It is almost certain that somewhere in your house is a book by Richard Bach. With roughly 36,000,000 copies of Jonathan Livingston Seagull circulating, the work may be the best selling novel in history. It is certainly an unusual achievement. Even more unusual:  His ideas are not exactly an easy fit with what we think of as popular culture. The last time I checked, people were not falling all over themselves to read metaphysics.

Richard Bach creates landscapes that are not friendly to classification. In fact, any kind of boundary is antithetical to his ideas. He is frequently a main character in his fiction. His fiction is not necessarily fiction.

He is known for leaving endlessly quotable lines in his wake that make it onto inspirational plaques at the dental office. Strange indeed. The casual reader couldn’t easily interpret the ramifications of his message without leaving most of her or his cherished beliefs far behind; You teach best what you most need to learn.

His most recent effort, The Messiah’s Handbook, is a collection of the very most quotable quotes gathered from his most beloved books. Or, if you like, is an instruction manual for accessing the infinite.

TVP: So many of the people who interview you sail past the writer and go straight to your metaphysics, so I want to start with your authorship. Your latest book, The Messiah’s Handbook brought you in touch with a very imposing legacy of material. Did you garner any new insights that had not occurred to you when you had written those books?

Richard Bach: Wow, what an interesting question. The kind of ideas to which I’m drawn seem to have many levels. I’ll meet them in an environment that will show me one level. Some time later- sometimes years later- I’ll see a whole different level of meaning. That’s what charms me about the pieces that have become the Messiah’s Handbook, that they seem to encompass quite a few different facets. They seem to be able to reach me when I’m in very difficult times, and also when I’m doing well in pleasant times too. They bring me a kind of perspective. That’s a great mystery and a great pleasure.

TVP: Did you find yourself tuning in on the person you were when you wrote those books, thought these thoughts?

RB: I remember when most of them came to me and it is not at all unusual for them to come to me while flying. I’ll write something on a blank spot on a map. When I come back from the flight I’ll put it into the computer. I’ve often wondered why ideas come to us when we are least able to give them the attention they deserve, when we’re farthest away from a computer or pen and paper. Then I discovered that there’s an idea fairy and she knows when the time is right. When we’re in the middle of a shower or working hard on something else our mind becomes clear and for her it becomes a blank slate. She rushes in and hands us an idea that startles us and turns us from whatever else we’re doing.  There’s a kind of impact there: "gotta remember this, gotta remember this…"

For a while I had a grease pen and a slate in the shower because I was always getting these really interesting ideas to me when I was just totally wet and unable to write.

TVP: So many artists get ideas when they ‘shouldn’t’ that I’ve come to the conclusion that any mundane task that pushes the ego aside for a while seems to kick the ideas in.

RB: I completely agree with that. It doesn’t seem to be something that one can direct oneself to do. Stories about writers are filled with comments about them not inventing their characters and not having a clue that their stories would turn in a certain direction. It is a giving up of one’s conscious sense of self and drifting into this blank meadowland of the inner world, in which these events just happen. I know that when I’m writing, the computer just disappears and I’m in a different place. I just watch what happens.

There’s always some compelling reason that brings me there. If it’s a book idea I can no longer run away from, that idea becomes this bright core, a kind of magnetic target. I don’t know how I’m supposed to hit it or what I’m supposed to do, but I do know that I’m supposed to give up thinking, and give up any sense of conscious creating. I simply give to the idea my typing skills and my vocabulary and all the experiences I’ve had through my life. Out of this somehow will come a story that will touch me and teach me and entertain me. I don’t quite know the process; I just throw my rough ideas out there. I have taped on my computer monitor: "Have fun," "Don’t think." And "Don’t care." Each of those is a profound lesson that I learned along the way. Ray Bradbury gave me one of those, "Don’t think." That was really important.

TVP: The ironic thing about writing is that it’s one of the most intellectual pursuits, but you can only go there by getting stupid.

RB: That is so true. Very often you need to get networked into "Don’t care." If we think that we must be erudite, intellectual, and must never be seen as foolish, you’ve really started out on the wrong foot as a writer. Most new writers do just that. It takes a lot of experience to learn that the gift I have to give is my foolishness. It’s the craziness of my ideas that make them interesting, make them worthwhile. Once we learn to relax and not to worry about how the reader, the editor, or the publisher thinks of us. Then we can get down to the interesting writing.

TVP: Because of the metaphysics you deal with, there’s always, on a certain level, an agenda when its time to write. Has the writing process ever pulled you away from that?

RB: I disagree with the use of the term agenda, but I think you’re right. There probably is an agenda that I’m simply not aware of.

Most of my books, I hope all of them; can be reduced to a single sentence. Illusions for instance: What would it be like to be the best friend of the savior of the world? That idea was so charming and so filled with excitement for me. I have no idea what it would be like to be the best friend of the savior of the world, but I sure wanted to find out. The only way to find out was to go with this inner locomotive that was there steaming and smoking, "Will you please touch the throttle and get my wheels going, please sit down at the typewriter!"  When I did, all these things happened. It wasn’t my agenda, other than to have fun with this idea. I get so bored with solemnity when it comes to things of the spirit. I wanted to have something that was light, that was funny. I wanted to see my messiah as a person who was frustrated with the solemnity of it himself. He had something to say about the nature of reality and he was excited about it. He was a teacher and loved to teach. But the people who came to him weren’t interested in learning. They were saying "You heal me please, you fix my bank account. Touch me and give me understanding, but I don’t want to work for it. After a while it was pretty clear as I was writing that story, that this gets old. Finally you say, "Do it yourself, I’ll see you around!" Then what happens? What happens after the messiah quits his job? That’s really interesting. I laughed and I just had fun with that idea as it was unfolding itself to me.

I have an agenda in that I want every book to be entertaining. I want a reader to smile and say "I’ve known that all along." Rarely if ever will I write about an idea no one has ever heard of. I just couch it in my way for that family of readers who have the same sense of humor as I do.

TVP: One thing that makes you very different from any writer I can think of is that writing is more the byproduct rather than the product of what you do.

RB: I agree with that.

TVP: You meet your characters, rather than construct them, for example.

RB: I’m interested that you would make that comment, because I feel very much that way too. I have a lot of respect for my characters, a lot of respect for my reader too.  I’m part of a process, as any writer is.

An idea, in order to be expressed, first has to find someone who loves it. That happens intuitively or mystically, I don’t know how. Somehow, full blown, this idea appears and it needs a writer, or a film maker, or a painter or whatever, and that’s step one. Step two; the idea will draw to it everyone else it needs to manifest itself in the mind of a reader somewhere. In needs to have a publisher, for instance. When it chooses a writer, it has to find someone with a stubborn tenacity, someone who is used to rejection slips- I expect to get some rejection slips before my work finds a home. The Idea needs a printer and publicity and all that. The writer just sits there and watches it happen. You know from your writing that you feel like you have some control over the idea. Then it goes out to the publisher and you realize that it’s not yours anymore. Then you have the strange experience. If you write about things that are important to you- you’ll hear back from a total stranger about your life or your experience. It’s oddly come round in a full circle. One of the pleasures of being a writer is to be a servant of that idea, to be critical to its existence for a while. After that it says thank you and goodbye. Now and then you hear back from someone here or someone there who tells you what the idea did for them, how it changed their life. The idea now has its different life.

TVP:  It has always amazed me how much courage it must take to be so generous with you autobiographical material. You place an incredible amount of trust in your reader.

RB: I don’t think courage is quite the word because during the writing process there’s a safety switch. If I get uncomfortable I can just delete the whole thing, though that’s probably not quite true because by the time you’re deeply into a book you become committed to the work. There are times when I kind of grit my teeth, but the story says that it needs that experience- that I need to share. There’s a backup that says that I can just cut it out if I don’t like it. It seems that most often I don’t cut it out. People may think I’m really odd in this way or that, and that may be so, but the story needs it. And out it goes. It’s an intimate kind of writing. Many readers will have a sense that they know me. It is a little bit disconcerting as a person instead of a writer to have a very small percentage of readers feel that it is important for me to know all about them. Sometimes in the case of stalkers it gets to be a little uncomfortable. That all goes with the calling.

TVP: That is probably healthy.

RB: I think so. The great thing about flying, the other passion in my life, is that it doesn’t care how many books I’ve written, or what other people think at all. All it cares about is how well I fly and how well I know the sky. Flying keeps me grounded. It reminds me that the stuff of inter-human communication is an atmosphere of the mind. The airplane reminds me that if I have a fifteen knot crosswind I want to touch down on the upwind wheel and keep that nose going straight down the runway. It doesn’t care at all about affairs of the mind. That’s good balance.

TVP: You’re writing from a broader perspective than many writers, do you find that many of the things that you’ve discovered about consciousness also serve to shape your stories?

RB: Those are all tools in the tool box. I took a course in writing when I was in high school to get out of a course in English literature. The teacher of that course was the football coach, but he was also a writer for an outdoor magazine and a series of books for young people. The sense of power that he gave us, that every thing you need to know is out there. You can make a study of how various writers used various techniques, but listen to the ones who touch you. If someone uses a technique that works for you, salt it away deep in the storehouse of your thinking and someday it will come up when you need it.

I’m very impressed by the way writers reach me. One of my very favorite writers was Neville Chute. He wrote 23 absolutely fascinating books. When I reread his books I’ll notice that three pages later I’ll be in a different frame with no idea how he did that. I’ll stop and go back and find out that he shifted perspective to a different character. The sense of wonderment that comes from that kind of surprise is available to any writer. What fascinates and amazes me, I can use that. And it all flows within the current of the idea itself.

I love being taken off balance when I read a book. I love being taken off balance when I write a book. Very often something I don’t even suspect, all of the sudden it will just be there and I realize that somehow I need to change the tense or change the person or go into a totally different environment and I haven’t pulled the reader. And then I choose not to tell the reader. I write for a reader who is extremely capable of understanding the smallest nuance. There will be very subtle connections between one part of the story for example and another.  I assume my reader is going to see that, that she is working on a kind of creative puzzle, and that each time she finds a piece of the puzzle it deepens her enjoyment of the story.

I don’t have any special techniques that other writers don’t have; it comes from the idea itself. Irving Stone, for instance, did enormous amounts of research, just boxes and boxes of index cards and he wrote the most beautiful books from that.

I am exactly the opposite; I use almost no notes, no research other than my life. My life is my research, and I obviously draw upon my own experience in my stories, but that’s it. I have just a hazy, foggy notion of where this thing might be going. When I was writing "Running from Safety" I had no idea until something like page 342, who one of the characters was. There was this other person hiding behind the character

TVP: I knew that!

RB: That you would know that makes you the kind of person that I write for.

TVP: The fabulous thing about that book is that the entire conflict, the entire development, is ultimately one character interacting with himself.

RB: That is exactly right.

TVP: The structure suggests that this is not a fictional process. So much of what we do experience is necessarily filtered through the funnel of other aspects of our consciousness.

RB: Absolutely right.

TVP: From that very perspective, when you started writing, no one was thinking this way.

RB: I don’t believe that.

TVP: I’m going to say that if they were, they certainly weren’t shouting it from rooftops.

RB: I don’t think I’ve brought anything new or different into writing other than what any other writer brings, and that’s their own sense, experience, playfulness as a gift to a limited number of readers.  I write for a family of people, and I know there are lots and lots of other families whose needs and hopes draw them to other writers.  I have a sense that I am writing to a close friend, my reader.  I’ve come to know her or him over the years.  When I sit down to write a new story I have the sense of someone for whom I am writing, that I’m not the only one who’s going to love this story.  The story is enveloped, from my point of view, with the kind of anticipatory delight.  As that progress is and unfolds I’m trusting that the reader is going to have the same enjoyment that I have from it.

TVP: A physicist can write a theorem that may imply that time moves out from a postulated center rather than a linear format.  That’s a very different from moving into your own past, your own future, and outlining what it means to go sideways in time.

RB: Sure, in that sense.  A physicist is looking at the structure of possibility, and the writer is experiencing the act of moving through it. The physicist is designing the airplane; the writer is taking it across the sky.  Both are important.

[Editor’s Note: Beginning in the early 1960’s, Jane Roberts started receiving messages from a ‘disembodied’ personality called Seth. The messages were of profound density and complexity. The personality began to speak through her, dictating a large number of books regarding the relationship of consciousness to matter, space and time. This was nearly 20 years prior to the spate of New Age channelers who later became prevalent and well known for comparatively predictable and insipid ‘channeling’.]

TVP: After you had written Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you met Jane Roberts and Robert Butts. That had to have been an unbelievable experience.

RB: (Laughter) It was.

TVP: You were already developing theories that were very similar to their work. The level of recognition must have been astounding to you.

RB: The way I was led to meet Jane and Rob was one of these examples of the principle of coincidence.  When someone says there’s a book I have to read I say " sure". When the third or fourth person in a row tells me I need to read a book, I start listening. That had happened with Jane’s first book, The Seth Material. I was in this dim little corridor in a second hand book store with books to the ceiling. This book was sticking out like it was about to fall down. I reached up to push it back in and I noticed it was that book. I opened it and was completely fascinated. If you know the Seth books, there like deep chocolate fudge. One sentence will last you for hours. At the time Jane-believe it or not- was in the phone book, so I called her. I told her that I’d had this strange experience. I’d written a book that I felt was not of my personal creation. She asked me what book. I said Jonathan Livingston Seagull. She said that people had been telling her to read that book. She and Rob, her husband, invited me up for dinner. So I flew up and had a wonderful time with them, and occasionally with Seth, who would come booming through Jane at odd intervals whenever there was something interesting for him to say. It was fascinating to see the way they all worked together to communicate these ideas. The wonderful thing about Seth is that he never took himself solemnly, seriously, yes, but solemn never. He was always making little jokes and inflections and turns of voice, immensely powerful. He was using Jane, but it certainly wasn't her voice.

Incidentally, she wore coke-bottle glasses because her vision was so poor, and the instant he came through he would toss the glasses aside, able to see perfectly. It was a very strange, very happy experience. Lots of things that I thought at the time were strange were happening. It was a great example of being led to a like soul. I did disagree with him about a few things, his assertion that we create our own reality. I indicated that we create our own appearances. He preferred the world ‘reality’ and I thought that that was sloppy, and there’s a critically important difference. There is one reality. He acknowledged that, but never to my satisfaction.

TVP: If you go over the entire work, he was taking a ‘baby-steps’ approach, dribbling out as much as a 20th century mind would handle, at once.

RB: Maybe. I don’t know that it was a conscious process. There’s a writer with an agenda. He knew what he was going to write seven books down the road. Their walls were lined with transcripts of his dictation. Listening to him, everything he said was final draft, complete and finished.

TVP: It strikes me that during that time, there was a multi-dimensional upsurge coming through in as many places as it was allowed.

RB: Well said.

TVP: And you were part of that process.

RB: One of many people. I’m happy to see that what at one time might have seemed like a very strange set of concepts are now very widespread. It shows an acceptance of ideas about our own personal responsibility for shaping our world. I find that really encouraging. I’m glad to be in a world in which so many people are being adventurous with their consciousness.

There are a lot of people making their lives much richer as a result.

TVP: You have to confess that you made a significant contribution to that.

RB: I made a significant contribution to people who have read my books and enjoyed them.  Other people have read other books and developed in the same way. I don’t have a sense of myself as being an important writer. I made a difference to that small family of readers who have found some of my books. I’ve written a lot of books that no one has read. The Ferret Chronicles, my favorite book. Virtually no one has read them. Simon and Schuster loved them. Their sales force could not sell the book. The rights reverted and now Hampton Roads is going to publish them.

I have no illusions about my status in literature. I write ideas that enchant me. If I do a really good job, they’ll enchant the readers too. Once in a while there are a whole lot of readers for a book. Other times there will be none. I’ve got 30 copies of Out of My Mind sitting in the hanger. It was an experiment. It worked for me. I don’t think I worked for many readers. The idea was: "Here’s a ticket on a kind of underground psychic railroad. I’ll show you the place I went." Some people got it, some people didn’t. I don’t necessarily have any power over that. My job is to write as clearly and as entertainingly as I can.

I’ve had readers cut Jonathan into little pieces and mail it to me with a note that says, "This is what I thought of your book, you Antichrist!" That’s not about me, it’s about them. Again, once the story goes out, I have no power over it.

TVP: There are two different imperatives in publishing. A writer wants to express. A publisher wants numbers.

RB: An individual at a publishing house may agree with a writer’s point of view, but always there is that bottom line. It’s truer today than it was 20, 30 years ago, especially with all the publishing mergers. Now they’re not willing to develop an author, they’re after a best seller.

TVP: That’s why the smaller publishing houses are meeting a lot of needs that can’t be considered at the big firms.

RB: I’m dealing a lot these days with little Hampton Roads. They said that they couldn’t get the kind of advance that you could get somewhere else, but that they could care about my book, and they’d do all they can. They’re striving to open a relationship with their writers. Their president flew out here to meet me and we just talked about all kinds of things. I have an old fashioned, personal relationship with them, but I don’t have what some of the big publishers who still publish my book. I was just wondering yesterday who I could call at William Morrow, who is no longer William Morrow, but is now Harper Collins. In the place of the person I talked to there are now all these corporate suits. I have to call the corporate operator to find out who to talk to.

I made a game out of collecting rejection slips. When I sent a manuscript out, I needed a rejection slip to expand my collection. Most often I’d get one. Once in a while I’d get a little thing that said, "We want to buy it." I’d feel almost disappointed.

Everyone has to come to terms with this somehow, by sheer persistence; you have to find someone to publish your book.