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Gestalt psychology or gestaltism (/ɡəˈʃtɑːlt, -ˈʃtɔːlt, -ˈstɑːlt, -ˈstɔːlt/;[1] from German: Gestalt [ɡəˈʃtalt] "shape, form") is a philosophy of mind of the Berlin School of experimental psychology. Gestalt psychology is an attempt to understand the laws behind the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world. The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies.

This principle maintains that when the human mind (perceptual system) forms a percept or "gestalt", the whole has a reality of its own, independent of the parts. The original famous phrase of Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, "the whole is something else than the sum of its parts"[2] is often incorrectly translated[3] as "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts", and thus used when explaining gestalt theory, and further incorrectly applied to systems theory.[4] Koffka did not like the translation. He firmly corrected students who replaced "other" with "greater". "This is not a principle of addition" he said.[5] The whole has an independent existence.

In the study of perception, Gestalt psychologists stipulate that perceptions are the products of complex interactions among various stimuli. Contrary to the behaviorist approach to focusing on stimulus and response, gestalt psychologists sought to understand the organization of cognitive processes (Carlson and Heth, 2010). Our brain is capable of generating whole forms, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of global figures instead of just collections of simpler and unrelated elements (points, lines, curves, etc.).

In psychology, gestaltism is often opposed to structuralism. Gestalt theory, it is proposed, allows for the deconstruction of the whole situation into its elements.[6]

Origins

The concept of gestalt was first introduced in philosophy and psychology in 1890 by Christian von Ehrenfels (a member of the School of Brentano). The idea of gestalt has its roots in theories by David Hume, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, David Hartley, and Ernst Mach. Max Wertheimer's unique contribution was to insist that the "gestalt" is perceptually primary, defining the parts it was composed from, rather than being a secondary quality that emerges from those parts, as von Ehrenfels's earlier Gestalt-Qualität had been.[citation needed]

Both von Ehrenfels and Edmund Husserl seem to have been inspired by Mach's work Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations, 1886), in formulating their very similar concepts of gestalt and figural moment, respectively. On the philosophical foundations of these ideas see Foundations of Gestalt Theory (Smith, ed., 1988).

Early 20th century theorists, such as Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer, and Wolfgang Köhler (students of Carl Stumpf) saw objects as perceived within an environment according to all of their elements taken together as a global construct. This 'gestalt' or 'whole form' approach sought to define principles of perception—seemingly innate mental laws that determined the way objects were perceived. It is based on the here and now, and in the way things are seen. Images can be divided into figure or ground. The question is what is perceived at first glance: the figure in front, or the background.

These laws took several forms, such as the grouping of similar, or proximate, objects together, within this global process. Although gestalt has been criticized for being merely descriptive,[7] it has formed the basis of much further research into the perception of patterns and objects (Carlson et al. 2000), and of research into behavior, thinking, problem solving and psychopathology.

Gestalt therapy

The founders of Gestalt therapy, Fritz and Laura Perls, had worked with Kurt Goldstein, a neurologist who had applied principles of Gestalt psychology to the functioning of the organism. Laura Perls had been a Gestalt psychologist before she became a psychoanalyst and before she began developing Gestalt therapy together with Fritz Perls.[8] The extent to which Gestalt psychology influenced Gestalt therapy is disputed, however. In any case it is not identical with Gestalt psychology. On the one hand, Laura Perls preferred not to use the term "Gestalt" to name the emerging new therapy, because she thought that the gestalt psychologists would object to it;[9] on the other hand Fritz and Laura Perls clearly adopted some of Goldstein's work.[10] Thus, though recognizing the historical connection and the influence, most gestalt psychologists emphasize that gestalt therapy is not a form of gestalt psychology.

Mary Henle noted in her presidential address to Division 24 at the meeting of the American Psychological Association (1975): "What Perls has done has been to take a few terms from Gestalt psychology, stretch their meaning beyond recognition, mix them with notions—often unclear and often incompatible—from the depth psychologies, existentialism, and common sense, and he has called the whole mixture gestalt therapy. His work has no substantive relation to scientific Gestalt psychology. To use his own language, Fritz Perls has done 'his thing'; whatever it is, it is not Gestalt psychology"[11] With her analysis however, she restricts herself explicitly to only three of Perls' books from 1969 and 1972, leaving out Perls' earlier work, and Gestalt therapy in general as a psychotherapy method.[12]

There have been clinical applications of Gestalt psychology in the psychotherapeutic field long before Perls'ian Gestalt therapy, in group psychoanalysis (Foulkes), Adlerian individual psychology, by Gestalt psychologists in psychotherapy like Erwin Levy, Abraham S. Luchins, by Gestalt psychologically oriented psychoanalysts in Italy (Canestrari and others), and there have been newer developments foremost in Europe, e.g. Gestalt theoretical psychotherapy.

Theoretical framework and methodology

The school of gestalt practiced a series of theoretical and methodological principles that attempted to redefine the approach to psychological research. This is in contrast to investigations developed at the beginning of the 20th century, based on traditional scientific methodology, which divided the object of study into a set of elements that could be analyzed separately with the objective of reducing the complexity of this object.

The theoretical principles are the following:

• Principle of Totality—The conscious experience must be considered globally (by taking into account all the physical and mental aspects of the individual simultaneously) because the nature of the mind demands that each component be considered as part of a system of dynamic relationships.
• Principle of psychophysical isomorphism – A correlation exists between conscious experience and cerebral activity.

Based on the principles above the following methodological principles are defined:

• Phenomenon experimental analysis—In relation to the Totality Principle any psychological research should take phenomena as a starting point and not be solely focused on sensory qualities.
• Biotic experiment—The school of gestalt established a need to conduct real experiments that sharply contrasted with and opposed classic laboratory experiments. This signified experimenting in natural situations, developed in real conditions, in which it would be possible to reproduce, with higher fidelity, what would be habitual for a subject.[13]

Support from cybernetics and neurology

In the 1940s and 1950s, laboratory research in neurology and what became known as cybernetics on the mechanism of frogs' eyes indicate that perception of 'gestalts' (in particular gestalts in motion) is perhaps more primitive and fundamental than 'seeing' as such:

A frog hunts on land by vision... He has no fovea, or region of greatest acuity in vision, upon which he must center a part of the image... The frog does not seem to see or, at any rate, is not concerned with the detail of stationary parts of the world around him. He will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is determined only by size and movement. He will leap to capture any object the size of an insect or worm, providing it moves like one. He can be fooled easily not only by a piece of dangled meat but by any moving small object... He does remember a moving thing provided it stays within his field of vision and he is not distracted.[14]

The lowest-level concepts related to visual perception for a human being probably differ little from the concepts of a frog. In any case, the structure of the retina in mammals and in human beings is the same as in amphibians. The phenomenon of distortion of perception of an image stabilized on the retina gives some idea of the concepts of the subsequent levels of the hierarchy. This is a very interesting phenomenon. When a person looks at an immobile object, "fixes" it with his eyes, the eyeballs do not remain absolutely immobile; they make small involuntary movements. As a result the image of the object on the retina is constantly in motion, slowly drifting and jumping back to the point of maximum sensitivity. The image "marks time" in the vicinity of this point.[15]

Properties

The key principles of gestalt systems are emergence, reification, multistability and invariance.[16]

Reification

Reification is the constructive or generative aspect of perception, by which the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which it is based.


Reification

For instance, a triangle is perceived in picture A, though no triangle is there. In pictures B and D the eye recognizes disparate shapes as "belonging" to a single shape, in C a complete three-dimensional shape is seen, where in actuality no such thing is drawn.

Reification can be explained by progress in the study of illusory contours, which are treated by the visual system as "real" contours.

Multistability


the Necker cube and the Rubin vase, two examples of multistability

Multistability (or multistable perception) is the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations. This is seen, for example, in the Necker cube and Rubin's Figure/Vase illusion shown here. Other examples include the three-legged blivet and artist M. C. Escher's artwork and the appearance of flashing marquee lights moving first one direction and then suddenly the other. Again, gestalt does not explain how images appear multistable, only that they do.

Invariance


Invariance

Invariance is the property of perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognized independent of rotation, translation, and scale; as well as several other variations such as elastic deformations, different lighting, and different component features. For example, the objects in A in the figure are all immediately recognized as the same basic shape, which are immediately distinguishable from the forms in B. They are even recognized despite perspective and elastic deformations as in C, and when depicted using different graphic elements as in D. Computational theories of vision, such as those by David Marr, have provided alternate explanations of how perceived objects are classified.

Emergence, reification, multistability, and invariance are not necessarily separable modules to model individually, but they could be different aspects of a single unified dynamic mechanism.[17]

Prägnanz

The fundamental principle of gestalt perception is the law of prägnanz [de] (in the German language, pithiness), which says that we tend to order our experience in a manner that is regular, orderly, symmetrical, and simple. Gestalt psychologists attempt to discover refinements of the law of prägnanz, and this involves writing down laws that, hypothetically, allow us to predict the interpretation of sensation, what are often called "gestalt laws".[18]


Law of proximity


Law of similarity


Law of closure


Law of Symmetry

A major aspect of Gestalt psychology is that it implies that the mind understands external stimuli as whole rather than the sum of their parts. The wholes are structured and organized using grouping laws. The various laws are called laws or principles, depending on the paper where they appear—but for simplicity's sake, this article uses the term laws. These laws deal with the sensory modality of vision. However, there are analogous laws for other sensory modalities including auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory (Bregman – GP). The visual Gestalt principles of grouping were introduced in Wertheimer (1923). Through the 1930s and '40s Wertheimer, Kohler and Koffka formulated many of the laws of grouping through the study of visual perception.

1. Law of Proximity—The law of proximity states that when an individual perceives an assortment of objects, they perceive objects that are close to each other as forming a group. For example, in the figure that illustrates the Law of proximity, there are 72 circles, but we perceive the collection of circles in groups. Specifically, we perceive that there is a group of 36 circles on the left side of the image, and three groups of 12 circles on the right side of the image. This law is often used in advertising logos to emphasize which aspects of events are associated.[19][20]
2. Law of Similarity—The law of similarity states that elements within an assortment of objects are perceptually grouped together if they are similar to each other. This similarity can occur in the form of shape, colour, shading or other qualities. For example, the figure illustrating the law of similarity portrays 36 circles all equal distance apart from one another forming a square. In this depiction, 18 of the circles are shaded dark, and 18 of the circles are shaded light. We perceive the dark circles as grouped together and the light circles as grouped together, forming six horizontal lines within the square of circles. This perception of lines is due to the law of similarity.[20]
3. Law of Closure—The law of closure states that individuals perceive objects such as shapes, letters, pictures, etc., as being whole when they are not complete. Specifically, when parts of a whole picture are missing, our perception fills in the visual gap. Research shows that the reason the mind completes a regular figure that is not perceived through sensation is to increase the regularity of surrounding stimuli. For example, the figure that depicts the law of closure portrays what we perceive as a circle on the left side of the image and a rectangle on the right side of the image. However, gaps are present in the shapes. If the law of closure did not exist, the image would depict an assortment of different lines with different lengths, rotations, and curvatures—but with the law of closure, we perceptually combine the lines into whole shapes.[19][20][21]
4. Law of Symmetry—The law of symmetry states that the mind perceives objects as being symmetrical and forming around a center point. It is perceptually pleasing to divide objects into an even number of symmetrical parts. Therefore, when two symmetrical elements are unconnected the mind perceptually connects them to form a coherent shape. Similarities between symmetrical objects increase the likelihood that objects are grouped to form a combined symmetrical object. For example, the figure depicting the law of symmetry shows a configuration of square and curled brackets. When the image is perceived, we tend to observe three pairs of symmetrical brackets rather than six individual brackets.[19][20]
5. Law of Common Fate—The law of common fate states that objects are perceived as lines that move along the smoothest path. Experiments using the visual sensory modality found that movement of elements of an object produce paths that individuals perceive that the objects are on. We perceive elements of objects to have trends of motion, which indicate the path that the object is on. The law of continuity implies the grouping together of objects that have the same trend of motion and are therefore on the same path. For example, if there are an array of dots and half the dots are moving upward while the other half are moving downward, we would perceive the upward moving dots and the downward moving dots as two distinct units.[22]
6. Law of Continuity—The law of continuity states that elements of objects tend to be grouped together, and therefore integrated into perceptual wholes if they are aligned within an object. In cases where there is an intersection between objects, individuals tend to perceive the two objects as two single uninterrupted entities. Stimuli remain distinct even with overlap. We are less likely to group elements with sharp abrupt directional changes as being one object.[19]
7. Law of Good Gestalt—The law of good gestalt explains that elements of objects tend to be perceptually grouped together if they form a pattern that is regular, simple, and orderly. This law implies that as individuals perceive the world, they eliminate complexity and unfamiliarity so they can observe a reality in its most simplistic form. Eliminating extraneous stimuli helps the mind create meaning. This meaning created by perception implies a global regularity, which is often mentally prioritized over spatial relations. The law of good gestalt focuses on the idea of conciseness, which is what all of gestalt theory is based on. This law has also been called the law of Prägnanz.[19] Prägnanz is a German word that directly translates to mean "pithiness" and implies the ideas of salience, conciseness and orderliness.[22]
8. Law of Past Experience—The law of past experience implies that under some circumstances visual stimuli are categorized according to past experience. If two objects tend to be observed within close proximity, or small temporal intervals, the objects are more likely to be perceived together. For example, the English language contains 26 letters that are grouped to form words using a set of rules. If an individual reads an English word they have never seen, they use the law of past experience to interpret the letters "L" and "I" as two letters beside each other, rather than using the law of closure to combine the letters and interpret the object as an uppercase U.[22]

Criticisms

Some of the central criticisms of Gestaltism are based on the preference Gestaltists are deemed to have for theory over data, and a lack of quantitative research supporting Gestalt ideas. This is not necessarily a fair criticism as highlighted by a recent collection of quantitative research on Gestalt perception.[23]

Other important criticisms concern the lack of definition and support for the many physiological assumptions made by gestaltists[24] and lack of theoretical coherence in modern Gestalt psychology.[23]

In some scholarly communities, such as cognitive psychology and computational neuroscience, gestalt theories of perception are criticized for being descriptive rather than explanatory in nature. For this reason, they are viewed by some as redundant or uninformative. For example, Bruce, Green & Georgeson[7] conclude the following regarding gestalt theory's influence on the study of visual perception:

The physiological theory of the gestaltists has fallen by the wayside, leaving us with a set of descriptive principles, but without a model of perceptual processing. Indeed, some of their "laws" of perceptual organisation today sound vague and inadequate. What is meant by a "good" or "simple" shape, for example?

— Bruce, Green & Georgeson, Visual perception: Physiology, psychology and ecology

Gestalt views in psychology

Gestalt psychologists find it is important to think of problems as a whole. Max Wertheimer considered thinking to happen in two ways: productive and reproductive.[25]

Productive thinking is solving a problem with insight.

This is a quick insightful unplanned response to situations and environmental interaction.

Reproductive thinking is solving a problem with previous experiences and what is already known. (1945/1959).

This is a very common thinking. For example, when a person is given several segments of information, he/she deliberately examines the relationships among its parts, analyzes their purpose, concept, and totality, he/she reaches the "aha!" moment, using what is already known. Understanding in this case happens intentionally by reproductive thinking.

Another gestalt psychologist, Perkins, believes insight deals with three processes:

1. Unconscious leap in thinking.[18]
2. The increased amount of speed in mental processing.
3. The amount of short-circuiting that occurs in normal reasoning.[26]

Views going against the gestalt psychology are:

1. Nothing-special view
2. Neo-gestalt view
3. The Three-Process View

Gestalt psychology should not be confused with the gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls, which is only peripherally linked to gestalt psychology. A strictly gestalt psychology-based therapeutic method is Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy, developed by the German gestalt psychologist and psychotherapist Hans-Jürgen Walter and his colleagues in Germany, Austria (Gerhard Stemberger and colleagues) and Switzerland. Other countries, especially Italy, have seen similar developments.

Fuzzy-trace theory

Fuzzy-trace theory, a dual process model of memory and reasoning, was also derived from Gestalt psychology. Fuzzy-trace theory posits that we encode information into two separate traces: verbatim and gist. Information stored in verbatim is exact memory for detail (the individual parts of a pattern, for example) while information stored in gist is semantic and conceptual (what we perceive the pattern to be). The effects seen in Gestalt psychology can be attributed to the way we encode information as gist.[27][28]

Use in design

The gestalt laws are used in user interface design. The laws of similarity and proximity can, for example, be used as guides for placing radio buttons. They may also be used in designing computers and software for more intuitive human use. Examples include the design and layout of a desktop's shortcuts in rows and columns.[29]

Music

An example of the Gestalt movement in effect, as it is both a process and result, is a music sequence. People are able to recognise a sequence of perhaps six or seven notes, despite them being transposed into a different tuning or key.[30]

Quantum cognition modeling

Similarities between Gestalt phenomena and quantum mechanics have been pointed out by, among others, chemist Anton Amann, who commented that "similarities between Gestalt perception and quantum mechanics are on a level of a parable" yet may give useful insight nonetheless.[31] Physicist Elio Conte and co-workers have proposed abstract, mathematical models to describe the time dynamics of cognitive associations with mathematical tools borrowed from quantum mechanics[32][33] and has discussed psychology experiments in this context. A similar approach has been suggested by physicists David Bohm, Basil Hiley and philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen with the notion that mind and matter both emerge from an "implicate order".[34][35] The models involve non-commutative mathematics; such models account for situations in which the outcome of two measurements performed one after the other can depend on the order in which they are performed—a pertinent feature for psychological processes, as an experiment performed on a conscious person may influence the outcome of a subsequent experiment by changing the state of mind of that person.

See also

• Psychology portal
• Amodal perception
• Cognitive grammar
• Fuzzy-trace theory
• Gestaltzerfall
• Graz School
• Hans Wallach
• Hermann Friedmann
• Important publications in Gestalt psychology
• James J. Gibson
• James Tenney
• Kurt Goldstein
• Laws of association
• Mereology
• Optical illusion
• Pál Schiller Harkai
• Pattern recognition (machine learning)
• Pattern recognition (psychology)
• Phenomenology
• Principles of grouping
• Rudolf Arnheim
• Solomon Asch
• Structural information theory
• Topological data analysis
• Wolfgang Metzger

References

1. "gestalt". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
2. Koffka 1935, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, p. 176
3. Tuck, Michael (Aug 17, 2010). "Gestalt Principles Applied in Design". Retrieved 2014-12-19.
4. David Hothersall: History of Psychology, chapter seven, (2004)
5. Heider, F. 1977. Cited in Dewey, R.A. 2007. Psychology: An introduction: Chapter four - The Whole is Other than the Sum of the Parts. Retrieved 4/12/2014.
6. Humphrey, G (1924). "The psychology of the gestalt". Journal of Educational Psychology. 15 (7): 401–412. doi:1 Bruce, V., Green, P. & Georgeson, M. (1996). Visual perception: Physiology, psychology and ecology (3rd ed.). LEA. p. 110.
8. Bernd Bocian: Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893–1933. Expressionism – Psychonalysis – Judaism, 2010, p. 190, EHP Verlag Andreas Kohlhage, Bergisch Gladbach.
9. Joe Wysong/Edward Rosenfeld (eds): An Oral History of Gestalt Therapy, Highland, New York 1982, The Gestalt Journal Press, p. 12.
10. Allen R. Barlow, "Gestalt-Antecedent Influence or Historical Accident", The Gestalt Journal, Volume IV, Number 2, (Fall, 1981)
11. Mary Henle 1975: Gestalt Psychology and Gestalt Therapy; Presidential address to Division 24 at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, September 1975. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14, pp 23-32.
12. See Barlow criticizing Henle: Allen R. Barlow: Gestalt Therapy and Gestalt Psychology. Gestalt – Antecedent Influence or Historical Accident, in: The Gestalt Journal, Volume IV, Number 2, Fall, 1981.
13. William Ray Woodward, Robert Sonné Cohen – World views and scientific discipline formation: science studies in the German Democratic Republic : papers from a German-American summer institute, 1988
14. Lettvin, J.Y., Maturana, H.R., Pitts, W.H., and McCulloch, W.S. (1961). Two Remarks on the Visual System of the Frog. In Sensory Communication edited by Walter Rosenblith, MIT Press and John Wiley and Sons: New York
15. Valentin Fedorovich Turchin – The phenomenon of science – a cybernetic approach to human evolution – Columbia University Press, 1977
16. Steven., Lehar, (2003). The World in your Head: A Gestalt View of the Mechanism of Conscious Experience. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. ISBN 0805841768. OCLC 52051454.
17. "Gestalt Isomorphism". Sharp.bu.edu. Archived from the original on 2012-02-17. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
18. Sternberg, Robert, Cognitive Psychology Third Edition, Thomson Wadsworth© 2003.
19. Stevenson, Herb. "Emergence: The Gestalt Approach to Change". Unleashing Executive and Orzanizational Potential. Retrieved 7 April 2012.
20. Soegaard, Mads. "Gestalt Principles of form Perception". Interaction Design. Retrieved 8 April 2012.
21. "Why Your Brain Thinks These Dots Are a Dog". Gizmodo UK. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
22. Todorovic, Dejan. "Gestalt Principles". Scholarpedia.org. Scholarpedia. Retrieved 5 April 2012.
23. Jäkel, F., Singh, M., Wichmann, F. A., & Herzog, M. H. (2016), "An overview of quantitative approaches in Gestalt perception.", Vision Research, 126: 3–8, doi:10.1016/j.visres.2016.06.004
24. Schultz, Duane (2013). A History of Modern Psychology. Burlington: Elsevier Science. p. 291. ISBN 1483270084.
25. Sternberg, Robert, Cognitive Psychology Fourth Edition, Thomas Wadsworth© 2006.
26. Langley& associates, 1987; Perkins, 1981; Weisberg, 1986,1995"
27. Reyna, Valerie (2012). "A new institutionism: Meaning, memory, and development in Fuzzy-Trace Theory". Judgment and Decision Making. 7 (3): 332–359.
28. Barghout, Lauren (2014). "Visual Taxometric Approach to Image Segmentation Using Fuzzy-Spatial Taxon Cut Yields Contextually Relevant Regions". Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems: 163–173.
29. Soegaard, Mads. "Gestalt principles of form perception". Interaction-design.org. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
30. Ellis, Willis D. (1999). A source book of Gestalt psychology (Vol 2 ed.). Psychology Press.
31. Anton Amann, The Gestalt problem in quantum theory: Generation of molecular shape by the environment. Synthese, October 1993, Volume 97, Issue 1, pp 125–156; Das Gestaltproblem in der Chemie: Die Entstehung molekularer Form unter dem Einfluß der Umgebung, Gestalt Theory, 1992, 14(4), 228-265.
32. Conte, Elio; Todarello, Orlando; Federici, Antonio; Vitiello, Francesco; Lopane, Michele; Khrennikov, Andrei; Zbilut, Joseph P. (2007). "Some remarks on an experiment suggesting quantum-like behavior of cognitive entities and formulation of an abstract quantum mechanical formalism to describe cognitive entity and its dynamics". Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. 31 (5): 1076–1088. arXiv:0710.5092. Bibcode:2007CSF....31.1076C. doi:10.1016/j.chaos.2005.09.061.
33. Elio Conte, Orlando Todarello, Antonio Federici, Francesco Vitiello, Michele Lopane, Andrei Khrennikov: A Preliminary Evidence of Quantum Like Behavior in Measurements of Mental States, arXiv:quant-ph/0307201 (submitted 28 July 2003)
34. B.J. Hiley: Particles, fields, and observers, Volume I The Origins of Life, Part 1 Origin and Evolution of Life, Section II The Physical and Chemical Basis of Life, pp. 87–106 (PDF)
35. Basil J. Hiley, Paavo Pylkkänen: Naturalizing the mind in a quantum framework. In Paavo Pylkkänen and Tere Vadén (eds.): Dimensions of conscious experience, Advances in Consciousness Research, Volume 37, John Benjamins B.V., 2001, ISBN 90-272-5157-6, pages 119-144
• Carlson, Neil R. and Heth, C. Donald (2010) Psychology the Science of Behaviour Ontario, CA: Pearson Education Canada. pp 20–22.
• Smith, Barry (ed.) (1988) Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Munich and Vienna: Philosophia Verlag, 1988.

External links

• Gestalt psychology on Encyclopædia Britannica
• Gestalt principles article in Scholarpedia, by Dejan Todorović
• Journal "Gestalt Theory - An International Multidisciplinary Journal" in full text (open source)
• International Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications – GTA
• Embedded Figures in Art, Architecture and Design
• On Max Wertheimer and Pablo Picasso
• On Esthetics and Gestalt Theory
• The World In Your Head – by Steven Lehar
• Gestalt Isomorphism and the Primacy of Subjective Conscious Experience – by Steven Lehar
• The new gestalt psychology of the 21st century
• The Pennsylvania Gestalt Center
• Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
• James J. Gibson in brief

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Survey of the Francis Underhill Macy papers
by Online Archive of California
Accessed: 4/3/19

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Description: Correspondence, reports, meeting materials, notes, lists, memoranda, printed matter, and photographs, relating to nongovernmental exchange programs between Americans and citizens of the Soviet Union and its successor republics, and to promotion of Gestalt psychology, environmentalism, nuclear safety and alternative energy sources in the Soviet Union and its successor republics.

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Francis Underhill Macy - improved Russia relations
by Peter Fimrite
SFGate
Published 4:00 am PST, Tuesday, February 10, 2009

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YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Taken about 1986. obit photo of Francis Macy, dedicated environmentalist, energy activist and citizen diplomat, whose ground-breaking work inspired fresh collaborative ventures with the former Soviet Union, died unexpectedly of an apparent heart attack in Berkeley on January 20th at age 81. Photo: Family Photo, Courtesy Photo

A memorial service will be held on Feb. 21 for Francis Underhill Macy, an environmental activist and expert on Russian culture who dedicated much of his life as a citizen diplomat working to improve relations with people in the former Soviet Union.

Mr. Macy, who advocated for racial equality long before the civil rights movement and was a well-known opponent of nuclear proliferation, died Jan. 20 in his Berkeley home from a heart attack. He was 81.

Born in Evanston, Ill., he was the youngest of four brothers whose parents were involved in the theater. Known to everyone as Fran, he received a bachelor's degree in government in 1949 from Wesleyan University, where he also excelled as an actor.

The course of his life began to take shape at Wesleyan, where he did what was, at the time, almost unthinkable. He became roommates with a black man named Chuck Stone, who would become a prominent journalist.

The two men worked together at one point trying to desegregate restaurants in Washington, D.C., and became lifelong friends.

After graduation, he enrolled at Harvard, where he turned heads rooming with another African American. He received a master's in 1951 in Slavic studies at Harvard and learned to speak Russian.

In 1953, he married Joanna Rogers, who embraced her husband's activism and remained his compatriot for life.

He began working for the Russian-language station Radio Liberty, which was based in Munich, at the height of the Cold War. He worked for the U.S. Information Service, which sent American citizen diplomats around the world to talk to people about American values and democracy.

The NSC's Project Democracy

Efforts to create "political development" programs date back to the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, when Congress discussed, but declined to approve, several bills to establish a "Freedom Academy" that would conduct party-building in the Third World. The passage of the Title IX addition to the Foreign Aid Act in 1966 spurred renewed interest in such an agency. The Brookings Institute, one of the most important policy planning institutes, undertook an extensive research program on political development programs in coordination with the AID and other government agencies.37 In 1967, President Johnson appointed the three-member Katzenback Commission which recommended that the government "promptly develop and establish a public-private mechanism to provide public funds openly for overseas activities of organizations which are adjudged deserving, in the national interest, of public support."38 A bill was introduced in Congress in 1967 by Rep. Dante Fascell (D.-Fla.) to create an "Institute of International Affairs," but it was not approved.39 Meanwhile, the public outcry against intervention abroad in the early 1970s as a result of the Indochina war and the revelations of CIA activities, as well as the Watergate scandal, put these initiatives on hold for much of that decade.

Then, in 1979, with reassertionism taking hold, a group of government officials, academicians, and trade union, business, and political leaders connected to the foreign-policy establishment, created the American Political Foundation (APF), with funding from the State Department's United States Information Agency (USIA) and from several private foundations. The APF brought together representatives of all the dominant sectors of US society, including both parties and leaders from labor and business. It also brought together many of the leading figures who had been developing the ideas of the new political intervention, many of them associated with the transnationalized fraction of the US elite.40 Among those on the APF board were Lane Kirkland of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), former Republican National Committee chair William Brock, former Democratic National Committee chair Charles Manatt, international vice-president for the US Chamber of Commerce Michael Samuels, as well as Frank Fahrenkopf, Congressman Dante Fascell, Zbignew Brezezinski, John Richardson, and Henry Kissinger. The APF was chaired by Allen Weinstein, who would later become the first president of the NED. The names of APF activists and the composition of the APF board are revealing. They fall into three categories. One is members of the inner circle of second-generation post-World War II national security and foreign policymakers, such as Kissinger, Brezezinski, and Richard Allen, all former National Security Advisors. Another is top representatives of the four major constituencies that made up the post-World War II foreign-policy coalition -- the Democratic and Republican parties, labor and business. The third is operatives from the US intelligence and national security community. These intelligence and security operatives include people associated with the CIA and dozens of front organizations or foundations with which it works, as well as operatives from the USIA.

The prominence of the USIA is significant, since this is an agency with a long track record in political and psychological operations. It was created by the Eisenhower administration in 1953 as an agency within the NSC at the recommendation of a top-secret report issued by the President's Committee on International Information Activities. Its explicit purpose was to conduct propaganda, political and psychological operations abroad in conjunction with CIA activities.41 A National Security Action Memo in 1962 stipulated coordination among the USIA, the AID, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department in waging political warfare operations, including civic action, economic and military aid programs.42 Based on research programs it conducts directly or commissions governmental and non-governmental agencies to conduct, the USIA selects propaganda themes, determines target audiences, and develops comprehensive country plans for media manipulation and communications programs. As part of Project Democracy, USIA activities were greatly expanded in the 1980s.43

The APF recommended in 1981 that a presidential commission examine "how the US could promote democracy overseas." The White House approved the recommendation for Project Democracy. At its onset, Project Democracy was attached to the NSC, and supervised by Walter Raymond Jr., a high-ranking CIA propaganda specialist who worked closely with Oliver North, a key player in the Iran-Contra scandal, on covert projects.44 "Overt political action," explained Raymond, could help achieve foreign-policy objectives by providing "support to various institutions [and]... the development of networks and personal relationships with key people."45 Raymond explained that the creation of the NED as a "vehicle for quasi-public/private funds" would fill a "key gap" in US foreign-policy -- it would be a "new art form."46 Raymond and his staff at the NSC worked closely with Democratic Congressman Dante Fascell of Florida. Fascell chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee which would draft the legislation creating the NED and organized support for the project within Congress.47

In June 1982, in a speech before the British parliament considered the symbolic inauguration of the new policy, Ronald Reagan announced that the United States would pursue a major new program to help "foster the infrastructure of democracy around the world."48 A secret White House memo on the minutes of a Cabinet-level planning meeting to discuss Project Democracy held two months later, in August, set the agenda: "We need to examine how law and Executive Order can be made more liberal to permit covert action on a broader scale, as well as what we can do through substantially increased overt political action."49 Then, in January 1983, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 77 (NSDD 77), which laid out a comprehensive framework for employing political operations and psychological warfare in US foreign policy. At least $65 million was allocated by the administration to underwrite the activities and programs contemplated in the NSC directive.50 NSDD 77 focused on three aspects of Project Democracy.51 One aspect was dubbed "public diplomacy" -- psychological operations aimed at winning support for US foreign policy among the US public and the international community -- and involved an expansion of propaganda and informational and psychological operations. The directive defined "public diplomacy" as "those actions of the US Government designed to generate support for our national security objectives." An Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD) operating out of the White House was established.52 The General Accounting Office ruled OPD an illegal domestic propaganda operation in 1988. Another aspect set out in the NSC directive was an expansion of covert operations. This aspect would develop into the clandestine, illegal government operations later exposed in the hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s. Parallel to "the public arm of Project Democracy, now known as the National Endowment for Democracy," noted the New York Times, "the project's secret arm took an entirely different direction after Lieut.-Col. Oliver I. North, then an obscure National Security Council aide, was appointed to head it."53

The final aspect was the creation of a "quasi-governmental institute." This would engage in "political action strategies" abroad, stated NSDD 77.54 This led to the formal incorporation of the NED by Congress in November 1983. While the CIA and the NSC undertook "covert" operations under Project Democracy, some of which were exposed in the Iran-Contra investigations, the NED and related agencies went on to execute the "overt" side of what the New York Times described as "open and secret parts" of Project Democracy, "born as twins" in 1982 with NSDD 77.55 But while the Iran-Contra covert operations that grew out of Project Democracy were exposed and (assumed to be) terminated, the NED was consolidated and expanded as the decade progressed. With the mechanisms in place by the mid-1980s, the "reassertionists" turned to launching their global "democracy offensive." "The proposed campaign for democracy must be conceived in the broadest terms and must weave together a wide range of superficially disparate aspects of US foreign policy, including the efforts of private groups," noted one Project Democracy consultant. "A democracy campaign should become an increasingly important and highly cost-effective component of ... the defense effort of the United States and its allies."56 The countries in which the NED became most involved in the 1980s and early 1990s were those set as priorities for US foreign-policy. "Such a worldwide effort (a 'crusade for democracy'] directly or indirectly must strive to achieve three goals," one Project Democracy participant explained. "The preservation of democracies from internal subversion by either the Right or the Left; the establishment of new democracies where feasible; and keeping open the democratic alternative for all nondemocracies. To achieve each of these goals we must struggle militarily, economically, politically and ideologically."57

In countries designated as hostile and under Soviet influence, such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the United States organized "freedom fighters" (anti-government insurgents) in the framework of low-intensity conflict doctrine, while the NED and related organs introduced complementary political programs. Those countries designated for transition from right-wing military or civilian dictatorships to stable "democratic" governments inside the US orbit, including Chile, Haiti, Paraguay, and the Philippines, received special attention. By the late 1980s and early 1990s ,the NED had also launched campaigns in Cuba, Vietnam, and other countries on the US enemy list, and had also become deeply involved in the self-proclaimed socialist countries, including the Soviet Union itself. While these first programs were tied to the 1980s anti-communist crusade, the NED and other "democracy promotion" agencies made an easy transition to the post-Cold War era. As the rubric of anti-communism and national security became outdated, the rhetoric of "promoting democracy" took on even greater significance. Perestroika and glasnost highlighted authentic democratization as an aspiration of many peoples. But US strategists saw in the collapse of the Soviet system an opportunity to accelerate political intervention under the cover of promoting democracy. In the age of global society, the NED and other "democracy promotion" organs have become sophisticated instruments for penetrating the political systems and civil society in other countries down to the grassroots level.

-- Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony, by William I. Robinson

In 1961, Mr. Macy led the first ever citizen diplomatic mission into the USSR. The group of Russian-speaking American graduate students were the first Americans many locals had ever met.

"The word got out and, rain or shine, there were long lines of people waiting to talk to young Americans," said Mr. Macy's wife, who accompanied him on the mission. "It changed their attitude about Americans. They saw for the first time that Americans were real people, not the rich capitalist racists who fit into the Stalinist stereotype."

It was such a moving experience that Mr. Macy turned down a prestigious government posting in Moscow and joined the Peace Corps. He also took time to join the 1963 March on Washington and was there when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech.

"Fran saw that when you bring people together, magic happens," said his wife.

Between 1964 and 1972, he served as deputy Peace Corps director in India, country director in Tunisia and Nigeria and finally as director of all Peace Corps programs in Africa.

In 1983, Mr. Macy organized an exchange program. He has since taken delegations of educators, environmentalists, psychologists and civic organizers to Russia and the former Soviet republics for talks and professional training.

He got involved in nuclear issues after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which occurred while he was in Russia. In 1995 he founded the Earth Island Institute's Center for Safe Energy, which has trained hundreds of activists in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan.

He and his wife, an activist, author and teacher of Buddhist theory, have been involved in many local environmental groups and causes, including the Nuclear Guardianship Project, the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability and Tri-Valley CARES, a watchdog group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Besides his wife, he is survived by his sons, Christopher of Amsterdam and Jack of Berkeley; his daughter, Peggy Macy of Berkeley; and three grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Feb. 21 at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way.

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Kremlin angry as Radio Liberty Airs: After delay, U.S.-financed broadcasts begin in Chechnya today
by Anna Badkhen
Chronicle Staff Writer
Published 4:00 am PST, Wednesday, April 3, 2002

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Moscow -- Today's premiere of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the volatile North Caucasus region -- including breakaway Chechnya -- may sour U.S.-Russia relations, the Kremlin says.

"The launch of the service is likely to fuel extremism not only in Russia but elsewhere in the world, given the ties between Chechen terrorists and international terrorist groups," said Alexei Volin, the Putin administration's deputy chief of staff.

The U.S.-financed broadcast in local North Caucasus languages had been scheduled to begin in late February but was delayed at the request of the State Department on the ground that it could set back efforts to start a dialogue with Moscow on ending the Chechnya war, according to State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

Some analysts, however, said Washington was more afraid of upsetting its budding partnership with Russia in the war against terrorism.

Russia, which is fighting its second war in separatist Chechnya since 1994, portrays Chechen rebels as terrorists who deserve no media coverage. Russian journalists generally accept the Kremlin's spin on the war -- that the army is fighting the good fight to rid the region of Islamic rebels.

"This move (by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) is incompatible with the common fight against terror and with the spirit of budding relations of partnership between Russia and the United States," read a Foreign Ministry statement handed to a senior U.S. diplomat yesterday.

"Launching specific propaganda broadcasts in the region, including Chechnya, could seriously complicate efforts by the (Russian) government to stabilize the situation in the area."

The Russian military force has been accused of random detentions of Chechen civilians, arbitrary killings and demanding bribes for the release of imprisoned Chechens and even for dead bodies. These actions have been reported by Western journalists but have never been broadcast on Russian television.

The Kremlin says the U.S. view of the campaign, reflected by previous Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports, inflates the brutality of Russian troops and diminishes the atrocities committed by the rebels in the name of independence.

The few Chechens who have television sets are allowed to see only Russian reports based on information provided by the army. Moscow has set up a radio station that broadcasts in Chechen, but local citizens say the coverage is biased.

As a result, many Chechens who speak Russian have turned to the Russian services of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty or the BBC as their main source of news.

Tom Dine, president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said the new service will provide "perspectives that you cannot get elsewhere" in Chechen, Avar and Circassian -- the languages spoken by ethnic groups in Chechnya and the republics of Dagestan and Karachayevo-Cherkessia.

"Our news will be of the region, produced by correspondents who are in the region," Dine said. "We'll be able to let people think things through in their own language."

Dine said the station plans to use correspondents based in Brussels, Grozny, Chechnya's capital; Nazran, the capital of the republic of Ingushetia; and Dagestan's capital, Makhachkala. The two-hour broadcasts will be put together in Prague and transmitted from Istanbul.

The Kremlin's Volin, however, fears that some programming in Chechen will be done by "members of Chechen radical groups," an allegation Dine vehemently denies.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a private, nonprofit corporation that receives funds from the U.S. government. It was established in 1949 to spread pro-Western news to Eastern European countries and to promote democratic values and institutions. In 1975, it merged with Radio Liberty, which had been broadcasting in the Soviet Union.

The station became a symbol of democracy and free speech in the Soviet Union, where millions of people secretly listened to its broadcasts that were banned and jammed by the KGB.

When former President Boris Yeltsin came to power after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he embraced the radio station and even signed a decree to create its Moscow-based Russian service.

The honeymoon ended after Russia sent troops into Chechnya for the second time more than two years ago. In 2000, Russian troops arrested and held for several weeks a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reporter named Andrei Babitsky, who had angered Moscow by frequently interviewing Chechen rebels.

When the U.S. Congress first opted last year to finance broadcasts to the North Caucasus region, the Kremlin called the decision "interference into Russia's internal affairs" and threatened to shut down the station's Russia service.

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A Look Back … The National Committee for Free Europe, 1949
by Central Intelligence Agency
Historical Document
Posted: May 29, 2007 04:10 PM
Last Updated: May 25, 2017 03:14 PM

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On June 1, 1949, a group of prominent American businessmen, lawyers, and philanthropists – including Allen Dulles, who would become Director of Central Intelligence in 1953 – launched the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE) at a press release in New York. Only a handful of people knew that NCFE was actually the public face of an innovative "psychological warfare" project undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). That operation – which soon gave rise to Radio Free Europe – would become one of the longest running and successful covert action campaigns ever mounted by the United States.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty examines the first twenty years of the organization, policies, and impact of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, arguably one of the most important and successful policy instruments of the United States during the Cold War.

The book is based on extensive archival research both in the United States and in Germany, Poland, and Hungary, as well as on interviews and the author’s own experiences. It uses CIA materials, in part declassified at the request of the author, extensively. Johnson concentrates on the origins and role of RFE/RL in the context of U.S. national security strategy, with particular attention to the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in covertly organizing and funding RFE/RL from 1949 to 1971. And he details RFE activities during the most important East European crises of the era—Poland and Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

-- Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond, by A. Ross Johnson

George Kennan of the Department of State could be considered the godfather of NCFE. He – more than any other official – pressed the National Security Council to reorganize covert action planning and management. This resulted in the creation of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) at the CIA in September 1948 and the appointment of the visionary OSS veteran Frank G. Wisner as its chief.

Kennan proposed that OPC work through an "American freedom committee" in dealing with anti-Communist émigré groups in the United States to develop operations abroad. The idea was to fund selected émigrés in their activities to demonstrate that the newly imposed Soviet-style dictatorships in Eastern Europe oppressed the aspirations of their people. NCFE was the American umbrella for these exiled European figures in the United States, raising private funds through Crusade for Freedom to supplement CIA funding and organizing exile activities to reach back to their occupied homelands.

From the start, Wisner and OPC regarded NCFE as one of their signature operations. As the Cold War reached perhaps its most dangerous phase, NCFE and other projects (such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1950, and Radio Liberty, which began broadcasts to the Soviet Union in 1953) rallied anti-Communist intellectuals, politicians, and activists to fight the Soviets in a contest for the peoples' "minds and loyalties."

NCFE soon gave rise to its more famous progeny, Radio Free Europe, which began broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain on July 4, 1950. Radio Free Europe aired programs to Eastern Europe in six languages. For decades, it was a beacon of hope to people who had otherwise lost access to the outside world.

CIA subsidies to the Free Europe Committee (NCFE's later name) ended in 1971, after Sen. Clifford P. Case (R-NJ) revealed that it received covert assistance. After that date, all CIA involvement ended, and Radio Free Europe was publicly funded by Congressional appropriation through the presidentially appointed Board for International Broadcasting. RFE merged with Radio Liberty (RL) in 1976 in a new non-profit corporation, RFE/RL, Inc. Oversight was assumed in 1995 by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, responsible for all non-military U.S. international broadcasting.

Today the programs of RFE/RL – radio, internet, television, and mobile – reach 27 million people in 26 languages and 23 countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the republics of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, as well as the Baltic states.

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Radio Liberty, the CIA on the beach of Girona
by Irina Schytcheva
http://blog.barcelonaguidebureau.com
5 March, 2019

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Radio Liberty was an American radio station built in Costa Brava in the Cold War, to broadcast anti-Communist propaganda. This media was a prop provided by the United States to strengthen the Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. Specifically designed for the CIA, The Central Intelligence Agency, a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of US. This radio was located on the beach of Pals in Girona. A city located 99 km northeast of Barcelona, at the confluence of the rivers Ter, Onyar, Galligants, and Güell. One of the biggest Catalan cities and where you will find the amazing Dalí museum!

What were the antecedents of its creation?

The rapprochement campaign began in 1937 in the New York Times. In 1943, the Special Services Office of the CIA sent to Spain the wife of the Count of Romanones, Aline Griffith. In 1947 Franco dictated the Law of Successión or “Ley de Sucesión” “Spain will be a Kingdom”, they sign then with the “kingdom of Spain”. Foster Dulles and William F. Jr. Buckley praised the figure of Franco in 1957. That year the agreement was signed to mount the station. Buckley’s brother, James L, was president of RFE-RL from 1982-1985.


The interior of Radio Liberty

Who supported the radio?

The pillars of the radio were: the CIA, large companies with their economic contributions and the military. Its work was to issue propaganda to the countries of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (URSS) with the objective of “achieving its liberalization”. They did it from Spain that was kidnapped by a dictatorship. It was one of the most powerful in the world, with the most innovative material at the time.

Why on the beach of Pals?

The Americans decided to build it in this little paradise of Costa Brava because of its strategic position, since the waves that emitted bounced with the stratosphere and went directly to the city of Moscow.
Marina Capdevila wanted to give life and color to this building, painting more than 2000 m2 of surface in 12 days of hard work. See this magic and historic place from the top in this video!

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Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (review)
by Malcolm Byrne
Journal of Cold War Studies
The MIT Press
Volume 14, Number 3, Summer 2012, pp. 213-215

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by Malcolm Byrne: A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond. Washington, DC: Wilson Center Press, 2010. 304 pp. $55.00.

A video marking 60 years of broadcasting at Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL) begins with a grainy, black-and-white clip of Ronald Reagan narrating a promotional film about the radios. As footage of a radio tower rolls by, Reagan intones: "This powerful 135,000-watt Radio Free Europe transmitter pierces the Iron Curtain with the truth, answering the lies of the Kremlin, and bringing a message of hope to millions."

This tongue-in-cheek glimpse of a bygone era is entertaining, but the segment also unintentionally points up one of several ambiguities that have shadowed RFE and RL ever since Ramparts magazine and The New York Times published articles in 1967 exposing the radios' ties to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Were the stations supposed to be independent sources of news and information, as their sponsors claimed? Or were they just propaganda tools of the U.S. government, as the ham-handed Reagan promotional video unwittingly suggests?

Ross Johnson's fervent hope in this valuable new book is to be able finally to settle some of these nagging questions and misperceptions. By focusing on RFE's and RL's formative first two decades, he not only fills a gap in the literature but manages to convey many of the subtleties and complexities about the radios' formation and early development that helped give rise to their somewhat ambiguous image.

The chief cause of this ambiguity was RFE's and RL's relationship to the CIA. Johnson does not see that connection as a problem and explains why in his view the agency turned out to be a helpful, even necessary, institutional base. One reason was policy-related. George Kennan conceived of the idea to establish a broadcasting operation using Soviet-bloc émigrés as a weapon of psychological warfare, which placed it squarely under the purview of institutions like Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination and the CIA.

The relationship also had a financial basis. Voice of America (VOA) already existed through public funding. In the postwar environment it was highly unlikely that Congress would be willing to appropriate money for a second, similar-sounding government radio operation. Far easier to use the agency's clandestine funds.

Another source of confusion is the fact that the nature of RFE's and RL's mission changed over time. RFE's first broadcasts out of New York in July 1951 were unvarnished propaganda salvos against the Soviet-bloc regimes—"short and negative," reflecting the perspective of U.S. hardliners. Only after management succeeded, following some political and bureaucratic struggle, in transferring production and transmission [End Page 213] operations from New York to Munich did "a second RFE" emerge, eventually developing a quite different role as "surrogate broadcaster" for the captive nations. The service would no longer be a simple mouthpiece for the United States but one run substantially by émigré broadcasters who were thought to know best what would work with their audiences.

The decision to grant considerable autonomy to the individual services was critical to RFE's (and RL's) long-term success. But it also played a part during RFE's bleakest episode—the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Johnson calls that experience "the story that never dies." His defense of the overarching—and relatively circumspect—official policies that were in effect well before the uprising is spirited but also well-sourced. So is his critique of certain instances in which the guidance coming from headquarters was not honored in the breach. The violations that did occur, he says, were less dire than many have believed. What is more, the really egregious broadcasts more likely came from the "many other foreign radio stations" that were broadcasting to Hungary during the revolution (such as the right-wing Radio Madrid).

Some of these points are disputed by other researchers (and certainly many Hungarians are unlikely to be persuaded), but Johnson's access to all the available recordings, log tapes...

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Joanna Macy
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/3/19

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Another woman who experienced Freda's ability to break down barriers to get what she wanted was Joanna Macy, renowned American environmentalist, teacher, and author. She was living in Delhi with her husband Francis Underhill Macy], who was working for the Peace Corps, when Freda came to visit.

"I remember I opened the door and she stood there in her maroon clothes, greeting me as if somehow I and not she were the guest. I loved the way that touch of the Raj blended so paradoxically and superbly with the monk's garb she wore. She had come because she wanted my husband to release a particular person in the Peace Corps to work for her in Dalhousie. 'I shall speak to my friend Mr. B in the Cabinet,' Mummy said with a smile. 'When do you think we can expect him?' It was the marriage of serenity and sheer nerve. She was English in the way only the English can be. She had implicit authority," Macy said.

Later, Macy went to Dalhousie to help settle Khamtrul Rinpoche, a high lama who had escaped from Tibet with a huge number of followers, including monks and a large community of accomplished artists and craftspeople. She took the opportunity to take teachings from Freda at a small class for Westerners she had organized in Dalhousie. Macy also undertook a silent retreat under Freda's direction, and today acknowledges Freda's influence on her spiritual life.

"What she had to say had a lucidity and simplicity about it. I can't accept any teachings if there is a false note -- if it is not coming from a person's wholeness and integrity, if what they are saying merely comes from what has been heard or read. With Freda I was able to drink it in. It was coming from beyond."

"I don't know how realized she was. I didn't go into those areas. She told me something about her mystical experience in Burma. She said she came out onto the street and saw everything in the world lit up as though from within. She did not go into a featureless expanse -- but the ordinary world was transformed for her.

"She also taught me from her actions. I never heard her say a mean thing about anyone. She was always thinking of others, writing to people all the time, trying to get others what they needed. And it was done with such affection. She constantly had a folder in her lap, and whenever she had a minute, she'd write a note to someone.

"Mummy was wonderful for me to a very high degree," Macy continued. "First of all, she was important because she was a woman. I am grateful to someone who understood the teachings and practice, and that it was a woman in a tradition that is quite male dominated. That was not by choice -- it was sheer good luck. I was not consciously being a feminist, but I knew and I trusted her. She had a love of the Dharma and used it in a bold, brave way. When I first approached her for teachings, she replied, 'Yes, of course, my dear, I will be delighted. That is just the thing.' I sensed she had just been waiting for me to ask.

"Although she had reverence for the tradition, she did not present me with any overlay of doctrine or view. Nor did she start me off as the lamas would have done, with the Vajrayana (the Buddhism exclusive to Tibet). Instead, she wanted me to recapitulate her own journey, starting with the Theravada buddhism she had learned in Rangoon. For me this was quite marvelous. It acquainted me with the early teachings of the Buddha and disciplined my mind in a way of following empirically my own experience in the immediate arising of mental and physical phenomena in my own body and mind. 'Bare attention -- just watch the thoughts. Know you are thinking, thinking. Get the "I" out of it," Mummy instructed. This allowed me later on in graduate school to approach the early teachings without any filter, with tremendous respect and curiosity for what the Buddha was saying. During my retreat I was in torment yet fascinated watching my own mind.

"She was trying to bring me right up to Tibetan practice. She kept talking about Trungpa, whom she loved very much. 'Wait till you meet him,' she said. When Trungpa came to the States, I thought, 'Now I'll graduate to a Tibetan practice,' but I stayed with the Vipassana I'd learned from Mummy.

"What Mummy did not do for me, however, was to model the social significance of the Buddha's teachings for our times, which is what I had become very focused on. 'Engaged Buddhism,' as it's called. To me Buddhism frees us to act for social and ecological survival, what needs to be done for a just and sustainable society. This wasn't of interest to Mummy."

-- The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi, by Vicki Mackenzie

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Institute of Noetic Sciences president Willis Harman argued that significant social change cannot occur without significant consciousness change.[66] In the 21st century, humanistic psychologists such as Edmund Bourne,[67] Joanna Macy,[68] and Marshall Rosenberg[69] continued to apply psychological insights to social and political issues.

-- Humanistic psychology, by Wikipedia

Joanna Macy - Choosing Life | Bioneers
We open our heart-mind to behold and give shape to our world, to let our hearts be a mirror to the world....

Carl Jung believed that the core of each life is a question that that life, that person, must pursue, and is fortunate if he or she discovers it. Well, I know what the question was ... the question was how to be fully present to my world, present enough to enjoy it and be useful, while at the same time knowing that my species, we human species, are progressively destroying this world. Wow! That splits you right down the middle and puts you back together again, over and over again. It has asked me to keep my eyes and heart open to what I see happening, to unblock the feedback loops, and help others do it too, to speak the truth...

I wanted to dedicate the minutes of my talk with you to Edward Snowden, and to Chelsea Manning, and to countless others of our brothers and sisters who are helping us see what really is going on, breaking down the walls of secrecy! Because it is only when we are able to see our world and touch it that we can be part of its self-healing....

In 1953, he [Francis Underhill Macy] married Joanna Rogers, who embraced her husband's activism and remained his compatriot for life. He began working for the Russian-language station Radio Liberty, which was based in Munich, at the height of the Cold War. He worked for the U.S. Information Service, which sent American citizen diplomats around the world to talk to people about American values and democracy.

-- Francis Underhill Macy - improved Russia relations, by Peter Fimrite

Ramparts magazine and The New York Times published articles in 1967 exposing the radios' ties to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

-- Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (review), by Malcolm Byrne

The prominence of the USIA is significant, since this is an agency with a long track record in political and psychological operations. It was created by the Eisenhower administration in 1953 as an agency within the NSC at the recommendation of a top-secret report issued by the President's Committee on International Information Activities. Its explicit purpose was to conduct propaganda, political and psychological operations abroad in conjunction with CIA activities.41 A National Security Action Memo in 1962 stipulated coordination among the USIA, the AID, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department in waging political warfare operations, including civic action, economic and military aid programs.

-- Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony, by William I. Robinson

To see my world as lover and self, to not be afraid of the suffering, and not being afraid, can get my heart-mind kind of bruised and banged up a little bit. That's what the time we're in seems to call for. And so the times of welcoming the world in a heart and mind have brought such adventures....

So this question opens me up, and opens us all up. And I turn to Rilke again, "I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world." ...

I've been circling around God, that primordial tower, I've been circling for thousands of years, and I still don't know. Am I a vulcan, a storm, or a great song? Same for you! That's the same for you! I've learned that in my deep ecology. Friends, as we tell the truth of what we feel and know is happening, as we let others speak through us, other life forms, the life in us is so big, it cannot be reduced to one social role, to one curriculum vitae. Our roots go back, back, back to the beginnings of life. You know that. To the first splitting and spinning of the stars. And all of that journey forward, our human journey, and those before us, have brought us to this point. And we can be so grateful, I am so grateful to be alive now. Because, for life to continue, well, that means -- and you know it in your heart, and that's why you're here at Bioneers, and that's why Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons are so faithful in bringing it -- that we have to make a giant step in our consciousness. We have to make real what we dream and know and intuit: That we are one planet people. And we can only be one planet people if we honor all our differences. That we belong to one living sacred body of earth. And when we get that, my brothers and sisters, when we really get that, we'll be able to achieve the ongoing singing of the song of life. Isn't that so?! ...

Rilke said toward the end of his life, in a sonnet to Orpheus ... "Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you." And then he says, "Let this darkness be a bell-tower, and you the bell, and as you ring, what batters you becomes your strength!" Ho, ho! Get that! Then you realize that you're made for change.

And I love it that systems thinking helps us see that, with positive feedback loops, where the change is so great that the old values, and the old norms, and the old self-images, the old worries and feuds, don't fit anymore. And that you have to die to the old forms, and resurrect in a larger self, wider rings....

The word is "positive disintegration." Because you are having to die to images and concepts of yourself that are simply too small. That there is something so big that wants to happen through us. And that we MUST allow it to happen through us if we want life to continue on this planet. Because the engines of destruction are strong!

Joanna Rogers Macy
Born 2 May 1929 (age 89)
Occupation Author, Buddhist scholar, environmental activist
Nationality American

Joanna Rogers Macy (born May 2, 1929), is an environmental activist, author, scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. She is the author of eight books.[1]

Biography

Macy graduated from Wellesley College in 1950 and received her Ph.D in Religious Studies in 1978 from Syracuse University, Syracuse. She studied there with Huston Smith, the influential author of The World's Religions (previously entitled The Religions of Man). She is an international spokesperson for anti-nuclear causes, peace, justice, and environmentalism,[1] most renowned for her book Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World and the Great Turning initiative, which deals with the transformation from, as she terms it, an industrial growth society to what she considers to be a more sustainable civilization. She has created a theoretical framework for personal and social change, and a workshop methodology for its application. Her work addresses psychological and spiritual issues, Buddhist thought, and contemporary science. She was married to the late Francis Underhill Macy, the activist and Russian scholar who founded the Center for Safe Energy.[citation needed]

Key Influences

Macy first encountered Buddhism in 1965 while working with Tibetan refugees in northern India, particularly the Ven. 8th Khamtrul Rinpoche, Sister Karma Khechog Palmo, Ven. Dugu Choegyal Rinpoche, and Tokden Antrim of the Tashi Jong community. Her spiritual practice is drawn from the Theravada tradition of Nyanaponika Thera and Rev. Sivali of Sri Lanka, Munindraji of West Bengal, and Dhiravamsa of Thailand.

Key formative influences to her teaching in the field of the connection to living systems theory have been Ervin Laszlo who introduced her to systems theory through his writings (especially Introduction to Systems Philosophy and Systems, Structure and Experience), and who worked with her as advisor on her doctoral dissertation (later adapted as Mutual Causality) and on a project for the Club of Rome. Gregory Bateson, through his Steps to an Ecology of Mind and in a summer seminar, also shaped her thought, as did the writings of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Arthur Koestler, and Hazel Henderson. She was influenced in the studies of biological systems by Tyrone Cashman, and economic systems by Kenneth Boulding. Donella Meadows provided insights on the planetary consequences of runaway systems, and Elisabet Sahtouris provided further information about self-organizing systems in evolutionary perspective.

Work

Macy travels giving lectures, workshops, and trainings internationally. Her work, originally called "Despair and Empowerment Work" was acknowledged as being part of the deep ecology tradition after she encountered the work of Arne Naess and John Seed [2], but as a result of disillusion with academic disputes in the field, she now calls it "the Work that Reconnects". Widowed by the death of her husband, Francis Underhill Macy, in January 2009, she lives in Berkeley, California, near her children and grandchildren. She serves as adjunct professor to three graduate schools in the San Francisco Bay Area: the Starr King School for the Ministry, the University of Creation Spirituality, and the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Writings

• Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age; New Society Pub (1983); ISBN 0-86571-031-7
• Dharma and Development: Religion as resource in the Sarvodaya self help movement; Kumarian Press revised ed (1985); ISBN 0-931816-53-X
• Thinking Like a Mountain: Toward a Council of All Beings; Joanna Macy, John Seed, Pat Fleming, Arne Naess, Dailan Pugh; New Society Publishers (1988); ISBN 0-86571-133-X
• Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural System (Buddhist Studies Series); State University of New York Press (1991); ISBN 0-7914-0637-7
• Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy; Riverhead Books (1996); ISBN 1-59448-156-3
• Coming Back to Life : Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World; Joanna R. Macy, Molly Young Brown; New Society Publishers (1998); ISBN 0-86571-391-X
• Widening Circles : a memoir ; New Catalyst Books (2001); ISBN 978-1897408018
• World as Lover, World as Self; Parallax Press (2005); ISBN 0-938077-27-9
• "Pass It On: Five Stories That Can Change the World"; Parallax Press (2010); ISBN 9781888375831
• "Active Hope : how to face the mess we're in without going crazy"; Joanna Macy, Chris Johnstone; New World Library (2012); ISBN 978-1-57731-972-6

See also

• David Korten, a collaborator with Macy on the Great Turning Initiative

References

1. George Prentice (January 18, 2012). "Anti-nuclear activist is 'just a sucker for courage'". Boise Weekly.
2. "John Seed is founder and director of the Rainforest Information Centre in Australia".
External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Joanna Macy

• Joanna Macy's website on the work of Experiential Deep Ecology
• Gaia Foundation of Western Australia — an Australian organisation based on the principles of Deep Ecology.
• California Institute of Integral Studies
• Interview with Joanna Macy by John Malkin — published in ascent magazine, summer 2008
• The Healing on Mother Earth Project — a Sebastopol, Ca organisation based on the principles of deep ecology.
• "The Work that Reconnects" — Video series of a workshop with Joanna Macy.
• A Wild Love for the World, an interview with Joanna Macy, by Krista Tippet on the American Radio Show "On Being." This page provides links to the original program that first aired in 2010, along with the unedited version of the program. Macy also recites many Rilke poems during the show, but some of these poems are edited out so you can listen to them recited individually.
• "Allegiance to Life: Staying steady through the mess we're in," An interview with Joanna Macy from Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

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Joanna Macy on the relevance of the Shambhala Warrior Prophecy for our time
by http://newstoryhub.com
10 September 2017

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Findhorn Fellow, Eco-philosopher and root teacher of The Work That Reconnects, Joanna Macy, shares the twelve centuries old Shambhala Warrior Prophecy from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which is said to come true in our time. She invites you to listen to it as if it were about you….

“There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. At that time great powers have arisen, barbarian powers, and although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common. Among the things these barbarians have in common are weapons of unfathomable devastation and death and technologies that lay wast to the world. And it is just at this point in our history, when the future of all beings seems to hang by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of shambhala emerges. Now, you can’t go there because it is not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds of the shambhala warriors….

“Now the time is coming when great courage is required of the shambhala warriors: moral courage and physical courage, and that’s because they are going to go right into the heart of the barbarian powers to dismantle their weapons. They are going to go into the pits and citadels where the weapons are made and deployed. They are going to go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made, to dismantle the weapons in every sense of the word. The shambahla warriors know that these weapons can be dismantled because they are made by the human mind. They can be unmade by the human mind. The dangers that face us are not brought upon us by some satanic deity, or some evil extraterrestial force or some unchangeable preordained fate. They arise out of our relationships and habits, out of our priorities. They are made by the human mind; they can be unmade by the human mind.

“Now is the time the shambhala warriors go into training. They train in the use of two implements. One is compassion and the other is insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. You need both. You need the compassion because that provides the fuel to move you out where you need to be to do what you need to do. That means not being afraid of the suffering of your world. When you’re not afraid to be with that pain, then nothing can stop you. You can be and do what you’re meant to.

“But by itself that implement is very hot – it can burn you out. So you need that other tool – you need the insight into the radical interconnectivity at the heart of existence, the web of life, our deep ecology. When you have that, then you know that this is not a battle between good guys and bad guys. You know that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. And you know that we are so interwoven in the web of life that even the smallest act, with clear intention, has repercussions through the whole web beyond your capacity to see. But that’s a little cool; maybe even a little abstract. You need the heat of the compassion – the interplay between compassion and wisdom.”

The mystics usually regard technology, science, and reason as the basic sources of the ecological crisis, and contend these should be contained or even replaced by toil, divination, and intuition. What is even more troubling is that many mystical ecologists are neo-Malthusians, whose more rambunctious elements regard famine and disease as necessary and even desirable to reduce human population.....

Social ecology [on the other hand] claimed that....Capitalism -- not technology, reason, or science as such -- produced an economy that was systemically anti-ecological....

Social ecology offered the vision of a nonhierarchical, communitarian society that would be based on directly democratic confederal communities with technologies structured around solar, wind, and renewable sources of energy; food cultivation by organic methods, a combined use of crafts and highly versatile, automatic, and sophisticated machinery to reduce human toil and free people to develop themselves as fully informed and creative citizens.....

[Deep ecology is] an exercise in a superficial form of social analysis that grossly underplays the profoundly systemic factors that have produced overfed elites in all parts of the world and masses of underfed underlings. Nearly all we learn from Dammann’s liberal good intentions is that an ecumenical “we” must be faulted for the ills of the world -- a mystical “consumer” who greedily demands goodies that “our” overworked corporations are compelled to produce....

The principal practical recipe for social change they have to offer “us” in Deep Ecology is little more than a naive prayer. “Our first principle,” they write, “is to encourage agencies, legislators, property owners and managers to consider flowing with rather than forcing natural processes.”....

The Ehrlichs’ treatment of fundamental social issues ... reveals the extent to which they come to terms with the status quo. Our democratic “market-based economies [are] so far the most successful political and economic systems human beings have ever devised ” That there is a systemic relationship between “market based” economy and the ruthless plundering of the planet hardly appears on the Ehrlichs’ social horizon.

Naess [claims] that deep ecology has an affinity with “contemporary nonviolent anarchism.” But the reader who might be stunned by this commitment to a libertarian alternative quickly learns that “with the enormous and exponentially increasing human population pressure and war or warlike conditions in many places, it seems inevitable to maintain some fairly strong central institutions” -- or, put less obliquely than deep ecologists are wont to do, a “fairly strong” centralized state....

[James Lovelock said it is] “when we drive our cars and listen to the radio bringing news of acid rain [that] we need to remind ourselves that we, personally, are the polluters.” Accordingly, “we are therefore accountable, personally, for the destruction of the trees by photochemical smog and acid rain.” The lowly consumer is seen as the real source of the ecological casts, not the producers who orchestrate public tastes through the mass media and the corporations who own and ravage Loveloek’s divine Gaia.....

The attempt by many mystical ecologists to exculpate the present society for its role in famines, epidemics, poverty, and hunger serves the world’s power elites as the most effective ideological defense for the extremes of wealth on the one side and poverty on the other.

-- Will Ecology Become ‘the Dismal Science’?, by Murray Bookchin

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John E. Stapleton Driver
by Dilgo Khyentse Fellowship - Shechen
June 1, 2014

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

The tulkus were learning English and their lessons on the modern world with varying degrees of success. Freda's star student, Trungpa Rinpoche, however, was making exceptional progress, and Freda's aspirations for him became increasingly ambitious. He had a natural aptitude for English and had taken to reading the poets that Freda presented him with, especially T.S. Eliot. He was keen on history and geography too. Freda decided that he was ready to try to get into Oxford, her own university, where he would receive the finest education the West had to offer. With such credentials he would be perfectly equipped and have the clout to bring the sacred Buddhist teachings to the outside world in a language it could understand.

With the help of John Driver, an Englishman who was also tutoring Trungpa, Freda set about getting a Spalding Scholarship for Trungpa, and succeeded. In early 1963 Trungpa set sail for England accompanied by Akong Rinpoche, to enter into the arcane, privileged, and hallowed halls of Oxford University. It was another epic journey into the unknown, heralding as many adventures, pitfalls, and triumphs as they had met in their escape from Tibet.

-- The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi, by Vicki Mackenzie

Alongside this new emergency, Freda continued to pursue another hugely ambitious project. 'My two lama "sons" are coming to England in March ... wonderful young lamas,' Freda told Olive Chandler -- an indication of the strong emotional as well as spiritual bonds forged with these tulkus.24 Along with John [E. Stapleton] Driver, a scholar of Tibet who had spent several years in Kalimpong, she managed to secure a Spalding scholarship to allow Trungpa to study at Oxford University. Akong was to accompany him. They were, in Cherry Armstrong's words, Freda's 'golden boys'. She recognised in Trungpa, in particular, an exceptional spiritual presence and an ability to communicate and to inspire those with whom he came into contact. Both had formal roles at the school -- Trungpa as codirector (he described himself as the school's spiritual advisor) while Akong made sure that the place ran with tolerable efficiency. Anita Morris, who taught English both at Green Park and at Dalhousie, had mixed opinions of the two. 'Akong was very much taking care of the younger ones -- a lot of them were a lot younger. So if they had any pains or any problems, they would go to Akong,' she recalls. 'He'd be going down maybe to a doctor at Dalhousie if necessary or just for ordinary shopping and taking care of things. Whereas Trungpa just did his own thing, his bits of painting and that sort of stuff.'25 A Tibetan lama who knew both well at Dalhousie comments that Trungpa always wanted attention and prominence, while Akong was solid and reliable. Trungpa was already developing a reputation as something of a wild child. Although it was a well-kept secret, he apparently fathered a child with a Tibetan nun who came to Dalhousie to visit him. They took a mattress up on the roof of the school -- said Trungpa's English wife in her memoirs -- and spent the night there. That was not at all typical of the school, but not entirely untypical ofTrungpa.26 He was an enormously important figure in the spread of Tibetan Buddhism in North America and Europe and one of the first to teach westerners in English, but he had lifelong issues about sexual promiscuity and the use of drink and drugs.

At Ladakh Buddhist Vihar, Cherry remembers Trungpa and Akong sitting in their room studying maps of the London Underground and out-of-date bus timetables in preparation for their journey. They travelled by boat. On the day they were due to dock outside London, the pupils at the Home School -- by now back in Dalhousie -- held a prayer ceremony on an open patch of woodland on the hillside adjoining Kailash. 'They lit a fire of juniper branches and the smoke rose in a blue spire into the branches of the trees and on up into the cloudless sky. We sat on brightly patterned Tibetan rugs spread over the stony ant-infested ground and the lamas began their chanting. It was a happy, picnic-like affair around the scented bonfire, with kettles of hot buttery Tibetan tea.'27 At Tilbury, Cherry's parents were on hand to welcome the two Tibetans -- as were Anita Morris and other well-wishers -- and to provide them with an initial berth at the family home in High Wycombe. Once installed at Oxford, Trungpa and Akong were joined by an old friend and another alumnus of the Home School, Chime Rinpoche. They shared a small flat in St Margaret's Road, on the same street as Freda's old college, and Akong took work as a hospital orderly to help support the household. All three became powerful beacons of Tibetan Buddhism in the west.

-- The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi, by Andrew Whitehead

John E. Stapleton Driver was one of the first Europeans to meet and receive teachings from the great Tibetan lamas when they fled homeland in the 1950’s. He was an integral part of this unique period of history.

John was born in 1931 in England. He taught himself Tibetan from a textbook when he was young. In later years his natural linguistic ability gave him a wide knowledge of both occidental and oriental languages. He earned a degree in Classical Chinese at Oxford University (Merton and St. Antony's Colleges). During those studies he became interested in Tibetan and Sanskrit and related Buddhist teachings.

In the mid-1950’s, he traveled to India to do research and field work for his Ph.D. on the Guhyagarbha Tantra. He lived in Kalimpong, a small town to which many of the most important Tibetan Buddhist teachers of the last century had fled.

He was a student of Jamyang Khyentse Cho Kyi Lodro and took numerous teachings from him in Sikkim and India. The Fourth Dodrup Chen Rinpoche lived in John’s house for some time and gave the Nyingtik Yab Shi empowerments there to him and John Blofeld. John was deeply devoted to Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and often met him informally to receive teachings.

In India, John also taught English classes to Trungpa Rinpoche, Tulku Thondrup, Chime Wangmo (Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche’s daughter), and others. He was instrumental, with Freda Bedi, in getting a scholarship to Oxford for Trungpa Rinpoche and continued to help him with his studies in England.

John translated two great classics into English: Tibet: Land of the Snows by Giuseppe Tucci and R.A. Stein’s Tibetan Civilization. He wrote a descriptive catalogue of the Tibetan manuscripts in the important Bodleian Collection that still provides invaluable material for researchers.

"It was not just the ideologists and theoreticians of national socialism who were closely concerned with Tibet, but also high-ranking intellectuals and scholars closely linked to Italian fascism. First of all, Giuseppe Tucci, who attempted to combine Eastern and fascist ideas with one another, must be mentioned (Benavides 1995)."

-- "The Shadow of the Dalai Lama," by Victor and Victoria Trimondi

He worked for The London Stock Exchange as part of the team setting up Talisman, the first computerized share-dealing system. In 1979 he founded a consultancy, Flowergold Ltd, and one of his contracts was with The British Library, defining international cataloguing conventions and also facilitating technical compatibility with the Library of Congress.
.
His warm and personal relationship with Khyentse Rinpoche continued over the years and in 1990, he traveled to Tibet with him and a number of students on pilgrimage. John passed away on May 28th in England after a long illness that he faced with fortitude and courage.

******************************************

Donation of J.E. Stapleton Driver Collection of Tibetan texts to Bodleian
September 3, 2016
by yeshiuk.blogspot.com



J.E. Stapleton Driver in Kalimpong, 1958

In May 2014, J. E. Stapleton Driver passed away.

Many in the Tibetan Studies field will know of the works he translated, Tibetan Civilisation (by R.A.Stein) and Tibet, Land of Snows (by G. Tucci).

Driver was a graduate of Merton College (in Classical Chinese, 1954), and then pursued his interests in Tibetan studies (Guhyagarbha Tantra) in Kalimpong, Gangtok and Kathmandu, 1957-60.

He returned to St Antony's College as a fellow to continue his researches (1961-65), and thus was in Oxford when the Tibetan Buddhist lama tulkus Trungpa Rinpoche, Akong Rinpoche and Chime Rinpoche first came to Oxford (1963).

In the early 1970s Driver created a descriptive catalogue of the Tibetan manuscripts and older xylographs held at Bodleian, which is still used today.

One of John Driver's sons, Felix Driver, kindly got in touch earlier in 2016 to enquire whether the Bodleian Tibetan Collection would like to receive his father's Tibetan texts, and also the books, thangkas (scroll paintings) and Tibetan artefacts.

Bodleian readily agreed, and the Driver Collection has been formed.


Sample box of wrapped texts ready for transport (136 texts in all)


Sample box of loose texts ready for transport (estimated 400 smaller texts in all)

In future, the catalogue shelfmark heading for the manuscripts and early xylographs will be 'MS. Driver' followed by the relevant number. The catalogue records should appear on Karchak (online digital catalogue of Tibetan texts in Bodleian) when that is published online.

Meanwhile, back in the 1960s, Gene Smith had created a catalogue that included 35 of Driver's collection which had been microfilmed at the British Library. The catalogue was published by T.V.Wylie (U of Washington, 1969), the Driver Collection records are in vol. 2.

After 2 days of sorting through the collection, by Felix Driver and Charles Manson, eventually on July 7th 2016 the Driver Collection was transported to Weston Library to be deposited in the Special Collections storage. Thanks due to Edward Adcock and his team for facilitating the move so easily.


After the sorting, 2 happy people (Manson & Driver).

Subsequently on August 2nd, Felix and his mother, Mrs Anne Driver, and sister Tabitha were able to visit Weston Library to see where the collection is, and some Tibetan Studies scholars in Oxford were there for the happy occasion.


Robert Beer, Felix Driver, Anne Driver, Prof Heather Stoddard discussing a thangka from the Driver Collection


Inspecting a Tibetan xylograph text (Stoddard - Anne Driver - Felix Driver - Manson - Ujeed)


Inspecting a Tibetan manuscript (18th century) of the Driver Collection (F Driver - A Driver - Stoddard - Manson - Ujeed)


MS. Driver 1 (Weston Library)





Much work to be done cataloguing the collection - updates will be forthcoming.

With many thanks to the Driver family.



******************************************

Marginal Amusement at the Bodleian
by Tibeto-Logic
December 21, 2011

Earlier today, under inspiration from the latest blog entry from Janus, I was doing an internet search for ‘Hero Capable [of overcoming all comers all at] Once,’ or, in the original tongue, Dpa'-bo Chig-thub. What to my great surprise could possibly pop up, but a rare catalog of Tibetan manuscripts and so forth that are kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. It’s so rare it’s not even a publication, really, just a typescript done, as you might expect, on a typewriter. I could hardly believe my eyes. What could explain this outrageously good fortune?

Answer: Descriptive Catalogue of the Tibetan Manuscripts Held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, prepared by John E. Stapleton Driver in ca. 1970, and revised by David Barrett, 1993. Total page count: 152.

Some very thoughtful person put it up for us in a searchable PDF format. Here.[dead link]

You can find something entertaining already, 4 pages into it (there are no page numbers) in the entry for MS.Tibet.a.1, described as "a meditation text," with the title Bla mgon dbyer med kyi rnal 'byor thun mongs ma yin pa nyamsu len tshul rin chen dbang gi rgyal po'i do shal.

Someone wrote on the title page (I give it 'as is,' except for changing it into Wylie): 'di mang gi yi ge phal cher ma dag pa dang 'ga zhig rang zo byas pa'ang mang tsam 'dug pas zhu dag tong tshod mi 'dug go. This is there translated, “As the text in this is generally corrupt and in a good many cases even made up, there’s no end to correcting it.”

A second person wrote on the title page in a different hand: 'di 'bri mkhan dang khyed rang gnyis ka ma dag pas skyon dan[g] .... rang bzo byed mkhan gtso bo khyed rang 'dra. — khyed 'dra bas zhus dag gtong ba las ma gtang ba dga 'dug. This is translated, “Of the writer of this and yourself, the chief introducer of corruptions and inventions seems to be yourself." — "Rather than have someone like you make corrections, they were better not made at all.”

And finally, at the end of the text, somebody wrote (in English? Well, no Tibetan is given): “It would shame you if a scholar were to see such a corrupt text, so I suggest you burn it.”

The original text was purchased in 1885 from two of the Schlagintweit brothers: R.H. and A. If you are like me you may well have trouble keeping straight which of the five Schlagintweit brothers was which, in which case this webpage would be a big help.[dead link]

But what about the person given as the author of the text, the monk Legshé Ludrub (Legs-bshad-klu-sgrub)?

A quick search of TBRC [Buddhist Digital Resource Center] and a few other places turned up neither the title of this guruyoga text nor its author. Who can he be? Where’s our good Doctor Watson?

John E. Stapleton Driver, in case you don’t remember, was the one who translated R.A. Stein’s Tibetan Civilization into English.

As part of this catalog, you can find some of the papers that were left behind by W.Y. Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) — famous editor of such well known works as The Tibetan Book of the Dead — after his own entry into the bar-do. Among these papers are some draft translations by Lama Kazi Dawa Samdrup.

Some of the Tibetan books here came from Solomon C. Malan (1812-1894), a friend and student of Csoma de Körös. For more about this, see P.J. Marczell, The Tibetan Mss. of the Malan Bequest in the Bodleian and Their Relation to the Life and Works of Csoma Körösi, Studia Asiatica, vol. 2, nos. 1-2 (2000), pp. 55-71. Get it for free (or not!) here.[dead link]

Other materials came from Samuel Turner (1749-1802), author of An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet (London 1800).

(*My note: I guess this means Joseph White, since he did indeed marry Mary Turner, sister of Samuel.)

For more about this, see the late Michael Aris’s article, A Note on the Resources for Tibetan Studies at Oxford, Bodleian Library Record, vol. 10, no. 6 (May 1982), pp. 368-375. Or look at this page of the Bodleian's own website (scroll down the page to the section about Tibet).

If the kind person who did this is still in a generous mood, I suggest they put up two other rare catalogs of Tibetan manuscripts that exist (however seldom) in typescripts. They are:

P. Denwood, Catalogue of Tibetan Mss and Block-prints outside the Stein Collection in the India Office Library (1975), in 145 pages. For a reference, look here.

E. Gene Smith, University of Washington Tibetan Catalogue, vols. 1-2 (Seattle 1969). For a reference, look here.

Or is this asking too much?