When
I first met Richard Alan Miller
in 1976, his career in Parapsychology was in full-swing. We had both come up
with a strong background in Theosophy. Not only that, his interests in metaphysics,
alchemy and Magick, which paralleled my own, as well as our mutual interests
in Jungian and Transpersonal Psychology made us a formidable couple. So click
the heels of your Ruby Slippers together three times, and come along for the
ride.
Rick
was notorious in Seattle, known as the "Emerald City" as their local
media-savvy magician/witch and operated Beltane
Occult Books
and Beltane Herb Co. at the time, centers for a variety of what have come
to be known as New Age activities and services. But these were no channeling
housewives nor slacker hippies, for Rick was trained as a rigorous scientist,
having built a cloud chamber, then a linear accelerator for the national science
fair in high school, and a plasma jet in college. Clearly he was destined for
experimental, rather than theoretical physics. Wherever he went as a "strange
attractor," he surrounded himself with an innovative group of individuals.
Miller
had worked for duPont and Boeing in infrared countermeasures and in biophysics
as an instrumentation specialist at the University of Washington, Department
of Anesthesiology, under pain specialists Dr. Ray Fink and Dr. John Bonica.
There he participated in the first studies in the U.S. on acupuncture.
He had been taught by eminent scientists such as Dr. Charles Muses (hyperdimensional
math) and Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorki (quantum biochemistry). Linus Pauling and
Richard Fineman, on sabbatical from Cal Tech, were his first chemistry and physics
teachers, in the John Day Lecture Series at the UW. Along with 12 graduate
students, he audited David Bohm's 1970 class in Quantum Geoelectrodynamics.
In graduate school, his thesis advisor was Dr. R. B. Murray, winner of the Nobel
Prize in solid state physics. He also picked up such enrichment courses as
Helmut Schmidt's "Eight Lectures on Yoga on the I Ching."
And
he brought that rigor, and his security clearance, to the then embryonic science
of parapsychology where his worked was picked up for publication by Dr. Stanley
Krippner, now Dean of Consciousness Studies At Saybrook Institute, the Transpersonal
Psychology graduate school.
Miller
had learned, as Kuhn told us, about the structure of scientific revolutions
and how science purges itself of outmoded notions roughly every 20 years. He
considers science to be the leading religion of the times--the modern day form
of magic. And he was well-poised to be a player in the latest revolution which
was forecast and outlined by Marilyn Ferguson in 1980 as The Aquarian Conspiracy,
and by Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics and The Turning Point,
and by Ken Wilber in The Holographic Paradigm.
The
wise and wonderful Oz says, "Pay no attention; don't look at the man
behind the curtain..." But since I was no naive Dorothy, but more like
Glinda, the good witch of the South, I had a front-row, center seat for the
festivities. Unlike Dorothy, there was no "falling asleep" in these excursions
through a variety of multidisciplinary consciousness-altering "fields."
KIRLIAN
PHOTOGRAPHY
Rick
began his professional career as a physicist, then as a biophysicist and instrumentation
specialist. His first foray into Parapsychology, or more accurately Paraphysics,
came in Nov-Dec of 1972. He conducted experiments in Kirlian Photography with
Karl Elmendorff at the University of Washington. He was aided in this effort
by Dr. John Bonica and Dr. Neidemeyer, who had worked on the Manhattan Project.
Miller
wrote the field theory for Kirlian photography; these experiments showed the
effect to be a secondary emission of electrons ionizing local gases, rather
than a bioluminescent phenomenon of extrasensory or spiritual importance. People
were pre-disposed to see physical demonstrations of so-called auras, and so
they attributed the phenomenon to this traditional analog, because it served
their belief system. This effect also can occur among researchers where it
is known as experimenter-bias.
However,
even when Miller's finding was published as "The Physical Mechanisms in Kirlian
Photography" in 1975 in The Energies of Consciousness, edited by
Stanley Krippner and David Rubin for Gordon & Breach, the superstitious interpretations
continued, and continue to this day. Other contributors to this Krippner book
included Edgar Mitchell, Victor Adamenko, William A. Tiller, John Pierrakos,
Theodore Barber, David Bresler, and James Hurtak.
This
work was also published as part of Kirlian Electrophotography, a data package
prepared by Mankind Research Unlimited, Inc. headquartered on Wisconsin Avenue
in Washington D.C., a government front organization. Miller's contribution
was the Kirlian Device Circuit Diagram.
SEAL
CORPORATION
In
the spring of 1973, Rick met Burt Webb through the Experimental College at the
University of Washington. The Experimental College was the graduate project
(MBA thesisi) of another friend, Michael Wells Mandeville, and became the model
nationally for community-based continuing education. Michael is now pursuing
his predictions of earth changes based on Edgar Cayce's prophecies, and often
appears on talk radio.
Burt
was a technology forecaster in the local chapter of the World Future Society.
He had coordinated the computer exhibits at the Global Villiage conference at
Evergreen State College, sponsored by the Governor's office. Burt shared Rick's
interest in exploring the interface between science and the paranormal.
By
September, 1973 Miller had found funding under the sponsorship of Seal Corporation,
a thinly disguised front for Army Intelligence, doing business in Maine. Rick's
handler was Ted Krueger. Experiments conducted here were primarily in ESP monitoring
and induction through Hypnosis.
Rick
subcontracted Burt for a research project requested by Krueger. Burt's job
was to develop a series of products which could exploits the public's interest
in the paranormal. He reported back with 6 possible product designs.
The
techniques for Inducing
ESP through Forms of Self-Hypnosis came through collaboration with Yugoslavian
hypnotist Milan Ryzl, who was a guest for several weeks. Employing Ryzl's techniques
with his own synthesis, Miller was able to win the First Psychic Tournament,
sponsored by Llewellyn Publications at Gnosticon Conference in Sept1975 . He
competed with around 40 other self-styled psychics, such as Noel Tyl, Jean Dixon,
Sybil Leek, James Hurtak, Isaac Bonewits.
Another
development of this work is the ESP Questionaire, which Miller gave to
around 1000 students at both the Gnosticon Festivals and his Experimental College
class, where he taught the induction of ESP with self-hypnosis.
Another
concurrent project at this time was Project Parafile, a computer-based
bibliography of parapsychology and occult references to psi phenomena. This
project was done in the days of card files, and the work was extensive. A full
10% of the entries related to ESP, even though the field was still in its infancy.
Burt
led a group of volunteers who carefully keypunched thousands of citations onto
punch cards. Ken Hockett and another Boeing employee utilized Boeing computers
to create a database from the punch cards.
The
Seal Reports were Miller's first paranormal works for the government, initiating
him into the world of Black Ops as one of the original "Men in Black." Having
shifted his worldview from that of a buttoned-down scientist to that of an open-minded
psychonaut and consciousness explorer, he often found his experiments demonstrated
the hypothesized psychophysical phenomena. He embodied the paradox of being
an underground regional "edge-celeb," yet at the same time being sponsored by
a government often hostile to his worldview and orientation. In other words,
he cleverly got the government to sponsor his parapsychology hobby! Or so he
thought, little realizing how that information might be employed in twisted
mind-control experiments, or how his own notoriety with the government could
affect his further work.
In
1973, what has come to be known as the Pribram-Bohm Holographic Model was non-existent.
But this Seattle think-tank, lead by Miller and Burt Webb were able to put together
the work of Northrup and Burr on the electromagnetic nature of the human being
with Gabor's work on holograms and come up with a new notion. Pribram had postulated
2-dimensional interference patterns, physical holograms, as underlying all thinking.
The holographic component, for him, represented the associative mechanisms and
contributed to memory retrieval and storage and problem-solving.
However, Miller, Webb and Dickson boldly asserted that the holographic metaphor
extends to n-dimensions and therefore constitutes a fundamental description of
the universe and our electromagnetic embedding within that greater field. Thus
was born the "Holographic
Concept ofReality"
in 1973. This paper was presented at the 1st Psychotronic Conference in Prague
in 1973, and later published by Gordon & Breach in 1975, and again in 1979 in
Psychoenergetic Systems: the Interaction of Consciousness, Energy and Matter,
edited by Stanley Krippner.
Other notable contributors to this volume included Michael A. Persinger, (now
famous for his neuromagnetgic simulations of alien abduction often demonstrated
on TLC and the Discovery Channel), John Curtis Gowan (taxonomies of states of
consciousness from Trance, Art and Creativity; Development of the Psychedelic
Individual), Robert O. Becker (effects of electromagnetism on physical systems),
Theodor Barber, David Bresler, S. D. Kirlian, and Thelma Moss.
Picking up on the work of Pribram independently, David Bohm published his explication
of the holomovement in his classic text Wholeness and the Implicate Order
and the Pribram-Bohm theory was born and embraced widely as a foundation of the
new sciences from physics to neuropsychology. This theory was fundamental to
a deep understanding of the later emerging Chaos theory and Complexity, the dynamics
of complex interrelated systems.
Rick took a primitive
remote terminal to the Omniversal Symposium. He linked up to the Project Parafile
database in Seattle, took questions from the audience and read off the answers
returned by the database. This was the primitive forerunner of what have become
laptop computers, but this terminal was briefcase-sized.
Miller and Webb followed up their ground-breaking paper with "Embryonic
Holography," which was also presented at the Omniversal Symposium at California
State College at Sonoma, hosted by Dr. Stanley Krippner, September 29, 1973.
To our knowledge, this is the first paper to address the quantum biological properties
of human beings--the first illustrations of the sources of quantum mindbody.
Dropping a level of observation below quantum biochemistry and conventional biophysics,
they proposed that a biohologram determines the development of the human embryo;
that we are a quantum bodymind with consciousness informing the whole process
through the level of information. They postulated DNA as the possible holographic
projector of the biohologram, patterning the three-dimensional electromagnetic
standing and moving wave front that constitutes our psychophysical being.
This work was reprinted much later in the journal Psychedelic Monographs and
Essays, Vol. 6, 1993. However, in the meantime, Miller had drawn the attention
of the government in a less favorable way. "Spooks" (Feds and Army Intell) came
to his business, arrested him, searched his files, and seized all work on embryonic
holography, for whatever reasons they did not disclose, but we can only conjecture.
Perhaps it had to do with implications of the theory such as physical regeneration
of tissue, or the liquid crystal properties of body fluids. Or perhaps it had
to do with his research in Allan Frey's work in the .3-3 gHz regions, which is
a microwave input which allows the brain to directly receive voice transmissions.
This discovery has recently resurfaced as synthetic telepathy. Miller and Webb
were able to reconstitute the bulk of the Embryonic Holography paper from memory,
but laid low with their findings for many years after this traumatic experience.
MANKIND
RESEARCH UNLIMITED
By
this time, Miller was the Northwest Regional Director of Mankind Research Unlimited
(MRU), the Washington D.C. based paranormal phenomena investigation team. He
worked under the direction of Dr. Carl Schleicher. A large portion of the work
of Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama was turned over to Miller, including original
strip-charts, to duplicate his experiments in psychokinesis, one person's mind
influencing the body of another, in the same and in remote locations.
Rick as well as many doctors at the University of Washington were wondering
what was happening with "psychic surgery." Rick brought the problem to Dr.
Motay, Dean of Pathology at the UW. This incident was recounted in The National
Observer, March 30, 1974:
"Richard
Miller, director of Mankind Research Unlimited's Northwest Regional Office
here says that a study by the University of Washington's Dept. of Pathology
showed that one man, Warder Bacon, probably had his body entered by the psychic
surgeons. 'An X-ray before he left for the Philippines shows that he had
a great amount of cancerous tissue in his liver,' says Miller. 'He died about
two months ago, and the liver showed no traces of cancerous tissues upon autopsy.'
He says that not enough is known about the healers to make a positive or negative
statement. It certainly warrants a definitive study, says Miller, who also
is director of the Dept. of Parapsychology and Paraphysics at the Experimental
College of the University of Washington."
To
this end, Miller conducted experiments with Filippino psychic "surgeon" Tony
Agpaoa. Perhaps the results are best described in his own words, at this time
those of a "true believer," although subsequent research has disclosed the sleight-of-hand
tricks of psychic surgery, as shown by debunkers on the Discovery Channel.
The former article continued:
"Psychic
surgery is an emotional issue. There have been no authoritative studies of
it. AMA statistics show, says Miller, that persons who have terminal cancer
have a one-in-five recovery rate, even after the bad news is pronounced.
The key will be to determine what percentage of persons who have been treated
in the Philippines recover, says Miller, who adds that he is working to have
a follow-up study started."
In
1974, Miller incorporated O.A.K. as the Organization for the Advancement of
Knowledge, also known to its inner group as the esoteric Order of Ascending
Kundalini. OAK sponsored several projects of its own, and under its auspices
director Miller taught Shamanism at Evergreen State College and Parapsychology
at Edmonds Community College between 1974 and 1976. He also taught at the Experimental
College at the University of Washington, several classes on parapsychology and
the occult, publishing a regular column in The Daily.
Meanwhile, fellow
OAK member Burt Webb inspired his colleagues to create a science fiction short-subject
of a religion based on biofeedback, called EAT THE SUN. Burt plays the
High Priest. The documentary-style film became a cult classic in the underground,
revealing the evils of cult indoctrination long before many of the now-famous
incidents. The film describes the Tapazia Ritual, an electronic trial by fire,
wherein one's psyche and physiology are put into total synch through a videofeedback
process conducted by the Church of Self Amplification, lead by Guru Telemahandi.
But in the movie, something goes wrong to the film's creator, Jim Cox, and they
"fry his brain." The guru's philosophy was summed up in a few choice aphorisms,
such as "Eat the Sun, and then you will be your own father," and "The
ecology of the soul is to recycle one's consciousness," and the parting-shot,
"If they're old enough to pee, they're old enough for me!" A curious
phenomenon about this movie is that, even when told it is a spoof, most people
come out believing this actually happened!
Experiments conducted under the Organization included those in biofeedback,
in conjunction with Burt Webb and manufacturer J. & J. Enterprises, Inc. A
group of 60 students at the University of Washington were monitored while engaging
in Autonomic Training of various physical parameters, and they were trained
in the induction of alpha brainwaves through hypnosis.
Around
the same time, Miller attended the Claremont Conference with Walter Houston
Clark, where he presented papers on Time Distortion and Electrophoresis.
In
1975, Miller produced and Webb directed Paracon I. The symposium at Seattle
Center was attended by some 3000 people during the annual Bumpershoot Festival
in Seattle. It was a day long conference on parapsychology. There were 5 different
tracks covering cody, mind, spirit, nature and science. Burt gave the keynote
address in the evening which brought all the subjects together.
In
1976, inspired by the synergy of Rick and Iona's magickal pursuits, OAK sponsored
the infamous Tiphareth Experiments, with participation by invitation
only. These experiments became the basis of a later mystical compendium,The Holistic Qabala, (1981). These disciplines were drawn
from traditional and eclectic sources and this Retirement Ritual was designed
for the qabalistic invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel, or one's Higher Self,
facilitating creativity and the embodiment of self-actualization or self-realization.
Regular practices included the Banishing Ritual, Middle Pillar Exercise, HGA
Invocations, Tantric Lunar Resonance Meditation, (later published in
Psychedelic Monographs & Essays) and Qabalistic Pathworking techniques
for altering consciousness and stabilizing or integrating changes into a steady
state.
Beginning
in the late 70's, Rick and Iona collaborated on The Magickal and Ritual Use
of Herbs (OAK, 1978; Destiny, 1983), The Magickal and Ritual Use of
Aphrodisiacs (Destiny, 1985), The Magickal and Ritual Use of Perfumes
(Destiny, 1990), and The Modern Alchemist (Phanes, 1994), with artist
Joel Radcliffe.
OAK
eventually became largely the publishing wing of Miller's endeavors and those
of his wife, Iona. In 1981, still pursuing the elusive psychotronic goals of
Eat the Sun, they published The Diamond Body: A Solid State Mandala.
This modern alchemical view of the philosopher's stone linked the Synergetic
geometries of Buckminster Fuller with those of Qabalah's famous glyph of the
Tree of Life, and forecast the fad for Merkabah Mysticism. A synopsis of this
work is presented in Iona Miller's article "Buckminster Fuller and the Qabala."
Miller
and Miller further pursued this interdisciplinary thread in the Diamond Body
Trilogy, which includes Electro-Magick:
Self-Realization through Yogatronics, Video-Graphics and Light-Loops,
an advanced biofeedback technique implementing a mind/computer interface. The
final volume, Yogatronics: Experiments in Perceptual Synergetics foresaw
this application of synesthesia and Virtual Reality for inducing discrete states
of consciousness. This led to Iona Miller's collaboration with Burt Webb on
two papers in 1992, on Virtual Magick and Virtual Therapy.
From
1992 to 1998, Richard was the first instructor in Metaphysics on AOL's IES,
and the archives of those classes are available and being codified. During
this period he assembled an extensive, searchable Metaphysical Library
of available works for FTP download from the Internet. Rick
and Iona had never written screenplays before, but Burt Webb had experience
in screenwriting and in designing technological-looking sets for Star Trek movies.
So when our literary agent requested we try a script, we were all game.PSI-OPS
(4-92)was a proposal and script treatment written at the request of
our agent Bernard Shir-Cliff for his friends at FOX who wanted to produce a
TV show around the Unknown. Rick, Iona, and Burt came up with a Mission Impossible-type
team of researchers whose adventures would take them through the gamut of the
paranormal. Our proposal came in second to a little show called the X-Files,
but we've noticed it was followed shortly by Psi-Factor which certainly shares
a lot in common with our original proposal.
In
1992, OAK published Iona's Anatomy of the Star Goddess: Quantum Cosmology,
Virtual States, Energy Science, and Scalar Fields. Also in 1992 came Dreamhealing:
Chaos and the Creative Consciousness Process with shaman/therapist Graywolf
Swinney. In 1996, she published Lost In Translation: the UFO Phenomenon
as an Informational Virus, a prescient description of the phenomenology
of what are now known as memes. In
1999, she co-authored SYNDEX I & II: A Synergetic Perspective on Number
Dynamics with Bob Marshall, graphically demonstrating a solution to the
prime number enigma and the 9/11 basewave in the number continuum.
In
1999, Iona's alchemical article on drug-free experiential journeys "Chaos
as the Universal Solvent" was published in Tom Lyttle's Psychedelics
ReImagined (Autonomedia), which features a foreword by Tim Leary. During
this period she also self-published Chaosophy '93: A Journal of Chaos,
Consciousness, and Philosophy; Chaosophy 2000: CRP Monographs;
and Chaosophy 2001: Neuropsychology and Quantum Metaphysics.
Though
we have been divorced since 1994, we are still best of friends and our work
continues. Now in 2001, Miller and Miller are investigating leading-edge Neuropsychology,
Neuromagnetic Therapy, Brain Fingerprinting, and PGO Waves.
We are still in the process of realizing our Qabalistic Pathworking game in
VRML, a further illustration of our interest in altered states and synthetic
realities. Our work and interest in the deep nature of Reality, Quantum
Metaphysics, quantum cosmology, psi phenomena, altered states (including
dreams and REM), natural psychedelia, neuropsychology, and consciousness studies
continues unabated.
Iona
Miller is a multimedia artist, web author and designer and continues working
through the Asklepia Foundation (asklepia.org) and Chaosophy Journal
on the relationship between experiential journeys, healing, creativity, illumination,
dreams, consciousness and chaos theory with Dr. Stanley Krippner as mentor.
Richard
Alan Miller pursues his career as the foremost international expert in the
growing and marketing of botanicals, under his company Northwest
Botanicals, (nwbotanicals.org). In that regard, he appears in Who's
Who in the West, and America. His current parapsychological
interest is in exploring synthetic
telepathy and writing a book on self-induction of ESP.
Rick
and I have also had many adventures in the world of Magick, the Occult, and
Mysticism with a wide variety of players in those fields...but that, as they
say, boys and girls, is another story. Along the way we found a lot
of Brains, Heart, and especially Nerve! And learned "There's no place like
Home."
