MISHLOVE: You know, one of the themes that has come out of the decade or two of research at SRI is that psychic functioning works best when you separate out the intellectual overlay, because we often get confused by that. I notice the same theme in your writings, especially your most recent one. You've got the child who keeps criticizing you for being too intellectual. 

BACH: Just this minute you're putting that together. I never made that connection between what Russell was saying, and what experience has taught me about writing, which is: Stand aside. Let the story sing through you. Let the ideas just use your fingers, but don't stop and think and say, "What will people think? Maybe I'll be seen as a fool. Maybe this is ridiculous." It no longer matters. So I have on my computer monitor, where I write, it says, "Have fun." It says, "Don't think." It says, "Don't care." So even when I'm writing, I don't care. If my little character wants to remind me of things that I have forgotten, and if he wants to integrate events that I could not sit down and integrate rationally in any way, if he wants to bring them all together and then teach me something that I had no
idea that he was going to teach me, let him run, Richard. This is your job, to get out of the way. 

MISHLOVE: I think it's so both appropriate and ironic that here on a program called Thinking Allowed we are in effect advising our audience not to think at certain times. 

BACH: That is so much a part of this highway that can be opened to information between our imagining selves and our formal, this-world self. If we allow that to take down the barriers and the tollgates and all the business that must be gone through to open this highway, these strange things, the longer they say, "Is it OK for me to be weird? It's a nutty idea, but there's truth behind it, and maybe you could learn from this truth." We say, "OK, however you come, however you come." "I will come to you as a teaching angel who knew you when you were nine years old, and you made a pact that you would come back 50 years later and
tell you everything you knew. Is that all right?" "That's all right. Anything you -- whatever you say. Show me; appear before me." And so in this swirling tunnel
of mist that the computer monitor becomes for me when I'm writing, this character appears, and he says, "Here I am." I'm little Dickie, 50 years ago. Do you remember? Do you remember that pact you made?" Of course I don't remember. Life has gone by. There are other things. "Well, he cares about you." "That's all right; he's going to be fine, he's going to be fine. Give him my good regards, and I'm going to go paragliding; I'm going to jump off this mountainside." "Don't you care about the little child that you were?" "He'll be OK." The angel looks at me and tries to melt me with the inherent sorrow of what he's offering to me, and then later on I do start thinking about Dickie, and I do realize that I've shut him away. I don't know why I shut him away, but I've been running my life on
intellect for a long time. Why is that? Wouldn't he like to be right here in the air, flying with me -- in this paraglider, drifting like thistledown, 2000 feet in the air, above the forests of Washington. Wouldn't he like that? And I thought about that, and I'd close my eyes, flying there in this high swing under this lovely rainbow
wing, and he says, "Dickie, this is gonna be fun. Come to me, little child, and look out through my eyes, and you will see flight!" And instead, he says, "I hate
you and everything you stand for! Get out of here!" 

MISHLOVE: With a flame thrower. 

BACH: With a flame thrower. The kid even had a flame thrower. So this ball of flame comes roaring toward me, and I slam the door shut. What kind of way to treat your future self is that? He really hates me because I did shut him away. I'm his jailer. I'm the guy who locked him and said, "No, it's no time for fun. It's time for discovery! We're going to lock ourselves out of learning who are we, why are we here, and where are we going, and not much time for anything else, not fun and games." 

MISHLOVE: Let me ask you -- at this point, the book seems rather autobiographical. You're dealing with a trauma that occurred in your own childhood. 

BACH: That I had forgotten. And Dickie, I discovered, is the keeper of my memories, and I'd always thought, "Well, I had a very happy childhood, but I have a terrible memory." I would just remember a few things from my memory, and I didn't know why I remembered them. And then -- and this now has to be nonfiction, because now I'm going to talk about a dream. I had a dream shortly before I decided to write this book, in which I saw this child on a wide, cobblestone courtyard, standing alone -- not a tree, not a flower, not a blade of grass. I knew that was me when I was a kid, and I said, "Dickie, what are you doing here?" And he said, "This is my country." I said, "This is your country? It's sere and barren. There's no life here!" And he kind of smiled as if he knew something that I didn't, and he reached down to one of those cobblestones that I thought was just rock, and he picked it up, and when he picked it up, the cobblestone part was just the top of it. It was like withdrawing an amber crystal, honeycomb crystal, and he tossed it to me. It shattered at my feet, and I
remembered, and when I remembered, I woke up. And I woke up saying, "My God, I never have dreams that make sense. They're always a suitcase full of waffles followed by a bag of springs, and nothing makes any --" but here that was the little kid that I was, and I reached for my little pad that I always have by the bed, and wrote in the dark: "I had this dream with Dickie. What did that mean? That's so wildly creative! Those are my memories. He has my memories! 

MISHLOVE: They seemed barren to you, but every one was like a beautiful crystal. 

BACH: Yes, yes! He had it all! Then immediately he has something I want, right? How do I find this guy? The only way I can find him is to have this inner
journey, to seek him out. And even though he hates the sight of me, to somehow, somehow make it all right so we can begin to talk. Because I've got things to
give him, too. I know how it works out -- or at least how one of his futures works out. And so gradually, we have this tentative, tentative friendship, and he
begins sharing memories. I didn't realize, when my brother died when I was nine, it was not a big event, as I recall it. He was my brother; we were very good friends. He was extremely smart. Bobby was always the smartest kid in the class, and there were people studying him. He was a brilliant, brilliant kid. I was his little brother, so all I had to do was follow him. We were friends. Bobby told me one day -- and I had forgotten for the longest time, for like half a century -- Bobby said, "I'll lead the way for you, Dickie. I'm older than you are. I'll go ahead of you, and I'll warn you about really bad things. If I find anything that's really tough out there, I'll tell you, 'Look out,' and if I find something that's really interesting, I'll say, 'Come on, we'll go this way.'" And I had settled back, dangling my fingers in the water, while Bobby rode the boat of both of our lives. And then he died. 

MISHLOVE: How did he die, I ask? 

BACH: He died, I found out later, from leukemia. My parents didn't tell me. They didn't want me to suffer, I guess, and so I was the only one who didn't know that Bobby was dying. I knew that he was sick for awhile, and that he missed school, and that he looked very, very tired, and that he and my parents would have long, quiet talks to which I was not invited. What are they talking about? Are they going to get rid of me? What have I done that they're going to -- because the child always thinks it's me that's the cause. And then Bobby began feeling bad. He went to the hospital. A week later he was dead. Wow! Is that the way it
happens? Is that what death is? And no one cried in our family. I saw the obituary in the newspaper; I said, "Golly, that's our names in print." And I put that up,
and I came back and I found that it was taken down. I put it up again; it was taken down. And so I discovered my mom didn't want to be reminded about this. So finally she told me Bobby had leukemia. 

MISHLOVE: This is the point where you left little Dickie. 

BACH: That's where I left him. I said, "OK, no more fun and games. We really have to decide what this life -- if death can come so swiftly, I'd better be sharp finding out why I've lived at all. So I set about doing that, and there was this sense of vague distress about Bobby's death, but that was it. The rest of my world then became the search, became books and talks and yearnings and why? Why are we here? My father was a minister, and he had left the church when he
couldn't answer his own questions about why we were here. So we would talk from time to time, but not a great sense of progress. And as I grew, that whole incident faded out, so I thought I never even had a brother, until a few years ago, and just for fun, with a friend who had a way of exploring the past. She said, "Name some event from your past." I said, "I don't remember anything." She says, "Come on, there's got to be something." "Oh, my brother died." "OK," she said, "talk to your brother, right now. What have you always wished you could tell your brother?" And I burst into tears: "Why did you leave me?" Just uncontrollably crying. It was a magnificant kind of shattering of walls, because suddenly there was my brother again, back in my life, reminding me of what he had said. He was going to lead the way. Maybe he had decided that he would lead it in a little different way, that he would be hovering right beyond space-time for me. And perhaps he has been leading the way all this time; I don't know -- Bobby. we're going to have to talk about that.

Part 2 of 3 parts
 
 
 

Previous "Dolphin Relationship Lagoon" pages:
 

#1	How to Develop Self Esteem
#2	Love Them, Anyway
#3	Perf Measurements at Call Centers
#4	Staff Empowerment
#5	Team Training for Your Teams
#6	Handling Confrontations
#7	Social Support
#8	The Power of Influencing...
#9	Expectations
#10	Impression
#11	Learning Through the Ages
#12	Instructions for Life
#13	More Instructions for Life
#14	Inner Feelings with Virginia Satir
#15	More conversations with Virginia Satir
#16	What I've Learned in Life
#17	What Do You See?
#18	If the World Were a Village...
#19	Lessons from Noah's Ark
#20	Discussion with Albert Ellis, Part I
#21	Discussion with Albert Ellis, Part II
#22	Discussion with Albert Ellis, Part III
#23	Discussion with Albert Ellis, Part IV
#24	Discussion with Albert Ellis, Part V
#25	Discussion with Beverly Potter, Part I
#26	Discussion with Beverly Potter, Part II
#27	Discussion with Beverly Potter, Part III
#28	Discussion with Dennis Jaffe, Part I
#29	Discussion with Dennis Jaffe, Part II
#30	Discussion with Dennis Jaffe, Part III
#31	Discussion with Dennis Jaffe, Part IV
#32	Discussion with James Kouzes, Part I
#33	Discussion with James Kouzes, Part II
#34	Discussion with James Kouzes, Part III
#35	Discussion with James Kouzes, Part IV
#36	Discussion with Cynthia Scott, Part I
#37	Discussion with Cynthia Scott, Part II
#38	Discussion with Cynthia Scott, Part III
#39	Discussion with Cynthia Scott, Part IV
#40	Discussion with Richard Bach, Part I

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