It took the Vatican more than three hundred years to admit that Galileo was right, and some things about the world haven’t changed. I am constantly amazed at the depth of intellectual prejudice in Western culture. Nothing is a fact unless it comes out of a petri dish. A certain type of political correctness discourages inquiry beyond certain limits; prejudice against responsible scientific research in certain fields—parapsychology, for example—is appalling. But nothing beats the apathy and skepticism regarding the mental disciplines of the Eastern religions. For at least two thousand years, yogis and swamis have been certain of the power of the mind over the body, as demonstrated by their ability to put their bodies in a kind of suspended animation that enables them to survive being buried underground for hours or even days. Their accomplishments cry out for more research, but to many Western scientists these powers and the insight that the swamis, yogis and other students of the mind have attained are merely tricks or scientific oddities.
This hasn’t changed since the first British colonials landed in India and observed the extraordinary yogic disciplines; they all but ignored them because they considered Western culture the font of all wisdom and knowledge. Even now, if a scientist such as Linus Pauling acknowledges that Eastern religions have developed extraordinary mind-body relationships in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, he is considered a flake. This isn’t surprising because that’s what usually happens when bright people with achievements in one field challenge the status quo accepted by specialists in others. Even Einstein, when he expressed opinions in fields other than his own, was thought of as an eccentric; Arnold Toynbee was told to stick to history and not venture into areas of science he knew nothing about because his ideas didn’t conform to concepts that were in vogue at the time. Still, during the next century, as science shifts from its twentieth-century preoccupation with exploring the physical world to the far more interesting world of the mind and neurogenetics, this attitude will change. As Francis Crick has pointed out, brain chemistry is responsible for human thought, behavior and character—everything about us. I believe that we can control the mind, and that man will demonstrate a capacity to do things beyond his wildest imagination. I don’t know yet what the limitations of my own mind are. I haven’t reached them yet, but I won’t stop searching for them until I die. It is territory different from anything I’ve ever explored before—uncharted waters—and I feel like an explorer. In many ways it is the most exciting expedition I’ve ever undertaken.
The more I have meditated, the more I have been able to control not only stress in my life, but pain. If I have a headache or stub my toe, I’m often able to locate the pain with my mind and will it away. So confident am I of this ability that when I decided a few years ago to be circumcised, I asked the doctor to do it without a pain-killer. I assured him that I could eliminate the pain using mind control during the operation. He was skeptical but said it would be an interesting medical experience, and he scheduled the operation. But when I arrived at the hospital, what seemed like its entire medical staff was waiting to witness the event. The prospect of seeing a movie star circumcised without anesthesia must have been a hot topic of discussion in the doctors’ lounge. I didn’t welcome the presence of uninvited guests, and since I go by instinct, I went home.
Later a different doctor agreed to do the operation without pain-killers, but he became frightened and an anesthetist was waiting for me when I kept my appointment. He said that because of medical ethics he couldn’t circumcise me without using a pain-killer. Disappointed and angry but tired of the delays, I let the anesthetist give me a shot in my back. Nevertheless, I still wanted to show the doctors what I could do, and I told them to take my blood pressure. I had already meditated, brought my blood pressure down more than twenty points, and even put myself into one of those moments of satori that I rarely achieve. To this day, I’m sure that if they hadn’t given me the shot, I would have felt no pain.
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THE NINE YEARS during which I didn’t make a movie afforded me the luxury of time to get to know my children better, as well as myself. I was beginning to come to terms with myself with the help of Dr. Harrington, and I spent much of that time under the thatch roof of my hut on Teti’aroa with my feet sticking out the door, looking through the shell curtains at the vivid colors of the lagoon; like the sunsets on Teti’aroa, they change constantly, depending on the sun and clouds. I sat like that for hours at a time contemplating my life, assessing my values, examining every little bird of thought that flitted through my mind.
My life on Teti’aroa is very simple—walking, swimming, fishing, playing with the children, laughing, talking. I feel a tremendous sense of freedom there. At night there isn’t much to do except look at the stars, which I love to do, and most days I don’t wake up until about eleven, when I hear the fluttering of wings over my hut and birds plummet out of the sky, hit the lagoon in a quick splash and with the grace of ballerinas grab a fish for breakfast.
There is fresh fruit off the trees for my breakfast, then a walk on the beach. Or I may spend an hour or two with my ham radio, talking to strangers around the world, telling them that my name is Jim Ferguson—the name of my childhood playmate—and that I live alone in Tahiti. Nobody knows I’m a movie star, and I can be like anyone else.
Once when I was on Teti’aroa, for two or three weeks I would be drunk every day by lunchtime. I’d go down to the pool hall, shoot a few games and have a wonderful time. But it was a momentary lapse; I’ve never come close to becoming an alcoholic. It’s never taken more than a drink or two to put me into a tailspin, and that’s usually when I stop. There has been a lot of alcoholism in my family, but fortunately those family genes passed me by.
I’ve looked on Teti’aroa as a laboratory where I could experiment with solar power, aquaculture and innovative construction methods. I built one of the first sawmills in Polynesia that could turn coconut trees into lumber, and felt a great sense of accomplishment. I savor the smallest details on the island. Once I filled a hundred-foot-long piece of galvanized pipe with water, left it in the sun and produced steam through solar heating, which was very satisfying. Even the least achievement on Teti’aroa delights me. One of my most rewarding triumphs was to restore a rusted two-inch iron plug for a pipe. The salt air had corroded it so much that the threads seemed to be gone. I rubbed and rubbed it with a wire brush but couldn’t dent the thick crust of oxidized metal. Then I remembered having read somewhere that lemon juice helped dissolve rust because of its high acid content. I picked a few limes off a tree, squeezed the juice, mixed it into a slurry with salt and rubbed it on the fitting. The acid ate through the rust and made the plug shine, revealing the lost threads. What a wonderful feeling! It was a small thing that gave me great happiness.
In its prime the hotel had twenty-eight bungalows, a kitchen, a couple of bars, a dining room and reception area. Over the years I have spent millions on it, though it has never been profitable. Some of the money was lost because of hurricanes, some to wishful thinking and unfulfilled dreams, some to projects started and never finished, some to thieves. A lot of people robbed me—a few who worked for me, others who were con men and came to the island promising to do things they never did, took my money and then disappeared. One operator promised to produce lobsters in the lagoon through aquaculture, and I invited about twenty scientists to the island with their wives. There was a lot of wonderful talk about harvesting lobsters that came to nothing. Storms frequently struck the island; every time we finished a new building, it seemed that another hurricane came along and damaged it. But I enjoyed all of it. Ever since I was a kid I’ve relished having projects, and I didn’t want to spend all my time lying on the beach. We did a great deal on the island to protect the environment, including saving a lot of hawksbill turtles. They were depositing their eggs on the island, only to lose most of them to predators. We fenced the area, created a basin where the eggs could hatch safely, and fed the young turtles until they were large enough to ha
ve a chance of surviving at sea.
In that part of the world, I learned quickly, people fail at their peril to take hurricanes seriously. Shortly after the turn of the century, a glancing blow from one killed hundreds of Tahitians, and I was on my island in the early 1980s when meteorologists in Papeete sent a warning that a hurricane potentially as powerful as that earlier one was forming in a tropical depression near Bora Bora. Soon we were buffeted by stiff winds, the barometer fell, the surf outside the reef began to rise and the meteorologists predicted that the storm’s main thrust would hit Teti’aroa within forty-eight hours. When the birds started to leave, we were told, it would be there soon. Then all of a sudden everything returned to normal; it became very peaceful, the winds died and the ocean was calm again. We thought the storm had passed us by, until a ham radio operator on Bora Bora warned me not to relax because the winds appeared to be loitering off Bora Bora and gaining more strength.
A week later the storm slammed into Teti’aroa with the fury of an avenging angel, hitting us so suddenly that I didn’t have time to call a plane from Papeete to evacuate people. Even the birds barely managed to escape in time. First there were high winds, then towering waves that smashed the reef with such force that it felt as if a thousand cannons were bombarding it from an armada of ships just offshore. But it was the sound of the hurricane that made it most frightening. It was a Wagnerian opera, the thunderous roar of the waves pounding the reef and winds screaming through the trees like ten thousand Mongol warriors on horseback wailing a war cry behind Genghis Khan.
The wind quickly knocked down the radio tower and made so much noise that we couldn’t hear one another speak; we shouted, but the wind defeated us, and walking into it was like stumbling into the exhaust of a jet engine. I put on a sou’wester and told everybody they had nothing to worry about, but I had visions of a wave washing over us and taking us all with it. I’d read a lot about hurricanes and cyclones in Tahiti and knew that they sometimes generated waves eighteen to twenty feet high, and we were in the middle of such a storm. As the waves got larger, rain started to fall in torrents and the lagoon began to wash over the beaches while the current in the channel became swifter and swifter until it must have been racing past us at twenty knots. On the main island the water level was soon up to our shins, and furniture began floating past. I kept telling everyone to relax, that this was just an unusually powerful storm and wasn’t it marvelous to be here and experience nature unleashed? I couldn’t admit that I was terrified waiting for that one wave that would wash over us and take us out to sea.
At dawn the winds were still blowing hard when I left my hut to inspect the damage. Palm fronds strong enough to pull a truck were strewn all over the island. In places the water was still rising, but the worst seemed to be over. For another two days the storm continued to batter the island, and everybody huddled together, singing and praying. I slept in my sou’wester and tried to keep everyone calm, including a woman who was staying with me, a New Yorker whose most serious bout with inclement weather until then had been being snowed in at a country house in Connecticut. When the winds finally subsided, everybody, including her, pitched in and began the cleanup. A few hours later the weathermen in Papeete radioed that another hurricane was on the way. I called for a plane from Papeete to evacuate the island, but when it arrived, four or five of the Tahitians refused to leave; they said they trusted in God and if they left, it would insult him and risk his wrath.
I thought the Tahitians who wanted to be evacuated were leaving because they were frightened, but when they boarded the plane, I heard them joke about the fun they were going to have in Papeete, and realized that all they were thinking about was getting to town, having a day off, drinking beer, chasing girls and having fun. I had intended to leave on the plane, but when some people said they wouldn’t leave, I couldn’t either. I was captain of the ship and it wouldn’t be right to let them fend for themselves.
The second storm was less severe than the first, but powerful nevertheless, and after it passed, I sat down in the lagoon in shallow water up to my waist with my friend from New York, a bright lady with whom I had shared much from the time I was nineteen or twenty. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon and the sky was spectacular. Every cloud appeared to have been torn in half, but the sky no longer seemed ominous and there was no wind. I had never seen a sky like it, nor have I since. Then suddenly it was sunset. Tahitian sunsets defy any ability to describe them, but if you have never believed in God, you are tempted to think otherwise when you see one there. They are celestial symphonies, a concerto of colors that shift in mood, tempo and color by the second: greens, grays, every shade of pink you can imagine, oranges, fiery reds and angel blues, while everything on the horizon changes constantly.
Once the sun sets, darkness arrives abruptly; you had better get home fast or you’ll be groping around in the dark. There is no twilight in the tropics, though Tahitians tell me that if you are lucky, every once in a while you may see a sudden green flash in the sky just as the sun disappears. It’s magic, they say. One of my favorite pastimes on Teti’aroa is to lie down on the grass at the end of the airstrip, wait for the sun to set and hope for a glimpse of that green flash. I never have, but many people I know have been luckier. A bright green light explodes in the sky, hangs there for an instant like a sudden, brief explosion of fireworks, then vanishes. Every time I go to Teti’aroa I wait for that magic, and someday I’ll see it.
For half an hour after the sun goes down, the horizon continues to change color as the clouds reflect the unseen light. The tops of the clouds are always illuminated because they are the last to reflect the sun, sometimes at sixty or seventy thousand feet high. Once it’s dark, you lie on the sand and wait for the first star. If you’re with friends, there’s a game to see who will spot it first. When it’s completely dark, a celestial panorama begins unfolding above you: single lights turn on, then a string of them, then galaxies. I’ve never seen the heavens look so vast as they do from an atoll. The first light is usually a planet, Venus or Mars; then, very slowly, subtle, distant needle pricks appear in space, and as the last glow of the sunset ebbs away and it grows darker, the stars shine more brightly. Finally the sky opens and the Milky Way and other constellations explode in a panoramic umbrella of lights that reaches from horizon to horizon.
As I sat up to my waist in shallow water with my friend from New York that afternoon following the second hurricane and watched the night come on, she asked me if I had ever seen a shooting star. I told her yes, that you usually see them “over there” and I pointed up to the sky. Just as I said this, we saw the flash of a shooting star exactly where I was pointing. It was as if somebody were striking a match across the sky, but there was no sound, just a streak of light.
As I’ve said, small things mean a lot on Teti’aroa.
There have been several important influences on my life. Philosophically I’ve felt closest to the American Indians; I sympathize with them, admire their culture, and have learned a great deal from them. Jews opened my mind and taught me to value knowledge and learning, and blacks also taught me a lot. But I think Polynesians have had the greatest influence because of how they live.
In Tahiti I learned how to live, though I discovered I could never be a Tahitian. When I first went there, I had illusions of becoming Polynesian. I wanted to fuse myself into the culture. However, eventually I realized that not only were my genes different, but the emotional algebra of my life was unsuited to becoming anything but who I am, so I gave up trying and instead simply learned to appreciate what they have. I suppose I was learning the same lessons that I did from Jews, blacks and American Indians: you can admire and love a culture, you can even attach yourself to the edges of it, but you can’t ever become part of it. You have to be who you are.
When I discovered Tahiti in the pages of the National Geographic in the library at Shattuck, what impressed me most was the serene expressions on the faces of its natives. They were happy f
aces, open maps of contentment. Living there has confirmed to me that Tahitians are the happiest people I’ve ever known. The differences between Polynesian and Western culture are deceptive. In the United States we think we have at our disposal virtually everything—and I emphasize the word “think.” We have big houses and cars, good medical treatment, jets, trains and monorails; we have computers, good communications, many comforts and conveniences. But where have they gotten us? We have an abundance of material things, but a successful society produces happy people, and I think we produce more miserable people than almost anyplace on earth. I’ve traveled all over the world, and I’ve never seen people who are quite as unhappy as they are in the United States. We have plenty, but we have nothing, and we always want more. In the pursuit of material success as our culture measures it, we have given up everything. We have lost the capacity to produce people who are joyful. The pursuit of the material has become our reason for living, not enjoyment of living itself.
Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 37