Willis W. Harman (August 16, 1918 – January 30, 1997) was an American engineer, futurist, and author associated with the human potential movement. He was convinced that late industrial civilization faced a period of major cultural crisis which called for a profound transformation of human consciousness. Over a career lasting some four decades, he worked to raise public awareness on the subject through his writings and to foster relevant research through the nonprofit research institute SRI International, the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), and the World Business Academy (WBA). He served as president of IONS for two decades, and he was a cofounder of the WBA. His many books include volumes coauthored with the futurist Howard Rheingold, who put forward similar views, and the mythologist Joseph Campbell.
Early life and education
Willis W. Harman was born in Seattle, Washington on August 16, 1918. His father was a hydroelectric engineer and his mother was a music teacher. He attended the Western Washington College of Education before moving on to graduate from the University of Washington in 1939 with a B.S. in electrical engineering.
In 1954, he attended a summer seminar on ethics, meditation, and the spiritual life that had a transformative effect on both his thinking and his career. He later said of this experience that it "opened up vast areas I didn't even know were there. It completely changed my concept of what is important in education, and in time led to various activities in the field of humanistic psychology." As Harman saw it, "If you look at the assumptions underlying our economic system – especially the ones regarding the prerogatives of ownership – and then you look at the goals we humans have about how we want to live our lives, there is no compatibility. The assumptions can never lead to the goals."
In 1980, he was appointed a regent of the University of California by Governor Jerry Brown. He served as a regent for ten years.
Institute of Noetic Sciences
Harman was invited by astronaut Edgar Mitchell and writer/speaker Christopher Hegarty ("How to Manage Your Boss") to join the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Sausalito in 1973, the year it was founded.
Harman was in charge of "Global Mind Change", then one of four major IONS programs, and was a prophet of Social Media and the Internet. The WBA grew out of his conviction that business would play a critical role in the period of profound social transformation that Harman foresaw.
Family and death
In 1941, Harman married Charlene Reamer, who survived him. They had three daughters (Billie, Mary, and Susan) and a son, Dean.
Quotes
:"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."
:"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."