"I of my own knowledge…"

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.

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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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.

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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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It occurs to me, perhaps I haven’t ever posted any photos of the Monroe Institute buildings and grounds, for the benefit of those who have never visited. Here’s one I like, part of the Nancy Penn Center taken from the side of the building that is away from the road.

Jim Price and I have never met, but we are friends, brought together by temperament and indefinables. I know him as a gifted writer, for one thing. Yesterday he sent me an email saying, “In response to your blog entry today, here’s a poem I wrote years ago about clouds. A spell of clouds is a group, like a flock of birds. It may be the only word I’ve coined, but I like the sound of it.”

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What could be lovelier? If people had to pay to see them, perhaps they’d value them more. Thoreau said (after the woods around Walden Pond had been logged, some years after he’d lived there) “Thank God they cannot chop down the clouds!”

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In going through old journals, I found this poem copied out, by Archibald MacLeish, titled “Conversation in a Belfry,” from Ten Conversations. It was written more than 30 years ago, and is, unfortunately, truer now than then, even.

Conversation in a Belfry

Centennial bell that will not ring,

Tell me why your iron tongue

Rusts in the rain, your mouth is dumb.

Why are you silent, bell?

                                                For shame.

You are not shamed.

                                    Not I but you.

We? With all we’ve done and do?

We’ve ruled ourselves two hundred years.

No name on earth is proud as ours.

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I said a while ago that it is now realized that the subconscious mind processes about 42 million bits of information in the one second that it takes the conscious mind to process about 42 bit, for a million-to-one difference.

This means that if I glance at something for one second, the subconscious sees what the conscious mind might see if it looked at the same thing for 16,667 minutes, or nearly 28 hours, or more than 11 and a half days.It struck me this morning, perhaps this has something to do with what we often call intuition, and something to do with meditation.

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“[It is no little thing] to achieve anything in any art, to stand alone perhaps for many years, to go a path no other man has gone, to accept one’s own thought when the thought of others has the authority of the world behind it,…to give one’s life as well as one’s words which are so much nearer to one’s soul to the criticism of the world.”

W.B. Yeats

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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