In Memoriam: John E. Mack, M.D.
October 4, 1929 - September 27, 2004By Trish Corbett and Michael Mannion
On Monday evening, September 27, we learned from a close friend of John Mack's that he had been hit by a car and killed in London on his way home from speaking at an exciting meeting about T.E. Lawrence. Initial shock gave way to sorrow. How could this be? He was poised at the beginning of a new period of creativity as a writer and also through the new John E. Mack Institute which has just been launched.
Beginning in 1998, we worked with John closely over a three-year period and continued our involvement with him in the years that followed on a number of individual events. We were honored when he agreed to speak at our first Mindshift conference in September 2003 and hoped to co-create and co-adventure with him for many years to come.
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. In one of our meetings, we told John about our plan to start The Mindshift Institute and about our central metaphor, "The Trance State." He was tired at the end of a long day but a fire came to his eyes and he sat up straight in his chair. In a strong, serious voice he said, "I'm with you on that. You plant your flag, put forward your truth, and take what comes your way!" Shortly afterwards, he invited us through his Center to give a presentation on The Trance State in Cambridge. His support, guidance and participation in our work meant a great deal to us. At a pivotal moment in both of our lives, John had a powerful, positive and healing influence. We know he had a similar impact on many other women and men.
Soon, the first press reports on the death of our friend and colleague, began to appear. Upon reading some of them, we couldn't help but think of the end of Herman Melville's Billy Budd. Melville presents the reader with a newspaper account of the events that have just transpired in the novella. Although the newspaper account presented in the story profoundly misrepresents both the character of the people involved and the actual events that occurred, Melville writes, "It was doubtless for the most part written in good faith, though the medium, partly rumor, through which the facts must have reached the writer, served to deflect and in part falsify them."
In Melville's fictional account, it is the worldview of the reporter that shapes and distorts the information he provides the readers. Similarly, it is the worldview of those in the mass media today that shapes and often distorts the image of John Mack that they present to readers, listeners and viewers. The impact of worldviews on our conception of reality was a theme John investigated throughout his career, but especially in the last decade. In December 2002, during a visit with him in Cambridge, John told us that he was writing then about "worldviews in collision." The exploration of how one's perceptions affect one's relationships has been a dominant theme in John's work from his early clinical explorations of dreams, nightmares and teen suicide, through his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) to his controversial work on the nature of human encounters with nonhuman intelligences.
John found that these recurrent encounters dramatically affected the worldviews of the 200 women and men with whom he worked. For example, many developed a heightened sense of spirituality and environmental concern. He focused on the spiritual or transformational aspects of people's extraordinary experiences and suggested that the alien contact itself may be more spiritual than physical in nature. This set him apart, not only from mainstream science and society, but also from many who investigated the same anomalous phenomena.
One of the goals of the new John E. Mack Institute is to "honor his courageous examination of human experiences, and his landmark explorations of the ways in which perceptions and beliefs about reality shape the human condition." Let's hope that those who benefited from their relationships with John Mack honor his courageous efforts by moving forward with their own positive contributions with the great spirit that John manifested during his life here on Earth.
He was a wonderful man and we miss him.
Trish Corbett and Michael Mannion
The Mindshift Institute