Spirit of the Horse

by William Shatner

  I am very much like a horse in that respect; perhaps we all are. But we override our gut with our brain … not often to our advantage. A few examples.

  I performed, once, with an orca … a killer whale. Maybe “performed” is too strong a word. I was present: Yaka did all the performing. I certainly didn’t control that behemoth in any way.

  It was 1987 at Marine World in Vallejo, California. I had finished Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, about a desperate effort to save the humpback whale. The appearance in Vallejo was to raise awareness for the California Rare and Endangered Species Preservation Program.

  We were seeking publicity for an environmental cause, and the publicity people said, “We can get you to swim with this orca.” And I’ve got pictures, by the way, on my wall. I’m looking at them right now.

  While I was flying to the location, I was doing my homework and reading in the papers about the orca in San Diego that had gone down and half drowned the trainer. So I get there and the trainer of the orca says to me, “All right, this is very serious. Here’s what we’re going to do. You’ll sit right here on the pier. You will open your legs and make a circle with your hands, and I’ll whistle for the orca. The orca will come up and poke his head between your legs. You then step on his fins and put your arms around his nose so you’ll have purchase and stand on his fins. He will then dance with you.

  “Then when I blow the whistle again—and Bill, listen very carefully—I will have a fish in my hand. The orca will come to get the fish, and I want you, as swiftly and as silently as you can, to get up on the dock.”

  And that’s how he said it. I’ve got pictures of me dancing with the orca. I’ve got pictures of me with the orca doing a jump, over me. You see me in the water and this B-17, this 747 of a killer whale going over my head and diving past me and into the water.

  I was too busy not-drowning, not being overwhelmed by the waves this giant created, to worry about being attacked. But there was something else I felt, alone with the orca in that pool. Something I couldn’t identify at the time. Since then I’ve read several books on orcas, and the captive ones are very angry at us. We have incarcerated them, and we’ve driven them insane, as we’ve driven all these animals in zoos insane. They’re resentful and they’re ready to kill us. And the trainers are very much aware of that.

  Interestingly, the lower you go on the evolutionary chain in terms of creatures that are self-aware—at least, as far as we know—the sense of danger is of a different sort. The animal is simpler, reacting to hunger, reproductive needs, or self-preservation.

  I did a movie in 1977 called Kingdom of the Spiders, with the wonderful, wonderful Woody Strode, in which killer tarantulas invade a small town. We used real tarantulas, and once you get past our own natural revulsion to small creatures that are tickly, crawly, and can get under loose-fitting clothes, tarantulas aren’t as bad as people think.

  Not that they’re harmless. They’ll sting you when threatened, and it’ll hurt, but if you’re careful how you handle them, they won’t. Also, tarantula hair is used as itching powder. So they will make your skin crawl … literally. And the filmmakers used to dump bags of tarantulas over me.

  My most vivid memory of that shoot was self-inflicted. I wanted to fall into the camera with a tarantula on my face, twitching my face, and then have the tarantula walk off. So it had to be live. It took me a half a dozen tries to glue it to my cheek, with just the right amount of glue and the correct amount of time to let it set; to fall into the camera, about two feet away; to give a dying twitch; and to have the tarantula walk off. It took me a half a dozen tries but I did it.

  But there’s a real difference between an animal that you can brush away, if you have to, and an orca. Or a bear. I remember, when I made The Brothers Karamazov with Yul Brynner in 1958, we had a scene with a big dancing bear. All I had to do was walk across the set—a tavern, as I recall. My insides were like a Geiger counter. Tick, tick, tick, TICK, TICK, tick tick … I thought it was my natural animal instinct for survival being triggered. It may have been, to some extent. And sometime after we shot that scene, I saw footage of that same bear turning on the person it was sitting beside and trying to eat that person. So I now believe it was the power of the bear that I felt. Fear is sudden: what I felt then was a slow build, peak, and ebb. Had I understood that, how much earlier I could have begun these explorations!

  This brings us to something that is particularly interesting, though it’s an area where I profess to be very much a novitiate. There are animal psychologists and also animal telepathists, psychics. I used one when my beloved Doberman pinscher had a disability in which his hindquarters were dragging. The veterinarians weren’t able to find anything neural, so I went to an animal psychic, and she said that what the dog was telling me was that when I’d had him shipped the year before to do his breeding, they’d dropped the cage he was in.

  Was the ailment traumatic or physical? Apparently both, since the former triggered the latter. Thereafter, whenever we took him anyplace, even by car, I took the time to comfort him, to reassure him that everything was all right. And slowly, his hindquarters regained their previous vigor. I read about another incident, which was corroborated, of a trainer in Indiana calling a psychic in California to say that they were having trouble with such and such a horse. The psychic said, “I am reading the horse, and the horse is telling me that the new fencing in my favorite spot in the pasture is making me nervous.” It turned out that the horse had been shying from that spot for the last few days. It was something beyond a traditional, rational explanation, because this lady was saying to the guy two thousand miles away, “Here’s what your horse is thinking.” And the physical circumstances were correct.

  I’m a bit of a psychic, too: I know what you’re thinking. It’s like a Vulcan mind meld. Mr. Spock used it to bond psychically with humans and even the Horta, a silicon-based alien. I know that Leonard took that process seriously. All you have to do is watch him seek the connection to understand that. Science is catching up to spiritualism more and more. It wasn’t long ago that Chinese medicine was considered an outlier by establishment doctors. No longer. If I had to bet I would say that sooner rather than later psychic healing performed by highly sensitive individuals will be recognized as a legitimate form of therapy.

  Until then, there is evidence of human-animal psychic transference, especially in animals like dogs and horses that are around humans a great deal. It is an area I personally hope to examine more in the future.

  You know, you have to ask yourself whether maybe the pagans had something, whether there is a spirit in everything and it is a link to the godhead, however you call it, and whether what I am feeling will carry through with me to my death and perhaps beyond.

  As I said, with some resignation, I don’t know.

  I do know that birds, in the thousands, turn like one in a flock. We know they do it because of slow-motion studies. Every bird, every fish in a school, is turning as one with the others. All those horses racing across the range turn left or right as one. They are highly aware of their environment and what’s going on around them.

  I also know it’s a journey that I am on with these horses. I know that I am a far better rider, horseman, because of this spiritualism than I ever was when I was riding in movies like White Comanche, when it was more mechanical.

  Leaving a stable, a farm, a ranch, is a very different experience than arriving. You do not feel a break in the same way that you experienced a sudden merging. When I cross that line again to go home, and I’m back on that road, I’m filled with goodness. If the morning has gone right, I’m filled with elation. I am filled with anticipation of going into competition. What I said earlier about people who want to win: I’m not nervous in competition, because that isn’t my goal. I only want the beauty of this horse to be brought out. Which means I have to be at my best: if I make a mistake, this horse will do less well in the point spread. That won’t be his fault, but mine. That’s how good th
ese horses are. As I said at the beginning of this book, they are Olympic athletes.

  Yet after thirty-plus years as a serious rider, I firmly believe it goes deeper than this. There is a collective wisdom to horses and it appears that they have much more access to that than we do. It’s a collective unconscious group mind that humans block because of our so-called practical mind—for example, the way we measure time, which is a major distraction—which animals are not subject to. The British writer and parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake came up with the idea of the morphic resonance field for each species, the idea that when we die our experience is still retained by the collective morphogenic field of that particular species.

  Many people who train horses empathically have had experiences where they connect with individual horses who are not present. They insist it is not a memory from their own experience, but it’s coming through the horse. Native Americans who “skin walk” understand this idea very well.

  It’s a big, bold world out there … and we’re only just beginning to grasp its incredible implications.

  I can tell you, for myself, one of the beauties of riding is that the horse—well, I won’t say he makes the job easy. Often, it isn’t fun. But I have never, ever come from the experience empty-handed. And those experiences add up over the years, over the decades.

  I have been privileged to make what one might describe as a fifty-year journey from Alpha Centauri on Star Trek to a spiritual Centaur in real life. To paraphrase a line I’ve heard … somewhere:

  “It is … fun. Oh, my…!”

  ALSO BY WILLIAM SHATNER

  Up Till Now: The Autobiography

  Zero G

  Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  WILLIAM SHATNER has worked as a musician, producer, director, and celebrity pitchman, and notably played Captain Kirk on Star Trek from 1966 to 1969 and in seven Star Trek films. He won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his role as attorney Denny Crane on the TV drama Boston Legal. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Elizabeth. You can sign up for email updates here.

  JEFF ROVIN began his career as an editor for DC Comics. He has written nearly 150 books, as well as articles for Ladies’ Home Journal, Omni, and Mad. In addition to the New York Times bestselling Tom Clancy’s Op-Center series, he wrote A Vision of Fire, with actress Gillian Anderson, and Zero-G, with Mr. Shatner. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Victoria. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION: THE ZEN OF RISK

  THE FOUR-LEGGED OLYMPIAN

  Tachyhippodamia by William J. Powell

  MY FIRST TIME

  Experience of Two Boys in Managing Horses, with Many Anecdotes of Quadrupedal Intelligence by Thomas W. Knox

  THE WINGED HORSE

  Pegasus, the Horse Who Could Fly by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

  The Horse and the Olive by James Baldwin

  The Horse, Hunter, and Stag by Aesop

  THE WORLD IS A CAROUSEL

  The Fox and the Horse by the Brothers Grimm

  The Black Horse by Joseph Jacobs

  ALEXANDER AND BUCEPHALUS

  The War Horse of Alexander edited by Andrew Lang

  Of War Horses, or Destriers by Michel de Montaigne

  WILD HORSES

  Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

  HORSING AROUND ON THE SET

  The Horseman in the Sky by Ambrose Bierce

  THE MIND OF THE HORSE

  Mr. Stiver’s Horse by James Montgomery Bailey

  THE HORSE AS HERO … NOT

  Don’t Look a Gift-Horse in the Mouth by Harry Graham

  MY GREAT DAY

  Samuel Cowles and His Horse Royal by Eugene Field

  To Horse by Frances and Gertrude Warner

  BLIND FAITH

  “White Dandy”; or, Master and I by Velma Caldwell Melville

  THE STABLE AS CATHEDRAL

  A Race Horse That Paid a Church Debt by Clarence Louis Cullen

  THE REIGN OF THE REINING HORSE

  Only the Mare by Alfred E. T. Watson

  LITTLE SURE SHOT

  The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide, An Autobiography by William F. Cody

  The Blue Grass Seminary Girls’ Vacation Adventures; or, Shirley Willing to the Rescue by Carolyn Judson Burnett

  BORN IN THE SADDLE

  How the Old Horse Won the Bet by Oliver Wendell Holmes

  Four Horses and a Sailor by Jack London

  THE UNCERTAINTY FACTOR

  A Military Steeple-Chase by Captain R. Bird Thompson

  OUR HORSES, OUR SELVES

  “Whooping” a Race-Horse Under the Wire by Clarence Louis Cullen

  THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE HORSE

  ALSO BY WILLIAM SHATNER

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  COPYRIGHT

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  SPIRIT OF THE HORSE. Copyright © 2017 by William Shatner. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover design by Rob Grom

  Cover photography by Guy Noffsinger

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-13002-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-13003-7 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781250130037

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  First Edition: May 2017