The Men Who Stare at Goats Read Online Free PDF

he posing as someone who wanted to learn the good things, but was planning to use them against me?”
    I was struck by how vividly Steven recalled his encounter with Jim. That, Steven explained, is because people who work in the ambient-music field don’t get approached by the military all that often. Plus, Jim seemed to walk the walk in terms of inner peace. Jim was very charismatic. And anyway, Steven added, these were paranoid times. “We’d just come out of Vietnam,” he said. “It turned out that some of the most violent antiwar agitators were double agents. It was the same in the UFO community.”
    “The UFO community?” I said. “Why would government spies want to infiltrate that?”
    “Oh, Jon,” said Steven. “Don’t be naive.”
    “Why, though?” I asked.
    “Everyone kept tabs on everyone,” said Steven. “It got so paranoid that UFO speakers would start by asking all the government spies to stand up and identify themselves. The more you know, the more you don’t know, see? Anyway,there was a lot of paranoia. And then some guy came over and said he was from the military and he wanted to learn about my music, and that was Jim Channon.”
    “Why do you think he approached you in particular?” I asked.
    “Someone once said that my music allows people to have a spiritual experience without
naming
it,” Steven replied. “I think that was it. He said he needed to convince the higher-up military brass, the top ranks. These are people who had never known a meditative state. I think he wanted to get them into it without
naming
it.”
    “Or maybe he wanted to hypnotize his leaders with subliminal sounds,” I said.
    “Maybe so,” said Steven. “They’re very powerful things.” Steven told me a little about the power of subliminal sounds. One time, he said, an American evangelical church blasted the congregation with silent sounds during the hymns. At the end of the service, they found their donations had tripled.
    “Tactical advantage, you see?” said Steven. “You want to know why evangelical churches are making so much money while regular churches are failing? Maybe that’s your answer.”
    And recently, he added, he visited a friend’s office. “As soon as I walked in there, I felt irritated. I said, ‘Your office is making me feel irritated.’ He said, ‘That’s my new subliminal peak-efficiency tape.’ I said, ‘Well, take it off.’” Steven paused. “I spotted it right away,” he said, “because I’m attuned. But most people aren’t.”
    Steven told Jim Channon about the power of subliminal sounds too, and Jim thanked him and left. They never met again.
    “This was twenty-five years ago,” said Steven. “But I remember it as if it were yesterday. Jim seemed such a gentle soul.” Steven fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “You know what? Now that I think back, I’m not sure I ever asked him what he planned to do with all that information.”
    Almost all the people Jim visited during his two-year journey were, like Steven Halpern, Californians. Jim dropped in on 150 new-age organizations in all, such as the Biofeedback Center of Berkeley; the Integral Chuan Institute (“Just as the bud of a flower contains within it the innate form of the perfect flower, so do we all contain within ourselves the innate form of our own perfection”); Fat Liberation (“You CAN Lose Weight!”); Beyond Jogging; and, in Maine, the Gentle Wind World Healing Organization (“If you attended school in America or a country with similar education practices before the age of ten to twelve years, you suffered severe forms of mental and emotional damage… . The Gentle Wind healing technology can help”).
    Gentle Wind presumably offered Jim, as they have offered all who’ve passed through their gates, their Healing Instruments, the magic ingredients of which have always been a closely guarded secret, although a clue offered by the company is that they are derived “from the Spirit World,