The Men Who Stare at Goats Read Online Free PDF Page B

not the human world.” Imagine something that looks like a largish bar of white hand soap painted to look like a computer circuit board. That is Gentle Wind’s Healing Bar 1.3, “Requested donation $7600.” Although pricey, it “represents the new leading edge of the healing technology, significantly surpassing the Rainbow Puck III and IV” and includes “well over6–60 MHz minimum of temporal shifting combined with millions of predefined etheric modifications.”
    Gentle Wind’s publicity material assures potential purchasers and company recruits that “There Are No Messiahs Here … NO MESSIAHS at the Gentle Wind Project. Please do not waste your time looking for any. There are none here.”
    Nonetheless, some former members have alleged to me that Gentle Wind’s chief guru, John Miller, has over the past few years ordered his entire staff to go on the Atkins diet and wear only beige, and that the mysterious spirit-world ingredient incorporated into their Healing Bars is actually group sex. The alleged scenario is apparently something like this: John Miller sidles up to a female staff member and says—and I am paraphrasing, based on allegations made to me by former members of the group—“Congratulations. You have been selected by the spirit world to take part in our top secret energy work. Don’t tell your husband because he wouldn’t understand the energy work.”
    She is then led into John Miller’s bedroom, has sex with him and various female selectees, and then, the moment it is over, John Miller says, “Quick. Build a Healing Bar.” Gentle Wind and its leaders, including Miller, are contesting these allegations and, in 2004, launched a lawsuit against the former members who made them.
    One Gentle Wind customer review—from a couple in Bristol—reads, “We have noticed remarkable improvements to our cat Moya, who virtually changed overnight from a neurotic timid rescue cat into a friendly confident adventurer after we used one of the Gentle Wind healing instruments on her.”
    Another customer, however, has noted, “At first I was pleased that the device did have a noticeable effect on my aura [but when I turned it over to the label marked Tranquillity] it left me feeling inwardly unresponsive to the experience. To cut a long story short, I have been using Equilibria’s Universal Harmonizers for the past five months instead and now feel very much myself again.”
    Gentle Wind says that over 6 million people in more than 150 countries have used their products. They also told me that they don’t remember meeting Jim, and perhaps it was a different Gentle Wind he came across during his Pentagon-funded odyssey. They could be right, but I have not managed to find another Gentle Wind operating within the new-age or human-potential movement at that time.
    Jim Channon couldn’t remember much about Gentle Wind either, although the group must have made an impact on him because he gave them a special mention in the confidential report he later prepared for the Pentagon.
     
    Jim went through Reichian rebirthing, primal arm wrestling, which was regular arm wrestling accompanied by guttural screaming, and naked hot-tub encounter sessions at the Esalen Institute for the Advancement of Human Potential, in Big Sur, where he was counseled by Esalen’s founder, Michael Murphy, the man credited with inventing the newage movement. At no time did Jim reveal to the therapists and gurus he met how he imagined their techniques might be adapted to teach the American soldier to be more cunning.
    “It is often ten years,” Jim wrote in his diary at the time,“before the values developed in Los Angeles find themselves into rural Arkansas. What is developing today on the Coast will be the national value set ten years from now.”
    This is how Jim visualized the America of the 1980s: The government would no longer have an “exploitative view of natural resources.” Instead, its emphasis would be on “conservation and