Background
Willis Harman was born on August 16, 1918, in Seattle, Washington. His father was a hydroelectric engineer and his mother was a music teacher.
(Insight is the mind’s magic in action, solving problems, ...)
Insight is the mind’s magic in action, solving problems, understanding relationships, creating new images—with a speed and certainty unavailable to ordinary consciousness. Breakthrough insights go even further. They take a quantum leap beyond ordinary creativity and our previous ways of looking at things—to a whole new method of resolving our difficulties. Almost all of us have experienced such moments in relation to work oriented or personal problems, and wish we could have them more often—in fact, we can. According to Willis Harman, Ph.D., president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and Howard Rheingold, human behavior columnist for Esquire, the main reasons we fail to have this kind of breakthrough experience more frequently are that we don’t believe we can, and we don’t apply the known techniques which can generate these insights. In Higher Creativity, the authors discuss this self-imposed limitation and argue persuasively for an enlarged image of everyone’s creative potential. They examine the secret history of inspiration through contemporary and historical accounts of profound creative breakthroughs, and finally they describe a surprisingly simple and reproducible sequence that has often triggered these insights for outstanding innovators in business, science, and the arts. These apparently special people became special by harnessing, sometimes quite accidentally, the awesome power of the unconscious in the service of higher creativity. Following their example and using historically validated procedures for reprogramming the unconscious, you can learn to capture the lightning for personal breakthrough in your own life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0874773350/?tag=2022091-20
1984
(In the tradition of the bestselling Aquarian Conspiracy c...)
In the tradition of the bestselling Aquarian Conspiracy comes the first scientific basis for New Age thinking from one of the nation's most widely recognized thinkers, and the author of Higher Creativit and An Incomplete Guideto the Future.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446391476/?tag=2022091-20
1990
("Does the nature and belief of the observer have anything...)
"Does the nature and belief of the observer have anything to do with what is observed?" The most comprehensive examination of the role of causality in our understanding of reality, this book is the fruit of the Institute of Noetic Sciences' Causality Project: research into what constitutes reality, and how things happen. We ask whether the fundamental assumptions embedded in the current scientific paradigm place "blinders" or at least boundaries on what contemporary science is free to discover.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0943951119/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(Revolutions are generally thought of as large-scale, bloo...)
Revolutions are generally thought of as large-scale, bloody upheavals involving whole countries and societies. But there are quieter revolutions that begin in the individual mind and create the kind of change that may be even more significant. By deliberately changing their internal image of reality, people are transforming the world. Right now we are living through one of the most fundamental shifts in history -- a change in the actual belief structure of Western industrial society. Revolutions are generally thought of as large-scale, bloody upheavals involving whole countries and societies. But there are quieter revolutions that begin in the individual mind and create the kind of change that may be even more significant. By deliberately changing their internal image of reality, people are transforming the world. Right now we are living through one of the most fundamental shifts in history -- a change in the actual belief structure of Western industrial society.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1576750299/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(Biology Revisioned presents an engaging look at the chang...)
Biology Revisioned presents an engaging look at the changing state of biology and proposes that we reconsider our views of science and life. Harman and Sahtouris suggest that it is an historical accident that physics came to be the generally accepted root discipline of science. If, for example, biology were instead the foundation, life sciences would be analyzed in a complete different way. We would need to look at wholes (organism and ecological systems) prior to parts (fundamental particles). The book examines several theories of “new biology”—simply adding new tool to the current definition and a moderately holistic outlook—but focuses on an even more radical holistic view which assumes the possible presence of consciousness as an underlying layer of physical reality. The authors also suggest that the scientific perspectives of non-Western cultures are invaluable to a complete understanding of science—that Western ideals are no complete without these views.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1556432674/?tag=2022091-20
1998
educator engineer futurist writer
Willis Harman was born on August 16, 1918, in Seattle, Washington. His father was a hydroelectric engineer and his mother was a music teacher.
Harman received his education at the Western Washington College of Education before moving on to graduate from the University of Washington in 1939 with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering.
After the end of World War II, Harman received his Master of Science degree in physics and Doctor of Philosophy degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Harman started his career working for General Electric and then joined the Navy as an electrical officer, serving till 1946.
After World War II Harman taught for several years at the University of Florida before joining the Stanford faculty in 1952 to teach physics and electrical engineering. Eventually he left the University and became a senior social scientist at Menlo Park’s Stanford Research Institute International, serving in that role for sixteen years.
In 1973, Harman was invited to join the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Sausalito. He went on to serve as its president from 1978 until his death in 1997.
In 1980, Willis was also appointed a regent of the University of California by then governor Jerry Brown. He served as a regent for ten years.
Since 1987, Harman also worked as a director and founder of the World Business Academy with Rinaldo Brutoco and other businesspeople.
("Does the nature and belief of the observer have anything...)
1994(In the tradition of the bestselling Aquarian Conspiracy c...)
1990(Insight is the mind’s magic in action, solving problems, ...)
1984(Biology Revisioned presents an engaging look at the chang...)
1998(Revolutions are generally thought of as large-scale, bloo...)
1998(This book is a part of the McGraw-Hill Electrical and Ele...)
1953
Quotations:
"A noetic science—a science of consciousness and the world of inner experience—is the most promising contemporary framework within which to carry on that fundamental moral inquiry which stable human societies have always had to place at the center of their concerns."
"Business has become, in this last half-century, the most powerful institution on the planet; it is critical that the dominant institution in any society take responsibility for the whole, as the church did in the days of the Holy Roman Empire. But business has not had such a tradition."
"The assumptions about economic progress seemed to work rather well during the time when you could equate material progress with general benefit. But that equation doesn’t work anymore. We now have a system that works to the benefit of the few and penalizes masses of people today and in the future."
"All the things that I had been taught all of my life were of value clearly were of no value at all. In a few instants they would be gone. But one thing is of value—and only one. Alan Watts called it 'the Supreme Identity'—the identification with the Divine."
Harman married Charlene Reamer, who survived him, in 1941. They had three daughters (Billie, Mary, and Susan) and a son, Dean.