OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  Human contact seemed superficial, striving for meaningful goals, wanting deeper meaning but only talking around it. Competitive living left no time for what we were, who we could be, and what we could mean to each other. I had seen very few relationships with real and lasting meaning—my own included. They hadn’t seemed able to survive our own scrutiny of them.

  And instead of going deeper, we chose to respond to urges to be comfortable, to just accept the limits and restrictions imposed by safe superficiality, to be successful and well-attended creatures of comfort with protection and warmth and no challenges from what could be frighteningly new and unknown … no challenges from what more we could be or were, no challenge from what more we could understand, no challenge from how that might threaten us, and no recognition of what it could mean to end up alone.

  Alone … that was the cold word. Everyone was afraid of being alone. Yet it didn’t really matter who we lived with or slept with or loved or married. In the final analysis, we were all alone—alone with ourselves—and that’s where the rub came. So many relationships were failing because the people involved didn’t know who they were, much less the person or people they were involved with.

  But could that now be changing? Were people now beginning to search into their own depths as a kind of instinctive survival mechanism to offset the polarity of violence and disturbance that was clearly stalking the world? Were they finding the potential for unbridled joy in themselves—as Lars and Birgitta had described? It could be that thousands of people all over the world were involved with this mystery of whether or not there was a life beyond the physical, or in addition to it, rather, and hence necessarily, something we called a “soul.” I found myself giving more and more credence to spiritual teaching, the helpfulness of meditation, the essential decency and lightness of the emotional message, and the boundless possibilities of metaphysical reality. If all energy was eternal and infinite, then our own unseen energy—thought, soul, mind, personality, whatever you wanted to call it—had to go somewhere. I was finding it increasingly difficult to believe this energy merely dissipated when the physical envelope decayed. And apparently a great many other people felt the same way. Was I rapidly being drawn into a groundswell of human realization? If Gerry represented the old, intellectual, rather cynically pragmatic approach to the meaning of life, it could be that that was why both of us found the relationship ultimately unsatisfying. I wanted to “be.” He wanted to “do.” I was beginning to think that each of us had only half the equation.

  I wondered what other friends of mine would think of what I’d been reading and thinking. Anything of a spiritual nature would undoubtedly embarrass them, or make them laugh, given the kind of world we live in. But the psychics I was reading about were all saying the same thing. Rudolf Steiner, Leadbetter, Cayce, and so many countless others—all claiming the fundamental existence of a Divine Will—an energy force from which everything else sprang. The same Divine Will was in all living things. We were part of it and it was part of us. The task was to find that divinity in ourselves and live by it.

  And I wondered, if we indeed found life on other planets, would it too know what we knew, or would “they” have a clearer understanding? Science seemed virtually certain that there had to be life on other planets. The chances against its having developed were remote. And if there were, would that life have a different Divine Will or would it be the same? Was the energy force at the center of all the cosmos attending to life on other planets as well as life on our own?

  The ancients said, “Study yourself, for in the self one may find the answers to all problems that may confront you. For the spirit of man, with all its attributes, physical and mental, is a portion of the whole great spirit. Hence the answers are all within the self. Your destiny and your karma depend on what your soul has done about what it has become aware of. And know that every soul will eventually meet itself. No problem can be run away from. Meet yourself now.”

  I thought that what the ancient seers said was no different from what modern psychologists said, or religions, or science, or Shakespeare for that matter. It was all the same: “Know yourself, have the courage to look, and it will set you free.”

  To know oneself perhaps it was necessary to simply be aware, to acknowledge one’s own soul. To know the sum of the lifetimes that soul had experienced seemed outrageously impossible and maybe even irrelevant. But many people I knew did want this knowledge and moreover accepted the theory of re-embodiment as readily as they accepted the sun coming up each morning.

  Eventually I was to learn that a very accomplished actor, and one with whom I had had wonderful professional experience and a warm personal relationship, was certainly one of these people—Peter Sellers. And an experience he lived through, which he confided to me, helped to confirm his belief to himself that his soul was in fact separate from his body.

  I had made two pictures with Peter. One was called Woman Times Seven, in which he played a supporting role as one of my seven husbands, and the other was Being There, in which I played a supporting role to the most brilliant acting job of his entire career. Peter always became the characters he played, offscreen as well as on. In my opinion he was a genius, but he suffered personally from what he called a lack of knowledge of his own identity. He said he knew the characters he played better than he knew himself, that he felt he had been those characters at one time in a way that could only be described as “having lived them in the past.”

  One day toward the end of filming Being There, we talked about it. We had returned from location in Asheville, North Carolina, and were shooting some interiors on the Goldwyn lot in Hollywood. When I arrived on the lot that morning, I was struck with the feeling that something was wrong. I didn’t know if it was because memories of the films I had made there flooded back to me—Irma La Douce, Two for the Seesaw, Children’s Hour, and The Apartment—or whether something was actually going on that I’d learn about later.

  Peter wasn’t in great form that morning. Probably because he was tired, I thought. He was working ten hours a day with a pacemaker in his heart and he had never been a candidate for the marathon. We sat together in the back of a mock-up limousine waiting for the lighting to be set up.

  Suddenly Peter clutched his chest and grabbed my arm. It wasn’t a huge overt lunge or anything. Actually, it was very insignificant as far as anyone else could tell, but I knew something was really wrong. I casually called over the production manager and whispered to him to have a doctor stand by. He nodded and went away. Peter went on talking about acting and parts and how he felt he knew all the characters he had played. In fact, he was quite specific about feeling that he “was each of those characters at one time or another.”

  At first I didn’t realize what I was hearing, but as he continued, I understood he was talking about having lived those characters in some of his own past-life incarnations.

  “Oh,” I said casually, “you mean you feel you are drawing on those experiences and feelings that you actually remember living in other lifetimes?” I was very matter-of-fact. “That’s probably why you are so good at acting. You just have better past-life recall on a creative level than most people have.”

  His eyes lit up as though he had finally found somebody he could talk to, to share this belief of his.

  “I don’t go into this with many people, you know,” he said, “or they’ll think I’m bonkers.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know. Neither do I. But there are probably more cosmic closet believers than we are aware of.”

  He seemed to relax a bit.

  “So what was that pain you just had?” I asked.

  “Oh, just a touch of indigestion, I guess.”

  “Well maybe,” I said, “but maybe it would be good to talk about it.”

  He didn’t seem to want to go into it immediately. He fumbled and talked about food and what was right and wrong for him to eat and what it was like living with “this goddamn toy contraption I have in my heart.”<
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  I listened. I knew he still hadn’t gotten to what he wanted to say.

  “This sound stage gives me the creeps,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  He wiped perspiration from his forehead and took a deep breath.

  “Because,” he said, “this is the sound stage where I died.”

  I tried not to overreact. I remembered reading in the papers what an awful brush with death he had had.

  “Rex Kennamer saved my life,” he said, “and I saw him do it.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “How?”

  Like a person recounting a scene that had happened to somebody else, he said:

  “Well, I felt myself leave my body. I just floated out of my physical form and I saw them cart my body away to the hospital. I went with it. I was curious. I wondered what was wrong with me. I wasn’t frightened or anything like that because I was fine; and it was my body that was in trouble. Then I saw Dr. Kennamer come. And he felt my pulse and saw that I was dead. He and some other people pushed down and up on my chest. In fact, they pummeled the shit out of me … literally, I believe. They did everything but jump up and down on me to get my heart beating again. Then I saw Rex shout at somebody and say there was no time to prepare me for heart surgery. He commanded somebody to carve me open right there on the spot. Rex took my heart out of my body and massaged the hell out of it. Did everything but toss it up in the air. I was so curious watching him. He just refused to accept that I was dead. Then I looked around myself and I saw an incredibly beautiful bright loving white light above me. I wanted to go to that white light more than anything. I’ve never wanted anything more. I knew there was love, real love, on the other side of the light which was attracting me so much. It was kind and loving and I remember thinking, ‘That’s God.’ I tried to elevate myself toward it as Rex was working on my heart. But somehow I couldn’t quite make it. Then I saw a hand reach through the light. I tried to touch it, to grab onto it, to clasp it so it could sweep me up and pull me through it. Then I heard Rex say below me, ‘It’s beating again. I’m getting a heartbeat.’ At the same moment a voice attached to the hand I wanted to touch so much said, ‘It’s not time. Go back and finish. It’s not time.’ The hand disappeared on the other side and I felt myself floating back into my body. I was bitterly disappointed. After that I don’t remember anything until I regained consciousness back inside my body.”

  When Peter finished, I tried to continue to sound matter-of-fact. “Yes,” I said, “I’ve read a lot of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stuff and she has so many documented accounts of so many people describing the same phenomenon when they were pronounced clinically dead. But apparently it wasn’t time for them either, and they came back to tell about it.”

  Peter looked at me closely in that way he used to have of openly questioning whether he should go further. I tried not to press him but I didn’t want him to stop talking about it either.

  “You don’t think I’m crazy?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “of course not. I’ve heard about too many people describing the same phenomenon. They can’t all be nuts. I think the important thing is to figure out what one comes back for.” I said “one” instead of “you” because with Peter, if you pressed too hard on the personal stuff, you could lose him. As I have said, the identity of “Peter Sellers” completely eluded him. He had often said to reporters that he understood his characters to the core and many other mysteries of life besides, but Sellers? Nothing … he didn’t have a clue.

  Peter squirmed around in the mock-up.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “but all of this … this set … that camera … these lights … this car … reminds me that I haven’t yet understood just what you said. I don’t know why I’m here! I don’t know what I came back for this time! That’s why I act like I do. I don’t know. I can’t figure out my purpose. What am I supposed to be doing?”

  His eyes filled with tears. He began to whisper under his breath, “I know. I’m a pain in the ass to so many people. And I know they think I’m crazy. But I’m crazy about the right things. I’m not sure they are.”

  He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his immaculate costume in the character of Chauncey Gardiner. He blinked and sniffed as Chauncey would have.

  “I know I have lived many times before,” he said, “and that experience confirmed it to me, because in this lifetime I felt what it was for my soul to actually be out of my body. But ever since I came back, I don’t know why, I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to do, or what I came back for.”

  He took another deep breath, a long agonized sigh—still maintaining the persona of Chauncey Gardiner.

  A few minutes later the camera crew was ready. Hal Ashby, the director, walked onto the set and we went into the scene as though nothing had happened. We were shooting our first scene in the picture on the last day of filming. Life was an illusion … just like the movies.

  About a year and a half later, I was sitting with some friends in my apartment in Malibu. I had been traveling and didn’t know that Peter had had another heart attack.

  We were chatting amiably when suddenly I jumped up from my chair.

  “Peter,” I said. “Something has happened to Peter Sellers.”

  When I said it, I could feel his presence. It was as though he was right there in my living room watching me say it.

  I felt ridiculous. Of course, all conversation stopped.

  Then the telephone rang.

  I disguised my voice and said hello. It was a newspaper reporter. “I’d like to speak to Miss MacLaine,” he said. “Well, actually I wanted to get her reaction.”

  “To what?” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “If you haven’t heard, I’m sorry, but her friend Peter Sellers just died.”

  I turned in toward the room. I could feel Peter watching me. I wanted to tell the reporter he was mistaken. I wanted to say, “Yes, you probably think he’s dead, but he’s really only left his latest body.” I wanted to say, “Listen, he did the best work of his life in our movie, and he did it portraying one of the gentlest, sweetest souls that ever walked this earth. There was nothing else left to accomplish, he probably couldn’t figure out what else he was hanging around for, so he must have gone for the white light … and besides, he really missed his mother.”

  But of course, I didn’t. Though Peter would have loved it …

  Instead I said, “Shirley isn’t in. But I’ll give her the message.”

  I turned away from the phone.

  “What happened?” asked my friends.

  I could feel Peter smile.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Some reporter was trying to tell me that Peter Sellers just died.”

  Chapter 13

  “Why should it be thought incredible that the same soul should inhabit in succession an indefinite number of mortal bodies …? Even during this one life our bodies are perpetually changing, though by a process of decay and restoration which is so gradual that it escapes our notice. Every human being thus dwells successively in many bodies, even during one short life.”

  —FRANCIS BOWEN

  “Christian Metempsychosis”

  When I first got back to California from Sweden I had called Cat at The Ashram. I told her I had seen Ambres in Stockholm and that I wanted to talk with her. At the time I asked her to meet me for a mountain walk. In the undulating hills of Calabasas perhaps I could clear up my intentions. During our walk I told her about my experience with Ambres and that the whole thing was so puzzling that I had been writing about it to try to clear it up. Her blue eyes lit up like neon saucers and she clapped her hands.

  “Great, Shirley!” she said. “Oh! That’s great! You’re going to write about being drawn into the spiritual dimension? You know, there are so many people who would love to read about what you’re doing, and you know they’re ready out there to read about this stuff.
Really they are!”

  This was going further than I had intended, but nevertheless I asked why she thought anyone would be interested.

  “Because nothing else these days is working for them,” she said. “So many sense that there is another way to lead their lives … and the spiritual path is about the only one they haven’t tried.”

  We walked for a little while longer and then she said, “Would you like to have a great spiritual channeling in English? I know a very well-respected trance medium here in California. He’s busy channeling all the time but he’s coming down from Santa Barbara to channel for some of the guests here at The Ashram. Maybe he could work in a session with you.”

  “Oh, really?” I said, marveling once again at how Cat was a catalyst in my life. “Have you had a session with him?”

  “Oh, Shirley,” she said, seeming to spread her arms and her radiant energy all over the mountain tops. “Yes! And you will love his light, and you will love the spiritual entities that speak through him!”

  Cat always talked in exclamation points and had such a sunny nature I couldn’t imagine her not loving anyone, disembodied or otherwise.

  “Sure,” I said, getting into the spirit of the thing as it were, “that would be fun. What do you think would happen?”

  “Oh,” she said, “several entities come through as a rule, and it’s just as though they’re right in the room with you.”

  “And what do I do?”

  “Just ask anything you want. They can tell you about your past lives, or help with physical diagnosis and pain, or with diets that are good for your vibrations—anything you want …”

  “Well,” I said, “after hearing about the creation of the world from Ambres I’d like to hear something a little more personal.”