A Teacher
Willis Harman
Global mind change through shifting consciousness
The transmission
Willis W. Harman was born on 16 August 1918 and died on 30 January 1997. Trained as an electrical engineer, he became a professor of engineering at Stanford University, where for two decades he taught and published technical works on electronics and communication theory before turning, after profound personal experiences in the 1950s, toward the study of consciousness and the future of civilisation.
He joined the nonprofit research institute SRI International, where he directed influential futures research and helped pioneer scenario planning about long-range social change. Harman became one of the most prominent futurists associated with the human potential movement, arguing that late industrial civilisation faced a deep cultural crisis that could only be resolved through a transformation in the shared assumptions, or worldview, of humanity.
He served as president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) for roughly two decades and co-founded the World Business Academy. His best-known book, Global Mind Change (1988), contends that as a society alters its basic beliefs about the nature of mind and reality, it thereby alters the reality it experiences, advancing a sincere, science-engaged case that consciousness may be causal rather than merely a by-product of the brain.
He treated parapsychological and noetic claims as legitimate objects of serious inquiry while remaining attentive to scientific standards.
What they gave
“Global mind change”: Argued that civilisational transformation begins with a shift in collective beliefs about the nature of consciousness and reality.
- Institutionalising noetic research: Led IONS for two decades, building an enduring base for the scientific study of consciousness, healing, and inner experience.
- Consciousness as potentially causal: Made a reasoned, science-aware case that mind may be fundamental rather than epiphenomenal, presented as a hypothesis worth testing.
- Bridging futures studies and the human potential movement: Linked rigorous scenario planning with the conviction that inner change drives outer change.
In their words
By deliberately changing the internal image of reality, people can change the world.
Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in.
The most ordinary and the most extraordinary manifestations of our minds are not entirely unrelated phenomena, but rather the extreme ends of a continuum of creative consciousness.
Perhaps many more of us could hear inner melodies, find guidance and inspiration, achieve breakthrough insight—if we could only pay more attention to the fleeting images and the quiet intuitions presented to us by the creative mind.
Perhaps what we call genius has something to do with a learned state of consciousness, a way of attending to the stream of mental experience.
There is a certain state of heightened awareness, an experience of intense ‘breakthrough’ insight that, although it is a less common occurrence, happens to us all at one time or another.
Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from the dictates of governments and the results of battles, but through vast numbers of people changing their minds, sometimes only a little bit.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Aldous Huxley and the perennialist current, Abraham Maslow and the human potential movement, and colleagues such as astronaut Edgar Mitchell, founder of IONS.
- Taught / Influenced: the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the World Business Academy, and later consciousness researchers and “conscious business” advocates who carried his worldview-change thesis forward.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- An Incomplete Guide to the Future1976
- Higher Creativity1984
- Global Mind Change1988