It was a Wednesday early in 1996. My friend Ed Carter was at The Monroe Institute taking one of their weeklong residential courses, and he called me at work, suggesting that I come down there Friday morning for breakfast, as there was someone I ought to meet.
Ed had invested in Hampton Roads a few years previously, and, at his request, we had had a few business cards printed up for him listing him as Vice President for Development. In his spare time during the program, he had been functioning in that capacity. That is, he had gotten into a conversation with a fellow engineer, a tall thin guy from Colorado named Bruce Moen.
Bruce had done TMI’s Lifeline program, more than once, and had become adept at retrieving lost souls. While eating at Bennigan’s one night, he had unexpectedly wound up doing a retrieval for the people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing the year before. He had written up the retrieval process, and had brought it to the program, not knowing why.
Ed knew why.
So, on a Friday morning not long after sunrise I walked into TMI’s dining room, got myself some food, talked to Ed and met the others around his table, then settled into a long talk with Bruce. Bruce didn’t tell me till later, but he had been seeing visions of me throughout the week, not knowing who I was. So when the person from his visions walked into the dining room Friday morning, he paid attention.
Bruce told me that he was an engineer, not a writer, but was tempted to write a book about his retrievals. He might even be willing to leave his job and devote full time to writing the book, if he had some assurance that he could get the book published, but he’d heard the usual horror stories about how hard it was to get your stuff considered by publishers. He didn’t feel justified in starting the project without contract from a publisher.
“If that’s all that’s stopping you,” I said, “I can give you a contract before you leave Virginia.” And a few months later, there was a manuscript on my desk that became Voyages into the Unknown, the first of his four Afterlife Exploration books.
(Much later, in a chapter of Voyages into the Afterlife, Bruce described our meeting as it had appeared from his point of view, which I found quite interesting to read.)
Perhaps because he was an engineer, Bruce had a way of explaining things that made them very accessible. Also, he’s a natural story teller. The only thing was, he tended to say the same thing three times! (He told me it was his engineer’s training: Tell ‘em what you’re going to say, then say it, then tell ‘em what you said.) I went through slashing and burning, eliminating redundancies, and when he saw the edited manuscript Bruce did what I still think is the most intelligent thing I’ve ever seen an author do: He methodically compared his original and my edited version, page by page, and thus learned in one fell swoop what not to do. His subsequent manuscripts didn’t suffer from redundant prose.
Bruce’s four books in the Afterlife Exploration series:
* Voyages Into The Unknown starts with the Oklahoma City retrievals but then goes back to the beginning, when he was five years old, and proceeds through his initial learning experiences up to the first external verifications that began to convince him that he wasn’t making it up.
* Voyage Beyond Doubt continues his story, culminating in the retrieval that finally persuaded him that he just couldn’t be making it up, because the information that he brought back made no sense to him, but made huge amounts of sense to the living person involved.
* Voyages Into The Afterlife carries his explorations into other realms. There’s a mountain of material in this book to start the old squirrel spinning the squirrel cage. (There’s also my cameo appearance, surely by itself worth the price of the book!)
* Voyage to Curiosity’s Father goes farther yet, and has the most far-ranging implications. Using the technique of partnered exploration (which makes the task of verification easier, which reduces the anxiety one feels about bringing back information that cannot be otherwise verified), he delves into the underlying conditions of human life. Hard to say much more than that in a few words. Suffice it to say, it isn’t trivial.
After a while Bruce’s work began attracting attention. He became a public speaker, the put together a workshop to teach people-in a weekend, without external support-how to obtain verifiable information about deceased individuals. I took one of those workshops, and was able to provide just that kind of information to a fellow participant, so I know they work. Bruce put that information into his Afterlife Knowledge Guidebook which he first self-published, then gave to Hampton Roads to publish.
Quite a nice body of work, for an ex-engineer who only wrote his first book because a man he met introduced him to a publisher who gave him a contract before he had a manuscript, a man he trusted because he’d seen him in several visions.