I’m Over All That (21 page)

I have been working on understanding these principles
since I was a very young girl and will continue to do so until I transition into what comes next. When I visited Monticello, I made friends with the curator and he let me sleep overnight in Jefferson’s bedroom. There was thunder and lightning that night. I sat very still in the center of the banquette trying to feel Jefferson. I couldn’t remember the relationship I’d had with him, when (and if) I was his contemporary, Robert Morris. There were copies of his Jeffersonian Bible on a table. I sat reading his denunciation of religion, ducking each time the thunder and lightning roared outside the window. A pair of his glasses rested beside a candle. Just above his desk there was a loft where he and Sally Hemings sometimes slept. No one would have known they were sleeping in the cavelike loft. I didn’t go in the loft. Too invasive, I thought.

In between lightning strikes I felt a presence. It was quiet, but commanding. Then I heard a whistle. I whirled around. Nothing there. Soon after, I fell asleep on the banquette. In the morning, the guards came in and gently woke me. One of them looked out the window, then back at me.

“Jefferson walked last night,” he said. “He walked and whistled.”

“How often does that happen?” I asked.

The guard smiled. “Every night. But last night he knew you were here.”

I’ll never forget my visit to Jefferson’s home. The guard said he had loved it so much he never wanted to leave it. As I was preparing to go on my way, the curator handed me
a small package. Enclosed was a glass case and inside was a single lock of Jefferson’s hair. I still have it. The “authorities” knew I had it and wanted to check the DNA bloodline from it. But I wouldn’t give it to them. As I waved goodbye, one of the guards waved goodbye and said, “We’ll say hello to the great gentleman for you because he walks and whistles every night.”

I’m sure I was there at the birth of our nation, and when I look at what has become of our original dream I simply can’t fathom it. It’s time we looked at how “self-evident” we’ve become.

I hope I don’t end up penniless and in prison again for speaking out about how far off our transcendentalist track we’ve wandered.

I
am very happy in my life. I live alone with my Terry and my friends who come in and out of my beautiful home in Santa Fe. I teach seminars in spirituality and run a Spiritual Boot Camp at my ranch. I still work in films—when a good one comes along. I’m back on the stage, appearing in theaters around the country in an evening that is a mixture of show business, movie business, and Is-ness business (spirituality and metaphysics). It’s all the same thing really. I have learned, profoundly, in my life that I create my own reality every minute of the day
and
night. I enjoy interacting with the live audience.

After so much searching and traveling, I can’t get over the belief that the philosophic and spiritual cultures of ancient Greece, Egypt, and India were superior to our mechanistic, technological, and cynically skeptical culture of today.

We have forgotten the haunting truths of mysticism. The mystics were supposedly channeling the truths from the gods.
Much of what they taught contributes now to the divine secrets of the sciences. Science is becoming freer to include the spiritual aspects of reality. It admits more and more that there is a spiritual ignorance we must get over, that we all must feel free of ridicule as we pursue truth. After all, science exists mainly to explain God and reality.

But there is so much to get over in pursuit of our freedom of thought.

The memories of our lives as spiritual beings seem to have vanished from our objective minds as we focus predominantly upon making money with the political and commercial circus. So many people feel ignorant of their purpose in life, ignorant of what lies beyond the mystery of death, ignorant of why we are here. We know somehow that our souls are inextricably bound to the divine, but we can’t seem to touch the connection. We are ignorant of our ignorance.

Intellectuals and hard evidence scientists have appointed themselves the final judges of all knowledge, both human and divine. Most of them believe that mystics are delusional and saints are religious neurotics. Most say God is a primitive superstition, that the universe is an accident with no particular harmony, that nothing exists after death, and certainly we don’t live again.

People everywhere feel ground down by a soulless culture which heralds competition, money, and fame. They long for some kind of enlightenment and meaning within themselves.
They are sensing that commercial materialism is actually impractical, that there is some other truth that is more satisfying and long-lasting.

People who once felt perfectly content living in the material world, now confronted with its sinking economics, are seeking happiness elsewhere but don’t know where to look. We sense that it lies within the soul’s understanding, but we get no reinforcement for the search. From experience, I know that those who attempt such a search are often ridiculed.

Most modern scientists and academics regard thinking as a purely intellectual process. Yet the power to speculate in more feeling and intuitive ways will be the saving grace of humanity. I believe the supreme source of power is the unfolding of the spirit within each of us, the God-force within.

The ancient philosophers knew that living according to the power within superseded the intellectual powers. The power within was the yin. The intellectual power was the yang. We know that the entire universe is made up of yin and yang, masculine and feminine, thrust and receive, night and day. The balance of the two can be the foundation of the New Philosophy, the New Spirituality, the New Age.

No one can live in happiness without finding and articulating a spiritual philosophy for themselves. Neither can a nation. And that spiritual philosophy must dedicate its existence to advancing policies that are consistent with its core beliefs. That is what our Founding Fathers dedicated themselves to.

Our modern world makes a philosophy of its own fabrications.
Its gods are of its own fashioning. We have forgotten how much we actually know. We believe that the physical reality is all there is. But an emphasis on our inner spirituality would lead us into a land of peace where the knowledge within would be given outer expression. Every blade of grass would be respected for its being. And its purpose would be self-evident to us. The yearning of humanity would find its wisdom in the soul of every living entity. The struggle from the womb to the tomb would have meaning and purpose and wisdom. The physical is not the true measure of truth.

The soul reaches out to the stars, knowing it is not alone, and our soul’s spirit mingles with all there is in the cosmos. That is when we “feelingly” comprehend the wonders of the universe. What we didn’t know was only what we were not conscious of.

We are reborn when we see what we are looking at. The barriers are down. All mysteries are returned to us as answers. They permeate everything within us. Then our reality changes. Through the spiritualization of our emotions we would see the real sadness of the human race and what it could be if we looked within
and
without ourselves with open hearts.

That has been my experience. I see the possibilities beyond the stars, possibilities that could unite us with our neighbors and with our own human potential if we would only acknowledge their existence. Free spirituality would release us from our materialistic bondage and from the restrictions of religion.
We would move into the light, into being transcendentalists, into manifesting that which our Founding Fathers dreamed. We, like nature and the mystics, would be self-governing in our connection to the Divine.
E pluribus unum.
Out of many comes one. A new order and a new age begin, and the deity, which is both male and female equally, is reflected in each of our higher selves.

Our own perfection is yet to be reached, but that is what gives us a purpose in being alive.

I will not get over this.