Susan M. Watkins wrote two nonfiction books about the happenings at the ESP class conducted by Jane Roberts, who at times would enter a trance state and the 'channeled entity' known as 'Seth' would speak. Additionally, Susan's candid memoir Speaking of Jane Roberts (2001) includes some recollections about the night in 1972 when Richard Bach visited the class —
He'd been visiting Jane and Rob [her husband] that day, with an editor friend, having run across the Seth books, and recognizing a certain kinship with the origins of his best-seller, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
A1972 New York Times article by Raymond Walters Jr. presents a description of the events in the life of Richard Bach that resulted with the publication of his famous book. The headline is "Seven Ways Not to Make a Best Seller" as some customary publishing industry beliefs concerning how to 'induce a bestseller' have nothing to do with the rise in popularity of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. At first no mainstream magazines or book clubs were interested in the book. There wasn't even a single magazine or newspaper review other than in what the reporter called 'flying fan journals.' Nor was there a single TV showman interested in having Bach as a guest.
The following paragraphs are from the New York Times article.
This mid-thirtyish native of suburban Chicago, onetime Air Force captain and latterday barnstorming pilot, was supporting himself in a way by editing and writing for flying fan magazines. He had published three books, the most successful of which, Stranger to the Ground, the reflections of a fighter pilot on a flight from England to France, sold a grand total of 17,000 copies.
One foggy evening back in 1959, depressed by the fact that his writing was barely paying his rent, Bach took a stroll along a canal embankment in Belmont Shores, Calif., when he heard a crystal clear voice chant in his ear three words: "Jonathan Livingston Seagull." He rushed back to his lonely writer’s room and, a man inspired, typed out some 3,000 words. These told of a sea gull who grew discontented with the life lived by the other birds in his flock, dreary creatures who flew merely to pick up scraps of food dropped from garbage scows. One day this sea gull, whose name was Jonathan, soared up and away, determined to perfect his flying ability. Unable to think of a way to end his little fable, Bach put it away.
Nine years and several editorial jobs later, Bach woke up early one morning in Ottumwa, Town. That crystal clear voice was dictating the next chapter. In perfecting his flying at high speeds, Jonathan had turned into a bird of another feather. By reaching for the impossible beyond the boundaries of time and space, he became a kind of divine teacher to other birds.
After a couple of tries, Bach placed the story with Private Pilot Magazine, for an honorarium of $200. So many fan letters flew into the editor's office that Bach obliged with two more installments. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” was reprinted by other magazines here and abroad with thanks but no fee. Bach then asked his agent, Don Gold, if he could find a publisher willing to bring it out as a book.
All told, the saga of Jonathan Livingston Seagull ran less than 10,000 words. Gold decided to circumvent this obstacle by submitting it to juvenile-book editors. Short tales about animals, if generously illustrated, are popular with children. One reply: “The personification of the seagull represents a grave problem. Jonathan's lucid analysis of a falcon's wing seems to suggest that birds really can analyze the physics of flight. There is no evidence that this can be true. Have you ever thought of doing a factual book for children that explains how birds fly?”
Two years passed. Then, in the summer of 1969, Eleanor Friede, senior editor at Macmillan and an amateur pilot herself, happened to have lunch with a friend of Bach. Mention of his name reminded her how much she had enjoyed Stranger to the Ground. She promptly launched a prescient letter off to Ottumwa: “I have a very special feeling about the subjects you write about that makes me think you could do a work of fiction that would somehow speak for the next few decades.” Within a week tearsheets of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” arrived in her office.The text made Mrs. Friede's heart and imagination soar, but the stiff, scientifically accurate sketches sent along to illustrate it left her uneasy. Perhaps photographs would serve better. Bach, on a flying trip to New York, solved the problem readily. A friend and fellow flying nut, professional photographer named Russell Munson, just happened to have in his files a thousand pictures of seagulls he'd taken on a grant.In a memo proposing the book's publication to the Macmillan management, Mrs. Friede projected more visions: “While the story has special appeal to pilots and seamen, its theme is a universal one, suggesting that through perseverance, ability and love of learning each of us can touch perfection every day of his life and in lives to come. I think it has a chance of growing into a longlasting standard book for readers of all ages.”
On publication day, Aug. 31, 1970, fewer than 3,000 copies had been ordered, mostly in California and the Midwest.
Once in the stores, Jonathan Livingston Seagull took flight, slowly at first, then ever higher and faster. The first printing was sold out by the end of the Christmas season, largely to flying fans. It made a fine remembrance for a friend for whom a card was not enough, a TV set too much. The friends started coming into the stores for several copies for their friends. Enthusiasts of a great variety of persuasions began to appear — Christian Scientists, Yoga devotees, Buddhists, practitioners of Zen, existentialists, theosophists, followers of Karl Barth, Platonists, Christians who professed to find it an allegory of Jesus's life.
During 1971 there were eight more printings, for a total of 140,000 copies. But it was not until this past spring that the trade and press began to realize what an extraordinary phenomenon it had on its hands. Macmillan began to run large ads. A short interview with Bach in the daily Times led to a two‐page picture spread in Life. Publishers in half a dozen countries bought rights. A West Coast film maker who read the book in the barber's chair rushed to the telephone to buy film rights in a deal that gives Bach half the profits and collaboration in the production. A TV showwoman in Pittsburgh ventured to book Bach on her show, found that the tall, rangy, mustachioed flier has the makings of a show‐biz personality and has invited him to return again and again. A Chicago talkcaster had the same experience. A West Coast FM station that drew a record mail when the story was read on one of its programs, now styles itself “The Jonathan Livingston Seagull Station.” The Book‐of‐the‐Month Club offered the book as a dividend in April. The Reader's Digest condensed it in May. At last month's convention of the American Booksellers Association in Washington, Bach attracted the most clamorous lines of any of the authors present to autograph their works.
The end of Jonathan's tale is not in sight. Even now the deep thinkers of the land are scanning Bach's misty, poetic prose and its parable “of one little seagull's search for freedom, his striving to attain perfection.” They'll soon have figured out what all this reveals of the predicament of Western man in the afternoon of the 20th century.
This blogger hasn't read any of Richard Bach's other books yet while researching this article I noticed that the author's life experiences include having participated in a 1975 remote viewing experiment conducted by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff.
Here is a paragraph from Jonathan Livingston Seagull that provides an example of this feathered protagonist's mentality.
"I don’t care what they say," he thought fiercely, and his vision blurred as he flew out toward the Far Cliffs. "There's so much more to flying than just flapping around from place to place! A . . . a . . . mosquito does that! One little barrel-roll around the Elder Gull, just for fun, and I’m Outcast! Are they blind? Can’t they see? Can’t they think of the glory that it’ll be when we really learn to fly?”
In 2012, author and longtime pilot Richard Bach was severely inured during an accidental plane crash on San Juan Island after his "single-engine Easton SeaRey amphibian plane . . . clipped power lines about three miles west of Friday Harbor Airport and flipped." (The Seattle Times article) Another online article [defunct] offers Richard's account of what happened:
Stephen [Interviewer]: On August 31st 2012 you were involved in a near-fatal plane crash. What happened that day?
Richard: I was landing, and made a gentle smooth landing in a friend’s pasture, except as the wheels touched, I couldn’t see. Oh, I thought, I must not have been flying, this is a dream! In a while I could see again. I was in a room way up high; it felt like I was in a gondola under a dirigible. I could see the ground 1500 feet below, very beautiful. Didn’t see anyone in the room, but someone asked, three times, if I wanted to go back to my life on Earth. I said yes, after a while, and all of a sudden I was in a hospital! Turned out that I had been in a coma for days, that it wasn’t a dream, that my little seaplane’s wheels had caught some high-tension wires, and the sudden stop slammed the airplane upside down into the ground. The illusion of a gentle landing, how was that possible? I learned again, that everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but . . . well it went on from there.
Stephen: In fifty-eight years of flying you had never previously sustained an injury. You must have wondered why this, why now?
Richard: Exactly what I wondered. And gradually, through some strange teachers (who reminded me that only Love is real), I found that I had asked for this startling lesson. Changed me profoundly, the way personal experience changes us when theories don’t. I saw death as life, fresh and bright again. Took over a year till I healed, had my little seaplane rebuilt and we flew again. Decided that one reason was to share the event with a few others . . . that there’s no such thing as dying.
Susan M. Watkins shared her experience of Richard Bach's visit in the "Counterparts" chapter of her book Conversations With Seth: The Story of Jane Robert's ESP Class Volume Two (1981):
. . . Seth named Richard Bach (author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull) as another of Jane's counterparts. Richard attended class one August night in 1972 and exploded forever some of my worst fears. At the time, I was working in an Elmira printing company. I wanted to quit and write full-time, but was terrified of poverty — and failure. During break, Richard and I talked briefly about the risks of writing. "Don't hassle your job," he finally said. "When the time comes to quit and go out on your own, you'll know it — because you will have done it. And until then, it won't be the right time.
"But be true to what you love," Richard added, "because if you are, then it will take care of you — because that is the nature of love."
Susan revealed that she soon thereafter gave notice at her job and "began the real apprenticeship of writing, which led to my weekly newspaper work — and this book."
Susan quoted Seth about the idea of 'counterparts':
". . . the individuals alive in any given century have far deeper connections than you realize."
"Now, you take part of your world as you understand it, in your time as you understand it, and all of the creatures on the earth — in your terms — in the century, participate. And so each of you works out challenges and possibilities, creativity and fulfillment. And so you are born in different races, in different cultures, with different, but same, desires. And each in his or her own way participates in what you think of as the history of your time."
"Now, in your terms only, these other counterparts — and in your terms only — these other counterparts are like latent patterns within your mind — echoes. How many of you have actually thought of what the 'unconscious' may be? Or, the voices that you hear within your mind or heart — are they 'yours'? To what counterpart do they belong? And yet, you, in your own identity, have the right to do precisely as you wish, and to form your own reality . . ."
". . . But in your terms, the population of the Earth is made up of counterparts, and so there is, indeed, a relationship . . ."
"There are deep spiritual and biological connections also . . ."
"So, counterparts exist, in your terms, at any given time in history; and so you are indeed related . . ."
Rich Kendall was another student in the ESP class. Rich wrote in his memoir The Road to Elmira (2011) that by the end of 1972 more than a million copies of Jonathan Livingston Seagull were in print and the book had reached the top of the New York Times Best Seller list where it remained for 38 weeks. He remembered:
Dick Bach received a lot of attention that night from Seth as visitors often did, whether famous or not. Sumari came through with a song enacting a drama involving Dick Bach and two other class members. It seemed that all three of them knew each other in another life and also knew "Nebene," a reincarnational aspect of Rob Butts [Jane's husband].
In 2014 a new version of Jonathan Livingston Seagull was published: "The Complete Edition Includes the rediscovered Part Four." The book has apparently gone widely unnoticed as an Internet search conducted this week indicated few media outlets have generated publicity about the new edition for reasons that can be rationalized. Considering contemporary publicity opportunities, it all comes down to individual reporter/influencer interests and concerns, perspectives and choices. After all, our contemporary news media—Internet websites, newspapers and magazines, books, TV news shows, etc.—is a collective manifestation of countless people 'creating their own reality' and indeed no two individual vantage points of this shared 'collective reality' are or ever will be the same.
Forty-four years ago on March 1, 1974—more than two decades before my pen name became Mark Russell Bell—I contributed commentary about Jonathan Livingston Seagull in my high school newspaper Pasadena Chronicle during my senior year. The article had a shared byline and today I can't even recall precisely which comments were mine. A Hollywood movie was inspired by the book, complete with a hit soundtrack album by popular recording artist Neil Diamond.
In Conversations With Seth Volume Two, class participant Betty DiAngelo is quoted about her perspective of Seth's teachings about 'counterparts':
"The counterpart thing was one of the ideas brought out in class that I understood when first confronted with it; and strangely, I can trace the idea back to my parochial school days.
"In a classroom, there was a picture of Christ's mystical body — it was an outline of Christ filled in with people of many nations. It gave me the feeling that we were all part of one another . . . ."
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