Bobs life is a good example of our lives as an endless chain of influence. He affected uncounted and uncountable others, certainly mine. If I had never met Bob, my life would have been unimaginably different. But it isn’t easy to describe our various relationships. Over the course of more than 30 years, he and I were friends, then allies and antagonists as business partners at Hampton Roads, then once again friends, and then also publisher and author and collaborators in another important endeavor.
As I look back on my life, I see that I didn’t stay conscious enough. I rarely turned the inner spotlight on me, though in another sense that is all I ever concerned myself with. It was a self-centeredness that was not egotistical, a self-awareness that was not introspective. I was there, doing (or usually reacting), but I wasn’t there, thinking about what I was doing or reacting to, or why. And so I couldn’t learn from experience, because I wasn’t altering my reactions from having thought about past reactions.
I – and everybody else who ever dealt with Bob – saw clearly that he did not communicate, a thoughtless quality that often made life difficult for those around him. Only in the past year or two have I realized I shared this characteristic. I had always assumed that because I am so voluble, if anything, I over-communicate. But recently I have realized that most of my inner life has gone unexpressed, perhaps leaving me as big a mystery to others as was Bob.
I should have known this all along: Why else would this quality in him have aggravated me so severely, if it was not a trait I shared unconsciously?
It wasn’t the only point of contention between us while we were Hampton Roads. Bob was extremely chary about giving credit I, being extremely sensitive to this, often burned with a sense of injustice, which led me to erupt unpredictably. The result? Two partners, each feeling somewhat unappreciated, each finding the other hard to deal with. I thought, why can’t he give me credit? He no doubt thought, why is he so touchy, so volatile?
The tragedy is that neither of these two highly intuitive, idealistic, intelligent men was able to bring the underlying dynamic into the open, so that they might get control of it. (As I came to say in other contests, feelings acknowledged can be managed. Feelings unacknowledged can’t. Or, as Jung put it, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.”) I doubt that anybody else really understood the good and the bad that went on between us.
It’s amazing that we did as well as we did, really. Bob and I would be extremely close, and bitterly incompatible, and instinctively aligned, and living in different worlds, depending on the time of day and the phases of the moon, so to speak. When we worked together, we pulled off some amazing things, and when we worked against each other we wound up losing what we had built from nothing. And then, being forced by circumstances to work together again, we rediscovered what we had valued in each other, so that our final dozen years were again productive and mutually satisfactory.
Not least, for me, is the fact that Bob came to see the importance of the information put forth by the guys upstairs. For more than a dozen years, I transcribed and posted new sessions – with the guys, then with Rita, with Nathaniel – always with this strong sense of Bob as supportive background presence. Often, as I sat transcribing the latest session, I would wonder what Bob would make of it. It was he, and not I, who thought of turning Rita’s daily material into a book, the first of what became four books.
One after another, Bob published my books, even though they made him little money. And always there were emails, or sometimes luncheon conversations, exploring what this or that meant , wondering how it squared with something else he had read. Sometimes, he would forward questions for me to ask . It became a true partnership centered on the metaphysical curiosity that drove us both, a mutually supportive relationship in the way we had sometimes (but not always) functioned while at Hampton Roads.
The guys once compared me to Bob and Colin , and I found it very enlightening. Edited excerpts (my responses in italic):
&&&
Both Bob and Colin were thinkers in a way that you are not. They reflected. They pondered. They learned from experience considered. This doesn’t mean that what they learned necessarily was right; we are concerned here with the nature of their process. Someone considering something new in the light of past conclusions may end up merely adjusting new perception to not contradict older conclusions, or they may learn something.
So if Bob and Colin are intending to live their lives from a stable platform that will allow them clear observation (and of course this is not all they were doing, but it is one way of looking at their lives), you cannot expect them to want to jettison that stable platform just when things get interesting. Instead, by not moving, they get the effect they wanted: front-row seats. And from those front-row seats, they were able to describe the view to others (although this is only one aspect of what they were doing).
You by contrast are a moveable platform – or, not so much a platform as a set of water wings. What you know is an idea of yourself shaped by your reaction to your surroundings. You are aware of “external” changes, you think of yourself as changing and unchanging, and what you chiefly have to report is your own process, your own journeying. Only, can it be called journeying when it is more like being rafted along?
Of the three of you, Bob was perhaps the most self-aware, in that he did not live in a continual whirl of mental and physical activity like Colin, and did not lose his inner compass by throwing himself into new circumstances (inner or outer) like you.
&&&
I repeat what I said at his memorial service: Bob was a great man.