It's All In the Playing (31 page)

“Well,” I said to Stan, “maybe those three people are afraid of themselves.”

Stan put down his coffee cup.

“Well, I just wanted you to know,” he said.

I nodded and sighed.

“Thanks for taking what they said seriously, Stan. And don’t worry,” I went on. “We won’t have bad luck. We might have a hard time, but we won’t have bad luck.”

Stan looked deeply into my eyes. He was a remarkably open and kind man. I was glad he was the producer of my show.

I got up from the table and walked to the balcony. It was funny. Whenever I came to what Butler would call a “glitch” in my feelings I reminded myself about the totality of time—that our show was already on the air.
What was important now was the personal growth and transformation of everyone involved. In my view the objections to the “I am God” scene were not so much objections to the material as an expression of fear of the personal and individual responsibility that the scene suggested we take as humans who recognize our own divine energy. To blame God for anything was so easy. I remembered something I had read once and it made such sense.
“God needs us because we are a way He can express Himself.”

Meanwhile, the world was waiting for us to get on with living…. We piled ourselves back onto the bus. For some reason John was colorfully muttering to himself about Judas’s effect on Jesus Christ. I couldn’t decipher whether he saw himself as the betrayer or the betrayee. Probably the latter, and probably it had something to do with the rain. John had the gift of turning any situation into a personal matter—one of the devices that made him such a good actor.

He hunched down next to me.

“Do you know I have this big mother-fuckin’ crush on you?” he said.

While I tried to sort this out he stuffed his stereo earphones in his ears. He was out of hearing distance. He swayed and tapped to the music he was hearing.

“Do you know the greatest love song ever written?” he asked.

“No. What?” I asked. He looked blank. I shook my head.

“Well,” he said, “it’s about wanting one more loving spoonful from my baby, and the guy who wrote it shot his mother.”

I tried to speak, but my mouth opened and nothing came out. John leaned back and howled.

I wanted to contribute something to his free-flowing insanity, but all I could think of was that he smelled like vanilla.

*   *   *

   On the bus trip down the mountain an engaging tourist entertainment occurred. Young boys left the top of the mountain at the same time as the bus. They slid down waterfalls, gullies, and wild mountain footpaths. Then they lay in wait as the bus made its curve in the road, indicating that on foot they had gone faster than the vehicle. For people like Cowboy who had an affinity for belief in magic, it was a mystifying mountain trick. At the bottom he gave them a huge tip. That was how they supported themselves.

At the train station we all pitched in and loaded equipment back on the train, wondering what drama would be in store for us the next time we came.

On the train ride back I talked with some of the crew. The discussion revolved around the troubles some of them were having with family members who were only comfortable with what they could see and measure and were spooked by dimensions that they sensed were true, but couldn’t be controlled. Not many actually ridiculed the search, but instead some found it dangerous and foreboding, as though the dead could come back and refute their “safe” accepted reality. What I found interesting was that the crew members who openly discussed the personal effect their questioning had on others in their lives understood that they themselves had created the opposition as an aspect of themselves which was also still not sure.

The train ride was becoming more revealing with each mile. Tina and Julie were now buoyant as they flung American money to the children of the poor.

“Oh, look at that sweet little one,” Tina would say and fling the child a piece of food or a coin. They were relieved that they were helping someone less fortunate than they. I looked the other way. I’m still not really sure why.

John’s pain for the poor was infinitely more profound
to me. He was literally sick about it and couldn’t eat. I wondered how he was when he really loved someone.

   At the end of the train ride Colin and Simo and I got into our car to go back to the hotel in Cuzco, which was still another two hours away.

Presently we found ourselves in the Sacred Valley of the Incas and from that moment on I spent the rest of the day in an altered state of consciousness. I was to remind myself many times on this Peruvian location that making the movie was not the highest priority reason for my being in Peru.

There have been a few times in my life when I was absolutely certain that I had been somewhere before. It doesn’t matter whether I’m in a city or out in the wilds; the feeling usually comes initially as though borne on a soft wind. Then an uncanny cloak of memory settles over me. As I look around, it nudges and jabs my mind until either I gently concede that memory will have to wait until another future, or I haltingly feel I can place the time and circumstance.

Such was the feeling I had in an Inca ruin called Ollantaitambo. Ollantaitambo overlooked the magical sacred Valley of the Incas where the Urubamba River tumbles freely and the surrounding landscape is emerald-green. Terraced hillsides slope under skies that look like a turquoise backdrop spattered with fluffy, wispy paint. It is sacred all right, just by virtue of what it does to your heart when you stand in the midst of it.

But Ollantaitambo was what got me. I saw the other company cars veer to the right toward Cuzco, but as though pushed forward by an invisible arm, I asked our driver to stop. He casually related some of the history of the ruins: They stood at a strategic point where the Sacred Valley narrows and the Urubamba plunges steeply toward the Amazon. Ollantaitambo defended Cuzco against incursions by jungle tribes from the North. The ruin was
named for a local chieftain who had a forbidden love affair with the daughter of his sovereign, the Inca Pachacutec. He rebelled and was crushed. Great battles took place during Manco Inca’s rebellion. When the Spaniards finally besieged the place, it was abandoned.

That was the history as related by our driver, who was also a tourist guide. But I felt something different.

The invisible arm pushed me from the car. Colin and Simo got out too. But I wanted to walk alone through the ancient stone blocks of ruined history which somehow spoke to me. The twenty-ton stones seemed constructed with a kind of flexible perfection.

I walked toward the hillside ruin. A misty wind came up behind me and there was that feeling again. I began to climb the stone stairs leading up the mountain. The arm supported me as I went. I saw Colin and Simo talking to our driver and then going off on their own as well. I climbed the two hundred steps, looking down on them occasionally from above.

Then somehow I knew I had to climb all the way to the top of the mountain ruin. I was compelled to do it. I didn’t know why. There was no rail—only stone foot ledges jutting out from under the earth, and intermittently obscured altogether. But I somehow knew where they were. I felt that I had used them before. Then I had had sandals on my feet and some sort of plumage around my neck. It was the most bewitchingly haunting feeling I had had in a long time, quite different from the past-life regression memories I had experienced in a clinical environment with the acupuncture needles. These memories were coming back to me with no stimulation but the environment. I continued to climb. The mountain was very, very steep. I knew I was climbing to the lookout tower where I used to spend a great deal of time. I was breathing hard now because of the altitude. Then I made the decision to relate to the altitude as though I were living in my past experience. I did a kind of focused
mental gymnastic with my concentration. I felt my body straighten up and a powerful strength surge through my thighs, as though on such a climb the pressure should be held in the legs, not the solar plexus.

What happened next was a lesson in mind over matter. Suddenly I found I had no trouble breathing. I was free of concern because I
knew
there was no reason for it. I climbed higher. Then I looked down again for Colin and Simo. I saw only Colin. Simo had disappeared. I continued to climb. The sun was falling and I wanted to be able to descend in daylight. I began to see narrow animal trails winding through the mountainside underbrush. The nature of the undergrowth changed; the wind hugged my body in forceful gusts. The clouds forming over the Sacred Valley began to gather in charged mountainous shapes. It began to rain at the top of the mountain. I looked up. Then I looked around me, breathed deeply, and smiled. I felt totally happy all the way through to my heart. I was in sheer and absolute heaven. No, I thought, my memories of this place are not of battles and war and disease and killing. My memories are of reverence to nature. I knew that I had waited on the side of this mountain for sunrises and I had chanted and held my palms to the sun in a collective exercise with thousands of other people around me. I knew we worshipped the rising sun on one side of the mountain and the setting sun on the other side. I looked up ahead. I had to get to the top and see what associations came up for me. Just then I saw someone below me rounding a corner of the mountain ruin with his head down. He was climbing quickly to catch up with me. I looked closely. It was Simo. His brown curls swirled in the wind.

“Wait for me,” he shouted. “This is so incredible.”

I stopped and wiped my face. I did a plié to feel the strength in my knees.

Simo was not breathing very hard when he reached me.

“Isn’t this weather like our house in the mountains?” he asked. “It all feels so familiar.”

Then a thought occurred to me as I gazed at him silhouetted against the misty drizzle.

“What do you mean, familiar?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “I just needed to climb this mountain here and I needed to because I saw you doing it. I mean, I think the two of us have climbed above this ruin before. I can feel it.”

I looked at him.

“Do you really?” I said.

“Yes,” he answered straightforwardly.

“So do I,” I answered. “I know we’ve been here before and if you say you feel that way, then I think we were here together, and maybe one of the reasons we’re associated with working together now, especially in Peru, is because we know each other from this place.”

“Maybe it goes back further than Inca,” said Simo. “It feels secret, almost as though no one is supposed to know.”

Yes, I thought. Maybe so. Maybe my associations of collective meditation spoke to a time long before the Incas. Many anthropologists believed that the Incas borrowed much of their administrative and agricultural knowledge from a culture much older than theirs.

“Shall we go all the way up?” I asked. “I have to.”

Simo began to climb again.

“Yes,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s why we’re here.”

Now there was no path at all. Tourists and guides clearly never came this far. As I looked across the mountains I could see the remnants of ancient Inca footpaths. Again I felt myself fly along them, barely skimming the ground.

The sun was beginning to set now. The trunks of the mountain trees looked golden. The clouds played roller coaster among the trees as if they were alive. Simo
and I climbed higher as though driven by an omnipresent force.

We looked up to the last ledge. Above it was a temple tower of some kind.

We carefully picked our way through cactus and prickly underbrush. A mountain goat darted in front of us, stopping and challenging us with a stare that seemed to request our credentials. We smiled.

“It’s just like home,” said Simo.

The goat set about eating a prickly bush. We passed. Carefully we climbed the last ledge. A full-blown wind enveloped us on the top of the mountain. There was the temple tower, stark and resilient, a monument to a time of splendor, I thought. Just adjacent was a compact windswept courtyard surrounded by stone structures which enclosed it. The stone structures formed niches waist-high from the ground. I had seen niches like that in Egypt, but now as I saw them again I thought I knew what they were for. Immediately I walked to a niche and leaned the top part of my torso into it. Then I began to hum. The vibrational amplification from the walls resonated through my head and body. For me the niches had been used as a form of sound therapy.

I chanted the scale using OM. With each ascending note I felt a different vibration in my body. I felt the amplified vibration touch internal organs as well.

Simo chose a niche and began to chant and hum. Then we chanted the same notes together. Despite the wind, the sound echoed and reechoed, bouncing off the walls and reverberating around us. It was a healing exercise.

I stepped back from the niche and contemplated the surroundings. From another level of consciousness I saw pictures form around me, materializing as though out of the air. There were women dressed in garments made of some kind of crystal fabric and decorated with bright plumage. The skin tone of the women was golden-brown-orange. Gracefully they fitted themselves into the niches,
leaning forward and chanting. The exercise seemed to put them into some kind of alignment and reverie. They were smiling and peaceful, not communicating so much by language as by mental pictures. I felt that I had known how to communicate like that too.

I walked away from the courtyard of niches and out to the temple tower. It was a simple structure with lookout points on all sides. I climbed into the tower and looked down. From my altered mind state I saw how the twenty-ton stones of the ruin were being transported from the quarries miles away in the valley below.

On the valley floor were long lines of priests of some kind, sitting about twelve feet apart. Clad in white crystal-fabric robes, they sat peacefully in the lotus position, collectively meditating. And hovering in the air above the long line of priests were great monolithic stones floating toward the mountain, guided by the meditative power of the priests’ minds. The pictures I saw in the valley were astonishing, but I knew they came from an alternative, yet parallel, consciousness which I knew I possessed even today if I could just get out of my own way and allow it to flourish. What I saw didn’t frighten me. It was as though I was observing another truth within a bubble of time, and within the bubble I saw myself seeing it all.