“War?” asked Mike.
“Sure. You can extend this example to a worldwide scene of haves and have-nots. It’s the same dilemma. But if we never really actually die anyway, then life becomes a question of how we handle a situation of injustice rather than not allowing it to happen by violent means.”
Mike leaned back against the tree. A cloud passed in front of the sun and a scream of seagulls took off as though they had made a collective decision to leave. “Do you realize,” said Mike, “that every despot in the world has taken advantage of that kind of thinking and gone on to cause incomprehensible suffering? To support that philosophy is despicably self-righteous. I mean, to teach that everyone should turn the other cheek is an open invitation to tyranny. I believe in self-determination and revolution if some bastard is doing me wrong.”
“So then you’re agreeing with killing if you are the one who feels it is necessary?”
“If some guy is trying to kill me first, yeah.”
“Okay,” I said, “I understand that. That is certainly the usual way out. But I’m wondering if we ever really kill our enemies anyway. Regardless of what one’s reason is for killing another person, I mean whether it’s personal or because some government or maybe religious authority tells one to, if the law of cause and effect is in operation—and that is at the root of reincarnation—then what have you accomplished except to accumulate a lot of bad karma? If death, meaning oblivion, a final end, is not a reality, what’s the point of killing? If we could ‘prove,’ as they say, that killing is not an answer, is ultimately self-defeating in a literal sense, maybe more than a few good minds would look for other solutions.”
“It’s a bit esoteric,” Mike said. “I can see why you have to worry at it because that’s the kind of mind you have. And I guess you’re bound and determined to unravel the knot to your own satisfaction. But Shirl, what’s it going to do to you?”
“How d’you mean?”
“Well, shit,” he said, “people will wonder what’s happened to you. I mean they don’t know you like I do, they’ll think you’ve gone off the deep end with no paddles in the water.”
Mike was genuinely concerned for me just as Bella was—even as Gerry had been. But why such concepts should be so personally threatening to Mike was another issue. Why he couldn’t relate with open-mindedness instead of anxiety was of course what I was concerned about, and not just in Mike.
“But Mike,” I said, “don’t you find nearly everyone has wondered about this stuff in one way or another? Don’t you think everyone has had something happen to them that they can’t explain?”
“Sure they have. But they just leave it unexplained. Why do you feel you have to develop this elaborate set of beliefs in order to explain things that are probably better off left alone?”
I was defensive enough to feel somewhat exasperated. “Who says they are better off left alone? What’s so good about the status quo that the world wants to preserve it as is? I’m looking for better answers, Mike. Part of it is just plain cussed curiosity I guess—I’ve always wanted to know why a rose was red, or a thought was strong. Surface explanations have never been enough for me so I suppose it is inevitable that I would carry my questioning all the way through—wherever it brings me out.”
Mike took my hand and patted it. “Well, a lot of other folks couldn’t leave well enough alone, like Louis Pasteur or Madame Curie. And look what they came up with. So who knows? But what bothers me is that what they did was all they did. They didn’t have to depend on audiences not being alienated to make a living. I don’t want that to happen to you.”
“I don’t think that’ll happen, Mike. Anyway, it’s the most meaningful thing in my life right now—to put it mildly. I just can’t leave it alone. And when I go the limit with my identity or anyone else’s identity I ultimately get to the fuller identity of what might have gone before this life. I mean I can see where you and I might have had a karmic relationship in a life before this one. I can see that we were together this time around because there was stuff still left to work out from before.”
“You mean maybe this conversation is part of working that out?”
“Could be.”
“Well. But I can only handle this life. That gives me enough to think about. And I don’t see how understanding any of what you’re talking about will help me raise the bail for a friend of mine who got busted for coke.”
Mike got up and stretched. “Be careful, Shirl. That’s all, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Wanna walk?”
Sure.
We put our arms around each other and walked out from under the tree toward the mountains. Mike leaned over and whispered in my ear, “So tell me. In our last lifetime together did you make secret trips to Europe to see me?”
That evening I felt really tired. I decided to take it real easy, maybe not do any writing that night. At the end of the day I sat out on my balcony and watched the wind play on gusts of sand as the sun set. The low glasslike tide reflected a glow of pink-orange. I wondered when the grunion were supposed to run and how they knew they were supposed to. I wondered if fish had souls.
A lone figure walked along the shallow rippling waves about a mile down the coast. I watched him. I always wondered what other people thought about when they walked at sunset. Some walked with purpose, some ambled and others walked as though they weren’t walking at all—perhaps they were somewhere else. This lone figure walked as though he were looking for someone. He didn’t look much out to sea but more at the direction of the buildings on their pilings. He was eating something, an apple. He carried a pair of sandals in his other hand and walked with a slumped left shoulder. I looked closer as he came nearer. He saw me looking at him from above and waved. It was David.
Oh my God, I thought. Now what? When he reached the front of my building he stopped, smiled, waved again and yelled up at me.
Chapter 17
“I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research.”
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
The World As I See It
“Hi,” he said. “It’s beautiful down here.”
I got up and leaned on the railing. David was wearing a sweater over a shirt and a pair of white gym socks hung from the back pocket of his slacks.
“How are you?” I called.
He threw his cigarette into the waves. “Come on down and walk,” he yelled. “Let’s walk up to the big rock. Then if you feel like it, we can have some dinner at Holiday House.”
I straightened up from the railing.
“But bring a sweater,” he yelled. “It’ll be cold later.”
I got the woolen sweater that had been around the world with me, the green one Gerry loved, and climbed down the wooden stairs leading to the sand, feeling that I was seeing David for the first time—and in some respects wishing I had never met him at all. I was feeling bruised from the encounter with Mike which I was far from having sorted through.
David looked at me hard when I joined him. “Are you okay?” he said.
“Okay, fine, just fine.”
“I see,” he said, as we began to walk into the sun. “So you’ve been thinking a lot, eh?”
“Haven’t had time, really,” I said noncommittally.
He lit a cigarette.
“You sure do smoke a lot,” I commented. “Why d’you smoke so much if you’re into this spiritual stuff and all squared away with yourself?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it helps to ground me. Otherwise I’d be out on Cloud Thirty-nine all the time. Wouldn’t you smoke if you really got into it?”
“Smoke?” My voice was a little shrill. “I’d be inhaling giant redwoods if I really believed all I’m learning about.”
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s scary at first, like everything new is, but after a while you learn to desensitize yourself. Smoking is one way to do it. Also, I’m addicted.”
We walked a w
ay in the cold sand. The sandpipers did their sundown minuet. I felt I was doing my own minuet with David. For a time I said nothing. Then I thought I might as well.
“I guess you know,” I said, “that we’re old friends and have been married before?”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “I know.”
“Who from?”
“Oh, around. We’re lifetime partners or something, right?”
“Hmm.”
He puffed on his cigarette and looked up into the sunset. He had a way of sounding so sure of things he was almost pompous.
“You know,” I said, “I’ve been thinking. When the astronauts travel out there in space, are there spirits all around the space capsules?”
David laughed and coughed. “Well yeah,” he said. “You could say that because the spirit world is everywhere, even around us right now. I mean the spiritual plane is invisible to us most of the time because our consciousness is too dense to see them, but we aren’t invisible to them. And you can feel it sometimes, can’t you? I mean, don’t you really wonder sometimes where certain ideas and inspirations come from? Don’t you sometimes feel you are actually being guided by some invisible force? You know how so many of the great minds have talked about really feeling an invisible kind of inspirational force? Well, I think it’s probably their spiritual guides as well as a kind of recall from a talent they experienced in a past lifetime. You can see it in child prodigies. I mean, Mozart was probably playing the piano at four because he was remembering how.”
“David,” I said, interrupting his dissertation, “what proof is there that all this stuff is true? I mean really. You can sound like an asshole spouting off these theories like it’s fact and Santa Claus is real.”
“Well, there’s no question about it to me. I just feel it. I believe it. I know it. That’s all. Of course there’s no proof. So what? But the connection between the spiritual and physical planes is what’s missing in the world today. To me, the soul is the missing link to life. I mean if everyone understood that their souls never really die, they wouldn’t be so frightened, and they would understand why they’re alive as well.”
Every time David opened his mouth he delivered a spiritual sermon.
“So,” I said, “what you’re saying is that reincarnation is like show business. You just keep doing it until you get it right.”
“Yeah.” He had the good humor to laugh. “Something like that. You know,” he continued, “I’m convinced that Christ was teaching the theory of reincarnation.”
I wrapped my turtleneck sweater closer around my neck. Everything gave me chills these days. When David made one of his statements, he never gave it a buildup.
“Why do you think that?” I said, remembering what John had told me about the Bible.
David swished his feet in the water, breaking the mirrored reflection below us in the sand. “I’ve read a lot about the interpretations of Christ’s teaching other than what appears in the Bible.” He looked into my face and hesitated. “You know that nothing is recorded in the Bible about Christ from the time he was about twelve until he began to really teach at about thirty years old. Right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I had heard about that and I just figured he didn’t have much to say until he got older.”
“Well, no,” said David, “a lot of people think that those eighteen missing years were spent traveling in and around India and Tibet and Persia and the Near East. There are all kinds of legends and stories about a man who sounds just like Christ. His description is matched everywhere and he said he was the Son of God and he corroborated the beliefs of the Hindus that reincarnation was in fact true. They say he became an adept yogi and mastered complete control over his body and the physical world around him. He evidently went around doing all those miracles that were recorded later in the Bible and tried to teach people that they could do the same things too if they got more in touch with their spiritual selves and their own potential power.”
David did not know about my session with Kevin and John, nor that I had met a woman at The Ashram, a kind of protege of Sai Baba’s (an avatar in India). She and her husband had written a book and done a documentary film on the missing years of Christ. Their names were Janet and Richard Bock and they had done extensive research on that period in Christ’s life on Earth. They had compiled stacks of evidence researched by respected archeologists, theologians, students of Sanskrit and Hebrew writings, et cetera. All seemed to agree that Christ had indeed traveled extensively in India.
As we walked I told David about Janet and Richard and he said he had never met them but would love to compare the notes he had made when he spent two years in India researching the same thing. He said when Christ returned to Israel he taught what he had learned from the Indian masters, that is, the theory of reincarnation.
“But David,” I said, “why aren’t these teachings recorded in the Bible?”
“They are,” he said. “The theory of reincarnation is recorded in the Bible. But the proper interpretations were struck from it during an Ecumenical Council meeting of the Catholic Church in Constantinople sometime around 553 A.D., called the Council of Nicea. The Council members voted to strike those teachings from the Bible in order to solidify Church control.
“The Church needed to be the sole authority where the destiny of man was concerned, but Christ taught that every human being was responsible for his or her own destiny—now and future. Christ said there was only one judge—God—and he was very opposed to the formation of a church of any kind, or any other kind of ceremonial religion that might enslave man’s free will or his struggle for truth.”
This confirmed what Kevin had said, but it seemed logical that anyone heavily into reincarnation would have read about that famous Council.
The sun began to set behind the waves now, sweeping a pink-purple slash across the clouds above the Pacific.
“Anyway,” said David, “that’s what I believe Christ was really doing and when the Church destroyed those teachings, it screwed up mankind from then on.”
I didn’t answer him. I thought that if the Church had been teaching that our souls were involved in a continual physical embodiment in order to work out Karmic Justice, I would have been interested in it from the time I was little. That would have made sense to me. It would have given me a reason to believe in the spiritual dimension of man, because I would have been responsible for my own destiny (and so would everyone else). It would be up to our own consciences, not up to the Church to judge our behavior. And it also would have explained all the suffering and horror in the world which all my life had rendered me helplessly incapable of understanding or altering. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” would have taken on a different meaning. And it would have given me a deep-rooted comfort that we did indeed live forever and eternally according to our actions and reactions as we went along. “Turn the other cheek” would have had new meaning also. In fact, it would have been more possible because we would have held our eternal priorities higher than our earthly problems.
The law of cause and effect was accepted in science as fundamental. Why wasn’t that same law operable where human life was concerned? Laws were not always based on what we could see, and therefore prove. Morality, ethics, love—these were not visible, tangible things. But that didn’t mean they were not there.
I was not an expert in science or any of the given fields of provable facts. But, I was slowly beginning to wonder why these fields mattered so much. I didn’t see much value in physical proofs when it came to the struggle of understanding why we were alive. Such a struggle belonged to each individual personally and in the deepest sense. It didn’t necessarily belong in the domain of “experts” of any variety. Maybe that’s what was meant by “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Perhaps the meek who didn’t see any need to act “strong” were those who related to God and the goodness of life and mankind; and the Golden Rule was the first and last axiom to live by. Maybe all those who tended to complica
te life out of fear were adding, not only to the karmic complexities of the earth itself, but also to the karmic complexities of their own lives.
David and I walked on in silence. We walked to the public beach about three miles up the coast where he had parked his car.
It was an old Dodge, green, and in the back seat was a stack of books tied with string. “I brought you some more books, plus a Bible. Just read and see what you think. Want to go eat?” Books? I needed more books?
We sat together in the restaurant above the sea. Whenever we talked, it was never small talk—never, “How was your day?” or “Do you like Brahms?” It was always big talk, as though chat would have been a waste of time. It was unusual for me not to be personal where a man was concerned because the “personal conversation” was usually a lead up to what we both wanted from each other … either clues to character or indications of goals in life.
This was different. I wasn’t interested in this man in that way. I was interested in what he had to say. I guess all people establish a set of unstated but understood rules of communication when they’re together one on one. It’s something you don’t think about, but it’s there and in operation until one of the two breaks what’s established and attempts to go on to another level.
David didn’t seem interested in breaking what was established either. It made me comfortable, and I instinctively knew that what we had was how it was going to be. Paradoxically, this created an atmosphere in which each encounter with this man who was partially responsible for my deeply questioning our perceptions of reality was a new experience for me.
So, even though we had a delicious Bordeaux wine and a really good beef Wellington, and even though there were candles on the table and we were deeply engrossed each in what the other was saying, and even though some of the other patrons wondered who it was I was with, I never felt inclined to relate to him on a man-woman level, and I didn’t really care specifically how he came to believe what he believed. This process was usually an abstract evolution of thinking, anyway. At least, it had been in my case, prompted by a few specific moments that motivated me further. We talked instead about the need for faith and a feeling of purpose, about whether the human race had progressed by itself or with some kind of spiritual “guidance,” and finally, about the wisdom of being open-minded about all new concepts.
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