OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  Was this what all those people interviewed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross had experienced? Had my spiritual energy separated itself from the physical form? Was I floating as my soul? I was consciously aware of my questions as I soared freely above the Earth. I was so conscious of what I felt that in those moments I understood how irrelevant my physical body was. I was experiencing the separation, I guess. Experiencing the two entities—and very much more besides.

  I watched the silver cord attached to my body. I had read about the silver cord in metaphysical literature. It glistened in the air. It felt limitless in length … totally elastic, always attached to my body. My sight came from some kind of spiritual eye. It wasn’t like seeing with real eyes. I soared higher and wondered how far the cord would stretch without snapping. The moment I thought about hesitation, my soaring stopped. I stopped my flight, consciously, in space. I didn’t want to go any higher. As it was I could see the curvature of the Earth, and darkness on the other side of the globe. The space surrounding my spirit was soothing and gentle and pure. I began to perceive waves of energy connections and undulating thought energy patterns. The silver cord wasn’t taut or stretched. It only floated gently.

  I directed myself downward, back to my body. Slowly I descended. Slowly … down, down … gently through the space I wafted back to earth. The energy vibrations subsided … the rolling sensation of the undulating thought waves disappeared above me and with a soft fusion of contact that felt like a puff, I melded back into my body. My body felt comfortable, familiar, but it also felt restricting and cumbersome and limiting … I was glad to be back, but knew that I would want to go out again.

  The silver cord melded into the flickering candlelight and I shook myself free of the concentration and looked over at David who was smiling.

  I didn’t really understand what had happened. I tried to explain it to David.

  “I know,” he said. “See how realization is a physical act?” he said. “What you realized was your soul and your soul left your body. That’s all.” But he was clearly delighted.

  “You mean I was astrally projecting just then?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “I was doing that this morning right here while you were off walking. I take trips all over the place. I save on fuel costs,” he grinned. “In the ascral world you can go anywhere you feel like, meet all kinds of other souls too. It’s just that when you return to your body and wake up you often don’t remember where you’ve been. Something like dreaming.”

  “So is that what happens when you die; your soul just rises out of your body and floats and soars into the astral world?”

  “Sure,” said David, “except you’re only dead if your silver cord snaps. The cord snaps and breaks off when the body can no longer sustain the life force. It’s really very simple. I can’t tell you specifically how it is to die, but I can tell you that the principle is the same as astral projection, only there’s no body to return to.”

  I began to shiver slightly in the water. I wanted more hot milk … something familiar. I couldn’t go back to a warm cozy room or bask in a really hot soapy tub. I could only keep going forward regardless of how uncomfortable it might be.

  “I guess I should get out of this water,” I said, feeling my teeth begin to chatter.

  “Okay,” said David. “Let’s go get some milk and food.”

  I rubbed my skin hard until it tingled and whipped on my clothes like a quick change artist. Outside David hugged me hard as though I had graduated or something.

  All my perceptions were upside down … that is all of my worldly, conditioned, perceptions were topsy-turvy. My new perceptions were becoming more clearly simple. What I had experienced had a dreamlike quality to it but it wasn’t a dream. It was more like a new dimension.

  A cloak of calm settled over me as we had our hot milk and stew with the woman with no teeth and her children. The soccer game from Lima blared loudly on a shortwave radio interspersed with reports of widespread riots in Huancayo about an hour further into the mountains. The announcer said they were “inflation” riots. People were throwing rocks and debris into shop windows protesting the high cost of living. Even here in the Andes people couldn’t afford to live because their wages couldn’t accommodate the prices. David said there would probably be a change in government soon, whether by coup or otherwise, but it probably wouldn’t matter anyway because it would be the same problem all over again.

  When we walked outside to cross the highway to our “hotel,” it was dark. We stumbled over some large rocks. David said the protestors used the line of boulders as a technique to prevent traffic from making it to Huancayo where its 100,000 residents were already subject to a curfew after nine o’clock. The rocks prevented government troops from rushing to the rescue too.

  I had a kerosene lamp which gave off a kind of gaseous, smelly heat. But at least there was some warmth as I walked into my room and collapsed on the bed. The cold earth floor smelled musty and when I wrapped myself in my poncho, I wondered how open I would be to learning if I were more comfortable. Was it necessary to live with basic discomfort in order to learn basics?

  “Okay,” said David, “have a good sleep. Relax. Maybe I’ll see you on the astral plane!” He winked and quietly left.

  I stared into the silver fragment of the kerosene lamp until my eyes hurt. I lay on the makeshift cot—listening to the silence of the rocky mountains. I could hear the pigs snorting outside.

  My brain swirled and leapt and crawled around inside itself. I was exhausted. I wanted to leave myself. Did I want to run and hide and forget everything I had experienced up here? I had been a grabber at life, wanting to feel, touch, experience everything I possibly could. I couldn’t imagine not being avidly involved in the daily scrabble. Yet did I really want my old life back, the familiar agony of searching for purpose and reason, my fears, jealousies, struggles in driving toward whatever was true in reality? Did I long to have back again everything that had made me unhappy, or ecstatic, simply because it was familiar? Would I ever be able to relax again in the belief that life and reality were simply what I could see, touch and hear? That death was death and simply the end? Did I want to go back to the “safe” feeling that without proof, nothing was worthy of faith?

  I heard a soft tap on the wall separating my room from David’s.

  “Relax, Shirley,” David whispered loudly with a laugh in his voice. “I can feel your brain and it’s keeping me awake.”

  I laughed too. “You got me into this,” I said, staring at the gray slab wall beside my head. “Now you say I’m keeping you awake

  “Try to sleep. You need it.”

  “Sure. How? How do I fall asleep when I know I’m going to live a million years? I’m not sure I’ve even liked this much.”

  “Concentrate.”

  “On what?”

  “On your golden dream, remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  Only I didn’t. I couldn’t think of anything I could call my golden dream. And that was harder than anything.

  Chapter 25

  “… now our whole life, from birth unto death, with all its dreams, is it not in its turn also a dream, which we take as the real life, the reality of which we do not doubt only because we do not know of the other more real life? Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real life—the life of God.”

  —LEO TOLSTOY

  Letters

  I spent the next few days walking and thinking. Sometimes David came with me, sometimes not. Sometimes I wanted to go home, back to America, back to the familiarity of my old world with its fast-paced involvement, its clanking relationships, its unrealistic romance, all the rushing with no seeming purpose—the events, the news, the arts, movies, hits, flops, sweat, hard work, black humor, competition, new fashions, profits, color TV, and success. I missed it all. I was used to it. I had survived in its colorful confusion, and I missed it. But I didn’t
want to be unfulfilled in it anymore either. I watched the woman with no teeth wash her clothes by stamping on them with her feet. They came out clean. The clothes, I mean. (Probably the feet, too.) That’s what I wanted to do with my life … stamp on it until it came out clean. Could I go back to my old world now? Would I be two people? Was I more than one person anyway? I stopped and laughed right there. That was the whole lesson, wasn’t it? I was all the people I had ever lived. I had probably been through versions of this brain drain more than a few times before.

  David watched me go through the emotional pull with calm understanding.

  “I had to do the same thing,” he said one day, sitting on a rock staring into a mountain daisy. “Just know yourself, remember? And in yourself is the universe.”

  One night after stew in the FOOD building, he asked if I wanted to watch the sky for a while. The food made us warm and gave us a feeling of reinforcement against the cold.

  “Let’s try it,” he said. “If it’s too cold, we’ll go inside. Straw is warm if we bury ourselves deep enough.”

  So, using a shovel belonging to one of the coca-chewing workmen, we dug a fairly deep rectangular hole in the soft earth just behind our “hotel.” Then we piled mounds of straw into it. We lay on top of the straw and piled even more on top around us. It seemed warm enough to relax. If I thought I was warm, I was warm.

  David gazed up into the sky. He had a kind of longing expression on his face.

  I lay in the straw wondering how I would feel about Peru when I left it. I had a curious habit of getting homesick for every country I had ever been in—even the Soviet Union which I didn’t like very much. Some spark in me was always touched when I went to a new place and I was usually haunted by it when I left. I wondered how many countries I had lived in in my other lives. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t remember.

  The stars above us looked two feet over our heads. I shivered a little but the grandeur made the chill ridiculous. David lay quietly beside me. We looked into the sky for about an hour.

  Then I looked over at him.

  “I’m glad I came,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Soon after that we fell asleep. If the space discs came out it was irrelevant to both of us. We needed rest. We woke up with the sunrise and walked in the dawn shadows for about two hours. We didn’t talk much. And later, when we ate our rolls and hot milk, our conversation was about how reassuring it was that no one or nothing ever dies. In the afternoon, we walked some more … up and down the sides of mountains and along the Mantaro River. We bought Mantaro yogurt along the road. We skipped and ran. We waded in the cold river and splashed with the orange water. I felt totally and completely in the present, and when I took a nap in the late afternoon sun, stretched out on the hot grass, my mind and heart felt as though gentle waves of liquid velvet undulated over and around me.

  I began to feel (rather than to think about) a new way of looking at life and myself. I felt as though I was giving up an old self. A self that had believed that guilt, jealousy, materialism, sexual hangups, and doubt were part of being human. I had once come to terms with the performance of those emotions, felt reasonably resigned to them, and now I was having to undo the resignation and venture into a new kind of life-thought that required that I not only work out the negatives, but that if I didn’t I would have to pay for avoiding it with my own karma later on. Since my life would apparently not be over when I died, I was stuck with it right smack into eternity. So I might as well get started now. Such a concept had been alien to anything I ever imagined. I thought about my life and relationships back home.

  I remembered Gerry’s sudden revelation one day when he said that I had romanticized him to such an extent that he couldn’t possibly live up to it. It was my way of programming the relationship so that it couldn’t possibly work. Romantic notions did that. They made life impossible to live—realistically or otherwise, because romantic notions were impossible to sustain.

  I found myself thinking of Gerry in a different way. I looked at him in a more objective light. Much more realistically and from his point of view.

  David and I talked about it, although I never identified Gerry. But David helped me with understanding my own feelings. As we talked, it slowly dawned on me that I had always used my loving, protective, cocoon relationships with men to hold myself back. To keep from being really free and expansive, I had woven a web of soothing safety around myself and the man in my life. The us, therefore, had been more important to me than me. I was protecting myself from my own potential in the name of love.

  David and I walked miles every day across the plains of wheat and along the Mantaro River banks. We sat and watched sunups and sundowns. When my conflict got me down, I talked it over with him and he reminded me to examine the reasons for it, my conditioning, my contradictions and that the choice of breaking through to a new freedom and learning process was mine.

  Sitting in a relaxed sunlit mood on a hill somewhere, or in the bubbly sulphur water, he came back again and again to his talks with Mayan.

  In one session, she had spoken of the need for all women to believe in themselves as women, the need to be secure in that. “Women have the right, even with the independence already achieved in the United States, to be even more independent and free,” she said. “No society can function democratically until women are considered equal on every basis, particularly to themselves. And you will never attain such a thing other than through your own self-effort. In fact,” she said, “nothing is worth having, except that which is won by ‘self-effort.’ The souls of human beings, particularly women, are chained to the earth through the comforts of home and land and limited love, and until you learn to break those chains for higher knowledge, you will continue to suffer.”

  She had reminded David that women are cleverer than men—which he repeated with a straight face. He sure took Mayan seriously.

  In another session, Mayan had described science as the handmaiden of God. But she said that science had so advanced technology on Earth that it had outstripped our ability to cope with it to the point where technology had become totally life-threatening; that we actually needed to dismantle our nuclear fission plants and concentrate research resources on solving the problems of dangerous technological wastes of all kinds. Even technology, she said, is not a bad thing—it is how you use it and what you use it for: as an example she had cited the sun as a limitless source of energy which we should learn to store and utilize. Then science, through technology, would serve both man and Earth.

  Mayan continually emphasized that in all of the cosmos, nothing was valued as highly as one living soul, and in the value of one living soul lay the value of the entire cosmos. She said that humankind follows a spiral projection upward, that although it may appear we are not progressing, that is in fact not true. With each rebirth and afterlife reflection, humankind finds itself on a higher plane, whether we realize it or not. And, she said, with each individual soul’s progression, the machinery and the movement of the entire cosmos is affected, because each individual soul is that important.

  She said that man has a habit of reducing his understanding to the perceptions of his own mind, that it is difficult for us to break through our own frames of reference and allow our imaginations to take quantum leaps into other dimensions, transcending the limits imposed on us by lifetimes of structured thinking.

  We had been in the Andes now for two-and-a-half weeks. It seemed two-and-a-half years. To say my point of view had been altered was obvious. I could feel it in everything I thought. I felt as though my own potential was opening up. Now, I thought, if I could only hang on to it when I returned to earth! And I wondered whether my new point of view would also change my life.

  We took side trips to Ataura every few days for tape batteries, paper, pens, and just to see crowds of people. We didn’t see any rioting, but police were everywhere. When I shopped in the small, dusty food markets, the fruit and vegetables were not fresh and the prices were outr
ageous. Fifty-nine cents for an apple. Small tape recorders were $450.00 and prices for other electrical hardware appliances would have been exorbitant even for a thriving economy: no wonder there were incipient rebels all over the place. Prices were astronomical and salaries low. There were few Americans visible, mostly college students on treks through the Andes.

  At the Sunday fair in Ataura people came from hundreds of miles away to sell wares that included everything from antique Victrolas to goats. We ate rice and beans, and I didn’t care whether the onions sprinkled on top gave me heartburn or not. We continued to hear people in shops and restaurants talk about UFOs. David translated and it seemed that each person had had some kind of UFO experience, describing cigar-shaped craft out of which flew discs, or just discs alone.

  Nearly everyone had a story about the Huaytapallana Ice Peaks. Either they seemed on fire at certain times “with the sky lighting up,” or formations of craft were seen above them. There didn’t seem to be much fear running through the related experiences, only awe. And everyone who had seen a UFO believed the craft belonged to beings from outer space.

  We were sitting in the heartburn cafe on my last day in the Andes. I was scheduled to leave for New York from Lima at six o’clock the next morning. Looking out at the Ice Peaks, David got up, plucked a daisy from the vase on the table, put it behind his ear, and went to buy a Spanish newspaper. I saw his face drop when he read the headlines.

  “There’s been a big blackout in New York City,” he said, “and lots of people went ‘free shopping.’ ”