• Monroe’s journeys – further thoughts

    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…

  • Brothers, sisters

    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.…

  • Colin

    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…

  • Carl Jung, the intrepid explorer

    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?…

  • Thoreau , shaker of worlds

    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…

  • Enter my first teacher

    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…

  • Suni Dunbar

    [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,…

  • Bob Friedman (1)

    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…

  • Bob Friedman (2)

    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…

  • Bob Monroe

    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…