OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  “Yeah, sure,” I lied.

  “You’ve read the ancient psychics, haven’t you?”

  “The ancient psychics?” I asked. “Like who?”

  “Well,” said John, feeling, I’m sure, that he was in under his head, “like Plato, Pythagoras, Buddha, Moses.”

  “Oh, they were psychics, too?” I said as impartially as possible.

  “Why sure,” said John. “How do you think they could write all that stuff they wrote? For example, how do you think Moses wrote of the creation of the world if he hadn’t been plugged in psychically? And the same with Christ. I mean, those guys were highly developed spiritual people who felt their mission in life was to impart their knowledge. That’s why the Bible is so valuable. It’s a storehouse of knowledge. And most all of their writings jibe too. There’s hardly any discrepancy in what any of them was saying.”

  “Did they talk about reincarnation?”

  “Well, not all of them used that word. But they all spoke at length about the relationship between the eternal soul of man and the Divine. They all spoke of the universal laws of morality. They didn’t always use the words karma or reincarnation, but the meaning was the same. Am I talking too much?”

  I shook my head and coughed and smiled and cleared my throat.

  “Well,” I asked, “what did they say about not remembering your previous lives?”

  “They talk about a kind of ‘veil of forgetfulness’ that exists in the conscious mind so that we aren’t continually traumatized by what might have occurred before. They all say that the present lifetime is the important one, only sparked now and then by those déjà-vu feelings that you have experienced something before or know someone that you know you’ve never consciously met before in this lifetime. You know those feelings you sometimes get that you’ve been somewhere before only you know you haven’t?”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.” It was a great relief to know what he was talking about. I was remembering how I had felt in the Himalayas when I was there—as though I had lived there alone for a long time. As a matter of fact, I remembered feeling familiar when I reached the top-of-the-mountain cave of the monk who gave me the saffron scarf. The familiar feeling was the reason I took his warnings seriously and why I have the scarf to this day. I always felt it meant something more than what the lama said, but I wasn’t sure why I felt it.

  John asked one of his assistants for some tea and then he sat down on the bench with me just below the bookshelf.

  “I know I’m talking too much,” he said, “but when I get into this stuff, I just can’t quit. It’s so important … see, for people like Pythagoras or Plato or any of those guys, all the misfortunes in life like disease, deformities, injustices, and all that, were explained by the fact that each life embodiment was a reward or punishment of a preceding life embodiment, and as each soul progressed, that person was rewarded with more choices of how to reincarnate, all with the moral purpose, of course, to work out his or her own individual karma. A really superior soul, for example, would choose to work out his karma through choosing a life embodiment of self-sacrifice, but each identity has his own thing. And apparently the older and higher in spiritual accomplishment the soul, the more it can remember of past life embodiments.”

  “But,” I asked, “what if a soul doesn’t want to progress? What if a soul wants to forget the whole thing and say screw it?”

  “Well, there’s a lot written about that too. A soul can choose to advance or regress. If it chooses to continually regress, it will eventually lose its humanity and become animal-like with no choices for advancement or moral atonement left to it. That is what was spoken of as Hell. If you don’t choose spiritual evolution, you don’t get the chance after a while, and that’s Hell,”

  “So that’s what they meant when they said, if you didn’t believe in God you’d go to Hell—a kind of never-never land of nonexistence?”

  “Sure. And the reverse, of course—God, meaning the everlasting eternalness of the soul and the attainment of moral atonement. Do you know what atonement means?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Just analyze it. It means at-one-ment. Atonement with the original creator or with original creation. We are both creators and, unhappily, destroyers. But when we identify most strongly with creation, we are closest to at-one-ment. You know, when you begin to unravel a little bit of it, the whole tapestry begins to make sense.”

  “So this business of reincarnating souls makes even the worst kind of evil and suffering have meaning?”

  “Of course, everything happens for a reason. All physical suffering, all happiness, all despair, and all joy happens in relation to the Karmic Laws of Justice. That’s why life has meaning.”

  John stopped and began to lift his arm to make another point. Then, perhaps seeing the look on my face, he stopped and said, “Let’s go have our tea.”

  We walked into his office and sat at a window shaded by a tree outside.

  “How come you got interested in all this after you were in India?” he asked.

  I sipped the hot ginger tea. “Maybe I was a Himalayan monk in another life who knew all the mysteries of life and I’m going back to relearn what I already know.”

  He laughed.

  “Do many people around here believe in reincarnation and Karmic Justice and all that?”

  “Sure. You know that. There are lots of us weirdos around.” He winked and got up. “Okay, so you have your books on psychic readings. See what happens after the next week or so. I’ll be here if you want to talk some more.”

  We finished our tea.

  I thanked him, paid for my books, and walked out into the traffic on Melrose Avenue. Whatever John needed to believe was his affair, but at least I had listened, and now I would read.

  I went home to Encino. Marie fixed me some tea and hot French bread with Brie cheese. She always kept the Brie in good French fashion, at room temperature until it melted to the edge of the Limoge china plate she always placed it on. I loved her sense of detail. It didn’t matter that she didn’t like me in her kitchen.

  I knew I shouldn’t be eating cheese and bread, but I didn’t care. I took it upstairs with me, sat down with my new books, and began to read about Edgar Cayce.

  Edgar Cayce was born in 1877 near Hopkinsville, Kentucky. He was a simple and devoutly religious man (a Christian) who was essentially uneducated, having had to cut high school to go to work.

  He had suffered from chronic asthma and went to a well-trained and highly respected hypnotist to seek relief when no traditional doctors were able to help him.

  While under hypnosis a strange thing happened to Cayce. He began to speak in the third person and with a voice that had no resemblance to his own. He used the word “we” and began to prescribe a treatment for himself in great detail. When the session was over, the hypnotist reported what had happened and suggested that Cayce follow the instructions. Out of desperation Cayce tried it. The asthma soon disappeared. But when the hypnotist described the “voice” that was apparently speaking through him, Cayce was horrified. He considered it blasphemous. The Bible had instructed man never “to suffer any spiritual entity other than God.” And Cayce was a man who believed in the Bible.

  But Cayce also had great compassion for people. Since the Voice seemed to be one that served to help people, he decided to go along with it for awhile. Cayce soon learned to put himself into trance in order to help others. The Voice (which described itself as “we”) always used medical terminology and prescribed from what was obviously a thorough knowledge of medicine, a subject about which Cayce knew nothing. If the prescribed treatments were followed accurately, they always worked. Cayce began to trust the process as much as those who came for help trusted him.

  Word of Cayce’s strange power spread. People from all over his community and finally the country began to contact him. He didn’t need to see or meet the patients who sought help. The “we” seemed to be able to enter their minds and bodies, e
xplore the condition in question, and prescribe treatments which if followed exactly, continued to always work.

  The New York Times did an extensive investigative story on Cayce and pronounced that it had no explanation. There was no evidence that Cayce was speaking from his own subconscious (he knew nothing of the medical profession) and as far as “spiritual” entities were concerned, the Times couldn’t comment.

  Cayce became famous all over the world.

  Soon people began to question Cayce’s “Voice” about more cosmic issues. “What is the purpose of life?”

  “Is there such a thing as life after death?”

  “Is reincarnation of the soul accurate?”

  The Voice answered in the affirmative and began to speak of the past lives of the people who inquired. It connected past-life experiences with certain maladies that an individual might be suffering now.

  Again Cayce became flabbergasted and confused. Such cosmic connections had never occurred to him. Medical treatment had become acceptable to him but he considered past life information anti-religious. The Bible said nothing about such things. For awhile, he refused to accept the information in the readings. It was too outlandish. But soon, with continuing examples of confirmation of past-life identities, he began to wonder. Too many people returned to him with proof that there had been a Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so living in the identical conditions in the past that he had described. Of course, they had no proof that they had been those people, but whenever they investigated in detail, they all reported they had indeed felt strangely yet extremely familiar with what he described.

  The morality of karma and reincarnation was heavily emphasized in each reading. For example:

  A thirty-eight-year-old woman had complained of being unable to commit herself to marriage because of a deep-seated mistrust of men. It turned out that a husband in a previous incarnation had deserted her, immediately after their marriage, to join the Crusades.

  A girl of eighteen had a terrible overweight problem which she couldn’t control. Other than her obesity, she was extremely attractive. The readings submitted that two lifetimes ago she had been an athlete in Rome with both beauty and athletic prowess, but she frequently ridiculed others who were heavy and couldn’t move well.

  A young man, twenty-one, complained of being an unhappy homosexual. The readings reported that in the French Royal Court he had taken great delight in baiting and exposing homosexuals. The readings submitted: “Condemn not then. What you condemn in another, you will become in yourself.”

  The files and records compiled by Cayce were among the most extensive in medical history. The fourteen thousand readings produced examples of health karma, psychological karma, retributive karma, family karma, mental abnormality karma, vocational karma … on and on.

  But what came through in the readings more strongly than anything else was the need for the assertion of free will. The Voice said that the basic error that man makes is his belief that his life is predetermined and therefore he is powerless to change it. It said that the lives we lead now hold the higher priority and the assertion of our free will in relation to our karma is our most important task. It was up to us to get in touch with ourselves spiritually so that we might achieve some insight as to what our purposes in life are. For every act, for every indifference, for every misuse of life, we are finally held accountable. And it is up to us to understand what those accounts might be.

  As I read about Cayce and the “readings” of other psychics and trance mediums, I found myself fascinated with the idea that they might be true. Wherever the information came from didn’t matter as much to me as the sense it made. Maybe it was a psychic’s subconscious talking; maybe they were just good actors.

  But even if that were true, the morality of their message was unmistakable. And a good set of values to live by.

  “All the answers are within yourself,” they said. “Only look.”

  Chapter 8

  “If we could see ourselves and other objects as they really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community with which neither began at our birth nor will end with the death of the body.”

  —IMMANUEL KANT

  Critique of Pure Reason

  I read far into the night, and the next morning I got up early and walked into the Calabasas mountains to think. The mountains are craggy and steep with an eye-caressing view of the Pacific. Nestled in the high hills was “The Ashram,” a kind of rough-and-ready, spiritually involved health camp (“spa” to those who had a lot of money); I loved the activities at The Ashram and often went there to get in shape for a television special, or whenever I knew I would be doing two shows a night in Vegas or Tahoe. I’d eat pure, raw food, take the long, ten-mile-straight-up-mountain walks, exercise in the open air, and got in touch with what the Swedes who ran the place called the “prana” in the air. The Swedes were Anne Marie Bennstrom (who founded The Ashram) and her assistant, Katerina Hedwig. They seemed to know just about everything there was to know about health. I trusted them anyway, because I always felt terrific when they got through with me.

  Now, climbing the fire trail, I ran into Katerina, whom I adored. I called her Cat for short. She was leading a group of “inmates” on one of the torturous climbs. I only had to look at Cat in order to feel better. She was joy. Bubbly, funny, and light-heartedly intelligent, she and Anne Marie were also deep into spiritual exploration and were devotees of Sai Baba, an avatar in India.

  Cat was a big woman and as strong as the mountains she climbed. She was also gentle but forceful, and her infectious personality had led me through a particularly arduous workout period when I first returned from the political campaign trail for George McGovern and finally from China—twenty pounds overweight. She made the pain and the discipline possible to endure. I also teased her that her nickname was Cat because she became a “cat”-alyst for events that followed which were responsible for completely changing my life.

  We trudged up the fire trail together. For a while I didn’t say anything. Neither did she. I was glad, because when you’re climbing straight up you haven’t enough breath to talk anyway. At the crest we stretched and looked out over the Pacific. Cat seemed to sense that I wanted to talk but didn’t know how.

  “Well, fickle lady of fame, how are you?”

  ‘Fickle lady of fame?’ It was such an odd way to refer to me.

  “Hey,” I said, “are you saying that you think I’m fickle?” I laughed, not really sure why I felt the need to do so.

  “Yes, about fame you’re fickle. You’re not really sure you want it, are you?”

  Cat had the damndest way of immediately zeroing in on the conflict a person might be feeling.

  “Fame?” I said, “I don’t think I’ve ever cared all that much about recognition, only about the quality of the work. And right now I care more about what I’m looking for.”

  “You mean yourself.”

  “Myself? I care more about myself?”

  “I mean you seem to care more about finding out who you are than you do about fame. Isn’t that true, Shirley?”

  “Yes.… Yes,” I said, “and it’s a struggle. Because suddenly now I’m into a dimension of myself that I didn’t know existed, much less ever explored before.”

  “You’re talking about your spiritual dimension?”

  God, it sounded so banal to hear another person put it into words. But then no words were safe havens anymore. I remembered how often I had been judgmental about the words people chose to use when describing a deeply moving experience relating to some abstract occurrence in their lives.

  “Yes,” I said, “I guess you could say I’m really curious about this spiritual stuff. I don’t know what’s going on but the more I hear about it the more I want to hear?” I felt myself make the statement as though I were asking a question.

  “Oh, Shirley, that’s wonderful!” Cat said, her gay laughter enveloping every word. “It’s so satisfying to be drawn to the spirit, isn�
�t it?”

  I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jogging jacket. “Drawn to the spirit?” I asked. “Is that what I’m experiencing?”

  “Why sure, Shirley,” Cat smiled. “God and spiritual recognition are everything. That’s why we’re here. It’s the whole explanation of life and purpose. For me it’s all I live for. I don’t care if I never have another man, and you know how lusty I used to be. Well, forget about it. I feel my own spiritual light and I’m in love with that and I don’t need anything else.”

  Jesus, I thought, if I could be in love with my own spiritual light it would save me a lot of plane trips and a lot of grief, too.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “I guess I should plunge on ahead but I’m not sure I quite know how.”

  “Oh, Shirley,” Cat went on, “I know a wonderful entity you must meet. Anne Marie is with him now in Sweden. But she’s talking about bringing him over here.”

  “Wait a minute, Cat,” I said, interrupting her all-out enthusiasm, “an entity in Sweden? What kind of entity?”

  “A spiritual entity. His name is Ambres and he comes through a man named Sturé Johanssen.”

  “Comes through? Are you talking about trance channeling?”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised that I didn’t understand, “oh yes. Sturé is a very simple carpenter who lives in Stockholm, and a spiritual entity called Ambres uses him as an instrument to speak through. His readings are incredibly beautiful, Shirley. You should hear him. Of course he only speaks Swedish and an ancient Swedish at that but either Anne Marie or I will translate for you. He is such a strong, powerful, benevolent entity, Shirley. Oh my, you would love him.”

  “Stockholm?” I asked. “Jesus, that’s a long way to go to talk to a spirit.”

  Cat laughed. “Well, maybe sometime next year Anne Marie will bring Sturé and his wife here to the States. Then you can have a session.”

  “Does his stuff work the same way that Edgar Cayce’s stuff worked?” I asked, remembering what I had just read on Cayce.