Catalyst House

Remembering Marilyn Ferguson’s Birthday

Our dear departed friend, Marilyn Ferguson’s birthday was today.  For those who haven’t heard of her … scratch that, everyone has heard of Marilyn, right?  

Marilyn was an American author, editor and public speaker, best known for her 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy and its affiliation with the New Age Movement in popular culture.  (1997 video interview provided by Tom Ross / Kivastone)

A founding member of the Association of Humanistic Psychology, Ferguson published and edited the well-regarded science newsletter Brain/Mind Bulletin from 1975 to 1996. She eventually earned numerous honorary degrees, served on the board of directors of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and befriended such diverse figures of influence as inventor and theorist Buckminster Fuller, spiritual author Ram Dass, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine and billionaire Ted Turner. Ferguson’s work also influenced Vice President Al Gore, who participated in her informal network while a senator and later met with her in the White House.

The Brain Revolution by Marilyn FergusonAs a professional freelance writer of popular magazine articles in the 60s, including Cosmopolitan and Time, Ferg developed an enduring interest in what came to be known as the “human potential” movement, and particularly the latest research on the potential of the human brain, with its implications for learning, creativity and wellness. This inspired her to write The Brain Revolution: The Frontiers of Mind Research (Taplinger, 1973), a successful and broadly hailed popular summary of these discoveries.

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The Economics and Marketing of Madness

Based partly on the work of Thomas Szasz (The Manufacture of Madness*) and produced by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, an anti-psychiatry group – The Marketing of Madness is the definitive documentary on the psychiatric drugging industry. Here is the real story of the high income partnership between psychiatry and drug companies that has created an $80 billion psychotropic drug profit center. (source: TopDocumentaryFilms.com)

But appearances are deceiving. How valid are psychiatrists’ diagnoses – and how safe are their drugs? Digging deep beneath the corporate veneer, this three-part documentary exposes the truth behind the slick marketing schemes and scientific deceit that conceal dangerous and often deadly sales campaigns.

*In his seminal work, The Manufacture of Madness, Dr. Szasz examines the similarities between the Inquisition and institutional psychiatry. His purpose is to show “that the belief in mental illness and the social actions to which it leads have the same moral implications and political consequences as had the belief in witchcraft and the social actions to which it led.”

In this film you’ll discover that… Many of the drugs side effects may actually make your ‘mental illness’ worse. Psychiatric drugs can induce aggression or depression. Some psychotropic drugs prescribed to children are more addictive than cocaine.

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Catch Thrive!

THRIVE SYNOPSIS of THRIVE: An unconventional documentary that lifts the veil on what’s REALLY going on in our world by following the money upstream — uncovering the global consolidation of power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions, empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and our future.

INTERVIEWS in THRIVE: Duane Elgin, Nassim Haramein, Steven Greer, Jack Kasher, Daniel Sheehan, Adam Trombly, Brian O’Leary, Vandana Shiva, John Gatto, John Robbins, Deepak Chopra, David Icke, Catherine Austin Fitts, G. Edward Griffin, Bill Still, John Perkins, Paul Hawken, Aqeela Sherrills, Evon Peter, Angel Kyodo Williams, Elisabet Sahtouris, Amy Goodman, and Barbara Marx Hubbard.

 

A “Cresting Wave” of Evolutionary Spirituality

The Symphony of Science (SoS) is a musical project headed by John Boswell, designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. The project owes its existence in large measure to the classic PBS Series Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steve Soter, as well as all the other featured figures and visuals.

For the past 18 months our Catalyst home page has been graced by the second music video in the series, We Are All Connected, produced by SoS, featuring Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman and other notables.  Today we have replaced it with one of John Boswell’s newest videos – The “Cresting Wave” of Evolutionary Spirituality – the first one themed around the quest to discover the source of spirituality and consciousness itself, and featuring so many luminaries that we will let you discover who they are.

From John Boswell –

Our first video’s highly positive reception provided motivation to elaborate on the theme of remixing scientists, which spawned the Symphony of Science project. The second video, “We Are All Connected”, was released in October 2009 on the heels of A Glorious Dawn with much success. Although the methods of remixing and tuning spoken word, combined with original electronic music and similarly themed footage, are unorthodox in the context of other science-themed music, the results have often been inspiring, humbling, and of course humorous.

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Is “Science-Based Medicine” a “Mythology”?

Dr. Larry Dossey, Deepak Chopra and Dr. Rustum Roy, writing in Huffington Post, had some interesting insights on what they call the “Mythology Of Science-Based Medicine.”

The current healthcare debate has brought up basic questions about how medicine should work. On one hand we have the medical establishment with its enormous cadre of M.D.s, medical schools, big pharma, and incredibly expensive hospital care. On the other we have the semi-condoned field of alternative medicine that attracts millions of patients a year and embraces literally thousands of treatment modalities not taught in medical school.

Huffington | January 7, 2010

One side, mainstream medicine, promotes the notion that it alone should be considered “real” medicine, but more and more this claim is being exposed as an officially sanctioned myth. When scientific minds turn to tackling the complex business of healing the sick, they simultaneously warn us that it’s dangerous and foolish to look at integrative medicine, complementary and alternative medicine, or God forbid, indigenous medicine for answers. Because these other modalities are enormously popular, mainstream medicine has made a few grudging concessions to the placebo effect, natural herbal remedies, and acupuncture over the years. But M.D.s are still taught that other approaches are risky and inferior to their own training; they insist, year after year, that all we need are science-based procedures and the huge spectrum of drugs upon which modern medicine depends.

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