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Seth, in fact, sounds rather like the former Indian Defense Minister, crotchety Krishna Menon. He proved a great help to Bach. For one thing, he advised Bach not to worry about religions that claim Jonathan is preaching their doctrine. ("The seagull is free. How they think about him you cannot dictate.") He also told Bach that every individual consciousness has many aspects that move freely through time and space. Jonathan was not alien but came from one of Bach's aspects. "Information, then, becomes new and is reborn as it is interpreted through a new consciousness," Seth continued.
Jane Roberts and her husband Robert have recorded 6,800 pages of Seth's talk. Much of it has been put together into two Prentice-Hall books, The Seth Material (1970) and, this fall, Seth Speaks. Whoever he is or is not, Seth speaks with more cogency than most of the troubled spirits that find their way into print. To Bach's relief, the two Seth books outline a cosmology that coincides a good deal with his own way of viewing life and death. Though Bach would hate the labels, the final result, like Jonathan, seems to be a blend of Jung, Christian Science and theosophy. It assumes individuals exist as multidimensional personalities who do not die but simply change consciousness. Explicit too, are the great powers that reside in the individual, if he will only tap them, to evolve and to triumph over matter (and sickness) through thought control. Or, as Jonathan Livingston Seagull puts it: "A seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself."
Homing Widgeon. Such a philosophy requires being open to new learning. What Bach is mostly trying to learn right now is how to live with fame and fortune, and at the same time how to protect Jonathan from too grubby exploitation. For starters, Bach has vowed that there will be no Jonathan pop records, water wings, plastic dolls or seafood restaurants. He has retained all rights to the bird. Last spring he incorporated himself and Jonathan into something called Creature Enterprises, Inc., with renowned Lawyer Maury Greenbaum to give advice and consent. One of their first jobs was to squelch an incipient Jonathan restaurant in San Francisco and force Herb Alpert's A & M Records to give up distribution of a rock record called Fly, Jonathan, Fly.
For these new activities, Bach does not really have any home base. For eight months he has been renting a beach cottage—formerly inhabited by Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva—in Bridgehampton, L.I. It belongs to Eleanor Friede, the editor at Macmillan who originally accepted Bach's book and kept plugging for it. (For a while, Jonathan was known around Macmillan as "Friede's Folly.") But Bach is rarely in Bridgehampton. Whenever possible, he operates out of a charming buff and brown $46,000 Grumman Widgeon amphibian, one of the first fruits of Jonathan's success. Says Greenbaum: "He's always calling from airport phone booths. He never knows where he'll be next day." The Widgeon has two 300-h.p. radial Lycoming engines, a