Just recently this welcome, but somewhat cool understanding of forgiveness in general and of letting go of my father in particular has been greatly deepened and warmed up into love (believe it or not!) by four experiences: a dream, an event, another dream, and a second event, all happening in quick succession. It was obvious to me that these experiences were connected and very important. They happened with a vivid insistence that I attend to them and understand them.
Earlier in the book I mentioned my father’s friend, the great metaphysician Ernest Holmes, who founded the Church of Religious Science. Dr. Holmes had visited our home several times, and Dad used to take me to hear his sermons on Sunday mornings. Though I was only ten or twelve at the time and my understanding was limited by youth, some of Dr. Holmes’s principles remained in my mind. And my father’s philosophy was greatly influenced by Dr. Holmes.
In the first dream I found myself in a spacious building with lots of glass partitions. The building seemed to have aspects of a film set, a library, and the administrative offices of a church. Suddenly, I realized I was in the offices of the Church of Religious Science and I was told that Ernest Holmes was still living and I was directed to his office. I longed to visit him and as I approached his office I saw him through a glass door leaving for the night with an armful of books. Dr. Holmes turned and saw me and exclaimed “Holy shit!” and hurried toward me. We embraced with seemingly equal glee, and a tremendous, vibrant flood of love flowed between us.
The dream sparked my interest in reading Dr. Holmes’s work, which I hadn’t thought about in years, but I allowed the hurly-burly of my life to distract me. Then a few days after the dream the first “event” happened.
As I was searching through some packing boxes of books in the garage for a certain play I was thinking of doing, I came across a small (in size only) book at the very bottom of the box titled Ernest Holmes—Seminar Lectures. I began to read with unexpected excitement. The book was a veritable gusher of wisdom and seemed vibrant with Dr. Holmes’s confident presence. As in the dream it was like embracing a beloved friend.
Then came the biggest surprise. While I leafed through the front pages of the book looking for the publishing date I came across this inscription:
Dick,
Parts of this book
I find reach the heights.
Most of it in fact.
Let me know how
it strikes you.
Love,
Dad
My father had given me this book perhaps fifty years ago. I had completely forgotten. It was indeed a gift of love. Reading the inscription was almost like hearing Dad’s voice speaking to me with warm affection. I could feel his presence all around me.
A few days later I had the second dream. It took place again on a film set, which also seemed like a large cruise ship. I was standing in a big room when the actor Jason Robards (with whom I had worked on a film in England) came up to me with a joyous smile and embraced me in a warm hug, saying he was so glad to see me again. I was equally glad to see Jason and said I thought he was one of the best actors of all time. Again there was complete acceptance and great love between us. Then Jason walked into the ship’s bar for some manly festivity.
Whatever else Jason represented in my dream, he was obviously a version of my father. I awoke from the dream with the clear and happy knowledge that I had greatly underestimated my father’s capacity for love. And I discovered that despite (and perhaps because of) all our problems and misunderstandings, I loved my father unreservedly, and somehow in spirit he loved me, too.
This was a considerable change from the neutral feeling of forgiveness and well-wishing toward my father that I had come to earlier. This was an active sense of mutually loving friendship.
The second event happened three days after the second dream. I had flown to Los Angeles for a job and was sitting in my hotel room surfing through the TV channels. I happened upon a movie in which Jason Robards played the estranged father of a young woman. He had years before abandoned his daughter and her son to pursue a string of dubious business ventures. At the beginning of the movie the secretly ill Robards character returns to his daughter’s home hoping to win back her love and the love of his grandson before he dies. The daughter resists angrily and the boy is suspicious.
Watching the great Robards gradually win over his daughter and especially his grandson with his superb warmth, charm, and honesty, I experienced a kind of spiritual reunion with my own father (the fictional story and my real story happening simultaneously). I fully realized a mutual love between Dad and me that brought tears of gratitude. Our war had ended several years before. Now our peace was filled with joy.
In this new sense of love there is a lightness and freedom which I cherish. Perhaps on a soul level my father and I have always loved each other and had participated in our thorny relationship as a process of mutual teaching and learning. In any case, I sense the warmth of his presence now and feel on some level that we are and always have been true friends.
WHAT IS HATRED ANYWAY?
What is hate? What is the violent emotion that we all, from time to time, share? And I wonder, how is it that we’re so hospitable to hate within ourselves, taking the feeling for granted as a perfectly acceptable reaction to certain troublesome people and events? Clearly, intense hatred is causing atrocious mayhem in our world—and yet we treat our own feelings of loathing like welcome members of our psychological family.
But life is showing us that hatred is a nightmare and it’s time for us to wake up. We are, after all, potentially angelic beings learning how and why we come to hate other potentially angelic beings.
Some time ago I found myself hating my contractor (to whom I’d paid top dollar) for screwing up my house. Being uncomfortable with this feeling, I took a long, honest look at the situation and I saw that from the start I had let clues and warning signs slip by; I had not consulted enough expert advice along the way; I had obviously trusted unwisely; I had not coolly confronted the man and intelligently discussed the situation either during construction or before instituting legal means to demand restitution. In short, from the beginning I hadn’t dealt intelligently with the problem.
Looking into my own experience of hate, I see my utter abandonment of love and love’s intelligence. My heart closes up tight and I want to cause some kind of harm to the person I imagine has provoked my ill will. With the intensity of this emotion I seem to blind myself to clear thinking and any accurate perception of the person I hate. I also lose sight of my part in the conflict. The reality of the person I hate becomes irrelevant and I find myself hating my ideas, my stories, my disappointed expectations of the person.
I experience my hatred as a dark, oppressive, airless little room inside my mind, in which I’m raging against flickering home movies I’ve created about the villain. I’ve scripted these movies with all my betrayed expectations, unfilled hopes, and dramatic outrage. (The person I hate, by the way, has not been invited to the screening. He’s nowhere in sight.)
In short, hatred is nothing more than our immature avoidance of dealing with reality; it’s stimulating, but useless. Grown-ups size up a new dilemma, acknowledge their complicity, summon up all their smarts—and, if need be, all their professional advisors—and deal with the realities, without the distractions of rancor.
I’m discovering that it’s unwise and counterproductive to close down my heart in the face of trouble. Resentment and hatred cloud my thinking, they stand foursquare between me and the solution to my problems. Hatred totally shuts out love, and love is the smartest thing there is. Everything else is dumber than love.
This is yet another of life’s cosmic jokes. Our negative thoughts and feelings are self-created and exist only in our heads, not out there in the world. The world simply is what it is. We’re the ones who choose a negative stance. The world at any present moment is exactly as it should be, there being no alternative. Spilt milk cannot be unspilt. The question is, do we cry and moan
about it or do we clean it up and be more careful next time? Time can’t be reversed. We cannot change the present moment, but we can certainly change the next one. And we can certainly change our thinking. Wouldn’t it be dumbfounding to discover that all negative feelings are in fact dispensable?
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AND YET ANOTHER REINVENTION
By the time this book is published I’ll be, amazingly, sixty-nine years old. The trappings of youth are long gone, and the subtractions of age have begun. Though acting still fascinates me, the glory days of my once all-important career are over. The infamous paparazzi are looking elsewhere for their thrills.
When I was growing up, the middle-aged and elderly people seemed to feel it was quite natural and right for them to be middle-aged and elderly. Youth, with all its excitements and confusions, was something to get over, not a place in which to linger or to cling to. Middle age, with its house and job and kids, was where life happened, and old age was a fitting denouement.
In movie dramas and love stories of the thirties and forties, the actors were predominately mature, fully grown, made interesting and desirable and glamorous by their life experience rather than by pimples and raging hormones. Even the child actors in those films were often un-cute and middle-ageish. Youth was considered slightly annoying.
The British pushed the point even further: They rarely saw their children until they returned from boarding school and university with doctorates in hand.
Not so today.
I suspect that our current worship of callow youth and its frivolities and our panic in the face of the wrinkles of experience are signs of considerable cultural decadence. Grown-ups are passé.
Though I admire maturity in others, I reluctantly admit to having been seriously addicted to youth. As a beginning actor I was secretly certain that my success was almost entirely due to my youthful good looks; that when my youth waned, so would I.
Luckily, my parents passed along hardy genes and my youthfulness lasted an astonishingly long time. I don’t remember feeling or looking older until I was well up into my fifties.
It has long been rumored that I have had several face-lifts. In Hollywood everyone past the ancient age of twenty-nine is suspect. For years I took this chatter as a sort of compliment, but being disbelieved is never pleasant.
When I was touring Europe in My Fair Lady, we held a press conference in Hamburg where the reporters’ questions were particularly invasive on several subjects, one being cosmetic surgery. Exasperated by their persistence, I offered this challenge: Bring in a respectable plastic surgeon to examine me closely. If he finds a single bit of evidence (inevitable scarring) of any “lifting,” I will pay you ten thousand dollars cash. If he finds no signs of surgery, you may pay me the ten thousand dollars cash.
I repeated this offer on Larry King’s show when he asked if I had “had any work done.” The offer still stands. So far there have been no takers.
Because of this preternatural extension of youthfulness, the long-delayed but inevitable ravages of time have taken me completely by surprise. My life is morphing into something quite different and new. Who am I? What am I becoming? It seems to be time for another reinvention.
Fortunately, as I gaze into my still somewhat murky crystal ball I glimpse some happy prospects.
Caressed by balmy trade winds, and the sea’s amiable warmth, the enchantment of living in Hawaii way out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—unlike youth—has never waned. I’m still fascinated with and challenged by my painting, and acting continues its allure. I still feel the excitement of beginning a new job with new actors and crews, and a unique character to find and create. But sitting around shooting the breeze with friends or walking the dog along a palmy beach are pretty great, too!
The one consistency underlying all these possibilities is my keen interest in the endlessly mysterious pas de deux of body and spirit, of the seen and the unseen, of time and eternity, of fiction and truth.
I love to think about life. I love to listen to life. And I feel that the unseen aspects of creation love to be attended to, and questioned by, us visible beings. If properly listened to I think the invisible will answer us in its own time with its own insightful voice. The great trick on our part is of course learning to listen.
A LETTER CONCERNING SELF
Writing this book has made me think more deeply about our morphing world and has helped to open a new phase in my life. Carolyn Conger and David Spangler, spiritual teachers and dear friends of mine, have each asked me to participate with them in teaching various student groups they work with. Though I certainly do not consider myself an authority of any kind, I love this experience of discussing with serious students the possibilities of stepping beyond the limitations of our conditioned thinking and opening ourselves to the wisdom and power of love despite all the craziness dancing around our planet.
David Spangler recently asked me to coteach a workshop of his in Seattle titled “Standing Within Self.” I said that I’d welcome the challenge, and he asked me to write down a few of my thoughts on the subject of self and send them to him. I sat down and wrote the following letter.
Dear David,
“Standing Within Self” seems a perfect subject. As a person who has feared and rejected himself for decades and pretended to be a more acceptable someone else, and who has only recently (at age sixty-eight!) discovered a place of truth within and found the joy of trusting that wellspring, the various levels of self are a subject I’d love to explore with you and your students.
The word “self” refers to so many states of being. Krishnamurti said the self is nothing—I agree. I also think the self can expand into everything. I also think the self is God’s (that is, all of life’s) laboratory of discovery—each self is an aspect of God learning.
I’m currently very interested in detachment. It seems obvious that clear awareness, compassion, and love presuppose detachment. I’ve only begun to think about this. What detaches from what? The self as most of us experience it is the very bastion of attachment, need, want and desire. Self-protection and survival and self-exploitation are paramount. And we accept the various fictions of our self-image as the real thing. Detachment is thought to be cold, even a kind of death. And of course it is a kind of death, and there lies its beauty. Detachment dies to the old as it innocently approaches the new.
So here we are, alternatively manufacturing the self, exploiting the self, fictionalizing the self, plumbing the self, deepening the self, losing the self, finding the self, and searching out the self divine.
Yes we’re separate, yes we’re one, yes we’re profane, yes we’re sacred, yes some are smart and some are dumb, yes we share the same Mind and very likely, the same soul.
Krishnamurti asks profoundly, disturbingly, “When thought ceases, where is the self?”
Is the self entirely the product, the projection of thought? If thought precedes self, who is thinking?
I suspect that the only thing that thinks is God (the essence of all that is). Life is thinking us, life is breathing us, life is learning us. We are the instant manifestation of God’s thought. God’s thoughts are not abstractions like ours, God’s thoughts are the thing (mountain, star, bird, person) itself. God thinks abstractly through Itself as us.
How elusive and various the self can be. In one day, one hour, I can be depressingly cynical and joyfully inspired, grumpily listless and vitally engaged. Our self is naturally so liquid and quick, yet we’re frightened of change, of the new, so we tie ourselves down and nail ourselves to an image, a collection of past ideas. We deaden ourselves with comfortable sameness. Or, finally bored to death by such predictability, we wake up and let go and let life fling itself into us.
Then, as you have said, David, our elastic self can expand from its separate nucleus into great things.
Love,
Richard
I co-led the two-day workshop with David in Seattle in which we explored many aspects of the thing we call �
�self.” The group included about thirty people, nearly all of whom seemed smart and eager to learn. The great thing about teaching—especially for a novice like myself—is that you learn so much by doing it. We met all day Saturday and Sunday in a large yurt at Moss Hollow, a rustic mountain retreat outside of Seattle. David usually introduced the topic of the morning or the afternoon sessions, and then I would chime in with my ideas and experiences. A group discussion followed. I was struck by the vitality of these discussions. The mostly middle-aged participants were thoughtful and wise and deeply committed to enriching their experience of life and spirit.
After finishing David’s workshop, I flew down to Los Angeles and worked with one of Carolyn Conger’s ongoing groups. This smaller group of women from all around the country meets with Carolyn four or five times a year. Because they’ve all studied together for so long, these women shared a depth of understanding and cocreative energy that brought out the best in all of us. My subject in our two-hour session was the stupendous power and intelligence of love, including forgiveness and the overrated dramas of negative thinking. Again, I learned as much from them as they did from me.
I had assisted both David and Carolyn in their workshops before, and together with writing this book, I do seem to be morphing into something new. My desperate need for fame and prestige is giving way to the realization that the emptiness I so feared is actually vibrant with the silent treasures of spirit. Like everyone else, the love I sought from the outside is always abundantly present within my own being. The object isn’t to “get” love, but to share the love we already have.
Shattered Love Page 19
