Justin Pomeroy

I wrote Osha that I'm sad about Bruce's passing....he was such a humble, loving person. It's a pity how he died seemingly all alone. Yet, he is/was one of those rare beings who was "in the world but not of the world", here, yet not here, not involved with samsaric living.....just dedicated to the truth, to being conscious, awake, open and helpful to others. Bruce was one of the "originals" of the Enlightenment Intensive "revolution" as were Osha, Edrid, and Mark. He carried that original "Abilitist spirit"—communication and understanding as an accelerated pathway to awakening to ultimate truth. But as his "planetary" life crumbled all around him—a mystery to me at first— he still attended enlightenment intensives to the very end. I think he saw his highest calling, his 'bodhisattva path" as being there for others in the contex of an enlightenment intensive, the venue of truth-talking and awakening. He didn't seem to find anything else in life more worthwhile for himself.

One of my favorite memories of Bruce

Back in the 1980's, my friend, Norm Don (who many of you know from enlightenment Intensives) wanted Bruce and me to give a presentation on the "Enlightenment Intensive Process" at the Council Grove Conference held every year in Council Grove, Kansas, a rural bucolic park once the center of Native American council meetings of braves, chiefs and medicine men. I had heard about this yearly event for years and I had heard it was a kind of "top secret" gathering of many luminaries of diverse backgrounds: cutting-edge quantum physicists, biofeedback researchers, paranormal experimenters, intuitive healers, psychedelic scientists, transpersonal psychologists, Transcendental Meditation masters, UFO abductees, Tibetan Buddhist Lamas and Rimpoches, roshis and sufis. If you were a "consiousness junky", Council Grove was the place to be every year the week after Easter! It was/is a kind of "sacred" area where many Native American tribes met each year in the geographical center of the contiguous United States. It had morphed into a consciousness conference started by Walter Pahnke, a LSD researcher back in 1968. However, you had to be formally invited to this very limited audience, secretive event. Somehow, Norm, who had been invited for a number of years due to his excellent work in parapsychology, had secured an invitation for Bruce and I and we were on the "roster" to present on the Enlightenment Intensive!

When Bruce and I arrived, we couldn't believe our audience! There was physicist Gary Zukof, Rupert Sheldrake ("morphogenetic fields"), Jean Houston ("Varieties of Psychedelic Experience"), Andrew Weil, Caroline Myss ("The Anatomy of the Spirit"), Elmer Green, Chief Rolling Thunder along with various Buddhist monks , Hindu Swamis and sundry other consciousness rogues, healers and yogis! I was nervous! Like, what did we step into? When it was our turn to speak, Bruce let me go first. I did my best to share my experience, myself, my "hit" on what the EI process was all about. Then Bruce took over! He hardly spoke of the Enlightenment Intensive; instead he talked about his experience of "no self" as his awakening. He went on and on about the importance of waking up, of directly experiencing the truth. I looked over at the the Buddhist monks, many of whom were dressed in traditional Tibetan robes. They had that look, that glint in their eyes of recognition. A lot of them smiled! I knew then, that our presentation was a success. Bruce had wowed them all!