Author: Frank DeMarco

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Portrait of the guys upstairs

(So were you expecting a screenshot?)

All right, a bit of foolishness, but there’s a point to it. When you deal with the non-3D, by definition you deal with things that are beyond the sensory . How could the non-3D be detected by our physical senses, or by instruments, which are merely extensions of our physical senses?

In common speech we say “I heard them say such-and-such,” or “I could see them doing x-and-such,” but this is merely the imprecision of language. We don’t really see them or hear them., not directly. Phenomena such as visions, words, feelings are produced on our end  and represented as if they had been experienced through the senses. (That’s why it is called extra-sensory perception!)

You can’t see them, hear them, smell them, taste them. You can’t bump into them.

But then, why is that it seems like we can do just those things? Why do people hear voices in their head? Doesn’t that contradict what I just said about us being unable to experience them through our senses? I don’t think so. I think it is our bodies translating the effects of communication.

We differ in how we perceive things. Some people are clairaudient, some see visions, some experience an emotional response, some get feelings in their bodies, such as chills, or goose bumps, some merely know.  The non-3D contacts us, and we experience that contact in whatever way we experience. It isn’t a difference in the other side (I think); it is a difference in us.

Or maybe I’m all wet, but that’s how it seems to me at the moment. Maybe tomorrow I’ll see it differently.

 

 

 

 

 

Soon after Rita and I finished our series of session in 2002, I got her to write an introduction for the book of transcripts,  but by the time The Sphere and the Hologram came out, she had already made her transition. She came to me in a dream to assure me that she was fine, and then for six and a half years I assumed our work together was over.

But in December, 2014, I dreamed of her saying she was ready for us to work together again. I was surprised, but pleased. At 7:30 the next morning, I sat down with my journal, prepared for anything or nothing, as usual in this business of communicating. We were beginning where we had left off, still looking for clarity about life, and the afterlife, and the reality behind appearances.

She began by surprising me, saying, “You have had an effect on my life here, you know. Letting people in body know of our work together results in some of them contacting me, not necessarily being aware of it, which of course affects me here.” I took this to refer to The Sphere and the Hologram, and my talks to Guidelines groups at TMI.

“So – did you have something in particular you wanted to start with? Or did you already?”

“That’s as good a place to start as any – the continuing interaction between those in and those out of the body, not necessarily known to those in body, but real nonetheless. There is a tendency to think of life in the body as an interruption of life outside it, as though we come into form, have a lifetime’s worth of experiences, and then report. But it doesn’t work that way. I’d like to correct the picture, but it can’t be done in a hurry.”

“Well, I got the sense, the other day, that I was being primed for a new set of lessons. Didn’t guess that it was going to come via an old friend rather than anonymous guys upstairs.”

She reminded me that i had gotten that my understanding to date “was merely provisional unless you lost your nerve or your appetite for further refinement and redefinition.” In other words, somebody wanted to use us to redefine life for people. And I got the sense that Rita had an outline of where she wanted to go.

 “Let me say, this is exciting! I have Papa’s Trial to finish, yet something tells me this won’t interfere and actually may help.”

“It will be reciprocal, as you will see.”

So we began, and, as promised, we wound up redefining things we had been told before and had thought we had thoroughly digested. For instance, she started by saying:

“’This side’ and “the other side’ [what I now call 3D and non-3D] are in continuous unbroken communication, regardless what it feels like to those in body. Some, like you, won’t find anything to object to in that statement, but in fact, in day-to-day living, in ideas as expressed in action, few if any live that reality. In fact, in actual living, you live as though communication exists only when you intend it, or are aware of it. This is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’; it is how the separation of 3D life leads you to experience (or not experience) that aspect of life. But your life is bounded by your expectations of life, and we’re interested in expanding these expectations.

“The idea that there can be a separation between physical and non-physical stems from the idea that different substance is involved in either realm. As you were told pretty much right away, there is no difference between beings in the physical and in the non-physical except the conditions of the terrain each is on. In other words, although it is convenient to talk of different beings, in truth we are all part of one thing – the ‘everything’ – in a way you can’t yet imagine, which I am going to try to help you with. Many of the contradictions between systems disappear if you see that all is one.

“’All is one’ – it is a New Age cliché – but what does it mean in practice? Next time.”

And so we were off to the races yet again. That entry was the first in six months of entries. Bob Friedman suggested they be made into a book, and he published Rita’s World in two volumes. Then came Awakening from the 3D World (which I wanted to call Awakening from the 3D Trance, which I still think would have been a better title), and It’s All One World. Taken in connection with The Sphere and the Hologram, a massive amount of work, a real accomplishment.

Can you be involved in so massive a project and be unaffected by it? That isn’t quite the right question. A better question would be, Can you be involved in such a work, over the span of nearly 20 years, and realize the extent to which it has changed you? My answer would be, I doubt it, not by yourself. You are a moving platform, and you will tend to overestimate your continuity. What you need, if you are to recognize the changes, is a friend, or friends, to tell you what you look like from the outside. Those friends are likely to be in the 3D, but they needn’t be.

I am pretty sure Rita’s and my work together is finished – but then, I have thought that before!, In any case, it is clear to me that the work we did – while she was in 3D and even more, as it turned out, when she moved to the non-3D – changed her, changed me.

What more can you ask?

 

Jim Szpajcher took this nice photo in October, 2006

Rita’s husband Martin died on Friday, April 7, 2000, a few days after an accident in his car, after having asked to be taken off life-support. A few hours later, I sat down with my journal, thinking to talk to the guys upstairs, and instead this is what came out:

“Frank, this is Martin. Tell Rita thanks and remind her that over here we have no time – so the slight delay in decoupling from the body doesn’t have any significance. I will be seen and heard for a little while, tell her, so don’t be surprised and don’t be surprised at what she hears from others. Tell Leslie [Rita’s daughter] that the timing was good as always. She’ll know what I mean by the ‘as always.’”

Now, this was cryptic, except for the part about Rita experiencing him for a while, and if Rita or anybody ever told me what it meant, I have forgotten. It was the second paragraph that changed things:

“Don’t tell her, but take care of Rita. I know you will want to. It won’t be all that long, as you already know.”

Then he was gone and I asked the guys if that was really Martin.

“Did it feel like his presence?

“Yes it did. Quite strongly there, for a moment. But who ever knows what we self-suggest.

“Don’t worry about it. You know the saying, you inhibit what you doubt. You aren’t a true believer, so don’t worry so much about deceiving yourself.”

Well, if you had received such a message, would you write it off as one of those things, or would you listen? Martin asked me to take care of Rita. I took that to mean, give her some attention. So I got us into the habit of having supper together every Saturday night. (Always at the Lovingston Café, almost the only restaurant she ever frequented, as far as I know, Charlottesville being twice as far from her home on the New Land.)

I thought I was doing it out of the kindness of my heart, but as usual, kindness paid unexpected dividends. You can’t go out to eat with someone every week, for months, without moving your relationship to a deeper level. You will share stories, and experiences, and jokes, and (if only between the lines) values and hopes deferred and hopes not yet abandoned. And all the time you are doing that, you will be building up an understanding and a trust between you, and trust is always the sine qua non. Without trust, any relationship can go only so far.

Neither Rita nor I had any idea, at least, not on the conscious level, that we were being brought together to accomplish something. We were enjoying each other’s company.

She was one more example of benign, nurturing, maternal energy that I seemed to need. (She was only five years younger than my parents.) yet she was also a rigorous intellect, a trained academic, an experienced Monroe participant, an inquiring mind with a long list of questions she had not been able to get the answer to.

Just what she saw in me, I don’t know, of course. Sincerity, openness, curiosity, intelligence, no doubt. Kindness. And perhaps I was a window into other worlds: journalism, business, politics on the practical level, even perhaps merely the world-view of someone her children’s age.

In any case, we interested each other, and we enjoyed each other’s company, and in the months between April and September, we entered a relationship of mutual trust and affection. Then I took a step that led to so much more. I signed up for ten sessions in TMI’s black box.

Beginning in September, I spent every Friday morning in the isolation chamber, with Skip Atwater as monitor. He and I would discus my goals beforehand, and would debrief the session afterward, and during the session itself he, sitting in the control booth, would watch the instruments and vary the Hemi-Sync frequencies being delivered to my earphones, and would sometimes offer input, and would answer whatever questions or concerns that would arise.

When I returned home with the cassette tape of the session, I would spend time – a lot of time! – transcribing it, and then would send that transcript to a short list of friends, of whom Rita was one. She and I would discuss those sessions the following night, Saturday, over supper in Lovingston. (I later self-published those transcripts as A Place to Stand.)

Fast forward to August, 2001. Rita had gotten me another session in the black box as a birthday present, and when I said I wished I could do sessions on a continuing basis, she said I didn’t need the box, and so we set up a schedule. Tuesday nights after I had supper, I would drive up to Rita’s house, only a couple of miles away. I would lie down on the bed in the guest room, with my head toward the center of the room. She would sit nearby with her pad of questions and the tape recorders, and we would do just what I did for ten weeks at the end of the previous year. And I would take my tape home and transcribe….

We did that for 22 weeks in a row, and those sessions became The Sphere and the Hologram.

Now, bear in mind, Rita is the one who originally designed TMI’s protocols for PREP sessions. For the lab’s first four years, she and Martin had functioned as monitors. She had a huge backlog of questions she had never been able to get answered.  She would ask them of participants who had run through their own questions, and would get only frustratingly vague non-answers. “Oh, it’s hard to explain.” “Everything is fine.” “You’ll know when you get here,” etc.

But from me, for some reason, she could get fluent answers, and the more complicated or arcane the question, the better it got. At one point I said to her, “Rita, you’re asking me these questions, and you’re getting these answers, but I don’t know any of this stuff. I feel like I’m lying here just being a  know-it-all.” She paused and then said, “That’s practically the definition of an intuitive.”

So Rita’s part of my story is that she brought me from exploring experiences to actually bringing forth information. She did that partly by building on the trust between us. (Trust removes that inhibition that comes from doubt as to how material will be received.) But Skip had done the same thing. Equally important in Rita’s case was her long backlog of specific unanswered questions, and the academic training that led her to question closely the material as it arrived. Thus she would say, “But this seems to contradict what you said three sessions ago,” and the guys would pause and say the could see why it might look that way, and then explain both the previous and the present statements. They more than once said, “The better the questions, the better the answers,” and her questions were first-rate.

Rita died March 19, 2008, and I had a dream that told me she was fine, and I thought that was the end of the story. Not quite!

 

Nancy

Dana used to say, “No one crosses alone.” I would add to that, that no one crosses alone not only from 3D to non-3D, but in the long journey from birth to death. We can’t do it. One way or another (and hopefully, in more than only one way) life gives us the companionship that we need.

That companionship  may come from family or from friends, living or remembered. The friends may be living presences, or they may be friends we’ve never met: authors, historical examples, any who serve us as role models; even the unseen presences that are always ready to support us, including the very strands that comprise us.

But primarily, we need the warmth provided by living, breathing, people, and they need us no less. In this context, re-read the Transcendentalists on friendship and love, and it may become clearer, what they were talking about.

Although I met Nancy before I met Rita Warren, for about 10 years I knew her only as a friendly acquaintance and Hampton Roads investor. But just at the time Rita passed, Nancy’s and my relationship changed.  She was experiencing a problem with her hand that she couldn’t fix. Although she was quite experienced with healing, including self-healing, her guys told her that I could help. I said I’d try if she would make the trip to Nelson County (I was living at Rita’s house at the time), and she did, and our deeper relationship began. Suddenly we weren’t relating around Hampton Roads, nor even around metaphysical discussions. Now we were into experience. Now we were into real work.

And although in most ways, my relationships with Nancy and with Rita couldn’t have been more different, in one crucial way, they were identical. Nancy, like Rita before her, was willing and able to accompany me. It made many things possible.

It is one thing to explore and discover. It is quite a different thing to figure out what it is that you have discovered, and what it means, and how you should react to it. It is one thing to explore externally, and quite a different thing to explore internally. Internally, where are you going to find landmarks? How are you going to coordinate what you found today with what you found two years ago? How are you going to view the changes in yourself – particularly the changes of which you are unconscious?

You can’t. You need help. No one crosses alone.

What you need, first and foremost, is someone you can trust to give you an honest response. What good does it do you for someone to say, “Yeah, yeah, that’s great, well done, keep at it,” at the times when you’re going off the beam? Ultimately that would be just as destructive as someone saying all the time, “You’re wasting your time. Give it up.”

But opinion needs to be grounded in something. If the person doesn’t have the experience, doesn’t have the depth of character, doesn’t have the active interest, how much can they help?

I have been fortunate in my friends, but mostly they come, and stay for a while, and go. They die, or for whatever reason we move off in different directions, and in any case perhaps our friendship is based in this or that special interest. Even lasting friendships change as each of us change. It is as Thoreau said, “No man was ever party to a settled friendship. It is no more a constant phenomenon than meteors and lightning. It is a war of position.”

It has been more than 16 years now since Rita died, and in all that time Nancy and I have been cooperating and contending. I knew, as soon as we moved from acquaintanceship to friendship, that here was someone who was absolutely straight, a rigidly honest person who could be depended upon to give her opinion without shading.

That doesn’t mean such opinion is always comfortable to hear, nor that it is invariably accurate. But it means, here is an honest, interactive mirror, someone to be counted on for honest feedback.

This sounds like I’m talking about a sort of literary criticism. It is way deeper than that. It is the confrontation of everything that is in you with everything that is in your friend.

It may sound like I am the intrepid explorer and Nancy is left on the shore waiting for my reports. That isn’t right either, for not only does she do her own exploring, she has her own deep background in these matters. I came to this through Monroe, she via Machelle Small Wright. I always dealt primarily with my own strands and resonances. She dealt primarily with nature. The differences have been as illuminating as the similarities.

And then there is the healing work, which in a way is where we began. She has her methods, I have mine. She has her problems, I have mine. What a great laboratory for experimentation and feedback! As anyone with the experience knows, you can do a certain amount of self-healing – sometimes an impressive amount – but it is often easier to have someone else work on you than for you to work on yourself. This is not because you are lazy, or need self-confidence, but merely because another person works from a stable platform unaffected by the problem you are working on.

For 16 years, ever since the day her own guys told her to see me about a persistent problem she was dealing with, Nancy and I have been working together. Her continuing contribution hasn’t always been obvious, any more than Bob Friedman’s was, in those mornings when I would be transcribing my latest conversation, wondering what he would make of it. That doesn’t make it any less important.

No one crosses alone.

 

In the desert she loved so much

When you sit down to write about the people who have given your life decisive turns, sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it isn’t. Some people affect you by an action, or by being the right person at the right time; others, by who they are as example or as catalyst. In the former case, the linkage may be obvious; in the latter, not necessarily.  I am finding that some of those who affected me most deeply, did so in ways I find hard to explain.

Dana, like my friend Louis who I mentioned in an earlier post, was one of those whose effect is hard to express to others. The things that can be said, don’t express it. The things that made the difference, can’t be said, and can hardly be pointed to.

But just because something is nearly incommunicable doesn’t mean it is unimportant. In fact, I would argue that it is often the reverse: The deepest influences make less of a splash at the surface. I’d make a small bet that this is equally true for everyone who ever reads this.

Dana stretched my boundaries in many ways. But I find it hard to write about . Unable to write about the profound things, I am unwilling to write about the superficial ones. And that’s too bad, because she was a very interesting person,  a gifted author, a remarkably self-educated person, and superlatively funny both in person and in print.

When she sent us the manuscript of her first novel, Ezekiel’s Chariot, I loved it and insisted that we publish it. If I remember rightly, this was one of our first ten titles. Unfortunately, metaphysical fiction was a hard sell. Bookstores were making some money on what was called New Age or sometimes Body Mind Spirit books, but these were non-fiction. An author not yet known to the public would get lost among general fiction, but we found it next to impossible to persuade bookstore owners to leave a little room in their New Age section for fiction other than James Redfield or Richard Bach. Over the years, we worked to get the industry to accept a category named Visionary Fiction, but without much success.

Still, we published Dana’s other novels: Lucy Blue and the Daughters of Light, and Jonah. Here was visionary fiction as its best: insightful, deep, intricate, funny —  God help us, could she write funny scenes! Metaphysical fiction often falls into preachiness. She did not. But we didn’t do a very good job of promoting her books, a fate that many of my authors were to experience over the years.

Dana’s deepest concern, though, was not the exercise of her considerable literary talent, but exploration of her experiences as one who repeatedly had been abducted by aliens. And this posed quite a problem for me.

Talk about cognitive dissonance! On the one hand, I never doubted that Dana was telling the truth. She didn’t lie,  she didn’t exaggerate, she didn’t embellish or shade things. But that only made it harder to edit her books (Summoned and The ET-Human Link} because how was I supposed to edit a book I could scarcely wrap my head around? I had been reading about flying saucers since I was in high school, but this was another level of complexity. Most of the issues she raised were things I knew nothing about. Yet there was no one else to do the editing, and no other prospective publishers.

Perhaps you think this was no dilemma at all, that I should have either disbelieved her or accepted her interpretation of what had happened. I didn’t see it that way, and fortunately Dana was not at all invested in proving that she knew everything. (When I said that one of her abduction experience seemed to me to be a second-body experience, she did not take me to be disbelieving her experience; she was intrigued and wanted to know more, and we wound up having quite a discussion.).

As you probably know, being an experiencer puts you in a difficult position. First, it is often traumatic. Second, people don’t believe you/ Third, if with time you come to understand more of what’s going on, you may find the new understanding to be as overwhelming as the original experience.

Trauma. If you can be abducted at any time, from any place, and you have nothing to say about it, where is your sense of safety in the world?

Disbelief. If your family and friends – let alone stray acquaintances and strangers – either flat-out disbelieve you or at best give you a strained believe that has more to do with personal loyalty than with true belief, where do you go for support? It is one more form of being “in the closet,” however unwillingly, because, as Thoreau said long ago, it takes two to tell the truth: one to tell and one to listen. And what if nobody believes you? As Dana said once, someone steals your jewelry and when the police show up, all you have to show them is an empty box and a story.

.Overwhelm. The more she thought about what had happened, and compared notes with others when she finally found them, and read books and attended conferences, the more questions it raised.  A one point (she being on very good terms with her guys upstairs), she was impelled to study quantum theory, for no reason she could have named. Later it turned out to help her understand some things about what was going on above and beyond so-called normal life.

In a very real sense, her quest for understanding was much like mine; in fact, there were close overlaps. And this was both reassuring (it’s always good, having company) and disconcerting (tending to uproot even the tentative understandings already achieved).

Dana died of lung cancer in 2007, after a long struggle. I have a box of correspondence from her, written in her quirky, not-too-legible script (not that I should talk),. When I pick up one of her letters, her personality comes back vividly.

Dana found it hard to live in this world, and I was relieved for her when she was finally released, but, as I said when my brother died, later that same year, death is not the end of everything, but it is the end of something. She was a pure soul and a great joy, and, as I say, most of what knowing her brought me is incommunicable.

Bon voyage, my friend.

 

Kelly, signing a book

In the summer of 1992, a prospective author in California called, wanting to know if Hampton Roads might be interested in looking at a thousand-page manuscript novel on the lives of Martha and Thomas Jefferson. I explained that we mostly did metaphysical books, but that I had a deep interest in history, and I’d give her my opinion of it, if that was worth her time and postage. And that undramatic exchange was the beginning of my dealings with Kelly Joyce Neff.

The manuscript  was so good! I read it right through in a week, at the office by day and at home by night. I had read a good deal about Jefferson, but nothing had brought him, let alone Martha Jefferson, so vividly to life. I couldn’t see how Hampton Roads could publish it, but I sent Kelly a letter meant to be helpful (just as I had done previously with Ed Carter). I made a few suggestions, and then asked if she would consider deleting its many intimate scenes and conversations, as we in the twentieth century couldn’t know the inner lives of these people from the eighteenth century. Fateful question!

By return mail she came clean: “I speak not as an outside observer, but as one who lived with and amid Thomas and Patty. You might understand that I have been very cautious about going public with such information, for I have no desire to be taken for a nut, or to have my credibility as a scholar questioned. What I know does not invalidate my ability to sleuth out validations of it, but I doubt the public at large is ready to hear the truth. I am only telling you to assuage your qualms. … You are free to think of me as a nut if you wish.”

She thought she had been Martha Jefferson! That would explain the vivid, sure-footed description., but was it possible? She didn’t strike me as crazy, but how could I judge? I was willing to leave the question open.

After that, we corresponded throughout September and into October, but I still wasn’t thinking of her as a psychic. I thought of her in terms of Jefferson, and of writing, and of scholarship. This although she had told me she was accessing past-life memories!

Kelly had established a reputation as a Jefferson researcher; she was going to participate in a Jefferson conference at Monticello in October. I invited her to stay at my house on the weekend following. (This was something my wife and I sometimes did. We enjoyed getting to know authors, who were generally interesting people.) But immediately after she called from Charlottesville to say she had arrived, my mother called: My uncle had just died. I drove up to New Jersey for the funeral on Saturday, and didn’t get back till late Sunday afternoon.

Over the weekend, Kelly had used her anthropological training and her inner guidance to find the foundations of Martha Jefferson’s childhood home. I finally realized: She was in the habit of talking to what she called “the guys upstairs.” She was psychic! She had done past-life research! She could help others do the same. She and I talked nonstop from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.

The first thing I asked was why I was helping with her manuscript even though Hampton Roads was unlikely to publish it. [Although, ultimately we did, as Dear Companion.] She said it was a reversal of form. We had been together in an English monastery in the middle ages. She had been a monk, the head of the scriptorium, responsible for recopying books. I was a young man from a wealthy family, a second son. Instead of buying his way to a bishopric, his linguistic abilities were fostered and he was trained in secret ways. (What that was all about we didn’t find out right away!)

Just that easily, she and I started to work together. Something she would say would spark a knowing in me; something I would say would bring forth further detail from her. We’d get a word or a name or a knowing. I took notes, but I didn’t think to tape-record the session. In my journal next day I said that she “turned out to be a big surprise.” Over the next few weeks, her presence transformed my sense of possibilities. For the first time I had a partner experienced in the methods of research.

At just this time, Bob said that maybe Monroe would feel more comfortable about our proposal to distribute his Hemi-Sync tapes to bookstores (a proposal that had been hanging fire for three years) if he and I did Gateway together. He said we could have the company pay for it. I was on the phone instantly. November was booked up, but the first week of December had two openings. I signed us up, and began waiting impatiently.

Kelly continued to encourage and exhort me by every post. She insisted I knew how to do the things I wanted to do, if I would only let myself do them. On October 31, expressing her frustration at my caution and self-doubt: “My dear old one, don’t you ever read anything you publish? You know all of this! What is holding you back from it manifesting in your life? Why do you question where your knowing of past incidences and all comes from ? This is not meant as a criticism!!! But it anguishes me to see you ground-bound, when I know you can fly. The other part says, ‘have patience, he has chosen this unremembering for its lessons, its experience.’”

One day that fall, I noted that I was quietly restless, that money was extremely low, “yet I am not worried; hardly touched. It is something within, saying, there’s always more, don’t worry about it. And I do not. …”

And why did I not? Because Kelly “has turned my life upside down, or rather has opened it into wider channels. Between her and [certain others] and the prospect of going to TMI for Gateway, and the opening up of communications with people in so many places, physical and psychic, I am ready to burst out into new levels of awareness. Or so it feels. … If only I could have the little bit—that giant bit—of external reinforcement that would be breakthrough into direct memory—and into direct powers of perception and management—”

By the time Bob and I left for Gateway in early December, 1992, I had had several weeks of work and intense communication with Kelly, which had given me more growth than I had gotten in my entire life with the exception of my time twenty years earlier working with Louis Meinhardt. Kelly and I, working together, swapping insights and questions and knowings by mail and telephone, had helped each other immensely. From me she got acceptance and eager cooperation. From her I got direction and encouragement.

Of course, as soon as I got home from Gateway, she was one of the first people I called. Right off, I asked if she knew anything about some detail of Monroe training. She said, sort of humorously wearily, that yes, she had heard quite a bit about it lately. Turned out that all the time I was talking to her, she was hearing me. “It was like direct feed,” she said. She provided confirmation of details I had seen; and more confirmation came as I received her letters written while I was at Gateway.

The Gateway experience can leave its graduates gasping, somewhat. So much happens, so quickly. Sometimes it helps to have pointers, and not everyone’s life provides them. For me, it was a quantum leap, because in Kelly I had essentially immediate verification. I can’t think of anything more important in helping me to integrate—and therefore retain—my new abilities after I went back to the so-called “real” world.

In getting to know an undoubted psychic, I had been freed from doubting that such people and abilities exist. This had allowed me to begin to find and develop those same abilities within myself. Processing her feedback after I returned, and working with her at an ever more intense level in the weeks and months that followed, I got a surer sense of what I could and couldn’t do; what I could and couldn’t trust. All that changed with time, of course, but as a means of speeding up my initial learning, the relationship was invaluable. It made all the difference.

 

At Nancy Penn Center, TMI. Lifeline, July, 1995

The usual suspects that week, Ed and me and Rich Spees

I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my mentors. This series of posts mentions friends who helped open new worlds to me, but necessarily leaves out others equally important in their own way, merely because no one could mention every important person in his life, any more than he could mention or every thing that was important. A pity, that, but inescapable.

I was able to leave the newspaper primarily because of Living Is Forever, a manuscript by one J. Edwin Carter, sent us in the fall of 1989 by Eleanor Friede, a literary agent who was a friend of Bob Monroe’s and who knew Bob Friedman as well. Ed, we learned later, had retired as CEO of Inco, Ltd. (International Nickel), and had found himself trying to write a novel. He didn’t know why he had to write it, he didn’t particularly want to write it, and he never knew where the plot was going –  all of which he describes in the book’s prologue. All he knew is that he had to write it.)

I read the manuscript and saw that it had good scenes, an interesting story, and an important message, but needed rewriting. As much out of the goodness of my heart as for any business reason, I wrote Mr. Carter a three-page letter saying why I thought the manuscript not publishable in its present form, and giving an extensive analysis of the changes that I thought would make it work. I noted this in my journal, adding, “Not that any of this helps deal with my personal life.” Proof again of how little I know.

In December, 1989, Mr. Carter responded to my letter, agreeing with my criticisms, but saying he could not himself do the work needed to fix it. He said that he would be willing to pay a professional editor to do the job, and at Bob Friedman’s suggestion, I offered to do it and also guaranteed publication by Hampton Roads—for I did believe in the value and appeal of the story, and knew I could put it into publishable shape. When Ed agreed, I arranged that he pay the money to the company rather than to me personally, and the company in turn put me on the payroll part-time. This meant that I could begin to leave the newspaper! Before the end of January 1990 I was working half-time at the paper and half-time at Hampton Roads.

Soon Ed and I were conferring over the phone and sending each other disks in the course of the rewrite. And since he had specified in the contract that I should confer with him in person at least once a month, I two or three times flew down to Jekyll Island, Georgia, where he and his wife Meredith were wintering, and spent weekends with them. In short order Mr. and Mrs. Carter had become Ed and Meredith, and he and I had become friends. Between the book project and our developing habit of telephone conferences “just to check in,” he became ad hoc financial advisor, then investor, and finally full partner in our publishing enterprise. In the seven years we knew each other, he and I went down several surprising roads together, Hampton Roads and TMI not least.

As a big “for instance,” I did Lifeline mostly because Ed asked me to do it with him, and made it possible by paying my way. He said he thought he and I would both get more out of the program if we did it together.

If I had not done Lifeline in July 1995, I might have had to wait a long time before another opportunity arose. Literally on the day Lifeline ended, Ed (newly a shareholder in HRPC) and Bob Friedman and I were enmeshed in the details of moving the company from Norfolk to Charlottesville. All fall I worked hard, first at moving the company, then commuting between Charlottesville and the Hampton Roads area (where my family remained until the following spring). In December Ed and I rented an apartment together, which gave me a place to stay weeknights and him a place when he came to spend a week or ten days every so often. An unexpected bonus to this mutually convenient arrangement was that it gave us a convenient place and time to have sessions with The Gentlemen Upstairs.

Meteors pass so quickly. On Wednesday evening, December 4, 1996, Ed called me from his place in New Hampshire, and we had had one of our long phone conversations, in the course of which he made a point of paying me a couple of compliments that had the air of having been long thought and never previously said. In retrospect, the call was a farewell.

I went to bed and awoke at about 4 a.m. , sat down at my computer, and at Ed’s request asked TGU to expand on their prior reply to a question he had had me ask them. This consultation ended at 4:54 a.m. and I sent it off to Ed as an e-mail message, which means he had all day Thursday to read it, though nobody can positively state that he did.

Ed’s daughter Ginna Colburn had come to work for us, staying at her father’s apartment during the week and returning home to West Virginia for long weekends. On that Friday Ginna told me that she had just been told that her father had been found dead near his computer, having died apparently swiftly and presumably painlessly.

Calling the staff into the conference room and telling them was the saddest duty I had ever had there. We all held Ed in great affection. After a while Bob Friedman and I went into one of our offices and turned on the tape recorder and I went Upstairs, to see what The Gentlemen Upstairs had to say about it.

&&&

Here are excerpts from my transcript:

Bob: Do you have any comments about the reason Ed chose this particular time to leave us?

Although what you call his Downstairs level sort of forgot, itself, he’d been telling you for more than two years he was going to leave this month. He later was hedging his bets, but this was the plan. He was surprised to go, actually. We will give you the assurance that he’s not disappointed, however. He has finished— There would never be an empty agenda, because he was always one to put more into the mix, but he finished all the things that were the most urgent, and he more than accomplished what he came here to do. [Pause.] You will find that he didn’t leave you without final messages, some of which were already delivered.

Bob: Do you know where he is now?

He’s where he always was, but—disconnected from this body, let’s put it that way. If you mean, is he aware and conscious at this point—unlike the people who need time to recuperate, you know?—yes he is. Very quickly and easily and we can talk to him if you wish.

Bob: I’m not sure we wish, except to wish him godspeed, and that if he has any messages for us, to tell us, at this point.

We smile, passing on his smile, because he’s saying something that amounts to, “Don’t worry, I’ll have messages for you.” [A laugh.] To-do lists. …

Bob: Anything else you wish to say?

We remind you that Ed Carter went downstairs in a Heartline program after a particular tape and looked around and said everyone in the room was an angel. And we tell you that he saw true. You understand? … You’re all surrounded by angels. Which means, of course, that you’re all angels. Not meaning you’re not human, but meaning that humans are more than you think you are. And we say “you” with an asterisk, because it’s more like “we,” but you make the distinctions.

Bob: I don’t know if Frank has any questions or not.

Frank: Well I don’t have questions, but I have a feeling there’s something waiting to be said. Or waiting for us to precipitate it, I think. Gentlemen, you want to give us whatever’s? Or, why are we doing this—I mean, do you have an agenda here?

When you find your heart opened, cherish the feeling. Cherish the ability to have an opened heart. That’s Ed’s last gift.

…

As part of a message to Ed’s family, they added:

Ed very late in his life learned that love is the only thing in life that counts. He believed it a long time, but he learned it and knew it toward the end, and that’s what he became.

&&&

That is very true, and everybody who knew him was aware of it.