Going Within (22 page)

Luis used no brushes. His fingers applied various degrees of pressure, effecting lines and curves and
shapes according to the force that guided them. He used the heel of his hand, his knuckles, and so on. It was as though an invisible guidance “understood” how an effect could be achieved that bore no resemblance to traditional techniques of art.

As soon as the van Gogh canvas was complete, Luis cast it aside on the carpet. Another canvas was quickly placed in front of him. The energy coming from Luis changed. It felt more abrupt, more demanding and crisp. Luis began to speak English with a Spanish accent different from his own Portuguese. His arms and hands began to move with more precision as he forcefully grabbed more tubes of acrylic and squirted the colors onto the fresh canvas. In a moment Picasso began to talk about the need for discipline and work! The voice was gruff and much deeper in tone than Luis’s. He painted what looked like the side of a face with violent green and red colors. It was masculine and sparse. The eye was lopsided, of course. Completing this subject also took about three minutes. Luis then brushed that canvas to the floor. Again his energy shifted. It was a remarkable display of prolific personality alteration. All the time the music continued to play, loud and harsh, almost as though the painters were absorbing the vibration of the sound and using it to carry their movements.

Suddenly Luis became more languid and soft. A smile drifted across his face. (From the beginning his eyes had been closed and he shielded them from
whatever light was reflected in the room. He preferred to paint in darkness.)

The soft smile continued. He was painting the face of a young girl, gently and with adoration. I felt tears well up in my eyes and stream down my face. I didn’t know why I was crying. Now Luis began to speak in French. It wasn’t Luis, though. As the painting of the young girl evolved, I realized that the artist must be Renoir. He said something to me about my emotion in French. I easily answered him in French—though I speak very little French, somehow I found myself speaking with him quite fluently.

He spoke of her face and her innocence. I asked him why I was so moved. He answered that I identified with her purity. I wanted to ask if somehow I knew her or recognized her, but I didn’t. He said he understood what I was thinking, but he didn’t answer the question in my mind.

Luis lovingly patted and prodded the nuances of her delicate face with his fingertips and knuckles. All the while I cried. Gently he pushed the canvas to the floor and waited.

Luis then began to laugh mischievously. He was suddenly lighthearted and fatherly.

On the bottom of a fresh canvas he squirted purples and blues, then orange and reds on top. I saw that he had outlined a face. He turned to me with his eyes closed and spoke English with a French accent.

“’Allo,” said a voice that was distinctly not that of Luis.

I felt something familiar immediately. I wiped the tears from my eyes and answered him.

“Hello,” I said.

“It is nice to see you again,” he went on. He painted as he spoke.

“Oh?” I answered. “How did you know me?”

“Know you?” he chided. “I took you in. You were often one of my models.”

“I was?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Pigalle,” he answered.

My mind flashed. Pigalle? I remembered how comfortable I had felt shooting two films in the Pigalle section of Paris—
Irma La Douce
and
Can Can.

“You have been in Pigalle many times,” he went on, “as your films indicate.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

He laughed. “I am your guardian and friend,” he said. “I am Toulouse.”

“Toulouse-Lautrec?” I felt simultaneously silly and exhilarated.

“But of course,” he answered. “I am painting you in your lifetime with me in Pigalle.”

I looked at the developing face. She was rather chinless with decidedly homely features.

“You were not beautiful,” he said. “But you enjoyed the men and they enjoyed you.”

I laughed. “Was I a hooker?”

He didn’t laugh. “No,” he said. “You were a dancer
from the Netherlands who had difficulty finding work there. Therefore, you migrated to Paris. You made your living many ways. One of them being a model for me. We were good friends.”

I watched him finish the portrait. She had orange-red hair. He was right about the face.

“You were obsessed then, as you are now, with a concern about fatness. You must realize, my child, that holding on to fat is holding on to the past. Let the fat be part of the past. Allow it to go. Enjoy the present where there is no fat.”

I had been thinking about losing weight all morning. In fact, all the way to Orange County I had been calculating what it would take to drop ten pounds or two inches. I stared at the medium who was channeling an energy who knew my private thoughts and was painting me in a lifetime I had always suspected I had had. He smiled and finished.

“Your name was Janette,” he said as he titled the painting and deftly signed his initials. Then he spoke deliberately in a pronouncement.

“We artists are together in our nonphysical dimension to prove that we never passed out of existence, we only passed the earth plane.”

“I see,” I said. “What do you see when you paint like this?”

“We see light,” he answered. “Every color has a light vibration. We feel the vibration through the hands of the instrument. We enjoy it.”

His painting of Janette completed and his statement of purpose expressed, I had the feeling he needed to depart to allow more artists to come through. He didn’t present me with the painting of myself. It was all too matter-of-fact for that. Instead, the canvas was brushed to the floor like the others, as Luis proceeded with more artists, more speed, and more incredible feats.

His rhythm speeded up. His head rocked back and forth. His eyes remained tightly closed and his left hand was now covering his face. He changed the tape in the recorder as if by rote to a loud classical Brazilian piece. He proceeded to channel Modigliani, Monet, Manet, Leonardo da Vinci, and a Brazilian painter called Partinari. He changed from acrylics to crayons, to watercolors, to oils depending on the needs of the artist. When he wished to clean his palms, he simply brushed them down the front of his overalls. He never opened his eyes and never took more than fifteen minutes on any subject. Most required a much shorter period of time. Sometimes the physical act of painting occurred with such force that we needed to hold on to the canvas so he wouldn’t paint it off the table. He sometimes rested his head on his left arm while the right arm continued to be directed by the unseen artist.

Then he took oils with his left hand, rested his right hand, and began to paint with his left hand. I looked closely. The painting was just as well done. At the same time he began painting again with his
right hand. He was painting two different pictures on two separate canvases with two separate hands! I looked at the picture painted by the left hand. It was Modigliani and he was painting it upside down!

This session went on for about an hour—painting after painting—all great artists, one after another, as though they had waited in line in some heavenly garret to come through once more and express themselves on Earth. Each signed his own painting and quickly departed to make room for the next.

Finally Luis dropped a blank canvas to the floor. He removed his shoes and socks (still in the altered state of consciousness), turned up the legs of his overalls, chose some tubes of colors, opened them, and dropped them onto the canvas on the floor. With his toes he squeezed the tubes of color into the outlines he desired and began to paint with his feet! At the same time he placed two more canvases on the table and simultaneously, with Rembrandt painting with his feet, Monet and Picasso painted respectively with the left and right hands. It was absolutely unbelievable.

In twelve minutes there were three more paintings, each artist signing his work at the same time!

I was exhausted.

Luis came out of trance. He opened his eyes, blinked at the afternoon light, and smiled. He looked down at the canvases casually.

“Choose what you like,” he said.

I told him about Toulouse painting me as Janette.

“You must have it,” said Luis. “Take several.”

I chose the first van Gogh, the Renoir because I was so moved, Toulouse’s Janette for obvious reasons, and the one-eyed Picasso for Anne Marie, who was going in for an eye operation the next day.

As Luis and I chatted for another hour he explained what he felt like before actually painting.

“I feel changes take place in my muscles and nerves,” he said. “As though the artists are preparing my body. Then I feel as though something wonderful is about to happen. I am covered with a layer of sweet energy. They then speak to me telepathically and tell me what they are going to do. When I go into trance, I hear them tell me I am ready to begin. From then on the sensation is different as they take control of my body. I can feel each painter has a different vibration and personality. Some are more friendly than others. I feel van Gogh’s tortured soul. It is difficult. Picasso is impatient and gruff, and becomes upset when people talk as he works. He is so temperamental sometimes he stops and tears the canvas. Toulouse is my most constant companion. He likes to discuss his work with me. Once he was concerned over his expertise in anatomy. He used a session, at which there were many people observing, to practice. He sketched many, many nudes in different poses. My mother lifted the canvases and saw what he had done and was shocked. She apologized to everyone. Toulouse disappeared for three months. When he returned I asked where he had been. He
said he was told to go away and meditate on the responsibility artists have for how pictures impress the minds of people.”

Luis went on to tell me of the different relationships he had with the various artists. His body could tolerate them all, and since being made aware of what it was he was doing, he had learned that he had made an agreement with them to serve as their medium before he ever came into this life. He said he did it because he knew the end of this century would be a time when it was crucial for people to understand that communication between the “dead” and the living must exist, and that the spirit of mankind evolves and develops but remains eternal.

We talked together until I realized I needed to beat the traffic on the freeway back to Los Angeles.

That day with Luis Gasparetto was one of such sweet pleasure that he brings a smile to my face when I think of him. I don’t understand this phenomenon, yet it’s very simple to allow myself to accept it. I remember so many moments of artistic inspiration in my own life when I was convinced that what was happening wasn’t coming from me. Who was it? In the truest sense of the word, perhaps all of it is God
impersonating
people!

14

Light from Within

What we are and what we may be
Is revealed by the light within.

M
auricio Panisset was born March 6, 1930, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He was the third child born into a family in which the father, a Methodist minister, was also interested in metaphysics. But shortly Mauricio’s mother claimed she couldn’t handle her son’s uncontrollable rebelliousness. Out of desperation, when he was nine years old, his parents sent him to live with his grandmother on a farm, where it was hoped the greater freedom would give some release to his bounding spirit.

He often walked to the forest where he (later) claimed that “lights” followed him. The lights appeared as shimmering balls and “talked” to him whenever they appeared. But out of fear that he would be even more unacceptable to his family and to his new home, at the time he told no one of his encounters.

When he reached puberty the lights disappeared.

In 1949, at age nineteen, he joined the army and
one night while he was on watch the lights reappeared. Now he nurtured and developed his loving relationship with them and read fervently the works of Blavatsky, Leadbetter, and Alice Bailey, the Kabala, and whatever other esoteric literature he could find. He also plunged deeply into the study of Buddhism, Shiism, and Hinduism.

In 1953, out of the army, he became a 33 degree Mason (advanced student of metaphysics).

He married, fathered several children, divorced, and married again. In 1966, he was employed by the Department of the Minister of Education. While working on their broadcasting tower, he fell one hundred and twenty feet. He thought he was going to die, but instead he only fractured his leg and never even lost consciousness. He regarded the event as a miracle and determined for himself that his survival had something to do with the lights and therefore concluded that he must have a “mission.”

After the fall from the tower the lights never left him. Moreover, they seemed different. In their presence he was more psychically aware and found he could access the Akashic Records (events, said to be stored in ether energy, that can be tapped by someone who is sensitive) and know the past lives of people.