BPM Magazine interview with Chris Holmes

www.chrisholmes.net/blog/blogvideo/bpminterview.pdf

Allan Bennett Bio from golden dawn

Allan Bennett
1872 - 1923

Allan Bennett was an analytical chemist by training who was brought up as a Roman Catholic by his widowed mother. He was the typical Sagittarius who radiated much spiritual intensity. He was a man with very distinguishing features, burning eyes and thick brows.

He was recognized as an Adeptus Minor in the Golden Dawn by the age of 23. He is most remembered as the first teacher of practical magic to the famed Aleister Crowley.

Bennett was always close to the Mathers and had made frequent visits to their home to stay, sometimes for days, even weeks. Although Bennett's effect upon the Order of the Golden Dawn wasn't as influential as other members like William Westcott, Annie Horniman, or William Butler Yeats, he contributed a part of himself to the Order in his own silent way. Bennett helped Mathers in collating a mass of papers and valuable Order material. Some of these works were later undertaken by the hands of Crowley and published under the title, Liber 777. Much credit was also given to Bennett for laying out the ground work of the Sepher Sephiroth.

MacGregor Mathers bios

Samuel Liddell (or Liddel) "MacGregor" Mathers, born as Samuel Liddell (January 8 or 11, 1854 – November 5 or 20, 1918), was one of the most influential figures in modern Occultism. He is primarily known as one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a ceremonial magic order of which offshoots still exist today.

Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney

Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney

on view June 26 - September 21, 2008


One of the great American visionaries of the twentieth century, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) endeavored to see what he, a single individual, might do to benefit the largest segment of humanity while consuming the minimum of the earth's resources. Doing "more with less" was Fuller's credo. He described himself as a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," setting forth to solve the escalating challenges that faced humanity before they became insurmountable.
More...


Fuller's innovative theories and designs addressed fields ranging from architecture, the visual arts, and literature to mathematics, engineering, and sustainability. He refused to treat these diverse spheres as specialized areas of investigation because it inhibited his ability to think intuitively, independently, and, in his words, "comprehensively."

Although Fuller believed in utilizing the latest technology, much of his work developed from his inquiry into "how nature builds." He believed that the tetrahedron was the most fundamental, structurally sound form found in nature; this shape is an essential part of most of his designs, which range in scale from domestic to global. As the many drawings and models in this exhibition attest, Fuller was committed to the physical exploration and visual presentation of his ideas.



The results of more than five decades of Fuller's integrated approach toward the design and technology of housing, transportation, cartography, and communication are displayed here, much of it for the first time. This exhibition offers a fresh look at Fuller's life's work for everyone who shares his sense of urgency about homelessness, poverty, diminishing natural resources, and the future of our planet. - Jennie Goldstein


http://www.whitney.org/www/buckminster_fuller/about.jsp

french spiderman Alain Robert

Bio

Alain Robert (born as Robert Alain Philippe on 7 August 1962), is a French rock and urban climber, from Digoin, Saône-et-Loire, Bourgogne, France. Nicknamed after the Marvel Comics character "Spider-Man," or "The Human Spider" he is famous for scaling skyscrapers.

More...

Alain Robert climbing Petronas Tower 2 in March 2007
Robert has scaled 85 giant structures around the globe including many of the world's tallest structures, most of which he has scaled using only his bare hands and climbing shoes.

Robert began climbing as a young boy, scaling rock cliffs in the area around his home. His buildering career began at the age of 12 when he forgot his keys and was locked out of his parents' eighth-floor apartment. Instead of waiting for them to return home, he simply scaled the exterior wall to his home.

In 1982 he suffered two accidents, the first in January at the age of 19 and the second in September at the age of 20. He fell 15 metres (49 ft) on both occasions. He suffered multiple fractures and now suffers from permanent vertigo. The doctors considered him 60 percent handicapped and told him he would not be able to climb again. However, within 6 months he was climbing again. He kept taking on more and more challenging structures and improving his skills. He polished his rock-climbing skills in the French Alps before turning to buildings.

Strategy

Because authorities will not normally give him permission for such dangerous exploits, Robert usually appears, at dawn, on the side of whichever giant skyscraper he has chosen to climb. His exploits attract crowds of onlookers who stop to watch him climb, in awe of what is happening. As a consequence, Alain has been arrested many times, in various countries, by law enforcement officials waiting for him at the end of his climb. The arrests and trials are normally little more than brief formalities and he has always been discharged.

Robert's physical conditioning and expert climbing technique allow him to climb using the small protrusions of building walls and windows (such as window ledges and frames). Many of his climbs provide him no opportunity to rest and can last over an hour. At 1.65 m (5'5") tall, he is short and light, attributes that enhance his dexterity while climbing. He sometimes has a small bag of climbing chalk powder (similar to powdered rosin), which is used to absorb sweat, fastened around his waist.

Career

Robert's urban climbing career has been characterized by an ever-expanding list of famous landmarks which includes the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House and the Montparnasse Tower in Paris, as well as the world's tallest skyscrapers. In the 1990s, as his exploits brought him worldwide media exposure, speculation began as to whether or not he would attempt the tallest building in the world at the time: the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Although Malaysian authorities were expecting his attempt, they were still astonished when one day in 1997 he suddenly appeared several floors up on the side of the tower. He was eventually arrested at the 60th floor, 28 floors below the top.

While scaling the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois in 1999, he encountered the most challenging climbing conditions in his career. Near the top of the 110-story building, a thick fog set in that covered the glass and metal wall of the last 20 floors with moisture, making it dangerously slippery. Although the climb became agonizingly slow and very strenuous, Alain Robert overcame the difficulties and reached the top.

In 2000, Robert climbed the 23 metres (75 ft) high Luxor Obelisque in Place de la Concorde, France.
In February 2003, he legally climbed the 200 metres (656 ft) National Bank of Abu Dhabi, UAE, watched by about 100,000 spectators.

It has become more frequent for Robert to be paid to scale buildings as part of publicity efforts. In May 2003 he was paid approximately $18,000 to climb the 95 metres (312 ft) Lloyd's of London to promote the premiere of the movie Spider-Man on the British television channel Sky Movies.

On October 19, 2004, he scaled the 187 metres (614 ft) headquarters of the French oil company Total while wearing a Spider-Man costume.

Robert scaled Taipei 101 on December 25, 2004, a few days before its grand opening as the tallest building in the world. The 508 metres (1,667 ft) climb was legal, part of the week's festivities. The skyscraper's outwardly slanting sides posed no apparent difficulty for him, but heavy rains in Taiwan resulted in a climb lasting four hours--double his estimate.

On June 11, 2005 he climbed the Cheung Kong Centre in Hong Kong, scaling 283 metres (928 ft) to reach the top of the 62-story tower.

On September 1, 2006, he climbed the tallest building in Lithuania and the Baltic States - Europa Tower, 148 metres (486 ft), in Vilnius. Wearing a black suit and using a safety rope, which he detached several times, he reached the observation deck of the building, 114 metres (374 ft), in 40 minutes. In 2006 he also climbed Torre Vasco da Gama in Portugal as part of an advertisement for Optimus, a national mobile operator. He finished the year climbing the Santa Fe World Plaza in Mexico City, on December 7th. On 23 of February 2007, he legally climbed the headquarters Building of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) on the coast of Abu Dhabi city (United Arab Emirates).

On March 20, 2007, he again climbed the Petronas Twin Towers, marking the tenth anniversary of his previous ascent of this building. Upon reaching the 60th floor, he allowed himself to be apprehended . He flew the Malaysian flag and drew applause from waiting police, fire crew, and media representatives before handing himself in. He was handcuffed and escorted off the premises before being driven to a police station.

On May 31, 2007, he scaled the 88-story Jin Mao Building in Shanghai, then China's tallest skyscraper, once again wearing a Spider-Man costume. Robert was later arrested and jailed for 5 days before being expelled from China. In November 2007, Robert was invited by the local government of Zhangjiajie, a scenic region in the southern province of Hunan, to climb the 1,518 metres (4,980 ft) Tianmen mountain to boost the profile of the region and bring in tourists.

On September 4, 2007, he climbed the 244 metres (801 ft) Federation Tower office building in Moscow, (Russia's tallest skyscraper), in 30 minutes using a ladder. Detained by police, he could face a fine for violating safety norms at a construction site despite being told by his sponsor that permission had been granted for him to climb safely.

On December 18, 2007, he climbed the 29-story Portland House office building in London, (Westminster's tallest building). It took him just over 40 minutes. Police taped off the area and later arrested him for criminal damage and wasting police time.

On April 15, 2008, he climbed the 60-story Four Seasons Place in Hong Kong. The police and 4 fire engines were standing by and it took him almost 1 hour to reach the top. Alain encountered difficulty at the top when he found that the last 5 metres were impossible to climb. He had to climb sideways until he reached a corner and managed with difficulty to reach the top. He almost fell when a woman on the other side of the glass screamed and almost fainted. Witnesses said that he was detained upon completing the climb. He stated that his climb was intended to increase awareness of global warming.

On June 5, 2008, he climbed the New York Times Building in New York City, USA. He unfurled a banner with a slogan about global warming, and then was arrested by police on the roof. The banner read "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week" At the time, he was wearing a sweatshirt advertising his website: TheSolutionIsSimple.org


Notable climbs



Alain Robert climbing Torre Agbar (Barcelona, 2007-09-12.
A few of the more than 85 skyscrapers and monuments climbed by Alain Robert:[10]
Sydney, Australia – Sydney Tower and the Sydney Opera House
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Hotel Vermont
Montreal, Quebec, Canada – Crown Plaza Hotel
Hong Kong
Four Seasons Place
The Far East Finance Centre
The Cheung Kong Centre
London
One Canada Square
Lloyd's building
Portland House
Paris, France
Eiffel Tower
Grande Arche at La Défense
The Luxor Obelisk in Place de la Concorde
Tour Montparnasse
Tour Cristal at Front de Seine
Mercurial Towers at Bagnolet
Frankfurt, Germany – Dresdner Bank Tower
Milan, Italy – Banca di Milano building
Tokyo, Japan – Shinjuku Center Building
Warsaw, Poland – Marriott Hotel
Johannesburg, South Africa – IBM Tower
Abu Dhabi
United Arab Emirates – National Bank of Abu Dhabi and the Etisalat building
Abu Dhabi Investment Authority [ADIA], Headquarters Building, UAE
United States of America
New York Times Building– New York City
Empire State Building – New York City
Sears Tower – Chicago, Illinois
Golden Gate Bridge – San Francisco, California
Blue Cross Tower – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Luxor Hotel pyramid – Las Vegas, Nevada
Tampere, Finland – Hotel Ilves
Malaysia
Petronas Tower 1 – Kuala Lumpur (arrested at the 60th floor in 1997)
Petronas Tower 2 – Kuala Lumpur (arrested at the 60th floor in visit Malaysia year 2007)
Sabah Foundation Building – Kota Kinabalu, Sabah (for fund raising)
Melia Hotel – Kuala Lumpur
Singapore – Overseas Union Bank Centre (arrested at 21st floor in 2000)
Taiwan – Taipei 101
Venezuela – Parque Central Torre
Barcelona, Spain – Torre Agbar
Portugal
Torre Vasco da Gama
25 de Abril Bridge[11]
Mexico City- Santa Fé World Plaza Corporate Tower
Bratislava, Slovakia – Slovak Radio Building
Shanghai, China – Jin Mao Building
Moscow, Russia - West Federation Tower
São Paulo, Brazil - Edifício Itália[12]
[edit]Accidents

In a 2005 interview, Alain Robert said that he has fallen seven times in his life. The worst was his second fall in 1982.
On January 18, 1982, at 19, he fell 15 metres (49 ft) when his anchor and rope gave way during training. He fractured his wrists, heels and nose and underwent three operations.

On September 29, 1982, at 20, he fell 15 metres (49 ft) when his rope came undone during rappelling, (abseiling). He was in a coma for five days and fractured both forearms, his elbow, pelvis, and nose. His elbow was also dislocated and a nerve was damaged leaving him partially paralyzed. He also suffered cerebral edema and vertigo. He underwent six operations on his hands and elbow.

In 1993, he fell 8 metres (26 ft) while showing students how to rely on their legs when climbing. He kept his hands behind his back on an easy route but lost his balance and fell headfirst shattering both wrists. He went into another coma and spent two months in the hospital.

In 2004, he fell 2 metres (6.6 ft) when climbing a traffic light whilst posing for a photo in an interview. He landed on his elbow and needed forty stitches, but a month later he climbed the world’s tallest skyscraper, Taipei 101, as part of its official opening week.

Arrests

On November 22, 2005, he was arrested as he began to climb the One Houston Center building in Houston, Texas. He was charged with criminal trespassing and misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance. The controlled substance charge was due to two pills that the police found in his possession. He claimed the pills were the prescription drug Urbanyl, a medication used to prevent epileptic seizures. He spent two days in jail and then appeared in court on November 29 and provided proof of a doctor's prescription for the medication, asking that the drug charges be dropped. On December 20 he climbed the Cristal Tower in Paris in protest of the arrest. His next court appearance was scheduled for January 4, 2006, but Robert said that he would be climbing in Mexico at that time.

On March 15, 2006 he climbed one of the 122 metres (400 ft) Mercurial Towers in Bagnolet in protest of the presumed seven-day sentence, prior to returning to Texas to serve the sentence. On March 31 he appeared before a Houston court. The drug charge was dropped because of the valid prescription, and the jail sentence was reduced to one day and a $2000 fine for trespassing. The previous time served in November was credited so Robert did not have to serve any more time in jail.
On May 31, 2007, after scaling the 88-story Jin Mao Building in Shanghai, he was arrested and jailed for 5 days before being expelled from China.

On February 27, 2008 he climbed the Edificio Italia, one of the tallest buildings in Brazil despite being unauthorized to do so. He was detained by the police after his successful attempt.
On April 15, 2008, he climbed the 60-story Four Seasons Place in Hong Kong. According to witness reports, he was detained by police upon completing the climb.

On June 5, 2008 (11:40 am local time), he climbed the 52-story New York Times Building, hanging a yellow banner on the 9th floor which read, "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week" He was arrested upon reaching the roof at 12:25 pm.

Gurdjieff Biography

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (Armenian: Գեորգի Գյուրջիև; Russian: Георгий Иванович Гюрджиев; Georgiy Ivanovich Gyurdzhiev (or Gurdjiev); January 13, 1866? – October 29, 1949), was an Armenian mystic, a teacher of sacred dances, and a spiritual teacher. He is most notable for introducing what some refer to as "The Work," connoting work on oneself according to Gurdjieff's principles and instructions, or as he first referred to it, the Fourth Way.

At different times in his life he formed and liquidated various schools around the world to utilize his teachings. He claimed that the teachings he brought to the West from his own experiences and early travels expressed the truth found in other ancient religions and wisdom teachings relating to self-awareness in one's daily life and humanity's place in the universe.
His teachings might be summed up by the title of his third series of writings: Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am', while his complete series of books is entitled "All and Everything."
More...


Biography

The only account of Gurdjieff's early biography before he appeared in Moscow in 1912 can be found in his text Meetings with Remarkable Men. This text, however, cannot be read as straightforward autobiography.

It was in the pre-1912 period that Gurdjieff went on his apocryphal voyage outlined in Meetings with Remarkable Men where he comes upon a map of "pre-sand Egypt" which allegedly leads him to study with the esoteric group the Sarmoung Brotherhood. Coincidentally, Gurdjieff is one of the only sources lending credibility for the existence of this group.
Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol (now Gyumri), Armenia. The exact date is unknown (anything ranging from 1866 to 1877 has been offered). Some authors argue persuasively for 1866 even though his passport states that he was born on November 28, 1877. Gurdjieff grew up in Kars and traveled to many parts of the world (such as Central Asia, Egypt, Rome) before returning to Russia in 1912.

From 1913 to 1949 the chronology appears to stand on the much firmer ground afforded by primary documents, independent witness, cross-reference, and reasonable inference.[4] On New Year's Day of 1912, Gurdjieff arrived in Moscow and attracted his first associates. In the same year he married Julia Ostrowska in St Petersburg. In 1914 Gurdjieff first advertised his ballet, "The Struggle of the Magicians," as well as supervised his pupils' writing of the sketch "Glimpses of Truth". In 1915 Gurdjieff accepted P. D. Ouspensky as a pupil, while in 1916 he accepted the composer Thomas de Hartmann and his wife Olga as students. At this time he had around thirty pupils.

Many authors have speculated that Gurdjieff was a spy, most likely of the Tsar, during the wars. This claim has been neither proven nor widely dismissed, since Gurdjieff had access to most places in Asia. Gurdjieff personally commented indirectly on this claim in his book Beelzebub's Tales when he said that "during a war every person that is somewhat awake is considered a spy because of his seriousness and alertness."

In the midst of revolutionary upheaval in Russia he left Petrograd in 1917 to return to his family home in Alexandropol. During the Bolshevik Revolution Gurdjieff set up temporary study communities in Essentuki in the Caucasus, then Tuapse, Maikop, Sochi and Poti, all on the Black Sea coast of Southern Russia, where he worked intensively with many of his Russian pupils.
In March 1918, Ouspensky separated from Gurdjieff, and four months later Gurdjieff's eldest sister and her family reached him in Essentuki as refugees, bringing news that Turks had shot his father in Alexandropol on 15 May. As Essentuki became increasingly threatened by civil war, Gurdjieff planted a fabricated newspaper story of his forthcoming "scientific expedition" to Mount Induc. Posing as a scientist, Gurdjieff left Essentuki with a following of fourteen (which does not include Gurdjieff's family or Ouspensky). They went by train to Maikop where hostilities detained them for three weeks. In spring of 1919 Gurdjieff met and accepted as pupils the artist Alexandre Salzmann and his wife Jeanne. In collaboration with Jeanne Salzmann, Gurdjieff gave the first public demonstration of his Sacred Dances (Movements in Tbilisi Opera House, 22 June).

In autumn 1919 he and his closest pupils moved to Tbilisi. In late May 1920, when political conditions in Georgia changed and the old order was crumbling, they walked by foot to Batumi on the Black Sea coast, and then Istanbul. There Gurdjieff rented an apartment on Koumbaradji Street in Péra and later at 13 Abdullatif Yemeneci Sokak near the Galata Tower. The apartment is near the tekke (monastery) of the Mevlevi Order of Sufis (founded by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi), where Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and Thomas de Hartmann experienced the sema ceremony of The Whirling Dervishes. In Istanbul Gurdjieff also met John G. Bennett.

In August 1921 and 1922, Gurdjieff traveled around western Europe, lecturing and giving demonstrations of his work in various cities such as Berlin and London, capturing the allegiance of Ouspensky's many prominent pupils, notably the editor A. R. Orage. After he lost a civil action to acquire Hellerau possession in Britain, Gurdjieff established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man south of Paris at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in Fontainebleau-Avon near the famous Château de Fontainebleau. Gurdjieff acquired notoriety after Katherine Mansfield died on 9 January 1923.

In 1924, while driving alone from Paris to Fontainebleau, Gurdjieff had a near fatal car accident. Nursed by his wife and mother, he made a slow and painful recovery—against medical expectation. Still convalescent, he formally "disbanded" his Institute on 26 August (but in fact he dispersed only his less dedicated pupils), and began writing All and Everything.
In 1925 Gurdjieff's wife contracted cancer, and she died in 1926 despite radiotherapy and Gurdjieff's unorthodox treatment. Ouspensky attended her funeral.

Starting in 1929, Gurdjieff made visits to North America where he took over as the teacher of pupils who were at that time being taught by A.R. Orage.

In 1935 Gurdjieff stopped writing All and Everything, having completed the first two parts of the trilogy and only having started on the Third Series (published under the title Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am').
In Paris, Gurdjieff lived at 6 Rue des Colonels-Rénard, where he continued to teach throughout World War II.
Gurdjieff died on October 29, 1949 at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. His funeral was held at the St. Alexandre Nevsky Russian Orthodox Cathedral at 12 Rue Daru, Paris. He is buried in the cemetery at Fontainebleau-Avon.
[edit]Ideas

Gurdjieff claimed that people do not perceive reality, as they are not conscious of themselves, but live in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep."
"Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies." Gurdjieff taught that each person perceived things from a completely subjective perspective. Gurdjieff stated that maleficent events such as wars and so on could not possibly take place if people were more awake. He asserted that people in their typical state were unconscious automatons, but that it was possible for a man to wake up and experience life more fully.

Main article Fourth Way
In his early lectures G.I. Gurdjieff described his approach to self-development as the Fourth Way.[10] In contrast to the three eastern teachings that emphasize the development of the body, mind, or the emotions separately, Gurdjieff's exercises worked on all three at the same time to promote comprehensive and balanced inner development. Today, Gurdjieff's teachings are also sometimes referred to as "The Work," "The Gurdjieff Work," "Work on oneself" or simply the "Work."[11] Though Gurdjieff never put major significance on the term "Fourth Way" and never used the term in his writings, his pupil P.D. Ouspensky made the term and its use central to his own teaching of the Gurdjieff Ideas. After Ouspensky's death, his students published a book with that name, based on his lectures.
Gurdjieff's teaching mainly addressed the question of people's place in the universe and their possibilities for inner development. He taught that higher levels of consciousness, higher bodies, and inner growth and development is possible.

In his teaching Gurdjieff gave a distinct meaning to various ancient texts such as the Bible and many religious prayers. He claimed that those texts possess a very different meaning than what is commonly attributed to them. "Sleep not;" "Awake, for you know not the hour;" "The Kingdom of Heaven is Within"...are examples of biblical statements that point to a psychological teaching whose essence has been forgotten.

Gurdjieff taught people how to increase and focus their attention and energy in various ways, and to minimize daydreaming and absentmindedness. According to his teaching, this inner development in oneself is the beginning of a possible further process of change, whose aim is to transform a man into what Gurdjieff believed he ought to be.

Distrusting "morality," which he describes as varying from culture to culture, often contradictory and superficial, he greatly stressed the importance of conscience. This he regarded as the same in all people, buried in people's subconsciousness, thus both sheltered from damage by how people live and inaccessible without "work on oneself."

To provide conditions in which inner attention could be exercised more intensively, Gurdjieff also taught his pupils "sacred dances" or "movements" which they performed together as a group, and he left a body of music inspired by what he heard in visits to remote monasteries and other places, which was written for piano in collaboration with one of his pupils, Thomas de Hartmann. Gurdjieff also used various exercises, such as the "Stop" exercise, to prompt self-observation in his students. Other shocks to help awaken his pupils from constant day-dreaming were always possible at any moment.

Methods

Gurdjieff transmitted his ideas through a number of different methods and materials, including meetings, music, movements (sacred dance), writings, lectures, and innovative forms of group work. He was not consistent in his use of these materials through his lifetime; for example, six years in Paris were devoted primarily to writing, while composition of music and movement centered around a few distinct periods. In Russia he was described as keeping his teaching confined to a small circle, while in Paris and North America he gave numerous public demonstrations.

Gurdjieff felt that the traditional methods of self-knowledge -- those of the fakir, monk, and yogi (acquired, respectively, through pain, devotion, and study) -- were inadequate.
"Gurdjieff's system, which involved music, movement, dance, and self-criticism, enabled the unrealized individual to transcend the mechanical, acted-upon self and ascend from mere personality to self-actualizing essence."

In this way, Gurdjieff's methodology has been compared to fellow Eastern European mystics Peter Deunov and Ottoman Hanish, whose Paneurhythmy and Persian/Caucasoid Yoga work, respectively, also centered on physical movement, music, and dance: "these men come from an ancient tradition scattered around the Black Sea," and stemming from ancient Gnostic Bogomilism, the synthesis of Armenian Paulicianism and the Bulgarian Slavonic Church reform movement. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Gurdjieff quickly became well known in the West, establishing centres from France to New York to Scottsdale, Arizona.

Music
The Gurdjieff music divides into three distinct periods. The first period is the early music, including music from the ballet Struggle of the Magicians and music for early Movements, dating to the years around 1918.
The second period music, for which he is best known, written in collaboration with Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann, is described as the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann music. Dating to the mid 1920s, it offers a rich repertory with roots in Caucasian and Central Asian folk and religious music, Russian Orthodox liturgical music, and other sources. This music was often first heard, and even composed, in the salon at the Prieure. Since the publication of four volumes of this piano repertory by Schott, recently completed, there has been a wealth of new recordings, including orchestral versions of music prepared by Gurdjieff and de Hartmann for the Movements demonstrations of 1923-24.

The last musical period is the improvised harmonium music which often followed the dinners Gurdjieff held in his Paris apartment during the Occupation and immediate post-war years, to his death in 1949. A virtually encyclopedic recording of surviving tapes of Gurdjieff improvising on the harmonium was recently published.
In all, Gurdjieff in collaboration with de Hartmann composed some 200 pieces.

Movements

Movements, or sacred dances, constitute an integral part of the Gurdjieff Work. Gurdjieff sometimes referred to himself as a "teacher of dancing," and gained initial public notice for his attempts to put on a ballet in Moscow called "Struggle of the Magicians."

Films of Movements demonstrations are occasionally shown for private viewing by the Gurdjieff Foundations, and one is shown in a scene in the Peter Brook movie Meetings with Remarkable Men.

Group Work

Gurdjieff taught that group efforts greatly surpass individual efforts towards self-development, and therefore he created innovative ways for individuals to come together to pursue his work. Students regularly met with group leaders in group meeting, and groups of students came together in "work periods" where intensive labor was performed and elaborate meals were prepared.

Gurdjieff student William Segal recounts periods of hard labor "around the clock" in his autobiography[19] A Voice at the Borders of Silence. Gurdjieff's student John Pentland connects the Gurdjieff group work with the later rise of encounter groups. Groups also often met to prepare for demonstrations or performances to which the public was invited.

Writings

Gurdjieff wrote and approved for publication three volumes of his written work under the title All and Everything. The first volume, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, is a lengthy allegorical work that recounts the explanations of Beelzebub to his grandson concerning the beings of the planet Earth. Intended to be a teaching tool for his teachings, Gurdjieff had gone to great lengths in order to increase the effort needed to read and understand the book. The second volume, Meetings with Remarkable Men, was written in a very easily understood manner, and purports to be an autobiography of his early years, but which also contains many allegorical statements. His final unfinished volume, Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am', contains a fragment of an autobiographical description of later years, as well as transcripts of some lectures.

As Gurdjieff explained to Ouspensky ... "for exact understanding exact language is necessary." In his first series of writings, Gurdjieff explains how difficult it is to choose an ordinary language to convey his thoughts exactly. He continues..."the Russian language is like the English...both these languages are like the dish which is called in Moscow 'Solianka', and into which everything goes except you and me...".

In spite of the difficulties, he goes on to develop a special vocabulary of a new language all of it his own. He uses these new words particularly in the first series of his writings. However, in The Herald of Coming Good, he uses one particular word for the first time which does not appear in any of his other writings: ..." Tzvarnoharno...leads to the destruction of both him that tries to achieve something for general human welfare and of all that he has already accomplished to this end." According to Gurdjieff, King Solomon himself coined this particular word; as such, it seems to be a key to understanding the legend of Hiram Abiff.


Reception and Influence

Opinions on Gurdjieff's writings and activities are divided. Sympathizers regard him as a charismatic master who brought new knowledge into Western culture, a psychology and cosmology that enable insights beyond those provided by established science.[23] Critics assert he was simply a charlatan with a large ego and a constant need for self-glorification.

Gurdjieff had a strong influence on many modern mystics, artists, writers, and thinkers, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Keith Jarrett, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Fripp, Jacob Needleman, John Shirley, Dennis Lewis, Peter Brook, Kate Bush, P. L. Travers, Robert S de Ropp, Walter Inglis Anderson, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Louis Pauwels and James Moore. Gurdjieff's notable personal students include Jeanne de Salzmann, Willem Nyland, Lord Pentland (Henry John Sinclair), P. D. Ouspensky, Olga de Hartmann, Thomas de Hartmann, Jane Heap, John G. Bennett, Alfred Richard Orage, Maurice Nicoll, George and Helen Adie and Katherine Mansfield. Aleister Crowley visited his Institute at least once. Gurdjieff called Crowley 'dirty,' and wanted him to leave the institute. Privately Crowley praised Gurdjieff's work, though with some reservations.
However one regards Gurdjieff's teaching, or Gurdjieff personally, he appears to have given new life and practical form to ancient teachings of both East and West. For example, the Socratic/Platonic emphasis on "the examined life" recurs in Gurdjieff's teaching as the practice of self-observation. His teachings about self-discipline and restraint reflect Stoic teachings. The Hindu/Buddhist notion of attachment recurs in Gurdjieff's teaching as the concept of identification. Similarly, his cosmology can be "read" against ancient and esoteric sources, respectively Neoplatonic and such a source as Robert Fludd's treatment of macrocosmic musical structures. American psychological culture has seized on one of Gurdjieff's introductions, the enneagram. Although for many students of the Gurdjieff tradition the enneagram remains a "koan," challenging and never explicated once and for all, the enneagram figure has been used as the basis for personality analysis, for example in the Enneagram of Personality, developed by Oscar Ichazo, Helen Palmer, and others, and in that application is not related to Gurdjieff's teaching or to his explanations of the enneagram.

Groups

Gurdjieff had influenced the formation of many groups after his death, all of which still function today and follow his ideas.
The Gurdjieff Foundation, the largest organization directly linked to Mr. Gurdjieff, was organized by Jeanne de Salzmann during the early 1950s, and led by her in cooperation with other direct pupils. The main three branches of the Foundation are The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, The London-based Gurdjieff Society, the Institut Gurdjieff (Paris), and the network of foundations in South America founded by the late Natalie de Etievan, daughter of Jeanne de Salzmann. Connected to these four foundations are numerous smaller groups around the world, collected under the umbrella of the International Association of Gurdjieff Foundations. The president of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York was Lord Pentland, who retained this position until his death.

There are also other groups formed by one or another of Gurdjieff's pupils. Willem Nyland, one of Gurdjieff's closest students and an original founder and trustee of The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, left to form his own groups in the early 1960s. Jane Heap was sent to London by Gurdjieff, where she led groups until her death in 1964. Louise Goepfert March, who became a pupil of Gurdjieff's in 1929, started her own groups in 1957 and founded the Rochester Folk Art Guild in the Finger Lakes region of New York State; her efforts were closely linked to the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York. There are also independent groups which were formed and led by John G. Bennett.

There are also third-generation independent groups today such as those of William Patrick Patterson (student of Lord Pentland). Interestingly India, one of the cradles of spiritual traditions since ancient times, also has a Group under the mentorship of Ravi Ravindra who was a student of Mme De Salzmann and Dr. Welch.
Currently, Gurdjieff's influence has expanded from traditional Gurdjieffianism to variants with no relationship to him or his teaching apart from the use of his name.

Criticism

Criticism of Gurdjieff's system largely focuses on his insistence that people are "asleep" in a state closely resembling "hypnotic sleep." Gurdjieff said, even specifically at times, that a pious, good, and moral man was no more "spiritually developed" than any other person; they are all equally "asleep."

The primary criticism of Gurdjieff's work is that it attaches no value to almost everything that comprises the life of an average man. According to Gurdjieff, everything an "average man" possesses, accomplishes, does, and feels is completely accidental and without any initiative.

In his most elaborate writing, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (see bibliography), Gurdjieff records his reverence for the founders of the mainstream religions of East and West and his contempt by and large for what successive generations of believers have made of those religious teachings. His ironical discussions of "orthodoxhydooraki" and "heterodoxhydooraki"--orthodox fools and heterodox fools, from a Russian word -- position him as a critic of religious distortion and, in turn, as a target for criticism from some within those traditions. Gurdjieff has been interpreted by some to have had a total disregard for the value of mainstream religion, philanthropic work, and the value of doing right or wrong in general.
Gurdjieff's detractors, despite his seeming total lack of pretension to any kind of "guru holiness," argue that the many anecdotes of his sometimes unconventional behavior display the unsavory and impure character of a man who was a cynical manipulator of his followers. Gurdjieff's own pupils wrestled to understand him. For example, in a written exchange between Luc Dietrich and Henri Tracol dating to 1943: "L.D.: How do you know that Gurdjieff wishes you well? H.T.: I feel sometimes how little I interest him--and how strongly he takes an interest in me. By that I measure the strength of an intentional feeling."

Other Views


Gurdjieff's funeral
With so much surrounding Gurdjieff and his teaching, other views are possible. For example, during the Russian period he spoke with respect of the obyvatel, the simple householder or salt-of-the-earth peasant, who lives by traditional values and slowly develops himself. Much later, in Paris, he gave encouragement and financial help to a multitude of people who were hard up for one reason or another. His Paris flat had, people say, one of the world's worst art collections, consisting of pieces purchased from indigent artists as a cover for providing them with funds without humiliating them. Diogenes, the ancient Greek Cynic philosopher whom Gurdjieff resembles, once said of himself that like the chorus master, he set the note a little high so that the chorus would hit the right note. For his pupils and in his writings, Gurdjieff set the note "a little high" as a goal and inspiration, while in his personal conduct he was generous to "the average man." Many such people attended his funeral at the Russian cathedral, rue Daru. Gurdjieff's pupils did not know them.

Bibliography

Gurdjieff is best known through the published works of his pupils. His one-time student P. D. Ouspensky wrote In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, which some regard as a crucial introduction to the teaching. Others refer to Gurdjieff's own books (detailed below) as the primary texts.
Accounts of time spent with Gurdjieff have been published by A. R. Orage, Charles Stanley Nott, Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, Fritz Peters, René Daumal, John G. Bennett, Maurice Nicoll, Margaret Anderson, and Louis Pauwels, among others. Many others were drawn to his 'ideas table': Frank Lloyd Wright, Kathryn Hulme, P. L. Travers, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Toomer.

Three books by Gurdjieff were published after his death: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Meetings with Remarkable Men, and Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'. This trilogy is Gurdjieff's legominism, known collectively as All and Everything. A legominism is, according to Gurdjieff, "one of the means of transmitting information about certain events of long-past ages through initiates". A book of his early talks was also collected by his student and personal secretary, Olga de Hartmann, and published in 1973 as Views from the Real World: Early Talks in Moscow, Essentuki, Tiflis, Berlin, London, Paris, New York, and Chicago, as recollected by his pupils.

The feature film Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), based on Gurdjieff's book by the same name, depicts rare performances of the sacred dances taught to serious students of his work, known simply as the movements. The film was written by Jeanne de Salzmann and Peter Brook, directed by Brook, and stars Dragan Maksimovic and Terence Stamp.

J Craig Venter-Brilliantly Inspired, and Changing the World

The J. Craig Venter Institute

J. Craig Venter Interview in Wired
Picture this: You are standing at the edge of a lagoon on a South Pacific island. The nearest village is 20 miles away, reachable only by boat. The water is as clear as air. Overhead, white fairy terns hover and peep among the coconut trees. Perhaps 100 yards away, you see a man strolling in the shallows. He is bald, bearded, and buck naked. He stoops every once in a while to pick up a shell or examine something in the sand...

Wikipedia Biography

Venter is an ex-surfer and a Vietnam war veteran. According to Time, it was not always evident that he would become a transformative figure, particularly when he was a boy; according to his biography, A Life Decoded, he was said to be never a terribly engaged student, having Cs and Ds in his eighth grade report cards.
He enlisted in the United States Navy and served a tour of duty during the Vietnam War. While in Vietnam, he attempted to commit suicide by swimming out to sea, but changed his mind more than a mile out.

Venter began his academic career at a community college, College of San Mateo in California.

More...


He received his bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1972, and his Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology in 1975 — both from the University of California, San Diego. In San Diego, he married former Ph.D. candidate, Barbara Rae. After working as a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he joined the National Institutes of Health in 1984. In Buffalo, he divorced Dr. Rae-Venter and married his student, Claire M. Fraser,[ and remained married to Ms. Fraser until 2005.
While at NIH, Venter learned of a technique for rapidly identifying all of the mRNAs present in a cell, and began to use it to identify human brain genes. The short cDNA sequence fragments discovered by this method are called expressed sequence tags, or ESTs, a name coined by Anthony Kerlavage at The Institute for Genomic Research. In a controversial court case, Venter tried to patent these gene fragments and lost the case.

Human Genome Project

He was the former president and founder of Celera Genomics, which became famous for running a parallel version of the Human Genome Project of its own for commercial purposes, using shotgun sequencing technology in 1999. The method was blasted by the international genetics community who derided it as unfeasible. The aim of the Celera project was to create a database of genomic data that users could subscribe to for a fee. This proved very unpopular in the genetics community and spurred several groups to redouble their efforts to produce the full sequence and release it as open access. At the same time, the HGP consortium applied political pressure to appropriate the shotgun technology and the collected data from Venter's company. There were also concerns that Venter might shatter what was supposed to be an "international" face on a landmark event in history. DNA from 5 individuals was used by Celera to generate the sequence of the human genome; one of the 5 individuals used in this project was Venter. In the end, Celera Genomics submitted to the pressure and shared its data and the credit for sequencing of the human genome with the international consortium of the Human Genome Project, which was composed of many groups from around the world. After his inability to collect royalties for the Human Genome, Venter was fired by Celera in early 2002.

Venter resisted efforts by the company board to change the strategic direction of the company.
Despite their differing motivations, Venter and rival scientist Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome in 2000, along with US President Bill Clinton. Venter and Collins thus shared an award for "Biography of the Year" from A&E Network.

Current work

Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in 1992. He is currently the president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, created and funded by TIGR's board (which Venter chairs). In June of 2005, he co-founded Synthetic Genomics, a firm dedicated to using modified microorganisms to produce ethanol and hydrogen as alternative fuels. He used his sloop, Sorcerer II, in the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition to help assess genetic diversity in marine microbial communities.

On September 4, 2007, a team led by Sam Levy published the first complete (six-billion-letter) genome of an individual human — Venter's own DNA sequence. Some of the sequences in Venter's genome are associated with wet earwax, increased risk of antisocial behavior, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular diseases. This publication was especially interesting since it contained a diploid instead of a haploid genome and shows promise for personalized medicine via genotyping.
The Human Reference (HuRef) Genome Browser is a Web application (http://huref.jcvi.org) for the navigation and analysis of the Venter's recently published genome.

The HuRef database consists of approximately 32 million DNA reads sequenced using Sanger methods, assembled into 4,528 scaffolds and 4.1 million DNA variations identified by genome analysis. These variants include Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), block substitutions, short and large indels, structural variants like insertion, deletions, inversions and copy number changes.

The browser enables scientists to navigate the HuRef genome assembly and sequence variations, and to compare it with the NCBI human build 36 assembly in the context of the NCBI and Ensembl annotations. The browser provides a comparative view between NCBI and HuRef consensus sequences, the sequence multi-alignment of the HuRef assembly, Ensembl and dbSNP annotations, HuRef variants, and the underlying variant evidence and functional analysis. The interface also represents the haplotype blocks from which diploid genome sequence can be inferred and the relation of variants to gene annotations. The display of variants and gene annotations are linked to external public resources including dbSNP, Ensembl , Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) and Gene Ontology (GO).

Users can search the HuRef genome using HUGO gene names, Ensembl and dbSNP identifiers, HuRef contig or scaffold locations, or NCBI chromosome locations. Users can then easily and quickly browse any genomic region via the simple and intuitive pan and zoom controls; furthermore relevant data in specific loci can be exported for further analysis.
[edit]Mycoplasma laboratorium

Venter is seeking to patent the first life-form created by humanity, possibly to be named Mycoplasma laboratorium. There is speculation that this line of research could lead to producing bacteria that have been engineered to perform specific reactions, e.g. produce fuels, make medicines, combat global warming, etc.

In a recent interview with New Scientist when asked "Assuming you can make synthetic bacteria, what will you do with them?", Venter replied

Over the next 20 years, synthetic genomics is going to become the standard for making anything. The chemical industry will depend on it. Hopefully, a large part of the energy industry will depend on it. We really need to find an alternative to taking carbon out of the ground, burning it, and putting it into the atmosphere. That is the single biggest contribution I could make.
Furthermore it suggests that one of the main purposes for creating synthetic bacteria would be to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels.

golden dawn bios: yeats, mathers

William Butler Yeats
June 13, 1865 - January 28th, 1939

William Butler Yeats is one of the many famous names to come from the original Golden Dawn. His poetry and writings were a display of his passion for mysticism and the Occult Sciences. These were largely expressed in various publications (e.g. Your Pathway), earning him the Nobel Prize in 1924 for literature. But more important was his desire and striving for knowledge of that which is beyond what we know and that of the unknown.

More...

William Butler Yeats was third-generation Irish, born in Dublin on June 13, 1865. From day one he was up against a wall regarding his religious beliefs, for his grandfather was a deeply Orthodox Rector in the Church of England, while his father was a complete religious skeptic. With this conflict already in place, young William walked the very fine line of between faith and disbelief.
Being faced with this dilema, Yeats was destined to find the balance by whatever means necessary. This first step occurred after reading numerous text on the subjects of Occultism, the Tibetan Mysteries, Buddhism, and other beliefs. All of these subjects ignited his desire to learn and to know. Aside from his readings, what further expanded his desire was his discovery of a society purporting to be Ancient and non-European. This new movement simply called The Theosophical Society, claimed to have the ability to offer a "synthesis" of religion, science, and philosophy. For at that particular time in human development, none of these three disciplines were ready to integrate with the other, but this is what fascinated Yeats. This is what he longed for.
Upon hearing of the Society, Yeats soon met the founder, Madame Helene Blavatsky, and was very intrigued by her. After many metaphysical conversations with her and many hours of long thought on the issue, Yeats took one of his first steps on his path of occult wisdom, and joined the famed Theosophical Society of London. The Society provided Yeats with a kind of outlet that he needed to express his thoughts and feelings that the Victorian society of the time might have considered risque or improper. After attending various Theosophical meetings, Yeats felt at home.
William felt this way at least on an outside level. But deep on the inside, his heart had another desire that the Society could never touch. Being around others who shared similar lines of thinking was a step in the right direction for Yeats, but he realized that there was more to all this learned knowledge than just plain talk. With the thoughts in his mind forming very strongly, Yeats was once again yearning for more than what his universe had revealed.
But soon after this discovery was made, Yeats also discovered that fellow members of the Theosophical society felt the same. It was at this point that Madame Blavatsky was approached by such people, asking for more. She obliged, and formed an additional branch to the Society called, "The Esoteric Section." This branch of the Society dared to venture into the area of magic and hoped to prove to others that Occult phenomena is possible. This was the answer to Yeats prayers, (to an extent). In addition, the E.S. assured everyone that they would not actually be practicing magic but would be undergoing the necessary magical training before magical power was entrusted to the student.
Such magical training consisted of the learning of magical and esoteric symbols, correspondences, creating interrelationships between the seasons, various parts of the body, the five elements, colors, numbers, etc.
As fulfilling as all of this new knowledge and experience was, Yeats soon lost hope in this new branch, due to the fact that all experiments performed by the E.S. were quite unsuccessful. Several took place; raising the ghost of a flower, evoking a dream by use of a symbol under the dreamer's pillow, all of which failed. Once again, Yeats felt that something was missing. After witnessing many failures and only minimal success, Yeats lost hope in this new branch, and felt it was time to continue on, rather than stay stagnant. This led to his discovery of another society, which many of his friends in the T.S. were joining. This new organization was beautifully titled,
"The Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn."

The Golden Dawn satisfied Yeat's need to dig into his very core, and unleash what has been buried for so long. As Yeats soon discovered, the Golden Dawn Incorporated traditional European Cabalistic Magic and astrology, as opposed to the wisdom of the East. In addition, the Golden Dawn encouraged exploration and wielding of power (over the material universe, unlike Blavatsky who constantly warned students against the practice of phenomena and oftentimes discouraged it altogether.) This highly pleased Yeats, and allowed him to open his magical aspirations to as high as he would go.
Aside from knowing various friends in the Golden Dawn that were previously attending the T.S., Yeats' decision to join the Golden Dawn can be credited to one of the Order's founders: S. L. MacGregor Mathers. His magical powers left a strong and lasting impression upon Yeats, and assured him of the validity of the Golden Dawn's Work.
Instead of handing him theories on how and why things work, the Golden Dawn showed him the answers, gave him the desired results, and the freedom and the opportunity for constant experimentation and expression. This expression was further reflected in his writings. For example, his poem, Images, makes many references to various Occult meanings.
IMAGES

On Abiegino's side a multitude.
Restored by drinking that miraculous wine
to human form: Day beats upon their eyes
Sounds of unfinished battle upon their ears
One sways his head and laughs, another weeps.
Then all laugh out, discovering in laughter
that the dark valley at the mountain forest
Where wold must war on walk, abounding
grass.

Grow out of that foul blood, is magical
That they imagined it and bound themselves.
Therein contented with that bitter sweet
But the wind changes and the valley howls
One howls his answer back and one by one
They drop upon all fours, creep valley -- wards
Question that instant for these forms O heart
These chuckling & howling forms begot
the sages.

Yeats continued his search for knowledge of that which is not written for man to read. But like all things, life comes to an end. His accomplished life ended when the Sun entered Aquarius on January 28th, 1939. Roqueborne, South France was where he took his last breath. A last breath that would be long remembered by those in the world of literature, and the thousands who are thinking with a Western Mind.

Macgregor Mathers


S. L. MacGregor Mathers
1854 - 1918

Samual Liddel Mathers was born in 1854 at what is now 108 De Beauvoir Road, London, N.I.. His birthday is January the eighth, making him a Capricorn. Mathers claimed to be a descendant of the clan MacGregor and of Highland Scottish blood. Thus, this is why he added the name "MacGregor." Mathers, according to William Butler Yeats, had two ruling passions in his life: "magic and the theory of war." (It is interesting to note that although Mathers studied and wrote about military techniques, he was a strong vegetarian and avid anti-vivasectionist.)
It was Mathers who made the first English translation of Knorr Von Rosenroth's, "Kabbalah Denudata." This work was commissioned by Dr. Woodman and Dr. Westcott. It was about that time that the first discussions of the Golden Dawn were taking place. Mathers had an additional mentor who probably had the most impact on his life. This was Dr. Anna Kingsford (1846 - 1888), and it was to her that he dedicated the "Kabbalah Unveiled."
Dr. Anna Kingsford was one of the early fighters for women's rights. This characteristic was adopted by Mathers who demanded that women share equally in all ways in the Golden Dawn. She was also an anti-vivisectionist and a vegetarian. And, at a time when almost every male in English society smoked a pipe or cigar, Mathers was a non-smoker. Without a doubt that Dr. Kingsford, as a friend and as the leader of the Hermetic Society, was of great influence on the young and impressionable MacGregor Mathers.
Mathers used two mottos in the Golden Dawn. One was his Outer Order motto and was the motto of the entire MacGregor clan. The other comes from a mars talisman. They are respectfully:
S.R.M.D. which stands for S' Rioghail Mo Dhrem, meaning "Royal is my race."

D.D.C.F. which stands for Deo Duce Comite Ferro, meaning "God as my guide, my companion a sword."

Unlike many back then and even now, Mathers dedicated his entire life to the Western Mystery Tradition and to the magical way of life. He was not only the Chief of the Second Order of the Golden Dawn, he was the author of almost all of the important Golden Dawn teachings and documents. He masterfully took a dry system of angelic magic brought forth by the early British Astrologer Dr. John Dee and developed it into what may very well be one of the most powerful magical systems in the world.
Much of what we know of the Tarot comes from Mathers and his wife. Today, we take the Tarot for granted, but without the ground breaking work of Mathers and the Golden Dawn, our Tarot symbolism might be basic and trite. Also, the Z Documents of the Order were gigantic contributions in the area of magical methods and techniques. To this day, most reputable sources on invocation, skrying, divination etc. borrow from the Z Documents knowingly or unknowingly. (The Z Documents should not be confused with Z-5, a series of books by Patrick Zawelski.)
Mathers was an eccentric. He loved the drama of good ritual. He often dressed in his Highlander garb when working on or with the Celtic pantheon. Later, he would change his living decor to Egyptian as he produced the public invocation to Isis in Paris. These invocations were very successful, and it was Mathers who brought forth the Egyptian pantheon into the Golden Dawn.
Mathers was seemingly very good with language. He was able to read and translate English, Hebrew, Latin, French, Celtic, Coptic and Greek. This, in itself, is quite interesting in that there is no record of him being taught so many languages in school. He must have learned them through another source or in another way.

Here is a list of books and material Mathers authored:

Practical Instruction in Infantry Campaigning Exercise (1884) (French)
The Tarot: A Short Treatise on Reading Cards (French)

The Fall of Granada: A Poem in Six Duans (1885) (French)

The Qabbalah Unveiled (1888) [Originally in Chaldee, but he translated the seventeenth century version of the Kabbala Dunatta by Knorr Von Rosenroth from Latin.

Egyptian Symbolism (Published in Paris)

The Grimoire of Armadel (French)

The Tarot, Its Occult Significance and Methods of Play (1888) (French?)

The Key of Solomon the King: Clavicula Solomonis (1889) (Hebrew)

The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (1896) (French)

Astral Projection Ritual Magic and Alchemy -(Credit) Original Writings of the Golden Dawn Volume #1

Mathers has been much maligned by authors such as Crowley. Even many modern authors have portrayed a negative view of him. However, many of these authors had connections to organizations that broke away from Mathers and the Golden Dawn.
S.L. MacGregor Mathers, in many ways, remains somewhat of a private individual. No one really knows how he died. Violet Firth (Dion Fortune) claimed it was from the Spanish Influenza of 1918, but at best this is probably just a guess on her part. Moina Mathers claimed he was coherent right up unto the time of his death and that exhaustion from years of work with the secret Chiefs of the Third Order was responsible. It is very peculiar indeed that no body or grave site has ever been located of MacGregor Mathers, and there is no cause of death on his death certificate.
Whatever Mathers was or has become, in our minds, his work lives on in the life and Light of the Golden Dawn.

For more information about Mathers, please read the article The Truth about S.L. MacGregor Mathers.

william butler yeats and the golden dawn

Written and compiled by George Knowles.

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. His poetry and writings were a display of his passion for Irish mythology and folklore mixed with mysticism and the occult Sciences. He was a driving force behind the Irish literary revival and a co-founder of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin. As a prominent public figure, he served for six years in the Irish Free State Senate (1922-28), and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, his nomination stated that: “…his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”.

More...


Yeats was a third-generation Irishman, the eldest of four children. He was born on the 13th June 1865 in the seaside village of Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland. His father John Butler Yeats was a lawyer turned Irish Pre-Raphaelite painter, while his mother Susan Pollexfen came from a wealthy family who had prospered in the milling and shipping business. His mother introduced Yeats and his two sisters: Susan Mary Yeats (1866-1949) and Elizabeth Corbet Yeats (1868-1940) to the Irish folktales and legends he would grow to love so much. His younger brother Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957) followed in his father’s footsteps and become an accomplished artist.



Father - John Butler Yeats

In 1867 his father moved the family to London and settled in Bedford Park were he could study art. While there, Yeats attended the Godolphin School in Hammersmith before the family moved back to Dublin. In Dublin, he attended the Erasmus Smith High School, and in 1884, enrolled in Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art. While studying at the Metropolitan, Yeats met with the poet, dramatist and painter George Russell (commonly referred to as AE), whose interest in mysticism and theosophy inspired him to take a closer look at alternative religions. After reading numerous texts on the Tibetan Mysteries, Buddhism and other religious beliefs, he became fascinated in the subjects of reincarnation, spiritualism and occultism.



George Russell

In the meantime Yeats had started to write, and gained his first publication merits in 1885, when two of his lyrical poems appeared in the Dublin University Review. In 1886, Yeats formed the Dublin Lodge of the Hermetic Society, before returning to Bedford Park the following year to concentrate on his writing. Yeats quickly became involved in the literary life of London, making friends with fellow poets William Morris and W.E. Henley. In 1890 he and Ernest Rhys co-founded the Rhymers Club, whose members included other like-minded poets and writers from London’s literary elite. The group met regularly and published anthologies in 1892 and 1894.

While Yeats returned to Ireland nearly every summer, he was mostly kept busy in London, when not attending lectures or meetings at the Rhymers Club; he spent time in the British Museum of Natural History researching Irelands pre-Christian history. Yeats had always had a fascination for Irish legends and folktales, and as a part of an exploration of his Irish national heritage, he had hopes for an Irish literary revival. His study with George Russell and Douglas Hyde: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry was published in 1888. Yeats later wrote a less detailed version for children called: Irish Fairy Tales, published in 1892. The Wanderings Of Oisin And Other Poems published in 1889 is filled with sad longings, and was based on Irish mythology.

Yeats was often shy around women but made the acquaintance of many who became his friends, including the poet Katharine Tynan (1861-1931) and theosophist Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891) founder of the Theosophical Society, which Yeats joined in 1888. The Theosophical Society provided Yeats with the intellectual outlet he needed to express his thoughts and feelings on mysticism, but lacked the deeper practical aspects of magical symbolism that he sought. For this he turned to “The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn”, led by a fellow researcher he first met while studying at the British Museum of Natural History, S.L. MacGregor Mathers.



Madame Helena Blavatsky - S.L. MacGregor Mathers

Yeats was admitted into the Golden Dawn's Isis-Urania temple as a Neophyte on the 7th March 1890, taking for his motto Demon est Deus inversus (D.E.D.I. for short), which translated reads as Devil is the reverse of God, a name he took from the writings of Madame Blavatsky. After fractious events led to the break-up of the original Golden Dawn in the early 1900’s, Yeats joined forces with Dr. Robert William Felkin and John William Brodie-Innes in the Amoun Temple of the newly formed “Order of the Stella Matutina”. Yeats completed his Theoricus Adeptus Minor sub-grade in 1912, advancing to the 6=5 grade of Adeptus Major in 1914, from which time he served as Imperator and Instructor of Ancient Traditions until 1922. Yeats eventually left the Order being disillusioned with the constant in-fighting and power struggles among its members.

Yeats set out his magical beliefs in a lecture to “Golden Dawn” members in 1901:

“I believe in the practise and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are:

(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
(2) That the borders of our memories are shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols”.

In 1889 Yeats met the love-of-his-life Maud Gonne, a beautiful Irish actress who became a major focus in his future writings. Yeats worshipped Maud, but his love was hopeless lost. While she liked, admired and respected him, she was not in love with him; her passion was reserved for Ireland. She was a fervent Irish patriot, a rebel, commanding in voice and in person. She became a speaker for the Land League, founded the Daughters of Ireland (a nationalist organization), and helped to organize the Irish brigades that fought against the British in the South African War. It was Maud who influenced Yeats to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood, but while she had devoted herself to political struggle, Yeats viewed her world with suspicion.



Maud Gonne

After the death of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, Yeats believed that Irish political life had lost its significance, and felt that the vacuum left by politics might be better filled by literature, art, poetry and drama dedicated to Irelands national heritage, its culture and legends. In 1893, his first effort towards this end was a volume of essays called The Celtic Twilight. In 1896 Yeats returned to live permanently in his home town of Dublin, were he set about reforming the Irish National Literary Society in efforts to promote a new Irish Library.



Charles Stewart Parnell

In 1897, Yeats met Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, with whose patronage he founded the Irish Literary Theatre, which later became the Irish National Theatre Society. In 1904 the theatre moved to new premises and was re-named the Abbey Theatre, after the street in Dublin on which it stood. Yeats remained a director of the theatre for the rest of his life, writing several plays for it, his most famous being The Land Of Heart's Desire (1894) and Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902). Another director was the dramatist John Synge (1871-1909), a close friend of Yeats whose masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World (1907) was greeted with riots.



Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory - Coole Park

Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory was an Irish aristocrat, who after the death of her husband Sir William Gregory in 1892, had become involved in efforts to arouse Irish nationalism through an appreciation of Irish literature and speech. She had collected a vast store of old legends and folklore about Ireland, which Yeats found matched with his own researches of Irelands ancient rituals and beliefs. From 1898, Yeats spent his summers at Lady Gregory's home in Coole Park, County Galway. Later he bought a derelict Norman stone tower situated in the same neighbourhood as Coole Park, called Thoor Ballylee. After restoring it, the tower became his permanent summer home and a central symbol in his later poetry.

In 1899, Yeats asked Maud Gonne to marry him, but she rejected him, and four years later married Major John MacBride, an Irish soldier who shared her feelings for Ireland and her opposition to what she perceived as English oppression. MacBride was one of the rebels later executed by the British government for his part in the Easter Rising of 1916, while Maud herself was imprisoned for her part. After his death, Maud remained active in movements for the release of Irish political prisoners. Their son Sean MacBride later became foreign minister of Ireland and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Due to his association with Maud, a police report of 1899 describes Yeats as “more or less revolutionary”, perhaps he was, but never physically, only literarily, in 1916 he published Easter 1916. It referred to the executed leaders of the uprising and stated: “Now and in time to be, / Wherever the green is worn, / All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born”. In 1902 when his play Cathleen ni Houlihan was first performed in Dublin, it was Maud who played the title role.

During the winters of 1913-14, Yeats vacationed in England, spending time at Stone Cottage in Sussex with his friend the American poet and critic Ezra Pound. Pound, who was acting as his secretary at the time, was also editing translations of the Nō dramas of Japan, which caught the imagination of Yeats. Yeats thought that the Nō dramas could be re-designed for a small audience of initiates, using the resources offered by masks, mime, dance and song to convey his own recondite symbolism, and set about writing what he considered their equivalent in his plays: At the Hawk's Well (first performed 1916) and Four Plays for Dancers (1921).


Ezra Pound in 1913

By the age of 52, having constantly been rejected by the love-of-his-life, Yeats became obsessed with her daughter Iseult Gonne, who also turned down his advances. A few weeks later he proposed to 26-year-old Miss Georgie Hyde-Lees, while half his age she accepted and they married in 1917. Yeats at first doubted the marriage would work, but they were happy. During the honeymoon Georgie demonstrated her gift for automatic writing, and the notebooks they made of their sessions, later formed the basis of A Vision (1925). They had two children, a daughter Anne Butler Yeats born in 1919, and a son William Michael Yeats in 1921.


Georgie Hyde-Lees

In 1922, Yeats turned his attention to politics, and on the formation of the new Irish Free State, accepted an invitation to become a member of the Senate. Yeats served on the Senate for the next six years, where as a politician he defended Protestant interests and took a pro-Treaty stance against the Republicans. This put him at odds with his old flame Maud Gonne, for under the Emergency Legislation that he voted for, her son, Sean MacBride was imprisoned without trial.

In 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and became a celebrated figure, recognized as one of the most significant English-language poets of the 20th century. In 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee for the last time, much of his remaining life was spent outside of Ireland. In his final years with his health declining, he worked on the last version of A Vision (first published in 1925). This was followed in 1936 with his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1892–1935), a collection of his most favourite poems, and New Poems (1938). Also in 1938, he attended the Abbey theatre for the last time, to see the premier of his play Purgatory.



Yeats in 1930
After suffering from a variety of illnesses for a number of years, Yeats died on the 28th January 1939 at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France. He was buried first at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France, until in accordance with his final wishes, his coffin was moved to Drumcliffe, County Sligo, aboard the Irish Navy corvette L.E. Macha in September 1948. His grave is now a famous attraction in Sligo, bearing his own unique epitaph, taken from one of his last poems Under Ben Bulben in which he wrote: “No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot / By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman; pass by!”



Yeats’ gravestone with his famous epitaph.

Yeats once said, “the place that has really influenced my life most is Sligo”. Sligo is also home to a statue and memorial building in his honor.

Remote Viewing (on Wikipedia)

Remote Viewing (RV) refers to the attempt to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means or extra-sensory perception. Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974.

Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a 20 million dollar research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community.

One of the early experiments was lauded as having improved the methodology of remote viewing testing and as raising future experimental standards, but also criticized as leaking information to the participants by inadvertently leaving clues. Some later experiments had negative results when these clues were eliminated.

More...


Remote viewing, like other forms of extra-sensory perception, is generally considered as pseudoscience due to the need to overcome fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles currently held by the scientific community, and the lack of a positive theory that explains the outcomes.

History

From World War II until the 1970s the US government occasionally funded ESP research. When the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were conducting ESP research, it became receptive to the idea of having its own competing psi research program.

Early Stanford Research Institute experiments

In 1972 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) laser physicist Hal Puthoff tested remote viewer Ingo Swann, and the experiment led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. The result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project. As research continued, the SRI team published papers in Nature, in Proceedings of the IEEE and in the proceedings of a symposium on consciousness for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials including John McMahon, then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's Deputy Director, became strong supporters of the program. By the mid 1970s, facing the post-Watergate revelations of its "skeletons," and after internal criticism of the program, the CIA dropped sponsorship of the SRI research effort.

Sponsorship was picked up by the Air Force, led by analyst Dale E. Graff of the Foreign Technology Division. In 1979, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI investigators, was ordered to develop its own program by the Army's chief intelligence officer, Gen. Ed Thompson. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices, also continued to provide taskings to SRI's subjects.

The program had three parts. First was the evaluation of psi research performed by the U.S.S.R. and China, which appears to have been better-funded and better-supported than the government research in the U.S.

In the second part of the program, SRI managed its own stable of "natural" psychics both for research purposes and to make them available for tasking by a variety of US intelligence agencies. The most famous results from these years were Pat Price's description of a big crane at a Soviet nuclear research facility, a description of a new class of Soviet strategic submarine by a team of three viewers including Joseph McMoneagle and Rosemary Smith's location of a downed Soviet bomber in Africa (which former President Carter later referred to in speeches). By the early 1980s numerous offices throughout the intelligence community were providing taskings to SRI's psychics.

The third branch of the program was a research project intended to find out if ESP – now called "remote viewing" – could be made accurate and reliable. The intelligence community offices that tasked the group seemed to believe that the phenomenon was real. But in the view of these taskers, a remote viewer could be "on" one day and "off" the next, a fact that made it hard for the technique to be officially accepted. Through SRI, individuals were studied for years in a search for physical (e.g., brain-wave) correlates that might reveal when they were "on- or off-target".

At SRI, Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff also developed a remote-viewing training program meant to enable any individual with a suitable background to produce useful data. As part of this project, a number of military officers and civilians were trained and formed a military remote viewing unit, based at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Decline and termination

A struggle between unbelievers and believers in the sponsor organizations provided much of the program's actual drama. Each side seems to have been utterly convinced that the other's views were wrong.

In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster, appointed an Army Colonel, William Johnson, to manage the remote viewing unit and evaluate its objective usefulness. According to an account by former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith, Johnson spent several months running the remote viewing unit against military and DEA targets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote viewing's validity as a phenomenon but in its usefulness as an intelligence tool.

After the Democrats lost control of the Senate in late 1994, funding declined and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995, with the promise that it would be evaluated there, but most participants in the program believed that it would be terminated.

AIR evaluation of remote viewing

In 1995, the CIA hired the American Institutes for Research, a perennial intelligence-industry contractor, to perform a retrospective evaluation of the results generated by the remote-viewing program, the Stargate Project. Most of the program's results were not seen by the evaluators, with the report focusing on the most recent experiments, and only from government-sponsored research. One of the reviewers was Ray Hyman, a long-time critic of psi research, and another was Jessica Utts who, as a supporter of psi, was chosen to put forward the pro-psi argument. Utts maintained that there had been a statistically significant positive effect, with some subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance. Hyman argued that Utts' conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist, "is premature, to say the least." Hyman said the findings had yet to be replicated independently, and that more investigation would be necessary to "legitimately claim the existence of paranormal functioning." Based upon the study, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls, the CIA terminated the 20 million dollar project in 1995. Time magazine stated in 1995 three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon be shut down.

According to the official AIR report there was insufficient evidence of the utility of the intelligence data produced. David Goslin, of the American Institute for Research said, "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community."

PEAR's Remote Perception program

Following Utts' emphasis on replication and Hyman's challenge on interlaboratory consistency in the American Institutes for Research report, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab conducted several hundred trials to see if they could replicate the SAIC and SRI experiments. They created an analytical judgment methodology to replace the human judging process that was criticized in past experiments. They felt the results of the experiments were consistent with the SRI experiments.

Distant viewing and Stephan Schwartz

Parallel with the work at SRI, Stephan A. Schwartz, who had just left government as Special Assistant to the US Chief of Naval Operations, developed almost the same protocol which he called Distant Viewing. To study this, he began a research laboratory known as Mobius. A central question in the seminal IEEE paper was whether RV was electromagnetic in nature, or something else. Schwartz had begun to consider how this might be studied in 1973, after reading the work of Soviet Academician Leonid Vasiliev, the tutor for Russian psychic Nina Kulagina. This work had eliminated all of the EM spectrum except for very low frequency ranges, known as ELF.

Testing in the ELF range required a submarine, because the only shield for ELF is hundreds of feet of seawater. In 1976 Schwartz was offered the use of a small submersible, capable of the depth required, by University of Southern California Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies. In 1977, as the experiment was about to go to sea, he invited SRI to assist in the study. The Project, known as Deep Quest, was carried out with logistical support from the USC Institute. It took place off of Santa Catalina Island. Two remote viewings, one by Hella Hammid, and one by Ingo Swann, described where target individuals were hiding in California. Both sessions were conducted while the submarine was at depth, and both were considered successful by the researchers. The targets were, respectively, a tree and a shopping mall. Swann commented his site "could be City Hall."

The experiment also tested a protocol Schwartz had devised involving five multiple viewers. Four were given charts of the Pacific Ocean and were asked to locate an unknown wreck on the seafloor. They chose as their location a 10 mile square area near Santa Catalina. The sunken vessel was determined by the Bureau of Land Management Marine Sites Board to be previously unknown. A documentary was shot as the events took place of the entire project was made. But the riches which Schwartz and his investors have sought in their many undersea expeditions have never been found. The ship Schwartz's team found on the Bahamas Banks was carrying molasses, not the treasure that was their goal.

Schwartz also claims he was involved in the discovery and the first modern mapping of the Eastern Harbor of Alexandria and the discovery of numerous shipwrecks as well as Mark Anthony's palace in Alexandria, the Ptolemaic Palace Complex of Cleopatra, and the remains of the Lighthouse of Pharos. Much of this was discounted by two on-site Egyptian scholars whom Schwartz had listed as research associates, Dr. Shehetta Adam, head of Egypt's Department of Antiquities and Dr. Mostafa El Abbadi.


Scientific analysis

According to psychologist David Marks in experiments conducted in the 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute, the notes given to the judges contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the page. Dr. Marks concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates.

Marks has also suggested that the participants of remote viewing experiments are influenced by subjective validation, a process through which correspondences are perceived between stimuli that are in fact associated purely randomly. Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unattainable.

Others have said that the information from remote viewing sessions can be vague and include a lot of erroneous data. A 1995 report for the American Institute for Research contains a section of anonymous reports describing how remote viewing was tentatively used in a number of operational situations. The three reports conclude that the data was too vague to be of any use, and in the report that offers the most positive results the writer notes that the viewers "had some knowledge of the target organizations and their operations but not the background of the particular tasking at hand."

According to James Randi, controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) has said that he agrees remote viewing has been proven using the normal standards of science, but that the bar of evidence needs to be much higher for outlandish claims that will revolutionise the world, and thus he remains unconvinced:

"I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do. (...) if I said that a UFO had just landed, you'd probably want a lot more evidence. Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don't have that evidence." Richard Wiseman Daily Mail, January 28, 2008, pp 28-29

Wiseman also pointed at several problems with one of the early experiments at SAIC, like information leakage. However, he indicated the importance of its process-oriented approach and of its refining of remote viewing methodology, which meant that researchers replicating their work could avoid these problems. Wiseman later insisted there were multiple opportunities for participants on that experiment to be influenced by inadverted cues and that these cues can inluence the results when they appear.

Psychologist Ray Hyman says that, even if the results were reproduced under specified conditions, they would still not be a conclusive demonstration of the existence of physic functioning. He blames this on the reliance on a negative outcome -- the claims on ESP are based on the results of experiments not being explained by normal means. He says that the experiments lack a positive theory that guides as to what to control on them and what to ignore, and that "Parapsychologists have not come close to (having a positive theory) as yet". Ray Himan also says that the amount and quality of the experiments on RV are way too low to convince the scientific community to "abandon its fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles", due to its findings still not having been replicated successfully under careful scrutiny.

Science writer Martin Gardner, and others, describe the topic of remote viewing as pseudoscience. Gardner says that founding researcher Harold Puthoff was an active Scientologist prior to his work at Stanford University, and that this influenced his research at SRI. In 1970, the Church of Scientology published a notarized letter that had been written by Puthoff while he was conducting research on remote viewing at Stanford. The letter read, in part: "Although critics viewing the system [Scientology] from the outside may form the impression that Scientology is just another of many quasi-educational quasi-religious 'schemes,' it is in fact a highly sophistical and highly technological system more characteristic of modern corporate planning and applied technology." Among some of the ideas that Puthoff supported regarding remote viewing was the claim that two followers of Madame Blavatsky, founder of theosophy, were able to remote-view the inner structure of atoms.

Pseudoscientific Concepts

Claims:
Certain people have the paranormal ability to use their minds to see hidden, distant locations using the psychic powers of extra-sensory perception.
Related scientific disciplines:

Physics, Biology, Psychology
Year proposed: 1974

Original proponents:
Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff

Current proponents:
Ingo Swann, Russell Targ, Joseph McMoneagle, and Courtney Brown

Direct link to Wikipedia article