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Changing Images of Man
A reader named Nathan left what I think is quite a bombshell in one of the comments:
About the idea that a new religious movement might be in the process of being created: Back in 1973, the U.S. government comissioned a report from SRI International entitled Changing Images of Man. This report concluded that the spread of so-called “new values”- spiritual and ecological awareness and self-realization movements - had become unstoppable. They also predicted that if left unchecked this would bring about a transformation of society that would undermine ‘modern industrial-state culture and institutions’ and result in ’serious social disruptions, economic decline, runaway inflation, and even institutional collapse’. The report anticipates a lessening of trust in authority and a reaction against a regimented, tightly controlled society. In order to prevent this “worst case scenario”, SRI recommended identifying existing institutions or traditions that could be used to control and contain the impetus of the new movement - in other words, they recommended that the government infiltrate and co-opt the movement for meaningful spiritual/ethical re-definition and social change (Freemasonry was suggested as a particularly useful vehicle for this co-option).
So if a new science-based religion is in the making, something approved by the voice of Official Authority, something safe, neutered, materialistic, perhaps it is a part of a bigger plan. There is no question, that if you look at where we were 35-40 years ago, where we appeared to be going with all this, something has gone off-track. All the progressive possibility that seemed to be opening up in the wake of ’60’s new thought… this kind of thought hasn’t exactly disappeared, but it certainly hasn’t had much of a revolutionary effect either, the new boss is pretty much the same as the old boss, only with better public relations. What was supposed to be unstoppable has been confined to the fringes, and the Great Powerful Machine has kept rolling right along. It’s interesting to me that we hear about the Brookings Report all the time, in discussions of possible UFO secrecy, but the SRI report is never mentioned and seems to be almost completely unknown, even though its potential applicability covers a lot more territory, and even though SRI is very well known among alternative knowledge communities because of it’s CIA-sponsored remote viewing experiments. It makes you wonder if there aren’t some gatekeepers at work here, carrying out their assignments with a high degree of efficiency.
Does anybody have more information on this? It’s pretty much exactly what I’m looking for. A cursory search yielded very little info, except for a $150 copy of the book on Amazon, which I’m not about to touch. Any tips at all would be very helpful!
UPDATE!
The full title seems to be: “Societal Consequences of Changing Images of Man” and I’ve seen notes that Joseph Campbell was one of the authors of it. I’ve also not found anything that would suggest this report advocated infiltrating or subverting mystical groups. But then, information on it is very slim…
Here’s a conspiracy-slanted article about the SRI (Stanford Research Institute) on Rense which mentions the Changing Images of Man report, but neglects to give any useful info. I also keep seeing mention of a book called The Aquarian Conspiracy which allegedly put the SRI agenda into the public stream.
Also, while we’re at it, I found a follow up to the original report called Changing Images 2000 (pdf, html). Here’s a description of that report: “a retrospective assessment of that pioneering study and a forward-looking extension of the conclusions and applicability of the original study for the new millennium.” And Ken Wilber seems to be heavily involved or at least quoted in it.
June 27th, 2005 at 1:07 pm
So I visit Rigorous Intuition this morning, and he’s talking about Scientology, and he mentions, among other things, how well represented Scientologists were in SRI’s remote viewing experiments! Synchronicity strikes again. Perhaps we are hearing so much about Scientology right now because someone has decided it’s a better candidate for use and control in the current climate than Freemasonry, which might be seen as being a little old fashioned…?
My familiarity with the report comes from a brief discussion of it in the book The Stargate Conspiracy by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. That’s really a fun book, it’s full of stuff about how the work of various writers and researchers in alternative knowledge fields, like Richard Hoagland, Whitley Streiber, Graham Hancock, etc., is really being secretly sponsored by the covert forces that are supposedly trying to supress it. The lead author of the report, futurist Willis Harman, was the founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, they have plenty of samples of his work at the Institute’s website, he also wrote a couple books detailing his thoughts about where things were heading. Harman himself clearly saw the coming shift in consciousness as a positive thing, although he apparently felt in needed to be “managed” in order to avoid destructive effects.
June 27th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
i keep hearing about that book. i just looked on amazon, and one of the things about it said:
Does this book deal with a group called the Council of Nine, or “The Nine”? Another name I’d be interested if its in this book: Andrija Puharich. Oh wait i just did a search inside the book on Amazon and both those things are there. The book seems to contain a lot of junk info though, based on accounts I’ve read of it. You’d say it’s worth it though?
June 27th, 2005 at 1:58 pm
Here is an interesting review of The Stargate Conspiracy.
June 27th, 2005 at 3:00 pm
This also reminds me of the huge hoopla that occurred when Ronald Bailey wrote about the President’s Council on Bioethics and Francis Fukuyama’s Foreign Policy article:
There are all these fears of cults and X-Men-like scenarios, which seems to have the under-educated public fearing the future. Doesn’t seem much different than when our grandparents were beating our parents for listening to The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. Or when our grandparetns were hanging out in cafés and listening to that confounded big band or Dixieland or swing music. The parents today that don’t care sit their kids down in front of their Nintendos and PrayStations, while the ones freaking out don’t have the imagination to see what is really possible within the near-future.
And the saddest thing of all is that they never give people enough credit for being creative, beautiful, and being inspired by all this change.
The same fears of NRMs and neo-cults springing up are justified, I guess, in the craziness that was Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo, the United States’ Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate (and their sweet-ass logo), and countless others. My friend used to work in the University of Alberta Archives and there is a whole section on cults in there, from antiquity to present, and one good point I received from God’s Dedris was that none of them are wrong, none of them are right: they’re simply working with different information and symbolism.
Einstein made a good point when he said that “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” As we move forward into this new system, whatever it may come to be called, all these devout spiritual pursuits will be given the gift of scrutiny and reason. Hopefully under the guise of science, a more universal symbolism can be utilised to underline all these systems — math? — by which we can then build up our designer religious experiences to suit our own subcultural, tribal, branded ways of life.
Has anyone ever thought that all this chasing of phantoms — the CIAs, the Satanists, the Illuminati, et cetera — is the only seed that needed to be planted in order to confuse any movement. Each field has their own enigmatic enemies of Truth, and I think it’s good to be aware of the threats that exist, but chasing ghosts and giving them way more credit and power than they’re really worth is more defeating to us as a whole than it is anything else.
And by that, I mean the universe is a nice place if you take away free will. If you believe you can control everything and we’re all not fitting into some massive, otherly cybernetic system of grand intelligence, then, by all means, please go ahead and worry.
June 27th, 2005 at 3:07 pm
well, I’ll agree with you Tim, the 2000 version had ken wilber all over it. And while i know you’re a bit skeptical of him, i think that can only be a good thing. I know wilbers excessive intellectualism can be a turn off, but he’s making inroads with all kinds of people who don’t understand anything else, and that’s important.
He’s a modern champion of the perrenial tradition and I’ve listened to dozens of hours of the interviews on his integral naked.org site, and i can only conclude he’s a truly well meaning, funny compassionate and deeply insightfull guy. his main fault might be that he panders too much to aging baby boomers and their reformed narcissism, but that’s been his role for ten years or more now.
strictly light side of the force in my book.
June 27th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
And on the above note, New Scientist also has a interview with Masoud Adib, head of philosophy at Mofid University in Qom, Iran, about Islam and the challenge of science. It just seems to be the natural progression, the world over.
June 27th, 2005 at 9:12 pm
The Aquarian Conspiracy is a classic, the book that really did launch the new age movement, on its better sense. It´s a great book…. SRI is another thing… but the Changing Images of Man is a study of its time Tim, the 60s…
Another more interesting study in one done by the Trilateral Commission In 1975: The Crisis of Democracy. it asked three researchers from Europe, the US and Japan to analize the governance of the developed world. They were Michel Crozier (France), Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki. Their conclusions: The rich democracies are losing their capacity to be governed. Factos of inastability multiply…. It´s not just a crisis, its an structural crisis…” One of the reasons of this crisis are the intellectuals, that criticize corruption and materialism. The attitude of these intellectuals, more value oriented, contrasts with of the intellectuals closer to the system, policy oriented… The other cause of the chaos for them was the media. They couldn´t afford again a Vietnam live on American TV. So, afterwards they learnt the lesson. Why they kill journalists in Iraq? bad luck? Why the Pentagon ordered to censor the people jumping from the Twin Towers to the void? Why Huntington wrote Clash of Civilizations? Why The Nine - that the Stargate Conspiracy explains - speak against Islam? THIS is the real study Tim, the one that explains many many things now….
Chomsky explains the report: http://www.chomsky.info/books/priorities01.htm
More about the Commission: http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/NWO/nwo8.html
June 28th, 2005 at 8:25 am
i see the struggle between policy based intellectuals and value based intellectuals as equating with a technocrat vs artist dynamic that`s part of the archetecture of civilisation. it`s the on-going struggle inside of government, corporations, sports teams and everywher people come together.
regarding the maoist rural population of vietnam during the war. it reminds me, in one sense, of the american civil war. would it be safe to say that the majority of those casualties were from the rural population?
July 1st, 2005 at 2:30 pm
In regards to the Council of Nine, didn’t the Church of Satan originally have a “Council of Nine” that was supposed to be the governing body? The Temple of Set currently has a governing body by that name (which I believe was the CoSatan one that broke away from LaVey in ‘75). Does anyone know if there may be any relation other than these groups using the same name?
July 1st, 2005 at 4:13 pm
definitely worth looking into. ill add it to my list!
July 25th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
[…] ve quote? The only evidence I’ve seen of that so far is his connection to the “Changing Images 2000” report of the Fetzer Institute. Wilber seems to […]