Charles (Chas) Holloway is an American writer, lecturer and publisher most noted for promoting visionary works on the science of freedom, such as Jay Snelson’s The V-50 Lectures, Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School Lectures and Spencer MacCallum’s The Art of Community, as well as works of his own.
Holloway’s website and current lecture tour is called “The Freedom Chamber.”
Born inLa Jolla,California, he is the grandson of the World War Two aircraft tycoon, Reuben H. Fleet. In 1967, he was sent by his family to a military school but at sixteen dropped out to join the 1960s counter-cultural rebellion. A year later, he was accepted at a radical art and science college inHollywood. “I smoked dark brown hash, dropped acid, hung out in the music and science departments and got turned on by ideas,” Holloway said. “It was colorful, vibrant, intense.” His teachers at the college included Tom Hayden, Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison.
At twenty, he moved toEureka,California, to work at a PBS television station which had been taken over by ingenious artists. “We had a psychedelic TV truck and drove all over Humboldt County doing remote broadcasts – we looked like a nomadic Grateful Dead tribe, showing up to tape the kinetic sculpture race, the concerts, the stock car races, the dobro players on their wooden porches and the world-class glassblowers. We were the coolest thing inEurekauntil new management came in and fired everybody.”
Holloway returned to Southern California during the summer of 1976, America’s 200th Anniversary, and wrote musical scores for several stage plays, including Kohout’s Poor Murderer for The Old Globe Theater inSan Diego.
Around that time, he discovered an obscure subject called “Volitional Science” in a live course taught by Jay Snelson, which was based on the innovative theory of property of Andrew Galambos. The course changed his life. “In the 60s and early 70s we were all idealistic about finding freedom,” Holloway claimed. “But nobody knew how to do it. That’s why all my friends back then got absorbed into the system, one by one. Since I’d found out there was a scientific way to understand what freedom was and attain it, I just never gave up.”
During the next two decades, while studying and developing further scientific explanations about the nature of freedom, Holloway wrote radio jingles, an operetta, produced several songwriters and played coffeehouse pianos throughoutCalifornia. He created a newspaper, wrote and sold television scripts, news articles, documentaries, comic books, science fiction stories and studied writing with George Clayton Johnson, Danny Simon, John Truby, William F. Nolan and Theodore Sturgeon.
In the mid-1990s, he produced internationally known classical pianist, Gustavo Romero, recording and distributing (through Koch, International) many CDs, including the complete Beethoven Piano Concerti performed by Romero and the English Chamber Orchestra.
Currently, Holloway enjoys scientific epistemology, writes fiction and non-fiction and gives lectures on the science of freedom.
[parts of this bio were taken from an interview with Chas Holloway for the Arcata Eye]
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