“No?” (Why did I feel like one?)
David glanced at me. “No,” he said very firmly. “Listen, Shirl. What’s happening to you is mind-blowing. Just the way it was with me. And it’s happening awfully fast. There’s no way to really say these things without going all the way. That’s why it seems so heavy. Look, there’s a lot of outside proof of unidentified spacecraft—I mean from sources like the Air Force, radar tracking stations, literally hundreds of multiple sightings, that is, people who’ve seen them at the same time and place and with others—so we can go along with that, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. If there are UFOs, somebody’s got to be controlling them—in person, or by remote. And if not Earth people—and everyone seems agreed these craft do things our technology does not know about—then it’s got to be extraterrestrials.”
He peered at me to see how I was taking this. “It’s a pity everyone needs their own private proof,” he went on, “because from what Mayan told me, the extraterrestrials are superior because they understand the process of the spiritual domain of life. She says science, really highly advanced science, and spiritual understanding, are the same thing. Even Einstein was saying that. So, if you’ve gone as far as you have with the spiritual stuff, why not try to make the connection with higher technology? If it doesn’t feel right, forget about it.”
Forget about it? My God, who in hell could forget this kind of thing?
David saw me thinking … “open-minded” as he would say.
“Look,” he said, “you don’t have a problem with the reincarnation stuff, do you?”
“No,” I said, “not really. Not after all I’ve read on the subject and experienced myself. I mean, when I play a role, I put on the emotional cloak of another person. So, I can see that the soul might do the same thing every time it re-embodies.”
I was reminded of the many, many actors and actresses I had met who expressed bewilderment at where they got their inspiration when confronted with roles entirely alien to anything they had personally experienced: many times we based feelings we were supposed to act out on events in our own lives, but more often than not we were asked to dredge up feelings and reactions that we had never been familiar with, and as far as we knew, were outside our frame of reference. Yet the miracle of inspiration carried us to some deeper understanding, and when we were especially good, there was a faint resonance under our consciousness that reminded us that we had in fact emotionally been there before.
Maybe actors really were in effect the spiritual re-enactors of the soul’s experience. Maybe that’s why it felt familiar to me.
My mind drifted again to those haunting summer nights lolling on the hot grass with my telescope. It was as though I remembered the “feelings” I had had when I was looking at the stars. They felt familiar. It was as simple as that. Was I remembering an acquaintance with the knowledge of life there? Had I, or for that matter had everyone on Earth today experienced the familiarity with “helpers” from other celestial places during our long struggle through the traumas of time? John and McPherson and Ambres had said as much. But who were they? Shit, I thought, it’s perfectly straightforward—they are disembodied spirits who believe the world has always been visited by extraterrestrials. David is an embodied spirit who believes the same … My mind leapt to the Bible and I wondered if Ezekiel and Moses, for example, had been in the same circumstances centuries ago that David believed he found himself in with his Mayan today? It was easier then, I thought. Wonders and marvels were practically an everyday affair—everybody believed in such things then. Oh God, I thought—just like the folks around here …
I asked David if we could just sit in the sun for awhile. We found a grassy spot nestled in the mountain rocks and stretched out. We breathed deeply for a few minutes and lay down looking up at the sky.
I tried to put everything out of my mind and just “be.” I felt David do the same. Birds chirped and the river water gurgled and splashed. A small black dog ambled by, left his signature-on a bush, and trotted happily away.
About half an hour must have gone by. We didn’t speak. It was nice to feel peaceful. Then I heard David say something. His voice was slurred and sleepy. Or maybe it was I who was sleepy.
I looked over at him. “What?” I asked.
He sighed, turned over on his side, and looked at me. “Want to talk about Mayan?” he asked. “Because she had a lot to say about you.”
“About me?” I felt foolish. “Look, David. I don’t know any Mayan. I mean, she’s your problem.”
David grinned. “Oh, she’s no problem—although she may have created a couple for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, that’s why we need to talk about her.”
I thought a moment. “Okay if I record this?”
Sure.
I took out my tape recorder and pushed the record button. If this was really happening, I wanted to be able to prove it to somebody. I checked the moving tape and proceeded. “Well,” I said, “now what’s this all about, David?”
“In the first place, do you remember a guy coming to your door—oh, maybe ten years ago, with three stones from the Masai chieftain you knew so well?”
My memory raced backward. Yes, I remembered someone ringing my doorbell in Encino about two years after my African trip, sometime in the mid-sixties. He didn’t identify himself. He made no impression on me at all, but he handed me three colored stones which he said were magic amulets for health, wisdom, and security. The Masai chieftain had met him on safari and had asked if he was from America. He had said yes, and the chieftain then had asked him if he knew me. He said no, but he had heard of me. The chieftain had simply said, “Will you give these to her?” And the guy said yes, somehow he would.
Then it struck me.
“How the hell do you know about that guy?”
“Oh, it was me,” David said.
“You?” My voice rose to a strangled squeak.
“Yes. Now calm down, Shirl. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know myself at the time what it was all about. All I knew was the man gave me the stones for you and asked me to deliver them. I simply thought ‘far out’—and did it.”
“And then what?” I said belligerently, feeling somehow invaded.
“Well, a good deal later, Mayan told me about it. I mean what it meant. She said I had been directed to you because we’d known each other in previous lives, and some day you’d want proof of it.”
“Well, why all the goddamn secrecy? Why couldn’t you tell me who you were all this time?” And even as I asked I knew the answer.
“You weren’t ready, were you? The whole point was to deliver the stones—even before either of us knew what it was about. Then Mayan had to convince me. And now I have to convince you …”
“I guess,” I said slowly, “if proof is needed, it makes sense. But what’s the point? What does it all mean?”
“What it comes down to, Shirley, is that you’re to be a teacher. Like me. But on a much wider scale.”
“A wider scale?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean? I’m no teacher. I haven’t got the patience. I’m a learner.”
“Yes, but you like to write, don’t you?”
Oh my God, I thought. Am I supposed to write a book about all of this? Did I subconsciously plan to do that? Was that why I took my tape recorder with me everywhere and wrote notes at the end of every day?
“She thought that with your particular mental bent you could write a very entertaining, informative account of your personal excursion into these matters and maybe teach people at the same time.”
Jesus, I thought, did this make sense? My other two books had been a personal account of my travels and thoughts through Africa, India, Bhutan, America, politics, show business, and China—was I now supposed to write an account of my past lives, God, and extraterrestrials?!? I laughed at the logical absurdity of it.
“Who would believe it i
f I wrote for publication about all this?” I asked.
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “There are more people out there doing this than you realize. Everyone is motivated by a desire to know the truth. Everyone.”
“The truth? What truth?”
“The simple truth,” he said, “of knowing yourself. And to know yourself is to know God.”
“You mean that is the Big Truth?”
“That’s it. The point, Shirley, is that it is simple. God is simplicity. Man is complexity. Man has made himself complex. But he yearns toward understanding, toward the truth behind that complexity. And those who begin to understand it, desire to share their understanding.”
“But that would be only my understanding. That wouldn’t necessarily be the truth.”
“No,” David said, “there is only one truth, and that is God. You can help others understand God through themselves by sharing the account of how you understand God through yourself.
I felt a kind of clutch in my stomach and in my heart. It was true that I loved to share my adventures with my writing. But to say I would now write about how I found God was ridiculous to me. I wasn’t even sure I believed in this thing called God. I was interested in people. The idea of having had past lives interested me because it offered an explanation of who I was today.
“David,” I said, “look, my own personal identity and how I came to be who I am is something I feel comfortable with, but I can’t say I believe in God.”
“That’s right,” he said. “You don’t believe in God. You know God. Belief implies acceptance of something unknown. You have simply forgotten what you already know.”
I sat in the sunlit silence, my mind battering at itself. I had forgotten what I already knew.
David seemed to sense my flash of fear because he continued, “You certainly picked the wrong line of work if you are afraid of public humiliation, didn’t you?”
He caught me off guard.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “you set yourself up for a fall every time you walk out on the stage or act in a film, don’t you?”
I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but he was right. I had terrible stage fright and it wasn’t based on whether I’d be good or not, it was based on what the people would think of me. There was a big difference.
“Did it ever occur to you,” he went on, “that you chose a public profession so you would overcome your fear of humiliation?”
I had often thought the same thing, but never really admitted it to myself. I longed for anonymity, wanted to be the fly on the wall, was much more interested in asking questions than being asked, and whenever I was involved with the public exposure of my profession, I couldn’t wait for it to be over so I could become a recluse again and go away somewhere and think and write.
Yet, I kept on being a public personality as though I was slowly, little by little, trying to squeeze the fear out of myself. And it had gotten better recently too. In fact, the more I learned about my internal self the less self-conscious I was of what others might think. I had always longed for the feeling of being carefree and totally unconcerned with what others thought of me. In fact, I think I had orchestrated a public personality so distinct in that regard that people really did believe I didn’t give a damn what anybody else thought. I remembered telling my press agent once that I wanted to appear totally free-spirited.
So I said to David, “Do you think I planned to become a so-called ‘free-spirited’ public personality so I could get away with writing what you and Mayan have been talking about?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that’s the karma you chose for yourself. Why don’t you just put it on the back burner for now?”
On the back burner? I was trying to stop my mind from lurching over itself. I felt as though I was grasping way beyond what I could understand. It was a feeling of groping in a darkness with only the help of clichés as lanterns to light the way … phrases like inner knowingness, higher consciousness, high vibrations, inner peace, enlightenment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I was feeling none of those things. Instead, I was feeling set up. Was David setting me up to write about all of this?
“David,” I shouted. “For God’s sake, you say this Mayan is an extraterrestrial? Well, okay. Jesus, if you want to believe it, that’s your affair—but I think the whole thing sounds like a tub of shit!” It was more than I could stand.
I was suddenly overcome with suspicion, feeling absurd that I was directing honest questions, as though the discussion was credible at all, to a person who claimed to have had a relationship with an extraterrestrial. It was just suddenly too damn much. I felt more than a little hostile. In fact, I wanted to be even more than harsh. Write about this stuff? I couldn’t even think about it anymore. I felt my brain would explode. I had reached my limit of open-mindedness.
David continued to sit peacefully. Then he rolled over on his stomach, apparently unconcerned and uninvolved with what was transpiring. I could feel my pulse accelerate and I began to calculate how long it would take for me to get down from the mountains and onto a plane back to the sane world I understood.
My mind and hostility raced on as though I was having an inner dialogue with myself over my own stupid open-mindedness and the awful truth that I might be one of those suckers born every minute as ET. Barnum would say.
David breathed calmly.
“David!” My voice was harsh. “Are you there or not?”
“I am here,” he answered immediately. His voice was soft, with an annoyingly patient tone.
“Well?” I said loudly and defensively.
He raised up on an elbow. “Well, what, Shirley? You seem to have accepted the idea of reincarnation, you are at least partly convinced that there are UFOs and hence something that flies them. Now what can possibly make you think the human race has an exclusive on life in the cosmos?”
I didn’t know what to think. I began to feel physically uncomfortable. My skin itched. The sun was suffocating. I did not want to be there.
Finally David said, “Try to be calm. Breathe deeply and concentrate on that. I know it’s a struggle. I went through the same process. What you’re suffering from is overload. Overload with everything. Just proceed at your own pace, and try to proceed peacefully. You’ll make more progress that way.”
“Progress?” I screamed at him. “You are upsetting everything mankind believes in, replacing it instead with some kind of outrageous metaphysical twilight zone mumbo jumbo, and this you call progress?”
“It’s funny,” he said. “They think our priorities are mumbo jumbo. We are still in the Dark Ages. Certainly the behavior of the human race would seem to bear me out. The fact is, we are still basically rather primitive.”
“Well okay,” I said, “all right. I know that, goddammit. But man is probably only animalistic anyway. That explains why we act the way we do. So why do you espouse all these ideas that we are better than we are?”
“Ah,” he said, not in an I-told-you-so manner, but more as if I had proved his point. “That’s the rub, isn’t it? You are upset because I believe in you more than you do. And that challenges you to improve beyond what you believe you are capable of.”
My God, I thought. That’s what I had been doing to Gerry. I snorted out a breath that turned into a chuckle at the way I brought my cosmic outrage down to a personal example.
“Feeling better?” David asked. “I know that when you understand, you understand quickly.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do,” he said gently.
I got up and began to pace around David. I wanted to nudge him with my foot. No—I wanted to kick him.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Remember you are on the right path or you wouldn’t be here.”
That made me laugh. Oh Christ, I thought.
“It’s all only a question of time anyway,” he went on. “B
ut as you can see, just looking around at the world—time is running out. It’s a struggle, I know. But that’s life.”
I laughed again.
“And remember you have already been through this struggle in many lifetimes. So relax. You can do it again.”
I knelt back down on the ground beside him.
“But if I’ve been through this so-called spiritual struggle before, why am I going through it again?”
“Because,” he said, “there are other aspects of your soul’s progression you need to work out. Patience and tolerance, for example. It’s not enough to intellectually understand the spiritual aspect of man. You have to live it. Understand?”
“What do you mean? Like Jesus Christ or somebody?”
“Right. He worked out his soul’s progression to near perfection. Others can too. That, in fact, was Christ’s message: all people can accomplish what he accomplished—know your potential, that’s all it takes.”
“What about these extraterrestrials of yours? Are they doing it too? Do they need to?”
“Certainly,” he answered. “Every living soul in the cosmos needs to. That is the purpose of life. That’s all they are trying to teach … know your complete potential. The extraterrestrials are still learning about themselves too. But the spiritual aspect of ourselves is what is missing on Earth.”
I looked up into the sun. My skin had stopped itching and once again the sun rays felt good. I sighed to myself and looked over at my tape recorder. It was nearly to the end of the sixty-minute tape.
“Mayan always says,” David’s voice was a murmur, “love God, love your neighbor, love yourself, and love God’s work for you are part of that work. Remember that. And something else. She told me not to forget to tell you one thing. She said that in order to get to the fruit of the tree you have to go out on a limb.”
He stopped. I shut off the tape recorder and passed out on my back.
But I have that tape. I have listened to it again and again and heard David repeat the very words that McPherson and Gerry both used.
OUT ON a LIMB Page 32