OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  “Besides,” Cat was striding merrily along, “you need a good spiritual rest.”

  I wondered how on earth Cat could translate channeling into being spiritually restful. Well, maybe for her it was …

  Three months and a mini-library of books later I felt the time had come for me to do some personal channeling investigation. Through Cat I made an appointment with Kevin Ryerson, resolving at the same time that I would try to be noncommittal, bland and several other things I am not …

  My doorbell in Malibu rang at six-forty-five the following evening. I opened it not knowing what to expect. Looking at me under a slouched beige hat was a young man, about twenty-nine years old, with direct, kind, deep blue eyes. He was wearing a beige suit to match the hat, a beige vest, and beige shoes and beige socks. He wore an overcoat (also beige) slung over one shoulder and smiled directly into my face. His smile was innocent and gentle. Ironically, he didn’t seem to be aware of his amusingly theatrical garb. Looking at him made me want a huge slice of beige coconut cream pie.

  “Hello?” he said. “I’m Kevin?” His tone went up at the end of the sentence as though he had just asked me a question. “I’m Kevin Ryerson.” He gave the impression of being a little uncertain, yet relaxed somewhere way underneath.

  “Yes, Kevin.” I opened the door and ushered him in. “Please come in and sit down.”

  I watched him closely as he walked through the door, unaware that his beige coat was dangling nearly off his shoulder. He moved smoothly, though with a slouch, planting his heels down first as he walked.

  “May I leave my vehicle where it is outside?” he asked.

  “Your vehicle?” I said. “Oh, you mean your car. Yes, sure. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “My lady may drop in to meet me. I’d like her to be able to directly recognize it.”

  “Your lady?”

  “Yes,” he said, “we were just recently wed and we had planned a celebration dinner later tonight depending on the time periods we would be occupying?”

  I hesitated a moment not knowing how to react to his use of the English language. It sounded so affected. Combined with the way he walked and the way he dressed, it made me wonder whether he could be taken seriously.

  “Oh, sure,” I said perfectly casually. “I don’t know how long a session like this will take. You would very likely know better than I.”

  Kevin walked into my living room and sat down rather formally in one of my chairs.

  “Yes,” he said, “you direct your questions to the spiritual guides and they will determine the length of time required.”

  Kevin seemed strangely out of time, anachronistic. Or maybe I was just reading such an impression into his odd formality. Maybe that was what happened when you were with a trance medium.

  I asked him if he would like a drink or a cup of coffee or something.

  “No,” he said, “alcohol inhibits my accuracy. But tea would be fine.”

  I fixed the tea, telling myself firmly not to confuse the message with the messenger.

  “So, you’ve just recently gotten married?” I asked, making small talk and wanting to know what it was like to be living with a trance medium.

  “Yes,” he said, “I pretty well did in the bubble gum brigade before deciding to settle down.”

  I laughed out loud. He seemed to swing back and forth between the Knights of the Round Table and the rock generation.

  “Hmm. And will you be having children do you think?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “my lady and I would like to go out and change the world, but we can’t afford a babysitter.”

  I served Kevin the tea.

  “Are you familiar with trance channeling?” he asked.

  “Well, slightly,” I answered. I told him about Ambres in Sweden and about other people who had described their experiences to me. I said I was familiar with the Edgar Cayce material. Kevin said modestly that he was an expert on Cayce and admired him very much. “A great soul,” he said. “I have several Cayce books that are impossible to find. You’re welcome to them.”

  We chatted on about Cayce and spiritual guidance and medical diagnosis through the phenomenon of trance channeling. We discussed Sir Oliver Lodge’s research with the British Society for Psychical Research in England, and his experiments in contacting the soul of his dead son. We discussed the case of Mrs. Piper in Boston and how her information always checked out to be infallible.

  Kevin talked in a relaxed way, appeared to be well read in metaphysical matters, articulate, and surprisingly humorous with his intelligent assessments of some of the circumstances he found himself in as a result of his psychic and metaphysical talents.

  “I didn’t know what was happening to me either when this all first started,” he volunteered. “Spirit came through during one of my meditations. I didn’t even know it. But someone ran and got a tape recorder and got the whole thing. When they played it back to me I freaked. I knew nothing about the medical information I had channeled through. I didn’t know the voices that came through me either, and I certainly didn’t make up the past-life information while fabricating a phony voice.”

  It was difficult for me to accept what he was saying at face value. Why should I believe that he couldn’t or wouldn’t fabricate strange voices and intricate stories about past lives? I thought of Ambres in Sweden. If I had understood or spoken Swedish I would have asked him more questions too. Well, I’ll just keep listening, I thought. I folded my arms.

  “I couldn’t explain it in any rational way,” Kevin continued. “I just knew that I must be channeling spiritual guides. My sister can do the same thing. And it always freaked out our parents who just plain didn’t understand any of it. Then I began to read about other people who found themselves capable of the same thing—even kids eight and nine years old, channeling through languages they didn’t speak, and stuff like that. So I relaxed and just let it happen, and it’s helped a lot of people.”

  I looked at Kevin, quietly sifting what he’d said through my mind, remembering all the other case histories I had read. He sipped his tea. He seemed so modest, so unpretentious, even though he was dressed as though he had come straight from Western Costume. I had always trusted what a friend of mine described as my built-in “bullshit detector”—that inbred sense of skepticism. But I decided against questioning him about his garb for fear of intimidating him.

  I wondered what my ideal impression of a credible trance medium would be. Each individual was just that—an individual. What would a “typical” trance medium sound or look like? What would a “typical” psychiatrist or doctor or lawyer be like? Were there trance mediums who faked ninety percent of what they did, just as there were practitioners of other professions who made mistakes or were careless on “off” days or who really didn’t give a damn any day of the week? Didn’t one, in any case, have to judge pretty much by results? Was invisible reality something that could ever be proved?

  And, for that matter, what was invisible reality? It was, quite simply, something one believed to be true. Praying to a deity called God was investing faith in an invisible reality: when a baseball player made the sign of the cross before stepping up to the plate, he was invoking a higher invisible reality; when a basketball player crossed himself before attempting a tie-breaking foul shot, no one in the bleachers laughed at him; there were supposed to be no atheists in foxholes, and the moving spectacle of loved ones praying to an invisible God in a hospital emergency room was all too familiar.

  Millions of people spent every Sunday participating in the invisible reality of worshipping something they could not prove. None of this seemed to require skepticism in order to be credible. The invisible reality was accepted and had been for centuries. No one questioned it. In fact, faith in an invisible reality was what reverence was all about.

  “Well,” said Kevin finally, “whatever one thinks of channeling invisible spiritual guides, it is an individual decision. People usually just ‘k
now’ whether it feels reasonable or not. I don’t try to convince anyone. I just try to understand it and learn as I go along. I feel quite guided by my spiritual friends and continue to develop my metaphysical talents. You’ll have to make up your own mind.”

  I thought about what he said, wondering if my having a session with him actually constituted believing in what he was saying. Was it a way of asking to be convinced? I found myself analyzing my own “open-mindedness” in a new light. Was open-mindedness an act of gullibility? I sipped my tea.

  “So, are you religious, Kevin?” I asked.

  He choked involuntarily on his tea. “Are you kidding? What church would have me? I’m treading on their territory. I say folks have God inside them. The Church says it has God inside of it. There’s a phrase in the Bible which states that one should never countenance spiritual entities other than God. Most Christians go by that. But then the Bible says nothing about reincarnation either and it’s quite well known that the Council of Nicea voted to strike the teaching of reincarnation from the Bible.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Well, most serious metaphysical students of the Bible know that. The Council of Nicea altered many of the interpretations of the Bible. The man Jesus studied for eighteen years in India before he returned to Jerusalem. He was studying the teaching of Buddha and became an adept yogi himself. He obviously had complete control over his body and understood that the body was only the house for a soul. Each soul has many mansions. Christ taught that a person’s behavior would determine future events—as karma, as the Hindus say. What one sows, so shall he reap.”

  I didn’t question these rather sweeping assumptions. I offered Kevin a cookie. He seemed to like sugar. He ate it in two bites.

  I thought about the similarity between the Cayce readings and Ambres and Buddha and the countless numbers of people who had been professing the same kind of belief.

  “So,” I said, “what’s going to happen here?”

  Kevin swallowed another cookie. “All right,” he said, “right. Now … two, three, or maybe four spiritual entities use me to channel information. The first who usually comes through to greet people calls himself John. There are some of us who feel that he is the most highly evolved of all the disincarnate entities. He speaks in a biblical lingo that is sometimes hard to follow. If you prefer, or if John senses a difficulty in communication, another entity comes through. He calls himself Tom McPherson because his favorite incarnation was that of an Irish pickpocket a few hundred years ago. He can be very amusing. Lots of folks like working with him. Others find him too humorous to take seriously. Some folks prefer their spiritual guides to be solemn. Then there’s Dr. Shangru, a Pakistani of a few hundred years ago, well-versed in medical matters, and Obidaya, whose favorite incarnation was that of a Jamaican who understands modern-day racial problems.”

  I felt my mind trying to turn off again. It sounded like a comic strip with a collection of unlikely characters. But wait a minute, I thought. This only bore out everything I had been reading. If these entities are entities from the “astral plane,” then they would have individual personalities just as we in the body had.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me adjust. You say this Tom McPherson was an Irish pickpocket? Does that mean that was all he ever was?”

  “No,” said Kevin, “as I said before, it’s just that his pickpocket personality was his favorite incarnation. He teaches from the vantage point of that lifetime.”

  “Oh,” I said, “okay, why did he like being a pickpocket?”

  “Ask him,” Kevin replied. “But I think it’s because of his sense of humor.”

  “Okay, so do you hear these entities when they speak through you?”

  “No,” he answered. “I am not aware of my conscious mind. But I can speak to them on the astral plane when I am sleeping if I want to. And I can feel them guiding me when I’m in a consciously aware state.”

  “Do you believe everyone has spiritual guides?” I asked.

  Kevin looked surprised. “Why sure,” he said, “that’s what the soul does after it passes out of the body. Souls that have died, so to speak, help those who are still in the body. Why, that’s what spiritual understanding is all about.”

  “What is what spiritual understanding is all about?”

  Kevin sat up in his chair and leaned toward me. “Haven’t you ever had the feeling that you were being guided to do something by a force you didn’t understand?”

  I thought of all the times in my life when I thought I was listening to my intuition which seemed to almost compel me to make a certain decision or meet a person or go to a place. I thought of my experiences in Africa with a force that seemed to protect me when I traveled alone, or the time in Bhutan in the Himalayas when I felt impelled to inquire and investigate what the lamas were doing as they sat meditating in their monasteries 18,000 feet high above the clouds. I had seemed to recognize some similar force way back then, nearly twenty-five years ago. That force had motivated my curiosity and my drive to question what I couldn’t see.

  “Yes,” I said now to Kevin. “I must admit I’ve felt guided by some kind of force throughout my life. What does that mean?”

  “It means,” said Kevin, “that, along with your own intuitive certainty, you were being guided by your spiritual friends and guides and teachers. You might have defined it simply as a force but now I’m suggesting that you become more aware in your understanding of what was really going on.”

  I stood up. “What does it feel like to know that spiritual entities speak through you?”

  “Sometimes,” he said hesitatingly, “sometimes I’d like to be a gardener instead of the custodian of the garden. But maybe that’s my karma. We all have our roles in life, don’t we? Maybe mine is to be a human telephone.”

  Kevin suddenly looked so vulnerable sitting in his upright position with his tea cup balanced on his beige knee. I wondered what his life was like, what he did on Saturday nights, how he felt about politics. Had others who had gone through their spiritual questioning also gone through the same personalization of what they learned?

  I didn’t realize it then but Kevin Ryerson would come to be one of the telephones in my life. And, on this Friday night in Malibu, I was about to talk to some new friends … Real or not, I once again was reminded that each person experiences his own reality, and no one else can be the judge of what that reality really is. But it wasn’t simply a matter of believing what one wanted to believe. It was more a question of taking care to refrain from being so skeptical that one automatically shut out challenging ideas and new perceptions.

  Chapter 14

  “Every new-born being indeed comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free gift: but … its fresh existence is paid for by … a worn-out existence which had perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of which this new existence has arisen: they are one being. To show the bridge between the two would certainly be the solution of a great riddle.”

  —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

  The World as Will and Idea

  I lowered the lights in my living room. The ocean tumbled gently outside. I put the tape recorder on, and asked Kevin if he needed anything.

  “No,” he answered, “I think I’ll be going out now.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll be here.”

  “Right,” said Kevin. “See you in a while then.”

  He leaned back, placed his hands over his chest and crossed them. He closed his eyes. I moved the tape recorder closer to him. Slowly he began to breathe deeply. I waited. He sat still for about three minutes and breathed even more deeply. Then very gently his head toppled forward onto his chest and a catch spluttered slightly in his throat. His head straightened up and cocked to one side. About thirty more seconds elapsed. Then he opened his mouth and his body shuddered. His breathing changed rhythm. Slowly his mouth transposed into a smooth smile. His eyebrows lifted, giving his facial expression one o
f momentary surprise. His hands moved to the arm rests. In a raspy whisper which didn’t sound in Kevin’s vocal range, I heard,

  “Hail. I’m John. Greetings. Please identify yourself and state purpose of gathering.”

  I cleared my throat and shifted onto the floor next to Kevin’s chair.

  “Yes,” I began, “my name is Shirley MacLaine. I am from Richmond, Virginia, in the United States, but I am speaking to you from Malibu, California. I am a performer who also writes, and I can’t really say why I’m here.”

  “As such,” said the Voice.

  As such … I guessed that meant okay. I remembered Kevin had said one of the spiritual entities spoke in a biblical lingo.

  “We are taken to find ye have investigations. We sense your vibrational condition as such and have familiarity with it.”

  There was a pause as though he was waiting for me to ask a question or say something. I didn’t know where to begin.

  “Yes,” I said, “well, could you tell me please who ‘we’ might be?”

  “As such,” he said, “we are those who have known ye in lives past.”

  He startled me.

  “You people have known me in past lives?”

  “As such.”

  “Are you my spiritual guides then? Is that why I am here?”

  “As such.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said inaccurately. He went on.

  “To understand yourself now you must understand that you are more than what you seem now. The sum of your talents, the sum of your feelings, are those which ye have experienced before … and all that ye are is part of the oneness of all. Is that to your understanding?”

  I squirmed around on my carpet. Didn’t everyone have certain talents, feelings, and thoughts which did not correspond to present life experience? “Excuse me,” I said, “on what do you base your information either about me or anything cosmic?”

  With barely a pause he said, “On that which ye would term the Akashic Records.” He stopped as though I should be thoroughly acquainted with his references. He seemed so distant, so pseudo-Biblical. I felt detached.