A conversation with Oliver Markley and Ruben Nelson remembering Willis Harman, author of Global Mind Change and An Incomplete guide to the Future exploring who he was and what he meant to them. Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
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Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward: When you are doing a PhD you read a lot of books. One that I read and which made a big impact on me was Global Mind Change by Willis Harman. In my FuturePod journey I was always on the look out for guests who could do a Remembering podcast about Willis and I delighted to say that I have done just that. So who was Willis Harman?
Ruben Nelson: What Willis was for me was a senior and established person who basically said, Butch, the work that you're doing and the instincts that you have are all good doing it. Because remember, I've been fired for these instincts by the Prime Minister of Canada. In my life he's one of only half a dozen people who are truly extraordinary and part of it is the way that they were extraordinary. Way ahead of their time.
Oliver Markley: The main way that Willis really influenced me was to follow my own internal bliss about consciousness and be a vision. That's the reason I got into visioning work that it turned out to really do good trend analysis to look at only the cognitive. Aspect is not enough. You need to look at the intuitive side of things how to do that was deep relaxation and self-hypnosis and tapping into intuition and with his encouragement, I developed those tools and applied them and then published on 'em later as a professor. But the main thing that Willis really influences. Follow your bliss, do your thing.
Peter Hayward: Those are my guests today. Returning to FuturePod are Ruben Nelson and Oliver Markley to remember Willis. Welcome back to Future Pod Ruben Nelson and Oliver Markley. Glad to be here
Ruben Nelson: indeed.
Oliver Markley: This whole series of podcast you're doing, Peter, is wonderful.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, mate. So we're here to remember, and to let people find out a little bit about this person, Willis Harman that you both knew and worked with.
So I'll start you both with the opening question, which is, who was Willis Harman and how did you meet him?
Oliver Markley: Okay. So, Willis Harman was a professor at Stanford. When I got a four year fellowship to go to Stanford, I was an engineer, and my civil engineering teacher at San Diego State said, “If you're going to Stanford, there's one course you have to take. It's by this electrical engineer named Willis Harman, but it's called a Seminar on the Human Potential and it changes people's lives.”
So I went, and it did change my life as it changed many people's lives. The one thing that really blew me away was when he told us about his experimentation with liturgic acid and about how one of the people who took it had an experience of knowing heaven and hell.
Harman continued, “And by the way, I'm doing LSD research with some other people and you can buy your way into this research program. So of course I had to go for it.
And that's the way I met Willis Harman.
But mostly Harman is known as one of the creative pioneers of the Human Potential movement. One of the papers he wrote was called the “New Copernican Revolution.” It is about the coming of transpersonal psychology and a new paradigm. And his book on global mind , written at the end of his life was really the fulling fulfilling of all of that.
Peter Hayward: Wow.
Ruben Nelson: All amen to that. Willis came into my life, be at a time when Oliver, you were working with him at … What was the name of that institute on education.
Oliver Markley: That was called the Education Policy Research Institute. Basically, what happened was Willis got tired of teaching and he decided he wanted to do research at a time that as part of the Great Society movement, the Office of Education funded five pilot projects and SRI got one of them, Willis went from the Sanford University over to the Research Institute and he offered me a job of head of methodology in SRI’s new Educational Policy Research Center (EPRC).
Ruben Nelson: The thing that at that I found Willis through was the word policy. That policy was a newish word that the first degree in the first master's degree in public policy was offered at State University of New York in Buffalo by Chris AR when he was there. 1960 and I had, I was at Queen's at the time, and Queens created the first public policy master's degree in Canada in 68.
So if you go back I was already interested in. Field of policy because it seems to be a level above the kind of operational that most organizations had at the time. And the interesting thing, one of the.
The Great Society stuff would not have happened, which means that Stanford would not have been able to apply to be designated as a research center because I think it was a 10 year grant that ran most of the seventies. And so what attracted me to the center policy and in.
And we actually did in far more fundamental ways than the government of Canada at the time was interested in Yeah. That, that it got us into the field of human potential. It got us into what.
And we got fired for it. But that's a, but what it let me do is I had time to begin to connect with people and Willis was one of them. So by the time in the mid seventies that I had talked a different government department. A project called Cultural Paradigms where we were looking really seriously at what now is a reasonably common conversation to realize that modern Western culture is a particular take on reality.
And the thing about Willis on. Broke with modernity.
Peter Hayward: Okay.
Oliver Markley: One of the reasons that Harman was given this grant from the Office of Education was his major contention, is the important thing is what he called the Issue behind the Issues. Yes. And that issue is: Consciousness; and beliefs and the values we have about the future.
And that was what, at SRI, gave us the ticket to use consciousness as a methodology for doing futures research.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, that's what struck me again. I was coming, I was schooled in Ken Wilber's work with Richard Slaughter at Swinburne, and.
What struck me when I read Willis' stuff was like a lot of futurist, he was talking about the outside world, the reality, the systems, the institutions, and how they need to change. But at the same time, he talked about how the interior life has to change as well as the outside life. He was both, as you said Ruben, he was a policy person.
He didn't just want describe what the future could be. He wanted to create that future, but he also said that we need, as a.
Ruben Nelson: Yep. Yes. To answer your question, yes, that's right. The thing that was so interesting about Willis is that he had a feel for the deep connectedness of the inner and the outer. Lots of people get into that space, but they do it as both.
And in other words they do it as right hand and left hand as if they're not connected. And Willis had a non-trivial understanding of what in theological language, Christian theological language and Hebrew, the ancient Hebrews would talk of his incarnation. Consciousness becomes flesh,
Peter Hayward: right?
Ruben Nelson: And that therefore when you're looking at flesh, when you're at institutions, including public policy and administration, what you're seeing if you like, is frozen consciousness.
As in the Hebrew word to know something is to be it. Yes. Absolutely. And Christians don't typically understand that the Hebrews were deep into an incarnation theology.
Oliver Markley: Yes. That,
Ruben Nelson: that this was something Christianity invented, Willis. And of course part of my background, part of Oliver's background, Is some formal training in Christian theology, right? So that, we, we share that and we share an appreciation of Willis at least through.
Not in the sense to make him Christian, but through the lens of realizing that he, his feel for the embodiment of consciousness in cultures was way ahead of its time. It very rare. This is the 1970s and there are damn few people in the seventies who had any feel for that at all.
Oliver Markley: He realized that he was really pulling the same ancient truth of what Aldous Huxely called the perennial philosophy.
So Willis wrote this paper called. “New “Old Wine in New Wine Skins. Turning the thing upside down and basically saying that although we talk about New Age, this is ancient stuff. This is the perennial truth of reality.
Ruben Nelson: all,
Peter Hayward: I've gotta ask the question how did Willis, he was an electrical engineer by training.
Have you got any idea how this happened? That he had such a unique, I would say old, but also completely different perspective on the world?
Oliver Markley: Yes, there was a professor of law at Stanford named Harry Rathman who had a wife, Amelia Rathman, who was an amazing change agent. They invited Harman to a seminar that looked at Jesus as Teacher, but Amelia used it for an early form of encounter groups. And Harman got really smitten by this. For several years, he was the Stanford library all the time, going through books on mysticism and when it finally it turns out that this group started, experimenting with LSD and he was their first Guinea pig at which he had an out of the body experience.
That was the way it all started for him.
By the way, this whole story – as well as the story of my working with Harman - is detailed in a book by Art Kleiner, entitled: The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change.
When Kleiner began interviewing me for the book, I came to realize that he might be a trustable conduit for publicizing the truth about Willis my using LSD in our work. So, after I got Kleiner to agree that I could look at what he wrote about us before he published it, Art wrote a very detailed narrative about Harman's history at Stanford; and of my studying with him there, and of my working with Harman at SRI. Overall, it gives an accurate feel for that time in our lives.
Peter Hayward: And tell me if I'm wrong, but, willis also saw a complete change in how business had to operate. He didn't just say consciousness had to change and obviously policy, but he also said business has to change.
Oliver Markley: As we did our work at the SRI/Education Policy Research Center, we looked at all the different institutions of society, and it seemed to us that shifts in business were really required. And so the Willis then did a shift in a lot of his professional work to … I can't remember the name…
Peter Hayward: the World Business Economy.
Ruben Nelson: Willis was instrumental in the founding of the World Business Academy. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. That's why it still exists. Ronaldo Bruco is keeping it alive mostly as a vehicle for Ronaldo. But I expect you were named one of the fellows of it.
Oliver Markley: Oh actually I didn't, Willis was off into it and by that time I was into visioning and those kinds of things, and I had my own band of work that I was doing.
Ruben Nelson: He involved me. I was the third fellow in the World Business Academy, Uh huh, because of Willis.
I was. At the time I pitched up in Ottawa in 1970 and was there for 19 years. Never as a public servant, but often working very closely with politicians and senior bureaucrats doing interesting things. And because of that, it gave me leverage to invite Willis into Ottawa from time to time and to do some of the training so that in the early eighties, for example which then is after I think is.
Yes the head of the, of CDA, the Canadian International Development Agency, which is the Canadian analog of U-S-A-I-D. He wanted to fundamentally change the consciousness of the senior managers and committed himself to. And we ran 300 public servants in CDA each of them had us participated in a six week course, six weeks residential course.
So it was a very serious effort at Culture Change. And Willis played a major role in it early on. And how did that, how that. It it's so many other things that in it is that by and large, modern cultures don't have a good feel for the depth of human culture and therefore they think if they do something for a week, they've made a difference.
If they do it for a month, they've made a huge difference. God bless Marcel Masay. He understood that cultures were deeper than that, but it was also the case that when he moved on, the next person came in and much of the culture reverted simply because the culture around it in Ottawa. He, for a while, CDA was a sport in the sense that it didn't really belong in Ottawa.
It was doing stuff and promoting ideas about development in other places. That was remarkable. One of the most substantial things that came out of this was a fundamental commitment to understand a different role for women in development, and SITA was onto that because of this.
And of course, Willis didn't care how tall you were, what you weighed, what your gender preferences were. If you could understand things that he was talking about and showed any signs of responding to it positively, he was there for you as a person.
Peter Hayward: Well,
Ruben Nelson: and that's extraordinary.
Peter Hayward: So my next kind of structured question in the conversation, which I think you've been touching on, but how did Willis affect influence your own?
Ruben Nelson: I'll take a crack at that. Because I've been thinking that's such an interesting question and I realized that what Willis was for me was, a person who was established. I've had a few of these people in my life, but I can count them all on one hand and they're all extraordinary people.
But what Willis was for me was a senior and established person. Who basically said, Butch, the work that you're doing and the instincts that you have are all good doing it. Because remember, I've been fired for these instincts by the Prime Minister of Canada. Now once you're fired by our Prime minister, nobody else can really touch you. It also makes you bulletproof in a funny kind of way.
When? Maybe 77, 78, somewhere in there. When you folks at SRI in the Policy Education Policy Institute, were doing some work on paradigm change. Do you remember that? I do.
Oliver Markley: We summarized our alternative futures work for the education policy people came to us by saying that out the 50 highly plausible futures, only a small handful are desirable. And the getting into them requires either incredible good luck or major fundamental policy changes in attitudes, values, foresight about things like population growth, pollution, resource depletion, etc.
But the feds couldn't get into that, so just as Harman was looking around for other clients, the Kettering Foundation came to SRI recruiting policy researchers. They had all the SRI chiefs gathered to make a pitch, one after the other, to get some of the some of Kettering’s money. Among them, Willis Harman spoke very simply, he said, “I don't have a big pitch like you all, what I'm about is what I call the issue behind the issues. It's all about values and the kind of values that we choose, and I think that our society is choosing the wrong things. And with that, Harman simply sat down.
Kettering bought into Harman’s idea and ended up funding a number of studies by us, The first, which Harman asked me to head up, focused on “Contemporary Societal Problems.” Our study concluded that is useful to discern four major categories of societal problems: Substantive, Procedural, Normative, and Conceptual.
Substantive problems are situations that are known to be problematic, such as pollution, resource shortages, or over-population. Procedural problems are difficulties in how we solve the substantive problems, e.g., lack of foresight in planning. Normative problems involve valuation issues, such as societal values and/or goals that have become obsolete due to environmental changes. The fourth category, Conceptual Problems, is where we not looking at things the right way - which got us into the work of Thomas Kuhn and his theory of paradigm change.
So that then led the Kettering Foundation to fund us for a major study looking at we should have called Ethos, but we called Images, as in “Images of Man.” Oh, big mistake. But any rate that was probably the major study that Harman and I did there, Joseph Campbel, Duane Elgin and others.
This study looked at the leading value images that have led to the development of Western Society and what kinds of changes are needed. We didn't try to specify what the images of the future should be, but what kind of characteristics it should have.
It took us 10 years to get it published. A New York publisher said, it sounds to me like this was written by a committee. And we said, duh, at least you know how to read. Meanwhile, it was widely handed around, and became an underground classic. Finally we got it published commercially as . (A webpage about it is on my website at https://www.imaginalvisioning.com/changing-images-of-man/ and a permanently archived version of it can be seen by clicking here.
After 10 years together at SRI, Harman went on be President of the Institute Nordic Sciences, and I went off to teach and chair the graduate program in Studies of the Future at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
Peter Hayward: So, how did Harman’s work impact on the work you did, Oliver?
Oliver Markley: Willis was a pioneer who neglected to look for mentors or people who are professionally sophisticated to give us advice and and I imitated him in this. So, we made one naive mistake after another; for example, the prestigious British journal Nature wanted us to write a piece about our approuch to alternate futures research. But because we were busy raising money to support our work, we didn't even answer them.
Yeah. I would say that one of the ways he influenced me was to look inside and follow your intuition, even though that may not be the way the world wants it done.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Yeah.
Ruben Nelson: I'm into that. And he modeled that in his own life. Yes. I was one of the people, I'm sure there were many and, because by the time he went off to Noetics would be what, early eighties. Yes. 1978. 78. By that time we had met, I'd spent some time with him.
You and I had met, we met somewhere around 75, 76. Yeah. When Elizabeth Campbell was heading the AHP.
Oliver Markley: the Association for Humanistic Psychology.
Ruben Nelson: And AHP in those days was a gathering place. Yes. For lots of flakes as well, but also some very serious people. Yeah.
Oliver Markley: But AHP and humanistic psychology also led to the movement of transpersonal psychology, which was spiritual. Yeah. On top of. Humanistic.
Ruben Nelson: Yeah. And it so I remember Willis asking me, when the opportunity came up to move to Noetics, was this: Did this make sense? Did it make sense to me? Because without Edgar Mitchell, it didn't amount to much when he took it over.
Oliver Markley: Yes, that's true.
Ruben Nelson: And certainly I encouraged him to do it to follow his bliss, but also to say because by this point in a sense we were in harness together - emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. We were in harness in the way human beings, it's one of the great blessings of being human.
It also gets us in trouble the way we will egg each other on to do things you wouldn't do without the other.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. And of course
Ruben Nelson: that leads to crime waves as well as to extraordinary things happening. But I certainly encouraged Willis to do that, and it got me involved in Noetic in those early years as he was there.
And in a sense I traveled with him,
Oliver Markley: but I have to say in a much more profound way, the main way that Willis really influenced me was to follow my own internal bliss about consciousness and be a visionary. That's the reason I got into visioning work that it turned out to really do good trend analysis, where looking at only the cognitive aspect is not enough. You need to look at the intuitive side of things as well. How to do that involved deep relaxation and self-hypnosis for tapping into intuition. And with Harman’s encouragement, I developed those tools and applied them at SRI first, and then published about them later as a professor.
But the main thing that Willis really influenced me was to “follow your bliss; do your thing.”
Ruben Nelson: Particularly if your thing broadly speaking, mapped onto his thing.
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
Ruben Nelson: Yep. Yeah. That that encouraging you to do your thing was in no sense leaving him.
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
I'm gonna move you to the final question as a kind of wrap. It's a toughie but you guys are seasoned future thinkers, so I think you'll be able to handle it. If Willis was able, if he was around today, if he could still chat to you and influence you, what advice, direction, suggestion, provocation, do you think that he would be giving you now.
Oliver Markley: Don't lose the faith.
Ruben Nelson: Yeah. I if he had, Dale was young enough to have lived longer. I think he, one of the things that I find interesting now is that there is a. There's a conversation that's has always been at the edges, but is beginning to become more substantial under the language. One of the languages is to realize that we need personal to civilizational.
In other words, we need to transcend our own formation as persons and therefore as families, as community groups, as fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, whatever role we play. But that's tied in a way. To understand that modern Western civiliz, the modern Western forum of civilization is not long for this world.
And that this conversation is beginning to get more traction in a variety of places. If Willis had have lived, my sense is he would've helped this develop sooner and more substantially. Yes. We be further down that track. Yeah. And if he were just coming back into our lives to give advice, what I hear him saying is pursue that sense of personal two civilizational transcendence.
Because that's the path that we need. And of course, officially, it isn't a path that any major institution is on.
Oliver Markley: You think it would be a transcendence or transformation? Butch. Do you think Willis would've been setting transcendence or transformation?
Ruben Nelson: If you pursue transcendence, you end up being transformed.
Yes. If you, what so for me, they're not at odds and.
Conversations because a lot of people talk of transformation as if somehow we can just jump from here to there as opposed to doing to learning to. Come to terms with how deeply we have been formed by modernity. We who are males, we who are older, and I mean it's back to that sense again of consciousness becoming flesh of how.
Yeah. Civiliz, Pete,
Oliver Markley: Peter, a major learning came for me when I listened to the podcast you did for Wendell Bell. People talked about one of his singular characteristics being that he was hopeful, and that he was always pressing for the good news futures.
And I was struck about how opposite that was of Willis Harman and me - always focusing on bad news that will happen if we don't change our ways.
That is a way that Harman influenced me wrongly. And I think if I could change anything, it would be to go after what Wendell Bell did and about being hopeful and emphasizing preferred futures rather than maingly warning about the ones to be avoided.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Again, I think, I'm struck by the extent of the human potential movement. It was a, it was an extensive collection of people who all argued. For humans having tremendous unmet potential now. Yes, it did. Do you think, and I think I think Harman was a a classic exponent from that of that.
Yes. Do you think, and he part, he him potential still there, do you think it's still something that is available to people that are doing our work?
Oliver Markley: Yeah. Willis always advocating how repeating affirmations can bring about a desired future.
Ruben Nelson: Yeah, the thing that, one of the things that struck me about Willis, and it also fits the cut of my jib, is that to take absolutely nothing away from the human potential, and in that sense, the possibility of a positive future. But he also had a feel for the depth of culture that most so many people in the human potential PE movement didn't have That they, that there was often a sense of in HP and even transpersonal psych that that.
We could leap like a frog on a lily pad from one lily pad to another. And if we needed to be on a better one, we could just jump there. And Willis had some feel of how deep history is and how deeply we are in trained in history. Whether we like it or not. And therefore his the possibility of a positive future was never an easy thing for him.
It was never we'll just take it for granted. We'll just cheer each other along. Yeah. And my sense is that if you look at state of the world where. And the likelihood of the futures of just the 20 years that what we're against is of Western culture. And we haven't done the work even now, we haven't done the work of understanding that deeply enough to then develop the kind of research center centers of research and practice that actually move you from personal to civilizational transcendence.
Yeah. And in that sense I'm less cheery than Wendell Bell Put it this way, the hope that I talk of is a post despair. Hope,
Didn't. The simplicity, this side of complexity, but was interested in the simplicity of the other side of complexity. Said. I'm interested in hope, the other side of despair. Yeah, said into despair whether we like it or not. And most of the easy cheerfulness of modern culture is gonna be burned off like a hot day will burn off a morning dew.
A and it's, there's a lot of hard times coming for an awful lot of people.
Oliver Markley: That's that. A question,
Peter Hayward: I'm gonna close this off, guys. I'd once again thank you so much for. Taking the time out to put some flesh and humanity onto what I still think is a remarkable book. I think global Mind Change, if you've never read it and you can track a copy down, it's certainly still worth a read.
Yeah, absolutely. But just personally for me, thank you for telling me more about this quite remarkable
Ruben Nelson: guy. Thank you for inviting us and for holding Willis up in this way. Yeah. Because he's I mean in my life he's one of only half a dozen people who are truly extraordinary and part of it is the way that they were extraordinary.
Way ahead of their time.
Oliver Markley: Yes,
Ruben Nelson: indeed. And Oliver what a treat to be with you again.
Oliver Markley: Yes indeed, Butch. We've been in and out of each other's lives since the mid-seventies. Yeah, that's a long friendship.
Ruben Nelson: So, Peter,Oliver and I owe you for that. Thank you. Yep, for sure.
Peter Hayward: Thanks gentlemen. You get better Oliver, and just keep doing the work and just keep punching 'cause we'd like you to hang around on this side of the grass for a bit longer.
Oliver Markley: Yeah. Okay. Hope for the best. We'll see.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed the conversations between two of our remarkable senior members of the community about another remarkable and passed member Willis Harmon. I hope too you might be able to track down a copy of Global Mind change or an Incomplete Guide to the Future, they are a good read. Future Pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the pod, then please check out the Patreon link on our website.I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me today. Till next time.