In Memoriam

Dr. Richard Alan Miller

Physicist. Author. Herbalist. Teacher. Polymath.

1944  —  September 14, 2026

Dr. Richard Alan Miller — Rick to his family, “Dr. RAM” to decades of readers, farmers, radio listeners, and students — died on September 14, 2026. He spent a lifetime insisting that physics, psyche, and soil are one subject. He left still writing, still teaching, and still turning toward other people. Across the United States, Europe, Latin America, and late-night radio in every time zone, people who never met him in person still felt they knew him.

Family, friends, and the people he moved

Behind the public legend was a brother. Donna is now executor of his estate. Only five days before Rick died, he posted a memorial on this site for her husband, Paul McLain. That is the kind of man he was at the end: still making room for someone else’s grief while his own life was almost finished. He will be buried at Evergreen Washelli in North Seattle, where family already rests — a return to the Washington ground he came from.

For years he made his working home in Grants Pass, Oregon, after OAK moved south from Seattle in 1984. Friends who saw him in Mount Shasta days before his death said he was fine then, and in great spirits. One colleague wrote that they had been emailing only hours before the fall. That is how close the work stayed to the man: a show still on the calendar, a letter still unanswered, a farm book still “coming soon.”

He also built a second family out of collaborators. Iona Miller, artist and writer on Jungian psychology, co-authored The Modern Alchemist, The Diamond Body, Pantheon, and The Magical and Ritual Use of Perfumes with him — a partnership that put depth psychology and laboratory physics in the same room. Stanley Krippner, his mentor, kept vouching for him across decades. Burt Webb and Darden Dickson stood with him on the holographic papers. Matthew Stein walked the survival and off-grid path with him; after Stein’s death in 2013, J.C. Cole continued the farm-and-workshop work. Kerry Cassidy, radio hosts, farmers, students of magick, and late-night listeners became the wider household.

Brett Baggett knew Rick for more than a decade. Brett and Mike Harris visited him at his house twice, years before Rick’s last move. The talk never really stopped after that. In the last few years, after Rick said he needed help, Brett became his webmaster and confidant: the site, the books, the files, the day’s snarl of problems. If Brett’s memory is right, Rick’s old car wore a plate that read something like MAGICK. That was the man. He made Brett laugh constantly. There was always a metaphor or a joke waiting in the next sentence, on the phone or in an email.

John — Computer Helper John to everyone around Rick — came over daily, or several times a week. He fixed the machines and then stayed for the rest of a life that would not run on machines alone. Rick spoke of him the way a man speaks of a best friend: John was there when Rick needed him, especially when the computer turned pesky again.

Brett and John will miss Rick, and the child that always lived in him. He needed a team, he loved a team, and he was happier when people were in the room. The website, the books, and the late work of his life did not stand on one man. They stood on Rick and the friends who refused to let him stand alone.

That household was international. His herb and ritual books went into German, Spanish, and Hebrew editions. He spoke at Nexus conferences in Brisbane and Amsterdam. Coast to Coast AM, Project Camelot, Red Ice, Caravan to Midnight, Super Soldier Talk, Leak Project, Thread to Threshold, and a long chain of independent shows carried his voice into kitchens and trucks and night shifts on several continents. Small growers used his crop manuals who never cared about holography. Consciousness students used his papers who never planted echinacea. Both groups felt spoken to. That was the gift: he made strangers feel they had a teacher, and teachers feel they had a colleague.

If you were one of those people — if a book, a farm plan, a radio hour, or a kindness in email changed the direction of your week — you were part of what he leaves. The family now asking for help with two storage units in Grants Pass is not only Donna. It is everyone who still has his voice on a shelf or in a saved interview.

A life that would not stay in one field

Richard Alan Miller was born in 1944 in Everett, Washington, into a family that already mixed science, craft, and the unseen. His father, a retired Navy man, worked electronics at Boeing. His mother was known as a psychic investigator; he often said the metaphysical current in his work came from her and from his grandmother. He grew up curious and impatient with walls between subjects.

By his own account he was a prodigy with tools. As a teenager he built a linear accelerator and hydrogen bubble chamber for science-fair work and later said two high-school projects were taken up in NASA-related planetary studies. Those stories became part of the legend that followed him. What never changed was the pattern: he built apparatus, wrote the paper, then immediately asked what the result meant for living systems, farms, and the mind.

He graduated from Washington State University in 1966 and went to work for DuPont in Newark, Delaware. He also described graduate study connected with MIT and a brief engineering period at Boeing. Then the path bent. In the late 1960s and 1970s he moved into the borderland he never left: physics meeting consciousness, agriculture meeting metaphysics, classified-adjacent research meeting public teaching. He said he spent about a decade with Navy-linked and MRU circles on anesthesia, performance, ESP monitoring, and psychoenergetics. Followers heard those stories for fifty years. The published residue of that period is what he left on paper.

The holographic papers

In 1973, with Burt Webb and Darden Dickson, he wrote A Holographic Concept of Reality. The paper argued that biological organization is an electrodynamic field that both arises from and orients its physicochemical parts, and that a holographic model might explain psychoenergetic phenomena. It was presented at the First Psychotronic Conference in Prague and published in Psychoenergetic Systems (Gordon & Breach, 1975), then again in Stanley Krippner’s 1979 collection. A companion paper, Embryonic Holography, was given at the Omniversal Symposium at California State College, Sonoma, hosted by Krippner on September 29, 1973.

Those essays are the scholarly core of his reputation. Krippner remained his mentor and public advocate. Of The Modern Alchemist, written with Iona Miller, Krippner said it was the most illuminating discussion of alchemy since Jung. Of the later “power tools” work he said Miller was “one of the pioneers in the study of the paranormal,” and that techniques first aimed at military performance had become “invaluable tools for living life in the 21st century.”

He also wrote, with K. Elmendorff, “The Physical Mechanisms in Kirlian Photography,” published in Krippner’s The Energies of Consciousness (1975). Late in life he was still extending the holographic line: DNA resonance, water as an imprint medium, a proposed field theory, and popular books on the non-local mind. He did not retire from the argument.

Seattle, Beltane, and the shop that became a school

After leaving corporate engineering, he opened Beltane Occult Books and Supplies in Seattle in 1972 — a shop that became, in the phrase that stuck, “the Herman Slater of the West Coast.” He wrote for Gnostica News and Green Egg, moved among pagan and lodge communities, and treated ritual as applied psychology plus chemistry plus attention.

Out of that shop came the books that made his name in another public: The Magical Mushroom Handbook; The Magical and Ritual Use of Herbs (OAK Press 1978; Inner Traditions 1983; later German and Spanish editions); The Magical and Ritual Use of Aphrodisiacs; and, with Iona Miller, The Magical and Ritual Use of Perfumes. These are field manuals — botany, extraction, history, ritual use, and caution — written by someone who also sold herbs wholesale. In September 1975 he won Llewellyn’s first Psychic Tournament.

OAK — Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge — was founded in Seattle in 1974 and moved to southern Oregon in 1984. From Grants Pass he ran publishing, consulting, newsletters, and the long agricultural project that may outlast the more spectacular stories.

The farmer hidden inside the physicist

If the holographic papers are his contribution to consciousness studies, the herb-farming corpus is his contribution to ordinary survival. He insisted, year after year, that metaphysics without a garden is incomplete.

He founded Northwest Botanicals, wrote The Herb Market Report, and produced the books small growers actually used: The Potential of Herbs as a Cash Crop; Native Plants of Commercial Importance; The Encyclopedia of Alternative Agriculture for Urban & Semi-rural Communities; and scores of practical manuals on echinacea, comfrey, chamomile harvesters, prince’s pine, hydrangea, centralized botanical processing, forest farming, and how to start an herb farm.

He designed harvest machinery for specific botanicals. He preached intercropping, forest farming, drip irrigation, polyculture, cottage-scale value-added processing, and regional demonstration farms long before those phrases were conference slogans. After Matthew Stein’s death in 2013 he continued the American Heritage Farms conversation with J.C. Cole. His last public project on this site was Sustainable Lifeboat™ / The New Small Family Farm for the 21st Century. The motto he put on that work was simple:

“Building sustainable lifeboats for our future — productive today, resilient tomorrow.”

Books, courses, and the long teaching

A partial shelf includes A Holographic Concept of Reality; Embryonic Holography; The Modern Alchemist; The Diamond Body; Pantheon; ESP Induction Through Forms of Self-Hypnosis; Power Tools for the 21st Century and its workbooks; the Brain Driver courses; the herb-ritual trilogy; the cash-crop and native-plant volumes; and off-grid workbooks including Can You Live Off the Grid for 30 Days? with an appendix by Mat Stein.

He wrote for Nexus, spoke at Nexus conferences in Brisbane and Amsterdam, and became a regular on Coast to Coast AM, Project Camelot, Red Ice, Caravan to Midnight, Super Soldier Talk, and a long chain of independent shows. In those rooms he would move, in one hour, from Schumann resonance to chamomile economics to breath protocols to the claim that reality is a hologram you can learn to edit. People came for the stories. Many stayed for the homework.

What can be said without hesitation is this: he published early holographic-biology papers with named co-authors in real journals and books; he built a commercially useful herb-farming literature; he taught continuously for half a century; and serious figures in transpersonal psychology, notably Stanley Krippner, took him seriously as a pioneer of applied paranormal research.

The person

Those who worked with him describe a joiner of dots — his own favorite phrase for his gift. He was not a quiet specialist. He was a whirlwind: bookstore, farm newsletter, lodge, radio circuit, demonstration-farm plan, another manuscript. He could be grandiose. He could also be precise about row spacing, dryer design, and the difference between a ritual herb and a cash crop. He wanted students to test ESP, grow food, manage stress chemistry, and stop waiting for institutions to save them.

He played serious tennis. He kept teaching into 2025 and 2026. He put a tribute to Stanley Krippner on his site. He put a tribute to Paul McLain on his site in the same week he died. He donated his eyes. That last act is the man in miniature: even the body should still be useful.

What he leaves

• A sister, Donna, and family ground in North Seattle.
• Friends who had just seen him laughing in Mount Shasta.
• Brett Baggett, who knew him for years and kept the site in the last stretch, and Computer Helper John, who kept the machines — and the man — running.
• Readers and listeners on several continents who treated his voice like a compass.
• A stack of books that still circulate in several languages.
• A holographic metaphor that independent researchers still argue with.
• Grower manuals that put money and medicine into small fields.
• Courses on attention, breath, and “changing the movie.”
• An unfinished farm-and-lifeboat project, and an archive in Grants Pass that needs hands.

If you learned to plant from him, plant something. If you learned to sit still from him, sit still and then get up and work. If you only knew the radio legend, read The Potential of Herbs as a Cash Crop or The Modern Alchemist and meet the craftsman behind the myth. If you loved him, write Donna. The work of remembering him is now a family job, and the family is larger than blood.

Rest well, Rick.
The farms, the papers, the friends, and the students remain.