "There is not a dearth of leadership but an embarrassment of riches." The leadership passes from person to person, depending on the needs of the moment.

Because SPINs are so qualitatively different in organization and impact from bureaucracies, Hine said, most people don't see them—or think they are conspiracies. Often networks take similar action without conferring with each other simply because they share so many assumptions. It might also be said that the shared assumptions are the collusion.

From the simplest neighborhood or office networks (food co-ops, car pools, shared child care) people tend to move to more ephemeral or abstract sharing, such as expertise or information. Mutual-help and self-help networks are more intimate and therefore a more powerful transformative force. According to the National Self-Help Clearinghouse associated with the City University of New York, around fifteen million Americans now belong to networks in which people help each other deal with such diverse problems as retirement, widowhood, overweight, divorce, child abuse, drug abuse, gambling, emotional disorders, handicaps, political action, environmentalism, the death of a child. Such groups carefully keep from becoming too "professionalized" for fear that a hierarchy of authority may develop and their whole purpose would be defeated. For the mutuality is essential. It is in helping others that one is helped.

The British Broadcasting Corporation created a television series, "Grapevine: The Self-Help Show," to help people find appropriate networks. There are national and state clearing-houses for self-help networks, associations of self-help groups, and recently a self-help fair was held in Boston. Among the groups mentioned in a single issue of Self-Help Reporter were networks for unemployed persons over forty, parents of prematures, women recovering from mastectomies, families and friends of missing persons, and the survivors of suicide victims.

helping other addicts rehabilitate themselves.

One network, the Linkage, started by Robert Theobald, is international, computerized, and primarily conducted by correspondence. Its members introduce themselves via statements about their work and interests. These statements are reproduced by Theobald's service, Participation Publishers, and circulated by mail from Wickenburg, Arizona, for a small yearly fee. "Our operating assumption," Theobald said, "is that we are right now in the middle of a stress period caused by the ever more rapid collapse of the industrial era. We are looking for ways to aid in the necessary transformation. Many people would like to make this transformation. . . We are trying to find ways to help people make the required shift."

Personal statements that went out in a single mailing suggest the variety of backgrounds. Included were a military communications analyst, two political scientists, a nurse, two doctors, a historian, a Presbyterian minister, an educator, a nuclear physicist, an engineer. Their concerns included paradigm shifts, radical social transformation, personal mystical experiences, appropriate technology, decentralization, the bridging of East and West, intentional communities, voluntary simplicity, organization models built on trust and communication, "creative ways we can help each other," "conscious technology," power and freedom in relationships, "making a difference"

San Jose, California, the Mid-Peninsula Conversion Project, was founded to find alternative production for defense industries, a practical step toward disarmament. People Index in Fairfield, California, calls itself "a human switchboard helping people find others with the same goals.... We want people to connect more directly with each other. Got a project you can't do alone? Are you a resource for others? What future do you want to be a part of—and help create? Join the network of people for a new world."

And there are countless informal alliances, crisscrossing every institution and organization — for example, groups of sympathetic nurses and doctors in a hospital, faculty members and students in a university. Ready-made networks emerge from existing organizations, sometimes as "special interest groups" given subdivision status in professional associations, but more often just an informal alliance of those whose thinking has shifted into a larger paradigm. Humanistically oriented psychologists in the American Psychological Association, World Future Society members more interested in consciousness than hard technology, and social-transformation advocates within the Association for Humanistic Psychology have formed effective informal internal networks. They often succeed in changing the emphasis in the larger organization's official publication; they bring in more innovative speakers for programs, run for office, and otherwise break the hold of the thinking of the old guard. The collusion is so low-key that no one notices, and there is usually no significant struggle among network members for offices or honors.

OTHER NEW SOURCES OF POWER

There are new, more imaginative and rewarding sources of the power needed for social transformation. We have already talked about the power of the person, inherent in the transforma-

Matt Taylor, founder of the Renascence Project, compared social reordering to the turning of a ship. In the past, people have tried to put the rudder on the front of the ship when tackling social issues, applying direction and pressure at the wrong places. "You can steer a large organization with subtle input."

rapid transmission of new ideas, a contagion of visions, good questions, experiments, images. Economist Kenneth Boulding once said that a change which might take a generation to accomplish in a nonliterate society can occur in days in a culture with mass communication.

Aldous Huxley saw decentralization as the alternative to Left and Right. In a letter to a friend at the close of World War II, he wrote:

The majority of intellectuals at the present time recognize only two alternatives in their situation and opt for one or the other

With typical insight, Huxley had written earlier to his brother Julian that social transformation—"a direction of the power of the state, self-government, decentralization" — could best be accomplished by simultaneous attack along all fronts: economic, political, educational, psychological. H. G. Wells also insisted that change must occur in all parts of society at once, not one institution at a time.

This view parallels transformation in natural systems, the sudden change of the dissipative structure. The jump into a new order is sudden, all or nothing. Even at the most simpleminded level, we can see that any aspect of social transformation has a ripple effect. The individual who has learned to take responsibility for his own health is likely to become more interested in political aspects of medicine, environment, the role of learning in health and disease, the beneficial or deadly aspects of relationships and work, and so on. This is the power of a new paradigm, a perspective that politicizes even those who have had no interest in conventional politics.

"A radical consciousness," said Gurtov, "based on shared feelings and needs, is far more likely to hold than radical ideology." You can't defect from an insight; you can't unsee what you have seen.

The power of uncertainty makes it easier to innovate, experiment, risk. As Theobald said, "There is no riskless route into the future; we must choose which set of risks we wish to run." Writing in a network journal, philosopher Jay Ogilvy coined the term "parapolitical" to describe the avocational involvement in politics that comes from commitment to a new vision:

Too often it did not even occur to us that we had a choice. In discussing what he calls "alternativism," Erich Fromm said that most people fail because "they do not wake and see when they

stand at a fork in the road and have to decide.'

We are all surrounded by limits of a kind, Tocqueville said,

"but within that circle we are powerful and free."

As spiritual and humanistic values are coming to the fore, a

few politicians are struggling to articulate this shift.

The power of withdrawal, psychological as well as economic, comes from the recognition that we can take back the power we have given others. Teilhard said, "We have become aware that, in the great game being played, we are the players as well as the cards and the stakes. Nothing can go on if we leave the table. Neither can any power force us to remain."

boycott the products of manufacturers who aggressively market infant formulas in developing countries where infant mortality is worsened by artificial feeding. Community groups protest red-lining—the refusal of lenders to grant mortgages in certain areas—by withdrawing their savings from neighborhood banks and savings and loan companies until they agree to invest a specific dollar amount in the community.

THE POWER OF WOMEN

"Women hold up half the sky," says a Chinese proverb. Women represent the greatest single force for political renewal in a civilization thoroughly out of balance. Just as individuals are enriched by developing both the masculine and feminine sides of the self (independence and nurturance, intellect and intuition), so the society is benefiting from a change in the balance of power between the sexes.

The shift from militant feminism is evident in recent statements like that of Patricia Mische in a monograph, Women and Power. Instead of asking for a piece of the pie men have had all along, she said, "we should be trying to create quite another pie." Human affairs will not be advanced by the assimilation of more and more women into a literally man-made world. Rather, women and men together can create a new future. Women have been torn between their fear of powerlessness on the one hand and a fear of the capacity for destruction on the other: "We tend to block out both fears—the one because powerlessness is too painful to confront, the other because we associate power with evil drives."

Women are now learning to use their power openly, she

said, exercising what Rollo May called "integrative power" rather than the coy or manipulative ways of the past.

We cannot make somebody else's contribution to the ongoing shaping of history. Nor can anyone else make ours. Each of us is here for a purpose, each life has significance and meaning. This meaning—whatever it is—cannot be realized if we abdicate our powers....

generate civilization. Masculine approaches to social organization had reached a dead end, he said. Women, with their greater sensitivity to relationships and social form, might devise ways to transcend conflict and confrontation.

"The rise of women to their fair share of power is certain."

Ellis said. "... I find it an unfailing source of hope."

In 1916 psychologist George Stratton of the University of Southern California was describing the inherent superiority of female brains in seeing the whole. Writing on "Feminism and Psychology" in Century Magazine he expressed the hope that women would dispel masculine illusions when they took their rightful place in society. Men, he said, tend to fix on cogs instead of flesh and blood. Beginning with a generous wonder at nature, they end up with fascination for the tool—the scientific instrument. They establish governments to give order to life, then end up coveting the functions of government more than life. "The masculine genius for organization," Stratton said, "needs women's sense of the heart of things, not the trappings."

Wherever the Aquarian Conspiracy is at work, perpetrating holistic health or creative science or transpersonal psychology, women are represented in far greater numbers than they are in the establishment. For example, one-third of the founding members of a new holistic medical organization were women, compared to the percentage of women physicians in the United States (8.3 percent). Men in such organizations are not only comfortable with women in leadership roles but openly emulate such yin qualities as integration, empathy, reconciliation. They see in women a greater sensitivity to time and season, intuition about direction, an ability to wait. "If satyagraha is to be the mode of the future," Gandhi once said, "then the future belongs to women."

THE POWER OF RADICAL CENTER

As it was expressed in an editorial in the British journal, The

New Humanity

Most historical movements have written their last will and testament along with their manifesto. They have known more surely what they oppose than what they are. By taking a firm position, they trigger an inevitable countermotion, one that will disorient their fragile identity almost at once. Then rapid metamorphosis and self-betrayal: pacifists who become violent, law-and-order advocates who trample law and order, patriots who undo liberties, "people's revolutions" that empower new elites, new movements in the arts that become as rigid as their predecessors, romantic ideals that lead to genocide.

Partial viewpoints force us into artificial choices, and our lives are caught in the crossfire. Quick, choose! Do you want your politician to be compassionate or fiscally responsible? Should doctors be humane or skillful? Should schools pamper children or spank them?

The rare successful reforms in history—the durable Constitu-

Traditionally, we have wanted to identify our friends and enemies. Lobbies, political realities, and the media, playing both sides against each other, usually force politicians into taking black-and-white positions. But sooner than we may suppose, Radical Center will be a viable point of view. The rising number of new movements, all demonstrating and pressuring, combined with traditional special-interest lobbies, may finally force politicians to seek a middle way through the mine field. Politicians may finally have no choice but to transcend the either-or dilemma.

In the long run, it is the evolving Radical-Center constituency that will engender increasing numbers of candidates and elect some of them to office. This new constituency will support those who seem likely to create and conserve. It will admire them for refusing to make simplistic choices. It will encourage them to foster the kind of growth that charts and figures cannot measure. As in the model of Burns, the followers will help transform the leaders—those leaders who sense the shift to higher needs.

During the 1976 presidential primaries, political commentators observed that both Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown drew on "protest of the center" constituencies and seemed to sense an unarticulated trend. Brown once remarked, "We're going to go left and right at the same time," and the Los Angeles Times called him "our liberal-moderate-conservative-governor," both pragmatist and visionary. Unfortunately, the apparent paradox in the approaches of both Brown and Carter was more often attacked than supported, and both began to resort more and more often to politics as usual.

In his study of cultural awakenings, William McLoughlin said that Carter is subject to too many countervailing pressures to undertake an effective restructuring; consensus must first be reached at grass roots. "Some elements of [his] world view may indeed be part of the new consensus—his casual style, his recognition that America must restrain its power, his sense of common humanity, his concern for ecology, his recognition that the 'American way of life' is culturally limited and needs to be judged by some transcendent values." But our political leaders have never been the prophets of new light, in McLoughlin's judgment. "They may implement it but they do not originate it."

He foresees that at some future point, no earlier than the

Much of life is self-fulfilling prophecy. The citizen who takes responsibility for his/her own self-awareness and

The new power manifests itself through the emergence of a new kind of person, "a pattern which has not been seen before except perhaps in rare individuals." This is a new phenomenon, Rogers said. "We've had a few Thoreaus, but never hundreds of thousands of people, young and old alike, willing to obey some laws and disobey others on the basis of their own personal moral judgment." These new people refuse to put up with order for order's sake. They take action quietly, without fanfare, "openly but without defiance." They act in small, nonhierarchical groups to humanize institutions from the inside. They ignore meaningless rules, exhibiting what Rogers calls "an Elizabethan quality of adventure—everything is possible.... These emerging persons are neither power-hungry nor achievement-hungry. When they seek power, it is for other than purely selfish purposes."

the verge of a great evolutionary-revolutionary leap."

He has been responsible for an impressive body of California legislation aimed at humanizing education and medicine, but he is as quick to point out the failures and disappointments of each legislative session as the successes. There is null of the self-congratulation one expects from politicians. The emergent paradigm of power and politics is evident in Vasconcellos's public statements.

Government is us—and it is as we choose it to be. We elect leaders who are close to where we are in terms of vision. We need to see to it that our institutions, including government, become peopled by those who share our struggle, our vision about this human transformation.

The once-silent majority learned lessons in power from the student uprisings of the 1960s, Vasconcellos believes.

The real political revolutionary act is to enable someone to see something he has not been able to see before.

At a conference on holistic health, Vasconcellos urged participants to descend en masse on Sacramento. "We're not giving our power away any more," he said. "We're moving from 'mystique' and expertise." Citing evidence of "consciousness in the Capitol," he quoted new state educational guidelines emphasizing the uniqueness and potential of each child, the importance of self-esteem and self-awareness. The state has funded research on left- and right-brain perceptual modes as they relate to education, pilot projects on humanizing the workplace, the feasibility of hospices (humane centers for the care of the terminally ill). Vasconcellos brought obstetrician Frederick Leboyer, author of Birth Without Violence, to Sacramento to meet legislators and urge the study of more appro-

priate birth practices in the state. He urged Brown and David Saxon, president of the University of California, to establish a series of conferences on the nine campuses of the university, to address the transformation of thinking about health care, aging, education, death and dying, birth, and other topics.

The invitation to the conference, "Health Care: Whose Responsibility?" reflected the need to disperse power from paternal agencies to the community:

CONSPIRACY IN GOVERNMENT

implications of changing values and the prospects for social change, a meeting praised by the Washington Post as an effort by

bureaucrats to enlarge their vision.

A government, after all, is not a "they." In a bureaucracy there are many individuals with creative programs and new paradigms in their peddler's packs, just waiting for a responsive administration or the opportune moment. One veteran bureaucrat at the National Institute of Mental Health said, "There are a lot of us in the woodwork." He was referring to a loose coalition of conspirators in agencies and on Congressional staffs. Within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, innovators have created informal rap groups to share their strategies for slipping new ideas into a resistant system and to give each other moral support.

Concepts that might otherwise appear "far out" can be given legitimacy by a single federally funded program. The grant-making apparatus of government determines fashion in some research fields. This aura of legitimacy is fostered here and

there by conspirator-bureaucrats.

Government represents an incalculably large source of energy: people, money, authority. Political aikido, the power that comes from turning a potential opponent's energy to one's own advantage, can include the use of government funds, even defense grants, for humanistically oriented research and pilot projects. There are several strategies for obtaining such funding. Sometimes an attractive alternative is proposed, a more effective or economical medical treatment. Often the project is nominally orthodox, but a daring question has quietly been incorporated into the research design. Sometimes the project originates with a sympathetic conspirator-bureaucrat who recommends how the proposal should be written and what is likely to be approved. Conspirator-politicians sometimes apply gentle pressure for the agency funding of such programs.

Research projects on meditation, biofeedback, psychic phenomena, and alternative medical approaches have been funded by the Department of Defense. One example of the sophisticated use of government energy and authority is a project started by Jay Matteson, a civilian consultant to the United

States Navy.

Under a human-resources management contract let by the navy in San Diego, Jay Matteson helped organize an appropriate course. Matteson knew that he could never get away with teaching meditation to the navy. He knew that he was also unlikely to get approval for teaching the relaxation-response technique adapted by Herbert Benson of Harvard from Transcendental Meditation. After all, who wanted a relaxed military? But he was convinced that the technique would be the most powerful way to engender both the sensitivity to human behavior that the navy wanted in its officers and the awareness of their rights that it wanted to instill in its recruits.

They're given a course in "rights and responsibilities" where they're taught problem-solving, generalization, and other skills. The Navy is saying, let's take more time, give

Power has been used to empower others.

In the latter scenario, the American president in the 1990s (who had been a member of the youth movement of the 1960s) speaks out for the ratification of new amendments to the Con-

stitution:

Individuals and groups are translating inner discoveries into action. The Nobel Peace Prize for 1977 was awarded to "ordinary men and women"—to the Peace People in Northern Ireland and Amnesty International. "Our world is rushing toward disaster," said Mairead Corrigan of the Peace People, "but it's not too late to prove the power of love...." From California come announcements of new, politically oriented groups: Groundswell, "an association of people primarily from the consciousness/growth movement, who feel it's time to join forces... to generate social action"; members of a group in Sacramento describe themselves as "bureaucrats and academicians who want to coalesce California's transpersonal political network" for the rewriting of the state constitution; and New Age Caucus urges "decentralized, responsive government."

"If there is a new politics," said one Aquarian Conspirator, the co-founder of a preventive-health network and a treatment center for disturbed youngsters, "it thoroughly transcends all the old labels. It is a spiritual-bio-psycho-social perspective with powerful implications."

—TARTHANG TULKU

-ROBERT FROST

Here we can see what happens when consumers begin to withdraw legitimacy from an authoritarian institution. We see the rise of the autonomous health seeker, the transformation of a profession by its leadership, the impact of the new models from science, the way decentralized networks are effecting wide geographic change.

For all its reputed conservatism, Western medicine is undergoing an amazing revitalization. Patients and professionals alike are beginning to see beyond symptoms to the context of illness: stress, society, family, diet, season, emotions. Just as the readiness of a new constituency makes a new politics, the needs of patients can change the practice of medicine. Hospitals, long the bastions of barren efficiency, are scurrying to provide more humane environments for birth and death, more flexible policies. Medical schools, long geared to skim the cool academic cream, are trying to attract more creative, people-oriented students. Bolstered by a blizzard of research on the psychology of illness, practitioners who once split mind and body are trying to put them back together.

No one had realized how vulnerable the old medical model was. Within a few short years, without a shot's being fired, the concept of holistic health has been legitimized by federal and state programs, endorsed by politicians, urged and underwritten by insurance companies, co-opted in terminology (if not always in practice) by many physicians, and adopted by medical students. Consumers demand "holistic health," a whole new assortment of entrepreneurs promise it, and medical

groups look for speakers to explain it.

Taking its own pulse, American medicine has voiced the need for reform—for training in values, ethics, human relations. Most physicians, for example, have had little or no training in coping with death—not only in counseling patients and relatives, but in their own feelings of defeat and fear.

Articles on the human context of medicine appear with increasing frequency in the trade press. A former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association described his own use of touch—a pat on the back, a warm handshake. He said that modern practitioners may be better listeners to organs than the good clinicians of early times, but the old-timers were better listeners to people. "I suspect that some atrophy of our diagnostic senses occurred when subjective observation was replaced by objective laboratory data." Another medical publication expressed editorial concern about "the elusive skills"—the need for new doctors to recognize the psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of illness.

I-THOU MEDICINE

Compassions and intuitions are waylaid.... Physicians must recognize that medicine is not their private preserve but a profession in which all people have a vital stake.... It will take great medical statesmanship to correct a major failure—the patient's sense of unrequited love.

In Modern Medicine a physician wrote bitterly about "the Laying Off of Hands." Bartenders, he said, make people feel better, but we physicians usually make them feel worse. Warmth and palliation have been relinquished to other practitioners, many of them outside mainstream medicine. "Physicians are left with their diagnostic requisition slips and their prescription pads to pursue their increasingly automated, slick, scientific, impersonal 'art."

A poignant account of a surgeon-essayist described the physician to the Dalai Lama making the rounds of an American hospital. The Tibetan physician did a pulse diagnosis on a patient:

The Tibetan, he said, accurately diagnosed a specific type of congenital heart disorder solely on the basis of the pulse.

William Steiger, chairman of the department of medicine of a Virginia hospital, told a group of physicians that their empathy

"The therapeutic attitude should be, 'What can I do to help?' We should offer warmth and succor before we order the first

tests.′′

THE CRISIS IN HEALTH CARE

Like the foil wrap on a disappointing gift, the shiny technology has dealt stunningly with certain acute problems, as in inoculations and sophisticated surgical procedures, but its failures in chronic and degenerative disease, including cancer and heart disease, have driven practitioners and the public to look in new directions.

Health care (including medical insurance) is now the third largest industry in the United States; medical costs are roughly 9 percent of the Gross National Product. Federal health costs are over fifty billion dollars. Neighboring hospitals duplicate expensive equipment, doctors order unnecessary laboratory tests to protect themselves from malpractice suits ("defensive medicine"). Even a simple office call now represents a major expenditure to the average person. Runaway costs, especially hospital charges, have made it all but impossible to enact any sort of national health plan.

convalescing at home. A federal spokesman recently referred to the so-called war on cancer as "a medical Vietnam." The billions spent, the onslaught of technology, have yielded little. The mortality rate for most major cancers has not changed significantly in twenty-five years, despite more public education, new drugs, more sophisticated radiation and surgery techniques. It has been estimated that as many as a million hospital admissions per year are related to some form of drug reaction and that illness caused by the side effects of treatment adds perhaps eight billion dollars per year to the total medical bill.

Brilliant new operations are taken up like intellectual fashions. Thousands had coronary bypass operations before the belated studies reported that most candidates benefited as much from drugs as from the dangerous, expensive surgery. The pathos of the technological dream is especially plain in our hundred years' fruitless search for a powerful, nonaddictive painkiller.

A recent Gallup poll disclosed that 44 percent of the public does not believe physicians to be "highly ethical and honest"—a low blow to a group that had long been venerated. "MDs Take It on the Chin," read a medical newspaper headline; the article noted that thirteen of fifteen physicians running for national office in 1976 lost their elections. Physicians commented in their professional publications that malpractice suits seem to reflect disappointment or hostility and that doctors with good patient rapport are unlikely to be sued, no matter what.

A Senate subcommittee on health reported growing consumer disenchantment:

THE EMERGENT PARADIGM OF HEALTH

The new paradigm of health and medicine enlarges the framework of the old, incorporating brilliant technological advances while restoring and validating intuitions about mind and relationships. It explains many heretofore puzzling phenomena. Its coherence and predictive powers are superior to those of the old model. It adds the fire and poetry of inspired science to the prose of workaday science.

"Holistic," when that adjective is properly applied to health care, refers to a qualitatively different approach, one that respects the interaction of mind, body, and environment. Beyond the allopathic approach of treating the disease and symptoms of disease, it seeks to correct the underlying disharmony causing the problem. A holistic approach may include a variety of diagnostic tools and treatments, some orthodox, some not. A much-simplified comparison of the two views:

Treatment of symptoms.

Specialized.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE NEW PARADIGM OF HEALTH

Search for patterns and causes, plus treatment of symptoms.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE OLD PARADIGM OF MEDICINE

Professional should be emotionally neutral.

Pain and disease are wholly negative.

Body seen as machine in good or bad repair.

Disease or disability seen as thing, entity.

Emphasis on eliminating symptoms, disease.

Patient is dependent.

Mind is secondary factor in organic illness.

Placebo effect shows the power of suggestion.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE NEW PARADIGM OF HEALTH

Emphasis on human values.

Professional's caring is a component of healing.

Minimal intervention with "appropriate technology," complemented with full armamentarium of non-invasive techniques (psychotherapies, diet, exercise).

Disease or disability seen as process.

Emphasis on achieving maximum wellness, "meta-health."

Patient is (or should be) autonomous.

Professional is therapeutic partner.

Bodymind perspective; psychosomatic illness is province of all health-care professionals.

Mind is primary or coequal factor in all illness.

Placebo effect shows the mind's role in disease and healing.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE OLD PARADICM OF MEDICINE

Primary reliance on quantitative information (charts, tests, dates).

"Prevention" largely environmental: vitamins, rest, exercise, immunization, not smoking.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE NEW PARADIGM OF HEALTH

"Prevention" synonymous with wholeness: work, relationships, goals, body-mind-spirit.

Notice the parallels between the assumptions of the new paradigm and the scientific discoveries discussed in Chapter 6: dynamic systems; the transformation of stress; the bodymind continuum; a new appreciation of qualities, not just quantities.

After decades of trying to "explain" one mystery by invoking another, medical science is now coming to terms with the unavoidable and critical influence of the patient's expectations. "Placebo effect" now refers to more than the inactive substance (sugar pill, salt-water injection) given to difficult patients. The doctor's reputation, the mood of the hospital staff, the fame of the medical center, the mystique of a particular treatment—any of these can contribute to healing by coloring the patient's expectations. There is also a "nocebo effect," the opposite of placebo. When laboratory subjects were given an inactive substance and told it would give them a headache, two-thirds got a headache.

The placebo activates a capacity that was in the mind all along. As noted earlier, research has shown that placebo pain relief is apparently due to the brain's release of a natural analgesic. Yet most doctors and nurses still treat the placebo as a trick that works on people whose suffering is not "real," a misunderstanding that rests on a naive idea of reality and ignorance of the role of the mind in creating experience.

The belief of the healer can also alter the efficacy of the treatment. In a set of experiments described by Jerome Frank, an authority on the placebo effect, patients were given either a mild painkiller, a placebo, or morphine. When the doctors thought they were administering morphine, the placebo was twice as effective as when they thought they were giving a mild analgesic! In a similar study, psychotic patients were given either a mild tranquilizer, a major tranquilizer, or a placebo. The placebo's effects were far greater when the doctors thought they had given the powerful drug rather than the mild one.

As the placebo effect so vividly demonstrates to us, changing our expectations or fundamental assumptions can pro-

Ingrasci said that his experiences with patients have convinced him that once negative mindsets are released, healing takes place automatically. "It's as if there is a life force or ordering principle ready to reestablish our natural state of wholeness and health if we can just drop the barriers of negative expectations." If we relax, however briefly, these positive expectations can produce positive effects. "To start, we must first learn to get past the psychological barriers—cynicism, mistrust, fear—that prevent us from even trying. . . . The long-term effects may prove truly transformative for ourselves and society."

Attention itself is the key. Several years ago researchers at the Menninger Foundation reported that patients could abort headaches by raising the temperature of their hands. They conjectured that drawing blood from the head to increase hand temperature might relieve congested blood vessels causing the headache. Temperature biofeedback became a popular and successful method for treating migraine. But then biofeedback clinicians discovered that some patients can stop their migraines by lowering hand temperature—or by lowering it on one occasion and raising it on another.

It is not a simple physical change but rather the state of mind that is the key to health. This state has been called "restful alertness," "passive volition," "deliberate letting." Like the ice breaking free in a spring thaw, cumulative stresses seem to melt under this paradoxical attention, restoring natural flow to the bodymind whirlpool.

We can handle short-term stress naturally because of the body's rest-and-renewal response, its parasympathetic reaction. But long-term stress—the "one damned thing after another" typical of modern existence—takes its toll because there is no opportunity for rebound between stresses. When Pelletier studied meditators in the laboratory, he found not only highly integrated responses but the ability to shift the body into a parasympathetic phase. "The yogis have learned to let go of those excess levels of self-stressing neurophysiological activity and simply quiet themselves down."

Refusal to acknowledge stress means that we pay double; not only does our alarm not go away but it goes into the body. This was evident in a recent laboratory experiment. The threat of an imminent painful electric shock caused strikingly different body changes in individuals, depending on whether they decided to confront it or avoid thinking about it. The confronters tried to understand the situation. They actively focused their attention on the coming shock and wanted to get it over with. They thought about events in the laboratory environment or directed attention to their bodies.

The avoiders, on the other hand, used a host of strategies to

another, more pathological level.

be your old self again."

Another man I know of was a car dealer in partnership with a lazy brother. He carried the whole load of work without saying anything. When he had a stroke, his brother had to take over. He said later that he was glad he'd had the stroke.

If we learn to pay attention to such inner conflicts, we can resolve them in ways less drastic to our health.

THE BODY'S MIND

everything. Its mechanisms are linked by an alarm network, and it has a kind of dark genius, organizing disorders appropriate to our most neurotic imaginings.

The old saying, "name your poison," applies to the semantics and symbols of disease. If we feel "picked on" or someone gives us a pain in the neck, we may make our metaphors literal—with acne or neck spasms. People have long spoken of a "broken heart" as the result of a disappointing relationship; now research has shown a connection between loneliness and heart disease. In animal research, heart disease has been caused by the prolonged stimulation of a brain region associated with strong emotion. The same region is connected to the immune system. So the "broken heart" may become coronary disease; the need to grow may become a tumor, the ambivalence a "splitting headache," the rigid personality arthritis. Every metaphor is potentially a literal reality.

All illness, whether cancer or schizophrenia or a cold, originates in the bodymind. On his deathbed Louis Pasteur acknowledged that a medical adversary of his had been right in insisting that disease is caused less by the germ than by the resistance of the individual invaded by the germ. "It is the terrain," he conceded. As Lewis Thomas pointed out in The Lives of a Cell, our bodies often respond hysterically to harmless germs, as if the intruder evokes ancient memories and we react to a kind of propaganda. "We are, in effect, at the mercy of our own Pentagons most of the time."

This immune system has a memory whose subtlety was demonstrated in animal research. If an innocent drug is paired with an immunosuppressant—a drug that suppresses the immune system—the body learns to suppress its immune system when it gets only the innocent drug, even if it is months later. In just this way, stressful periods of our lives can be paired with innocent cues in the environment (for example, allergens or events that remind us of other events) to cause chronic illness, long after the original source of stress has been removed. The body "remembers" to be sick.

Cancer patients have more difficulty remembering their dreams than patients found not to have cancer, fewer marital changes (separations, divorces), fewer symptoms of illnesses known to reflect psychological conflict (ulcers, migraine, asthma).² Various studies have found that cancer patients tend to keep their feelings to themselves, and most have not had close relationships with their parents. They find it difficult to express anger. One study reported that they are conforming and controlled, less autonomous and spontaneous than those whose tests later prove negative. One cancer therapist said of

THE BODY AS PATTERN AND PROCESS

In the vicious cycle of bodymind pathology, our body's tight patterns contribute to our locked-in mental processes. We cannot separate mental from physical, fact from fantasy, past from present. Just as the body feels the mind's grief, so the mind is constricted by the body's stubborn memory of what the mind used to feel, and on and on.

Just as some psychotechnologies increase the fluctuation of energy through the brain, enabling new patterns or paradigm shifts to occur, bodywork alters the flow of energy through the body, freeing it of its old "ideas" or patterns, increasing its range of movement. Structural integration, the Alexander method, Feldenkrais, Applied Kinesiology, Neurokinesthetics,

bioenergetics, Reichian therapy, and hundreds of other systems initiate transformation of the body.

If the bodymind is a process, so disease is a process.... And so is healing, whole-making, with seven million of our red blood cells blinking out of existence every second, replaced by seven million more. Even our bones are fully rebuilt over a seven-year period. Just as in the dance of the goddess Shiva, we are continuously creating and destroying, creating and destroying.

HEALTH AND TRANSFORMATION

Illness, as Pelletier and many others have said, is potentially transformative because it can cause a sudden shift in values, an awakening. If we have been keeping secrets from ourselves—unexamined conflicts, suppressed yearnings—illness may force them into awareness.

One woman sought biofeedback instrumentation to see if she could lower her intraocular pressure and cure her glaucoma. She succeeded, but more importantly, she discovered that her states of consciousness affected her entire life, not just her vision. An MD, concerned about the abusive doses of Valium he was taking for his headaches, tried biofeedback...which led to inner attention...which led to meditation and wrenching change, including a far different career in medicine. A prominent attorney came to believe that there was a valuable purpose in his progressive loss of eyesight:

A psychologist, a national leader in holistic medicine, wandered into the field by way of a T'ai Chi instructor who interested him in acupuncture. He has now successfully integrated alternative medical approaches into the curriculum of a major medical school and has arranged lecture series on holistic approaches for a group of medical schools. "When you develop liaisons," he said, "it's critical that you speak the right language. If I talked yin and yang to most neurosurgeons, they wouldn't hear me. I talk the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. If we want to help people change, it's important that we don't push them or pull them—just walk together."

A former political activist—now on the faculty of a medical school—who teaches courses on the biology of the bodymind,

THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY IN MEDICINE

The new way of thinking about health and disease, with its message of hope and its charge of individual responsibility, is widely communicated by the Aquarian Conspiracy, as in a 1978 Washington conference, "Holistic Health: A Public Policy," cosponsored by several government agencies and private organizations. Agencies from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare were represented. So was the White House staff. Insurance companies, prepaid health-plan organizations, and foundations sent representatives—in many cases, their top executive officers. Politicians, physicians, psychologists, traditional healers, spiritual teachers, researchers, futurists, sociologists, and health policymakers shared the platform. The assistant surgeon-general opened the conference; principal speakers included Jerome Frank on the placebo effect, California legislator John Vasconcellos, meditation teacher Jack Schwarz, Buckminster Fuller on human ecology.

Topics included public-health policy, implementation of holistic health centers, crosscultural healing practices, systems theory, the holographic theory of mind and reality, yoga, music and consciousness, acupuncture and acupressure, Buddhist

out knowing why they are effective.

It was in 1970 that the first group of scientists and physicians — friends — gathered in a public forum to assert their interest in spiritual realities and alternative approaches to health. The standing-room-only program at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, was underwritten by Lockheed Aircraft. Six months later a similar cast of characters staged twin weekend programs at UCLA and Stanford, emphasizing the role of the mind in disease, telling of "new" therapies: meditation, visualization, biofeedback, acupuncture, hypnosis, psychic healing, folk healing. Within a few years, variations on this scientific-spiritual mating dance had been performed on the campuses of most major universities in the country, including Yale, Harvard, New York University, New York Institute of Technology, every branch of the University of California system, and the Universities of Massachusetts, Miami, Michigan, and Illinois. The Rockefeller, Ford, and Kellogg foundations funded programs exploring the interface of mind and health.

But even then, at the Tucson meeting, detente had begun. Take the case of Malcolm Todd. Todd, then president of the conservative AMA, gave a somewhat defensive recounting of the technological wonders of modern medicine. His talk was not an audience pleaser, but everyone agreed that his willingness to appear on the platform along with unorthodoxy was significant.

Less than a year later, appearing on a similar, larger program in San Diego, Todd endorsed the concept of a "humanistic medicine" that deals with the "bodymind." Nine months later he urged a heavily medical audience in Houston to take an active role in the integration of these holistic approaches into the

The conspiracy has understood that potential opponents should be listened to, not shouted down. And they should be given first-hand experience of the larger context. In 1975 and 1976 Rick Carlson, an attorney specializing in health policy, and others organized small conferences at Airliehouse, Virginia, near Washington, to acquaint government officials and legislative aides with the power of holistic concepts and alternative medicine.³ Those who attended had an opportunity to try biofeedback, meditation, imagery, relaxation, and other psychotechnologies. Those meetings were quietly funded by Blue Cross-Blue Shield.

retreats, fairs and festivals, giant expositions. Among them: Ways of Healing, Healing East and West, New All-American Bi-Centennial Medicine Show, Annual Healing Arts Camp and Fair, Health Expo, New Age Expo, Toward Tomorrow Fair, New Physics and New Medicine, Meditation-related Therapies, Human Ecology, Human Energy, Common Ground, Body Faire, The Mind Can Do Anything, It's All in the Mind, Holistic Health Retreat, Holistic Life University, Celebration of Health, New Perspectives on Medicine, New Prescriptions for American Medicine, Physician of the Future, Healing Center of the Future, Cultural Perspectives in Healing, Native American Healing, Natural Resources for Health, Self and Body, Body-Mind-Spirit, Stress Without Distress, Stress and the Psychology of Cancer, Biofeedback and Behavioral Medicine, Reintegrating the Body-Mind Split in Psychotherapy, Chinese Total Health for Body and Mind, New Dimensions in Health Care, Touch for Health, A Holistic Affair.

And the organizations: The Center for Integral Medicine, The Institute of Humanistic Medicine, The Association for Holistic Health, numberless "holistic-health centers" and "holistic-health clinics."

The conspiracy also recognizes the importance of semantics to bridge the old and the new. For example, the protocols for a landmark study of unconventional healing were approved by participating hospitals under the title "therapeutic touch" because it seemed less esoteric than "the laying on of hands." A researcher prepared a grant proposal to study "The Psychobiology of Health." It was rejected. Knowing that the funding agencies are more oriented to pathology than wellness, he retitled his proposal "The Psychobiology of Disease" and it was promptly accepted.

By 1977 there were weekly "rap groups" at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), informal discussions of shamanic healing, meditation, aura diagnosis. A working conference in California, sponsored by NIMH, produced a book of commissioned papers on alternative medicine for the express purpose of giving legitimacy to the concepts. Federal grants supported the study of bodymind changes produced by the psychotechnologies. NIMH also contracted for the preparation of an annotated bibliography on holistic medicine. In its work request, the agency eloquently defined the need:

cians and researchers to look for answers in other traditions and techniques.

"The war is over," Norman Cousins, publisher of Saturday Review, said in 1978. "We have allies out there, a lot of doctors who believe as we do but need encouragement." Cousins had reason to know of the "allies out there." He had recounted in the New England Journal of Medicine his own dramatic recovery from critical illness using an unorthodox approach when conventional medicine was at a loss. He prescribed his own treatment—a marathon of Marx Brothers movies and old "Candid Camera" shows, along with massive intravenous doses of Vitamin C. What had appeared to be a fatal cellular disease was reversed.

The response to his article was phenomenal. Seventeen medical journals asked to reprint it, thirty-four medical schools included it in their course materials, and Cousins was invited to address medical schools around the country. More than three thousand physicians from many countries wrote him appreciative, enthusiastic letters. Later in 1978 Cousins joined the faculty of the UCLA Medical School.

Cousins also addressed the 1977 convention of the American Medical Students Association (AMSA) in Atlanta. The convention theme, "Alternative Roles in Health—a New Definition of Medicine," made it increasingly clear that the paradigm shift is happening in medical schools. Around the country, students and sympathetic faculty have started informal discussion groups on consciousness and holistic approaches to medicine. These groups meet regularly at such medical schools as UCLA, the University of Texas in Galveston, Baylor in Houston, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

A national network, Goldenseal, grew out of the Johns Hopkins group; one of its founders was then vice-president of AMSA. From its two founding members it grew to a member-

ship of two hundred fifty in its first year.

ຝ devoted an entire issue in 1977 to alternative practices and has a regular department on humanistic medicine. Laurel Cappa, 1976 president of AMSA, told a physicians' convention of the students' interest in family practice and in nontraditional approaches such as meditation and Gestalt psychology. Medical students were saying that they want to be partners, not authority figures to their patients.

to health care.

But above and beyond the conscious assistance of the Aquarian Conspiracy, the implosion of knowledge and the failure of "rational medicine" are inexorable forces for change.

Life has not been easy for most doctors caught in the paradigm shift. They are between generations, not young enough to move smoothly into the new concepts, not old enough to have died with the technological dream and the mystique of the doctor.

The holistic ideal is hardly new. In the prestigious journal Science, in an essay titled "The Need for a New Medical Model," George Engel pointed out that the approach had been attempted at Johns Hopkins medical school before 1920. In The Will to Live (1950), Arnold Hutschnecker, a physician, made a vigorous case for bodymind medicine. The physician's preoccupation with disease and the psychoanalyst's preoccupation with the mind would be synthesized, for the truth is not a monopoly of either branch of medicine. "They will meet and fuse, and their fusion will be found most profoundly in the general practitioner."

Specialization was the understandable, perhaps even inevitable, result of an increasing reliance by medical schools on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). According to Harrison Gough, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been studying medical students since 1951, the test shaped a generation of American medicine by selecting students of a particular temperament. As higher scores were required for admission, the test eliminated many "doers and good workers" in favor of those with a strong academic orientation. These scholarly types tended to go into research or into specialties like radiology and anesthesiology. "Reliance on the test produced a generation of doctors who didn't want to talk to a patient about how his stomach hurt."

Medical students are starting to demand (and even organize) courses in nutrition, psychosomatic medicine, biofeedback,

acupuncture, and other nontraditional alternatives.

In a lecture to the faculty and alumni of the University of California-San Francisco medical school, an intern, Scott May, urged the respect and nurturance of feminine principles. He listed examples of the exaggerated masculine orientation: the medical schools' pushing students to ignore the exhaustion of their own bodies, the "objectification" of the patient which keeps the doctor from understanding his own feelings, the lack of compassion, the suicides and breakdowns and drug abuse among doctors. "Value, don't deprecate, those students who are less thick-skinned, less distant from their own feelings and those of the patients. Look for them on the admissions committee." He urged his classmates, "Remember your heart...."

School of Medicine set up their own free clinic.

Younger doctors see themselves in partnership with non-physicians. Their view was typified in a letter to the American Medical News editor protesting an article that had characterized chiropractors as cultists. The student said, "Let's work with chiropractors." Old issues of power (who has the expertise, who deserves more authority) are fading. Psychologists are as influential as MDs in a number of innovative medical programs. In California, a doctorate in mental health is being experimentally offered—a blend of psychiatry, psychology, and social-work courses. Old hierarchical distinctions fall away: Psychiatrists seek advice from psychologists, orthopedists from chiropractors, ophthalmologists from optometrists. Nurse-practitioners, midwives, family counselors, lay counselors, clergymen, folk healers, body therapists, physicists, medical engineers—anybody can contribute to holistic medicine. As an anatomist at a California medical school put it, "We all have a piece of the truth. Nobody has it all." Harvard's Hiatt said:

WAYS OF LIVING, DYING, HEALING

In a typical modern delivery, drugged babies are taken from drugged mothers, pulled into a shock of bright lights and loud noises, tied up, wrapped, and placed in plastic boxes. Their

fathers see them through glass, their siblings not at all. Yet we know now that mothers and infants become physically and emotionally "bonded" if given time enough together immediately after birth: The eye contact, touching, smiling, and feeding seem to have a long-term effect on their rapport and the child's later development. Practices from other cultures and revived customs from our own show us the startling benefits of natural behavior toward the newborn: a mother's cuddling, a father's play, human milk furnishing substances crucial to development, the human voice triggering micromovements in the infant.

At first the interest in bonding was dismissed by the medical profession. Capitulation, when it came, was sudden and unexpected. In 1978 the AMA announced its endorsement of obstetric approaches that consider the importance of mother-infant bonding.

Obviously, modern hospitals were not designed for family childbirth, a factor that caused an enormous wave of home births in recent years. At first this trend was looked on with alarm by the medical profession, but the first major evaluation of safety was a shocker. Studying nearly twelve hundred cases of home childbirth, the California State Department of Health found them safer than the state average on every count. (The mothers, who had been screened for major risk, were not quite representative of the general population.) More than twice as many babies died in the hospital deliveries, and midwives outperformed physicians when it came to handling complications! (For example, the midwives' techniques kept lacerations to around 5 percent, compared to 40 percent in physician deliveries.)

General and Hollywood Presbyterian, parents and other children are together in homelike quarters, listening to music, visit-

Leboyer has described his gradual discovery of the awareness and intelligence of the newborn, a phenomenon he had been educated against in his medical training. "A person is there, fully conscious, deserving of respect." A French experiment studied one hundred and twenty babies delivered by the Leboyer method, all from working-class mothers who knew nothing of the method when they arrived at the hospital for delivery. These babies scored higher on psychomotor scales than the average infant, had superior digestion, walked earlier, and were surprisingly likely to be ambidextrous!

Leboyer was among the speakers at a 1978 Los Angeles conference organizing Our Ultimate Investment, a foundation devoted to "conscious childbirth," sponsored by Laura Huxley, widow of Aldous Huxley. Strong convictions about the spiritual and psychological aspects of childbirth, infant care, and bonding have led to the formation of a network, NAPSAC (the National Association of Parents and Professionals for Safe Alternatives in Childbirth). Widespread interest around the country has inspired conferences, seminars, books, and informal mutual-support networks. It has greatly increased support for established natural approaches to birth, like the Lamaze method, and the La Leche League, a mutual-help network for women wishing to breastfeed their babies.

And just as increasing numbers of prospective parents are demanding home births or homelike settings, many of the dying are coming home to die or are seeking out the few available hospices, which are humane centers for the terminally ill modeled after St. Christopher's in London. Advocates of the hospice movement have described it as "a concept rather than a specific place," just as the Leboyer method was called a concept rather than a technique. "The hospice movement," said a Science report on a two-day meeting on hospices at the National Institutes of Health, "far from being a separate and specialized phenomenon, supplies a model for getting the whole health system back on the track."

The Shanti Project in Berkeley employs lay and professional counselors for the loving guidance of the dying and their families. At the Center for Attitudinal Healing in Tiburon, California, psychiatrist Gerald Jampolsky supervises a group of children with life-threatening illnesses like leukemia. They meet in each other's homes once a week to share their fears, meditate together, and convey healing thoughts to those among them in crisis. A grant from Pacific Bell has made it possible for the center to sponsor a telephone support network so that children around the country can talk to each other about their shared experiences of dangerous illness.

We're experiencing a new kind of humanness and our

I'm sorry when my peers put all their efforts into obtaining services, like reduced utility rates. Services are Novocain. They dull the pain but they don't solve the problem.

Psychiatry in the West is beginning to respect the insight of those societies that view madness as an attempt to break through to new vision. Acute psychosis may be a feverish strategy to transcend conflict, a sometimes valuable natural process rather than a symptom to be quickly eradicated. Sanctuary and understanding are often more effective than the powerful but temporary chemical adjustment usually given to psychotic individuals. In one California study young male schizophrenics who were not given drugs recovered from their acute psychoses about two weeks later than those given Thorazine, but they were far less often readmitted over the course of the next year.

All through history the fear of creative behavior and mystical states—of the intuitive side of human experience—has led to witch-hunts too various to name. Psychiatrist R. D. Laing blames this on the ambivalence of the society toward inner hungers, the consensus of denial of spiritual needs on which artists and mystics throughout history have been shipwrecked. Now increasing numbers of former mental patients have joined forces to oppose what they consider insensitive treatment of mental illness and to promote a greater reliance on such noninvasive therapies as biofeedback, meditation, nutrition, and sanctuary rather than drugs and electroshock. One such network is the Bay Area Association for Alternatives in Psychiatry. Many psychiatrists are looking at alternative therapies.

There is also a growing interest in traditional and folk healing systems. Physicians, nurses, psychologists, and anthropolo-

Brazil's popular medicine, sometimes called cura ("curing"), may be a preview of the synthesis taking place in some parts of the world. Cura blends Western medicine, spiritual healing, herbalism, homeopathy, Amerindian and African healing traditions. Some sixty million Brazilians are estimated to partake of cura, with rapidly growing numbers among the well-educated and middle class. Cura involves body, emotions, soul. There is a great respect for the "moral ascendancy" of the healer as well as the expertise of formally trained physicians. Cura emphasizes whatever works and establishes a support group for the individual in need of healing.

"I am convinced that there is such a thing as healing power," Jerome Frank said at a New York conference on alternative medical approaches. But he expressed doubt that it will be evaluated clearly enough in the near future for full acceptance by Western scientists.

Actually there is already something of a scientific grid through which we can understand a healing resonance between people. Bell's theorem, the Bohm-Pribram holographic theories, and other radical proposals offer a model for understanding the connectedness between persons. The image of the body as a responsive field of energy, predominant in Eastern philosophy, coincides with evidence that the acupuncture meridians are a reality and that the chakras of Buddhist lore may indeed have a basis in fact. Dolores Krieger, a professor of nursing at New York University, elegantly demonstrated changes in hemoglobin values in patients treated with a kind of "scanning" healing, in which practitioners do not actually touch the body but attempt to sense field changes—heat, cold, a tingling sensation—as their hands pass over particular regions of the body.

While psychic healing may prove a useful adjunct to medicine in the future, it is unlikely to become a primary mode of treatment—for a simple reason. A "healer" is ministering in much the same way as a doctor, doing something to the patient. Shamanic healers—the curanderos of South America, for instance—tell those they treat that they can affect the symptoms but they cannot change the inner process that produces disease. The symptom may disappear for a time but too often the deeper matrix of disease has not been changed. Only the individual can effect a healing from within.

A healing state of mind has specific benefits for the healer, however, and for the rapport between therapist and sufferer. A British scientist has observed a particular configuration of brain rhythms in most of the spiritual healers he has tested. (England has thousands of licensed healers, and they are permitted to work in hospitals.) One anxious physician wired to the brainwave device did not show that pattern. Finally the sympathetic researcher said, "Imagine you are about to treat a patient. You have no medicine, no equipment. You have nothing to give but your compassion." Suddenly the physician's brainwave activity shifted into the "healing state" pattern.

nurse to deliver tranquilizers and anesthetic.

Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

I would like to be able to fly if everyone else did, but otherwise it would be kind of conspicuous.

—Twelve-year-old girl quoted by DAVID RIESMAN in The Lonely Crowd

'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces, That miss the many-splendored thing.

—FRANCIS THOMPSON

We are in the early morning of understanding our place in the universe and our spectacular latent powers, the flexibility and transcendence of which we are capable. The scientific breakthroughs are throwing out a challenge: If our memories are as absorbent as research has demonstrated, our awareness as wide, our brains and bodies as sensitive; if we can will changes in our physiology at the level of a single cell; if we are heirs to such evolutionary virtuosity—how can we be performing and learning at such mediocre levels? If we're so rich, why aren't we smart?

This is the poignant human paradox: a plastic brain capable of endless self-transcendence, equally capable of being trained into self-limiting behavior. It is evident even in newborn babies, who have been shown by modern research techniques to be incredibly sensitive, seeking out patterns, reacting to subtle emotions in the human voice, attracted to faces, discriminating between colors. But science has also shown how easily newborns can be programmed. They can be conditioned to respond to a light or a bell not unlike the salivating dogs in Pavlov's famous experiments. Both Teilhard and Skinner were right: We are capable of evolutionary leaps and conditioning in boxes.

You can only have a new society, the visionaries have said, if you change the education of the younger generation. Yet the new society itself is the necessary force for change in education. It's like the old dilemma: You can't get a job without experience, but you can't get experience because no one will give you a job.

They are, as one expressed it, "in peaceful struggle" within

Yet there are reasons for optimism. Our error has been in assuming that we had to start with the schools. Schools are an effect of the way we think—and we can change the way we think.

Subtle forces are at work, factors you are not likely to see in banner headlines. For example, tens of thousands of classroom teachers, educational consultants and psychologists, counselors, administrators, researchers, and faculty members in colleges of education have been among the millions engaged in personal transformation. They have only recently begun to link regionally and nationally, to share strategies, to conspire for the teaching of all they most value: freedom, high expectations, awareness, patterns, connections, creativity. They are eager to share their discoveries with those colleagues ready to listen.

And many are ready, veterans of earlier, partially successful

movements to humanize the schools. They have learned a lot. Much as social activism moved in recent years from confrontation to cooperation and from external to internal healing, educational reformers are shifting their emphasis. And there is power in the new alignment of parents and educators. Teachers, administrators, and sympathetic school-board members are working together rather than confronting one another.

Another strong force for change: crisis. All the failures of education, like a fever, signal a deep struggle for health. The business of the Aquarian Conspiracy is calm diagnosis of that illness—to make it clear that synthesis is needed—paradigm change rather than pendulum change.

people.

Dis-ease, not feeling comfortable about ourselves, probably begins for many of us in the classroom. One biofeedback clinician remarked that the correlation between stressful memories and arousal of the body can be demonstrated. If a biofeedback subject is asked to think about school memories, the feedback shows immediate alarm. In one PTA workshop, every adult asked to write about a remembered school incident described a negative or traumatic event. Many adults describe nightmares of being in school again, late for class or having failed to turn in an assignment.

challenges and new learning.

lated by parents or other relatives from infancy, borne up by high expectations.

LEARNING FOR A NEW WORLD

It was enough to master the content of certain books and courses, learn the tricks of the trade, and you were finished. The student learned what he needed for his "field." The journeyman knew his job. Knowledge kept in its proper compartments, people in their departments. In the very short history of mass education—not much more than a century—schools went from teaching simple piety and fundamental literacy to eventual instruction in the arts and social sciences. Education became "higher" and "higher" in terms of elaboration and sophistication.

A society shaken by an implosion of knowledge, a revolution in culture and communication, cannot wait for a creaking educational bureaucracy to sanction its search for meaning. What we know of nature now has broken through the artifices of disciplinary boundaries; technology is accelerated so that traditional careers vanish and new opportunities materialize suddenly. New information is rushing together, dovetailing across disciplines.

The educational establishment has been nightmarishly slow in responding to our changing needs, slower than any other institution. At an increasingly high cost (nearly 8 percent of the Gross National Product, compared to 3.4 percent in 1951), the old forms are not working. New hardware and refurbished curricula are not enough.²

LEARNING: THE EMERGENT PARADIGM

The Radical Center of educational philosophy—the perspective typical of the Aquarian Conspiracy—is a constellation of techniques and concepts sometimes called transpersonal education. The name derives from a branch of psychology that focuses on the transcendent capacities of human beings. In transpersonal education, the learner is encouraged to be awake and autonomous, to question, to explore all the corners and crevices of conscious experience, to seek meaning, to test outer limits, to check out frontiers and depths of the self.

Transpersonal education is more humane than traditional education and more intellectually rigorous than many alternatives in the past. It aims to aid transcendence, not furnish mere coping skills. It is education's counterpart to holistic medicine: education of the whole person.

training and adult education.

Unlike most educational reform in the past, it is imbedded in sound science: systems theory, an understanding of the integration of mind and body, knowledge of the two major modes of consciousness and how they interact, the potential of altered and expanded states of consciousness. It emphasizes the continuum of knowledge, rather than "subjects," and the common ground of human experience, transcending ethnic or national differences. It aids the learner's search for meaning, the need to discern forms and patterns, the hunger for harmony. It deepens awareness of how a paradigm shifts, how frustration and struggle precede insights.

The larger paradigm looks to the nature of learning rather than methods of instruction. Learning, after all, is not schools, teachers, literacy, math, grades, achievement. It is the process by which we have moved every step of the way since we first breathed; the transformation that occurs in the brain whenever new information is integrated, whenever a new skill is mastered. Learning is kindled in the mind of the individual. Anything else is mere schooling.

The new paradigm reflects both the discoveries of modern

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE OLD PARADIGM OF EDUCATION

Hierarchical and authoritarian structure. Rewards conformity, discourages dissent.

Relatively rigid structure, prescribed curriculum.

Lockstep progress, emphasis on the "appropriate" ages for certain activities, age segregation. Compartmentalized.

Priority on performance.

Emphasis on external world. Inner experience often considered inappropriate in school setting.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE NEW PARADIGM OF LEARNING

Learning as a process, a journey.

Relatively flexible structure. Belief that there are many ways to teach a given subject.

Flexibility and integration of age groupings. Individual not automatically limited to certain subject matter by age.

Priority on self-image as the generator of performance.

Guessing and divergent thinking discouraged.

Emphasis on analytical, linear, left-brain thinking.

Labeling (remedial, gifted, minimally brain dysfunctional, etc.) contributes to self-fulfilling prophecy.

Concern with norms.

Primary reliance on theoretical, abstract "book knowledge."

Classrooms designed for efficiency, convenience.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE NEW

Strives for whole-brain education. Augments left-brain rationality with holistic, nonlinear, and intuitive strategies. Confluence and fusion of the two processes emphasized.

Labeling used only in minor prescriptive role and not as fixed evaluation that dogs the individual's educational career.

Concern for the environment of learning lighting, colors, air, physical comfort, needs for privacy and interaction, quiet and exuberant activities.

Education seen as a social necessity for a certain period of time, to inculcate minimum skills and train for a specific role.

Increasing reliance on technology (audiovisual equipment, computers, tapes, texts), dehumanization.

Teacher imparts knowledge; one-way street.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE NEW PARADIGM OF LEARNING

Encourages community input, even community control.

Education seen as lifelong process, one only tangentially related to schools.

The old assumptions generate questions about how to achieve norms, obedience, and correct answers. The new assumptions lead to questions about how to motivate for lifelong learning, how to strengthen self-discipline, how to awaken curiosity, and how to encourage creative risk in people of all ages.

LEARNING IS TRANSFORMING

A learning shift is preceded by stress whose intensity ranges across a continuum: uneasiness, excitement, creative tension, confusion, anxiety, pain, fear. The surprise and fear in learning are described in The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda:

Just as you can't "deliver" holistic health, which must start with the intention of the patient, the true teacher knows you can't impose learning. You can, as Galileo said, help the individual discover it within. The open teacher helps the learner discover patterns and connections, fosters openness to strange new possibilities, and is a midwife to ideas. The teacher is a steersman, a catalyst, a facilitator—an agent of learning, but not the first cause.

Trust deepens over time. The teacher becomes more attuned, and more rapid and powerful learning can take place.

A teacher clear enough for such attunement obviously must have a healthy level of self-esteem, little defensiveness, few ego needs. The true teacher must be willing to let go, to be wrong, to allow the learner another reality. The learner who has been encouraged to hear inner authority is tacitly welcome to disagree. Submission to outer authority is always provisional and temporary. As the Eastern wisdom puts it, "If you see Buddha on the road, kill him."

Come to the edge, he said. They said: We are afraid. Come to the edge, he said. They came. He pushed them...and they flew.

new, internal equilibrium. Even in the name of love or sym-

pathy, we must not be spared our learnings.

To understand how we learn fear and mastery, risk and trust, we have to look past the schools to our first teachers. Parents are our models of exploration. From them we learned to retreat or advance. We were imbued with their expectations. Too often, we inherited second-generation fears, anxieties we sensed in them. And—if we are not conscious of the cycle—we are all too likely to pass their fears and our own on to our children. That is the heritage of uneasiness, bequeathed from generation to generation: fears of losing, falling, being left behind, being left alone, not being good enough.

Recent studies of the "fear of success," a fairly common syndrome, revealed that its likeliest cause is the parent's communication of the fear that the child will not be able to master the tasks at hand. The child realizes simultaneously that (1) the task is considered important by the parent, and (2) the parent doubts that the child can do it unassisted. That individual establishes a lifelong pattern of sabotaging his own successes

whenever he is on the verge of real mastery.

Most parents, it seems, don't mind if their children are better than they at certain things: schoolwork, athletics, popularity. There is vicarious satisfaction in a child's extending one's ambitions. But most parents do not want their children to be different. We want to be able to understand them, and we want them to share our values. This fear of an alien offspring appears in myth and in science-fiction tales of children who leap into new modes of being and are no longer subject to their parents' frailty or their mortal limits, as in Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End.

If as parents we are afraid of risk and strangeness, we warn our children against trying to beat the system. We do not acknowledge their right to a different world. In the name of adjustment, we may try to spare them their sensible rebellion. In the name of balance, we try to save them from intensity, obsessions, excesses—in short, from the disequilibrium that allows transformation to occur.

WHOLE-BRAIN KNOWING

The deliberate use of consciousness-expanding techniques in education, only recently well under way, is new in mass schooling. Never before has a culture undertaken to foster whole-brain knowing in the general populace. The transcendent state in which intellect and feeling are fused, in which higher cortical judgment makes peace with the intuitions of the old limbic brain, was the province of the few: the Athenian philosopher, the Zen master, the Renaissance genius, the creative physicist. Such heroic stuff was not for "normal" people. And it was certainly not the business of the schools!

"Tacit knowing" has always had its defenders, including many of our greatest and most creative scientists and artists. It has been the essential, silent partner to all our progress. The left brain can organize new information into the existing scheme of things, but it cannot generate new ideas. The right brain sees context—and, therefore, meaning. Without intuition, we would still be in the cave. Every breakthrough, every leap forward in history, has depended on right-brain insights, the ability of the holistic brain to detect anomalies, process novelty, perceive relationships.

In a way, it makes sense that evolving human consciousness eventually came to over-rely on that hemisphere in which language primarily resides. Some theorists think, based on the research data, that the left brain behaves almost like a separate, competitive individual, an independent mind that inhibits its partner.

Our plight might be compared to the long, long journey of twin sailors. One is a verbal, analytical fellow, the other mute and sometimes dreamy. The verbal partner earnestly calculates with the aid of his charts and instruments. His brother, however, has an uncanny ability to predict storms, changing currents, and other navigational conditions, which he communicates by signs, symbols, drawings. The analytical sailor is afraid to trust his brother's advice because he can't imagine its source. Actually, the silent sailor has wireless, instantaneous access to a rich data bank that gives him a satellite perspective on the weather. But he cannot explain this complex system with his limited ability to communicate details. And his talkative, "rational" brother usually ignores him anyway. Frustrated, he often stands by helplessly while their craft sails head-on into disaster.

Now we realize that the right brain sees relationships, recognizes faces, mediates new information, hears tone, judges harmonies and symmetries. The greatest learning disability of all may be pattern blindness—the inability to see relationships or

Brain research is also revolutionizing our understanding of differences in the ways males and females perceive. The sexes vary markedly in some aspects of brain specialization. The left and right hemispheres of the male brain specialize at a much earlier age than those of the female brain, which gives them certain advantages and disadvantages. Male brains are superior at certain types of spatial perceptions, but they are less flexible, more vulnerable than female brains to deficits after injury. One recent study found almost no language loss in women who had suffered injury to the left brain and subnormal language in males with the same type of trauma. Vastly more males than females suffer from dyslexia (reading difficulty).

Dyslexia, which afflicts at least 10 percent of the population, seems to be associated with a dominance by the right cerebral hemisphere in the reading process. Those with a strong holistic perception are often handicapped by our educational system with its emphasis on symbolic language and symbolic mathematics. They have initial difficulty in processing these symbols. Yet this neurological minority may also be unusually gifted. They typically excel in the arts and in innovative thinking. Ironically, their potential contribution to society is frequently diminished because the system undermines their self-esteem in their first school years.

sion of others, "failing" those whose gifts are not on the culture's most-wanted list, thus convincing them for life that they are unworthy.

THE NEED FOR INNOVATION

The psychotechnologies ease the emergence of the stranger.

^<sup>3Sociologists calculated recently that an individual in Western society receives sixty-five thousand more pieces of stimuli each day than did our forebears one hundred years ago.

Most schools have been especially inhospitable to creative and innovative individuals in the past. Innovators jolt, they disturb the drowsy status quo. They dissent from the comfort of consensus reality, assorted Hans Christian Andersons marveling at the emperor's gleaming nakedness.

Hermann Hesse wrote of "the struggle between rule and spirit" that repeats itself year after year, from school to school:

Inadvertently, we may push people to the extremes of their innate tendencies by the bias of our schools. The rebelinnovator diverges more and more, perhaps to become antisocial or neurotic. The timid child who wishes to please is shaped into an even more conformist position by the authoritarian structure. In their study comparing high schools to prisons, Craig Haney and Philip Zimbardo commented that the real tragedies are not the troublemakers or even the dropouts, but "the endless procession of faceless students who go through the school system quietly and unquestioningly, unobtrusively and unnoticed."

"The present educational paradigm assumes that the only questions worth asking are those for which we already have the answers," said Ray Gottlieb, an optometrist specializing in learning. "Where, then, can one learn to live with the uncertainties of the real world?"

We are beginning to realize that we must educate for the uncertainty of freedom beyond frontiers. The ability to shift perspectives is a distinct aid to problem solving. In one experiment, psychologists trained students to reframe problems or to visualize them more vividly. Students who learned to reformulate had to enlarge their definition of the problem and check their assumptions to see if they were all true and necessary. The reframers dramatically outscored the visualizers! The experimenters remarked that perhaps you can be clear about the wrong thing, achieving "crystal clearness where there is null."

Imaginative leaps, curiosity, synthesis, spontaneity, the flash of insight—these should not be the franchise of a favored minority. Educator John Gowan, whose special concern is creativity, said:

Heretofore we have harvested creativity wild. We have used as creative only those persons who stubbornly remained so despite all efforts of the family, religion, education, and politics to grind it out of them....

number of creative persons [to the point of] critical mass. When this level is reached in a culture, as it was in Periclean Athens, the Renaissance, Elizabethan England, and our own Federalist period, civilization makes a great leap forward. We can have a golden age of this type such as the world has never seen. . . . A genius is always a forerunner; and the best minds of this age foresee the dawn of that one

For the first time, if we're very lucky, education may undertake to foster that richer, more fluent consciousness. Our schools may gradually stop trying to row sailboats.

THE NEED FOR CONNECTION

Meaning emerges from context and connectedness. Without context, nothing makes sense. Try to imagine checkers without a checkerboard, language without a grammar, games without rules. The right brain, with its gift for seeing patterns and wholes, is essential for understanding context, for detecting meaning. "Learning to learn" includes learning to see the relationships between things. "Unfortunately our schools are no help," anthropologist Edward Hall said, "because they consistently teach us not to make connections.... There should be a few people at least whose task is synthesis — pulling things together. And that is impossible without a deep sense of context."

Preschoolers, in one experiment, for example, learned to read

Under the Title I program designed to help culturally deprived children, educational consultants from Synectics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts firm, have taught thousands of elementary-school children how to make connections—in effect, how to think metaphorically.⁵ Initially, most of the children cannot make meaningful connections if the teacher asks, "How is the growth of a seed like the growth of an egg?" Typical responses of third-graders before training: "The flower is best." "The chick can walk." "The chicken is smaller." "There are no feathers on the flower."

After several hours of group exercises in connection-making, the children are asked again about the seed and the egg. All can now generalize some aspect of the similarities: growth, changing form, and so on. Their metaphors are often striking. In a program in Lawrence, Massachusetts, one child said, "Only the egg and the seed know what they'll be when they grow up.... Something inside must tell them. It's like 'Mister Rogers' on TV. He tells a story, and only he knows how it'll come out." One said that both a seed and an egg start small and get surprisingly big, like father's anger. "When he's mad, it starts out a little mad—and gets madder and madder." One compared the cracking of the seed and egg to the cracking of water pipes by expanding ice.

When the children in the Lawrence schools were tested one year after their training in metaphorical thinking, first graders showed a 363 percent increase in knowledge of letters and sounds, a 286 percent increase in aural comprehension, a 1038 percent increase in word reading. Kindergartners showed year-to-year increases of 76 percent on a picture-vocabulary test. Third graders showed an increase of nearly 40 percent in reading scores.

ing scores.

William J. J. Gordon, the originator of the Synectics ap-

⁵Synectics exercises are also used for adults, especially in training for creativity.

discouraged in many people.

In the midst of a wealth of information, we may be moving toward an economy of learning—a few powerful principles and

theories making sense across many disciplines.

The elements of the world cannot be understood except in terms of the whole, as our best thinkers keep trying to tell us. "Nature is one wonderful unit," Albert Szent-Gyorgyi said. "It is not divided into physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics..." Kenneth Boulding, economist and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, spoke of the "profound reorganization and restructuring of knowledge" taking place in our time: "The old boundaries are crumbling in all directions." Note that he said restructuring, not adding onto. It is the shape and form of what we know that is changing.

People must learn to accommodate "the whole brain in a whole world," said Joseph Meeker, speaking of what he called

"ambidextrous education":

Indeed, at the level of graduate education, synthesis is evident. The National Endowment for the Humanities is sponsoring a five-year teaching and research effort in conjunction with San Francisco State University, the Science-Humanities Convergence Program. The newly formed National Humanities Center near Duke University, funded by private foundations and corporations, aims to encourage interdisciplinary research by providing support for scholars. Law schools, medical schools, and other centers of professional training are enriching and broadening their curricula.

Not only are we learning to connect information, but we are connecting with each other as well. We are increasingly aware that no one culture and no period in history has had all the answers. We are gathering our collective wisdom, from the past and from the whole planet.

One such tool is the Indian Medicine Wheel, or the Cheyenne Wheel of Knowledge. In contrast to the way we compartmentalize information, the Cheyennes and other American Indian tribes attempt to show the circular, connected nature of reality by mapping knowledge on a wheel. For in-

Euphenics, a recent idea in genetics, suggests that there is a scientific basis for such learning approaches as paidea. Whereas eugenics promoted the breeding of certain traits and selecting against other traits, euphenics takes the view that the environment can be optimized to bring out potential traits. In human terms, we might say that everyone is gifted, in the sense of having special potentials in the genetic repertoire, but that most of these gifts are not elicited by the environment. If the learning environment is stimulating and tolerant, a great array of skills, talents, and capacities can be developed.

Another native system offers a new way to introduce relevance. Students have often complained that there is little point to the information offered by schools. A number of American educators have adapted the idea of the "walkabout," a prolonged and dangerous journey into the wilderness required for male Australian aborigines at about age fourteen. Knowing that they are preparing for a life-or-death initiation gives immediacy to the aborigines' tribal education. In some schools, urban youngsters are now creating their own programs of study in preparation for a great task they choose, their version of the walkabout.

coals, to try to exorcise sickness? What can human beings do? What are all the things we collectively know? "None of us," says a poster in an alternative school, "is as smart as all of us."

strategy for cultures engaged in transformation

In the accounts of life-changing, shaking experiences included in the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaires, several individuals mentioned cultural shock—moving to another country, another part of the world.

Experiments have also demonstrated the power of the self-image: the high or low expectations held by one's parents, one's teachers, oneself. A recent study of men from the same low socio-economic class revealed that those who were upwardly mobile had one critical ingredient the others lacked: parents who had expected them to succeed.

Teachers have been trained to expect little. In a famous experiment in the 1960s, Robert Rosenthal of Harvard and Lenore Jacobson, a San Francisco educator, demonstrated what they called the Pygmalion effect—the finding that teachers unintentionally communicate their expectations of what a student can do, thus setting in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those youngsters expected to do well usually thrive, even if the teacher's expectations are based on bogus information. On the other hand, one study showed that teachers give little negative feedback to students of whom they expect little, making it difficult for the students to correct what they're doing wrong. Not only has the Pygmalion effect been replicated in hundreds of experiments; it turns out that teachers also have measurable biases based on the sex, race, and physical attractiveness of their students.

This is living moral education, teaching for transcendence. Because of travel and communications, the interaction that once produced "schools" of artists and clusters of great physicists and writers can now be accomplished in surprising measure on a global scale.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF TEACHERS

You can no more reform education by decree than you can heal by what Edward Carpenter called "external ministrations." Teachers have to understand new ideas from the inside out if they are to benefit from them. As one educator said, "Teachers who do a bad job with old tools are likely to do a worse job with strange new tools."

Some teachers are what Bruner called "dream killers," what Aldous Huxley called "bad artists" whose shortcomings can affect whole lives and destinies. Just as medical colleges have tended to select for the academically sharp, good memorizers rather than those best suited to care for people, so the colleges of education have constructed an obstacle course of jargon and course work dull enough to discourage all but the most stubborn of the creative candidates.

Voices in education have proclaimed this need. "Education can transform culture, but only insofar as educators are transformed," said Diane Watson, a member of the Los Angeles school board.

This movement sounds simple: It aims to awaken teachers to their classroom behavior and their attitude toward themselves and others. By rating teachers in the classroom or by having

Research has shown that children learn best from adults who are spontaneous, creative, supportive, physically fit...who look for meaning rather than just facts...who have high self-esteem...who see their job as liberating rather than controlling the slow learner. Good teachers are more interested in the process of learning than in achieving specific goals. They admit their own mistakes, entertain radical ideas by students, discuss feelings, foster cooperation, encourage students to help plan their work, provide resources beyond the call of duty. Humiliation, lining up, punishment, and rulemaking inhibit learning.

Project Change in Los Angeles is just one example of the training programs around the country designed to increase teachers' sensitivity. "Without exception," one trainer said, "the teachers tell us that the greatest benefits were in their personal lives, total changes in perspective. They say they're now aware of talents they didn't realize they had, and many experience a real explosion of creativity in the classroom. They're more open to others—less critical, more apt to see what others have to offer. There's a correspondence between this growth and the teacher's productivity. They write more lessons, there are self-reports of more energy, and the students rate them higher."

Educators engaged in transpersonal and humanistic methods have begun linking in national networks and centers; there are also local networks, like Lifeline in Los Angeles, sponsored by the Association for Humanistic Psychology, whose intention is the establishment of a new paradigm in education "co-existing with other, more traditional paradigms."

that seems its opposite.

meditation, massage, movement, nutrition.

meditations, and relaxing techniques....

The crises now facing most school districts can be the springboard for your own humanistic experiments. When people hurt they ask for help. Education is hurting and is asking for help. Let's not be shy in responding.

Even a tiny minority of committed teachers, counselors, and administrators can set off seismic shocks with programs that work.

Because the emergent educational paradigm encompasses a great deal more than the old, experimental programs often fall short of their own ambitions. These are, after all, innovations and experiments, by definition not yet refined or streamlined. It is no small undertaking to humanize schools and challenge students at the same time.

Age groupings are usually flexible, not the lockstep structure of traditional education. Most innovative educational programs eventually learn to include enough structure to remind students of their responsibility and to prepare them for some oldparadigm expectations when they leave school. Letter grades are available for those who need a record for college entry.

They use their mathematics to build domes. They use the community for their campus. Parents and "experts" from the community are volunteer teachers for special subjects, and the students also tutor each other. Typically the curriculum includes a sophisticated dose of the arts and humanities; students may learn calligraphy and batik dying, stage a Broadway play, write and perform their own television scripts. They learn the uses and sources of political power by attending school board and city council meetings. They learn biology by caring for animals, botany while planting gardens.

breathing to engage the right hemisphere. There are courses in ecology, in discriminating between junk food and good nutrition, in being an intelligent consumer.

Students are pushed to think about paradoxes, conflicting philosophies, the implications of their own beliefs and actions. They are reminded that there are always alternatives. They innovate, invent, question, ponder, argue, dream, agonize, plan, fail, succeed, rethink, imagine. They learn to learn, and they understand that education is a lifelong journey.

Students of all ages play games: educational games, math games, board games of fantasy, history, space exploration, social issues. Rather than fiercely competitive physical games, they may play "New Games," an ever-expanding collection of activities, some of them ancient sport, that fit the slogan of the New Games Foundation: "Play hard, play fair, nobody hurt."

Competition, status, and popularity contests play a relatively small part in the dynamics of such schools. Most students attend voluntarily because they and their families favor this educational approach. Such families tend to de-emphasize social striving and competition and to emphasize excellence for its own sake. The curriculum and teacher behavior also reinforce autonomy, empathy, and mutual support in students. Squabbling is more in the vein of transient sibling disputes rather than the deep patterns of "in" and "out" groups typical of conventional schools.

As modern history has tragically shown, obedience based on fear is not morally selective. Psychologist Stanley Milgram, in a series of now classic experiments, ordered experimental subjects to administer what they believed to be painful shocks to another person. (Actually, the victim, a confederate of the experimenter, only pretended to be in pain.) Most subjects, although visibly anguished over what they were being asked to do, were incapable of saying no to the "authority," a psychologist in a white coat. Sixty-five percent of these ordinary people were willing to inflict severe, possibly permanent, damage by pushing the bogus lever of the apparatus to its highest setting. Even when they heard terrible screaming from the other room, they could not bring themselves to walk out on the experi-

BEYOND SCHOOLS

Achieving paidea, the Radical Center, the heavenly city; "teaching both halves of the brain"—this is no small ambition. No school can do it. No school has ever done it. Only a community can offer holistic education, and only a whole person can take it. Simultaneous personal and social transformation can take us into what Confucius called "the great learning," compared to the "little learning" imparted by the schools. "The university will most likely not grow into the size of a city," said William Irwin Thompson in The Edge of History. "It will shrink as it realizes that it is the city itself (and not the campus) that is the true university."

The greatest re-form of education may be decentralizaton, the dismantling of the windowless walls that have closed off school from community, from the milieu of real life. Ronald Gross, an educator, said:

The learning process has opened up: universities without walls, "free universities," mobile schools, work-study projects even for young children, medieval-style tutoring programs, community-run schools, elderly volunteers in the schools and youngsters in real work environments, field trips, adult education, an explosion of crafts and self-teaching literature for skills, life-experience credit toward college degrees, private instruction, peer teaching, skill-sharing, student-service and restoration projects in the community. And technological aids are getting cheaper and more accessible—tape-cassette instruction, for example, and computer kits.

Part of the transformative process is becoming a learner

In 1971 a consortium of twenty-five colleges and universities formed the University Without Walls (UWW) program, which they administer as the Union of Experimenting Colleges and Universities. Similar programs, many with less firm accreditation than the UWW, have been developed all over the country, some modeled on Britain's Open University.

Jose Arguelles said of such networks:

What the networking model suggests is a common paradigm linking together the physical and psychological, the intellectual and the intuitive, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere....

We give each other the courage to move into the unknown, to risk in each other's company and with each other's blessings. We are constantly engaged in what someone has called "mutual education." One who has become involved in his own education again needs the company of others on that journey. When we say we've "outgrown" someone or someone has outgrown us, we mean that one of us in interested in learning and the other is not.

CHILDREN OF THE NEW PARADIGM

10

The Transformation of Values and Vocation

If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body.

is an opiate to many people, a balm to disappointments, frustrations, emptiness. If the individual transforms that inner distress, there is less need for drugs and distractions. Inner listening makes clearer to us what we really want, as distinct from what we have been talked into, and it might not have a price tag. We may also discover that "ownership" is in some sense an illusion, that holding on to things can keep us from freely enjoying them. Greater awareness may give us new appreciation for simple things. And quality becomes important—the much-talked-about "quality of life." If work becomes rewarding, not just obligatory, that also reorders values and priorities.

We will look at the evidence for a new paradigm, based on values, which transcends the old paradigm of economics, with its emphasis on growth, control, manipulation. The shift to the values paradigm is reflected in changing patterns of work, career choice, consumption...evolving lifestyles that take advantage of synergy, sharing, barter, cooperation, and creativity...the transformation of the workplace, in business, industry, professions, the arts...innovations in management and worker participation, including the decentralization of power... the rise of a new breed of entrepreneurs... the search for "appropriate technology" ... the call for an economics congruent with nature rather than the mechanistic views that have propelled us into our present crises.

CRISIS AND DENIAL

We have proved that you can't eat yourself slim. Trying to consume our way to prosperity, we have been exhausting our resources. High production costs, scarcities, inflation, and severe unemployment have become our regular diet.

Because the economy is such a political issue it is propagandized, rationalized, lied about. Because our beliefs about the economy affect it, as in the "confidence index," business and government try to buffer the reaction of investors and consumers to unnerving economic news.

And because divergent viewpoints are loudly argued, you can choose whom to believe:

Nuclear power is essential/deadly. Solar energy will be cheap/impractical Fossil fuel is plentiful/exhausted. We should consume/conserve.

Full employment is feasible/impossible.

Automation/environmentalism do/do not undermine jobs and growth.

Labor and management savage each other periodically, like crazy Siamese twins who don't know that their lifeblood is the same.

The economy is alive and integrated, more an organism than a machine. It has qualities as well as quantities. Like the weather, it cannot be repaired. It won't be still long enough and is predictable only in patches. Even its "laws" are only descriptions of the past. "The truth is," said David Sternlight, chief economist for the Atlantic Richfield Company, "there are no facts about the future."

It is fashionable to assume that any economic prediction is better than none, E. F. Schumacher said in 1961. "Make a

The unexamined assumption of the old paradigm—dominant since the days of John Locke—is that human beings are most deeply motivated by economic concerns. Yet, beyond a certain level of material sufficiency, other strong needs clearly take precedence: the desire to be healthy, to be loved, to feel competent, to participate fully in society, to have meaningful employment. And even if Locke were right about our economic motives, we would have to change: Our civilization cannot go on escalating its manufacture and consumption of non-renewable resources.

as we know them, pivot on material values. They are inadequate philosophies for a transformed society.

Just as health is vastly more than medicine, just as learning transcends education, so a system of values is the context for the workings of any economy. Whatever our priorities—self-aggrandizement, efficiency, status, health, security, recreation, human relationships, competition, cooperation, craftsmanship, material goods—they are reflected in the workings of the economy. A society that prizes external symbols will want showy automobiles, whatever the cost. A family that values education may make considerable sacrifices to pay tuition for a private school. One who values adventure may give up a financially secure job to sail around the world.

Most importantly, when people become autonomous, their values become internal. Their purchases and their choice of work begin to reflect their own authentic needs and desires rather than the values imposed by advertisers, family, peers, media.

The two paradigms might be summarized as follows

¹Max Planck once said that he had started out as a student of economics; finding it too difficult, he took up physics.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE OLD PARADIGM OF ECONOMICS

People to fit jobs. Rigidity. Conformity.

Fragmentation, compartmentalization in work and roles. Emphasis on specialized tasks. Sharply defined job descriptions.

Aggression, competition. "Business is business."

Autonomy encouraged. Self-actualization. Worker participation, democratization. Shared goals, consensus.

Identity transcends job description.

Recognition of uncertainty in economics.

Cooperation. Human values transcend "winning."

Blurring of work and play. Work rewarding in itself.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE OLD PARADIGM OF ECONOMICS

Struggle for stability, station, security.

Quantitative: quotas, status symbols, level of income, profits, "raises," Gross National Product, tangible assets.

Short-sighted: exploitation of limited resources.

Emphasis on short-term solutions.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE NEW PARADIGM OF VALUES

Transcends polarities. Shared goals, values.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE OLD PARADIGM OF ECONOMICS

Centralized operations.

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE NEW PARADIGM OF VALUES

Attempt to understand the whole, locate deep underlying causes of disharmony, disequilibrium. Preventive "medicine," anticipation of dislocations, scarcities.

THE "ETHEREALIZATION" OF AMERICA: NEW VALUES

There seems to be growing sympathy, if not a mandate, for reversing the materialist trend. Maybe the etherealization is happening. A 1977 Harris poll showed an astounding preponderance of persons—79 percent—favoring better use of basic essentials rather than reaching higher material standards of living. A similar percentage preferred spending more time on human interaction rather than improved technological communication and hoped to see the society appreciate human values over material values. The idea of developing bigger and more efficient ways of doing things was less attractive than "breaking up big things and getting back to more humanized living."

A majority said they preferred finding inner rewards from work rather than increasing productivity, and they wanted to see their children's education directed more toward such in-

Our prehistoric ancestors helped lay the groundwork for this anticipation, in a sense, when they stopped being hunters and gatherers and became farmers, cooperating with nature's major cycles. Perhaps that is where we got our "agribusiness" minds, plowing and planning, concerned for the coming harvest. Perhaps we may become hunters and gatherers of a sort again, living for the day's treasures as well as for the long growing season.

The etherealization was expressed by one of the Aquarian Conspirators, a teacher:

I have been influenced by knowing and sharing with persons who have no major needs (financially well-to-do) and with persons who voluntarily adopt poverty (religious vows). It is mainly in terms of these associations that I have been able to order my values: authentic vs. inauthentic, must-haves vs. nice-to-haves, permanent vs. immediate, happiness vs. pleasure.

I will practice living. I will develop my intellect, which may incidentally contribute to the elevation of the esthetic and cultural levels of society. I will try to develop the noble and creative elements within me. I will contribute very little to the grossness of the national product.

THE VALUE OF SYNERGY: NEW WEALTH

Older than money, ancient economic shortcuts like cooperatives, credit unions, and barter give leanness to the cumbersome distribution system, for they involve only that which people want and have to offer, in contrast to the everaccelerating production of items people have to be persuaded to buy or "invest in."

There are modern urban counterparts of quilting bees, barn-

Popular women's magazines have begun publishing articles on how to start networks and cooperatives. Low-income people formed the Oregon Urban-Rural (OUR) credit union, in the tradition of the drought-poor villagers in southern Germany who started the first credit union in the mid-nineteenth century. Around the country, labor pools and service collectives have coalesced. Free for All in Los Angeles was organized for the bartering of services. Commerical barter companies like Trade-Americard, Executive Trade Club, Charge-a-Trade, and Business Exchange swap and credit goods and services to their members through sophisticated bookkeeping. One barter company does a yearly business of around one hundred million dollars in reciprocal trade agreements, recycling surpluses and mistakes, advertising space, and hotel rooms. About seventy-five bartering groups in the United States are franchised under the International Trade Exchange.³ They use computers to facilitate the transactions among member businesses, tradespeople, and professionals. Trading, as the owners of one exchange remarked, helps beat inflation. Barter is likely to boom in a recession. New Age observed:

Immigrants to California established similar networks, according to sociologists. James Q. Wilson described a version of urban labor-swapping in California in the 1950s that foreshadowed today's extensive bartering: "The Southern California equivalent of the eastern uncle who could get it for you wholesale was the Los Angeles brother-in-law who would help you put on a new roof or paint the garage, or lend you (and show you how to use) his power saw. A vast, informally organized labor exchange permeated the region, with occasional trades of great complexity running through several intermediaries—the friend who would ask his brother, the plumber, to help you, if you would ask your uncle with the mixer to lay concrete in front of somebody's sister's home. Saturday saw people driving all over the county, carrying out these assignments."

The founders of Provender, a natural-food cooperative in the Northwest, wrote of the self-reliance and regional unity they sensed when they joined forces: "Fellow cooperators, we can celebrate the birth of a network...."

One example of an established large communal household is Ramagiri, a center whose members came together in 1971 after experimentation in smaller groups. There are now forty members (including ten married couples, four pairs of siblings) living on a 250-acre California farm that was once a small Catholic seminary. Ramagiri has its own sustaining businesses, but most of the residents work outside as teachers, health professionals (nurses, physical therapists, nutritionists), secretaries. Two young medical residents plan to open a practice together. A garden, office, and kitchen are communally operated. The commune has published several successful books by Eknath Easwaran, the Indian teacher around whom its members originally coalesced, and a best-seller, Laurel's Cookbook.

We conceive of this enterprise as an experiment in human values. It is an attempt to demonstrate that a rich and dignified life can be sustained in an economically limited community, [by] sharing labor and political responsibility, choosing to restrict accumulation and consumption of material wealth, and making efficient use of natural resources.... We do not presume to be presenting either a social panacea or an easily replicable paradigm for every existing social institution. But we do believe we are realizing one possible alternative, thus concretely challenging prevailing conceptions of social and economic organization.

From a newsletter:

One of our objectives is to demonstrate that it is possible for a group of ordinary human beings to come together and to create a "new-age" community. New-age communities are not going to be built by big governments or by big corporations, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea for that to happen anyhow. We think it is desirable for people to take charge of their own lives, to become self-reliant (as groups)....We want to show that life can be lived more simply, in harmony with nature, within the constraints of nature, cooperatively, creatively, humanly....We hope to see a network of New Age communities, sharing, working, helping each other.

Some of the larger communities have indeed established ties; they are not competitive, and however different the expression, their visions have much in common. A magazine published for cooperative communities praised the networking between the larger ones, such as Arcosanti (Arizona), Another Place (New England), Auroville (India), and Findhorn (Scotland): "An important element of this sense of world community is the reaching beyond our idiosyncrasies, getting at the essence of what we are trying to do. Our work must be translatable to be usable."

An ever-changing portion of the population is living a shared dream in the midst of the wreckage of the old dream. One observer said, "Communes have been no less successful than the mundane American Dream. We judge them more harshly because they attempted to be more." We also judge them too often by the values of the old paradigm: economic success and stability.

THE VALUE OF KNOWING WHAT YOU WANT

We all know the feeling of being offered food when we are

not hungry. Now, as consumers, we may find that our appetites are changing. Knowing what we want, we may spend less, we may spend more, or we may spend differently. In 1936 Richard Gregg, a political philosopher, coined the term voluntary simplicity to describe a lifestyle in which one avoids clutter and focuses one's energies on what really matters. "The degree of simplification," Gregg said, "is a matter for each individual to settle for himself." A person living a life of voluntary simplicity might choose to own a costly and sophisticated quadraphonic sound system, for example, and drive an old car.

Voluntary simplicity is an attitude, not a budget: thoughtful consumption, resistance to artificially created "needs," sensitivity to the limits of natural resources, a more human scale for living and working. According to a Stanford Research Institute (SRI) report, adherents of voluntary simplicity want to realize "higher human potential, both psychological and spiritual, in community with others."

The report, which provoked more reprint requests from the business community than any other publication in the history of the think tank, warned business interests that a different social order may be in the making, one aimed more toward material sufficiency than material abundance. Its values would favor enlightened self-interest rather than competition, cooperation rather than rugged individualism, and both rational and intuitive judgments. An ever-growing segment of the population cares little for status or fashion, is willing to recycle durable goods and pay for products that are healthful, non-polluting, authentic, esthetically pleasing. Many of these products and the services likely to become popular are as easily furnished by entrepreneurs and local businesses as by multinational giants. The report was not an economic forecast to cheer General Motors and General Electric.⁴

^<sup>4A three-year, one-million-dollar study of changing consumer values, released by SRI in 1979, predicted a continuing shift away from conventional materialistic values by individuals across the economic spectrum.

One advocate called it "the only way to be rich." Usually it is embedded in larger changes: a deepened appreciation of ordinary pleasures, a keen sense of living in the moment, the company of affectionate, like-minded friends. One of the profound rewards of the transformative process is the discovery of how much we really have. Enhanced attention reveals all the valuables we have misplaced, forgotten, or—blinded by habit—failed to notice: books, records, people, pets, vistas, lost arts, neglected hobbies, abandoned dreams. "I'm not at all contemptuous of the comforts," economist E. F. Schumacher once said, "but they have their place, and it is not first." The less you need, he remarked, the freer you become. In Thoreau's terms, "You must live within yourself and depend on yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start."

The originators of an environmental fair, the New Earth Expo, announced their eagerness to reach all those who assume there is no hope: "There are many things people can do to regain control over their own lives." Increasing self-sufficiency is one.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF BUSINESS

Robert Fegley of General Electric described "a new breed of top executives" taking charge of American corporations, broader and deeper than most of their predecessors, more current, literate, articulate, open. Between 1976 and 1978, he said, the amount of time spent on public issues by chief executives of the top thousand corporations doubled—from 20 to 40 percent. "There is a deep interest in public attitudes and a desire to do something—not only to communicate 'our side of the story' but also to re-examine company policy and change it where necessary...."

The president of Trans World Airlines, C. E. Meyer, Jr., expressed the sense of transformed values in an editorial in the airline's magazine in July 1978. The most important change of the past decade was not technological advancement, he said, but "the virtual revolution that has occurred in our collective social awareness." After the turbulence, violence, and confrontations of the late sixties came a period of looking inward, "as if our whole people, shocked and deeply sobered by those years of uproar... began working quietly to sort out the merits of all those causes." We have tried to heal divisions, both with in-

sight and with effort, resulting in a qualitative change in our national attitude—our concern for the environment, job security for the work force, dignity for the handicapped, enhanced purpose for the aged, and higher regard for the consumer. These causes are no longer considered controversial but "society's unfinished business," he said.

Big business, in its need to understand the potential impact of the new paradigm, is becoming aware of the networks of the Aquarian Conspiracy as resources. This was the subject of a "preliminary document on emerging trends" published under the Diebold Corporate Issues Program in 1978: The Emergence of Personal Communications Networks Among People Sharing the New Values and Their Possible Use in Sensitizing Operating Management. Its authors urged that management try to "plug into" such networks, where new concepts were developed and experimented with before moving into the marketplace.

sanctioned by King James II in 1663.

Before we can discuss these networks, we have a cultural problem to overcome....Important organizational forms may exist which have none of the characteristics we usually associate with organizations. But their impact in originating the ideas that are shaping our times is undisputed, and increasingly they are so pervasive that we are surrounded by them. It seems to me there is a common thread....In one sense, it's a more idealistic, more humane outlook—a feeling that such goals possess, by being so clearly morally right, an unarguable kind of authority.

As an example, the report describes one such underground network, whose main orientation is radical science and transpersonal psychology and whose photo-copying is furnished by the vice-chairman of American Telephone and Telegraph.

history, the report said.

THE VALUE OF VOCATION

The contemporary individual's struggle to find that higher purpose—to find meaning in work—was discussed at length in The Gamesman, Michael Maccoby's composite portrait of the new corporate rebel. The gamesman is more innovative and playful than his predecessor, the "organization man," but still judges wins and losses by left-brain, manipulative rules. In a section titled "The Head and the Heart," Maccoby explored the uneasiness and frustration felt by many gamesmen, who acknowledged that they found little opportunity in their work to develop compassion, openness, humanness:

People think of the qualities of the heart as opposite to those of the head. They think heart means softness, feeling, and generosity, while head means toughness, realistic thought. But this contrast itself is symptomatic of a schizoid culture in which the heart is detached from the rest of the body. In pre-Cartesian traditional thought, the heart was considered the true seat of intelligence.... The head can be smart but not wise.

In the new paradigm, work is a vehicle for transformation. Through work we are fully engaged in life. Work can be what Milton Mayerhoff called "the appropriate other," that which requires us, which makes us care. In responding to vocation—the call, the summons of that which needs doing—we create and discover meaning, unique to each of us and always changing.

It's easy for the work to become less important. It's hard to keep making widgets after you've seen the sun. If your

job can expand with your vision, you're lucky

When you experience life as broader, richer, more complex, the events manifest differently.

Conventional goals of success are like a blueprint drawn up by an architect who does not yet know the terrain, who has outlined a structure too rigid for nature. Vocation has more the quality of an inner summons to move in a particular direction, feeling one's way, or of a vision, a glimpse of the future that is more preview than plan. A vision can be realized in many ways...a goal, in only one. The transformative process enables us to be the artists and scientists of our lives, creating and discovering as we go. There is the awe and excitement of cooperating with the life process, of becoming more sensitive to its clues, nuances, promises.

and pleasure, between convictions and career, between personal ethics and "business is business." Fragmentation becomes increasingly intolerable to the person moving toward greater awareness. As the anesthesia wears off, one feels the tearing of flesh and spirit. And it becomes hard to ignore the context of one's work. Products and services don't exist in a vacuum, after all. They reverberate through a whole system.

The growing network of support—the Aquarian Conspiracy itself—encourages the individual in the lonely enterprise of changing jobs, starting a business, changing the practice of a profession, revitalizing institutions. It is a do-it-yourself revolution, but not do-it-by-yourself. For example, friends in Washington, D.C., started a "go-for-it-group" to encourage each other in their vocational goals. They counseled, inspired, and prodded each other, ruthlessly pointing out the rationalizations and delaying tactics each was using to postpone the risk of a new step. Within a year, several had begun to realize their dreams. A librarian had started her own acting company, an attorney had opened a center for the study of psychology in law, another member turned her farm into an artists' colony, and a bureaucrat resigned his job to go into business with friends.

New attitudes change the very experience of daily work. Work becomes a ritual, a game, a discipline, an adventure, learning, even an art, as our perceptions change. The stress of tedium and the stress of the unknown, the two causes of work-related suffering, are transformed. A more fluent quality of attention allows us to move through tasks that once seemed repetitious or distasteful. We make fewer judgments about what we're doing ("I hate this," "I like this"). Boredom diminishes, just as pain abates when we drop our futile resistance to it.

The stress of the unknown is transformed by an attitude of

Carla Needleman, writing of her experience as a craftsman, described this paradox, the goal that betrays the process:

The attitude of the achiever is so fixed in us that we can scarcely envision a different way of our lives.... The fact of our lives is uncertainty, and we crave certainty. The fact of our lives is change, movement: We long to "arrive."

The need for success is a constrictive force that bars me from immediate participation in the moment as it appears, that prevents the all-important conversation with the material of the craft, prevents openness of relationship, prevents a kind of quickness of response much swifter than the cautions of the mind. The need for success distorts pleasure.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF WORK

There are lawyers trying to find less adversarial ways to practice their profession, who see a new role for the law as mediator. A 1978 Columbia University seminar on humanistic law for deans of law schools looked at the implications of the new paradigm, especially its emphasis on cooperation and collaboration.

In many ways the military, with its guaranteed financial base, has more opportunity to fund innovation than any other institution. Jim Channon, a lieutenant colonel in the army's public affairs office in Los Angeles, created a hypothetical "First Earth Battalion," a futurist vision of what a transformed military might be like. The soldiers of the First Earth Battalion seek nondestructive methods of conflict resolution. Their first loyalty is to the planet. After Channon introduced the notion at an army think tank in Virginia he was inundated with requests for more information. He created a packet of material and a T-shirt decal to send out in response to calls from army personnel all over the country. The army's Task Force Delta authorized him to prepare a multimedia presentation on the First Earth Battalion, an idea that seems to generate the response William James called "the moral equivalent of war," a sense of purpose as urgent as the confrontation of danger but without violence.

structure of the organization is circular rather than the conven-

tional pyramid of a hierarchy.

NEW WORKING RELATIONSHIPS

We are entering a period of real change in work relationships. A growing number of managers prefer to be catalysts rather than just power wielders, and an emergent breed of autonomous employees gives service but not subservience. This shift is causing not a little discomfort to those who are not changing. Some employees would rather be passive than take on new responsibilities or create their own work plans, which can frustrate the manager who is no longer a traditional boss. One executive commented that his own changes caused him to want not only a new set of friends but a new set of co-workers. On the other hand, autonomy in employees has proven stressful to many traditional managers.

349

A McGill University report described successful managers as unusually open to the complex and mysterious, interested in "soft" and speculative information (facial expression, tone of voice, gestures, hunches, intuitions). Another study portrayed the successful manager as "scanning the environment, perceiving, brainstorming, intuiting, daydreaming." Executives seemed to call more often than most people on right-hemisphere processes, judging from an EEG study, whereas corporate analysts relied on left-brain strategies, such as qualification.

The New American Working Machine is founded on the philosophy of working smarter, not harder—from the bottom up. (The Japanese have taught us that those who do the work seem to know more about how to do it than anyone else.) There will be a fresh emphasis on innovation and streamlining, for there is no security in our current levels of national productivity.

New American Managers will be recognizable not because they have all the right answers but because they know how to ask the right questions....

The New American Working Machine looks different than many of the worlds you and I work in. While it promises a better world, it challenges us to do a whole lot of growing and changing to get there.... In a very real way, the New American Working Machine is banking on the sleeping genius in every one of us.

"Sleeping genius," human potential—whatever term they use, new management theorists are interested in the latent capacities that can unfold, given motivation. For instance, workers in the Lucas Aerospace plants in England, threatened in 1974 with the consolidation of their seventeen factories, organized to brainstorm ideas for socially useful products their employer could manufacture. They inventoried their skills, everything from engineering to manual labor, and assessed the company's equipment. Then they issued a questionnaire to the entire work force asking, "What do you think you should be making?" One hundred and fifty viable ideas were translated into designs, specifications, and analyses. Although Lucas's management had been slow to take on the new products, by 1979 the company had manufactured some prototypes and was working with the employee group.

convert military into nonmilitary production.

There is a definite trend toward decentralizing power in companies—dismantling the pyramid, as one consultant put it. According to Frank Ruck, who became vice-president of Chicago Title and Trust, "Making organizational changes in work can make people happier, as well as enhancing productivity—a double payoff."

recent years. Semi-autonomous work teams were formed. Higher pay was awarded on the basis of proficiency tests, not job description. Signed time sheets replaced time clocks, those infernal symbols of dehumanization and lack of trust. Assembly lines were broken into smaller components. Some companies adapted consensual management ideas from Japan, Norway, and Sweden. By 1976 more than a thousand United States companies and government agencies were experimenting with "flex-time," a procedure that allows employees to choose their work schedule within certain limits, built around a core period: 6:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M., for instance, or 11:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M.

The American Council of Life Insurance trend-analysis program reported in 1979 on "The Changing Nature of Work": a new breed of employee seeking work consistent with personal values; greater flexibility of hours and type of work; more cooperation between management and employees; non-hierarchical organizational structures; a work environment increasingly compatible with physical and mental health.

These external changes have been fruitful, but they are not enough. Now those concerned about productivity and people have taken the inner route, turning to methods designed for self-actualization. Personal development has become the complement to job enrichment and a humane workplace. And, as one management trainer observed, "We turned to these techniques for pragmatic reasons, and a lot of us got hooked."

Much as the new paradigm of education sees in all of us the creative potential we once attributed only to geniuses, management trainers are beginning to look at all employees as potential self-managers who can begin to think like entrepreneurs.

THE NEW ENTREPRENEUR

The paradox is that the new world promises to be both personally and professionally more rewarding if we would take the leap of faith to embrace it.

Briarpatch, a Bay Area network of three hundred or so

Crossing this river is difficult: it means leaving behind some of your old ideas about work and jobs... Most of us (including myself) try to tiptoe around the pain, but it's important to talk about some of the agonies one is apt to confront. We're not talking about simply trading one job for another, or getting from one company into a more suitable one. When you start abandoning your old beliefs or values, some very primal circuits get ignited.... You may be stuck on the threshold for two or three years. Before moving on, you have to clear away all your cherished beliefs.

The new reality is that products are not going to be a

The Renascence Project in Kansas City, a network of entrepreneurs, demonstrated that alternatives can be both cost effective and profitable. Among its activities: renovation of properties at a key Kansas City location into an eight-million dollar business complex, the establishment of learning networks, an educational program for the "whole person," a self-supporting alternative high school, restoration of a historic dance hall, restoration of a large house by a partnership of residents, and development of a master plan for Kansas City calling for blockby-block renovation of neighborhoods along an eleven-mile pedestrian mall.

The new entrepreneurs refuse to separate good-for-business from good-for-people. Mo Siegel, co-founder of the Celestial Tea Company in Boulder, Colorado, has articulated this view for his two hundred and thirty employees: "All department leaders will be held accountable for their people development as well as business results." Achievement, Siegel said, is just a by-product of living an ideal. "In this age of transition, we're learning to retain the good aspects of the culture while discarding negative ones."

THE RE-EVALUATION OF TECHNOLOGY

In the emergent paradigm technology is not seen as negative, just abused and in need of rehumanization. Our technology promised us power but it became our master in too many areas of our lives. Little wonder many of the "new" political and economic perspectives look to the past in their preference for decentralization, their sensitivity to natural harmonies and concern for stewardship of the land, their desire for "creative simplicity," spiritual and cultural enrichment, the celebration of nonmaterial values.

A society's consciousness should be the context for its work and consumption; its technology, only the content: tools that create products and services the people value. E. F. Schumacher's original title for the book that became famous as Small Is Beautiful was Economics As If People Mattered. He particularly deplored the effects of big, unconscious applications of technology: centralization, urbanization, the depletion of resources, the dehumanization of workers. Particularly in developing countries, turbines, dams, and earth-moving machines can disrupt social patterns to the detriment of both environment and people. Schumacher's Radical-Center response to applied science gone berserk was what he called "appropriate technology."

urban factories.

resulted in the biggest reprint request in that publication's

history.

Schumacher's economic philosophy reflected intense spiritual values he discussed more fully in the posthumously published Guide for the Perplexed. Spiritual values, indeed, are at the base of much of the ecological concern in our time, a quickening sense of the whole earth, respect for the matrix of our evolution, the nature in which we are embedded. Fittingly, Lao-tse is quoted in the brochure of California's Office of Appropriate Technology: "These are my treasures. Guard

Environmental concerns have a growing impact on lifestyle and consumption. A study conducted in the state of Washington in 1976, published in 1978, polled householders drawn randomly from the telephone directories of every community. The researchers found evidence of surprising adherence to "a new environmental paradigm."

Behavior is not necessarily consistent with beliefs, the researchers noted, and conceded that many of the respondents might resist personal sacrifice.

The shift to an environmental view involves vastly more than a concern for redwoods. Nowhere is the connectedness of all life more evident than in our awakened ecological conscience. Care of the planet joins economic, legal, political, spiritual, aesthetic, and medical issues. It extends to our purchases, choice of family size, recreation. The youngest school child is aware of the controversies — military defoliation, nuclear power, carcinogens, supersonic transports, dams flooding Indian burial grounds, population growth, propellant gases that may destroy the ozone layer. The young fear the slow death of Earth as a previous generation feared the atomic bomb.

ຝຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓຓ

Well-known architects surveyed in 1979 described a new paradigm of urban design: more human, with a richer mix of housing and community facilities, places to walk, heightened concern about public transportation, the creation of festive malls and squares, the planting of more trees, a sense of "the commons." An emergent technology will draw increasingly on wind, sun, tidal forces, natural lighting, and natural ventilation.

We may be on our way to regaining the intimate connection and awareness of our place in nature. This neo-medieval trend is evident in another phenomenon: environments of celebration—fairs, expositions, and festivals. In medieval Europe fairs were set up at crossroads, in neutral territory, so that warring people could drop their hostilities long enough to barter, juggle, mime, eat, drink, make music. They were one in celebration—playful, curious, unself-conscious. We are recreating spontaneous community in our tens of thousands of art and craft exhibits, music festivals, environmental and newage "expos," and period celebrations like Renaissance fairs, medieval games, Dickensian bazaars.

ourselves the opportunity to explore our imaginations—if we let go of prefabricated forms of creativity?"

IMAGINATION AS A SOURCE OF WEALTH

The true source of wealth, Eugen Loebl concluded while brooding about economics during his fifteen years as a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia, is not its productivity, its Gross National Product, its tangible assets. Creative intelligence is the wealth of a modern society. "If we see gain as a function of man's ability to think, and if we recognize the importance of the intellectual level on which the economy is based, then our prime interest will be oriented toward the development of this level. . . . We can change our reality toward the goals we desire."

On his historic visit to the United States, Tocqueville sailed down the Ohio River. On one hand was Ohio, a free state; on the other Kentucky, a slave state. On the Ohio side of the river he observed industrious activity, rich harvests, handsome homes. The Ohioan could enter any path fortune might open to him. He might become a sailor, a pioneer, an artisan, a laborer. On the Kentucky side Tocqueville saw only indolence. Not only were the slaves half-hearted in their labors, but the masters themselves were enslaved. They could not work their own land because that would demean their status. A few crossed over to Ohio to work, but most turned for excitement to "the passionate love of field sports and military exercises . . . violent bodily exertion, the use of arms. . . . "

11

Spiritual Adventure: Connection to the Source

Behind the night...somewhere afar Some white tremendous daybreak.

-RUPERT BROOKE

Spiritual or mystical experience, the subject of this chapter, is the mirror image of science—a direct perception of nature's unity, the inside of the mysteries that science tries valiantly to know from the outside. This way of understanding predates science by thousands of years. Long before humankind had tools like quantum logic to describe events that ordinary reason could not grasp, individuals moved into the realm of paradox through a shift in consciousness. And there they know that what cannot be is. Millions living today have experienced transcendent aspects of reality and have incorporated this knowledge into their lives.

it into an inadequate beliet system.

By radically altering one's values and perceptions of the world, mystical experience tends to create its own culture, one with wide membership and invisible borders. This parallel culture seems to threaten the status quo; as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, Western society is outraged if an individual gives his soul as much daily attention as his grooming. The statements and behavior of those in the emergent culture are judged by a belief system as irrelevant to their experience as the warnings of the Flat Earthers were to Columbus. Critics call them narcissistic, not knowing the thoughtful nature of their inward search; self-annihilating, not knowing the spaciousness of the Self they join; elitist, not knowing how desperately they want to share what they have seen; irrational, not realizing how much further their new worldview goes toward resolving problems, how much more coherent it is with everyday experience.

THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning. At first this may be only a restless desire for something more. The prescient Tocqueville remarked on the coexistence in America of a strong religious spirit and material ambition. But perhaps, he said, this was a precarious balance. "If ever the faculties of the great majority of mankind were exclusively bent upon the pursuit of material objects, it might be anticipated that an amazing reaction would take place in the souls of some. I should be surprised if mysticism did not soon make some advance among a people solely engaged in promoting its own worldly welfare."

This is why there is a search for personal religion, for direct

connection with the spiritual....Ultimately, every human being, once he reaches the stage of self-consciousness, wants to feel that there is some inner and deeper meaning to his existence than just being and consuming, and once he begins to feel that way, he wants his social organization to correspond to that feeling....This is happening on a world scale.

In a public poll conducted by Yankelovich, Skelly, and White, 80 percent of the respondents expressed a strong interest in "an inner search for meaning." In 1975 the National Opinion Research Corporation reported that more than 40 percent of the adults polled believed they had had a genuine mystical experience. These experiences were characterized by joy, peace, a need to contribute to others, the conviction that love is at the center of everything, emotional intensity, knowledge impossible to articulate, unity with others, and the imminence of a new world. A 1974 Roper poll found that 53 percent believed in the reality of psi, with stronger belief correlated with higher income and education. A 1976 Gallup poll reported that 12 percent were involved in a mystical discipline.

hard to pin down statistically."

In early 1979 Ram Dass observed that his audiences had

changed considerably. "For the most part it's the middle class these days, and the ages are broadening incredibly. Where I was working with a ten-year age span out of the alternative cultures five or six years ago, I'm now seeing a fifteen-year span out of the mainstream of society—what used to be called straight. Now there are hundreds of thousands for whom spiritual awakening is a reality. I can go to Omaha, Idaho City, Seattle, Buffalo, or Tuscaloosa, and everywhere thousands of people are ready to hear. They are growing spiritually in their daily lives, without putting on far-out clothes and wearing beads around their necks. Their spiritual awakening grows from within."

A Washington lobbyist for an organization promoting international peacemaking called the mutual recognition of these seekers "the small mysticism":

ressible hunger for meaning. Jung compared the spiritual

I'm a journalist whose ability to take notes and ask the right questions evaporated years ago on a sunny beach in Spain, when I suddenly became aware that the whole world was alive...I saw the earth breathe, I felt its rhythms, and I discovered a missing part of myself. Finding corroboration neither in the New York Times or the New Republic but only in literature I'd hitherto shunned as religious (then an epithet) or plainly bizarre, I began the long, slow drift away from the radical mainstream towards shores for which I've yet to find a name.

The unnamed shores, the power, the spirit—these are the subject of this chapter. We will look at the spiritual experience in contemporary America, an experience that has little to do

FROM RELIGION TO SPIRITUALITY

The emergent spiritual tradition is not new in American history, according to Robert Ellwood, a scholar of Oriental religions at the University of Southern California. Rather, it is the revitalization of a stream "going back as far as Transcendentalism." Adherents prefer direct experience—what Ellwood calls "excursion" to an inner world whose vision then infuses all of life—to any form of organized religion.

With its periodic Great Awakenings, the United States has always attracted mystics and evangelists. Long before the spiritual revolution we see now, Eastern and Western mystics influenced mainstream American thought. Their ideas were daily bread to the American Transcendentalists and the "beat generation." Yet, as Ellwood pointed out, all these exports are filtered through the American psyche and experience. Zen, Swedenborgianism, Theosophy, or Vedanta in the United States are not what they were in Japan, eighteenth-century England, or nineteenth-century India. American adherents may sometimes use Eastern symbols, but their essential spiritual life is better understood through the American lineage of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, the Shakers, and others. "Down-home Zen" is the term Rick Fields used to describe the Zen center in the heart of the Wilshire business district of Los Angeles.

In January 1978, McCall's magazine published a survey of sixty thousand readers showing an overwhelming skepticism about organized religion, even among churchgoers. A poll commissioned by Protestant and Catholic groups and released in June 1978 revealed what Gallup summarized as "a severe indictment of organized religion." Eighty-six percent of the "unchurched" and 76 percent of the churchgoers agreed that individuals should arrive at their beliefs outside organized religion. About 60 percent of the churchgoers agreed with the statement, "Most churches have lost the real spiritual part of religion."

A Catholic theologian, Anthony Padovano, remarked at a

1976 conference on meditation:

certain in an anxious, uncertain time." Laypeople are urging reforms, evangelizing and participating in pentecostal and charismatic movements; by 1979 one-half million Catholics were estimated to have become charismatics, speaking in tongues and engaging in healing practices. The number of nuns and priests declined dramatically during the seventies, theologians were dissenting from papal authority, parochial school populations were declining. Similar rebellions have been taking place in nearly every organized religious body in the country.

A convocation of spiritual leaders read a statement to the United Nations in October 1975:

Cultural awakenings, as historian William McLoughlin noted, are preceded by a spiritual crisis, a change in the way human beings see themselves in relationship to each other and to the divine. During "great awakenings" there is a shift from a religion mediated by authorities to one of direct spiritual experience. Not unexpectedly, some religious groups see the emergent spiritual tradition as a fearful threat to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The fundamental Berkeley Christian Coalition, sponsor of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, devoted its August 1978 journal to this threat:

The coalition blames the rise of New Age spirituality on the timidity of the Christian church in America:

Eastern metaphysics and the New Consciousness, on the other hand, derive their popularity in part from the fact that they directly challenge the oppressive assumptions of technocratic Western mentality. They have not been afraid to charge our rationalist, materialist, mercantile culture with depleting the quality of human life.... Leaders of these movements have stepped into the vacancy created by the church's prophetic silence. They call plastic plastic and poison poison in a society whose economy is built on convincing people that both are good for them. Moreover the followers...are hard at work developing workable alternatives to the death-dealing culture they condemn.

The SCP expressed concern about the increasing legitimacy of the spiritual movement in the eyes of the medical establishment and its ability to draw on and consolidate support from many other groups: humanistic psychology, secular humanism, Eastern mysticism, authors like George Leonard, noted medical personalities like Jonas Salk. At every hand the Berkeley Christian Coalition detected the influence of non-Christian doctrine: the yin-yang symbol drawn by Salk at a San Diego conference, Ruth Carter Stapleton's friendly attitude toward meditation, references by physician-speakers to the Kabbalah and chakras.

more or less as heretics, whether they were the medieval mystics within Christianity, the Sufis within the borders of Islam, or the Kabbalists within Judaism.

Now the heretics are gaining ground, doctrine is losing its authority, and knowing is superseding belief.

Unitary thought is holistic. Because it goes beyond the further reaches of our rational tools, it can only be conveyed through paradoxes, meditation, experience. "Mystic traditions such as Taoism may offer the most thoroughly developed bodies of Unitary Operational Thought," Koplowitz said.

Transpersonal psychology, which draws from the world's spiritual disciplines, does not aim to reduce suffering to "normal" dimensions but to transcend suffering. "Getting in touch

naıre:

through midnight to get to the dawn.

As a way of looking at consciousness, holographic theory is closer to mystical and Eastern thought than to our ordinary perception, he said. "It will take a while for people to become comfortable with the idea that there is an order of reality other than the world of appearances." But the discoveries of science have begun to make sense of mystical experiences people have been describing for millennia. They suggest that we can tap into that order of reality behind the world of appearances. Perhaps mystics have hit upon a mechanism that gives them entry to the implicate, or enfolded, order: "My best hunch is

that access to those other domains is through attention...that the brain can somehow abrogate its ordinary constraints and gain access to the implicate order."

Physicist Fritjof Capra recounts such an experience in which he no longer merely believed in a dynamic universe, based on his intellectual understanding, but knew it to be so. He recalls that he was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves, feeling the rhythm of his breathing, when he suddenly experienced the whole environment as a cosmic dance—not just as a concept of physics but as an immediate, living experience:

I "saw" cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I "saw" the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I "heard" its sound, and at that moment I knew this was the Dance of Shiva....

Spiritual disciplines are designed to attune the brain to that larger domain. Ordinarily the brain is unfocused and dyssynchronous. It is also busy filtering out a vast amount of information not needed for survival; otherwise we would be bombarded by awareness of electrical fields, slight temperature changes, cosmic radiation, internal physiological processes. Yet we can have access to a wider sensory realm and the mystical dimension by altering the brain's biochemistry. Meditation, breathing exercises, and fasting are among the common technologies for shifting brain function.²

For many people in many cultures, psychedelic drugs have offered a beginning trail if seldom a fully transformative path. Aldous Huxley, who had no illusion about drugs as permanent routes to enlightenment, pointed out that even temporary self-

transcendence would shake the entire society to its rational roots. "Although these new mind-changers may start by being something of an embarrassment, they will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities...."

Huxley believed that the long-predicted religious revival in the United States would start with drugs, not evangelists. "From being an activity concerned mainly with symbols religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with

He said that he himself had been electrified by understanding fully, under the influence of mescaline, the radical meaning of the phrase God is love. One of the Aquarian Conspirators said, "After many years in intellectual, left-brain pursuit of reality," I learned from LSD about alternative realities—and suddenly all bibles made sense." Others have said that they seemed to experience the nature of matter, the unity of all things, life as a splendid game we are playing, a story we are telling. One reported experiencing "dynamic present time—that the world is flow and uncertainty, not static as in the concepts of our culture."

Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who has guided over three thousand LSD sessions and has had access to eighteen hundred records of sessions conducted by his colleagues, sees psychedelics as catalysts or amplifiers of mental processes. There is no element of the LSD experience that does not have a non-drug counterpart. Psychedelics seem to facilitate access to the holographic domain described by Pribram and David Bohm, Grof said.³ The individual may experience himself as a field of consciousness rather than as an isolated entity. Past, present, and future are juxtaposed. Space itself seems multidimensional, limitless. Matter is no longer perceived as tangible but disintegrates into patterns of energy. Subjects report direct experience of microcosm and macrocosm, vibrating molecules and spinning galaxies, archetypes and deities, the reliving of early experiences, even what seems to be their own birth or uterine existence. "In the experiences of consciousness of the Universal Mind and the Void, LSD subjects... find the very categories of time, space, matter, and physical laws of any

THE SPIRITUAL ADVENTURE

In his account of a Sufi apprenticeship, Reshad Feild said:

I suddenly understood that it is most certainly necessary to seek, to ask the question; rather than pushing away the answer by dashing after it, one must ask and listen at the same time....At that moment I knew that I was being heard, that I was dissolving and becoming food for the great transformation process that was taking place in the universe....At the same time that I was dying I was being born....

Hamid said, "The Soul is a knowing substance."

In the West religious issues are customarily supposed to be resolved by faith, but a teacher in the traditions of direct knowing encourages questions, even doubts. This spirituality asks the seeker to drop beliefs, not add to them.

behavior, unsettling experiences, fanaticism, the passive sur-

render to an unworthy teacher, pendulum change.

Asked to name ideas they had given up as a result of the transformative process, several of those who responded to the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire said "conventional Christianity," "religious dogma"—and about an equal number said "atheism" or "agnosticism."

The Radical Center of spiritual experience seems to be knowing without doctrine.

One contemporary seeker described his own experience:

Disciples are supposed to find the teacher, not vice versa.

FLOW AND WHOLENESS

Two key principles seem to emerge in all mystical experience. We might call them "flow" and "wholeness." The ancient Tibetan teacher Tilopa referred to them as "the principle of the nonabiding" and "the principle of nondistinction," and he warned against harming them. Our culture has indeed harmed these principles. We try to freeze the nonabiding, we try to imprison that which exists only in movement, freedom, relationship. And we betray wholeness, nondistinction, by breaking apart everything in sight so that we miss the underlying connection of everything in the universe.

In mystical experience there is the sense that "this is the way things are." Not how we wish them to be, not how we analyze them to be, not as we have been taught, but the nature of things—the Way.

Flow and wholeness are seen as true principles, not just in relation to work, health, or psychological growth but throughout the fabric of life. The developer of a kind of psychological aikido for dealing with conflict remarked on the way the technique of flowing with an opponent causes a gradual change in the practitioner. "It may be subtle at first, but even the most mean-spirited of people begin to relinquish their grasp on their aggression, lose their anger, and reconnect with the living force."

These mystical experiences reflect, more than just the flowing wholeness inherent in living systems (as in the theory of dissipative structures), the flow of our world from another dimension and the tendency of the universe to create ever more complex wholes. On an everyday level this knowledge shifts our time frame from temporal to eternal; we accept impermanence and cease struggling to keep the same all that must change. We experience life's blows and blessings with greater equanimity.

that most ancient of mystical writings, the Rig Veda

"The world is a spinning die," according to an old Hasidic passage, "... and all things turn and spin and change, for at the root all is one, and salvation inheres in the change and return of things."

The second principle of wholeness — non-distinction — represents the connectedness, the context, of everything. Just as science demonstrates a web of relationship underlying everything in the universe, a glittering network of events, so the mystical experience of wholeness encompasses all separation. "In free space there is neither right nor left," says a Hasidic master. "All souls are one. Each is a spark from the original soul, and this soul is inherent in all souls." Buddhism maintains that all human beings are Buddhas, but not all have awakened to their true nature. Yoga literally means "union." Full enlightenment is a vow to save "all sentient beings."

This wholeness encompasses self, others, ideas.

Love is felt as a dynamic state of consciousness rather than as an emotion. Just as fear is constricted and chaotic, love is wide and coherent—a creative flow, harmony, acceptance of human frailty imbedded in deep self-knowledge. It is defenseless power, communication, vanished boundaries, closure.

You are joined to a great Self: Tat tvam assi, "Thou art That." And because that Self is inclusive, you are joined to all others.

In the mystical vision of William Blake:

Awake! awake o sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!

I am in you and you in me, mutual in love...

Lo! we are One.

Or, as a contemporary mystic expressed it on a personalized license plate, IMU URI.

This wholeness unites opposites. This Radical Center, this healing of the separation of human beings from each other and from nature is described in all mystical traditions. Nicholas da Cusa called it the coincidentia oppositorium, the union of opposites. In the Hasidic writings it is "the union of qualities, twos which oppose each other like two colors...but seen with the true inner eye form one simple unity." In Buddhism it is madhya, the transcendent middle way. The Kogi Indians of Colombia speak of the Way of the Souls leading at once upward and downward, the joining of polarities, the black sun.

A young therapist said:

An image occurs to me: the ocean shore. An outcropping of rock extending into the sea, strong and narrow. Which, when I restrict my field of vision sufficiently, appears to split the water into two distinct and separate bodies. The action of the waves lapping up on either side makes it seem as though these two are ever straining toward one another, striving with each surge to overcome this rock which prevents their joining...when, by simply stepping back and seeing more, by taking an all-encompassing perspective, expanding consciousness, I see that the separation is only an illusion—that both waves are and always were part of the one ocean, separated only by choice of my perception and my notion of striving to be one....

I see that I am already whole, that there is nothing to overcome. In those moments of emptiness, of letting be, of complete contact with another, I know that I am all I can be

In this wholeness, oddly enough, virtues we might once have sought in vain through moral concepts now come spon-

taneously. It is easier to give, to be compassionate.

GOD WITHIN: THE OLDEST HERESY

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely "understandable" world.... We belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong....

I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God.

In J. D. Salinger's short story, "Teddy," a spiritually precocious youngster recalls his experience of immanent God while watching his little sister drink her milk. "... All of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God...."

Once you have achieved the essence of religious experience, asked Meister Eckhart, what do you need with the form? "No one can know God who has not first known himself," he told his medieval followers. "Go to the depths of the soul, the secret place... to the roots, to the heights; for all that God can do is focused there."

British theologian John Robinson writes of a "shot-silk universe, spirit and matter, inside and outside, divine and human, shimmering like aspects of one reality which cannot be separated or divided." To Alfred North Whitehead, whose influence has risen like a flood tide in recent years, God is "the mirror image to structure in the [material] world. The world is incomplete; in its very nature it requires an entity at the base of all things, to complete it. This entity is God, primordial nature."

Buckminster Fuller tried to capture the sense of God as process:

We need not postulate a purpose for this Ultimate Cause nor wonder who or what caused whatever Big Bang launched the visible universe. There is only the experience. To Kazantzakis, God was the sum total of consciousness in the universe, expanding through human evolution. In the mystical experience there is the felt presence of an all-encompassing love, compassion, power. Individuals revived after clinical death sometimes describe passage down a dark tunnel to an unearthly light that seems to emit love and understanding. It is as if the light itself is a manifestation of universal mind

sciousness. Despite their disaffiliation with formal religion, 53 percent expressed strong belief in such survival and another 23 percent said they were "moderately sure," a total of 75 percent. Only 5 percent were skeptical and 3 percent disbelieving.

There was no weight to his body, no hardness to the stick. He felt more akin to the spirits, "on the borderline of life and a greater realm beyond, as though caught in the field of gravitation between two planets...." He felt as if he were acted upon by forces too weak to be measured by normal means, "yet representing power incomparably stronger than I've ever known."

The presences seemed neither intruders nor strangers, more like a gathering of family and friends long separated, as though he had known them in some past incarnation.

"Death no longer seems the final end it used to be, but rather the entrance to a new and free existence," he wrote. The values of his twenty-five years — even the importance of the long-dreamed-of flight—altered sharply.

THE VISION: LIGHT AND THE COMING OF LIGHT

Contemporary mystical experiences from many individuals and many parts of the world have centered in recent years on a collective and intensifying vision, the sense of an impending transition in the human story: an evolution of consciousness as significant as any step in the long chain of our biological evolution. The consensual vision, whatever its variations, sees this transformation of consciousness as the moment anticipated by older prophecies in all the traditions of direct knowing—the death of one world and the birth of a new, an apocalypse, the "end of days" period in the Kabbalah, the awakening of increasing numbers of human beings to their godlike potential. "The seed of God is in us," Meister Eckhart said. "Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God seed into God."

World, children of light, the "white-light experience."

more there were.

see a blinding light.

the light.'

12

Human Connections: Relationships Changing

All real living is meeting

-MARTIN BUBER

Each of us is responsible for everything to everyone else

--- FYODOR DOSTOFVSKI

In this chapter we will look at changing personal relationships, the nature of transformative relationships, and the effect of the transformative process on life transitions or "passages."

Relationships are the crucible of the transformative process. They are bound to alter, given the individual's greater willingness to risk, trust in intuition, sense of wider connection with others, recognition of cultural conditioning.

We are seeing the subtle power custom has wielded over our lives. Cultural norms and mores are the great unexamined assumptions that run our lives. We become accustomed to roles; they become customary and therefore unchallenged. Custom is like a buildup of smog. We only notice it when it has been swept away on a clear, clean day. We may fail to see the outlines of a new cultural development until its effects are pervasive.

TRANSCENDING CULTURAL ROLES

When one begins the transformative process, death and birth are imminent: the death of custom as authority, the birth of the self.

In a sense our simultaneous effort toward autonomy and connection, contradictory as it seems, is an attempt to be real. We are stripping away the trappings and constraints of our culture: false machismo, false eyelashes, barriers, limits.

Several men who filled out the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire noted that the women's movement was important in their own change—not only because it focused on the trampled potentials of half the human race but also because it questioned the supremacy of those masculine characteristics valued in the society: competition, manipulation, aggression, objectivity. One said, "Much of the transformation was catalyzed by relationships. Having loving women help me let go of sexist attitudes contributed greatly to the increased 'yin' nature I have acknowledged in myself, which has unified my life and work."