Why I stand behind Ira Einhorn….by James Sorrells, Ph.D.

I knew Ira Einhorn in the 1960s. I was working at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California with some of the finest minds in the fields of communication, psychiatry, and the study of schizophrenia. A friend who was completing his doctoral work in physics at Stanford, an old friend of Ira’s from Philadelphia, introduced me to Ira. At that time, Ira was a conduit of communication among theorists and researchers like Gregory Bateson, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Alan Watts, the founders of Esalen and Timothy Leary as well as political activists like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. In fact, Ira referred to himself as a “planetary enzyme,” producing catalytic reactions through his transmission of information. Ira was trying to make sense of a culture being transformed by LSD, the Beatles and Buddhism. I brought Ira to M.R.I., and the exchange was both fruitful and exciting.

Ira was surely a mentor to our little social network in those days. He was incredibly well-read, and although all of us were well-educated, he opened our eyes to “vistas we never dreamed existed,” to quote Auntie Mame. He also “baby-sat” our experimental “trips” with LSD in our homes and on the Big Sur coast. He was so thoroughly acquainted with LSD and so in control of his own mental processes that he could take twice as much as any of us yet still be able to be a responsible “baby-sitter.” It is noteworthy that all of us had complete trust in Ira to safeguard us when we were very vulnerable.

It is also noteworthy that in literally thousands of hours of interaction in all kinds of settings, I never saw one instance in Ira of jealousy, rage or even anger, “power-tripping,” hostility, or virtually any negative social traits.

That observation and the trust we placed in Ira constitute one component of why I stand behind Ira.

Ira knew a great deal about government research using LSD and other chemical agents, research that was then secret but know has been confirmed. I recently edited Ira’s book, “Prelude to Intimacy,” which he wrote while imprisoned in France before he was extradicted to the U.S. for a second trial, the first having been conducted in absentia, for the murder of Holly Maddux. In his book, Ira talks about various avenues of his research which have never been popular with our government and his contacts in countries, some of which also have never been popular with out government. Ira warned us that, because he “knew too much,” the day might come when he might be assassinated, or more likely, framed for something that would send him to be prison where his death would attract less attention.

The current administration’s eagerness to spy and to imprison, at Guantanamo Bay and other undisclosed locations around the world constitute a second component of why I stand behind Ira. Yes, I do think he “knew too much,” and I have no doubt whatsoever that agencies of our government would think nothing of framing a target.

The third component of why I stand behind Ira is how he was tried. I don’t know for sure if Ira did or did not kill Holly Maddux, but I do know for sure that he was not given a fair trial. It in uncontestably true that the presiding Judge, Judge Mazzola, did not even attempt to conceal his bias against Ira. He literally ridiculed Ira in front of the jury, heaping doubt upon Ira’s credibility. His handling of the trial was a complete and utter debaucle, and on that basis alone, the trial should be thrown out.

Secondly, all evidence used to convict Ira was circumstantial and/or flawed. Ira purportedly bashed Holly’s head in with some sort of blunt instrument, then stuffed her body into a steamer trunk until she and trunk were discovered over a year later on Ira’s porch! Her blood would literally have been gushing. Yet, this was the assertion despite the fact that one single speck of blood could be found in Ira’s apartment or in the trunk.

Third, Ira is one of the most intelligent, cool-headed people I’ve ever known. He managed to maintain false identitities in Ireland, Spain, Sweden, and France for years despite all kinds of efforts to find him (which is related in marvelous fashion in “Prelude to Intimacy”). Yet, allegedly here is a man so stupid that he can’t even dispose of a body, instead crams it into a steamer trunk where it will decompose and smell, not just for a few days but for over a year! Give me a break! His explanation – that someone else killed Holly elsewhere and quite some time later stashed her body in Ira’s trunk in one of his frequent absences – is much more plausible.

To recapitulate, Ira is not the sort of person I judge to be a murderer. Second, the government had means, motive, and opportunity. Third, his trial was a joke, a mockery of justice.

To readers who would like to support his appeal: If Ira were O.J. Simpson, he would be free right now. It takes big bucks to hire lawyers like O.J.’s lawyers and/or lawyers with huevos to take on the Pennsylvania court system and even the legislature, which passed a special “Einhorn law” to overturn a final judgment and thus permit a re-trial, something the state constitution specifically prohibits. If you have big bucks and/or you are or know such an attorney, Ira needs you. Join me in standing behind Ira.

Our Present Peril - Collapse - Ira Einhorn's Book Review

Our Present Peril
A Review By Ira Einhorn Of:

COLLAPSE:
HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED

Jared Diamond, Viking (2005). 576PP

“...because three-quarters of the world’s population will be living within 50 miles of the seacoast by 2010.”
Jared Diamond

“The earth’s history suggests that with warming of two to three degrees, the new sea level will include not only most of the ice from Greenland and West Antarctica, but a portion of East Antarctica, raising the sea level by 25 meters or eighty feet.”
James Hansen

Comparing these two quotes will make any honest processor of information quickly aware that we are in the midst of “the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century and a threat we have not even begun to deal with.”

I would say that Bill McKibbens’s quote just above is an understatement. The nuclear threat, involving the relationship of the leadership of two countries, was a minor difficulty given what we are now facing combined with our almost hallucinatory failure to fix our attention on what we are facing
N O W


Not during the lifetime of our children

Not next year, not tomorrow B U T

NOW

As I pick the latest global warming facts off of the bottom of page 6 or 7 of my Trib., I must seriously question the sanity of my species, a concern echoed by McKibben re one of the two books he is reviewing (New York Review Of Books, January 12, 2006: For convenience I have used some of his facts which serve my purpose as well as the facts I’ve gathered of late.)

Think upon:

The increasing slow down of the Gulf Stream.

The Arctic Sea is melting fast: there was 20% less of it this summer: “the feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover.”

Methane which I’m told has twenty times the effect of CO2 is bubbling up from the Russian Tundra in the midst of winter, so that standing H20 could not freeze even during the Russian winter.

Microbiological activity has increased in British soil (growing season is now eleven days longer), so that more carbon is escaping.

Ice in Alaska and Greenland is melting at increasing rates.

Soon we will be able to say two things: remember animals; remember glaciers.

I could go on, but if the above does not convince you, click on something else.

Every data point I have seen of late just reinforces one perception: we are now trapped within an out-of-control planetary experiment whose eventual outcome will please no one, and the closer you live to a sea coast, the less pleased you will be.

We are about to lose a great percentage of the real property that our species has created.

Think of a New Orleans once a month.

Also reflect upon the enormous failure of leadership: the gap between what W said on Jackson Square (playing catch up ball) and the now abandoned poor of New Orleans. A gap not dissimilar to “mission accomplished” and the actual on-going very expensive ($7 billion/month for troop maintenance) egregious horror that is IRAQ on 1/1/06.

We have apparently passed the tipping point in many processes whose accumulated non-linear hell now seems beyond our power to stop.

The genie is out of the bottle.

Pandora’s box is open.

Each data point is singing of chaos to come.

Put all those divas together and you will get a cacophony that no one can even begin to predict.

A series of extremely decoupled systems looking for new points of resonance.

Markets going like yoyos.

Nerves snapping like shoe strings.

Farmers getting 36″ of rain one day and then 2 years of drought.

When? Sooner than we think, if past earth perturbations are any indication, BUT in extreme non-linear systems no one can say much beyond: chaos is coming.

In light of the above, Collapse, an excellent book by Jared Diamond while packed with information about past collapses of individual civilizations (mainly) and avoidance of such (not really his focus) appears almost quaint though his research is large, his honesty is not to be questioned and his heart and soul are in the right place.

Anyone attempting to deal with global warming must have an absolutely global focus. That is not possible given the present political situation on our planet. And the ultimate reason for our dilemma: our present focus on growth in economic activity as the only game worth playing.

Capitalism and the infinite growth that it assumes as its just due does not allow for anything but MORE, for it is a system regulated by a linear variable (picture Sodom’s Bed Of Iron) and increasingly pushed by two unrelenting and maniacal forcing functions: daily stock quotations and shareholders incessant cry for more profit. Behavior that may be locally rational but is globally suicidal, under present conditions.

The system that produced the problems that got us into the mess we are in can’t be expected to solve it, for we would have to totally shift our central planetary focus on getting and spending to something more ethereal to avoid the sheer effect of numbers (there are too many of us now and many more each day). The by product of those numbers who are involved in a frenzy of consumption that is producing the warming effect that is melting the ice, pouring cold H2O into the oceans, and slowing the Gulf Stream is of course effecting everything that lives and breathes on the planet.

The disastrous changes seem locked in given our present momentum, sharply underlined by the accelerating development of China, India and Brazil. Miming the great criminal enterprise of the 20th century: American capitalism, profit, return on investment and everything else be dammed. And no, socialism/communism was not the solution for those systems have even worse ecological records.

The trouble is us Dear Reader, for we are truly what an earlier Diamond book called us: The Third Chimpanzee.

Monkey see, monkey do; what we see among our ‘elite’ is ‘conspicuous consumption’ aptly named by a brilliant relocated American Thorsten Veblen over 100 years ago.

All those SUVs, those gigantic houses, those celebrities with garages full of expensive cars, $10,000,000 parties, bonuses at Christmas that are equal to an honest worker’s lifetime salary – the worst excesses of finance capital – serve as models for our behavior, have diminished us all and are now threatening the basis of our existence.

Diamond seems too smart not to be aware of this, yet his book gives little hint of how deep the crisis is.

From my perspective, it is little better than Greenwash for it refuses to challenge our basic assumption as Americans that we can just continue to consume with some nod to ecology.

It would have been right on the money in the 70s. Welcomed gladly by those of us on the ecological front lines; in 2006 it is fine sociological history, but to me, little help in the quest to find some way out of the horror that grows closer with each published data point, bringing us ever closer to the reality of this Hopi/Zuni statement: “We were here long before you came, and we expect still to be here long after you too are gone.” (143)

1/1/06 Ira Einhorn

P.S.: Those who wish to dig deeper into the crisis need to fully grasp two principles:

1. Sub-Optimization: What the use of profit, exclusively, to run our system is doing to the entire planet.

2. Ross Ashby’s LAW OF REQUISITE VARIETY: An excellent way to begin to understand how a complex system can be modulated and transformed.

Also those who have not: look up the work of Vaclav Smil whose books are each an education in themselves and each seems to require years of work.

I get the same impression from Joyce Carol Oates regarding her novels, short stores, reviews and obvious wide range reading.

Two rare pleasures in this age of intense focus and specialization.

The New Brain - Ira Einhorn's Book Review

Review By: Ira Einhorn

THE NEW BRAIN
By: Richard Restak (Rodale Press, 2003)

“The dumbing-down, lowest common-denominator dynamic that cable and internet and tabloid culture have brought means that anything that is big and exclusive and legitimate is quickly turned into something trivial, tawdry, and dumded-down. If we had the most consequential scoop of all times about wrongdoing in the Bush Administration, it would quickly turn into “how’s it polling? What are they saying about it on Drudge? What are they saying about it on “Hannity and Colmes”?’ And it would be reduced to its cheapest most ephemeral essence.”

Mark Halperin, New Yorker, October 25, 2004


Richard Restak has written a small book that very deftly and gracefully provides the general reader with easily understandable information from the edge of neuroscience.

Its small package contains information that will eventually dwarf two major public interest issues that have occupied headlines for a while: tobacco and fast food.

Restak’s presentation of the research brings closer to scientific validity the intuitive awareness that many socially concerned people have shared for decades: presentation of violence in the media is a serious problem that effects us all, children in particular.

Restak’s 212 page book contains: a short overview introduction; an opening chapter on the plasticity of the brain; 7 chapters on research that will effect how all of us think about ourselves and live in the world; a concluding overview chapter that talks very directly about both the opportunities that the new knowledge opens up and the ethical dilemmas that our greater knowledge will force us to face.

New tools are now able to monitor the brain in both a safe and non evasive way. The information abstracted by these tools and massaged by computer programs enables researchers to formulate hypotheses and make predictions that are testable.

The correlation between watching violent action on TV and committing acts of violence is now established.

Restak talks with great sensitivity about loss and how TV violence is causing our inability to react to the pain of others. We are becoming desensitized to a whole spectrum of negative behavior.

He shows us what doing 2 or more things at once is producing. Multi-tasking is ineffective and costs us both in time and accuracy. Faster, faster, faster is the theme of an increasingly superficial age (read the head quote to this review slowly and ponder it.) that is characterized by increasing slippage.

He looks at what this frantic pace of processing is doing to our lives and the fact that ADD/ADHD may be classified as diseases, but is actually a lifestyle now being forced on people if they wish to survive.

He provides a number of moving anecdotes about what this lifestyle is doing to personal relationships.

Our frantic rush is overseen and controlled by an economic system that is ruled by one linear variable and can be simply defined as

M O R E

Anyone who has studied systems theory knows that the sad anecdotes that Restak presents are examples of sub optimization: the destructive output of an increasingly mad socioeconomic system that has avoided Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety.

There are positive fruits to the knowledge gained by the research, but they will be but noise in the system, if we don’t pay attention and be more mindful of the wrong pathway that our system-as-a-whole is now perusing.

Our too concentrated linear economic behavior is rapidly making the planet unlivable. What Restak writes about is reflective of the total situation.

If we fail to heed the mirror he holds up, we are looking at species extinction.
Ira Einhorn, November 2, 2004

In Search of P.D. Ouspensky - Ira Einhorn's Book Review

Review By: Ira Einhorn

IN SEARCH OF P.D. OUSPENSKY:
THE GENIUS IN THE SHADOW OF GURDJIEFF


Gary Lachman (Quest 2004)

The question of consciousness: What it actually is, how it functions, how we can modulate or raise it, is an enormous present concern that is occupying millions of people in one form or another.

During the 1970’s when I created an international information network out of whole cloth with the aid of one farsighted business executive and the resources of his massive company, the original focus was the ability of Uri Geller to produce effects upon the physical world that the science then accepted not only couldn’t explain, but also was forced to deny.

The core members of that network soon gravitated towards an attempt to explain how consciousness itself could effect the physical world. A discipline, let us call it the physics of consciousness, that one of my close associates, Andrija Puharich, had helped create when he originally published Beyond Telepathy.
The focus on consciousness, as a scientific object not as something to be raised, was rather unique then, and two decades away from the beginning of the present explosion and its focus in the massive Tucson conferences.

The 1960’s occupied itself with the question of how to raise one’s consciousness. It cared not a whit about consciousness as an object of scientific intention, but I cared, for I felt that consciousness must have some relation to the actual state of the body, and that we could learn many things by studying the relationship between specific bodily states and the kind of consciousness they produced. I was thrilled when I first encountered Beyond Telepathy in the mid 60’s, and then the author himself who became a close friend and associate in what we jokingly called the ‘psychic mafia.’ I took the trouble to have Doubleday republish both of his early books, doing an introduction to Beyond Telepathy.

Gurdjieff came to me during the 60’s via an apartment mate who loved Gurdjieff - though I kept reminding him Gurdjieff was dead - and his intense involvement with All and Everything that I am not alone in finding incomprehensible for the most part. With Gurdjieff came Ouspensky and a slew of others. There is nothing comparable in modern consciousness studies that approaches the quality of the literature that has gathered around the Ouspensky-Gurdjieff axis.

I also had a friend - a Leary LSD veteran - who ran the Boston Gurdjieff Group.

I am a reader, so I devoured all the extant literature and continued to do so until about the mid 80s.

Certain concepts developed in the work, as it is called by initiates are very powerful: self-remembering being primary, but the idea of higher centers, the fact of our mechanicalness, the concept of different levels of being coinciding with different types of people, the fact that we are not a unity, but a mixture of many ‘I’s who reign from time to time and quickly forget what they said or worse what they intended to do, and last but not least the idea of a magnetic center leading to real intention and the possibility of actually doing something.

Many of my ‘I’s developed a strong interest in knowing more about both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

Gary Lachman’s book has helped to fulfill that desire.

In Search of P.D. Ouspensky: The Genius In The Shadow Of Gurdjieff is as objective and honest a presentation of the life of P.D. Ouspensky as we are apt to get, given the present state of available sources.

The tale is a sad one, both in the sense that Ouspensky got sidetracked by his hypnotic meeting with a powerful sly man: Gurdjieff, and never actually realized the brilliant promise of his early books. An observation strongly reinforced by Lachman’s description of Ouspensky’s sad alcoholic twilight years, and his own sense of Ouspensky having given up his own path for something ‘miraculous’ that was never achieved.

The life path is almost an archetype of the powerful intellectual - juiced by Nietzsche’s intoxicating words about the superman - who is able to formulate concepts that transcend present knowledge and point to a higher reality that is suddenly realized using a substance that immediately puts one face to face with the experienced fact that there are other realms, mainly unmapped though they may be.

But, one comes down as Dick Alpert, now Ram Dass, said to me a number of times during the 60s. Ah, there’s the rub.

That experience, which words do not even begin to convey to the uninitiated and certainly do not satisfy the experiencer (part of the reason why language held such a fascination for so many philosophers, artists and writers during the 20th Century), lead many on a quest to permanently achieve the state of consciousness that the use of a substance or technique has allowed them to glimpse.

William James pulled back from this not to be future and continued his work, producing in the process The Varieties Of Religious Experience which has few, if any equals for those interested in consciousness.

Ouspensky didn’t, meeting the sad end Lachman describes with such empathy.

The real question that the book raises is that of quality control. In the older traditions the relations between teacher and student are carefully governed. The students are certified by teachers who have been carefully prepared in a long tradition in which certain states of awareness are recognized by the teachers under whom they are studying. The work takes years and usually, certainly in the most successful traditions, the many forms of Buddhism for instance, involves years of patient mediation whose effect can be somewhat understood by reading the literature, but only can be fully judged by a teacher who has explored the full range of described states and has reached a permanent state of realization that is transmitted by their embodiment and the practice that produced that embodiment.

After 45 years of investigating these areas, both historically in the culture of the recent west and in the historical traditions of Buddhism and other master disciplines, I feel deeply that most talk about consciousness is sheer nonsense. Anyone who is serious must seek a situation described in the paragraph above.

To do otherwise is to risk the fate so aptly described in Gary Lachman’s book.

Ira Einhorn
Jan/Feb 2005