ONE

The Genesis of Jedi Warrior

Another name for God is surprise.
Brother David Steindl-Rast

The golden light of an early August day in 1982 filtered through the plants in the office window, and I (Joel) was in the rhythm and flow of patient care at Group Health Cooperative Medical Center in Seattle. As the director of the Stress Management, Biofeedback, and Pain Control Center, my days were dedicated to guiding individuals in exploring the inner terrain of their mind-body, helping them to nurture the special forces of awareness, awaken self-compassion, and gain greater confidence, resilience, and self-mastery.

I was returning from a break when my receptionist Donna halted me midstride in the hallway. "Joel, Bud Cook is on the line," she said. "He says it’s urgent to talk with you right away."

I chuckled to myself, wondering what Bud had in mind. Bud was a dear friend and a former student of mine from a graduate program in the psychology of consciousness that I had designed and taught at Antioch University. He was also an adept sports psychologist and inspiring martial arts instructor, with a generous spirit, a hearty laugh, and a formidable presence. The last time Bud had called it had been about an idea for working with the Seattle Mariners. The time before that it was about training ski instructors in mind fitness aboard a sailboat cruising the Caribbean. Neither of those ambitious ideas had come to pass. Now what’s Bud cooking up this time? I wondered. Little did I know that fateful call would open a portal to a transformational journey that would radically change the course of our lives, challenge and unravel many deeply held views, and potentially help to stop the next world war. Getting straight to the point, Bud asked, "Hey, Wiz, how would you like to design the ultimate warrior training program for the Green Berets?"

There was a long, deep silence on my end. He continued, "This is for real. Listen. I just came back from a meeting with Task Force Delta, and some officers well placed in the chain of command asked for a proposal. They are seriously interested, and you’re the first person who came to mind to design this. Are you game?"

Bud had my attention. He went on to explain that he had developed a connection with Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon from the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania. For the past three years, Jim’s assignment had been to explore the human-potential movement in search of inspirations and ideas that could inform the army’s vision for the new warrior in the twenty-first century.

So why was the army interested in extraordinary human potential? It turned out that in the 1960s and 1970s there were widespread reports of psychic discoveries behind the Iron Curtain. I was well aware of these studies and had engaged in some parallel research and collaboration during my time in the labs at the University of Washington. Understanding that the security, intelligence, and military implications of psychic powers were enormous, many U.S. intelligence agencies had launched into a flurry of activity, funding research to understand and develop America’s own extraordinary powers. Over the years, research at Stanford Research Institute, Princeton School of Engineering, Menninger Foundation, and many other respected laboratories explored the phenomena of mental telepathy, remote viewing, psychokinesis—the power of mind to influence or move material objects at a distance from the body and other extraordinary human capabilities. This research consistently produced mind-boggling results that demonstrated not only that such special psychic powers were real but also, more importantly, that "ordinary" people could be trained to develop these extraordinary capabilities.

In thousands of rigorous, well-controlled, and replicated studies, researchers showed that our mind-bodies are capable of reaching out into the fabric of space and time in ways that produce measurable results that are often statistically significant at billions to sometimes trillions of times beyond what would be expected by chance. And though these results were inexplicable by any existing theories relied upon by mainstream science, the lack of coherent explanation didn’t refute the overwhelming amount of evidence for mind creating measurable change and sourcing accurate information at a distance.

In the late 1970s, the People’s Republic of China publicly reported that several thousand of its children aged eight to fourteen were capable of telepathy, clairvoyance, x-ray vision, or psychokinesis. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, and the U.S. Army had already begun to pour millions of dollars into their own similar research. The U.S. Army’s program was headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, and was part of the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). Leaders there included Generals Edmund Thompson and Albert Stubblebine, Colonel John Alexander, and Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, all of whom were assigned to the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks.

Drawing insights from his colleagues at the War College and from his own far-reaching and "far-out" explorations, Jim distilled his findings and synthesized his inspirations into a mind-expanding masterpiece titled: Evolutionary Tactics: A Manual for the First Earth Battalion. The manual offered a compelling higher-order vision for the evolving archetype of the U.S. Army’s most advanced soldiers for the twenty-first century・ones with techno-wizardly skills tempered by deep-spirited principles and the intuitive wisdom and spiritual power of a mystic, sage, and warrior-monk. As a prescient vision for the Jedi Warrior program, Channon wrote in Evolutionary Tactics:

I envision an international ideal of service awakening in an emerging class of people who are best called evolutionaries. I see them as soldiers, as youth, and as those who have soldier spirit within them. I see them come together in the name of people and planet to create a new environment of support and protection and nurturing of the mother earth. Their mission is to protect the possible and to nurture the potential. They are the evolutionary guardians who focus their loving protection and affirm their allegiance to the people and planet for their own good and for the good of those they serve. I call them evolutionaries, not revolutionaries, for they are potentialists, not pragmatists. They are pioneers, not palace guards.

As their contribution to a hopeful future, the warrior monks bring evolutionary tactics. They recognize that the world community of peoples demands hope from those who would operate as servants of the people. Services rendered by the warriors of the First Earth Battalion are specifically designed to generate workable solutions to defuse the nuclear time bomb, promote international relations, spread wise energy use, enforce the ecological balance, assist wise technological expansion, and above all, stress human development.

Armies are both the potential instruments of our destruction and the organized service that can drive humanity’s potential development. They are the "turn key" organizations that could either shift the energy of our world into a positive synergistic convergence or bring us to the brink of the void. We have no choice but to encourage world armies to accept and express the nobility they already strive to attain . . .

This will not be the first time that warrior monks have been active in our world. In Vedic traditions, the warrior monk was a philosopher and teacher, and therefore a powerful transformational player. In the Chinese culture, the warrior was both a healer and teacher of martial arts. History affirms our own belief that there is no contradiction in the warrior and the service-oriented monk prototypes living a completely harmonious, blended, and parallel path when the basic ethic and service is "loving protection" of evolution and humankind. There is no contradiction in having armies of the world experience the same ethic as they evolve in peaceful cooperation toward the greater good of all . . .

It is sometimes difficult to determine how we have set ourselves against each other as nations, and even the more frustrating when we realize that the people of these nations are not really very different inside, and in fact have the same desires for growth and environmental balance and for prosperity that we have. But this is reality. And soldiers who have grown up in an "arms race" world are obviously doing their job of protection when they come up with a new and more effective weapons package. But it is time for another approach, to use all of this military power for another end. It is time to give as much reward for the evolutionary contribution made by a soldier or an army as we have given in the past for the destructive contributions made on behalf of national defense. I know that this process will begin with the transformation of soldiers and evolutionaries everywhere on the face of our planet home. There are young men and women who already aspire to this level of service and who are ready to make a permanent commitment. They will begin to meet in small groups to provide a support system for the personal transformation of group members. And on a small scale, these groups will begin selecting evolutionary programs in their units and their communities. This manual serves as a handbook for the development of these evolutionary players and the development of their operating teams.1