OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  “In what way?”

  “Look, a whole lot of strange things have been happening to me lately, at least since we met. There’s been one coincidence after another throwing us together. There’s the strength of the pull between us which is illogical in the circumstances. You and I know it is much more than just a physical thing, but why? All this time with you I’ve been having these pre-cognitive feelings and recognition feelings. Gerry, tell me honestly—do you feel that you have known me some place before?”

  “Good God! I don’t understand you. In any case, what difference would it make?”

  “Well, maybe if we could figure out what we were before, we could sort out what we should be now.”

  He took a long breath. “Darling, you’ve been alone too long in this room …”

  “No, dammit!” I was suddenly out of patience. “Don’t patronize me! I just want to talk about this. I’m not overwrought, I’m not nuts, and I’m not stupid. And there seems to be a whole lot more to this world than you’re willing to acknowledge.”

  He gave a wry grin. “Well, that’s probably true at any rate,” he said. “What, specifically, are you thinking about?”

  “Reincarnation, for one.”

  “I’ve no objection to reincarnation—it’s fine for those who need it.”

  “Gerry, I’m not talking about starving peasants. There are a lot of people, all up and down the social and intellectual scale, and all through time, who believe in reincarnation. But specifically, I’m talking about us.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! If you’re suggesting that we have actually lived some previous life together, Shirley, so what? What the hell difference would it make since we can’t remember anyhow?”

  “Well, it might make a difference if we could find out through channeling.” I knew I was doing this all wrong.

  “What the hell is channeling?”

  “I mean,” I swallowed, “talking with disembodied spirits through a channel—people do it all the time to find out all kinds of things.”

  Gerry looked aghast and then very concerned. “Shirley, have you been going to mediums?”

  “You don’t have to make it sound like a dirty word,” I told him.

  “No, no! Of course not, I didn’t mean it that way.” He took a deep breath. “You’re right, we do have to talk about this. What, exactly, is it that you have been doing?”

  Feeling guilty and defensive, and resenting it, I told him about Cat and Ambres, about Edgar Cayce, about the reading I had been doing. He listened in silence as I slowly wound down. Then he looked at me in what, I realized with surprise, was embarrassment.

  “Gerry, what are you thinking?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what to say,” he muttered. “I mean, you just can’t be serious about this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, my God, isn’t it obvious? These mediums are psychos, or weird, dragging stuff up out of their own unconscious. Or else they’re taking you. You surely don’t believe they’re actually communicating with spirits?”

  “They aren’t communicating. They’re just channeling—they don’t even remember what’s been said.”

  “Whatever they’re doing, it’s utter rubbish. They do it for money, exploiting gullible people who want to be told some sugary nonsense about dead relatives or some other damned thing.”

  “Edgar Cayce took no money, the advice he gave was sound, and it didn’t come from his unconscious because he had no medical training.”

  Gerry looked at me helplessly. “Why in the name of God do you have to get involved with this sort of thing?” he asked desperately.

  “I’m just trying to find an explanation for us,” I said, “or maybe just for me. I’m beginning to think I can’t do it for us …”

  “I should hope not! Look, darling [he so rarely used endearments, and that made twice in the same conversation—he must be really upset], you really mustn’t go on with this business. I mean, it can’t possibly gain you anything. Ninety percent of these people are charlatans and everyone knows it—all your friends are going to think you’ve gone soft in the head. And God knows what the public would think if it ever got out.”

  It was interesting that he was concerned with my public image. I suppose it was logical that he should be, being himself at all times very aware of the importance of his own. But he still had not considered in any way the possibilities of the world I was exploring: it was something completely outside his ken, he couldn’t see it, he could not begin to acknowledge the possible validity of its existence.

  “What d’you mean ‘if it ever got out,’ Gerry? This is what I’ve been writing about.”

  “You can’t,” he said flatly. “Not for publication.”

  “Why not?” His rigidity was pushing me into a false position, because in fact, at this point, I had no intention of publishing.

  “Because every intellectual you’ve ever known, anybody with half a brain to use will tear you to pieces—” he stopped, floundering and unhappy.

  I was amused at his bland assumption that all intelligent people would share his views and touched by his obvious distress for me. But his blanket rejection of all I was talking about seemed to preclude further discussion—if indeed, there had been any! Leaning forward, I murmured, “Oh, the hell with it,” and kissed his nose. “It’s warm,” I said.

  “What’s warm?”

  “Your nose. It was cold when you came in.”

  He fingered my earrings and swept back my hair. I knelt beside him. He lifted my face and, in the middle of a word, kissed me and stroked my eyes.

  He lifted me onto him and when I raised the soft material of my negligee into the air and let it fall around our bodies, he watched the movement and made a soft noise. We never undressed. We made love just as we were leading our lives, the pleasure of it hidden from view.

  I fell against him. He kissed my eyes and neck.

  “You’re leaving tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I have to go.”

  “I love you more than I can say,” he said.

  I felt myself go into a sad limbo.

  “When do you think we’ll be able to spend a whole evening together again?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s January now,” I said. “Do you figure by September when your election is over?”

  He swept his arm up and, hiding his face behind it, stifled a cry under his breath.

  “Well,” I said, “let’s wait and see.”

  “I have to get up now,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll be too melancholy to bear it. Where will you be?”

  I told him I didn’t know. I would be traveling.

  He tried to get up, but stopped himself. He looked at our bodies and said, “This next move of yours may be impossible. We are one person, you know.”

  I smiled. He lifted me up and over him and stood up.

  “That was an extremely complicated maneuver, wasn’t it?”

  “Not as complicated as we are.”

  When he toddled off to the bathroom with his trousers piled around his ankles, I couldn’t believe he wanted to be Prime Minister of England.

  When he returned I was still on the sofa. He looked down at me and said, “You’re lovely. You’re really lovely.”

  “When is your birthday?” I asked.

  He said, “Tuesday, how did you know?”

  I said I just had a feeling.

  He said his deputy leader’s birthday was on the same day and he would be extremely disappointed if Gerry didn’t get back to England and help him celebrate it.

  I said, “What about celebrating your birthday?”

  He said, “That doesn’t matter.”

  I grabbed his arms and shook them. “Doesn’t matter? Gerry, what about your birthday!!” Then I stopped. I stopped in the middle of a thought.

  He said, “Yes?”

  I said, “Nothing.”

  I took some pictures of him with my Polaroid camera and flash. He subm
itted to it and then was curious to see how he looked. Slowly the image bled through in color.

  “Oh,” he said, “I look dreadful.” Gently I shook his arm again.

  He raced to the hallway for his coat and fur gloves. He put my hotel room keys on the coffee table, picked up his briefcase, and with more aggressive speed than ever, he headed for the door. I stood still without following him. He opened the door and turned around to look at me as though he was burning whatever I looked like into his memory.

  “You are really beautiful,” he said, and then he was gone.

  I ran to the door and locked it. When I walked back to the living room I saw he had forgotten his glasses.

  I raced into the hallway and whistled. I heard him retrace his steps. As he retrieved his glasses from me he said, “When is your birthday?”

  “April twenty-fourth,” I said.

  He nodded as if to say it was another date in the future he could look forward to. Then he said, “What do you think we have together?”

  I sighed and ran my fingers over the hair in his eyes.

  “I know,” he said, “to get to the fruit on a tree, you have to go out on a limb.”

  He looked into my eyes and walked away. He didn’t look back. I walked inside and closed the door.

  I lit a cigarette and went to the bay window. Opening it, I blew smoke into the air watching it mingle with the steam of my breath in the winter air. Snow was falling thickly now.

  I looked down into the street. He walked into the courtyard below. I whistled softly. He looked up and waved. His fur gloves and black coat were outlined sharply against the solid white background. Snow tumbled around him as he walked into the street looking for a cab. The street was empty. I felt him decide to walk. He looked up and waved again. I waved back and threw him a kiss, but he had already disappeared determinedly into the thick cold silent white Swedish night.

  Chapter 12

  “The ‘soul’ is indeed a vague conception and the reality of the thing to which it refers cannot be demonstrated. But consciousness is the most evident of all (invisible) facts … The physiologists are very fond of comparing the network of our cerebral nerves with a telephone system but they overlook the significant fact that a telephone system does not function until someone talks over it. The brain does not create thought (Sir Julian Huxley has recently pointed out this fact); it is an instrument which thought finds useful.”

  —JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH

  More Lives Than One

  The flight back to America was a strange one. I didn’t really know who or what I had just left or who or what I was returning to. Something remarkable was underway in my life. But it had no name and eluded description. It spoke to something very ancient and yet I had the feeling it was the forerunner to what could be a new age of thought for me. The experience with Ambres had been fascinating but the questions I had asked Lars and Birgitta still bugged me. Pragmatic child of my time, I decided, for one thing at least, to check out the process of channeling.

  In the weeks and months that followed, I read and investigated and checked. I asked questions and, wherever possible, I listened to tapes. I found there were a remarkable number of mediums, or trance channelers, functioning. With the exception of Edgar Cayce, almost no one spoke of these people by the name of the medium. The personality channeled was dominant, and among these there were a few whose reputations stood out above the rest, largely in terms of the clarity and cohesiveness of the messages channeled. Like experts, or talents, in any field, some mediums were better than others. (I established also that, like any professionals, there were days when absolutely nothing would go right: in that case, some relied on past experience, some faked, and some said flat out that nothing was working and everybody would do better to go home).

  But I was struck also by the variety and strength of personality demonstrated by the different entities who were channeled through. The rather hazy odor of solemnity that surrounds the phenomenon of channeling in the minds of most people (perhaps because their own mood in approaching the prospect of a discussion with a disembodied spirit would be somewhat somber?) seemed to be at odds with the reality. There was rich humor and occasional downright flippancy in some of the channeled personalities, for instance. Whoever, or whatever, these entities were, they conveyed enormous individuality of character and an aura, not so much of solemnity, as of experience.

  Moreover, channeling was something that had been going on for some time and several famous people not only “believed” in it but had practiced it, including Abraham Lincoln, who used Carpenter (the medium actually lived in the White House with the President) for regular consultations, J. P Morgan (who used Evangeline Adams), William Randolph Hearst—and many, many more from widely varying fields. The work of Sir Oliver Lodge and Mrs. Piper was of course well known. There seemed to have been almost a fashion for this kind of thing around the turn of the century, and not only channeling, but table-tapping, the use of the planchette, and the ouija board. No doubt it was entertaining, but equally clear was the fact that many worthy and serious people took channeling—and all that it implied—very seriously.

  It was also clear that some could not handle the sheer volume of information being channeled through, much less the quality of its nature. The cosmos is a staggering concept: to relate each individual human to such vastness was often more than the listeners could bear. And when it came to the particularities of extraterrestrial life, the structure of the atom, the cohesion of all matter, all thought—these were matters to which most people had not given very much attention. The entities communicating this information frequently appeared to have no idea of how much the party on the other end of the telephone, so to speak, could absorb.

  In sum, it seemed as though there was an individual pace, or rhythm, which each person gradually developed in assimilating the mind-boggling floods of information that came through. When dealing with the mind and the emotions, concentrated force-feeding simply did not work. It even appeared to alienate a good many people.

  I turned my attention to the more modern channelers and the entities who communicated through them.

  Best known of the current channeled spiritual entities appeared to be a spiritual master known as D.K., channeled by Alice Bailey, and later by Benjamin Creme. Seth, channeled by Jane Roberts, was a particularly interesting case and one which presented more than one facet of the phenomenon of channeling.

  Since 1963, when Mrs. Roberts was first approached by Seth, she and her husband (who, from the beginning, had taken notes on what Seth said) had accumulated a library of notes on the sessions. Some of this material has appeared in several published works, one actually dictated by Seth himself. What I found most interesting was the strong doubt evidenced by Mrs. Roberts in the early contacts with Seth (The Seth Material).

  Having no previous contact with, nor interest or belief in, psychic phenomena, Mrs. Roberts was assailed one night while writing her own poetry by a torrent of words which demanded to be put down on paper. Scribbling furiously for hours, she eventually discovered herself writing the title of what she describes as “that odd batch of notes, The Physical Universe as Idea Construction.” (These subsequently proved to be a synthesis of material that Seth would later develop). But at the time, knowing nothing of Seth, Mrs. Roberts was made uneasy, astonished, and upset by both the event and the content of “her” writing.

  In the weeks and months that followed, after Seth had virtually insisted on “coming through,” she and her husband conducted many tests to prove, or disprove, the existence of Seth as a separate personality, or the disembodied entity he claimed to be. In fact, it took Seth a considerable time and some quite spectacular displays of special abilities to prove to Mrs. Roberts that he was not a part of her own subconscious!

  Nevertheless, actual “proof of channeling, that is, a physical presence on Earth acting as a channel of communication for another kind of presence on a different plane, was hard to establish in scientific terms. In
the end, proof of the process came down to content: if a channel spoke in a foreign language, or displayed a talent (such as playing the piano) or practiced a professional skill (such as medicine) or conveyed information, let’s say, from a distant place or about a particular event or person which the channel had no way of knowing, then it would appear that the foreign language, or the talent, or the skill, or the knowledge, had to be coming from another source.

  (Over a period of time to follow I was to come across many instances of such “proof,” but by then the process had become commonplace tome—not unimportant, but rather like the preparation of a good meal: one was grateful for a good cook but the meal was what counted.) In fact, even at the end of two or three months of intense reading and questioning I had decided that the process was of lesser relevance. At least one aspect of the channeled information I was reading about cropped up again and again and that related to past-life recall. I was probably more curious about this as it seemed I might learn something helpful about my relationship with Gerry, but what had taken my real attention in the vast volume of material available for study was the fact that so much of the message seemed to be universal—that is, entities channeling through a variety of people in many countries in different languages were saying basically the same thing. Look into yourselves, explore yourselves, you are the Universe …

  More and more, as I read and thought, the message forced me to reexamine motives, to rethink, or perhaps to think for the first time, about values and aspects of living I had heretofore simply accepted.

  I had been used to living in a world where, by the very nature of the life we led, it was nearly impossible to get the time to look into yourself. Where just to stay alive, to say nothing of staying on top, seemed to require attitudes that were just the opposite … if you weren’t carefully checking out the progress of your neighbor, you had the impression that it wouldn’t be long before you’d be left behind yourself. If you were a successful person, you had to keep going in the rat race to stay there. If you were poor, you had to keep going to survive. There was never any time for just yourself, to do nothing, to enjoy a sunset, to listen to a bird sing, to watch a bee bumble, to hear what you were thinking, much less what anybody else was thinking.