human potential

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.

 

Bob, signing for someone

I met Bob Monroe because Bob Friedman and I wanted to get him to agree to let Hampton Roads try to get Hemi-Sync tapes into the Waldenbooks chain, back when that was the largest bookstore chain in the country. We drove for four-hours up from Norfolk, and I had a wonderful time. We had lunch in the staff dining room — Bob Monroe, his stepdaughter Scooter and her husband Joe McMoneagle, his book agent Eleanor Friede, and Bob and me – and Bob Monroe spent the entire lunch (as I remember it, anyway) telling me what he had been doing with his life and what he was trying to accomplish. (I realized later, the others all knew the story.)

I was ecstatic. This was exactly what I had been looking for, ever since my mescaline experience of 19 years before, a way to pursue higher consciousness that did not involved drugs. How I wished I could do a Gateway Voyage, his introductory course. But Bob and I weren’t paying ourselves very much in those days, and the price seemed prohibitive. I bought a couple of tapes, and hoped that practicing with them would lead me somewhere.

Of course, in terms of our specific hopes, the trip was not only inconclusive (Bob wouldn’t say yes, he wouldn’t say no), but was prophetic of all our future commercial relations. Bob wouldn’t say yes, wouldn’t say no. In time, we learned that his staff called his office “the black hole,” because things entered but never came out again. And this continued, off and on, for years.

But – in a larger sense – so what? Look what he accomplished! More to the point, much more to the point, look what he made possible for the rest of us to accomplish!

I always tell people, Bob Monroe gave us three gifts. In increasing order of importance,

• The Hemi-Sync technology and the residential programs he built around it, to provide first-hand experience rather than mere words and longing;
• A value-neutral language for us to use to describe those experiences, so that we could learn to discuss and analyze our experiences in productive ways;
• Most important, he gave us a community. What would we have given, when younger, for a community of like-minded individuals, speaking a common language, discussing similar experiences!

Perhaps as important as anything else, Bob consistently rejected the guru role, saying “I don’t want the responsibility.” He functioned, instead, as a finger pointing to the moon.  And this was exactly what I needed, when I needed it. If TMI had said that before you could do a course you had to believe certain things (no matter what those things might be) I never would have crossed the threshold. Instead they say, “Consider that you might be mor than your physical body” (not a stretch for me in any case) and they let us go exploring. As I say, perfect for me.

It seems to me that each of us has tasks we want to accomplish, some internal and some external. The greatest tasks take the longest to show their full effects, and are therefore the most easily underrated or overlooked. It takes a while for people to see what they had in their midst.

Bob Monroe set himself a great task, which ultimately amounts to the transformation of the world. He did the best he could, and his best was pretty good. The day will come when it will be more obvious, how good his best was, how much he facilitated.

 

We didn’t have him for long. I met him in 1989, and he was gone half a dozen years later. But the Institute remained. The tape exercises and program remained. The community remained. I can imagine Bob saying to himself that he had earned his leave. His body was beat up and he was tired: Why not move on?

On Friday morning, March 17, 1995, half a year after his 79th birthday, he died a quiet death in a Charlottesville hospital, with his children at his side. As it happened, I was in New York City that day to meet Colin Wilson, hoping to persuade him to come see the Monroe Institute and meet Bob. But, too late. Bob was gone.

The next morning, I bought the Saturday New York Times, thinking to read Bob’s obituary — which wasn’t there. I thought, like Emerson speaking of Thoreau, “The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.” I thought then, and think now, that 100 years from now, nearly every educated person on Earth will know his name.

A week later, when I returned from the memorial service TMI held, I wrote up some impressions and posted them to the Voyagers Mailing List, an Internet group we had started in late 1994. A few excerpts:

&&&

… The unusual began immediately: people directing parking on the lawn. Folding chairs, set up outside the sliding doors of David Francis Hall, faced westward toward that lovely view of the far mountains. Facing the chairs was a microphone and a little platform, and two enormous sound speakers. At a table off to the side were Mark Certo and two others, to control the special effects. The day was bright, sunny, with a wind that gusted stiff enough to make us warm on the south side, cold on the north side.

We milled around for a little bit, hugging old friends. Bob McCulloch was the first person I met, Bob who had been one of my trainers in both Gateway and Guidelines. And there was Karen Malik, a trainer with Bob McCulloch from Guidelines. She and I had last seen each other just three weeks before, which was also the last time either of us saw Bob. And so many others were there: Dave Wallis and Skip Atwater, Helen Warring and well, you know, the staff, and what I call the extended family, like Eleanor Friede and other nearby residents and associates. Then we all sat down, listening to the Metamusic from the speakers, and waited for the family to file in.

In my experience, religious ceremonies often have at least patches of emotional deadness; places that don’t resonate, words that are only empty words. This ceremony, conducted by the Rev. Shay St. John, had none of this deadness. But then, how could it? The first thing to come over the speakers was Bob’s voice, repeating the affirmation he wrote long ago. You may have heard the words once or twice: “I am more than my physical body….”

Rev. St. John spoke of Bob and then invited each of the family to speak. Bob’s brother Emmet; his stepdaughters Penny and Scooter; Scooter’s husband, Joe McMoneagle; his stepson A.J.; his daughter Laurie. I am sorry I cannot give even a précis of what was said. I used to be a journalist, but this day I was not in reporter mode; the words came washing in, affecting me to the core, then washed out, leaving little or nothing in short-term memory. I am left not with the specifics but with visual memories, and with the memory of the emotional impact.

… Then the family gathered in a circle, holding hands, holding the two white helium-filled balloons [representing Bob and his deceased wife Nancy] hat had been whipping around in the wind the entire time. Rev. St. John told us what would happen and invited us to stand up at the proper moment. Over the speakers came Bob’s voice, reading the climactic point of the “Going Home” tapes, advising the dying person that he or she was going to find that he or she was everything he or she had ever learned, ever been. And at a certain point the family released the balloons, and that terrific wind whipped them off to the south. As we had been invited to do, we all stood and watched the balloons fly off, two white points against that deep blue sky, climbing and also covering the ground at an incredible rate, and then they were out of our visual range, and Bob’s voice was giving his final advice, telling the departing soul, “Remember. Remember.”

&&&

“Remember,” he said. As though we who are his heirs could ever forget.

 

Bobs life is a good example of our lives as an endless chain of influence. He affected uncounted and uncountable others, certainly mine.  If I had never met Bob, my life would have been unimaginably different. But it isn’t easy to describe our various relationships. Over the course of more than 30 years, he and I were friends, then allies and antagonists as business partners at Hampton Roads, then once again friends, and then also publisher and author and collaborators in another important endeavor.

As I look back on my life, I see that I didn’t stay conscious enough. I rarely turned the inner spotlight on me, though in another sense that is all I ever concerned myself with. It was a self-centeredness that was not egotistical, a self-awareness that was not introspective. I was there, doing (or usually reacting), but I wasn’t there, thinking about what I was doing or reacting to, or why. And so I couldn’t learn from experience, because I wasn’t altering my reactions from having thought about past reactions.

I – and everybody else who ever dealt with Bob – saw clearly that he did not communicate, a thoughtless quality that often made life difficult for those around him. Only in the past year or two have I realized I shared this characteristic. I had always assumed that because I am so voluble, if anything, I over-communicate. But recently I have realized that most of my inner life has gone unexpressed, perhaps leaving me as big a mystery to others as was Bob.

I should have known this all along: Why else would this quality in him have aggravated me so severely, if it was not a trait I shared unconsciously?

It wasn’t the only point of contention between us while we were Hampton Roads. Bob was extremely chary about giving credit  I, being extremely sensitive to this, often burned with a sense of injustice, which led me to erupt unpredictably. The result? Two partners, each feeling somewhat unappreciated, each finding the other hard to deal with. I thought, why can’t he give me credit? He no doubt thought, why is he so touchy, so volatile?

The tragedy is that neither of these two highly intuitive, idealistic, intelligent men was able to bring  the underlying dynamic into the open, so that they might get control of it. (As I came to say in other contests, feelings acknowledged can be managed. Feelings unacknowledged can’t. Or, as Jung put it, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.”) I doubt that anybody else really understood the good and the bad that went on between us.

It’s amazing that we did as well as we did, really. Bob and I would be extremely close, and bitterly incompatible, and instinctively aligned, and living in different worlds, depending on the time of day and the phases of the moon, so to speak. When we worked together, we pulled off some amazing things, and when we worked against each other we wound up losing what we had built from nothing. And then, being forced by circumstances to work together again, we rediscovered what we had valued in each other, so that our final dozen years were again productive and mutually satisfactory.

Not least, for me, is the fact that Bob came to see the importance of the information put forth by the guys upstairs. For more than a dozen years, I transcribed and posted new sessions – with the guys, then  with Rita, with Nathaniel – always with this strong sense of Bob as supportive background presence. Often, as I sat transcribing the latest session, I would wonder what Bob would make of it. It was he, and not I, who thought of turning Rita’s daily material into a book, the first of what became four books.

One after another, Bob published my books, even though they made him little money. And always there were emails, or sometimes luncheon conversations, exploring what this or that meant , wondering how it squared with something else he  had read. Sometimes, he would forward questions for me to ask . It became a true partnership centered on the metaphysical curiosity that drove us both, a mutually supportive relationship in the way we had sometimes (but not always) functioned while at Hampton Roads.

The guys once compared me to Bob and Colin , and I found it very enlightening. Edited excerpts (my responses in italic):

&&&

Both Bob and Colin were thinkers in a way that you are not. They reflected. They pondered. They learned from experience considered. This doesn’t mean that what they learned necessarily was right; we are concerned here with the nature of their process. Someone considering something new in the light of past conclusions may end up merely adjusting new perception to not contradict older conclusions, or they may learn something.

So if Bob and Colin are intending to live their lives from a stable platform that will allow them clear observation (and of course this is not all they were doing, but it is one way of looking at their lives), you cannot expect them to want to jettison that stable platform just when things get interesting. Instead, by not moving, they get the effect they wanted: front-row seats. And from those front-row seats, they were able to describe the view to others (although this is only one aspect of what they were doing).

You by contrast are a moveable platform – or, not so much a platform as a set of water wings. What you know is an idea of yourself shaped by your reaction to your surroundings. You are aware of “external” changes, you think of yourself as changing and unchanging, and what you chiefly have to report is your own process, your own journeying. Only, can it be called journeying when it is more like being rafted along?

Of the three of you, Bob was perhaps the most self-aware, in that he did not live in a continual whirl of mental and physical activity like Colin, and did not lose his inner compass by throwing himself into new circumstances (inner or outer) like you.

&&&

I repeat what I said at his memorial service: Bob was a great man.

 

Bob and Colin in Cornwall, 2000

When Bob died in January, 2019, Publishers Weekly, the industry’s trade journal, described him as “founder of Rainbow Ridge Books and longtime publisher of works  of spirituality and metaphysics.” True enough, but hardly a fair assessment. I wrote about him here, on January 8, 2019, in a post I titled “Thinking about Bob”:

We live in a culture that fears death and seems to think that death is tragedy. When you really think about it, that’s a weird idea, which as much as says that life is a failure in that it ends.

Death is an ending, yes, but it is not a tragedy, just a natural culmination. However, still it is an ending, and there’s no talking it away.

&&&

I’m thinking these thoughts because my friend, publisher, and longtime partner in Hampton Roads, Bob Friedman, died on Monday the seventh, just a few weeks shy of his 77th birthday. He died of a relatively short illness which was apparently painless, not a bad way to go.

He leaves behind not only his beloved companion Beth Hines, and his four children, but friends too many to count, and a rich legacy of books.

Bob founded or co-founded no fewer than three publishing companies (The Donning Company in 1974, Hampton Roads Publishing Company in 1989, and Rainbow Ridge Books in 2009) and, in a career spanning more than 40 years, published more than 1,000 books.

Mary Summer Rain, Mary Elizabeth Marlow, Winter Robinson, Neale Donald Walsch, John Nelson, and so many others: Bob gave them their first chance. Without him, would they ever have found a sympathetic publisher? Without their books, would thousands of people have received the encouragement and inspiration they needed? And what of the people that these people may inspire and encourage in turn?

Certainly he changed my life! Changed, enriched, complicated, provoked, encouraged, facilitated…. Anything I accomplished as editor or author, I accomplished because Bob and I teamed up to start a publishing house. Anybody I encouraged came out of that base, which means it is a secondary effect of Bob’s life. You see the point, there’s no end to it.

For that matter, it was Bob’s idea that he and I do Gateway together in December, 1992, and put the cost on the company. The consequences that flowed from that decision make up an entirely different but equally important chain of influences.

There is no way to estimate this one man’s influence, because for one thing we will never see the end of it. Seems to me there’s an encouraging lesson there for all of us.

The next month, I posted this, saying in part:

“For someone of his reach and influence, Bob was surprisingly modest about his potential abilities. I used to say to him, “Bob, you could contact anyone in the New Age movement with two phone calls,” which was no exaggeration but merely a statement of fact, but sometimes he seemed to doubt it. Yet look at his track record: Our very first book at Hampton Roads — the book that returned our capital and gave us enough money to get us going — was Linda Goodman’s 1,100-page novel in blank verse Gooberz. Our second, Tapping into the Force.

“Whose personal interaction got those authors, if not Bob’s? Certainly not mine!

“I can’t help wondering, for the actor whose last role was Bob Friedman, what’s next. Hard act to follow.”

In April, I posted  an impression from the memorial service held at the auditorium of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in Virginia Beach. Excerpts from that post:

“If all his friends who live far away could have been there, the place would have been too small. If all his friends living and dead had been able to attend, we would have needed a much larger auditorium. Bob was a man who made many friends, and kept them.

“If, in addition, we had had all the people whose lives he vitally affected, via the authors he published, a large football stadium would have been too small. (Hyperbole? Well, consider the effect on society of just three authors out of the hundreds he put into print: Mary Summer Rain, Neale Donald Walsch, and Lynn Grabhorn.) His was a momentous life.”

I pointed out that Bob and I were “friends and adversaries and friends again over a period of 32 years. For 20 years we built Hampton Roads Publishing Co. Inc. together, and after that … he published eight of my books. It was a long many-faceted relationship, much of it invisible to others, like our periodic lunches over the years…. Our talk might range into history or literature or metaphysics, because Bob was an educated man, not a narrow-focus specialist. And of course there was always the world of publishing to discuss, or deplore.”…

“After an invocation and a buffet meal, we all sat and heard a succession of 20 people talk about various aspects of Bob’s life as they had experienced it. Twenty speakers: It sounds deadly, but in fact it was fascinating, as it always is when people speak from the heart.

“Again and again and again, we heard of Bob’s receptivity, and his kindness, and how his helpfulness to others changed their life. Again and again and again we heard first-hand testimony to – well, there’s no better word for it – his goodness.

“Goodness is undervalued in this world, as you can see by looking around you, but it is certainly properly valued when encountered. And that was Bob. I knew him perhaps as well as anyone beyond his family members, and I can say that in 32 years I never saw him do a malicious thing, never even heard him express a malicious thought. This isn’t just conventional “of the dead say nothing but good” rhetoric. It’s true. Not once. Bob as a business partner could be aggravating beyond all precedent (and I’m sure he would say the same of me) but I never worried about him acting out of malice. He just didn’t.”

I was the final speaker, so I mostly confined myself to a few points that complemented what others had said. Among the things I mentioned:

• Bob’s consistent lack of communication. I told how one day Ginna Colburn, our other partner, said, “Bob, you’ve got to communicate!” and he had grumbled, in response, “People have been telling me that my whole life,” and we had said, “Well?” It got a laugh, because everybody recognized that trait in him.
• Bob’s metaphysics was never dependent upon the state of his bank account. I told of a time in our early days when I went into his office and said I was tired of us just scraping by. He said it was strange, because he always was programing for us to have enough. (The answer, we suddenly realized, was to program for us to have more than enough. and shortly thereafter came Conversations with God.) The point is, Bob didn’t just give lip service to our beliefs, he relied upon their being real. Not everybody does!
• I mentioned his influence on the world at large, via the endless chain of consequences that follow as one person is inspired by a book and in turn goes on to inspire others.
• Finally, I said that even we who knew him well could not really see this full stature yet. It takes time. “But, he was a great man.”

I ended that post saying it was over-long . “Bob was a great man, and transformed many lives, my own not least, and will be fondly remembered.” But I find that in fact there’s more to be said. I’ll try that tomorrow.

 

[I cannot find one single photo of Suni, though I clearly remember at least one that showed her looking quizzically through her half glasses. How I wish I could find it! Otherwise, I have only memories from the few years between the time we met and the time she died. But, like so many things, it appears to have disappeared down the river of time.]

The notoriety I achieved by writing favorably, for a mainstream newspaper, about the Shirley MacLaine workshop, resulted in two acquaintanceships that developed into extremely important friendships. One was Bob Friedman, who will be the topic of my next post. The other, whom I met a few months earlier than Bob, was Suni Dunbar.

In the aftermath of my newspaper article, I was invited to join a group that had formed, that intended to meet regularly. (Weekly? Monthly? Can’t recall.) This would break my isolation, so I accepted gladly. I am pretty sure I was the only man in a group of – 15? 20? – women, most of them a few years older than I was. Of everyone there, the only one whose energy drew me was Suni, and as I found out later, I was the only one who interested her, though I don’t remember if we even said anything to each other. The group met only once or twice more, but by then I had become friends with Suni and her husband Jack, and I began to go over to their office in Virginia Beach occasionally for lunch (and mostly for talk).

Thinking about it today, I see similarities between Suni and Rita Warren, who at this time was still more than a decade in my future. They were more or less the same age, each old enough to be my mother, and in important ways, each performed just that function, in the process giving me something I sorely needed.

I know my mother had loved me, as she loved all her children. But loving someone  doesn’t guarantee that you can give them what they need. My mother, a very traditional Catholic, an equally traditional product of middle-class small town America, had little understanding of what I was looking for, nor of the places I went looking for it, not that I made an effort to explain myself.

(One of my major regrets, in all this looking backward, is that it took so many decades for me to realize that I was so bad at communicating my inner life. But the necessity never occurred to me, stupid as that sounds.)

But unlike mom, Suni – and, later, Rita – did have a sense of what I was looking for. They did sense how this complicated my life; they did empathize, and draw me out, with the result that I began to explain myself to myself. And one day, driving over to Virginia Beach for lunch, I became fully aware of how much I needed to talk to Suni, and my first reaction was a sense of shame that I should have the need, rather than being able to proceed on my own as usual. But then I realized that even knowing that I needed the connection was an advance. When I told her, she understood immediately, which in itself helped move the process along.

Suni and Jack had me over to their house once or twice, I seem to remember, but mostly I met them at their office. For a while we met frequently, then gradually we must have tapered off. Life moved on, as it does, as i moved from the editorial office to the newsroom, then Bob and I had started Hampton Roads Publishing Company, and after a few months I moved over to work there full time. I got busier. Bob and I did Gateway, and The Monroe Institute loomed ever larger in my mind. In August, 1995, we moved the company from Norfolk to Charlottesville, with all the problems that involved.

On Tuesday, January 7, 1996, I saw I had a phone message from Jack Dunbar in Virginia Beach. Jack? In all the time I had known them, I don’t think I have ever had a call from Jack. When I called him back, I said straight off, “Nothing happened to Suni, I hope.”

He said, “Suni died!”

She had died the previous day, of lung and bone cancer. She had been sick for less than a month, but I had known nothing about it. I wondered, immediately, how could it happen that we could drift so far apart, without even the shadow of a rift between us, that I could not even know she was mortally ill?

Jack invited me to her memorial service (she had been cremated), and I was there on the following Sunday morning in Virginia Beach. And there was another friend gone. In those days, it did not occur to me that I might still talk to her. I believed in psychic abilities. I didn’t necessarily believe that I had them. They were still for special people, or so I thought. As far as I knew then, Suni and i were separated forever.

&&&

Strictly speaking, I suppose the following poem doesn’t quite belong here, but one day Jack told me about his experiences at the Battle of Midway, and I went home and turned my impressions into a poem. If it doesn’t quite belong in a post centered on Suni, still, closer here than anywhere else, a tribute to a very nice guy I liked a lot.

Jack, at the Battle of Midway

They will grow old, some of them.
They will survive to fight some more,
survive this desperate long day
to fight from island to island,
sea to sea, until six months’ disaster
is hammered into victory.

They will remember, into another time,
how long the struggle balanced. So near it was
that every man could almost justly say
it hung on him. It was as though God tested,
weighed, compared, and at the final moment
lightly touched the scales.

They will do the impossible today.
Sweating, anxious, pushed beyond fatigue,
over‑riding rules and limitations,
they will launch the planes on which
it all depends. They will bring them in,
and fill them full and send them out.

Hour on hour, they will launch many
and see few return. They will watch
failed landings crumple into flames,
smashing barriers, killing pilots,
threatening the ship itself. Against
unforgiving seconds, they will trot all day.

And victory will come, by grace and by God,
and these heroes, some of them, the lucky ones,
will live on into worlds undreamed, will live on,
somehow, through the most of their lives
that is still ahead, knowing that this day’s work
can never be surpassed, never be outlived.

2‑19‑88