Willie is one of the first outsiders who has ever been worked on with our medicine. He has been coming to Maui for twenty years, and we have been watching him. We saw that he loves our islands and our people, so finally the old Kahunas—I am what you might call an apprentice, waiting and learning to take my place with the old Kahunas—agreed to use their powers to heal Willie’s recurring back injury and his problems with his sinuses and his lungs.
I received permission to take Willie into a secret place in the mountains to see Uncle Harry. Uncle Harry has the knowledge of the Kala, the cleansing process that comes through the use of herbal medicines.
First Willie was given the seed of the candlenut tree. It is a round seed that you peel and find a nut inside. You crack open the nut and eat it. For a person Willie’s size, four nuts are the perfect amount. In the beginning it made him very sick. The reason for this is the cleansing—bringing the poison out of him from his mouth and elsewhere. This is the basic level from where the healing can start. After he got over being sick from eating the nuts, he felt much better than before he ate them but still not strong enough for us to do the healing of the bones in his back.
Kahunas can heal compound fractures in five days through prayer and special medicines. Licensed physicians may call us heathens and say we cannot heal, but they do not understand our ways. Our knowledge of the divine laws of nature is much older and deeper than theirs. The white man covers up this knowledge because he thinks of us as heathens. The missionaries were strongly against Kahuna magic, afraid of our power. They forced the Kahunas into seclusion. But the knowledge has passed down through generations of Kahunas who know the strength of sunlight and natural elements.
After we cleaned Willie out, we let him rest a couple of days. He had been drinking alcohol for many years and had much bile that had to be drained from his stomach and intestines. When he was rested we took him to a woman who does the Kahuna way of massage. She examined him and found everything out of proportion. His stomach was resting on his bladder, his intestines were turned improperly. She realigned his internal organs through massage and removed much of the pressure from his back. Soon Willie was riding his horse bareback through the high mountain valleys. You could see the joy in his face.
I was in the army during the war in Vietnam, was shot down in a helicopter and spent eighteen months in a prison camp in Laos. In my younger days maybe I didn’t listen to the wisdom of my Kahuna ancestors, but in the camp I had plenty of time to think and evaluate. When I was freed, I went to my people in the mountains and became a “gatherer.” It is my job to gather people for the great coming-together of the native races, like the American Indians, the Eskimos, the Hawaiians.
I kept an eye on Willie for eleven years, after I met him in Charlie’s Bar in Piai near his house on Maui. Willie has an Indian bloodline. He is one of us. He will be very important in drawing the native races together.
There are Vietnam veterans living in caves in the mountains of Hawaii, guys who are fed up with society, who have turned their backs on the world, guys who are very violent toward intruders. But I have seen Willie go and talk to these veterans and coax them down from the mountains to take their place in peace once again. Willie has all the tools to accomplish great things, to cause the ancient mysteries to be revealed for healing and peace and power.
That is why he came to Maui in the first place. So we keep watch over him, because he is in fact an Old King.
Budrock is production manager and lighting director for the band.
Poodie is Willie’s stage manager.
Gates Moore has driven Willie’s bus for the last eight years.
Kimo Alo is a Kahuna—one of the magician-priests of Hawaii.
PART EIGHT
The Healing
Hands of
Time
The Healing Hands Of Time
They’re working while I’m missing you,
Those healing hands of time.
Soon they’ll be dismissing you
From this heart of mine.
They’ll lead me safely through the night,
And I’ll follow as though blind;
My future tightly clutched within those healing hands of time.
They let me close my eyes just then,
Those healing hands of time.
Soon they’ll let me sleep again,
Those healing hands of time.
So already I’ve reached mountain peaks,
And I’ve just begun to climb;
I’ll get over you by clinging to those healing hands of time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In the winter of 1980, Connie and I slipped off for a vacation to the Kauai Surf, a beach hotel in the town of Lahaina on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. We’d been there about two days when Bud Shrake phoned me from Hanalei on the north end of the island. He had big news. Our three-year-old movie project, Songwriter, was a cinch deal again, for at least the fourth time in the past eight months. Yet another agreement with a studio was set in wet concrete. “No bullshit,” Bud told me. “No way any assholes will back out on us this time. The concrete is drying around their knees even as I speak.”
He said why didn’t Connie and me come up to Hanalei and celebrate? Red Johnson, who owns Mariposa Air in Princeville, would fly down and pick us up in a helicopter.
Red planted his helicopter on the lawn of the Kauai Surf. Connie and me got aboard with the rotor blades whipping the leaves in the palm trees and fanning sand out of the grass. Red is a Korean War chopper vet who came to the islands and stayed. He has a red beard and sly, mischievous eyes and smile, like he’s only giving you about half the clues but you must trust he knows what’s he’s doing. We flew north to Hanalei over maybe the most dramatic and sensual scenery on this earth. Kauai is called the garden island. Green mountains rise straight up from the jungle behind the beaches and disappear into the clouds. Waterfalls come down the mountains in constant torrents from the forests in the clouds where it rains sixty feet a year. From Red’s helicopter we could see brown lava peaks poking through the breaks in the clouds above the timberline.
We fluttered down in a field near Dan and June Jenkins’ house, where Bud was staying. They had mountains and waterfalls out their back door, white beach and the surf in front beyond a stand of ironwood trees.
Dan and Bud ran out, ducking under the rotor blades, and climbed into the helicopter. Red shot us into the sky again.
Some of us—not Red Johnson, I hope to this day—lit up cigars rolled out of Kauai supernatural weed. Red instructed us to put on the big, padded earphones at each seat. He was playing one of my albums. I settled back in the seat, next to Connie and Dan, dragging deeply off the local herb, listening to a familiar voice in the stereo earphones, and I was totally at one with the universe, like an eagle, when—Whoa! What the fuck was this?
The earphones became silent. We were flying straight into the side of a huge green mountain. We were going fast, and J could see the treetops just below us, and the vast green wall looming straight ahead. I glanced at Red. He was leaning back, his hand on the stick, grinning like a maniac. I realized I was utterly stoned. Heading directly and rapidly into certain death against the green wall of the mountain with a madman at the wheel. Connie squeezed my arm. She understood. We loved each other. The big moment of transition was at hand.
Suddenly the stereo earphones boomed in “Zarathustra” by Strauss—the 2001 movie music. It was a shattering, soul-shaking sound: the enormous horns and strings, zinging electrically through our entire bodies as Red shot the copter absolutely straight up. The green foliage was only a few feet in front of our eyes. Overwhelmed by Strauss pouring through the stereo earphones, I was ready to experience death—and here we went, up and up and impossibly up, zooming straight up the green wall of the mountain. And now we popped over the peak into the glorious light of a setting sun in the Pacific—just as the music struck a heart-stunning crescendo and our spirits flew off into the universe.
&nbs
p; You talk about a rush! It was a mystical experience. By mystical I do not mean mysterious, weird, inexplicable, or unreal. Mysticism is all about the self and knowledge of the universe.
Have you ever wondered how it is possible for music to give you the rush I am talking about? The feeling is like the power of the stars exploding inside your body. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what it really is.
The purely physical impact of music works this way: the nerves of your body feel the vibrations of the music. The vibrations of your nervous system pick up the tempo with the vibrations of the music until you feel pumped up mentally, physically, and emotionally. What is it that passes through the air from the piano or the violin or the orchestra that sets your nerves into spontaneous arousal? You can’t see it. A great law is at work here.
After the Strauss rush, we were still tingling when Red set down the copter on another peak. There was just enough room for the machine and the five of us to stand on it without a foot to spare. We looked out at the fire of the sunset rolling on the ocean waves, and down at the green fields and blue rivers of Hanalei far below. It was like standing on the roof of Eden. My heart was full with the thrill and beauty of it. I don’t fear death, because there is no death. I am afraid of a root canal or a barium enema but I am not at all afraid of what we call death.
The next time I saw Dan and June Jenkins was at Elaine’s saloon in Manhattan. It was a year after our soul flight with Red Johnson. My lung had collapsed in Maui. I had written the Tougher than Leather album in the hospital. We were crowded around a table in the front room.
Dan said, “What’s your new album?”
It was very noisy. Elaine was hugging the writers and the stars who came in, directing them to tables, confronting the corporate biggies with their ladies in high-heeled shoes waiting in line at the register.
“Reincarnation,” I said.
Dan squinted at me over the top of his glasses and lit another Winston with his gold Dunhill. Pepi, the waiter, put down another J&B and water—Dan calls them “young scotches.”
“Red Carnations?” Dan said. “Great title.”
I leaned forward through the noise.
“It’s about reincarnation,” I said.
“About what?” Dan said, bending toward me and cocking an ear.
“Reincarnation,” I yelled.
Dan sat up. He pondered a moment and sipped his young scotch.
“No,” he said. “Red Carnations is a much better title.”
June, who is a beautiful black-haired woman with Cherokee blood, shifted over to me and said, “What’s he talking about?”
I said, “Dan don’t think I know what reincarnation means.”
Even as a child, I believed I had been born for a purpose. I had never heard the words reincarnation or Karma, but I already believed them, and I believed in the spirit world.
I remember walking down the road toward the cotton fields in Abbott when I was six or seven years old, and finding a piece of quartz. I didn’t know it was a mineral. I thought it was a rock, a curious shiny purple stone. The more I looked at it in the morning sunlight, the deeper I saw the shapes and colors and intricate intensity in the quartz. It felt very warm in my hand. I glanced down at the ground and saw tiny bits of rock shining up at me from the dirt, and I had a flash of illumination. This piece of quartz was not a separate thing from the shiny bits, or from anything else. Everything was one thing held together by some power.
In school and in church they tried to knock this awareness out of me by teaching other ways of viewing the world, but I never lost it entirely.
Now I know that what I was feeling in the quartz was the energy of the spirit. Glass and metal, flesh and wood, stone and plants—all are formed by the great force that radiates through space as vibrating spirit. It is hard to understand that just because your five senses tell you the chair you are sitting in is solid, your chair is in fact vibrating with energy as the atoms and molecules that form the chair are held together by a force strong enough not to dump you on your ass. Some people can feel these vibrations through their nervous system. But you can’t see the vibrations any more than you can see music or see the vibrations that make a magnet work.
I recently saw an interview with one of the hostages who had escaped his kidnappers in Lebanon after a few months of being blindfolded and chained alone in a room. He told the interviewer that during the first week of confinement, he started talking to himself. Then suddenly he realized he wasn’t talking only to himself—he was talking to God. “It’s true,” he said. “I can talk to God, and it’s real. Those guys in the Old Testament who said they talked to God, they really did it. I never believed any of this stuff before. I thought anybody who said they talked to God was crazy. But in that room I found out I was talking to God, and God was answering me through my intuition—not a Charlton Heston voice booming through the roof. God was talking to me through my inner being. You can talk to God, too. Try it, you can do it.”
The interviewer switched the subject, clearly a little nervous, but you could tell from the look on the ex-hostage’s face that he was a changed person. It had taken an extreme circumstance to get his full attention, but when he began to hear his inner voice responding to his cries and his anger, he learned to talk to God.
You can learn to do it.
Sit on top of a mountain in the Hill Country at sunset, looking off at the mountains and ridges poking up as far as you can see to the west, and pretty soon your inner self begins to see the smoke signals put up by the ancient Indians on the distant ridges, one after the other, and you will reach an inner peace that becomes a conversation with God. This is called meditation, and it is a much easier way to reach God than being handcuffed in a bare room in Beirut. But you don’t need either a peaceful, meditative situation or a hostile, threatening situation to talk to God. I talk to God all the time.
A little common sense must be used when making statements like this. I wouldn’t walk up to you at a cocktail party and say, “Hey, I talk to God, you know.” I wouldn’t sit down beside you at dinner at Elaine’s and say, “So what do you think of the Holy Ghost?” If you go around telling people you talk to God, they might burn you at the stake like they did Joan of Arc, or destroy your reputation one way or another, because people who talk to God are a threat to the authorities of both the state and the church.
Of course there are plenty of evangelists on television who say they talk to God and don’t get burned at the stake, because they claim God tells them to take your money and buy real estate with it. This is recognized in high places as just business as usual, nothing dangerous.
A Louis Harris poll a few months ago revealed that ninety-five percent of U.S. citizens say they believe in God. There is a great need for people to emerge into a state of peace. We realize there is something else beyond this reality, something we are supposed to do on this earth. A sort of religious fever is sweeping the country. But attendance figures at churches and synagogues are steadily falling.
This means the churches and synagogues are not giving us what we need—which is to know the truth about the laws that rule the universe, and to be free to think in a new way that is really as old as creation.
Dr. John Wheeler, who won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the big bang theory of creation, is a neighbor in West Lake Hills in Austin. I was moved by something he said on a TV show about creation: “At the bottom of everything is an ultimately beautiful idea, so simple and beautiful that when we finally discover it we will say, oh, why did we never see that before?”
I know Dr. Wheeler was a protégé of Einstein’s. Einstein believed that the sensation of the mystical is the closest we can come to knowing the truth and that the source of everything is what he called the Old Man. This is the divine force behind the universe. The big bang started with a thought in the mind of God. Everything that has happened since is a continuation of that thought. The greatest star and the smallest cell exist because of the energy of thi
s thought.
Scientists have identified the fundamental forces that govern all matter in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear energy, and so on. What they are looking for is an explanation that will bind all of these forces together into one force that controls all the laws of the universe.
This one force is God.
The scientists, not the preachers these days, are investigating the nature of God. Instead of being so busy thinking up ways to convince ten-year-old kids they’re going to burn in hell for smoking cedarbark, or ways of sucking up money for business investments, the leaders of the major churches and synagogues should be paying attention to raising the consciousness of humans to know the truth of the divine law. Pretty soon the scientists will prove it as reality.
The law I mean is that all is one, that every atom in your body was once in a star, that life is continuous and nothing dies, and that the law of Karma—what the scientist would call cause and effect—is as real as electromagnetism is real.
The law is love. What puts the law of love into proper operation is the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Most people don’t really believe in this law, to the whole world’s regret. The leaders of world governments, concerned only with holding on to their power, ignore the law of love, and are overthrown as a direct result, and cause wars of terrible destruction. We are only one bad decision away from destroying our planet. We live with famine and disease and violence, and terrible corruption in our big financial institutions—and we claim not to know why these things are happening.
I know why they are happening, and so do you if you’re not too cynical to admit it. We are not obeying the divine law. It is as simple as that.
We must realize that there are entities called adepts or Masters or angels or archangels—the heavenly hosts—who surround us. They are attempting to help us by pouring out their energies and their knowledge and their wisdom. An angel is literally a messenger from God, trying to give messages to the human race through energies that we are able to receive into our consciousness by turning a dial on our interior radio set. We can turn the dial merely by thinking correctly.
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