human potential

[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

Louis in later years

It was 1972. I was standing on the street waiting to take the bus to my job at the library. The book I was reading said, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”  I remember desperately hoping it was true.

Some few months after I got my graduate degree from the University of Iowa, my wife and I had come down to live in her grandparents’ house in Tampa, Florida, while I tried to turn my Master’s thesis on Thoreau into a book.  (Sigh. As usual. I knew I would become a famous author. Just a matter of time, like running for Congress in a few years.) So I made use of my M.A. to become a dishwasher at the local Howard Johnson’s, then snagged a part-time job at a cable TV station at night, then parlayed that experience into a job as assistant audiovisual librarian at the Tampa Public Library.  A library? Me? Gee, who would have guessed? And of course in some ways, that was a good job for me, especially after I moved from film to books .

But still my external life was one thing, my internal life something else, with little connection between them. There had to be a clue somewhere, but (I thought in those days) finding it might be an impossibility. So many books, so little time! And even if the answer was in a book, and I found that book, how could I know that I had read it right?

I needed a teacher, I knew that much.  But how to find one? And to believe that the teacher would appear when I was ready was such a leap of faith!

(Perhaps the fact that my prayer was answered helped show me by experience that life can be trusted, which helped mold my future attitude. Not everybody trusts life. After so many demonstrations, I came to trust it, and I trust it still.)

And, a few months later, Louis Meinhardt came into my life, a friend of a friend. Though he was only three years older, he had so much more experience of the world, so much more common sense, that for quite a while he couldn’t take me seriously. He saw only the comical, unformed, half-baked side of me, and believe me, there was plenty to see. I was all idealism and good intentions, but ungrounded. Where I longed for psychic abilities, Louis had them and took them for granted, and saw them, accurately enough, as no big deal.  Where I was always ready to believe anything, in certain directions, he was much more likely to see that the emperor had no clothes. Where I tended to take people at their own estimation, he usually saw more clearly.

Much later he told me that the first time he felt a spark of something for me was the day I said to him (in some context I have long forgotten), “I know I make a fool of myself, but sometimes I learn something.” Something within him resonated to that.

I wish I could describe our relationship, it was so unusual. The mutual trust, the shared understandings, the emotional resonances amounted to a bond between brothers. Indeed, it was very like the one I shared with my brother Paul  And the laughter! I’d love to have a dollar for every minute we have laughed together.

For more than 50 years, though with long gaps, we have maintained our friendship. , and whenever we resume communication it is as though there was no interruption.  Since 1974, it has been almost entirely a telephonic link, but still we have been there fore each other in good times and bad. But how write about it? Tell specific anecdotes? Set out broad generalizations? Leave it at, “Trust me, I know”?

I can provide a few generalities.

• External situations have exactly nothing to do with internal worth. Louis when I met him was a school teacher. Nothing in his resume would have given a clue as to the depth of his character, nor of his instinctive knowledge, let alone the knowledge and wisdom he encompassed.
• Similarities in background sometimes help, sometimes mislead. Like me, he was an ex-Catholic school boy, but his relation to the church and to religion in general were nothing like mine. Yet, as fellow members of what I call The Club (ex-Catholics) we intuitively know things shared by neither non-Catholics nor practicing Catholics.
• Similarities in temperament have little to do with the creation of the special bond. In many ways Louis and I couldn’t be more different, but what we shared linked us in ways hard to describe.
• Similar opinions seem to mean little. For many years. Louis scoffed at Colin Wilson, thinking I rated him far too high. When I led Louis to read The Occult: A History, he said, “It’s a comic book.” Such differences in opinion did not lead to a breach between us. We seemed to realize that we would never agree on everything, and that there was no need to do so.
• The teacher-student relationship may reverse, once, twice, continuously, depending on the subject matter and the situation and whatever is going on with either of you. The relationship is not a one-way flow of information or even of wisdom.
• Perhaps most interesting is the fact that you can be someone’s teacher and not even know it on the 3D level. You can be someone’s teacher and not know what it is they are to learn from you. You can be someone’s student and not realize what you are absorbing, let alone how.
• In this kind of relationship, as in any other, the essentials are sincerity and love. I mean this not in any sappy or ethereal way, but as plain fact. No true relationship can exist where either half is not sincere. No true learning is ever passed without love, be it expressed or not, felt or not, understood or not. Love is to human relationships as gravity is to 3D existence on earth: It is, you might say, the underlying organizing principle, without which all is chaos.

It was many a year – many a decade, in fact – before I learned two related things:

• We are each the center of our world: Therefore in a real sense, the world revolves around our thoughts, our emotions, our interests.
• And everyone else is the center of his or her world, a world that revolves around their thoughts, their emotions, their interests.

Among other things, this tells me that anyone may become our teacher, as we may become a teacher for others. Teachers may or may not realize their role in someone else’s life, and this doesn’t matter, provided one does one’s best. We are mysteries to one another other, containing unsuspected depths. Therefore, you can never know what others may have to offer. More to the point, they may not realize it either. It’s probably a good idea to stay alert, and in a state of expectation. Thoreau said somewhere that in his dealings with his fellows, he dealt with traveling gods, only they didn’t know it. True enough, and he might have added, and usually neither do we.

 

It has become a recurring thought in my mind: We never suspect how far our influence may extend, quite without out intention. Henry Thoreau laid down his life peacefully, tranquilly, in the spring of 1862, and yet he continues to change people’s lives today. Presumably he will continue to change people’s lives into the indefinite future. Certainly he changed mine!

I have told the tale of how I came to choose to explore Thoreau’s early social view as my Master’s thesis topic. It isn’t a very interesting story, except perhaps, in that as I began reading Walden, I was brought absolutely to a standstill by a paragraph that spoke to me. Later I learned that many people have been similarly moved by the same words, but at the time, I knew only that this man’s words, and therefore his heart, spoke to me. He said,

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite necessary.”

I wonder, do those two sentences still do for others what they did for the 24-year old I was then? I never had a yen to live alone in the woods (too far from libraries, for one thing!), but from that moment, I looked at life differently. weighed things in a different scale.

Or perhaps that is merely hindsight. All I know for sure is that I was one person when I picked up that book, and another when I finished reading it. Then came his journals (24 years’ worth of volumes, though in graduate school I had time only to read and absorb those from the first ten years), and the essays, and eventually the other volumes.

An attractive man, both in the content of his thoughts and in the dressing of them. His was the first writing that forced me to read between the lines to get his meaning.(Stray thought: Had I not learned on Thoreau, would I have known, much later, how to read Hemingway?)

Speaking of reading between the line, here is a thought-experiment. Can you see how the things I am going to quote affected me? Or, another way to look at it, can you see what pre-existing facets of my community of strands they would have activated?  And more important than what they stirred up in me, what do they stir up in you?

&&&

These are but a few gems, plucked almost at random.

• Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.
• There is always room and occasional enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.
• The highest condition of art is artlessness.
• Truth is always paradoxical.
• By sufferance you may escape suffering.
• When a dog runs at you, whistle for him. [I have always loved this one!]
• It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians. [This one too.]
• To be brave is the beginning of victory.
• Ah! Such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of, — we three, — it expanded and racked my little house; I should not dare to say how many pounds’ weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened the seams so that they had to be caulked with much dullness thereafter to stop the consequent leak; — but I had enough of that kind of oakum already picked.
• It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense.
• Undoubtedly all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level.
• Live free, child of the mist.
• “If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
• “A bore is someone who takes away my solitude and doesn’t give me companionship in return.”
• “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
• “A man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting his living.”
• “A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.”
• “Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.”
• “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”
• “As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”
• “Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.”
•  “Be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.”
• “Being is the great explainer.”
• “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”
• “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
• “Cowards suffer, heroes enjoy.”
• “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
• “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”
• “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
• “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”
• “Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.”
• “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.”
• “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
• “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
• “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
• “If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.”
• “In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.”
• “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
• “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”
• “We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”

Trust me, I could go on and on for a good long time. But perhaps a word to the wise is enough to send you to the library or bookstore. Only, be warned, this man will change your life, if you let him.

“Our thoughts are the epochs of our life: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.”

 

Carl Gustav Jung

If, for whatever reason,  you no longer find meaning in the religion you were raised in, or if you were raised in no religion at all, but are haunted by a gnawing sense of something missing in your life, what do you do? Do you just pick up some belief at random? Do you conclude, perhaps somewhat hastily, that life has no meaning at all?

If you’re lucky, if you’re open to it, life sends you pointers.

In 1970, life sent me first Colin Wilson’s book, them a book by Carl Jung titled Modern Man In Search of a Soul. I picked up Colin’s book not knowing why, but Jung’s title spoke to me. I’m always picking up books, but this was particularly good listening. (I think we were in London at the time.)

The thing to remember about Jung is that he wrote not as a philosopher, nor as a student of history, nor as a cultured European surveying life – though he was all of those – but as a physician, a psychiatrist, reporting on what he had observed in a lifetime’s medical practice. That is, rather than beginning with a theory and searching for evidence for it. he formed his theories on observed facts. He wrote that he had analyzed many thousands of  dreams before he began to formulate his conclusions.

Much later, I would learn (in Psychology and Religion) that Jung’s thought and experience had brought him to five basic conclusions on the religious side of the psyche:

• A spiritual element is an organic part of the human psyche.
• Such elements are regularly expressed in symbols.
• These symbols reveal a path of psychological development which can be traced backwards toward a past cause and forward toward a future goal.
• This goal is expressed by images of completion in a whole Self which is unique for each individual, formed by integration of the ego and unconscious.
• This whole is characterized by all the qualities of numinousness, unconditional authority, and value which also belonged to the image of God.

Of course I didn’t know any of this in 1970. Nonetheless, something guiding me knew that this was the influence I needed. Here was a man who brought intellectual rigor and clear-eyed perception to the question of religion and spirituality and our situation in life.

I needed  that. Everything within me said that (for me at least), Catholicism, Christianity, was not enough. I don’t mean that it isn’t true, exactly, more like, it isn’t true enough. Or probably a better way of putting it is to say that Christianity as I saw it being interpreted wasn’t enough. There was truth there; I could feel it. But the way it was being interpreted was dumbed-down, to the point that intelligent people mostly gave it lip service  at best. I knew the atheists weren’t right, but Christianity as I was seeing it wasn’t either. So what were the facts? What were the religious facts?

It isn’t like Jung could give me the answers. But he could, and he did, give me some of the questions. Like Colin Wilson, he shone light on areas of life that were darkness to me. In a word, he reassured me that my instincts weren’t wrong, even if I couldn’t yet say what was right.

A few relevant quotations from Memories, Dreams, Reflections,, to give you a faint sense of what he offered, and offers still.

“The idea of rebirth is inseparable from that of karma. The crucial question is whether a man’s karma is personal or not. If it is, then the preordained destiny with which a man enters life represents an achievement of previous lives, and the personal continuity therefore exists. If, however, this is not so, and an impersonal karma is seized upon in the act of birth, then that karma is incarnated again without there being any personal continuity….

“I  know no answer to the question of whether the karma which I live is the outcome of my past lives, or whether it is not rather the achievement of my ancestors, whose heritage comes together in me. Am I a combination of the lives of those ancestors and do I embody those lives again is to mark have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life and I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know. Buddha left the question, and I like to listen that he himself did not know with certainty.

“… When I die, my deeds will follow along with me — that is how I imagine it I will bring with me what I have done. In the meantime it is important to ensure that I do not stand at the end with empty hands.” (pp 317-8).

&&&

“Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about the daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the short-sightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upwards from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.” ( pp 326).

&&&

“Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. We stand perplexed and stupefied before the phenomenon of Nazism and Bolshevism because we know nothing about men, or at any rate have only a lopsided and distorted picture of him. If we had self-knowledge, that would not be the case…. [W]e have no imagination for evil, but evil has us in its grip. Some do not want to know this, and others are identified with evil. That is the psychological situation in the world today: some call themselves Christian and imagine that they can trample so-called evil underfoot by merely willing to; others have succumbed to it and no longer see the good. Evil today has become a visible great power. One half of humanity battens and grows strong on a doctrine fabricated by human Grassi is a nation; the other half seconds from the lack of a myth commensurate with the situation. The Christian nations have come to a sorry pass; their Christianity slumbers and has neglected to develop its myth further in the course of the centuries.” (pp 330-331).

And finally, as quoted in Jung’s Contribution to Our Time, by Eleanor Bertine, p 57:

“One of the toughest roots of all evil is unconsciousness, and I could wish that the saying of Jesus, ‘Man, if thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed, but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed, and a transgressor of the law,’ were still in the Gospels, even though it has only one authentic source. It might well be the motto for a new morality.”

Need I add that this is but a teaser? There’s enough in Jung to last you at least the rest of your life. It seems to be a matter of seek and you will find, ask and the way will be opened.

 

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?