Rita’s Legacy (2)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This was to be part two of the introduction to the book that would explain what Rita and I had learned in extensive conversations with The Guys Upstairs. Rita’s training as academic comes through quite clearly here, I think.

By Rita Q. Warren

The background

As Frank has reported, Bob Monroe turned his Explorer program over to my husband Martin and me shortly after his new lab was opened in early l984. Here is how that came about.

In 1979 Bob and his family had sold their home (“Whistlefield”) near Charlottesville, Virginia, and re-located about 30 miles south, in rural Nelson County, to build The Monroe Institute (TMI). He opened the first Gateway Voyage program in July, l979.
A friend and I had read about Bob’s work in his first book, Journeys out of the Body, and were eager to visit the Institute and participate in a Gateway. Fortunately, we were able to attend the second program given in Virginia, in August, 1979. My world changed in that week as it did for many who have experienced Gateway. [Those who have written about that life-changing event include Joseph McMoneagle (Mind Trek); Bruce Moen (Voyages into the Unknown), Ronald Russell (The Vast Enquiring Soul); F. Holmes Atwater (Captain of my Ship, Master of my Soul), and Frank himself (Muddy Tracks).]

I had thought of myself as a rather stodgy University professor during the l970s and early 1980s, although I had had some periods showing promise earlier. During Gateway, my life was full of color and amazing adventures, experiences beyond ego. I hadn’t planned to retire from teaching for another ten years or so, but when Bob offered lots near TMI for sale in 1980, I couldn’t resist. Martin, having already retired, came down to the New Land to build a large house so that we would have room for us and for Nan Wilson (the friend with whom I had done Gateway) and, shortly thereafter, Darlene Miller. Bob offered another Gateway for New Landers (as we were now being called) and although I was concerned that a second Gateway could offer nothing so incredible a second time, Nan and I attended, and I did indeed have more heart-warming and soul-stirring experiences.

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Rita’s legacy (1)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This entry, and the one to follow, were two parts of an introduction that Rita and I wrote to a book about the TGU material that has yet to appear. We wrote these explanations in 2002 but nothing needs changing. I can’t think of a better way of expressing Rita Warren’s legacy as experienced by me. This first entry is by me; Rita’s follows.

by Frank DeMarco

Probably you don’t need this book if the world makes sense to you, if your life makes sense to you. But perhaps you are puzzled, depressed, disheartened, by the life you see around you. Perhaps you ask yourself why you were born, why anybody was born. Perhaps you ask what’s the sense in it. Perhaps you find yourself unable to believe in any of the traditional faiths that have sustained humanity throughout the ages, the little you know of them. (To name them roughly in chronological order: Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and materialism, often called “science.”) Living without faith either in the west’s materialism or in any of the revealed religions, perhaps you suspect that life is by its nature not merely puzzling, but meaningless.

And perhaps-one final “perhaps”-perhaps you say to yourself, “If only I knew how to find the truth! I’m not in the mood for fairy tales. I want the truth, no matter how depressing the truth turns out to be. And I don’t want to be told, and then required to believe. I’m willing to listen to new ideas, but I want to be able to test them, to find out for myself.”

If that describes your situation, you’ve come to the right book.

Continue reading Rita’s legacy (1)

The Spiritual life

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

For the past week, as my friend Rita Warren has been slowly dying, I have been occupying my mind partly by going through old journals, continuing a task I set myself of finding and indexing all the quotations I have noted in 41 years of journal-keeping. Among them I find this one, to which, despite diverging terminologies and concepts, I have resonated for all the 19 years since I came across it. It seems particularly appropriate to days and nights spent in the near presence of death and life as we experience them, inextricably mixed.

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Yeats, magic and mysticism

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I find it a great pity that so much experimentation and discovery by men and women who become famous in other fields is disregarded and ignored as though [you did see those words “as though,” right?] by a conspiracy to silence testimony of the existence and interaction of the non-physical world. You see it in people’s non-quotation of Lindbergh’s out-of-body experiences over the north Atlantic in 1927 (though he himself described it fully in The Spirit of St. Louis) and, especially, in people writing of W.B. Yeats as if he were a poet and nationalist who had only an incidental and fanciful relationship to the other side.

As testimony I could offer many, many pages of Yeats’ Autobiographies, not to mention the entire book A Vision and many associated poems, but let this stand as an introduction to the magical world inhabited by one great man. From “Hodos Chameliontos,” part of Yeats’ Autobiographies, pages 258 to 262, speaking of his experiments as a young man with his uncle George Pollexfen:

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Yeats on revolution and religion

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

 How many of us, hope and passion kindled by the 1960s, learned this the hard way! How many have still to learn it! W.B. Yeats, speaking of his youth in the section of Autobiographies titled “Four Years: 1887-1891” (pp 148-149)

Then gradually the attitude towards religion of almost everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all the arrogance of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, and yet there must be a change of heart and only religion could make it. What was the use of talking about some new revolution putting all things right, when the change must come, if come it did, with astronomical slowness, like the cooling of the sun, or it may have been like the drying of the moon? Morris rang his chairman’s bell, but I was too angry to listen, and he had to ring it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at supper, “Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not come as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not being understood.” He did not show any vexation, but I never returned after that night; and yet I did not always believe what I had said, and only gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some near sudden change for the better.

A Trip to Iona — Sunday June 15, 2003

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday, June 15
Call it dream or nightmare, whatever. A recurring dream, back again.

I must get away because I have killed someone. (I think that’s what I’ve done.) In this one, I take a practice shot and am told by my sister, “I cannot undertake to explain contravention of the 1919 Firearms Act,” or words to that effect. She sort of knows I intend to use the rifle but doesn’t want to know.

Then I’m hiding, across the street from the house I grew up in. But I’m bad at hiding, and keep being caught by members of my family. Who don’t realize I’m really trying to hide. I try to figure out where to hide, how to make a place to hide.

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A Trip to Iona — Saturday June 14, 2003

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Saturday, June 14
It isn’t quarter to eight yet and I’ve been up, dressed, hung around the pier to get more of my fill of sea and waves and early morning; I’m entirely packed and waiting first for breakfast, then for the ferry – which isn’t due til 9:30. Better early, I suppose.

>From last night:

1) A sort of indescribable experience. I was in the middle of a dream. My wife in the dream and I were living separate. She came to me for comfort. I was in bed, under the covers, naked. She came into bed naked, and as she fitted her self against me, backing into my front, like spoons) my body got intensely charged with energy (not sexual energy), my hands especially. As I moved from being in the dream to realizing that I was awake, I can’t find the words to describe it. One moment I was in the dream; the next, I felt myself move out of that dream state into the waking state, my body remaining unmoving. It was the strangest transition, from dream to waking. I think the fact that my body didn’t move made it more tangible somehow. (And now, transcribing this later, I remember that in a Monroe program eight years ago I once transitioned from an altered state to a normal waking state in just that way, and it was just as memorable then.)

2) I thought I was going to retrieve dad – which was confusing, since I’d seen him in Focus 25 in 1995 and had seen later that he was gone. I did go looking but can’t find him. There was something else, but I can’t remember it.

In recording these dreams, I get a sense of how actively our internal life goes on with us mostly not aware of it.

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