Suzie drove Simo and me around the “Lost Horizon” that we felt we had reached.
Above the Santa Valley, overlooking the village of Mantacatto, I felt I should purchase a piece of land with the intention someday in the future of erecting a spiritual center where people from different areas of the world could come and meditate collectively. It was a strong and positive impulse as I looked out over the craggy white-capped range of the Cordillera Blanca. Again I felt the presence of an energy I couldn’t define. Again I couldn’t touch it. Gerry never left my mind, not really. And he had always claimed that I was persistent!
We left the mountainside and drove by the landslide site of Yungay. I thought of Vitko’s prediction screen on the spacecraft. He said he had seen, in those three minutes, the immensity and the swiftness of nature’s power. How had the space beings known about it? And why couldn’t they have prevented it if they were so interested in saving the human race? In the face of such catastrophic disaster, with all the personal tragedies involved, it was cold comfort at best to believe that the world’s collective consciousness was responsible. Just as it was heartbreaking, for those who believe in an exteriorized, loving God, to accept the daily toll of tragedy around them and often in their own personal lives. None of it made sense. Nor could it, until the human race took full responsibility for its own destiny, and included spirituality in that fullness.
After a lunch of wheat-grass soup and fresh vegetables, Suzie drove us into the mountains. An hour into the trek we came across a turquoise lake nestled silent and floating in its own higher kingdom, surrounded by bodyguards of chiseled beauty. The crisp mountain air brushed through my hair. I walked off by myself. I needed to be alone. I felt the haunting energy again, and then, as I looked up I saw the mountain covered in snow that I had seen in one of Vitko’s pictures. The “reclining Hindu” people called it because that’s what it looked like: a reclining body shrouded in white linen. But in Vitko’s picture a spacecraft had hung above the mountain. As I looked at it now I saw only the meditative splendor of its snowy silence—and surely that miracle of beauty was sufficient.
I walked closer to the mountain, pulling an apple from the pocket of my coat.
This was how it had started for me: gazing at a mountain in the Andes some ten years before. Here in these magnificent heights I had first connected to the untapped stirrings inside me that had longed to be recognized. Waking from the dream sleep of unawareness I had realized that I, and each of us, were more than we seemed to be. The realization had happened in the flash of an instant, although I had heard it as a song in my heart for some time. But here I had listened to its lyrical music. And since then it had never left me. It was there to sustain me through the weathers of misfortune and despair, only to accelerate its sweet vibration whenever I respected its existence. It was God and it was me simultaneously. We were intertwined. I could be whatever I wanted to be if I trusted that music, that song, that vibration of God that was inside of me.
And now as I munched my apple and raised my arms to the mountain wind I could feel myself make contact with another song energy. I sat down and closed my eyes, relaxing to allow whatever was going to happen to flow through me. A bright light began to form in my mind. It grew and expanded until the image and vision of Gerry appeared above me, yet inside my mind. I held tight to what I was “seeing,” needing very much to understand what it meant.
Gerry seemed confused and slightly desperate as he hovered in the light. Then he spoke to me.
“I don’t understand what has happened,” he said. “Where am I?”
I hesitated a moment in my mind before answering. He seemed so real, so separate from me. Then, as though speaking in a thought language, I said, “I think you have gone home.”
I could see his face reacting to me so clearly.
“Is this what you were always talking about?” he asked. “Is this what you meant when you said we were souls only living in bodies? And now I have no body?”
I nodded.
“I have been trying to contact you,” he went on. “But you were too busy to hear me. I have been around you for so many days.”
“I know, Gerry,” I said. “I felt you. Why did you do it? Why did you leave now?”
Gerry hovered there as though torn between what he had done and what it would now mean.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not really certain where I am.”
“You are home, Gerry. You are with the light and with that God-energy you didn’t believe in.”
I felt him absorb what I had said. “I needed to hear that again?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “I guess so.”
“I had no one else who could explain,” he said. “I need rest now. I’m so tired.”
I watched him in the light of my mind’s eye. I realized there was also a light ray emanating from him to me. It became brighter and brighter.
“We are one,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I will be with you,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I repeated.
Suddenly Gerry began to float away, his light becoming dimmer.
“You have helped me. I will help you. We are one,” he said from far away.
Then he was gone. Gone into the mist of my own mind. I looked after him, but he and his light were gone.
I opened my eyes and shook my head. I breathed the cool, crisp mountain air. What had just happened? Had I made it up? Or had Gerry actually, on some other level, in some other dimension, really visited me? His face was so clear, his expression so genuinely confused. Yet if he was dead and only a soul now, why did he have any form at all? Was it because form was the only way I had of recognizing him? Many people who had reported visitations from loved ones who had passed on said that they appeared to them in forms of light or sometimes just bodily forms as they had always been in life. Easily recognizable.
That had never happened to me before now. Perhaps I had never allowed it to happen before. On the other hand, I had never lost anyone I was in love with before.
I got up and stretched again. This was a scene I would like to have included in the show. The point of it would have been that Gerry was a character in my life who proved to me that it is possible to embrace two levels of consciousness at the same time: the earth plane physical level that is so real as it deals out its pain and its difficulties and its joys; and the spiritual level, which in its infinite wisdom is loving enough to guarantee us that it is the reality, everything else an illusion. The lesson of each? We create them both.
I didn’t say much on the way home. Something had shifted for me. I had learned long ago that the most valuable knowledge is that gained by experience. When that happens, everything changes.
I guess I had been as afraid of death as anyone else over the course of my life. The eternal black void of nothingness was indeed frightening, believed in by objective pragmatists who also necessarily believed that physical life was all there was. Death was oblivion, the “natural” way to go. Natural because, as the teaching of relatively recent times had it, what we see with our eyes is what is for real. But that has been changing.
Human beings, a few thousands of years ago, were not as capable of holding a thought or imagining a picture or perceiving some of the concepts that we are capable of today. Their belief in an afterlife rested in primitive deities, earth elementals like wind, sun, and fertility, whose power was physically evident all around them. The source of life, and those things which sustained it, were sacred. If they did not actually recognize the interdependence of all life, they at least respected what they saw as holy on this earth—and let their gods and goddesses take care of the rest.
The concept of an afterlife took on abstract reality when it became codified by the formal religions. Dogma and ritual created both good and bad afterlives—Paradise or Hell—using mankind’s urgent need to believe in something beyond this world as a mechanism through which to amass and exploit power.
Intellectual atheism rejected that kind of power and, as it were, threw out the baby with the bath water, making independence of mind coincidental with an absence of faith.
But actually, the levels of both our psychic and our mental capacities are far greater now than they ever were in the far past. That is a testament to the spiritual and mental progress of the human race. Our minds are more capable today of accepting unusual, unfamiliar, more complex ideas. The advancements in technology attest to that evolution of the human mind. But the inner technology of our unlimited thought has advanced also. And if it is true that we all create our own reality, then the capacity for creative technology is clearly infinite also. The creative technology of perceiving alternative realities is a quantum leap in the progress of mankind.
In the past, death belonged in the province of an exterior, unknowable “God”: the mythological garden of paradisiacal afterlife, untouchable and unrealized by mortals who longed to know its promise, its secrets, and, indeed, whether it existed at all.
Lately, more and more people are claiming to have seen the actual “light,” the blinding, indescribably loving light that they are certain is “Heaven.” “God is light,” they say after having had an out-of-body experience. “I died and lived to tell of it,” they say. And account follows account of such experiences. The reports are increasing, almost as though the numbers of people experiencing the light are increasing as a testament to the level of receptivity and openness to higher and higher consciousness. The chasm between Heaven and Earth is narrowing, and to no one’s surprise.
The light is expected now. It had always been there, but more and more we are beginning to recognize that in fact we are the light, if only we can bring ourselves to hold that evolved and sophisticated concept. The light is not outside of us. And whenever we recognize that light inside of us, we know we have found the secret to life well kept. We have been a secret to ourselves. That is what has been missing. We have been missing the light from ourselves. We are the light.
That night, as I tried to sleep I found myself waiting for something. I wasn’t sure what it was. I walked around my room. There was no more feeling of Gerry. I was glad that was resolved. I lay down and closed my eyes. Then I began to feel some strange energy surge through me, similar to what I had felt at Machu Picchu. Then I got a headache and the same nausea followed, except much milder. I opened my eyes. What was happening? I closed my eyes again. Maybe it would all go away.
Instead I felt as though something was trying to communicate to me.
As I lay there with my eyes closed, I felt myself drift off into what the scientists call the alpha state, a narrow band of consciousness somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. I extended no control over what I was feeling or thinking, yet could watch what was happening—a state of being both participant and observer. And then something very strange began to occur.
I saw a huge round gray-colored metal object over my head, as though I were looking through the roof of my guesthouse. It was a giant craft. And to my surprise it wasn’t at all beautiful. It was gray and metal. I watched it in awe. Then I began to have flashing feelings coming toward me in another language. I couldn’t make out the message. The headache intensified. I knew I wasn’t asleep and I knew I wasn’t awake. And I knew I was really seeing this thing, but I couldn’t figure out how. I was not outside, yet I saw it directly over the guesthouse as though the roof were transparent and I was seeing through it.
I wanted to write down my feelings, but I couldn’t leave the state of mind I found myself in. I didn’t even want to.
Then, as though through feelings, not words, I began to get a message. I felt that I was in an apex of time, where there was no measurement of any kind. I felt as though I were at the emotional crossroads of a transformation, where time and matter stood still and there was no judgment, desire, success, or failure. There was only truth and being. Then I saw the number 9 form in the center of the visualized crossroads. I didn’t know what it meant, although the word completion sprang to my mind. As soon as I felt completion, the craft disappeared.
In its place was a spectacular ocean of liquid crystal shimmering in front of me. I gazed at it for a while, enchanted, and then felt myself project out over the water. I danced on the waves of undulating, shimmering crystal liquid. It was glorious. I pirouetted, jumped, leaped, and skipped with exuberant joy in and out of the glittering surf.
The implications of dancing on top of the water didn’t escape me. In fact, with all my joyful abandonment, I wouldn’t have wanted anyone I knew to see me. And then I remembered….
The shift in understanding for people interested in achieving the ultimate in enlightenment was to touch the “Christ” consciousness in themselves and trust it. To know that we were each endowed with such powerful energy that we actually effected a physical force which collectively could alter the course of mankind. The power and reality were not in front of our eyes, not seen, but unseen—within. We were responsible for creating everything. Now we needed consciously to align ourselves with the Divine intention of the universe so that our forces could work together.
The image of my dancing on crystal water may have been coming from another time and another place, but the principle of its image was constant and forever. I knew that anything was possible if we desired it.
What we needed now was a new blueprint for human understanding which recognized that we were each involved with Divine intention, whether we acknowledged it or not. Until now we had identified with reality as though it existed only objectively, outside ourselves. The change occurring spoke to a more evolved understanding that the reality of God and Divine intention existed and began within us. Because we understood the Divine as outside of ourselves, we separated ourselves from our fellow man and nature. We were now ready to hold the thought, comprehend the concept, that we and the God-force were one and the same. Our souls contained the same Divine characteristics as God. We were made of the same stuff. And so the new and emerging blueprint for our understanding would be the conscious internalization of the forces of love, wisdom, responsibility, and power.
As I lay in bed thinking, it hit me that every single soul on the planet was involved in the process of making his or her own personal transformation. Or not making it. That was why so many lives were in upheaval. We, living on the planet, were involved in transition, not disaster, each of us in our own way, with different lessons to understand and a cleansing to accomplish.
Gerry had accomplished as much as he wanted to for the time being. Everyone I knew in my life was involved with his or her own transitions and growth. And each one of us carried with us a monumental charge of vibrational energy. It was palpable. You knew a negative vibration as soon as you encountered it, and you knew that that person had further to go, acting as a reflector for your own growth, therefore not to be judged.
I was beginning to integrate the forces of the physical and the forces of the nonphysical in my understanding. They coexisted simultaneously in my reality. I was learning from both. I loved both. I was both.
I would continue to play my role in the life I had written for myself. The world would continue to be my stage. Some of the characters would exit in a blaze of light; others would enter in the same fashion.
With all its complicated melodrama, high antic comedy, and desperate tragedy, one clear unmistakable truth emerged. The play was the schoolroom in which we understood fully and consciously that we were the Divine intention. It dwelt within us, and the physical effect of that illumination would shine a light on the world that would be profound. The actor and the role were one. The play and the part were one. The God and the human were one. It was truly a Divine Comedy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SHIRLEY MACLAINE was born and raised in Virginia. She began her career as a Broadway dancer and singer, then progressed to featured performer and award-winning actress in television and films. She has traveled extensively around the world, and her experiences in Af
rica, Bhutan, and the Far East formed the basis for her first two bestsellers, “Don’t Fall Off the Mountain” and You Can Get There From Here. Her investigations into the spiritual realm were the focus of Out on a Limb, Dancing in the Light, It’s All in the Playing and Going Within, all of which were national worldwide bestsellers. In her intimate memoir Dance While You Can, she wrote about aging, relationships, work, her parents, her daughter, and her own future as an artist and a woman. My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir, published in 1995, offers a candid and searching look at her forty years in Hollywood and the stars who taught her about show business and about life.
IT’S ALL IN THE PLAYING
A Bantam Book
Bantam hardcover edition / September 1987
Bantam paperback edition / September 1988
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1987 by Shirley MacLaine.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-47560
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76509-3
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
v3.1
It's All In the Playing Page 31