A great communicator lost to us

I hadn’t seen Chris since December 1998, hadn’t had a meaningful dialogue with him since 2009 and no communication at all since December 2012 (exchange of Christmas greetings). So it’s a measure of the man that I feel compelled to honour his life and his memory.

The Beck & Cowan SD-1 workshops of April 1998 completely transformed my life and made SD a sociopsychological obsession. Don may have made the jawdropping global maps but it was Chris who made it personal and relevant and empowering to me – and to everyone I know who attended his teachings.

Over the next 7-8 years Chris shared many challenging thoughts – always provoking, always pushing to think outside the box of conventions and see through vMEMETIC lenses. And, as Don gravitated towards the Integral crowd, Chris acted as a welcome grounding force, pulling me back to the theory and demanding evidence for ‘blue sky’ assertions. He gave me a healthy scepticism for unfounded claims while never denying wonderful possibilities.

Always with what I termed “a pithy sense of humour”.

Chris & Natasha’s scholarship rescued and gave us the only commercially available Graves publications (LEVELS OF EXISTENCE and NEVER-ENDING QUEST) as well as www.clarewgraves.com. If for nothing else, I would be so grateful for these…but www.spiraldynamics.org is full of wonderful, thought-provoking treatises.

So I will miss this great man who was a catalyst in one of the 2-3 most important transformations in my life and who served as a (distant) guiding mentor for years afterwards. And I will miss the possibility that one day we would have hooked up again.

Thoughts and prayers for Natasha as she goes through such devastation.

Keith Rice, August 4, 2015