OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  “As I have said before to you: the truth is simple. It is man who insists on making it complicated. And man cannot just learn the truth as one would learn a lesson. He must experience aspects of it in himself in order to go further. Learning and experiencing the truth of itself is a struggle. A struggle toward simple awareness. You must remember that the natural habitat of the human is not Earth; the natural habitat of human beings is the ether. Each individual already knows the Divine truth. They have simply complicated it and forgotten that they know it.”

  “But my intellectual friends say that believing one knows the truth is the ultimate act of arrogance.”

  “Each person knows his own truth. That is correct. But the only truth that matters is the truth of the relationship that one has with the source, or the God force. And that truth is limited when intellectual skepticism is applied to it. Because one does not need intellect to know God. In that respect, all individuals are equal. Your intellectuals seek to separate themselves from the masses in order to feel elite. They rely more on their intellect than they do on the God force within themselves. Many people, and not only intellectuals, are embarrassed to acknowledge the spark of Divinity within themselves. But the intellectual skeptics are more likely to be conflicted, confused and unhappy within themselves. All people seek peace. The path to inner peace is not through the intellect but through the inner heart. Within the inner heart one finds God, peace, and oneself. Intellectual skeptics avoid themselves. The self, however, knows the Divine truth because the self is itself Divine. Is this to your understanding?”

  I sat up feeling that, yes, I did understand. None of this felt religious either. It just made sense. And I could not understand why some others I knew had to make such a big deal of it—either couldn’t understand or didn’t want to.

  “Why are there wars, John? What causes people to want to conquer others?”

  “Because those who feel the need to conquer do not understand the truth of themselves. However, if a closed-minded tyrant is exposed to inner knowingness, inner awareness, he soon loses the intent of his conquest. He sees how vast he really is and does not need to secure his own immortality by conquering others. When the human mind experiences an expansion of dimensions on many levels it becomes more peaceful, more satisfied. The skeptic’s view of higher knowledge of self is most limiting. Your dogmatic religions, for example, are most limiting for mankind because they demand unquestioned reverence for authority—an exterior authority. You are God. You know you are Divine. But you must continually remember your Divinity and, most important, act accordingly.”

  “John, you mentioned extraterrestrials before. I don’t quite know what to think about that, but are they involved with the same struggle of inner knowingness?”

  “That is correct,” said John, “perhaps they are operating, at least some of them, on a higher level of awareness and a higher level of technology also. But they are not to be revered as Godlike. They are merely teachers. They have visited your Earth over the eons to bring knowledge and spiritual truth because they have found through the evolution of time that the spiritual understanding of the individual is the only understanding required for peace. All other knowledge stems from that.”

  “And the possible extraterrestrial references in the Bible were real? I mean in Ezekiel and all that?”

  “That is correct. They appeared at that time on your Earth to bring higher knowledge of God and spiritual love. They always appear when they are most needed. They serve as a symbol of hope and higher understanding.”

  “Will I ever meet one?”

  There was a pause. “We will speak of these matters again at another time. Think about what I have said and what you are willing to learn. Will that be all for now?”

  My mind felt so stuffed I had to say yes. “Thank you, John,” I said, “whoever you are. I just can’t think of anything else right now. I have to absorb what you’ve said.”

  “Very well,” said John. “Seek to be at peace with yourself and with God and his work, for you are part of that work. God bless you.”

  “Something unknown to our understanding is visiting the earth.”

  —DR MITROVAN ZVEREV,

  Soviet scientist

  Kevin shuddered as though the vibration of John’s spirit passed through his body and was gone. His hands lifted to his eyes and covered them. Then he rubbed them as though waking from a deep sleep.

  “Hello?” he asked drowsily, trying to focus on the room around him. “Hello?”

  I stood up and stretched and walked in a circle in front of him.

  “Hello,” I said, “I’m here.”

  “How did it go?” asked Kevin.

  “My God,” I said. “It was incredible. I just don’t know what to think.”

  Kevin straightened up in the chair and then stood up. “Just do what feels right,” he said. “Did what came through feel right? They’ve told me to just trust my feelings. There’s nothing else you can do once you begin to ask these questions.”

  “But they were saying incredible stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, about previous lifetimes. A whole lot of stuff about people I know now that I’m supposed to have known in other lives. And John and McPherson as well.”

  “So?”

  “Well, do you believe all that?”

  “I believe what feels right.”

  “And does reincarnation feel right to you?” I asked.

  “Well, it would have to, wouldn’t it? I mean I am an instrument through which many spiritual entities speak, aren’t I? So the existence of the soul in many dimensions makes sense to me. Otherwise that makes me either an actor or crazy. And as far as I know I’m neither.”

  I looked at Kevin closely.

  “Yeah,” I said hesitantly, “but John also said a lot of stuff about extraterrestrials having provided all kinds of spiritually advanced input for the human race. Do you believe that?”

  He sat down. “Sure,” he said, “why not? Not only are they mentioned all through the Bible, but they figure in one form or another in nearly every culture on Earth. So why wouldn’t they exist? Besides, I know lots of people today who say they’ve seen them.”

  “Have you ever seen a UFO?” I asked.

  “No,” said Kevin, “I have not yet had that pleasure.”

  “But you believe it anyway?”

  “Of course. It feels comfortable to me. And besides, who am I to argue with all the authorities who say there is a good chance they exist? I know there are a lot of people who say they don’t, but there’s no proof of that either.”

  Absently Kevin sipped what was left of some cold tea. Then he looked at the mug.

  “Where did this come from?” he asked.

  “McPherson. He said he needed an Irish-type mug to think more clearly.”

  “I was holding this mug?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What time frame would it be right about now?” he asked.

  “Good question,” I said. I got it sorted out. “A little before ten.”

  “I’ll be picking up my lady then.” He walked toward my door.

  “Well, could we get together again soon? I know how busy you are. But would it be possible to work me in?”

  “Let me check with my lady and I’ll be getting back to you.”

  I opened the door and thanked him.

  With his low-slung slouch, he slid his beige western costume overcoat over his shoulders. He moved out and descended the stairs like a character in The Lodger (an old movie I had seen in my childhood).

  I watched him walk to his “vehicle” on the street. As I looked after him, I wondered if trance mediums needed to be involuntarily theatrical in order to sustain an identity of their own.

  I fell into bed. I couldn’t sleep. My legs were vibrating with a strange almost magnetic energy from inside. I shifted my position. It didn’t help. The energy continued to vibrate �
� I was almost afraid of it because it was so unfamiliar. I felt the same vibration in my fingertips and around my lips. It felt physical but at the same time I could feel the energy emanating from my mind somehow.

  I tried to focus on small, familiar things—the softness of the breeze coming through my window off the Pacific, the slap of the waves, the walk I would take in the morning through the mountain of wildflowers. I went through some familiar choreography which I often did in order to fall asleep. I counted each step and movement to the music. I felt the meaning of the music in my mind. I stretched the muscles in my legs attempting to neutralize the magnetic stream of energy flaming inside. It was such a foreign energy, yet somehow positive. I pictured the pleasure of a hot fudge sundae dripping with thick, sweet chocolate over cold vanilla-bean ice cream.

  I felt I needed somehow to ground myself in the here and now on Earth. I laughed to myself. What the hell was going on? What was real? Had I in fact lived someplace with Gerry and with David five hundred thousand years ago? If I really believed this stuff there was no way I could continue walking around in this world the way I’d always done. It was bound to change my perceptions. Was that what happened to Walt Whitman and Pythagoras and Aristotle and Thoreau when they came to the conclusion that reincarnation was not only possible but probable? No wonder the people in Asia had a different concept of time than we in the West did. They grew up in the belief of the reembodiment of the soul from lifetime to lifetime. Jesus, I thought, maybe time and space are so relative they are not measurable. Maybe they both exist at the same time. Maybe the soul inside my body was telling me that everything is real. And if that was true, then reality had more dimensions than I had ever considered. Perhaps, as philosophers and even some scientists claimed, reality was only what one perceived it to be.

  If that were the case, I could understand on a colossal scale what an added spiritual dimension could mean to the planet and all the human beings living on it. What a wonder, what a marvel that would be!

  Everyone’s perception of reality would be valid. If the soul’s experience was all that mattered and one’s physical existence was literally irrelevant because, from a cosmic perspective, there was no such thing as death, then every living second on Earth was precious precisely because it did relate to a grand overall design which we had helped to create, and precisely because every atom had a purpose, maybe the purpose of this particular collection of atoms writhing around here on the bed was to convey the message that we are part of the God-force that created all things—it is as much a part of us as we are of it.

  In a ball of vibrating confusion, I rolled over and finally fell asleep.

  Chapter 16

  “And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,

  I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait …

  And as to you, Life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,

  (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)”

  —WALT WHITMAN

  Song of Myself

  I slept until late the next day. I just could not get up. When I finally did I went to the Colony Market and got a double-dip peach frozen yogurt. Anything with peaches always helped.

  On the way home I began to consider how my friends would react to what had happened. My thoughts flashed to my friend Bella Abzug. I had known and worked with her on the McGovern presidential campaign and we had become very close. She was tough, brilliant, compassionate, and pragmatic. I wondered what she’d think. I wondered if there would ever come a time when politicians could engage in their own spiritual search without seeming off the wall to voters.

  As I opened the door the phone was ringing. It was Bella.

  I told her all about what had happened in my session with Kevin. It took a long time and she didn’t interrupt once. Finally I stopped.

  “Let’s get this straight,” Bella said. “This Kevin told you you’d lived a previous life in an ancient civilization with someone you’re in love with now?”

  “No, not Kevin. Kevin was the channel. I talked with two entities, one called McPherson, the other called John.”

  “Yes, well,” she said, “whoever. Listen, this Kevin character could be just making it up and acting.”

  “Oh, Bella. That’s the first thing that occurred to me. And of course it could be true—but if he was he should be getting an Academy Award they haven’t invented yet. I’ve been doing a helluva lot of reading on this business of channeling and I really don’t believe I’m being taken in any way. I mean, this is something a lot of people are experiencing every day.”

  “Well,” Bella considered, “not meaning to be funny—would you say you were having a religious experience?”

  “God, no!”

  “Then, what? Are you saying you believe in reincarnation?”

  “Bella, I don’t know. I really just don’t know. The thing is it all seems to be about ‘feeling,’ not thinking. I feel that what those spiritual entities said could have really happened to me. In a way, it’s me I’m listening to, not anyone else.” As I spoke I had realized something. “And I can’t stop now and just forget the whole thing. I’ve got to know more.”

  There was a long silence.

  “My darling,” she said finally. “I don’t want you to be hurt. Just don’t do anything dramatic or public about it, okay?” I said okay. “And call me.” I said okay.

  An interesting and multi-dimensional period of my life now began for me. I can only describe it as a time of living on several levels. I went into rehearsals for a world tour with my live stage show. I danced, sang, acted, and made jokes with my company during the day while at night I pored over every book I could find to help me sort out my feelings and thoughts arising from the questions I found myself asking about life and purpose.

  My bookshelves began to bulge with esoteric metaphysical material. I was glad that I had an office in my house in Malibu private enough to shut the door and lock. I wasn’t prepared to answer questions about the books I was reading.

  There were reams of material on reincarnation alone. I read heavily in this area since it was a subject that interested me particularly. I was astonished to find, not only that reincarnation was an integrated part of most Eastern beliefs (which I already knew) but that hosts of notable thinkers from the West shared this view of the cosmic purpose of the soul, even though the Eastern beliefs were rooted in religion and the Western concepts seemed to grow more from philosophical roots. From Pythagoras to Plato to Socrates to Aristotle (even though he later denied reincarnation, splitting off from his Platonic master) on to Plutarch and down to the seventeenth century when a whole school of thinkers rose known as the Cambridge Platonists; from this followed many—John Milton, the poet Dryden, the statesman-intellectual Joseph Addison.

  I hit the eighteenth century—the Age of Reason as it is called, thinking that here I would find rebuttal and skepticism. Skepticism indeed there was—but not of belief in the soul and a deity, rather there was a rejection of formalized religion and of authoritarian thought. There was in fact an explosion of new thinking and a ratification of the right to think. This was a time that saw Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Sir William Jones the brilliant Orientalist, and the Scottish historian and economist David Hume (the latter dedicated to reason, but acknowledging that if there was such a thing as an immortal soul then certainly, in logic, it had to exist both before and after death!) This was a time of the flowering of intellect—yet most of these extraordinary minds believed in the rebirth of the soul.

  If I was overwhelmed I was rapidly discovering I had good company …

  Many writers and poets, such as William Blake and Goethe, gave expression to their beliefs in their work. Goethe wrote of his beliefs in letters. Heinrich Heine, the German lyric poet and critic, was, in fact, remarkably “image” conscious: Who can tell what tailor now inherits the soul of a Plato, what dominie is heir to
Caesar’s spirit? … Perchance the soul of Genghis Khan now animates a reviewer who, without knowing it, daily slashes the soul of his faithful Bashirs and Kalmucks in the pages of a critical journal …(The North Sea)

  Closer to home, I read my way through reports on the American Transcendentalists—spearheaded by Emerson and Thoreau. These were men in revolt against conventional, authoritarian Western religion, as their forerunners—among them Kant, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, and Wordsworth—had been. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is of course a paean to reincarnation. Malcolm Cowley said of Whitman, “The universe was an eternal becoming for Whitman, a process not a structure, and it had to be judged from the standpoint of eternity.”

  So all through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were great men of letters, philosophers, and scientists; and musicians, artists, poets, historians, essayists—and politicians—all giving voice to a belief in reincarnation arrived at through a pragmatic examination of the wonder of life on this earth, often combined with study of the Orientalists. This included men like Thomas Edison, Camille Flammarion (the French astronomer), Gustaf Stomberg (Swedish American astronomer and physicist), to name just a few.

  What, I wondered, did the twentieth century have to say? I found immediately, and again, that there was an enormous body of writing on the subject. I could only begin to scratch the surface. Among the many writers were Henry Miller, Pearl Buck, Thomas Wolfe, Jack London, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott—the litany of names was endless. I was delighted to find such diverse characters as Lord Hugh Dowding (British Air Chief Marshal during World War II), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Seton Thompson (founder of the Boy Scouts of America!), Lloyd George (British politician) and—my God—Henry Ford, all in the same reincarnational boat, as it were; also innumerable scientists, a whole school of modern art headed by Mondrian, Kandinsky, Klee. Malevich (Theosophists, one and all); and Herman Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Frost, John Masefield—to name, again, just a very few of the rich and distinguished roster of believers in the theory of reincarnation.