Insofar as a society’s tenets create conformity and order in a largely chaotic world, they are obviously useful and necessary. But I can now see that just as obviously these beliefs and mythologies so deeply imprinted on my brain eventually inhibit my longing for psychological and spiritual truth, for self-discovery. In the long run, conformity doesn’t elevate me to wisdom, it puts me to sleep.
Every day I encounter evidence of my preprogrammed thought patterns and beliefs that remain unexamined and therefore continue to obstruct my openhearted love of life. All the indoctrinations of my youth still linger in the corners of my mind. My job now is to embrace these learned and often arbitrary thought patterns, fears, and prejudices, with awareness and inquiry, to dissolve them in the light of love and understanding. The examined life is the only life worth living, and the reality of what is is the only place worth living in.
When I was about four years old, the photographer son of my grandmother’s great and classy friend Lee Maynard organized a photo session in the front yard of Lee’s home in Los Angeles to photograph Nonnie and then me. I remember that day well. Lee’s son saw that I was shy so he asked me to look for four-leaf clovers in the lawn to make me less self-conscious. I searched and the camera clicked.
Just the other day, while packing up to move into our new house, I came across the resulting sunny photo of myself as a rather lost little blond boy in short pants looking for cloverleafs in the grass. As I gazed at this distant image, I immediately felt I could love this kid with all my heart. How I would love to take him in my arms and spend time with him, getting to know who he was, whatever his problems and quirks.
His actual parents, of course, had tried to dictate who he was. They wanted him to conform to their image of a “proper” son, and they were annoyed and anxious when he resisted being turned into their poster boy.
Looking at this photo, taken over sixty years ago, my instincts were totally opposite. I’d be charmed by Dick’s dancing. I’d be fascinated to find out why he stubbornly refused to learn to tie his shoes or write his name, why he feared school and had such a dislike for reading. I’d encourage his daydreams and his love of art and music. I’d lead him into learning through an appreciation of his interests rather than my own. I would love him and honor him just as he was.
Thus, by respecting what is, I would not have burdened this kid with fear and self-loathing, trying to shame him into being what I wanted him to be. With careful guidance I’d let him prosper as himself. And somehow I’d try to teach him that all the necessary shoulds and musts that accompany growing up would eventually, if fully understood, lead not to the dull constrictions of conformity, but could eventually be discarded in favor of the vitality of freedom and genuine self-discovery.
Sidestepping our learned ideals of what should be and giving the reality of what is at this moment our entire attention, our whole, openhearted awareness (being aware of our expectations and “shoulds” as well) is I think not only the prerequisite for wise change but also the opening to Christ, to Buddha, to the sacred. If the divine isn’t present in what’s happening within, to, and around us right now, it isn’t anywhere. I think what is, right now, is governed by the laws of God’s nature, in fact it is God. In this sense the traits we would prefer to disown (like our greed, our anxiety, and our arrogance) become not enemies, but our friends, signaling to us that our thinking is off base.
What is at each moment, no matter how magnificent, boring, or devastating, is where divinity lives. I think every atom of existence is sacred. We’d like to pick and choose our moments, finding God in some and the devil in others. But each moment, without exception, is a manifestation of the divine. We simply haven’t expanded our awareness enough to feel the sacred everywhere.
If my sense of the ubiquitous nature of divinity is a fact, then each moment of life’s ups and downs, joys and sorrows—whether or not it is what we want, whether or not we judge it good or bad—is an opportunity for communion with the sacred. This detached, undistorted seeing opens our being to the natural flowering of our hearts, our spirit, our wisdom, and to acting rightly in the present situation. For at the center of each of us is the sacredness, the love we so desperately seek elsewhere. And that, I suspect, is life’s favorite irony.
All of these beliefs ring true to me, but what do they really mean? How can we love reality, what is, when reality is so often not what we expect or want?
The other day I was about half an hour into a long drive to the Honolulu airport when I discovered that I’d left my wallet, with driver’s license, cash, and credit cards, in my bedroom drawer. I had no choice: I had to drive back home, waste an hour of valuable time, and miss my plane. I was furious with myself, frustrated by my carelessness, hating the whole stupid process of finding the right freeway exit and circling back for my stupid wallet. I worried that I might not be able to get a later flight.
As I drove home, I was flailing myself with stories of disaster and my flagrant ineptitude, when suddenly I thought, “Wait a minute—what’s really happening here?”
The truth of the situation was starkly simple: I was a person driving a very nice car to a beautiful house to pick up a wallet and phone for a later reservation. It wasn’t the first time I’ve forgotten my wallet, and it probably won’t be the last. With this clear, unadorned view of what was happening, my self-flagellating inner Greek tragedy lost all its drama and became comic. I was free to drop it, enjoy the gorgeous island scenery, and listen to my favorite program on NPR. In short, I stopped fighting reality and got happy smack in the middle of what is right now.
BENEDICT CANYON
With some regret, in 1980 we left our New York City apartment, our first home, and bought a small ranch house in Benedict Canyon, a somewhat rustic retreat in the hills above Los Angeles. There were still hints of the wild—deer and coyotes roamed the underbrush and California oak trees.
After extensive remodeling the house took on a slightly Japanese proportion and serenity. I had purchased several beautiful screens and scrolls from the various Shogun sets, and Martin and I had found a number of striking pieces in Kyoto on a previous trip to Japan. My favorite feature of the house was a large spa bathtub with a broad shoji screen that opened onto a lovely Asian rock garden and hillside.
The main treasure we found in Kyoto was a large four-paneled screen of poetic calligraphy by the great Shoyo Morita. We designed the living room around this beautifully simple piece, presenting it in a long tokonoma that dominated the room. In Japan, a tokonoma is a special space dedicated to a work of art such as a screen or scroll, and perhaps a flower arrangement.
When the first heavy rainstorm hit our newly remodeled house, the roof sprang one small but lethal leak that during the night tragically aimed its single stream of water directly on the Morita. The soggy rice paper screen was a heartbreaking sight the next morning. We sent this prize possession to various art restoration experts, but no one could put Humpty together again.
On the brighter side, Martin had given me a dalmatian puppy for my birthday weeks before we moved in. We named this frisky little guy Billy Boy, but instead of bonding with me, Billy fell for Martin in a big way. They’d even sing together. Feeling a bit left out, I went to Billy Boy’s breeder and bought his half sister, Jesse.
Jesse was a beauty, aristocratic in bearing, intelligent, blatantly neurotic, and an accomplished actress. She could, for instance, pretend to be in terrible pain just to get attention. During these feigned episodes we’d take her to the vet just in case, but invariably she turned out to be fit as a fiddle.
Following one of her dramatic performances I decided to examine my side of our relationship and realized that, like some thoughtless parents, I loved Jesse when she behaved well and didn’t when she didn’t. Upon her return from the vet I sat down with her in our front garden and told her that from then on I loved her all the time, no matter what, and I meant it. She never feigned illness again.
Jesse was unique—I’ve never met
another dog like her. Despite the complexity of our relationship, or perhaps because of it, I was very attached to this four-legged, brown-spotted creature who seemed at times to have the soul of a disappointed lover from a past life, revisiting me in a form that, alas, would assure her continued disappointment.
Jesse’s eccentricities only added interest to her charmed life as one of two beloved household pets until advancing age began its inevitable subtractions.
Near the end of Jesse’s fourteenth year she was suffering so badly from arthritis that she couldn’t even lie down in her bed without yelping with pain. After consulting her vet, I decided very reluctantly to have her put down. Jesse still loved people food, so on the fateful morning I cooked her scrambled eggs and buttered toast for breakfast. She loved the treat. Then our vet came to the house and while I held Jesse on my lap (she knew what was coming, but barely resisted) the vet gave her a shot in her front leg and slowly Jesse went to sleep and then died.
I had never witnessed a death before and it was heartbreaking. The second her body ceased functioning this unique being vanished from the world. Her limp carcass, still warm, was there in my arms, but Jesse was irretrievably gone.
It seemed so clear at that moment that Jesse’s body, though instrumental in expressing her spirit, was not itself her spirit, her life force, her personality. Her spirit inhabited her body but was something other than body, beyond the physical. Our bodies seem unquestionably individual and separate, but is each life individual and separate? Could it be that we all share one life just as we all share one air, one water, one sun? Could it be that humanity is actually a unified being of which each of us is a single, essential cell? Could there be one mind thinking our thoughts and one soul overlighting our being? These questions and their implications interest me a lot. Perhaps, though unique, we are not separate at all. Blood is blood, thought is thought, breath is breath, suffering is suffering, joy is joy, love is love.
Imagine a room full of candles of different colors, sizes, shapes, and scents. A candle’s purpose is to give light. A candle, whatever its shape, is brought to life by fire. Now imagine lighting each of these candles with one match. The candles are now enlivened by separate flames of the same fire. And the glow that each candle emits blends with all the other lights into one roomful of indivisible light.
The brother/sisterhood of humanity seems so good, so noble as an ideal, but feels like a hair shirt when we actually try it on. Imagine facing Osama bin Laden and embracing him as your brother, as in fact a version of yourself. I can barely imagine realizing that the madness of his zealots is a version of my own zealotry. Where do I put my hatred?
As we resist comparing ourselves to this or any “satanic” creature, let’s take a long look inside. Consider how fanatically we cling to our self-image and images we construct of our husbands and wives and children. Consider how fanatically we cling to our conditioned thinking—all the stuff we’re force-fed by our particular families, cultures, and political spin wizards. Consider how ruthlessly we hold on to the stories we tell ourselves about our own superiority or inferiority and about our versions of God. Consider how fanatically most of us avoid any clear-sighted observation of our destructive patterns of thought and all the negative stuff we carelessly put up with in ourselves. Nearly all of us are to some degree fanatics.
I tend to hate and fear in others exactly what I fear and disown in myself. In this sense the people who irritate me the most are often superbly accurate mirrors reflecting back to me aspects of myself that I try to hide, like neediness, pushiness, selfishness, and degrees of violence. And for this invaluable service the people I dislike deserve my thanks. There is a Buddhist saying: “Be grateful to everyone.” Exceedingly good advice if you think about it.
DREAMING ON HIGH
Martin and I missed a lot of things about living on the East Coast—all the excitement and the cultural richness of New York City. But we found that Los Angeles offered its own brand of riches. We gathered a wonderful group of new friends—a motley crew of therapists, acupuncturists, a few show biz types, and a spiritual teacher or two. And we were interested in the various explorations of consciousness going on—some serious, some not—in the early eighties. We tried out a number of “California” activities like getting “rolfed” and floating in isolation tanks. We even got involved briefly with a pretty blond housewife who “channeled” an ancient and exotically alluring spiritual potentate of some kind. All this was new to us, and we cast our lines in many directions with varying luck.
One big nourishing fish we caught was a meditation group that met several times a year. The group consisted mainly of Gestalt therapists. The group originally wanted to discover or enhance our intuitive and psychic abilities and was led by a woman known for her gifts in this field. The group eventually met without the leader and developed into a loving extended family who encouraged one another’s inner development as evidenced in our outer lives.
Another arena of the New Age California experience that was quite spectacular occurred accidentally. In China, while walking on the Great Wall, Martin connected with an intriguing older woman from Marin who told him that she led blindfolded LSD trips as a means of accelerating one’s spiritual awareness.
When he told me about this, I said, “Blindfolded?” I thought the purpose of LSD was to “see” the world from a different viewpoint. Well, Martin, ever fearful of the loss of control that drug-induced states offer, was intrigued for the first time in his life. So was I. The idea of accelerating enlightenment was naive, and yet tempting. Eventually, we both ended up in the temple of the “Priestess,” where we ingested the “omniscient” LSD with our blindfolds in place. The experience lasted through the night as she played on multiple music players various symphonies, recorded poems, and speeches, such as the one John Glenn made when he first orbited earth.
As the LSD took effect and the music soared, we sailed off into our own orbits. I drifted into a state of transcendental beauty that was beyond imagination and lasted through the night.
The most illuminating moments of this experience gave me the sense of the vaster dimensions of our beings. I felt that my self was like a handful of brightly colored beads organized together in love, not by my mind’s image of myself. Again and again I joyously cast these particles of my being out among the myriad particles of the music, knowing that if life wished me to reunite as Richard, I would. If not, my particles would mix with equal lovingness with the rest of creation. There simply is nothing to lose.
We knew that drugs could be dangerous and that we were taking a risk. And it would be easy to dismiss the resulting experience as illusory and lacking significance. But my extraordinary vision has stayed with me all these years. I feel as if I had been briefly admitted into a level of esoteric truth that is genuine.
THE THORN BIRDS
This exploration of consciousness California style was interrupted by a great tsunami of the miniseries, roaring with incredible speed and aquatic power through the shoals of Shogun and crashing with equal might onto the steamy shores of Australia.
When I read The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough’s epic novel about the travails of an Australian family, I immediately knew this passionate love story cried out to be a great television miniseries. I also knew that I had to play Father Ralph, a character whose stature and complexity seemed to me an irresistible challenge.
The suspenseful scenario of being cast as Father Ralph was an almost exact repeat of the casting of John Blackthorne except that the enormous success of Shogun gave me a lot more clout.
One of the major studios first attempted to transform The Thorn Birds into a feature film directed by Peter Weir, again starring Robert Redford as the troubled priest. Like Shogun, the novel proved far too long and complicated to be distilled into a two- or three-hour film, and the property was sold to ABC television. Only the miniseries format could be expanded to contain the entire story. Again I waited in line and was finally tapped for the immensely g
ifted, but ultimately doomed character of Ralph de Bricassart.
Casting Meggie took a bit longer, as many actresses were clamoring for this plum role. Only Jane Seymour and Rachel Ward made the final round. We filmed two screen tests, and both Jane and Rachel were excellent. Jane was more experienced and assured, but I suspect Rachel won the part because she wasn’t so assured and therefore seemed more vulnerable. I, on the other hand, was terrible in both tests and was surprised when the network didn’t fire me on the spot. I hadn’t yet figured out how to play Ralph so I waffled around lacking conviction. I also made the fatal mistake of dying my hair black for the test, thinking this would give me a certain dark Irish glamour. Instead I ended up looking like a performing seal with a hangover. I must have had an ironclad contract, because ABC kept me on.
With Meggie cast and shooting almost ready to begin, I read the novel over and over again preparing for the job of actually becoming Father Ralph. I found him quite elusive until I realized that my predicament in life was somewhat similar to his. Ralph’s heart was torn into thirds, mine into halves.
Our young priest was exceedingly ambitious and loved the glamour and hierarchical power of the Catholic Church. He had a genuine vocation to serve Spirit and vowed his life to Christ. He also loved Meggie with all the passion and deep caring that a man feels for his soul mate. Even when she was a child, Ralph recognized in Meggie his other half, the woman he was destined to love. Ralph’s tragic dilemma was the incompatibility of his three loves: the glamour of power, his vows to the Christ, and his love of the one thing the Church most feared—a woman. Though Ralph had considerable success in all three of these conflicting loves—he advanced to the high rank of cardinal, he served humanity by covertly opposing the Nazis, and he won Meggie’s heart—he could fully commit to none and was ultimately torn apart and died lost and defeated.
Shattered Love Page 15
