During my senior year of high school, I was introduced to the writings of Richard Bach. I started, appropriately enough, with his first book, that ultra-mega-bestseller from the 1970s, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I read it in my high school’s modern literature class, taught by Mrs. Ellis, who included it on a list of books from which students could choose. She conducted the class in an independent reading mode, where we could each choose our books individually, spend time in class reading them, and then write reports and deliver presentations. It ended up being one of my favorite classes in all of high school, not least because Mrs. Ellis accepted suggestions for books not included on her provided list, which is how I came to read The Vampire Lestat and Stephen King’s It while sitting in first hour.
But back to Bach. I thoroughly enjoyed Jonathan Livingston Seagull and grokked it at a deep level (although I didn’t know the term “grok” at that point in my life). I then chose to read his Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah on my own time. It was a pure joy, and I still love it all these years later, even though I’m not really aligned with its central New Thought-inflected philosophy (although I do find value in some aspects of that). Something about Bach’s truly engaging and elegant way of presenting spiritual philosophy through the vehicle of a winsome semi-fiction, the way he combined his real-life experiences with an obviously fantastic story of how he ran into a bona fide messiah (now retired, having decided to quit the job when nobody would understand him) while making a private living flying an old biplane around the American Midwest and giving three-dollar rides, really enraptured me. I think it also added impetus to my then-developing penchant for books that deal with philosophical and spiritual ideas; shortly after finishing it, I started on Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson (including his nonfiction, although the boundaries are nebulous for him), and Nietzsche. Bach was also a featured author in the creativity class taught by Dr. Betty Scott that I took at the University of Missouri, which I talk about in my post “Shadow Visitors: Sleep Paralysis and Discarnate ‘Dark Ones.'”
Years later, when I was a hardcore reader of Wilson’s books, I learned from his The Illuminati Papers that Bach had been one of the experimental subjects in Russell Targ’s and Hal Puthoff’s remote viewing research at the Stanford Research Institute. At the time, I was only just learning about that whole wing of paranormal history, and its connection with Bach blew my mind. It was some time later that I discovered this info wasn’t exactly a secret, as Bach had written the foreword to Targ and Puthoff’s semi-classic 1977 book Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities (which also featured a foreword by Margaret Mead [!]).
Which brings me to this: A few days ago I stumbled across the following eight-minute clip from Jeffrey Mishlove’s Thinking Allowed in which Bach talks about his experiences at SRI. This discovery was thoroughly accidental, and it resurrected all those old feelings of affection for Bach’s books. This was helped by the fact that in the clip, he presents what seems to me one of the most candid and enjoyable accounts of what went on at SRI during those heady years. He starts by talking about the relationship between fiction, reality, and the ideas that seem to guide one’s life because they feel native when one first encounters them. The part about remote viewing starts at 2:33 and features Bach’s detailed account of one successful experiment that blew his mind.
I look back now on the last twenty years of my life and say, “Now, Richard, what have you been doing?” What I’ve been discovering is the power of the imagination and how ideas translate into what we call the real world around us. . . . [Russell Targ] said, “Richard, next time you’re on the west coast, stop by [SRI], please.” I did, and I walked into this room, and they shut the door behind me, and they closed the blinds. I said, “What’s going on here?” He said, “A fellow experimenter, Hal Puthoff, is somewhere in the Bay Area. You have no idea where. Now just relax, Richard, and tell us where he is. Describe what he’s looking at this minute.” “Well, what do I do, Russell? Do I open my eyes? Do I close my eyes? What am I supposed to do?” “Anything. If you want to leave your eyes open, that’s fine.” So I closed my eyes. I opened them again and said, “Russell, I’m making it up.” He said, “That’s right. You’re making it up. Tell us what you make up.”