Got a call today letting me know that long-time Prosperos student and friend Bruce King died in a New Orleans hospital on October 20, 2020 after a short illness.
I first met Bruce in the ’70s at The Prosperos center in Santa Monica.
He was a great friend to the The Prosperos, a great friend of Thane Walker, Billye Talmadge, Marcia Herndon, Perry Dickey, Ken Wauchope and many others, a contributor to the Bathtub Bulletin, a musician, a great lover of New Orleans, a great lover of France and all things French, having spent some time in Paris as a child, and a loyal friend to anybody who knew him.
I know this is a very incomplete remembrance of Bruce, so please add your own comments to this post or send me photos of Bruce or other memorabilia or anecdotes so we can share them with the readers of the Bathtub Bulletin. (E-mail me at zonta1111@aol.com)
A memorial service may be held in New Orleans.
–Mike Zonta, BB editor
Here’s a BB article from October 2016 from Bruce King and Zoë Robinson, H.W., M.
MINDFULNESS (FROM BRUCE KING AND ZOE ROBINSON, H.W., M.)
I am grateful for an email I received recently from Bruce King. Bruce has said I might forward it on to you so I hope you will take a moment to read it through. Thank you Bruce . . .
“Thanks so much for this. I think you’re entirely right in your attempts to promote the practice of Mindfulness among the Prosperos. I also agree that it a very useful expansion – one might even call it a perfect fit. At the risk of telling you something you already know, here’s why –
Actually, Mindfulness is, or was, at least in theory, part of the curriculum of the Prosperos, in the form of the “Minute Exercise”, taught by Thane in his Lessons in the Fourth Way. The “Minute Exercise” was derived, I’ve come to believe, from Thane’s long study and practice of Zen Buddhism. I’ve used both the “Minute Exercise” and breath-based meditation, and the only difference I can see is in the way the relaxation response (if that’s the right term for it…) is elicited. Once there, the process – of letting thoughts, images, and/or memories enter the mind while withholding judgment, then letting each one go – seems identical.
Another thought: Much of what Thane taught – or what I got out of my training, anyway – was a kind of “Zen on the fly”, a constant paying of attention, including self observation, while withholding judgment (so indeed Mindfulness, in the broadest sense of the term) as one goes about one’s “ordinary” life. So that’s another way Mindfulness can be said to fit in.
A final thought: Interestingly enough, I remember Thane saying, at the start of Lessons in the Fourth Way, that those lessons were going to go “beyond Translation and RHS”. So I think it’s more than likely that he considered Mindfulness, in the form of the “Minute Exercise”, to be a very advanced technique – at least for us, at that time, which was during the first six months of 1972…
Thanks again,
Bruce King