Cover

Praise for Muddy Tracks:

“DeMarco…presents an earnest and systematic account of his many years' journey to discover his higher self, so that his readers may do the same.…[T]he author maintains he acquired firsthand knowledge that we humans are eternal souls temporarily trapped in physical bodies but ultimately connected to each other and to a larger being whom conventional religions call God and New Age devotees call the Universe.…DeMarco has written for New Age readers and others in search of a reality greater than the one they already know.”

—Publishers Weekly—Feb. 19, 2001

“DeMarco artfully shares psychic ‘knowledge’ of truth rather than interpretations or beliefs. The author probes the preternatural gamut from dream analysis, channeling, and automatic writing to out-of-body experiences, hemispheric synchronization, distance healing, and reincarnation as well as more traditional fare like prayer and meditation.…DeMarco shows readers by example how to cultivate deeper connections with a greater, wiser being. Frank discussion of concepts such as ‘psychic's disease’ and the ‘no-guru zone’ balances this tale with the author's contention that extrasensory possibilities exist for all.”

—Library Journal—March 1, 2001

“This is a personal account of the author's experiences over a 5-year period at The Monroe Institute, founded by pioneer out-of-body researcher Robert Monroe.…Followers of Monroe, who died in 1995, will be fascinated by DeMarco's account, a compilation of his personal journals with the addition of retrospective musings on the course of his own journey of self-discovery.”

—Napra Review—Mar. 2001

“How does one develop psychically and live spiritually while dealing with the real world? That is the crux of this captivating book.…Muddy Tracks is entertaining, and at the same time a great how-to book about tools available to all of us to achieve our goals and have more joy in life.”

—Magical Blend, #75

“While he was alive, Bob Monroe was a pioneer in plumbing the depths of consciousness, and the institute in Virginia that bears his name has guided many a noetic explorer on interior journeys. In Muddy Tracks, author and publisher Frank DeMarco tells the story of meeting Monroe, and of the subsequent deep transformations that have characterized his life since then. Join DeMarco as he gives the reader an intimate view into the workings of the Monroe Institute's programs, and more importantly, into the workings of his own psychic development.”

—IONS—Nov/Dec 2001

“This book was written specifically for those people for whom the question of ‘what is real’ is the most important thing in life, says the book jacket blurb. On this note Frank DeMarco traces his personal work with non-ordinary consciousness.…A willing explorer, he has been neither gullible nor unquestioning during both his own experiments.…His background as a newspaperman holds sway as an objective witness despite the subjective nature of his research into his own psyche, because he reports failures and uncertain results as well as successes….

“His investigations have followed various avenues. In addition to venturing into diverse mental states, he has dabbled in hypnosis and practiced automatic writing, traced several of his past lifetimes and retrieved disoriented souls who became stuck during the transition following death. DeMarco feels his explorations have brought him positive changes; he now more conscious and aware, less closed off from the world around him and more open to others. This personal transition leads him to feel that ‘the answer to our social problems lies not so much in reorganization or reform as in increased consciousness.’”

—Venture Inward—Nov/Dec. 2001

Foreword

by Colin Wilson

When Frank DeMarco told me he intended to write a book about his experiences of The Monroe Institute, I immediately offered to write this introduction, for I needed no convincing that Robert Monroe is one of the most important figures in modern paranormal research. What I had not expected was that the book I had so casually offered to introduce, sight unseen, would be itself as remarkable as any of Monroe's books.

I met Frank on March 17, 1995, in the New York apartment of the distinguished paranormal researcher Alexander Imich. As it happens, it was the day Robert Monroe died. I remember the date because my taxi had gotten stuck in the Saint Patrick's Day parade, and I was two hours late for the party. Fortunately, it was still going strong. But the only one of the guests I mentioned later in my diary was Frank DeMarco. And that was partly because he had sent me a novel he had written called Messenger, a sequel to James Hilton's Lost Horizon, and that, unlike most sequels, it was totally absorbing. It was the story of a young American pilot whose spy plane crashes in Tibet in 1962, and who is taken to the monastery of Shangri-La. It was obvious that DeMarco had written it partly because he felt that James Hilton had missed some important opportunities. His young pilot attempts to escape but is caught, then decides to make the best of it and begins to practice mental and spiritual disciplines. The book made it clear that DeMarco knew a great deal about such disciplines, and had practiced them himself. And I sensed this as I talked to him—mainly about Monroe—at the party.

Back in England, I reread Monroe's book Journeys Out of the Body, which I had first read twenty years earlier. The book had deeply impressed me, and I wrote about it in Mysteries (1978), a sequel to The Occult. Monroe was a Virginia businessman who, in the late 1950s, began to have spontaneous out-of-the-body experiences—probably because, as a broadcasting executive, he had been experimenting with sleep-learning using two earphones. What was so interesting about Monroe was that, unlike many classic “astral travelers”—for example, Sylvan Muldoon and Oliver Fox—Monroe set out to discover how to teach others to leave their bodies, through the process he called “Hemi-Sync,” or hemisphere synchronization, the use of patterns of sound to synchronize the left and right halves of the brain, and to induce a deep calm that is conducive to “altered states” and out-of-the-body experiences.

Monroe was able to “project” himself to other locations—like a neighbor's house—but soon found journeys in “this world” oddly boring. But he quickly discovered a region where he felt more at home, a timeless realm he calls “Locale II,” and which seems to be the place we go to after death. In Locale II there are apparently many thoroughly bewildered people who do not know they are dead. Monroe began to help such people—although he occasionally needed help himself, as he came to realize that Locale II was also peopled by some very strange and occasionally terrifying entities.

Monroe will remind many readers of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose books contain descriptions of a realm beyond death that bears a remarkable resemblance to Monroe's Locale II. But readers of Heaven and Hell or The True Christian Religion will occasionally experience doubts about Swedenborg, whose Christian standpoint makes us wonder whether he was a religious crank. What is so impressive about Monroe is that his work carries a ring of total honesty, a man who is trying to tell precisely and exactly what he has experienced, insofar as it can be conveyed in ordinary language.

In 1986 I had bought Monroe's second book, Far Journeys, but had found it disappointing compared to his first, and never finished it. It was full of weird neologisms like “I plied,” “he flickered,” “I smoothed.” But when Frank DeMarco directed me to a strange and fascinating chapter called “Hearsay Evidence,” which offers a symbolic—and uncomfortable—history of why humans were created, I was so impressed that I went back to the beginning and read the whole book. After that I went on to read Monroe's third and most mind-boggling book, Ultimate Journey, in which he tries to take us just about as far as words can go. It is certainly one of the oddest and most fascinating books I have ever encountered, and I deliberately read it slowly because I was enjoying it so much.

At about this point, Frank sent me an account he had written of his stay at The Monroe Institute in 1992. This I also read straight through, totally gripped, because what he had to say was so amazing. In his younger days, Frank had practiced amateur hypnosis (as described in this book), and become convinced that it was possible to access past lives. He had been to visit Emerson's house in Concord, and had an impression that he had once visited Emerson there. Now, at The Monroe Institute, he began using Monroe's techniques to mentally project himself to Emerson's house.

He says that it was like watching a movie, with realistic playback. He saw himself—as a Dr. Atwood—arrive at the back door and be introduced to Mrs. Emerson, who seemed vaguely familiar. After that he talked to Emerson, until their conversation was interrupted by Thoreau, who at the time lived in the Emerson household, and who seemed to regard Atwood with mild suspicion as a possible rival.

I shall not describe all this further, because it is in this book. But when I came to write a book about the enigma of “alien abduction,” and felt the need to write a chapter on “remote viewing,” I asked Frank's permission to quote his story, and did so in Chapter 9 of Alien Dawn.

When Frank began to send me chapters of his new book, I felt exactly as I had felt on reading Monroe: that as weird and strange as all this sounded, it made an impression of complete truth and authenticity.

That was in the autumn of 1997. But after that, I gathered the book was not going so well. Although it seemed to me that all he had to do was keep on telling his story and the book would write itself, he apparently found that this was not so, and was getting himself into that tangle that happens to writers when they have too much to say.

Then, suddenly, it began to flow fast, and he began to e-mail it to me at the rate of more than three chapters a week. This, it soon became clear, was due to the help and support of what he called “The Gentlemen Upstairs” (TGU).

This in itself strikes me as one of the most interesting and important things about this book. Who are “The Gentlemen Upstairs”? Angels? Spirits? His own “superconscious mind”? I suspect that he himself is not quite sure.

If I had read this book in the late 1970s, I would have come down on the side of the “superconscious” hypothesis, for I was at that time fascinated by the phenomenon of multiple personality, and had come to the conclusion that every one of us possesses many levels of personality, and that our evolution as individuals means climbing what I called “the ladder of selves.” But then I came upon the work of Max Freedom Long, particularly that astonishing book with the atrocious title The Secret Science Behind Miracles. Investigating the religion of the Hunas of Hawaii—which had been suppressed by the Christian Church—he learned that the kahuna (Huna priesthood) believed that man has three souls: lower, middle, and high. The middle self is what we call “I,” the everyday personality; the lower self is what Freud called the “unconscious”; but there is also a “high self,” which is as far above the everyday self as the unconscious is below it. This high self can even foresee the future, which must mean that, in a sense, it is outside our time realm.

Long came to feel that the kahuna system explains multiple personality far better than our Western psychology. He cites a case recorded by Dr. James Leapsley of a girl whose original personality alternated with another personality every four years. Experts hypnotized her in an attempt to solve the problem in the standard way, by getting the two personalities to blend, or to persuade one of them to go away. Then an unfamiliar but authoritative voice spoke through the girl's mouth, identifying itself as the guardian of the two girls. It told the experts that if they did not stop interfering, it would simply withdraw the two girls and leave them with a corpse. The experts recognized that it could do exactly as it said, and gave up.

The case convinced me that many multiple personalities are, in fact, possessed by “spirits.” I agree that sounds like a hopeless backward step into the dark ages of superstition; but since that time, many similar case studies have convinced me that it is true.

So I would be inclined to feel that Frank DeMarco's “Gentlemen Upstairs” could be either Frank's own “Higher Self” or another person entirely. But even this may be a simplification. In 1907 an architect named Frederick Bligh Bond was commissioned by the Church of England to try to locate the remains of the ancient chapel at Glastonbury Abbey. He used a medium who specialized in automatic writing, and was soon getting messages from dead monks that enabled him to locate the ruins precisely. And one of these monks remarked, “Why cling I to that which is not? It is I, and it is not I, butt parte of me which dwelleth in the past and is bound to that which my carnal soul loved and called ‘home’ these many years. Yet I, Johannes, amm of many partes, and ye better parte doeth other things.…”

Are we all “of many partes”? Certainly, Frank's strange story of Katrina suggests as much. If Katrina was one of Frank's past lives, then how could his present self locate Katrina in “Focus 27” of that parallel world called Locale II? I asked Frank, and he admitted he was by no means sure.

It can be seen why I became so excited about this book, and in spite of a fairly heavy work schedule, printed up every e-mail attachment as soon as it came and read it straight through.

I was particularly impressed by his section describing the effect of taking mescaline as a student. To begin with, the drug produced the same effect described by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception: a deepened sense of reality. Frank writes, “If I were looking at a candle, say, I would really look at it, really see it, for the first time in my life.” Looking at a painting of a boat, it was as if the front half of the boat was sticking out into the room.

“The walls, I realized, were alive! Literally. What I had been taking for dead matter was something much more exciting; it was somehow alive in a way I couldn't fathom, but couldn't doubt.”

I was reminded of a passage in a book called The States of Human Consciousness by C. Daly King, a student of Gurdjieff, who describes how, standing on a New Jersey station one morning, he experienced a more intense form of consciousness, in which the dun-colored bricks of the station “appeared to be tremendously alive; without manifesting any exterior motion they seemed to be seething almost joyously inside and gave the distinct impression that in their own degree they were living and actually liking it.”

Even more important, I think, is the comment DeMarco makes about coincidence—that he had always taken it for granted that life was just a collision of forces on the material plane. Under mescaline he suddenly became aware that there is no such thing as coincidence. “Several times in the course of that long Saturday afternoon I watched the interaction of five people come to perfectly orchestrated peaks and lulls. I refer not to anything externally dramatic, but to the temporary clarity of vision that showed me (beyond later doubting) that more went on between individuals than their ordinary consciousness realized. Thinking about the orchestration I saw then, I for a while referred to God The Great Playwright.”

What this passage brought to mind was an interview I had had with the remarkable Australian mystic Barbara Tucker, wife of the painter Albert Tucker, one of whose experiences happened at a party:

“All the people round me were laughing and chatting and doing all the things people do at parties—and then, again, I suddenly saw all the connections between these people—how they all interconnected, how all this show that was going on was not, in fact, idle chatter. It was all interconnecting into their relationships with one another in the most extraordinary way.”

Obviously, Daly King, Barbara Tucker, and Frank DeMarco had all had that same sense that our world is not as chaotic as it looks, but is imbued with an underlying meaning.

This book is not, in the ordinary sense, an autobiography, which seems to me in a way a pity, for Frank's experience has been in many ways remarkable, and he has a natural gift for making it come alive. This is autobiography only insofar as it is relevant to his interest in The Monroe Institute and Monroe's own ideas and experiences. When I asked him to let me have a few biographical details for this introduction, he sent me an e-mail ironically entitled “My Fascinating Life.” But it provides the necessary background to this book.

He was born in 1946 in New Jersey, the son of a farmer, and brought up a Catholic. He graduated from George Washington University in 1969, and wrote his thesis on Thoreau. He married in that same year and had a son and daughter. After trying journalism and librarianship, he decided to follow the lead of his hero Kennedy, and ran for Congress at twenty-seven, coming fourth of six in the Democratic primary. For two years he worked for the man who was elected, then became a computer programmer, and finally became the co-founder of the Hampton Roads Publishing Company in Virginia. This was in 1989, and in the following year he made his first trip to The Monroe Institute, and got to know its founder—which is virtually the starting point of this book.

My own work had played a part in his development (as described in the first chapter), which is how I come to be writing this introduction. It helped to crystallize his own feeling that there is something oddly wrong with “this life,” and that there has to be some alternative, some other way. I had experienced the same odd sense of suffocation during my own teens (in the 1940s), and for me it had crystallized in T. S. Eliot's phrase, “Where is the life we have lost in living?” I began to collect material about what I called “Outsiders,” misfits who had experienced this same sense of not really belonging to our down-to-earth reality. The romantics of the nineteenth century felt the same, and often committed suicide, or died of a kind of self-induced despair at the thought that there is no alternative.

What fascinated me so much were these glimpses of overwhelming delight and affirmation, the kind of thing that led Van Gogh to paint “Starry Night” and made Nijinsky write in his diary: “I am God, I am God.” Were they sheer illusion—as Van Gogh believed when he committed suicide? In states of depression and fatigue, it was easy to believe this. But then there were those other moments, states of immense happiness and confidence, in which it was obvious that human beings are far stronger than they realize.

It was this question—what Thomas Carlyle called “Everlasting No versus Everlasting Yes”—that led me to write my first book, The Outsider, in 1955, whose publication in 1956 led to the vertiginous and not wholly pleasant experience of overnight success—the question that I later dramatized in the science fiction novel The Mind Parasites in the mid-sixties, and that Frank stumbled on a few years later.

Although I became deeply interested in “the occult” in 1969, when asked to write a book about it, and so discovered the work of Robert Monroe, I have never attempted to follow Frank into the exploration of these curious powers of the mind. In fact, although writing The Occult and Mysteries left me in no doubt whatever of the reality of out-of-the-body experience, I remained oddly skeptical about the whole notion of life after death, feeling that perhaps human beings ought to devote their attention to finding out why we are alive and what we are supposed to do now that we are here. Writing a book on the poltergeist in the early 1980s convinced me beyond all doubt that poltergeists are spirits, and not some manifestation of the unconscious minds of disturbed teenagers. And finally, researching a book called Afterlife convinced me that human beings somehow survive their death.

Yet what continues to obsess me is the notion that human beings are on the verge of a new step in their evolution, and that it is in the process of occurring at this moment. It seems clear to me that for well over three thousand years, human consciousness has been trapped by survival needs in a narrow “left brain” vision, and that it is now virtually in a cul-de-sac. Research into a book on the so-called alien abduction phenomena has convinced me that something very strange is happening, and that we are on the verge of some great change. It seems to me that there is much evidence that the “aliens”—or some of them—are attempting to “midwife” the human race to a new stage of consciousness.

Why do I feel that Monroe's insights are so important to the present time? I can illustrate the answer by pointing to a recent book called The Threat by my fellow researcher David Jacobs, who is convinced that the human race is about to be taken over by the aliens, who will overrun us as the Nazis once hoped to overrun the world. His book left me feeling worried, for thirty years of research have certainly taught him more about UFOs than I shall ever know. Then I thought about Frank DeMarco and his book, and suddenly became aware that Jacobs—with whom I had some interesting conversations at a conference two years ago—is leaving out of account what Monroe knew and what DeMarco knows: that in this strange “multiverse” there are powerful forces for good as well as evil, and that if we remain trapped “downstairs,” in a kind of worm's-eye view of reality, we shall inevitably take a pessimistic view of the future. What is so important, and so refreshing, about this book is that it provides a remarkable bird's-eye view of the universe that instantly induces a sense of what G. K. Chesterton once called “absurd good news.”

Introduction

“I of my own knowledge”

It was the third of a series of five questions that I had been instructed to ask the universe. “Who am I?”

I was at The Monroe Institute, in central Virginia, participating in a residential program called the Gateway Voyage. Given the amazing things that had already happened to me there that week, I asked the question fully expecting an answer.

Who was I? The answer came: “Muddy footprints in the grass.” Being in an expanded state of consciousness, I understood the image. It meant that I am here to encourage others to do some exploring. I am here to show you that others have passed through what may appear to be a trackless wilderness.

Muddy footprints. Not muddy as in muddled; muddy as in wet and indistinct. Wet, as one's footprints are wet after being immersed in water. Indistinct, little more than traces. Enough to let you know that you are not the first to tread this ground, but not enough to tell you much about the person who made them.

When you see muddy footprints in the grass, you may not know anything about who made the tracks, or which way the person was headed, or where they came from or where they're going. You may not know if the person who made them knew where he or she was going. What you do know is that someone, at some time, for some reason, went that way.

This image came to me in December 1992. The course of that week turned my life, beginning an opening-up to many longed-for abilities and perceptions. Within the next five years I took other courses there, and in August 1997 I received a message telling me to write a book about what I had seen, felt, and experienced, as a way to encourage others. I was even given the title: “Muddy Footprints in the Grass.” So shortly thereafter I took off six months from work and set out to write what had happened to me between 1987 and 1997, as a way of demonstrating some of the possibilities open to us all.

I tried to write this book the normal way for five months before I gave up and allowed it to happen. For five months I tried outlines, tables of contents, note cards, endless revisions. Got more and more enmeshed in the apparatus of scholarship. More and more enmeshed in prior versions.

Finally I had to concede I couldn't do it. Not that way, anyway. I took all my files off the computer (though I carefully saved them on floppies; what might be called controlled desperation, or perhaps performing with a net) and left a blank legal pad on my desk.

I'd tried doing it the right way. I'd tried giving up.

Now I'd have to try living what I was preaching. Or to put it more precisely, to write in the way I had learned to live. The inner guides I call The Gentlemen Upstairs had been gently mocking me for my fear of trusting the process. You don't need notes to talk, they said rightly. Why think you need notes to write?

The process worked; at least it sort of worked. As I began writing this, I had no evidence at all that it could be done. The legal pad was as blank as the unrolling present that we call the future. But the book got reorganized, rewritten, and ready (I thought) for publication in less than a month.

There followed a series of rejections from various publishing houses. Confused, because I knew that at least some of it was good, I consulted various friends whose judgment I valued. Eventually I realized that I was receiving (if not always hearing) a consistent criticism: the book was too much about the journey of brain-wave researcher and out-of-body pioneer Bob Monroe and too little about mine. The book had a split focus, continually alternating between my personal experience and my analysis of Monroe's. At length I resolved to rewrite it with one single focus: what had happened to me, with all this implied about who we are and what our possibilities are.

So now, dear reader, it is up to you to continue. You came to this book for a reason, and you yourself probably don't yet know why. You will learn why, if you persevere. This is not a formal thesis, or a summary of the books of Bob Monroe and others, but mostly a firsthand narrative of what I've learned and how I use it. From work at The Monroe Institute and elsewhere, I learned how to obtain firsthand knowledge of life beyond what our society considers normal. I learned how to extend my abilities in ways that our society considers to be impossible. Most important, my experience sheds new light on the reality underlying this world that has been described (and then repeatedly misunderstood) in scripture the world over.

From my own experience, I have become convinced that we are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies. This life is not our only life. And although we see ourselves as “individuals” separate from each other, in fact—and not at all metaphorically—we are all connected one to another, by way of our intimate connection with a larger being that cares about us and can be trusted, but that sees things differently. This larger being is a source of foresight and wisdom made available to us both at times of its own choosing and upon our request. Nonetheless, we may often lose communication with it by failing to remember that we are more than we appear to be.

Interestingly enough, this sketch of the way I now see the world encompasses Bob Monroe's description of earthbound individuals as part of a larger being that exists primarily in a region beyond what he calls the Time-Space Illusion. This larger being sends out probes to experience earth life; the probes live as if they were separate beings, and at physical death they reunite not only with the part of the larger being that stayed outside what I call 3D Theater, but also with the others who were in the physical. But Monroe's description also passes for a good description of God as he is understood in the Christian, Jewish, and Moslem traditions. In fact, it corresponds with descriptions handed down by mystics and other wanderers in realms beyond 3D Theater. And that ought to open up many a line of fruitful inquiry, retrieving various babies from the bushes where they landed with the bathwater.

The implications of these few statements are immense, literally changing everything from birth to death and beyond. If you once see us as all connected through a larger being, many otherwise puzzling reports become matters of common sense. They become, in fact, only what is to be expected. Communication with the dead? Telepathy? Distant healing? Ghosts? Our society has opinions on all of them; all over the landscape. Knowledge? Not to be found. And this goes double for the ultimate questions. Is there an afterlife? Does God exist? Do spirits exist? If so, in both cases, do they concern themselves with human lives? Of these things our society teaches nothing because it knows nothing. Indeed, silently, by implication, it teaches that we can know nothing. Our society not only lacks a common body of accepted knowledge, it lacks a commonly accepted method of acquiring knowledge on these subjects. Instead, various elements in society dismiss the questions with contempt, or maintain a benevolent neutrality, or invite us (silently) to form opinions based on the opinions of others, or on blind faith.

But when we find ourselves habitually putting aside entire classes of phenomena that nonetheless continue to be reported over the years—over centuries—we ought to take that as a sign that we need to find or construct a better picture of the world we live in. Only an inadequate worldview forces us continually to ignore inconvenient data or put it into separate boxes that don't communicate with the rest of our mental world or with each other.

Among those inconvenient reports: ghosts; out-of-body experiences. Possession and witchcraft. Telepathy. UFOs. Afterlife experiences including heaven and hell. The power of prayer. The ability to heal by touch, and at a distance. Plenty more.

To my mind, any way of seeing the world that has been believed over time by large numbers of people was not constructed out of whole cloth. It had at least a bit of reality. The trick is to keep the bit of reality and leave the logical structure that was constructed atop it. And the way to distinguish the two is to see which part can be reconciled with other parts. Truth, ultimately, is one. It's a good sign that you're on the right trail when many seemingly separate or even contradictory bits converge.

We now have a way of seeing things that makes sense, and that offers a continuing path for us to explore and refine. It makes our world whole without chopping out large bits that we can't find room for, and does so without requiring watertight mental compartments. That is, it stops us from having to believe mutually incompatible things and think in mutually incompatible ways. What is better, it reconciles and affirms the beliefs of many seemingly incompatible belief systems. Many of the differences in beliefs over which people have killed each other (or in our day, slandered each other) now seem to be little more than difference in nuance. Each saw a different aspect and took it for the whole picture, and each then built a dogmatic structure around it. As a friend of mine whimsically says, how do you describe a blind man to an elephant?

I hope it is obvious that I know better than to think that I—unlike all those others—have caught The Ultimate Truth. I haven't. We can't; not while we are still in the body, at least, and probably not afterward either. But it is quite worthwhile to have found a larger truth, a way of seeing that catches as much reality as possible. To my mind, the most valid system is one that reconciles the greatest number of seemingly incompatible beliefs by showing that each was a partial view of something now seen whole. Or at least more whole than before. Given our limitations, that's the best we can do.

My life's experience tells me that we can obtain firsthand knowledge of these things, and that firsthand knowledge is the only kind there is. In ancient Egypt (so says Joan Grant in Winged Pharaoh) the priests in the temples taught the people using this formula: “I of my own knowledge tell you that this is the truth.” Their formula was not, “This is what I have been taught,” but, “I of my own knowledge tell you that this is the truth.” Where would we find equivalent knowledge today? Where would we find an equivalent institution? Our universities and churches have no training program to produce such teachers. They teach what is said to be true, or might be true, or ought to be true, or what we wish were true. But knowledge cannot be transmitted by those who do not know.

Without firsthand knowledge, no one can transmit the true nature of physical-matter reality, or of the worlds beyond physical life, or of what we as individuals and as groups can achieve. No one can teach the meaning of life, as it emerges from a greater understanding of the inner and outer world we live in. In this, both religion and science have failed us. Religion fails us when its priests attempt to teach from faith rather than from personal knowledge, for as a natural result they then demand faith and obedience as substitutes for study and knowledge. Science fails us when it refuses to investigate certain categories of experience or thought (such as what people call the supernatural, whether labeled as religion or parapsychology) because it believes, before investigation, that these categories of experience are nonsense. In both cases this failure is not necessarily the result of hierarchies scheming to obtain and retain power. Just as often it is the result of people not realizing that firsthand knowledge is there to be obtained.

It is as well, perhaps, to say explicitly what ought to be obvious: that I am not denying that religion and science have worth, or that they are partly based on truth, or that at best they are based on a desire to find truth rather than belief. Still, it remains true that both become more valuable to humanity when they ground their view of the underlying nature of the universe less on inherited beliefs, no matter how widespread, and more on firsthand experience, firsthand knowledge.

We are starving for that knowledge. In fact, we could kill ourselves—certainly we often kill others—in trying to compensate for lack of knowledge by taking refuge in arbitrary certainty. Those who teach firmly held beliefs, grounded mainly in the strength of the need to have something to believe, produce things like Hitler's beliefs about the master race. It is from uncertainty—and the fear that uncertainty brings—that individuals and societies do desperate things. If you don't know, you cannot teach, except by faith. And faith implies doubt. Doubt and the resulting repression of doubt breed fanaticism and intolerance. Worse, they breed ignorance pretending to infallibility, which breeds charlatans and blind followers.

I am not an Egyptian priest, and I cannot transfer my firsthand knowledge. But I can tell how you may obtain your own firsthand knowledge, and I can offer my own preliminary report of my own findings. This book is a report, in descending order of certainty, of:

• What I have experienced, as best I can reconstruct it.

• What I think that experience means.

• What others have reported having experienced.

• What they thought that experience meant.

• What light I think my own experience sheds on such reports, and vice versa.

Among other things, I share with you some true stories that give a sense of what firsthand experience makes possible, hoping to describe my journey of self-discovery (self-creation?) in such a way as to encourage you, the reader, on your own journey. In this I would be doing for you what Bob Monroe and his institute did for me. It is my hope that my own muddy footprints will help at least a few people to spend less time feeling lost, so that they can spend more time joyfully exploring.

For instance, here's a small example of how I now live. One weekend I was in New York City, and met my agent—an old friend—for breakfast at a little place she knew. As we sat down, she said she didn't know if she could eat anything. Her throat had swelled up overnight and she felt terrible. Now, as it happened, she had just done me two big favors, which added gratitude to affection, which I knew would make the job easier. So (a little self-consciously) I asked if she would mind if I tried to fix it. She said she didn't mind, so I closed my eyes and visualized her throat opening and her returning to normal health. When I opened my eyes, I didn't need to ask. Her eyes wide, she said, “That's amazing!” Then we proceeded to have breakfast. It was no big dramatic deal, you see, just life the way we can learn to live it, helping each other. That was in 1995. Today I am even more offhand about it all.

The psychic abilities I long half believed in and wanted are, if not all within reach, at least a lot closer than they used to be. And my experience convinces me that they are within reach of any who want them. It's only candid to add that the major reason I finally decided to write this book is that I realized that only by doing so could I move to another level of being. And this is what seems to have happened.

I of my own knowledge tell you what follows.

Praise for Muddy Tracks:

Muddy Tracks

Acknowledgements

Contents

Foreword

Introduction