MK-Ultra and the Ashram Circuit – Echoes of Control in the Age of Awakening

A Whisper in the Wires

Cold War America split its attention between bombs and the brain. In underground laboratories and sealed hospital rooms, a secret programme called MK-Ultra tested chemical routes into the human mind. At the same time, across university campuses and quiet communes, seekers sat cross-legged on rugs, eyes closed, chasing something that felt identical to ego death, the breaking of boundaries, a new self beyond the self.

The two worlds, “the spymasters and the sages,” appeared to be opposites. But what if they were not? What if the chemical trials and spiritual revivals were not just parallel currents, but connected circuits, accidentally or deliberately linked?

It is known that the CIA’s MK-Ultra programme aimed to develop methods of behavioural manipulation using drugs, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation. It is also known that American interest in Eastern spirituality exploded in the same era, flooding the culture with yoga, meditation, and teachings about the dissolution of the ego.

This investigation traces what may lie between those two movements, not to collapse the distinction but to test the porous boundary.

Files That Vanished Overnight

The archive that might have answered these questions was destroyed. In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the shredding of most MK-Ultra records. What remains are scraps. Approximately 20,000 financial documents were misfiled and accidentally preserved. Their dry, bureaucratic tone belies the human chaos they funded. A cheque drawn from a front foundation disappears, only to resurface years later, endorsed in the name of a spiritual retreat.

The gaps are meaningful. Patterns of redaction in surviving documents reveal areas of enduring sensitivity. Whole pages are blacked out under “national security” exemptions, with names, institutions, and substances removed. The blank spaces whisper of narratives still being concealed.

“The blank spaces whisper of narratives still being concealed.”

The archival loss follows a telling timeline: the main MK-Ultra files were destroyed under Helms’s directive in 1973; then, in 1977, the cache of financial documents surfaced by administrative error.

The 1985 Supreme Court ruling in CIA v. Sims subsequently upheld the agency’s authority to withhold broad categories of information, including the names of researchers and institutions involved. Through the 2000s and beyond, Freedom of Information Act requests for such details have consistently been met with denial or heavily redacted releases.

Even the naming conventions worked against clarity. MK-Ultra had predecessors (Project BLUEBIRD, Project ARTICHOKE) and successors (MKSEARCH), allowing activities to shift codenames and continue in shadow. Some operations ran under seemingly benign fronts, including research into sleep disorders, memory enhancement, and stress resilience: terms that meant one thing to grant reviewers and another to operatives.

The Gurus the Chemists and MK-Ultra Currents

If there was a conduit between mind control and mindfulness, it passed through unexpected hands.

Dr Charles Geschickter funnelled MK-Ultra money into experiments involving drugs and “human patients for experimental use” at Georgetown Hospital.

Dr Harold Wolff, a leading neurologist, directed CIA funds through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.

Dr D. Ewen Cameron, under CIA sponsorship, used electroshock and “psychic driving” to obliterate patients’ personalities.

All operated with academic prestige.

Then there were the bridge figures.

Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist turned psychedelic prophet, received government funding via the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1950s. Some claim the money came through CIA channels. Leary’s Concord Prison Experiment, where inmates were given psilocybin, resembled the captive-subject trials found in the MK-Ultra files. His International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) and the Millbrook commune became hubs of psychedelic exploration – and, possibly, surveillance.

His collaborator, Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, carried the experimental flame into the spiritual world after a revelatory trip to India. He returned as a guru figure, speaking of love, service, and transformation. But his roots, like Leary’s, lie in the soil of drug experiments that may have begun with intelligence backing.

Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, received LSD as a willing test subject in a Stanford-based MK-Ultra programme. He went on to popularise acid in the counterculture, launching the “Acid Tests” that defined a generation.

Even Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and participant in the Macy Conferences, had an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) background. He later helped shape the Human Potential Movement at Esalen, a California centre blending psychology, mysticism, and altered states.

These figures moved fluidly between academia, experimentation, and spiritual leadership.

Were they co-opted, catalysed, or merely caught in the crossfire of history?

Safehouses, Communes and Quiet Convergences

Georgetown Hospital’s Gorman Annex, a CIA-linked facility, reportedly offered a “safehouse” with a supply of patients. Mount Sinai Hospital hosted Harold Abramson’s LSD experiments. In the Catskills, Millbrook became a psychedelic estate. In Big Sur, Esalen became a pilgrimage site for seekers and thinkers drawn to mysticism and mind-expansion.

These physical spaces became nodes of convergence. Georgetown University Hospital’s Gorman Annex served as a CIA-linked “safehouse” for medical experiments; upstate New York’s Millbrook estate, associated with the Castalia Foundation, became a hub for psychedelic explorations bridging academic research and spiritual awakening; and California’s Esalen Institute at Big Sur emerged as a pivotal centre for the Human Potential Movement, attracting figures from academia, former intelligence personnel, and spiritual seekers.

Money flowed quietly. Front foundations like the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation funded LSD studies with apparent CIA approval. The Human Ecology Society backed psychic driving and brainwashing research. Financial footprints show grants disappearing into universities, hospital wards, and possibly places where spiritual teachings were incubating.

No document explicitly states: “The CIA funded this ashram.” But the money trails often stop just short, ending in entities or individuals who then show up in spiritual spaces.

Voices from the Silence

The clearest voices are often the most broken.

Survivors of Dr Cameron’s experiments at McGill University describe waking with no memory, reduced to childlike states, haunted by voices from looping tape recorders.

Their accounts paint a picture of lives disassembled and never fully repaired. Jean Steel, for instance, one of Dr Cameron’s patients at the Allan Memorial Institute, entered seeking help for postpartum depression and was subjected to “depatterning” experiments. She emerged unable to recognise her children, her personality broken.

The case of Frank Olson, an Army biological warfare scientist who died under questionable circumstances in 1953 after being covertly dosed with LSD by CIA colleagues, epitomises the human cost and ethical void at the heart of the programme.

“Their accounts paint a picture of lives disassembled and never fully repaired.”

Meanwhile, spiritual seekers recount encounters with charismatic leaders and potent substances that dissolved their sense of self and opened new realities. Whether these transformations were liberation or manipulation often depends on the narrator.

Timothy Leary’s own story shifted over time. In prison, he denied CIA involvement. Later, he admitted it was possible that his funding and contacts were part of an intelligence operation. His memoir, Flashbacks, is as much myth as memory.

Richard Alpert, as Ram Dass, never disavowed his psychedelic past but reframed it as a doorway into spiritual awakening. Whether that door was built with government steel remains an open question. Indeed, some figures like Alpert would later openly question the origins and unacknowledged influences that might have shaped their spiritual paths and the broader consciousness movement.

Symbols Language and MK-Ultra’s Mirror Worlds

Language offers clues. MK-Ultra researchers spoke of “depatterning” – erasing a mind to rebuild it. Spiritual teachers spoke of “ego death” – letting go of the false self to find the true one. Figures like Leary, Metzner, and Alpert described this state of “ego death” as one of “complete transcendence… pure awareness and ecstatic freedom.” The structure was similar; only the purpose differed.

The term “psychic driving” described repetitive messaging to reshape thought. Mantras do the same, though voluntarily and with different intent. The serpent, symbol of awakening energy in yogic traditions, appeared in some hallucination reports from agency trials.

Were these symbols coincidental overlaps, cultural borrowings, or traces of intentional seeding?

A Glossary of Echoes

“Depatterning” (MK-Ultra): The clinical erasure of an individual’s existing personality structure, intended to make them susceptible to new programming or control.

“Ego Death/Loss” (Spiritual/Psychedelic): The voluntary dissolution of the sense of self, pursued as a path to spiritual liberation, mystical insight, or transcendence.

“Psychic Driving” (MK-Ultra): Dr Cameron’s technique of subjecting patients to endlessly looped audio messages, often combined with drugs and electroshock, to break down personality and implant new behaviours.

“Mantra Repetition” (Spiritual Practice): The voluntary, focused repetition of sacred sounds, words, or phrases to aid meditation, alter consciousness, and achieve spiritual insight.

Gregory Bateson once explored hypnosis and suggestion for military use, then taught about systems of communication and spiritual ecology. Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra, lived a hermit-like life in retirement, calling himself spiritual while overseeing experiments that tore minds apart.

The boundaries between liberation and control blur when the tools are the same.

Mirrors across Empires

This strategy of intersecting with spiritual movements is not uniquely American.

The British Empire watched the Theosophical Society closely when its leader, Annie Besant, called for Indian self-rule. In British India, the Theosophical Society, blending Eastern mysticism with political activism, drew surveillance. Its president, Annie Besant, a key figure in the Indian Home Rule movement, was arrested and interned by colonial authorities in 1917, highlighting state concerns when spiritual movements gain political traction.

In French Indochina, colonial agents armed and manipulated religious sects like the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao to undermine the Viet Minh. French intelligence services in Indochina, such as the SDECE, went further by actively funding, arming, and manipulating religious-political sects like the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, using them as auxiliary forces against communist insurgents.

During the Cold War, Soviet psychotronics explored telepathy, remote viewing, and mind influence, framing them as military assets, not mystical phenomena. Contemporaneously, the Soviet Union invested significantly in “psychotronics” – research into ESP, telepathy, and psychokinesis – funded by the Ministry of Defence and the KGB, with a clear view towards military and intelligence applications, creating a “psychic arms race.” The KGB and CIA were both reaching into the same liminal territories of human potential.

Belief systems have always drawn state attention. Their power lies not just in faith but also in their ability to reshape behaviour, create loyalty, and alter perception. This makes them either a threat or a tool, depending on who controls the ritual. Some have observed that “The mind is the last colony” (Colonial intelligence memo, 1927, unverified).

What Still Hides Behind the Redactions

Despite declassification efforts, thousands of MK-Ultra files remain sealed. The 1985 Supreme Court ruling in CIA v. Sims permits the agency to withhold the names of researchers and institutions, claiming national security.

Why the secrecy? It has been over 50 years. What dangers lie in names and places now mostly forgotten?

Some suggest it is liability. Others whisper of undisclosed techniques still in use. Perhaps it is simply shame: deep institutional knowledge that a line was crossed, and the evidence must never fully surface.

Three open questions remain particularly resonant:

• Did covert funding, directly or indirectly, reach specific ashrams or spiritual leaders, or was its influence confined to peripheral figures and academic research that later cross-pollinated?
• Are there individuals whose roles consciously or unconsciously bridged the worlds of intelligence research and spiritual leadership, acting as conduits for these ideas and techniques?
• What information within the still-classified MK-Ultra records is deemed so sensitive that its public release remains restricted, even half a century after the programme’s official termination?

The tools of mind control have evolved. Today, they appear as persuasive algorithms, biometric nudges, wellness applications promising transcendence. But some of these systems still speak in the old language: patterns of suggestion, repetition, self-erasure and integration.

The echoes are faint, but traceable. What if the mind control experiment never ended? Not as a conspiracy, but as a current, relabelled, rebranded, running quietly beneath the temples and timelines of the modern age.

Sources

Declassified CIA MK Ultra and subproject files (1953–1973); financial ledgers of the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and Josiah Macy Jr Foundation; university archives from McGill’s Allan Memorial Institute, Cornell Human Ecology Programme, Georgetown Hospital safehouse records, and the Harvard Psilocybin Project; personal papers and correspondence of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Ken Kesey, and Sidney Gottlieb; oral history testimonies from Canadian and U.S. MK Ultra lawsuits; Congressional hearings and FOIA litigation records, including CIA v Sims (1985); Soviet and Czechoslovak psychotronics memoranda (1960s 1980s); British intelligence surveillance files on the Theosophical Society (1917); French SDECE dossiers on the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects (1940s 1950s); Esalen Institute conference recordings and archives.