OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  At peace and exhausted, I fell asleep.

  Chapter 26

  “This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven.

  And I said to my spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?

  And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.

  You are also asking me questions and I hear you, I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.”

  —WALT WHITMAN

  Song of Myself

  When I arrived in New York I met with Bella immediately. It was her birthday and her campaign staff threw a fundraising party at Studio 54.

  Bella knew I had been in Peru, and I told her I had been meditating in a hut in the Andes. She had read my books and believed I was capable of any kind of weird adventure. In any case, it was not the time for a talk together. I told her I had a good rest in my mud hut and she laughed, rolling her eyes, and then plunged into her campaign strategy just to return to a familiar kind of insanity.

  I watched intently, waiting for something that would confirm or deny what Maria in the Andes had said. Bella’s losing campaign for the mayoralty of New York is now history. She never even made it to the runoffs. Ed Koch, that tall, balding fellow with the long fingers, won, hands down.

  I wished I had asked Maria more questions.

  With the accumulation of the events that led up to my trip to Peru and the events in Peru itself, I began to lead a life beneath the life that was obvious to most of my friends. I made my films, danced and sang in my television specials, and toured with my live show. I was still reasonably active in the women’s movement, politics and human rights, but I found that I really, preferred to travel and think.

  The relationship with Gerry cooled, and ended. With my new perspectives, it did indeed feel like something from another life …

  I loved traveling because it helped me gain a more accurate and objective view of the world as well as of myself. I went all over Europe, Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and to many cities in America.

  And the more I traveled, the more I learned about the spiritual dimensions of life that I was growing to understand. My own convictions were taking shape and being confirmed wherever I went.

  I found that the theory of the progression of souls through the process of reincarnation had become part of new age thought systems, not only in California, but all over the Western world. Over casual conversations it would come out. And whenever I pursued it more seriously, I found that people were thirsty to compare notes on their feelings about past-life recall and spiritual consciousness. They usually concluded by saying it was good to have a serious dialogue on such theories with someone who didn’t believe they were crazy. Some of the people were just regular citizens in their respective countries. But others held high-level positions of influence in political and journalistic circles. The latter were careful to hold their beliefs close to their vests and felt saddened by the need to do so.

  Yet I did not want to be talking to myself, as it were. I wanted and needed opposition, criticism, questioning. I searched for it first in my reading and found the strongest skeptics were among those with the most serious beliefs. I don’t know why it surprised me. People to whom spirituality and higher consciousness are truly important most particularly do not want to be taken in by fakes, charlatans, self-deluded prophets, or parlor mystics. I found that searching experiments had been conducted, sometimes over periods of many years, and certainly in all areas of psychic phenomena.

  The literature on the whole subject was vast—almost overwhelming—dating back to the ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets, and down the centuries through Egyptian records, the Greek oracles, Hindu scriptures, the Druidic tradition, Essene literature, the records of secret societies such as the Free Masons, and many more; all the way to the writings of Carl Jung and even more recent parapsychological investigations. The quest, and the point of view, was always to recognize the potential for expanded consciousness in man in order to enable him to live more fully and peacefully with and through his spiritual dimension.

  Along with my reading, I questioned many different kinds of people about their beliefs. Time and again the strongest prejudice I encountered was firmly entrenched in the minds of those who thought of themselves as intellectual pragmatists. These were people who had a kind of knee-jerk reaction to mere words like psychic, astral, spiritual dimension, and could not get beyond a conditioned reflex.

  After a while, I began to see that there was another kind of rejection of spiritual values, a rejection which was a real need in certain people. They had come to terms with this world just as it is, accepting the wonder and joy that life on earth offers, accepting as well the horror, pain, and agony. Courageously, such people embraced the whole, willing and eager to go the limit, but always within the compass that this life is all there is. A whole additional dimension which might—or might not—be crucial to their ills and joys was just the additional straw they could not, did not, want to cope with. Again, it was a view I could well understand. Enough is enough, after all. And yet …

  And yet everywhere I went, I continually encountered a deep need for spirituality and expanded consciousness, a need for people to come together, to share their energies in something that worked. I found people had had experiences similar to mine: people involved with trance channeling, past life recall, growing spiritual awareness, and even contact with UFOs. I found spiritual communities, such as Findhorn, were springing up all over the world. I visited and stayed at several.

  I wondered whether coming into the Aquarian Age (as the astrologers and astronomers called it) also meant that we were coming into an age of Love and Light. Those were the two words most often used to characterize the feelings attached to the new age discoveries. Some of the world’s leaders spoke in spiritual terms—Pierre Trudeau urged a “conspiracy of love” for humanity. Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke of an “increasing yearning for something spiritual” in a world of technology where materialism had proven unsatisfying. The spiritual urge, then, knew no politics, as I supposed it never had. Nor was the urge to transcend the material plane of existence new, either.

  I went back and read more about the American transcendentalist movement. Some of the people involved in that movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott (father to Louisa M., of Little Women fame) and dozens of others. They had been rebels against over-intellectualism and the linear custom of believing only what one could see or prove. They found this both limiting and ultimately wasteful since within these bounds man’s full potential could never be developed. They believed that the real essentials were invisible, untouchable—but not unreal.

  In fact, interestingly enough, even the American Revolution itself was conceived and initiated by men whose belief in the spiritual world was an integrated part of their lives. As I reread some of that period of American history, I realized how much we had forgotten, how metaphysically bold those revolutionaries had been. Our forefathers—Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington—all were transcendentalists.

  The significance of their beliefs emerged all over the Great Seal of America, on the reverse of which the legend reads, “A New Order of Ages Begins,” along with the third eye which also appears at the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza on the dollar bill! All of this symbolism was designated by our transcendentalist founders at the birth of the United States.

  I began to read more about these men and realized how deeply they threatened the older orders of the time with their new thinking. The transcendentalists drew not only from Quaker and Puritan traditions, but also from German and Greek philosophers, as well as from Eastern religions. When they were accused of having contempt for history, they replied that humankind should be liberated from history. They believed that all observation was relative. They saw through
their eyes, not with their eyes.

  All pointed out that inner reform must precede social reform. Continually they emphasized the need for personal transformation, but as the American Revolution moved into the Industrial Revolution, the transcendentalists found themselves increasingly isolated and misunderstood. Technology and machines were on the minds of Americans.

  They came to be known as occultists and began to operate more within their own circles. By the end of the nineteenth century, the worst fears of our founding fathers had been realized. We were now fully on the path of materialism—our spiritual heritage overwhelmed by industrialization, history books barely mentioning our mystical beginnings.

  But, as is more fully developed in Marilyn Ferguson’s “The Aquarian Conspiracy” published in 1980, the spiritual support system of our revolutionary forefathers had taken hold in art and in literature.

  William Blake, for example, considered the American and French revolutions as only the first steps toward a worldwide spiritual revolution.

  Just as Blake had been influenced by the German mystic, writer and philosopher Jacob Boehme and by Emanuel Swedenborg, Blake now influenced writers, artists and politicians for years to come: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, John Dewey, Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King—all deeply believed in metaphysical dimensions that would ultimately explain the mystery of life.

  I read and read and talked more and more freely to people about my experiences in spiritual search. Many others seemed to be searching also for a balance between their inner lives and their outer lives. Many of them attended spiritual channelings, seeking answers from the “other side.”

  Studio executives, bank presidents, journalists, actors and actresses, musicians, writers, househusbands and housewives attended the spiritual channelings that I had been introduced to. No one questioned the validity of the process anymore. They only wrestled with the information they received—past-life information, psychological information, dietary information, medical and scientific information: information about Atlantis, Lemuria, the creation of the cosmos, extraterrestrials … everything one could think of to ask. The spiritual entities (not in the body) became their friends and confidants. People discussed their personalities, their humor, their understanding, as if they were physically present.

  As I talked with the hundreds who came to these sessions, I realized they were more comfortable and open with each other than with those in their lives who had not recognized the need for spirituality. This was not a religious feeling. Not at all. It was simply that to be without spiritual awareness was like being without arms and legs. Some had skeptical questions when they found the going rough. But all of the people I talked to just kept going. They told me about the predictions that had been channeled that had come to pass. They told me how some of the past-life information had altered their perspectives on their present lives. They told me how vacant the lives of friends seemed to be who did not share their search—to whom they could not speak in spiritual terms.

  They were not at all close-mouthed when I questioned them, but all said they found it difficult to relate to others who did not understand. They went about their daily lives with the knowledge and support that they had each other, but mostly they derived great happiness and joy from the fact that they were getting more in touch with their own spiritual selves. Some of their relationships and long friendships eventually foundered because their spiritual beliefs and values could not be shared and they could not abide the cynical and intellectual limitations of the past. Some said they found it necessary to lead two lives—for fear of threatening those they loved.

  At the same time science was having its own struggle. I read in The New York Times that scientists had been forced to come around to the “big bang” theory of the creation of the universe. It looked as though the theologians had been right after all. The Bible had called the shot and the scientists were having to admit it. The universe had been created by a colossal explosion all at once, “in one moment of time,” about twenty billion years ago. The astronomical and scientific and biblical accounts of Genesis all coincided now, much to the dismay of most scientists, who found it “irritating,” to say the least. The universe was expanding in some places as fast as one hundred million miles an hour. That meant there had been a beginning.

  So the question the scientists posed was, “What came before the beginning?” They were concluding now that, “There must have been a Divine Will constituting nature from nothingness.”

  So perhaps a theological explanation might hold an answer. Scientists had been able to trace the origins of humanity on the planet, the chemical ingredients of life itself, the formation of stars out of primal mists: but now they had hit a solid barrier. An article (by the scientist Robert Jastrow, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) said, “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

  It seemed as though the whole world was rushing toward a confrontation with itself. In the last hundred years we had progressed farther and faster than in all the time preceding, most particularly in the areas of technology, matched only by the various scientific disciplines, fairly bursting with new discoveries. And this rapid growth was very much ongoing. People now living remembered a wholly different world, one they had experienced in their childhood, when life moved at the pace it took to walk to your neighbor’s for company; while others, now living, had been raised in the age of television and telephone communication, a computer-wise generation to whom reading was difficult and writing awkward.

  The energy packed into this period by the acceleration of discovery on all fronts had altered time. We were experiencing a form of time dilation, the kind of adrenaline-induced, stretched-out feeling that occurs in a moment of sharp crisis: but this dilation, this crisis, was on a massive scale, confronting us daily in every aspect of our lives. No wonder that more and more people were turning to the dimension of the spirit, seeking a wholeness that had been lost in the maelstrom of energy vibrating through their lives. The more intense their living became, the more they needed to control those energies.

  Now, it seemed to me, this search, this sense of spiritual dimension, this turning to a source for inner strength was inevitable, a process of humanity catching up with itself, an acceleration of spiritual discovery beginning to match the energy of discovery in other areas. More, spiritual discovery seemed to mean essential component if we were not to become disoriented by the other energies we were releasing. We needed that centered calm, the inward certainty that relaxes and concentrates our vitality so that we can direct our own energies, not have them merely react with an adrenal response to outside stimuli.

  As my spiritual interests and experiences increased, I wrote more and more about it. At first, this was mainly for myself. It helped me to clarify what I thought, and besides, I have always liked to write about what I was up to. What I had always liked now had an added dimension. My whole life was beginning to light up for me, but sometimes I’d wonder how readers would respond to what I was putting down on paper if I were ever to put it into a book. (By now, I needed no spiritual guides to inform me on the likely reactions of many intellectuals I know—of all those without even the leaven of personal friendship to soften their views. Nor could I really hold it against them. But I was sick and tired of dead-end philosophy—and I didn’t want to give up on the human race.)

  As for myself in the here and now, I had arrived at some kind of crossroads. I still had to deal with my private fear of writing about this material from the new point of view of belief. So what could a person do when confronted—although it had been a gradual confrontation—with understanding that the life they had led up to that point was only part of the truth? I never had been one to shut off about an
ything. I wasn’t about to do so now. As far as going public was concerned, I had gone public on politics, on women’s rights, on social change, on war and on what I believed to be injustice. I was public. That was my character. I was not used to holding back what interested me or what I believed in. I had thought a lot about that during every phase of my life. I had grown up in public. I had made my mistakes in public. I had been right and wrong in public. I had laughed and cried in public, been in love in public, written in public, apologized in public, and now, I thought, I suppose I will have to say what I think about human and extraterrestrial spirituality in public. Well, so be it.

  I talked it over with Bella, as I had a tendency to do about things that counted. I had long since told her everything that had happened in Peru. She knew that I was continuing to pursue my new concepts; that I was working with channelers, healers, and meditation; reading classics; visiting psychic centers and the like; and trying to expand and raise my own conscious awareness of dimensions that might be presently beyond our understanding.

  Now I tried to explain that the political solutions she was involved in seemed to be resulting in the same failures they had in the past, and that maybe it was time for all of us in the world to take a look at life from another perspective. We were sitting in an all-night restaurant in Manhattan after having seen yet another movie that exploited violence and fear.

  “We can’t go on like this,” I said. “We’re all scared and frightened. We can blow the planet apart any day. Life in any case seems to be falling apart around us, and the only solutions we can come up with are more law and order and more military spending.”

  “So?” she said, with one of her penetrating looks. “So? What’s your solution?”