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Michael Blumenthal's eulogy for John Mack
We present the first of eleven eulogies spoken at John Mack's memorial service by John's family and friends. This is one by Michael Blumenthal.
Delivered at Memorial Church, Harvard
University, Saturday, November 13, 2004
“The art of losing,” the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote, precisely because she knew it not to be true, “isn’t hard to master.” But it isn’t the art of losing—our husband, father, brother, grandfather, and our rare and remarkable friend—that we are here to try and master today. We are here, rather, I believe, to celebrate the great gift we were given in the shape of this good, kind, gentle and large-spirited man, my friend John.
I have only, in my life, once had the experience of love at first sight—some 20 years ago at a party in Newton where I first saw—and fell immediately in love with—my friend John Mack.
In the ensuing 20 years of our friendship, John was much, much more than a friend to me: He was a father, a brother, a Godfather to my son, a sex symbol to my wife (“those gorgeous Macks,” she called John and his sons) a mutual confessor and confessee of our joys and sorrows… he was, in the deepest sense of the word, a soul-mate. He was, in fact, for me, the living embodiment of what I immodestly call Blumenthal’s Law: That water—because it is fermented by the chosen—is often far thicker than blood.
My friend John knew, firsthand and at the earliest possible age, the meaning of loss—in fact, that gravest loss of all for a young child: the loss of his mother. But, like the Greek warrior Philoctetes, he also knew that our woundedness can also become the source of our strength, of our compassion, of our openness to the world and its mysteries. He knew that being wounded means remaining capable of being hurt… because it also means remaining able to feel. And, all his life, John was open to the wounded, in whatever form they came: neglected children, wounded veterans, suffering friends, confused and soul-searching young clinicians. Nor was one world even enough to contain the range of his sympathies: they extended, even, those who considered themselves frightened and misunderstood abductees from another.
And while certain more “serious-minded” persons, in high places and low, sometimes sought to mock— even to persecute— him for his openness and vulnerability, he went on doing exactly that by which Marcus Aurelius defines the good man: “modestly following the divine, saying nothing but what is true, doing nothing but what is just.” Like the truly good man that he was, he rarely, if ever, spoke badly of anyone—with the possible exception of George W. Bush—not even of those who tried to harm him.
Like all of us, John was hardly a perfect man. But, precisely for that, he was all the more impressively— and all the more profoundly— that rarest of human creatures: a truly good one. When I reflect upon those admirable qualities enumerated by Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations—“simplicity, goodness, purity, dignity, lack of affectation, love of justice, piety, kindliness, graciousness and strength for one’s appropriate duties”—these were the qualities I will always associate with my friend. Nor were they mere abstractions in his warm and capable hands: He put—in countless small, profoundly human ways— meat on their ever-hungry bones.
Professionally speaking, there were many Johns— John the child psychiatrist, John the biographer, John the teacher, John the political activist, John the holiotropic breath worker, John the investigator into what some might call the para-normal. But, in the most fundamental, and most spiritual, sense, there was always one and the same John… wherever he went, and whatever he did. Part of the genuine beauty, the genuine lovability, of who he was—and, since I am incapable of speaking of him in the past tense, of who he is—was that no situation, no human presence, no mortal contingency, could alter the fundamental integrity and wholeness of his being. Like Walt Whitman, his very presence, and his fundamental humility, insisted: “Nothing external can ever command me completely.”
Because he was a true aristocrat—an aristocrat of the spirit—human categories and status meant nothing to my friend John. He didn’t care—couldn’t have cared less—whether you were a Jew or a Sikh or a Muslim or an infidel. He didn’t care if you were a devotee of Yogi Batwan or Werner Erhard or Stanislav Graf or Sri Aurobindo, or of the B’aal Shem Tov. He didn’t care if you were a Harvard professor or a high school dropout, a Nobel laureate or a janitor, whether your book had sold 10 million copies or 10, whether you were the Dalai Lama or simply the four-legged kind.
He knew, as did Keats, that the world was “a vale of soul-making,” and he respected, and honored, the right of every single soul, no matter how humble, to get made. He was possessed, in other words, of a truly Augustian sense of humanity: “Love means: I want you to be.” And John wanted all of us to be.
Just a few days ago in Tennessee, my son Noah, who loved John like a grandfather and admired him like a father, said to me, “It’s just impossible to believe that John isn’t here.” “John,” I answered him, “is here… and, for us, he will always be here.” Because John was so vividly present to us— so vividly present, I think, to all who knew him—that, even when we were supposedly apart, I felt his presence with me… as I do now. And because goodness and kindness and decency and nobility of spirit survive the mere physical body that tries, unsuccessfully, to contain them, he will never, ever, be gone for me.
On what would have been John’s 75th birthday, October 4th, I took a walk around a pond in Tennessee near where I am presently living. It was a beautiful, crisp and luminescent Fall day— the kind John would have loved and which I sometimes spent with him in Cambridge or Thetford. As I walked around the pond, I saw a great blue heron, a family of cardinals, the common turtle known as a red-eared slider, muskrats, white-tailed deer, warblers of all sorts. I saw, in other words, all around me: Life, and its persistent continuing.
And, then, a single line came to me: “The dead are only dead to us if we let them die.” As did also some lines written by the poet Howard Nemerov, about the painter Paul Klee, which I believe are equally applicable to this particular occasion, and to the life of our dear friend:
So may it be to all of us, that at some times
In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail,
And when impatience in the street and still despair at home
Divide the mind to rule it, there shall some comfort come
From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his
His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought,
The same dream that flared before intelligence
When light first went forth looking for the eye.
And, when I considered those words, I knew that—though my beloved friend now had an unlisted number— for me, at least, he will never be unreachable. As an African proverb has it: “The wood burns out, but the fire goes on forever.” He is, I believe, here with us today. And the light from his flame will light my own life until the same Unidentified Flying Object that came to get him comes to get me.
We present another of the eulogies spoken at John Mack's memorial service by John's family and friends. This is one by Richmond Mayo Smith.
Delivered at Memorial Church, Harvard
University, Saturday, November 13, 2004
John Mack lived a large life and I am honored to describe one sphere of this life.
It is a sphere in which he joined with others in organized efforts for social transformation.
There are many people standing with me here today. I will name a few to give you a sense of the shape of this group, but I will be leaving out many wonderful people, some known to me and many more not known.
Dick Chasin and Paula Gutlove, chair of the board and executive director when I first joined the organization. It was called the Nuclear Psychology Program in those days, and underwent a number of name changes as it evolved. Its final name is the John E. Mack Institute, in honor of John and his work. Standing with Dick and Paula are the many people who served on the boards and staffs of these organizations.
Laurence Rockefeller, Bob Bigelow, Michael Baldwin, Dennis Briefer, Ted Mallon and many more who believed in John's work and supported it in spirit and with money.
Sophia Wesolowski, Pat Carr, Will Bueche, Maria Talcot and those special people who helped John get his work done and who enriched the doing with creative understanding.
Karin, Peter and all those with whom John co-adventured in his continuing exploration of what it means to be fully human.
Sequoyah Trueblood, Rudy Schild, Edgar Mitchell, Sarah Conn, Trish Pfeiffer, Roberta Colasanti and the many colleagues who joined with John in presenting a variety of programs.
Stan Grof, Gurucharan Singh Khalsa, Roz Zander, Michael Zimmerman, Lane Conn and the great array of people who engaged in unending dialogues with John about his work.
I am sure you realize that many people fall into more than one category.
What were we all about? In what work did John engage us?
I will try to answer that question and I hope you will hear me in John's spirit - in his joy of entertaining new possibilities with an open and skeptical mind.
I would say that we were all engaged in expanding our worldview. Our worldview answers two questions: "What do we believe is real?" and "How do we know what we believe we know?"
Our worldview is one of our most precious possessions because it frames the choices we make.
John held his worldview lightly, seriously but lightly, and with a high degree of awareness.
He and friends began by asking why we and the Soviets were building such huge numbers of nuclear weapons - overkill many times over. What was going on under the surface? From this question we moved on to look at the underlying forces in long-term international conflict and in our destroying of our earth home.
Then John's exploring ways brought him to a group of people who described their experiences interacting with intelligences from other dimensions.
John moved to meet these people with great skepticism, but he would not turn away because the dominant worldview declared the event to be impossible. I believe a scientist is first and foremost an individual with an open mind who believes in the public validation of findings. Living in these beliefs, the scientist must act with competence and experience. In Johns case, the experience was of a skilled clinician.
In a tribute to John Michael Mannion wrote, "John had a marvelous capacity to be present. As a clinician, his connectedness and caring were deeply expressed and deeply felt by those he worked with." John was able to be fully present with these experiencers and he found them believable and he thought their experiences deserved a full clinical study.
Can you imagine making the decision to investigate this phenomenon? People speak of his courage, and courage it took, but two other qualities were paramount. One is being a great humanitarian and wanting to help people who found themselves in such distressing circumstances. The other is the joy of exploring. How can you turn away from the possibilities of learning so much about human potential?
I do not fully grasp how he lived through the stress of those times in the wilderness. Special friends and a great sense of humor made it possible. Come through it he did and in the process enlarged our understanding greatly and gave support to many other brave investigators.
I would like to speak more personally now to describe an experience which I think will exemplify how John enabled many others to grow
Years ago I read a passage by Donald Oliver, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in which he observed that we are caught in a paradox. As we increase the focus and clarity of our verbal communications, we may be cutting ourselves off from a full knowing of an experience
I thought, "I believe this. What am I going to do?" Within a few weeks a flyer crossed my desk describing a workshop on Holotropic Breathing led by John Mack. I remember going to that workshop - half of me proud to be taking the risk and half calling myself an idiot. In any case it was the first of many experiences which led to a much greater understanding of what it means to be a human being.
I believe that all the people standing here with me and thousands more would be able to describe similar ways in which John expanded their sense of who they are.
Finally I would like to speak as a grandfather. I think of myself primarily as a grandfather these days, committed to doing what I can to build a decent world for my grandchildren and all children. I believe with every fiber of my being that, while we can do much to slow down the rates of destruction within the present dominant worldview, the worldview in which I grew up, our only hope of creating the world I desire for our children requires that we expand our worldview. John introduced me to such thinking and gave me a path to follow on which to act.
I was speaking in such fashion the other day and my conversation partner said "Oh, what you want are born again world viewers." I think John would enjoy that.
As many of you know John's latest explorations were about the survival of consciousness after we leave our bodies. I believe in such survival and I am sure John's spirit is with us today. For me and my group I say,
"Great thanks John. We love you."
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