dprogram • Willis Harman - Global Mind Change


Home > 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 Psychedelics You mentioned being involved with the early research into psychedelics, what is your own attitude to them? Willis Harman Well this is a controversial area, obviously, and having had the direct experience of bringing up three daughters in Southern California in the 60's, we had a close up view of a lot of this. I would have to say that it seemed to me that people's experiences with psychedelic drugs were on the whole very positive, very profound, very much in the new spirituality direction, very much in the changing world view direction, very compatible with mystical traditions and that this was very threatening to the scientific and medical communities. They did all sorts of things to twist that story around so that it came out negative. There's no question that after they started to do that, some people had negative trips! But the role of the psychedelic sacraments, which is what they have been in every other society but ours, seemed to me to be a very significant factor in the 60's, in bringing about this changing belief system. It has been suggested that the military's early experimentation with psychedelics ironically ended up contributing to it's wider use in the population. Do you think that's true? Willis Harman It may be part of the surface history, that the military were leaders in this, but that's not accurate at all. The groups that I found doing research on this in Canada, England, and to a lesser extent in the United States, was busy during the mid-50's and the term 'psychedelic' (mind-manifesting) was coined by Sir Humphrey Osmond in 1957. There was a network of people, long before 1960 that was recommending this kind of experience to leaders in all fields, particularly in government, and this was all being done very quietly. Then when the Harvard researchers, in around 1961, made this public and recommended that this other pathway was too slow and that we should give it to teenagers around the world, and really change things more rapidly, that just caused everything to blow up. Then the military did indeed get involved, with their particular kind of enquiry about it and I'd say the whole thing went pretty negative by the mid-60's. But there was a decade there of very positive work, with results that would still be worth paying attention to, some published in scientific journals. Apocalypse Soon? When you were studying the future, back in the 1960's, was it generally cheering or depressing to you? Willis Harman I never got depressed about it, although we began to unearth all these global problems like pollution and so on which, (this was around 1969 or so) nobody was talking about those things, nobody wanted to and we could begin to see them coming, along with the cultural change that looked very positive. But I did have one staff member, probably the most experienced staff member I had, this was in the Stanford Research Institute and this man said "I have to resign" and he did, he said "I just can't stand to come in day after day and look at the future." But you didn't, yourself, feel that much alarmed? Willis Harman Oh, quite the contrary because you could see the global dilemmas that were coming, really had no solution within the paradigm out of which they came. You could see that the attempt was going to be made to patch them up and that this really wouldn't work. But at the same time, you'd see all these indications of wonderful changes coming along that started more or less in the 60's. To be sure it had its very bizarre side, too and in Southern California we definitely saw that side! It was a whole population waking up, not just in the United States but in Europe and Australia. One of the questions we haven't really asked until recently is whether modern society is really sustainable in the long-term. Not just because of what it's doing to the environment and man-made climate change but in all sorts of other ways. The rich-poor gap expanding, the increasing hunger and poverty and so on. To whatever extent modern culture grows out of its world-view, just as other cultures have come out of their world views, the question becomes "Is the modern, scientific, Western world view really sustainable on the planet? Or does something have to shift within that?" I think the conclusion that we're coming to, and a lot of people on the mind network around the globe are coming to, is that in the long-term that must change. There's probably, in that group at any rate, quite a lot of optimism, about long-term change actually happening. It also observes, though, that there's a certain amount of short-term prejudice about the catastrophic sort of transition period that we might have to go through if we are not capable of dealing with these questions in a fear-reducing kind of dialogue. Home > 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 email • mail order credits © dprogram 1996>2008
	Originally broadcast on UK television's Channel 4, dprogram is an award winning, mind expanding trip featuring rare and exclusive interviews with leading edge personalities from areas like cyber culture, consciousness research, parapsychology, music and art. Volume 1 includes: • Dan Mapes CEO of San Francisco's leading edge virtual reality design company SynergyLabs on the metaphysics of VR. • Jah Wobble Musician and founder member of Public Image Limited on Cockney mystics, creativity and the inspiration of William Blake. • Dr Sara Parker UC Berkeley scholar on the New Age 'colonisation' of Native American spirituality. • Bishop Joey Head of the First Church of the Last Laugh - the worlds fastest growing snack relgion! • Burning Man A unique four day experience exploring creativity and consciousness in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. • Willis Harman Former president of The Institute of Noetic Sciences on their 'conventional research into unconventional areas'. • Dr Edgar Mitchell Founder of The Institute of Noetic Sciences and Apollo 14 astronaut on parapsychology experiments in space. • Nick Pope of the British Ministry of Defence on why he had to change his mind about the UFO phenomenom. • Peter Russell Author, on the global brain, spirituality on the net and our part in the evolution of the planet. • Ann & Alexander Shulgin Pioneer researchers into psychedelics and the mind, on the politics of ecstacy. And more... Running time: 70 mins. £19.99 plus Post & Packing. Post & Packing rates: For the UK add £3.00 For Europe add £4.00 For the United States and the Rest of the World add £6.00 ORDER ONLINE Snail Mail Orders: Make a Cheque, Postal Order or International Money Order payable to Digital Media Labs and send to: Digital Media Labs 8 Manson House 16-17 Manson Place London SW7 5LT United Kingdom Customer Service Helpline: +44 (0) 20 7225 0861 Please Note dprogram is only available on VHS PAL. To play this tape in the US you must use a multi-region video machine capable of playing PAL format tapes. We are currently working to provide dprogram on DVD. If you would like to be notified when this becomes available enter your email address below.