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Joy and Colin and me, March 17, 1995

As I said in a previous post,  Colin Wilson provided invisible companionship during long years from 1970 through the 25 years before we met. What he did for me, he must have done for uncounted thousands. But how to give even the faintest idea of his importance to my life?

Let’s look at part of John Ezard’s December, 2013, obituary in the Guardian, with a few comments by me, inserted in brackets.

The headline said:

Britain’s first homegrown existentialist star, he had a huge success with his 1956 book, The Outsider

[The obit began:]

For a few dazzling months, Colin Wilson, who has died aged 82, was taken at his own valuation in his diary as “the major literary genius of our century”, a writer destined to be “Plato’s ideal sage and king”. The phenomenal reviews and sales of his first book, The Outsider (1956), led him to be seen as a potential saviour of the human spirit, a thinker who might find a way through the spiritual nullity of the postwar years.

The book remains extraordinary, more for its reach than its grasp.

[The author doesn’t mean this as praise, but one might almost say that he here describes Colin’s strength, as I will try to show.]

It was an attempt to map a single, negotiable path of mysticism from the span of recent western art and philosophy. Wilson looked for the path through case studies of the agonies and ecstasies of thinkers, artists and men of action including Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Vaslav Nijinsky, Vincent van Gogh, Hermann Hesse and Lawrence of Arabia. He condensed them into a single type, “the Outsider”, a questing spirit straddled between devastating experiences of nothingness and moments of the highest insight.

[This is a vastly over-simplified sketch of a complex scheme which sees not one type of outsider, but three, a la Gurdjieff. And it doesn’t even hint that Colin was arguing that the West was suffering a crisis of belief, of which outsiders were an initial symptom.]

“Our life in modern society is a repetition of Van Gogh’s problem,” Wilson said, “the day-to-day struggle for intensity that disappears overnight, interrupted by human triviality and endless pettiness.” The book was excitingly written, with a sense of revelation. The failing, which took longer to emerge, was that it oversimplified and deformed some case studies to make them fit a thesis.

[No, I think the major failing was the same as its major strength: I tell my friends,  his value to you probably won’t be in the conclusions that he draws, but in the connections he leads you to make.  His explorations were so wide-ranging as to stun you with a sense of how much you didn’t know, how many things you had thought of only in isolation.]

A review in the London Evening News was headlined “A major writer – and he’s 24”. Philip Toynbee, of the Observer, called it “exhaustive, luminously intelligent”. Other critics followed suit. The book gave Wilson a celebrity and a status close to that of a prophet, even in tabloid newspapers. That was in 1956 – “how extraordinary my fame should coincide with Elvis Presley’s,” he noted. The Outsider sold more than 20,000 copies in its first two months.

His passionate inquiry into his themes continued but critics deserted him. He went out of fashion and – though he published more than 100 works – he survived financially only because many of those dealt with murder or the occult as pathways to the insights that fascinated him. His readership grew to include murder buffs, UFO spotters and new age believers. Typical of this later output was Alien Dawn (1998), marketed with the line “the evidence is overwhelming – they are here”. Serialised in the Daily Mail, it undoubtedly made more money than any of his philosophical books.

[It would be more accurate to say that Colin was not to be deterred by literary or scholastic fads. Unlike the critics and “scholars” who make sure to jump on whatever the latest bandwagon, he maintained his focus. That focus led him into all sorts of byways, many of them “disreputable” according to the official definers of culture; Colin couldn’t care less. He went his own way.]

Wilson, who was based for more than 50 years in Gorran Haven, Cornwall, bore his literary disappointments gracefully. He remained sure that he would triumphantly find and remove the psychic impediment which, he thought, had blocked all human creativity in his time. It was by no means an ignoble cause, as the praise for his early work showed. He was greatly gifted. Almost entirely self-educated, he had huge mental energy, read prodigiously and explored the worldwide resources of literature, philosophy and science with earnestness. His role model from the age of 13 was George Bernard Shaw, also self-taught.

Wilson’s defects – enough to undo him as a thinker – were an imperfect analytical ability and a protective conceit that left him virtually impervious to the rational or intuitive arguments of others.

[Again, I think this misreads what he was doing and how he was doing it. What the scholars and critics seem unwilling to grasp is that Colin was not playing by their rules. He wasn’t carefully hedging his arguments so that he might get tenure, or so that he wouldn’t jeopardize his status as “respectable” journalist. He was lighting fires! He was shining searchlights in the darkness. He wasn’t playing literary games, he was trying to help people wake up.]

Yet the literary establishment’s handling of his first books remains one of the more memorable intellectual disgraces of our time. He said, “I would like my life to be a lesson in how to stand alone and to thrive on it.”

[Hemingway had the same problem, for the same reasons,]

…

The key to the collapse of the Wilson phenomenon was perhaps that philosophy and religion ceased to be seen as mainstream topics after the 1950s. His promise failed as much for lack of a challenging or nourishing climate as for any other reason.

[In other words,  he didn’t trim to follow the fads; he did his work as it came to him.]

Wilson summarised The Outsider and its sequels in his 1966 book Introduction to the New Existentialism. He was Britain’s first, and so far last, homegrown existentialist star. His later books tended more and more to go to niche readerships, though he said The Occult (1971) earned him £100,000. Dreaming to Some Purpose, a memoir, appeared in 2004. In Super Consciousness (2009), he focused on “peak experiences” or states of heightened awareness, a concept explored by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow.

He and Joy were able to offer (carefully vetted) guests smoked salmon and fine wine in their Cornwall hermitage, its rooms and sheds groaning with 30,000 books and 10,000 classical and jazz records.

[Bob Friedman and I were privileged to visit them in 2001 and stay the night, a memory that remains warm.]

Wilson, still an unstoppably wide-ranging and oracular conversationalist, grew into a kind, mostly serene man. “The critics tried to take back what they’d written,” he said. “They couldn’t take back the passport they’d given me.”

[Thank God. That initial huge impact gave him the ability to  find publishers year after year, in subject after subject, and we are all the better for it. And, kind? Oh yes. He sent me several unknown authors that he thought might interest me as they had interested him.]

On their visit to the Hampton Roads office, 1998

I never dreamed in 1970 that one day I would publish books by Colin Wilson! But, we did. The Books in my Life, the Spiderworld series of four novels, Rogue Messiahs.

A wonderful man. A lifesaver, a bearer of light in a dark time.

 

More than I knew at the time, my life was shaped and guided by others. Initially, of course, there was  the family I grew up in, but here I refer to something else. My family provided the human warmth without which we can scarcely live, but their influence on my life must go largely unreported. Emotional warmth and shared curiosity leave little but anecdotal evidence for others.

But if our biological family provided the initial shaping, my journey from what I was to whatever it is that I am now depended heavily upon the following people, two of whom I never met, listed in the order of their appearance in my life:

• Colin Wilson (1970)
• Carl Jung (1970)
• Henry Thoreau (1970)
• Louis Meinhardt (1971)
• Suni Dunbar (1987)
• Bob Friedman (1987)
• Bob Monroe (1989)
• Ed Carter (1990)
• Kelly Neff (1992)
• Dana Redfield (1997)
• Nancy Ford (1998)
• Rita Warren (2000)

Again, this is a list, not of those who were important in my life, but of those who played a prominent part in the changes

Colin Wilson provided invisible companionship during long years when nothing else in my life seemed to support my feelings of something important, just behind the curtain. He continually reinforced me in a way no one else and nothing else did, for 25 years before we even met.

Carl Jung gradually shaped my view of who and what we are in this strange 3D life we lead. His was a very different viewpoint from mine: scientific, rigorously logical, careful in even his tentative conclusions, yet fearless and far-ranging. And everything I read and understood rang true.

Henry Thoreau articulated the longings I felt but did not yet understand. He set me to thinking in ways I might never have come to on my own. Like Colin’s books, Thoreau’s writing provided an invisible support.

Louis Meinhardt was my first teacher, the bridge — though at first well disguised — between imagination and reality.

Suni Dunbar. provided emotional support and a shared view of life. It amounted to effective mothering at a time when I needed it. For many years, she was a feminine presence that spanned the two worlds.

Bob Friedman provided an entry-point connecting the world of ideas and the world of people. We began from the shared experience of the Shirley MacLaine seminar, though we met only later. But as we came to know each other, over months of occasional shared lunches, we discovered something very simpatico between us. Ironic, in light of all our later difficulties, but there it was. And without Bob and the company we built, how could I have met the authors we worked with? How could I have entered that world as a participant rather than merely a spectator? And, not least, he introduced me to Bob Monroe and Monroe’s work

Bob Monroe provided a method, a language, and community. Immediately on meeting him (via Bob Friedman), I was fascinated with what he was doing and why he was doing it. As I read his books and did his programs, I saw a practical path to follow, finally. If you overlooked my analysis of Bob Monroe’s three books “Bob Monroe’s Journey,” I encourage you to go back and read it.

Ed Carter became an encouraging presence and a fellow explorer, repeatedly facilitating new beginnings. Not only did he help HRPC financially when we needed it, he encouraged me to do a Gateway Voyage at The Monroe Institute; he was actively interested in questioning the guys upstairs; he made it passible for me to do the Lifelines program that further changed my life.

Kelly Neff. She sent a manuscript about Jefferson’s wife, then took her courage in hand and told this unknown editor that she believed she had been Martha Jefferson, and said, “you are free to think me crazy if you want to,” We met seemingly fortuitously, just in time for her to put me in the right place to do the Gateway where everything opened up. There’s much more to be said about our complicated and tumultuous relationship, but it will have to wait for another post.

Dana Redfield.  Dana, like Kelly a few years earlier, addressed herself to an unknown editor with her tale of experiences that were often mocked or merely disbelieved. How safe was it, in the 1990s, to tell a stranger that you had been abducted, repeatedly, by ETs? And beyond that ,hers was not just another story of alien abduction: The closer one looked, the more there was to be found. And as important as the experiences – more important, I would say – was the story of her hard life and its lessons, and the effect we came to have upon each other.

Nancy Ford. In ways that would be hard to express, Nancy has been the mental, emotional and – dare we say it? – spiritual companion I needed. It is one thing to have one’s perceptions change; it is another thing to live those changes, and I don’t know if it can be done alone. Dana used to say, “nobody crosses alone,” and each of these women – Suni, Kelly, Dana, Rita – gave me something intangible that men could not.

Rita Warren. Rita, like Suni, was old enough to have been my mother, and, like Suni, in some ways filled that role for me, which, as I have said more than once, enabled me to be the affectionate, dutiful son she had never had. Like Suni, Kelli, Dana, and Nancy, our interactions nourished me emotionally as well as intellectually. And of course the work that she and I accomplished together – unanticipated by either of us – laid the groundwork for ever more extensive changes.

And this’s the common denominator here: You don’t get transformed merely by changing your ideas. You change yourself, or perhaps we should say you allow yourself to be changed, and the process involves your emotional body at least as much as  – probably more than – the mental body. Hence, the crucial importance of your friends, your brothers and sisters.

Nobody crosses alone.

 

In my post on “Bob Monroe’s Journey,” I recounted what I learned in marathon readings of his three books back in 1997, when I was writing what became Muddy Tracks. My friend Charles Sides reminds me that I ought to write about what I learned and how it affected me. He should talk, but he has a point.

Perhaps the easiest way to describe what I found important is to resort to bullet points.

• Monroe made a conscious decision to let his whole self drive (rather than merely his 3D ego-consciousness), and immediately everything changed.
• He found himself in “an apparent educational program that I am absorbing bit by bit.”
• Most of what he learned, he was unable to relate to “life here on time-space earth.”
• Initially he divided his experiences into those in what he called Locale I (“The Here-Now”), Locale II (“Infinity, Eternity”), and Locale III (“Reverse Image”).
• In Far Journeys, he describes his experiences with INSPEC, and with BB and AA. He gets the rote on Loosh, and later gets INSPEC’s view of the rote. He is given a vision of a probable future, a description of The Gathering, and a schematic outline of what he has learned.
• In Ultimate Journey, he gives us his analysis of human existence, including H Band noise and M Field interaction.
• He describes a trip to “the emitter” that establishes and maintains physical-matter reality. He shows that we are one, and that we are re-uniting
• He also – be it remembered – discusses curious experiences that he couldn’t get a handle on. People seem inclined to pass this by in silence.

These points are worth considering.

Monroe let his whole self drive and everything changed. There is a distinction between the ego and the Self that seems to elude people.

The Self is more than just the ego-self combined with unconscious content. I think the Self is the ego level, 3D and non-3D, plus our non-3D components that exist prior to and superior to our 3D self. That is, not merely is the Self everything we are at this level (unknown as well as known) but it is also other layers of ourselves, including the Strands with all their connections. Slightly a bigger deal than one bounded 3D life, wouldn’t you say?

He found himself in “an apparent educational program that I am absorbing bit by bit.” This says to me that his completed Self was leading him through the experiences necessary for him to be able to act as translator for his contemporaries  and those who would follow.

But he was unable to relate most of it to “life here on time-space earth.” Could this statement be more important? He said that everything he was telling us was a translation of a translation of a translation. In short, we need to seek to find the spirit of what he was saying, not letting ourseves get hung up on the letter. In short, we must remember that the spirit gives life and the letter kills.

Initially he divided his experiences into those in what he called Locale I (“The Here-Now”), Locale II (“Infinity, Eternity”), and Locale III (“Reverse Image”). Later he realized that these were more like hasty impressions than reliable roadmaps. His books were an explorer’s logs, conveying initial impressions of new terrain, not topographical maps. It’s going to take a lot of exploration, perhaps by generations of explorers, before such topos can be produced. Everything in the meantime is provisional.

Thus his experiences with INSPEC, and his adventures with BB and AA we may consider to be his best attempt to tell us what happened. We must remember his descriptions of “hearsay evidence” and Loosh and a vision of a probable future, and his description of The Gathering, are translations of translations of translations: careful reporting hampered by difficulties in terrain. Similarly, his trip to “the emitter.” I found that description moving; it felt true, and right, but it’s still a translation.

Also, we should remember to not blank out those experiences he couldn’t get a handle on. We may not know what to make of them; that doesn’t guarantee that they aren’t important; it doesn’t mean we won’t figure them out someday – provided that we don’t forget about them.

As important as anything else is his descriptions of H Band noise and M Field interaction. He called H Band noise “the peak of uncontrolled thought that emanates from all living forms on Earth, particularly humans…. The amplitude of each segment of the band is determined by the emotion involved in the thought.” He believed that it contained every time pattern that ever existed, sounding like a mob screaming in many tongues. But what sheer volume of energy! Monroe says the lure of that energy is what draws us here and usually keeps us here.

But bear in mind, his description of AA and BB is written as if they were separate individual entities, not as if they were part of all one thing. Thought-experiment: Tell yourself the same story thinking of AA and BB as interconnected with everything else, and see how your view of life changes.

As to Loosh, Monroe tried to reason it out:

“Loosh was an energy generated by all organic life; the purest form comes from human activity that triggers emotion. The highest emotion is love. But how can Loosh be love? It is produced when pain occurs, anger, hatred, etc.” He looked deeper, and concluded that interactive experience taught us to express various emotions until finally we grew into love. And, remembering the Guernsey cow, he thought: if she didn’t give her milk away, what would she do with it? And if she didn’t produce, why would she be taken care of? “He thought: neither the bull, nor water nor grass, the minerals that fed the grass, etc., produced Loosh, but without them, no Loosh. So, they could be considered indirect producers. They play a vital role.” [FJ-172-177]

This bears pondering in the context of BB being told, “Emotion is the points, the score” of the game of life in physical matter reality.

“Emotion is what makes the game seem so wild, but it is the game, the one game in which all other games are played. The others feed score to the big game in the form of emotional energy. The big game is to control and develop this emotional energy to its most effective condition, which is vaguely set by us humans as love, until we graduate. The more we score, the more fun it becomes. Most of us here–where you are now–we spend our energy going in to help other humans, however and whenever we can, to improve their score–and so have more fun.”

Ultimate Journey seems to have been motivated by one underlying belief:

“It may help to accept, as a belief to be converted into a Known, that we, as Human Mind-Consciousness, have both an individual and a species purpose, or purposes, for being in the Earth Life System which is not usually an understood part of our physical waking awareness. Conflict arises when the Human Mind demands an action and the Earth Life System self has trouble handling it. ” [UJ-75]

Y’ think?

 

[An early version of Muddy Tracks was going to be titled Living in Monroe’s New World.  That will never be written, now, so I might as well post it here.]

In the course of writing Muddy Tracks, I re-read Bob Monroe’s three books all at the same time, reading each one from front to back, but alternating as I felt so moved; a few chapters in one, a chapter in a second, a couple of chapters in the third. Perhaps I am too suspicious (though experience suggests otherwise!) but I thought I felt Their guiding touch as I felt moved to jump from iceberg to iceberg. In any case, at the end of the week I was astonished how much more I knew about Monroe, and about his thought and experience and speculations and conclusions, than I had a few days before.

I was chagrined, too, that I had had access to Bob Monroe for half a dozen years and hadn’t formulated the questions that puzzle me now, because I hadn’t read the books that thoroughly then. The only real conversation I ever had with him on his books came right after I read Ultimate Journey, when I called to congratulate him and thank him for the work he had done. In the course of that conversation I stated my understanding of “the way things are” and he agreed that he and I understood things the same way. I find that tremendously comforting now. It takes away some of the anxiety that must always accompany the task of explaining another person’s thought when that person is unable to defend himself.

In the foreword to the paperback edition of Journeys Out of the Body, Monroe said that once he let the whole self drive, with his present consciousness going along for the ride, he found himself in “an apparent educational program that I am absorbing bit by bit.” In Far Journeys, he said this presented a problem: though he learned a lot in what he called sleeper’s class, “I have been unable to relate the vast majority of such information in any way to life here on time-space earth.”

That statement ought to give us pause, considering the amount that he did bring back. And it ought to caution us against being too sure (a) that what he was able to find a way to say was not distorted by what he was not able to say, and (b) that we really understand even what he did say. But that’s the risk that always attaches to translations of translations of translations. So let’s go a little farther into Monroe’s world-view, beginning with a very brief summary of his books.

Journeys Out of the Body, originally published in 1971, comprises an introduction, 21 chapters, and an Epilogue. The introduction by Charles Tart puts OBEs — and Monroe as reporter — into perspective. There follow chapters on what happened and how he learned to deal with it, including his search among what he called the psychic underground. Then he discusses his experiences by theme, starting with descriptions of what he called Locale I (“The Here-Now”), Locale II (“Infinity, Eternity”), and Locale III (“Reverse Image”).

He discusses his first contacts with others after their deaths, and curious experiences that he couldn’t get a handle on. He describes some actions of his helpers, before he knew them, talks of nonhuman intelligences, precognitions, and various things defying classification. He discusses six properties of The Second Body that he has observed; talks of Mind and Supermind (as distinct from dreaming), and courageously discusses sexuality in the second state. He offers a two-part how-to, then an Analysis of Events (searching for patterns) and Statistical Classification. There follows a chapter called “Inconclusive,” which, had it come first, would have changed the tone of the book (and probably the reaction the book elicited) entirely. Finally comes a chapter containing four explosive premises. An interesting Epilogue is Monroe’s Personality profile as developed at the VA Hospital in Topeka, Kansas.

Far Journeys (my favorite of Monroe’s trilogy) was originally published in 1985 and comprises 16 chapters, with a Prologue and an End game. It begins with an analogy that asks: How do you help your friend learn to deal with the world beyond death? In Near Reaches it discusses strange things that happened, talks about the development of Hemi-Sync as a whole-brain tool, and moves on to discuss Gateway and the Explorer Team’s dealings with nonphysical intelligences.

After a segue on the development and use of NVC, we come to “Far Reaches,” fully three-quarters of the book. Here he describes his first experiences with his total Self driving; his meeting with INSPEC and his adventures in learning from INSPEC. He meets BB and they set out to rescue AA, Monroe gets the rote on Loosh, and later gets INSPEC’s view of the rote. He tries to give BB “One Easy Lesson” on what life is like, and has to leave him. He is given a vision of a probable future in which BB re-appears and his significance to Monroe becomes clear. Finally, there is a description of The Gathering, and a long, fascinating schematic outline generalizing what he has learned, a schematic which well repays careful reading.

Ultimate Journey, originally published in 1994, is Monroe’s analysis of human existence. He summarizes his search, talks of INSPEC and Home (KT95), describes the far past, and tells of nonphysical intelligences he met. He gives a summary of life on earth, of human minds, of the human brain and our animal ancestry, and provides a chapter on training for whole-brain activity.

Then comes the story of the first retrievals that came his way, and his awakening to who he was at many levels. He describes how he met inner guidance and how he learned how much more than his physical body he was. He describes H Band noise and M Field interaction, and who he really is, including his relationship to INSPEC. He describes a long trip all the way to “the emitter” that establishes and maintains physical-matter reality. (This was for me the emotional peak of the book, though tastes will differ.) He shows that we are one, and that we are re-uniting, and he talks about the park in Focus 27 and the Lifeline program. The final chapter is a tribute to his wife Nancy, crediting her for her many contributions to his work and wondering how he would live without her. There is a wealth of information in these books. There is in fact a world-view that may lead you to explorations that will change your life.

.2.

The central portion of Far Journeys is Monroe’s parable of BB. Or is it a parable? Maybe it’s straight reportage. Let’s take it as journalism rather than as creative writing, bearing in mind what he told us from the beginning: Translation from NVC to words aids intelligibility at the cost of reducing accuracy.

Chapter 10 of Far Journeys, “Newfound Friend,” tells how Monroe was accosted one day, out of body, by a being he identified as BB, who had mistaken Monroe’s Ident (his characteristic vibration) for that of his friend AA. Turns out AA and BB had been with a “tour group” that stopped by the Time-Space Illusion, and AA decided he wanted to experience TSI’s chaotic but powerful H Band energy.

In Ultimate Journey, Monroe called H Band noise

“the peak of uncontrolled thought that emanates from all living forms on Earth, particularly humans. If you consider it as truly all, even in the current time frame, you get a better idea of the magnitude of this disorganized, cacophonous mass of messy energy. The amplitude of each segment of the band is determined by the emotion involved in the thought. Yet our civilization does not even recognize that the H Band exists.

“My impression is that it contains not only current time thought patterns, but all that ever existed. They are continuous and simultaneous, and it may be that the older radiation is layered over so all one perceives is the current emission.

“To study it objectively, if one is so foolhardy as to want to do so, all one needs do is move to that state of disassociation just beyond the last vestiges of any direct Earth-related Human Mind activity in the nonphysical There.”

He says H Band noise sounds like a mob screaming in many tongues. H Band noise suffuses our reality, and is both the product and the proximate cause of much of our difficulty in relating to the greater reality around us. (It makes me think of C.S. Lewis’ book Out of the Silent Planet, which, though written from a very different mind-set, makes somewhat the same point.)

But AA wasn’t worried about the cacophony; he was entranced at the sheer volume of energy. He signed up to take a turn in the Time-Space Illusion. When he didn’t come back in a reasonable time, the Entry Director (“Ed”! There’s Monroe and his playful acronyms again) told BB that AA was clearly a Repeater, wanting to experience another life, and another.

For Monroe’s implicit cosmology in a nutshell, read Chapter 10 of Far Journeys, in which he describes the agreement AA signs to enter TSI. Herein is life’s purpose (TSI is a school for compressed learning), ground-rules (our pre-entry memories are temporarily blanked on entry, and as long as we live, we agree that time-space exists) and conditions and payoff (free will and consciousness are required and guaranteed).

Monroe says that as a first-timer, AA met four individuals entering TSI for reasons other than curiosity. I take it that this was Monroe’s way of outlining the motives that may lead us (perhaps I should say, may have led us) into the TSI:

• One was sent. As Monroe put it, “assigned HSTI-FES for retraining, don’t come back until you’re better.”
• One was coming in to conduct an experiment from within.
• One apparently had been a pet animal on earth, and was graduating to first-time human status.
• One was a reformer, coming in trying to “do something” about the TSI system as it exists.

After a while BB caught up with AA, and AA “ran him the rote” of what had happened in his first lifetime in the TSI. And then AA was gone again, back into the physical, anxious for more experience. Ed told BB that AA would likely get more and more involved in the human experience, dropping down a ring at a time until he reached the bottom. And then what would happen? “They stay at the bottom and don’t come back, or they begin to work their way back up. Most of ’em stay at the bottom.” [FJ-124-143]

So there was BB, waiting. “Before him was the blue-green planet, indistinct. Around the planet were rings of haze, gigantic thick rings, of indeterminate number. Demarcation between them was vague as wisps and tendrils reached from one to the other. Except the ring nearly touching the planet itself. It appeared isolated. With this exception, the others were flowing rapidly through portals in the Entry Station. No, there was one more, on the outer edge. It came nowhere near the Station. Very thin.” What’s more, the M Band noise was greatest closest to the planet, and thinned out with distance, and the bands themselves were composed of innumerable living forms. [FJ- 130-131]

These bands, these gigantic thick rings of haze, Monroe later named the Belief System territories, which of course he promptly shortened to BS territories. These rings, BB and Monroe learned, were composed of discarnate souls, clustered by vibration, with their vibration being determined by what they were. As I put it now, “souls of a feather, flock together.”

In Chapter 11, INSPEC gives Monroe an “alignment and balance” in the form of a scenario involving the supposed death of his dog Steamboat, to teach him how to deal constructively with the emotion involved. Then he is told: “Now you can move to your friend from the other system. He is lost. He will need your help.” He is told that it is important that he help BB. In fact, INSPEC says, they were responsible for the two meeting. “We interrupted your signal so you would perceive him.”

So Monroe found BB and followed him as he descended ring after ring, looking for his friend AA. First, through the outer ring, the first-timer and last-timer ring. Monroe says that last-timers who knowingly were about to make their final recycle, “gave off a radiation that was unforgettable–tremendous vital power that seemed totally under control. Within that strength were all of the values and ideal that humans hold important … something learned from being human. Most important, all under control, all a cooperating, melding part of the whole. They were completely open.”

He says last-timers choose inconspicuous roles on their final time, even though part of their vitality leaks through. He said he tried once to handle a percept of the experience that had made them, and it was too much to handle. “(I returned to the physical and was wistful for days thereafter.”)

Of the various belief-system levels, Monroe says: “You could spend thousands of years in the rings and never explore all aspects of them.” Some parts are great, some not so great. I was told that whatever man can think of is somewhere in these rings; thus more is being added constantly as man thinks more. Also I was told some humans do spend thousands of years here, rotating in and out of physical life. Could be exciting stuff if you planned and thought it out carefully. But most of them…”

Down they went, through later after layer. Near the bottom, the layer that he would later term Focus 23 contained

“countless forms hanging motionless. Actually, their movement was so slow as to be almost imperceptible. These were the ones who had just been released from their physical body at death and vaguely knew they had but didn’t have the rote to do much, if anything, about it…. The M Band noise was lower in this muck…. naturally, stupid. Nobody is doing much thinking at all. They’re in a state of shock from dying, having nothing to hang on to, so scared they can’t handle it, so they put their heads in the sand and try to hide…. Others are working on the effect, this end of the blockage. I’m supposed to be with those who try to help cut back the cause. [Italics added.] I don’t know which is more difficult.” [FJ- 152-153]

Note the italicized sentence, which summarizes what I would guess to be Bob Monroe’s life purpose. Cut back the cause of that blockage, and what human misery we may prevent!

Further down; last ring before the physical. Focus 22.

“I knew the next ring inward. It wasn’t nice. Beyond that was physical life. The two were tightly interwoven, the thick ring just slightly out of phase with physical matter. It was the interface between one reality system and another. Even from this perspective, it was difficult for a novice to distinguish instantly the differences in the two. But I could.

“That was the problem. The inhabitants of this ring couldn’t. They didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t realize they were no longer physical. “[FJ-153]

Beyond Focus 22 is the world we recognize. Monroe and BB found AA, but AA refused to come out of TSI. Monroe said to the reader that “what small percept I had of AA” indicated that “he would drop faster than the typical First Entry.” (Maddeningly, in light of who AA turns out to be, Monroe never followed up on this cryptic statement, and I never had the wit to ask him while he was still in the body. Why would AA drop faster than typical? Perhaps it is an unimportant question, but it’s just the kind of thing that nags at me.)

Monroe followed as BB followed AA, first in a life as a twentieth-century woman, then, farther in, to a scene in which AA, a warrior in ancient times, died in an ambush. Observing that AA had gone backward in time, Monroe said, “I had always assumed repeaters lived sequential lives relative to time. Either this is not the case or AA is the rare exception.” [FJ-151] Note, Monroe was sent into those scenarios by–something. This is particularly interesting to me, as I have repeatedly experienced similar direction during two Lifeline program and afterward, as we’ll discuss. In the event, BB again was unable to convince AA to leave, and Monroe had to leave for the physical, essentially without notice. [FJ-144-156]

The next time he saw BB, he tossed BB a rote describing the earth experience as a school for human compressed learning, and in return got a rote from BB, which BB said he had gotten on the “tour.” The two rotes didn’t match. And here we get the first part of Monroe’s understanding of the origins and purpose of the Earth garden and the life that lives in it.

BB’s rote, as Monroe understood it, said that Someone created the earth as a garden, to produce something Monroe called Loosh, a by-product of the death of living creatures. Someone created sea creatures, then vegetable life, then animal life, and finally humans. For the humans, “Someone pulled forth a Piece of Himself — no other source of such substance being known or available — to act as an intensive, ultimate trigger to mobility.” Humans, what Monroe called Someone’s Fourth Crop, produced Loosh in adequate quantity and quality: and then one day Someone noticed that somehow the Fourth Crop was also creating distilled Loosh, which was theoretically impossible.

Someone learned that distilled Loosh was a by-product of human emotion, so then Someone split humans into male and female, to assure loneliness as they sought to reunite, and developed tools for the harvesting of Loosh. “The most common [tools] have been named love, friendship, family, greed, hate, pain, guilt, disease, pride, ambition, ownership, possession, sacrifice–and on a larger scale, nations, provincialism, wars, famine, religion, machines, freedom, industry, trade, to list a few.” Monroe says that after he ran that rote, he was depressed for months. “I had long realized that the God of my childhood did not exist, at least not in the form and substance envisioned by my enculturation….” he said in Far Journeys. Now he came to think of humanity as a Guernsey cow being milked without her knowledge. [FJ-157-172]

“The loosh rote explained everything very neatly. Most important, it explained the purpose… [which] had long eluded me…. That left the INSPECS.. Were they the gardeners, the loosh collectors, or the overseers?” [FJ-173]

When he got up his nerve, he went out to meet the INSPEC, to find out. INSPEC said the rote was real, but the translation wasn’t accurate. “The difficulty of placing earth and human values properly into perspectives and energies that are not of time and space is a factor very familiar to you.”

Monroe tried to reason it out:

“Loosh was an energy generated by all organic life; the purest form comes from human activity that triggers emotion. The highest emotion is love. But how can loosh be love? It is produced when pain occurs, anger, hatred, etc. He looked deeper, and concluded that interactive experience taught us to express various emotions until finally we grew into love. And, remembering the Guernsey cow, he thought: if she didn’t give her milk away, what would she do with it? And if she didn’t produce, why would she be taken care of? He thought: neither the bull, nor water nor grass, the minerals that fed the grass, etc., produced loosh, but without them, no loosh. So, they could be considered indirect producers. They play a vital role.” [FJ-172-177]

This bears pondering.

INSPEC denied being Someone; denied being the keeper of the garden; denied being the gardeners. “We do not fit into any portion of the human compressed learning process.” But they did participate, they said, when needed to clear up a blockage in the flow. “Such participation ultimately serves a vital need for us.” He did not elaborate on that statement, but later knowledge makes clear INSPEC’s interest in eliminating blockages. (And, in passing, note that Monroe, who could be a very suspicious man, did not question their sincerity or accuracy.) [FJ-177]

INSPEC said Somewhere was not what we call Heaven. “It was created, as were all other systems.” Someone “is a creator who was created. You are a creator who was created.” Monroe mused, “If there had not been a Someone…” Humans would not exist.” [FJ-177]

By request, INSPEC took Monroe to the edge of Somewhere, which all but overwhelmed him by the power of its radiation. Then “slowly my rational and observing self began to emerge again, dominating the overwhelming emotional surge that had enveloped me.” (I would say this is a description in miniature of Bob Monroe: strong emotions fiercely held under intellectual control.) [FJ-178]

Monroe found BB again and told him that if he wanted to recognize AA when he saw him again, he’d have to get an idea about humans. BB asked for One Easy Lesson on being human. So, off they went, with Monroe as tour guide, making chapter fourteen another miniature tour of reality as Monroe saw it. [FJ-182-204]

Monroe showed BB situations demonstrating survival needs, reproduction, work — in short, what it’s like when you have forgotten that you are immortal and unlimited. Then he showed BB those who were no longer in the physical but couldn’t figure out that they weren’t; those who knew but were still focused on the physical; those who weren’t, but were locked in various belief systems. And he took BB to see Charlie, a friend of Monroe’s who knew he was dead and was having fun (in Focus 27) creating things that reminded him of things he had loved in life, like sunsets, ocean waves, etc.

Finally, he took him to “the very outer fringes of the outermost ring, where the haze was quite thin…. [Here] were the teachers, the helpers, the so-called guides of the inner rings–all on temporary but dedicated duty.” And here they found Monroe’s old “night-school” teacher, Bill. Monroe says, “It was no surprise that Bill was aware of BB and the whole sequence of events. I sometimes get the dim percept that my entire adventure, including this one, had been neatly planned from the beginning.” [FJ-201-202] This turns out to be among the understatements of all time.

Bill told BB: “Emotion is the points, the score” of the game that is life in physical matter reality.

“Emotion is what makes the game seem so wild, but it is the game, the one game in which all other games are played. The others feed score to the big game in the form of emotional energy. The big game is to control and develop this emotional energy to its most effective condition, which is vaguely set by us humans as love, until we graduate. The more we score, the more fun it becomes. Most of us here–where you are now–we spend our energy going in to help other humans, however and whenever we can, to improve their score–and so have more fun.”

And when BB claims not to have any sense of emotion or love energy, Bill clobbers him. “Of course you do,” he says, and asks him why he’s still waiting for AA. At this, BB closes, and Bill suggests that Monroe head back to the physical; he says BB will be fine. Monroe says he spent the weeks and months that followed thinking about the thin line that seemed to separate Bill from the INSPECS. [FJ-203-204]

Chapter 15 of Far Journeys, “Promised Plan,” delivers Monroe’s vision of a future we may come to, sometime beyond the year 3000. INSPEC flies him over the earth, travelling from Japan west around the world to the same Virginia hills where the Institute is now, though the land to the east was all long gone. (“We call it Virginia Bay for old times’ sake. Part of the ocean,” he is told shortly.) In all that long tour, no sign of human activity.

Standing on the old Virginia hills, in what looks to him like his 22-year-old body, he meets a man and a woman, and the man is — BB! After his talk with Bill, BB apparently went into the physical; by that far time in our future, he was far ahead of the version of Monroe living in our time, and was ready to emerge again from the TSI. (As to AA — in case you haven’t yet read the book, I say no more.)

As Monroe and the INSPEC had come in toward earth, Monroe had noticed that the gray and brown repeater rings were gone, and in their place was “a single flat ring…radiating and sparkling, not from the reflection of the sun, but from its own internal source.” The ring, BB now tells him, is the place where–consciously, now!–people between physical lives decide what they want to do next. BB describes some of the changes that have taken place: “Heavy cutback on the survival imprint”; “solid pre-briefing and training before entry”; no repeaters, just one-timers. [FJ-217-218]

Standing in our far future, Monroe asked, “In time-space, are there many growth patterns in consciousness similar to humans and earth?” He is told, so many you couldn’t count them, and new ones coming on line constantly. He was told that humans in that future are in contact with nonphysical energy systems, visiting them “as often as we can.” He asked, “To gather loosh?”

No, to sow it, to plant the seeds. That lets the, uh, ray have an ident to focus on.”

He says it implied so much knowledge that it made everything else seem like monkey chatter. [FJ-226]

Ultimate Journey went over some of the same ground from a different angle. It seems to me that Ultimate Journey was motivated by one underlying belief of Monroe’s that is stated concisely within one paragraph in Chapter Six.

“It may help to accept, as a belief to be converted into a Known, that we, as Human Mind-Consciousness, have both an individual and a species purpose, or purposes, for being in the Earth Life System which is not usually an understood part of our physical waking awareness. Conflict arises when the Human Mind demands an action and the Earth Life System self has trouble handling it. ” [UJ-75]

Monroe describes The Earth Life System as “an exquisitely self-adjusting, autotuning, self-regenerating organization of energy…. The entire system is one of polarities, yet each part is interconnected.” It is, he said, “a food chain predator system, although it is rarely accepted as such. It may appear chaotic and complex, but it is organized and operates under a few simple rules:

“Grow and exist as long as you can.

“Get what you need to exist.

“Maintain your species by reproducing.

“There are no limitations or conditions in applying these rules…. Every participant is a predator and the process cannot be altered or changed as long as the Earth Life System exists. Survival is difficult if not impossible without predatory action. “[UJ-63-64]

He points out that “The Earth Life System, for all its shortcomings, is an exquisite teaching machine.” (p.83)

Since we are human, but are something else before (and after) we are human, sometimes our physical and non-physical natures clash. INSPEC told Monroe that when his reference point changed from being human, he would cease to remain human, though he would retain his human memory and experiences.

“You have learned much. This experience is of great value as a nonhuman. It is one of the basic purposes for your sojourn.. You will draw upon it in many ways nonhuman, but your attention will be in another direction. The graduate from the human experience is very respected elsewhere.”

INSPEC added, “You will be as you were before, but the human experience will be added.” [UJ-23-24]

Monroe said that his goal had been service to humankind, until INSPEC pointed out that there are other goals. Back in the physical, Monroe thought about it. First he conceived a yearning to go Home to the place he came from. But after INSPEC accompanied him Home, Monroe learned that there’s a reason why you can’t go home again. He found a new goal: “to grow and evolve somehow into the awe-inspiring yet warm being that I happily called my INSPEC.” [UJ-31]

This was ironic, for, as he would learn, he already was a part of his INSPEC, as we saw in Monroe’s and Moen’s accounts that I cited earlier, describing what I called the larger being.

 

This past week, I got involved in one of those projects that keeps your surface mind occupied but gives you time to remember, and daydream, and ponder. Really, it worked like a time machine. I had all these clippings that had sat in my file cabinet, literally for decades. Editorials, columns, book reviews, that I wrote for the Virginian-Pilot between 1986 and 1990. A few news stories, plus a few guest columns thereafter. For some reason, I got the idea to put them into 3-ring binders. (Why? I don’t know, but I’m used to doing things without knowing why. I generally find out eventually.)

This process involved sorting them by date, dating them and trimming the margins where necessary, and fitting them into sheet protectors after inserting blank pages to serve as backing. A lot of fairly mindless work, and inextricably part of it, a lot of glancing back at all the stuff I had written over those years, which of course gave me glimpses of a version of myself nearly 40 years younger than today.

Then, having accomplished that, I decided to do the same thing to my folder of columns I had written for the shopper paper I was co-owner of, called Down Jersey, back in 1976-1979. The same mindless work, the same glimpses of a younger version of me. And as I performed these mechanical tasks, I realized a couple of things that I had surely always known, but that had never before come front and center. One is internal, the other external.

Disconnect

The internal factor. Those clippings from 40 and almost 50 years ago showed me how very different my life was then. But how to make it clear?

It isn’t merely a matter of what I said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do. It’s deeper than that. It would be closer to say that my life was divided, rather than whole. In a sense, I was two different people. My internal and external concerns were almost entirely disconnected.

I see it in the clippings. For Down Jersey, I wrote a column called “An Eye on Politics,” later renamed “An Eye on Events.” So much attention to politics! Politics as a game, politics as the conflict of individual ambitions, politics as the forming of policies. Sometimes I wrote of interpersonal rivalries, drawing on not only press reports, but also conversations with the players and observers. As a former newsman, former candidate, former congressional assistant, I had a fairly unique vantage point, and as a columnist even for a small and obscure weekly, I had good access, as well.

Naturally, everything I wrote was suffused with whatever I knew of the relevant history, whether I was discussing the Panama Canal treaty, or nuclear power, or the energy crisis.  All well and good, and although I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, probably, as Will Rogers said about experts, my guess was likely to be as good as anybody else’s. plus, I did know some things, and I was a good writer. (For instance, I also wrote a column I called “Friends I’ve Never Met,” about favorite authors and their books.)

But as I glanced at these columns, I was surprised to remember how much thought I gave to such things in those days. It isn’t like I was writing these things out of duty, or as a front. I was interested; I thought it was important.

Another part of me did not care about such things. That part responded to Thoreau, and Jung, and Wilson, and Cayce. That part remembered the larger world that mescaline had showed me. It remembered the things I knew, not knowing how I knew. It felt that big changes were coming, and needed to come. It yearned to be expressed, and nourished – and I had no idea how to do it.

The years between 1970 and 1987 took a long, long time to pass.

Rescues

The external factor. I realized that three times in my life up to 1987 I had so snarled any possible career path by decisions that were internally motivated but were inexplicable to others, that it would have taken a miracle to salvage things. and the miracle arrived.

First, I had graduated from college without ever having given a moment’s thought to how I would turn a college degree into a career.

Second, I had thrown away the career as professional librarian that I could have had, with no idea what to do after the end of the Congressional primary that I had looked forward to for several years.

Third, I was stuck in the computer-programming wilderness, with no idea how to get out, but with the rug being pulled from under my feet (because I did not know how to do the job for the latest employer I had jumped to).

In each case, I was rescued, more or less in the nick of time.

1. 1969. Vineland Times-Journal editor and publisher Ben Leuchter hired me as a news reporter on the strength of a piece I sent him about the Washington, D.C. riots of April, 1968. This job served as transition from college to life-after-college. It was a long way form the glass factory.
2. 1974. Bill Hughes hired me to help with his Fall campaign for Congress, and, after he won, hired me as one of his representatives in the congressional district. A good job that I could do well; a steady though not excessive salary with which I could pay a mortgage and support a wife and child; a stable platform that could move me toward a political career, if I decided I wanted one.
3. 1986. Bill Wood hired me as an Associate Editor (editorial writer) for the Norfolk, Va. Virginian-Pilot on the strength of editorial and columns I had written for Down Jersey a few years earlier. The Pilot provided me the platform from which to discuss the Higher Self Seminar, and thus be introduced to the New Age community of the Hampton Roads area.

(There would be other rescues, most notably by Bob Friedman in 1989 and Ed Carter in 1990, but this takes us beyond the Shirley MacLaine seminar.)

Each of these men had his own reasons for the rescue, but I feel that in each case, one could see  the universe saying, “Okay, good listening. Keep the faith; we won’t lead you out into the desert and abandon you.”

It was good to know, first-hand, that this could be relied on. It was not the least of the changes that brought me from what I was to what I am.

 

(Non)-ordinary life

From May, 1970 (the mescaline experience that woke me up to new possibilities), to January, 1987 (the Shirley MacLaine workshop that did the same thing in a very different way) was almost 17 years. Ordinary years? Ordinary life? Yes and no. The externals were much the same as anybody else’s. The internals were another thing.

To list even the highlights of what went on in those years would give an illusory sense of normality. Some highlights of those years,

• 1970-71. My wife and I spent six weeks in Europe, then off to grad school in Iowa City.
• 1971-73. With my new M.A. (which I never used) in hand, we were off to Florida where I would try to write. I wound up becoming a librarian, surely a job made for me, one would think Indeed, my bosses offered to pay my way through graduate school if I would get a master’s in library science., but I had other plans.
• Finally it was time to run for Congress. A primary race, an entry into the world of politics, I didn’t win the primary, but did well enough to attract favorable attention. That fall I wound up working for Bill Hughes, the primary winner who went on to win the election.
• 1975-77. Two years working as his district office manager in my home town. On the night of his re-election, I resigned.
• 1976-80. I joined with two others to found a weekly free-distribution shopper newspaper, providing me opportunity to write columns, but gradually losing money at an impressive rate.
• 1980-83. When the newspaper went south, needing another way to make a living, I passed a statewide test and became a computer programmer (on the job training).
• 1983-86. Moved to Virginia, still as a computer programmer, hoping to be close enough to the A.R.E. (Edgar Cayce’s group) to find something useful to do. A long three years.
• 1986-1989. I became an associate editor for the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, for a while functioning quite happily. It was in the first flush of enthusiasm for this return to writing that I attended the Higher Self Seminar.

Of course, braided into all that, personal life as husband and father and homeowner, with all that those roles entail. Throughout it all, I was reading, always, and making repeated attempts to write fiction, that came to nothing.

Those years were suffused with useless worry, always wondering, where was my work? When was I going to find my life? I don’t know that my life was any harder than anybody else’s, but it wasn’t easy. The things that made it hardest were, of course, within myself. But it took a long time to learn that.

What I know now is that my life up to then had been shaped by solitude and longing.

Solitude. I was more of a loner than I realized. I had a hard time making and keeping friends, and rarely had more than a couple at a given time. This, I know. Why this was, I didn’t know. It took until recently for me to realize that mostly, I didn’t let people in. From an early age I had gotten accustomed to the idea that what I thought, said, believed, did, was usually wrong and probably laughable. Naturally, the stranger my ideas got, the less inclined I was to share them. And this, in turn, meant that I was “living in the closet.” I didn’t quite realize it, because I was seeing it from a different point of view, but I was putting forth an “acceptable” façade that was quite different from who I really was. As I said in Muddy Tracks, once I decided to let people see who I was, what I believed, and do so without shame or apologies, it was very much as I imagine it is for gay people who come out of the closet. What a sense of relief! And what a greater level of honesty one can reach.

However, being used to going one’s own way can be a great strength. That, I had. As the Rimpoche said, “If we could not be bought by praise nor defeated by criticism, we would have incredible strength, we would be extraordinarily free.” Well, unfortunately I could be bought by praise, but I was fairly good at ignoring criticism. Still, a life alone among people is a lonely life, probably more so than if one were alone on a desert island.

Longing. Always there was a sense of time being lost. The years passed, and things changed, and I changed, and still I felt, so strongly, that I wasn’t doing my real work, and didn’t even know how to find it. This gnawing sense of being out of place nagged at me year in and year out, and I couldn’t find anything to do about it. As always, I threw myself into whatever it is I was doing, but as always I had to fight the part of me that was saying, “This is all so much lost time and motion.”

This longing was invisible to others (I think) and I never thought to try to explain it, But it is the hidden thread that explains so many things in my life that must otherwise be inexplicable.

• I had a good job, right out of college, as a news reporter – and quit before a year was up, saying I was going to write a novel.
• I got an M.A. from a good school – and did nothing at all with it.
• I bounced down to Florida for two years, “to write a novel” – and produced nothing that could be seen.
• I can for Congress on a shoestring, somehow neglected to quit mid-stream, parlayed the effort into a good job representing our new congressman locally – and quit after two years to start a newspaper.
• I got a steady job as computer programmer in New Jersey – and promptly decided to move to Virginia.

The hidden key to these eccentric decisions? I was looking for something, and didn’t know what it was, or where to find it, or how to find any road that might conceivably lead anywhere toward it. I couldn’t reason my way to it, and I never thought to seek people’s advice.

I know my father was puzzled, and I am sure he despaired at my lack of common sense. But how could I have explained to him what I myself didn’t understand? In 1985, when he died at age 70, I knew immediately that my life was about to change in a major way. (Astrologically, progressed Saturn was conjunct my natal Sun). My life was going to change. But how would it change? I had no clue. I was flying blind.

 

I have come to realize, nobody can possibly tell the true story of his life. How do you put a quart of material into a pint of words? It can’t be done. Life comes at us all at once, and all the time. When we come to try to describe it, we have to look at this or that; first this then that. We try to sketch logical sequences – necessarily – but this is so inadequate. Life is so much more than logic, so much less understandable than sequence. Describing what happened to you, and why, is like playing chess with half the pieces invisible.

Thus, in the past few posts I sketched four major events that followed immediately after college: a job as news reporter, Dave Schlachter’s death and its aftermath, my discovery of Colin Wilson, and an experience with mescaline that opened my eyes to the world. But how much it leaves unsaid!

• Love, marriage, and a honeymoon in New England
• Early married life in Vineland
• Dabbling in local politics in the spring of 1970
• Six weeks in Europe, my first time overseas
• A year in Iowa City (and an M.A. with thesis in nine months)

Each of these themes could easily support a post or three, because each of them had something to do with my development. But do they bear directly on how my life went from whatever it was to whatever it is? Not really. I mention them here only to remind myself, and you, that most of our lives go unexpressed. Not everything we talk about was important. Not everything that was important can be talked about. What’s worse, we don’t always recognize the fact. I certainly didn’t.

For instance, three of the most important people in my life: Henry Thoreau, Carl Jung, Colin Wilson. In 1970, Thoreau had been dead 108 years, and  Jung, 9 years. Colin was very much alive, but it would be another 25 years before we met. At the time, the three were just names to me; yet in many ways they were closer than the people around me.

• Henry Thoreau. It was my wife’s idea to visit Concord, Mass., and Walden Pond. At the time I knew Thoreau’s name, and nothing more. A year later, in graduate school, my thesis supervisor, after hearing my over-ambitious idea about metaphysical thought in American life, suggested first that I look at the recently published journals of Bronson Alcott, then said, almost as an afterthought, that I might look at Thoreau as a  sort of  community of one. Alcott’s journal was huge, and I scarcely looked at it. But I picked up Walden and was immediately entranced. This man and I were on the same wave-length.

I found his journals and examined his thoughts from 1837 to 1847 – that is, from age 20 to age 30 – and wrote my thesis on his early social views in light of his personal religion. (I may post that thesis here at some point.) After I got my M.A. and decided against continuing for a Ph.D.,(what would I do with it?), I thought I would write more about him. (My wife gave me as a splendid birthday gift the two-volume Dover edition of Thoreau’s journals, which remain a prized possession.) An unexpressed theme in my life from 1970 was a continuing process of discovery, book after book, by him and about him, that would lead to Emerson and others. But where would this thread show in the braiding? It wouldn’t, yet it was as real and as important to me as anything external that happened.

• Carl Jung. While my wife and I were traveling in Europe, I bought Modern Man in Search of a Soul, and again, the man spoke to me. I didn’t know anything about psychology. I knew the names: Freud, Jung, Adler, and nothing else. Yet as soon as I began reading Jung, I somehow knew, here was a teacher. As with Thoreau, Jung’s books continued opening doors through the years. Just as, in my mescaline experience, I somehow intuitively knew what I was doing, so I knew what Jung meant, and sensed things (rightly or wrongly) that he didn’t quite say.

Had anyone told me that 36 years later I would experience direct mind-to-mind contact with this great man, I would have scoffed. And when it did happen, it was a little overwhelming. But by then I had spent years, off and on, following in his mental footsteps, book by book. Again, an invisible but crucial part of my day to day existence, even when months or years went by between readings, because of course we become what we take into our minds.

• Colin Wilson. And always there was Colin, expressing in so many genres. I came upon him first in a novel, but then went to The Outsider, which I suppose might be called literary criticism, though it is much more than that. Then, over the years, he poured his abundant intellectual energy into so many different molds: detective stories, science fiction, biography, philosophy, and – mostly – what we might call Examination of Life. If you’ve never read him you won’t know what I mean. If you have, you will recognize why it is impossible to describe the effect his work produces. He is continually saying, “Look at this and this and this. Now, look at them in light of this particular phenomenon,” and you’re off to the races. He makes you think. More, he gives you thing to think about.

Henry Thoreau writes about who we are, how we are to live, what are our possibilities.

So does Carl Jung.

So does Colin Wilson.

Now, imagine a life that is being continually enriched and disturbed by these three invisible wizards, and you’ll get a faint sense of another of the factors that was always nudging me onward. But I doubt if much of it showed. I was always happy enough to talk to anybody who might be interested, but they were few enough. One tires of baring one’s soul and being the recipient of a kindly (almost contemptuous, certainly tolerant) amusement.  One is easily cured of the habit of easy confidences.

But the fire burned within. I didn’t know where, I didn’t know how, I didn’t know what, but I did know that the life I led was unsatisfactory, and its unsatisfactory nature had little to do with social position or prestige or money or any of the things people seemed to value so highly. All I knew was that, whatever I had seen to date was not enough. My reading, my briefly drug-enhanced experience, my inner drive, all told me there was more somewhere, if only I could find it.