The Rot at the Core of What Was the Apple of our Eye

TED is admirable in all the ways it is, but how about it becoming admirable in all the ways there are?

This follows a recent campaign to get TED, the high-minded organization that promotes “ideas worth spreading” in short talks that can get wide circulation on YouTube, to reinstate a talk by Rupert Sheldrake that they removed from their searchable database.

You could think of this as one skirmish in THE battle of our time, a paradigm war to release us from our implosion in scientific materialism, which is threatening our very survival. It is vital that we raise the collective level of awareness beyond its focus on self-service and the materialist perspective in favor with science now.  We have to become a more caring species, and the firestorm TED created by contracting around what spread-worthy ideas are, can make that impact on everyone. We don’t have many significant arbiters of intellect in our world today, and TED has such a popular platform that the ripples it is making bind us all in a contracted place. TED shedding its limited thinking would be a step toward all of us shedding ours.

The Sheldrake protest was a step beyond internet conversation. A petition was signed and a rally on the TED steps in New York took place. Now, my turn. TED being a Goliath to my little David, I need attention on what was done to me to get justice to occur. Thanks to pressure from the skeptical force, sometimes referred to as militant atheists, TED deemed Sheldrake, then Graham Hancock, and then the entire West Hollywood TEDx program that I produced unacceptable to the TED brand. No matter that I had a license and was in conformity with the 160-page manual that licensed TEDx groups around the world must abide by when producing TED events. Never mind that I had spent a year preparing for my event, and was flying in some of the most prominent figures in the world of thought to speak at it. No matter that I was fully funded but only as a TED event. Two weeks before delivery, TED cancelled my license for what in fact was an outstanding program.

Our event, “Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?,” will illuminate the urgent need to change our fundamental value system or worldview to one in which humanity pulls together rather than separately. This view would supersede the current worldview where whoever has the most toys wins. The new view is based on what science tells us about a quantum universe, with everything being interconnected and all of us being interdependent. A new science-based vision won’t take hold, though, until people know and understand that there are more humane alternatives available. This is what our presentations will focus on. Our hope is that our presenters will impact the world’s thinking about how we interact as global community. They will demonstrate and propose action on how practical programs and technologies can be implemented in communities everywhere. 

Then, when it was no longer a TED program and was being produced on my nickel, TED went after me and got Livestream to cancel my contract so the worldwide audience that had been recruited reached a dead page. After that, TED wouldn’t respond to me at all. Is this any way to treat your adopted family? When did I become the enemy? And why?

After going far enough with lawyers to discover it could cost half a million dollars and take five years to go through the legal system, I decided on the court of public opinion.

Much preferring that we be cooperative instead of adversarial, I took to emailing Chris Anderson, who heads up TED, in hopes that, with all the bad press TED has gotten for an unpopular retrenchment, he could be moved. Here are my communications in which I suggest we open a dialogue about what belongs in a serious consideration of how the world works: http://theconversation.org/ted. Where is the line between science and dismissible pseudoscience? As I said:

If TED would promote getting our program seen, it would be appreciated by many. There was profound conversation in the TED threads about what is fundamental to being human that could continue.

Ponder this statement about me TED issued when it cancelled TEDx West Hollywood: “More than 2000 TEDx events will take place in the year ahead. If your program is allowed to proceed, it will truly damage other TEDx organizers’ ability to recruit scientists and other speakers.”  After what hearsay has as the most participated in dialogue in Net history when Sheldrake and Hancock talks were dumped from TED’s roster and Nobel prize winners were vocal in complaining, with my license cancellation the blogosphere went through a next wave of revulsion at an organization that seemed to have lost its mind. There never was a back and forth with me, in which the situation was discussed, and hearken to the excerpts of what two of my speakers had to say after TED raised eyebrows at them:

“I can add my name to those of Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock as speakers who find themselves in TED’s crosshairs…I’ve lectured at dozens of top-tier medical schools and hospitals all over the U.S. for two decades…this is the first time my scientific credibility has ever been questioned.” –Larry Dossey

“I was co-founder of a 23-year research program investigating psychic abilities at Stanford Research Institute…for the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Air Force and Army Intelligence, NASA, and others…I thought a TED audience would find this recently declassified material interesting. And no physics would be harmed in my presentation.” –Russell Targ

If I had no personal stake and were just a knowledgeable observer, it would make my blood boil to see TED’s cavalier attitude, where off with their heads is a style unsuited to an organization people look up to. And, as I said to TED:

It is an antithesis to what we are all about to be combatants, but actions get reactions and your heads in the sand will see me shining a spotlight on our affairs. If cooperation is not to be, I will move on my own. 

This op-ed piece is the result. So is a campaign to email Chris@TED.com to tell him to do right by me. So far so good between me and The New York Times, which gave my crop circle documentary a good review. It’s a subject TED sycophants used to make fun of me, regardless of TED being happy enough with my accomplishments – that include graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from NYU — to have granted me a license. The circles are another thought-provoker, since the evidence does point to our being visited, but that is a topic of another op-ed piece. May this one be my first.