Heaven is truth. At long last I can just be (as Nana suggested so long ago). As long as I keep open and aware of what is, right now in the present, I can be a human among my fellow humans, with no reason to close my heart to love. Well into my sixties, I have finally made friends with life. The terrible weight of my fear simply disappeared like waking from a dark dream; I had nothing to prove anymore. Truth is heaven, and it’s right here within us and in front of us always. Truth never avoids us, we avoid it. And in avoiding or altering the truth of who and what we are at any given moment, we invariably avoid love, awareness, freedom, and joy. Freedom dwells only in truth, as does love, as does change.
There is a trick to this truth game. The important lesson in all this is not about revealing secrets. The real challenge is in daring to brave the silence and trust the invisible presence within each of us. Perception of the true requires not only inner silence, but also a moment of emptiness—being empty of preconceived ideas of what we want the truth to be, emptiness of desire and motive and any agenda—certainly emptiness of one’s accumulated self-image. The idea of experiencing this silent emptiness while listening for truth can seem mortally fearsome—it is a momentary death of the “self”—it is a surrender of what we think we want to the actual fact—it is an openness to and complete trust of one’s deeper self and of life. This detachment from the past, this complete lack of control, seems terrifying until it’s actually experienced. When you do allow yourself to experience this alert emptiness, you’ll find yourself in a place of trust and insight, and truth will arise with simplicity and grace.
INTIMATIONS OF ETERNITY
Last week I was sitting with some friends on the lawn behind my beach house looking out over the Pacific. It was sunset time—the big event of the day. We were sipping mai tais and enjoying the immense beauty of the early evening, which had made us all rather quiet.
As the color-drenched sky began to darken enough to reveal one or two faint stars (that had been there all along), my friends wandered into the house to start making dinner.
I lingered alone by the sea watching the majestic retreat of the sun. The sea was in a gentle mood, its tiny waves barely disturbing the reef’s tide pools. A school of small fish flashed up out of the shallow water all at once and disappeared, then leaped again, perhaps being chased by a predator or maybe just fooling around. Orange clouds reflected reddish ripples on the blue-green water.
Watching all this, I seemed for a few moments to disappear. There was only seeing. And an unusual dimension of consciousness opened. I remembered sitting on the wall under the walnut tree as a child and “seeing” for the very first time. It seemed clear to me in this silent moment that my personal worries and strivings, my desires for approval and fulfillment and fame, my sense of being a separate, competitive entity were in fact rather moot and trivial, strangely irrelevant in the timeless wholeness of eternal reality. It was briefly clear to me that there is vastly more to living than we’re usually aware of.
We’re used to thinking of the sacred as something set apart in a heavenly realm to be worshiped from afar. We invent distant deities who judge, reward, and punish us. We give these deities omnipotent power and consequently we fear them (when we give ourselves time to think about them at all).
Wouldn’t it be a splendid joke on us if the sacred wasn’t distant and “other” in the least, if holiness in fact surrounded and infused every atom of the clamorous tumult of our everyday lives? What if God, rather than being the remote creator and judge of our strife-ridden world, is our world and our selves and everything that exists and everything beyond existence, too? What if, despite our fears to the contrary, we’re ultimately not separate from sacredness, but wholly unified with each other and the divine? What if the only barrier between us and our realization of our own divinity is simply our ignorance?
PICTURE SECTION
Four-year-old Dickie looks for lucky four-leaf clovers, 1938.
Wee Richard, 1935.
The Chamberlain Magic Show. My shrink took one look at this photo and said, “In that family, you never had a chance.” Mother, Elsa; brother, Bill; father, Charles, 1938.
A pensive young Richard in a prophetic Hawaiian shirt.
With high school girlfriend Donafred at a dance, 1953.
Will Hutchins, Nancy Irvin, Hal Halverstadt, and me relaxing during a play rehearsal. Pomona College, 1955.
Mom visiting the Dr. Kildare set on what was once Mickey Rooney’s hometown street at MGM Studios, 1964.
Dr. Kildare meets Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney at MGM Studios. It was wonderful to see how these two former child stars loved each other.
Hamlet contemplating death, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, England, 1968.
Sir Laurence Olivier tells Lord Byron a thing or two on the set of Robert Bolt’s film Lady Caroline Lamb, 1972.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Having never before imagined myself writing a book, I’m grateful to Judith Regan for inviting me into the rich learning experience of doing so. And I’m immensely thankful for the editorial wisdom of Calvert Morgan.
I am happily beholden to Martin’s prodigious memory, his galvanizing flashes of truth, and his indispensable organizational suggestions.
My thanks to Sam and Nancy for setting the stage for an epiphany that changed my life.
Warmest thanks to Andrew Harvey for his beautiful translation of “The World of Origin.”
And my loving gratitude to Dr. Carolyn Conger for her heartfelt encouragement.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RICHARD CHAMBERLAIN has starred in such film and television classics as Dr. Kildare, for which he won a Golden Globe, The Thorn Birds, and Shogun. Chamberlain has also received rave reviews for his theatrical in Hamlet, Cyrano de Bergerac, and My Fair Lady. He lives in Hawaii.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
COPYRIGHT
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2003 by ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted material:
Quote from No Name on the Street by James Baldwin, reprinted courtesy of the James Baldwin Estate.
SHATTERED LOVE. Copyright © 2003 by Richard Chamberlain. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
FIRST EDITION
* * *
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Chamberlain, Richard, 1935–
Shattered love : a memoir / Richard Chamberlain.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-008743-9
1. Chamberlain, Richard, 1935–2. Actors—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.C47A3 2003
792’.028’092—dc21
[B]
2003046775
* * *
ISBN 0-06-008744-7 (pbk.)
04 05 06 07 08 QN/QW 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
EPub Edition © JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780062304759
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollins.com
Shattered Love Page 22
