It's All In the Playing Read online

  “I want you to,” I said at 6:00 in the morning, knowing I had to be on the set in an hour. “Bring Melissa with you. We’ll have a straitjacket made for both of you.”

  John laughed, seemingly delighted that I now knew what I and everyone else were getting into.

  What intrigued me the most was that John Heard had the guts to do what the rest of us only fantasized about—he was truly outrageous and never gave it a second thought. He was playing a part in his life, which if portrayed on the screen would have gotten all the laughs, all the sympathy, and probably would be the one the audience rooted for.

  I looked at the way I was playing my part and asked myself if it was a role I liked enough to go on the road with it. The answer I came up with was: “She seems like a nice enough character, sincere and questing, but I wish she could be rewritten to have a little more fun with the insanity going on in the world.” John Heard was clearly there to teach me that.

  After work that night I went into Hollywood to see A Chorus Line—The Movie. It was a balmy soft night when I wandered out of the theater thinking about the film. It brought up so many memories for me, having started in the chorus myself. I stopped on a side street and stood looking into the star-studded sky trying to “remember” whether I had written the scenario of my life before I was born: the struggling, disciplined, dancing days, the night I went on for Carol Haney, the relationship with Alfred Hitchcock, the smiling-through-tears on the silver screen, the adjustment to myself as a communicator, and finally the ventures into travel, politics, writing, and spiritual questing. Did my interest in performing have its genesis in understanding that my life always had been a role I had written long ago to be played out on an earth plane stage today? And had John Heard made his entrance just in time to live up to the part I had written for him in my script? And if it was my script, then was his character really an aspect of me?

  The convolutions of intersecting realities drifted through my mind as I left the side street and walked farther into the balmy “Hollywood” night. Hollywood … the most famous center of illusion in the world. And the illusions created on film and stage were alternative realities to me—not really make-believe. When entertainment was good and absorbing, nothing else existed. I forgot my “real” life and focused on another adventure. Was that the same principle by which we experienced lifetimes? A matter of focus?

  As I walked I began to speculate on whether my idea of linear reincarnation was a truth or merely a simplification. Using my present lifetime as an analogy to multiple life experiences, I began to wonder about the role that time played in my reality.

  Einstein had said there was no such thing as time—as we measure it. The spiritual masters confirmed such a concept. They said instead that past, present, and future were the same.

  In other words, all time was happening now, and always. Perhaps linear concepts were man’s way of dealing with the dumbfounding awesomeness of totality. Our way of measuring time, then, became a way of focusing on aspects of the totality.

  If time was happening to us all at once, then perhaps we weren’t living linear incarnations one after the other; perhaps we were only focusing on one at a time.

  As I walked I thought of my own body. It existed in its own totality. I was not aware of specific aspects of my body unless I focused on something I chose. I stopped walking. I focused on my big toe—the big toe of my right foot. I was unaware that my big toe on my right foot was important until I concentrated my attention on it. Then the big toe became paramount in my awareness: a kind of life in itself. Especially if someone should step on it, I thought. I stood still under the stars, focusing on the big toe of my right foot. I was creating that focus.

  Perhaps that was what we were doing with each lifetime, each experience being only that which we chose to focus upon. Would that explain our feelings that dreams were real, that visions were real, that fantasies were real? Maybe I was only dipping and overlapping into parallel realities and I was correct in my assumption that all of them were real.

  When I had premonitions of the future, perhaps I was tapping into an alternative reality which I could only define in a linear manner as the “future,” but in actuality it existed simultaneously with the present. When we had déjà vu experiences, perhaps we were not actually seeing something in a past/future life sense, but inadvertently shifting to a different aspect of the whole—much as I had (deliberately) focused on my big toe just a moment ago.

  So maybe life was essentially a matter of focus in time—analogous to film because films were also an attempt to focus on special moments of a life experience.

  Those of us who made films were creating the scenario we wanted to be played out. We knew the best films were karmically balanced (the bad guys always paid). The subjects that attracted audiences were subjects they could identify with and relate to in their own lives. We knew they would suffer with the heroes and heroines because they would see themselves as heroes and heroines of their own drama. And the supporting players would be easy to identify in their own lives as well.

  And even though we film-makers knew that they would know the ending of a movie was intact at the end of the roll of film, we presented it as though it would be a spontaneous experience for them. We expected them to glue themselves to our illusion, allowing the truth of it to function as a separate reality from what they knew was only a movie-making trick. We attempted to create a trick-truth for the audience and we evaluated ourselves by how completely they bought it.

  I began to walk again slowly under the stars and palm trees, releasing the focus on my big toe.

  So we film-makers were the purveyors of illusion, using all the tricks of the trade to convince the audience that what they saw was real. And wasn’t that what we did with our lives too? We focused on a feeling or an event that created feeling, and we called it reality. We put ourselves through sorrow, exhilaration, anger, love, or whatever, and all of it was only an exercise in searching out who we were more deeply. Was life simply to experience feeling? Was that also the great contribution of films in the world? Did they reflect human emotions back to ourselves, which was just what playing our parts in life accomplished? A certain kind of film had even developed a genre term: “slice of life,” meaning no beginning, no middle, no end. Not neat but, like life, just a piece of the whole. We could wander into the middle of any film in much the same way that we could wander into a daydream or a seemingly out-of-context dream at night. We woke in the morning knowing that the dream had occurred, but because of our limited concept of reality we said: “It was only a dream.”

  I wondered how it would feel, when I finally passed on, if I were to turn around, look at my life, and say “It was only a dream, but it seemed so real.”

  Maybe I would feel that the life I had created for myself had been like a movie dream. And just as I had liked certain kinds of movies because of what they had enabled me to experience for myself, I would see that I had created the dramas and events in my life from the same need to experience. Maybe I would see for sure, after I passed on, that I had created the lines I wanted, the events I wanted, the people I wanted. Perhaps I had designed them specifically to my own requirements. Maybe I would see clearly from “the other side” that I had been responsible on some level for all that happened to me. That I had created it all because it enabled me to learn and grow.

  Maybe I would see that all of us had liked to experience drama in order to know who we were; that some preferred comedy; that others grew more rapidly with adventure; and still others understood themselves only by staying home. Maybe it was the same as our taste in films: each person preferring to experience a different adventure, for whatever the reason.

  As I walked along the Hollywood street I thought of my job as an actress. It was to create illusion, just as my job as a human being was perhaps to realize that life itself was an illusion. An illusion of my own creation which could enable me to experience any emotion known to the human condition that I chose.


  Part of me has always known that my future was already written. That part of me was what I called my higher self. My higher self was the all-knowing me, possessed of all knowledge, which put this aspect of me now called Shirley through loops of learning. It invented relationships for me, events for me, sorrow for me, and laughter for me, while compassionately looking on with encouragement and hope that I would reap knowledge and understanding from it all.

  Not only was my higher self creating events in this lifetime for me, but I could sometimes feel it creating other time and place experiences as well.

  As I grew and knew myself more in this dimension, I would be more maturely capable of understanding the totality of what I was.

  Regardless of how I looked at the riddle of life, it always came down to one thing: personal identity, personal reality. Having complete dominion and understanding of myself was the answer to harmony, balance, and peace. There were those who would say that such a state of mind would be boring. But they were only aspects of me who couldn’t admit feeling the same way.

  I walked and I thought. I tried to breathe in the stars and their energy. I belonged to them and they belonged to me.

  Therefore I, now, on this street on this Earth, was experiencing only an aspect of what I really was. I was more than I perceived myself to be. And therein lay the grand truth.

  If I created my own reality, then—on some level and dimension I didn’t understand—I had created everything I saw, heard, touched, smelled, tasted; everything I loved, hated, revered, abhorred; everything I responded to or that responded to me. Then, I created everything I knew. I was therefore responsible for all there was in my reality. If that was true, then I was everything, as the ancient texts had taught. I was my own universe. Did that also mean I had created God and I had created life and death? Was that why I was all there was?

  A chilling wave of loneliness rippled through me. Was this what the great masters meant when they described the numbing aloneness that preceded the recognition of one’s totally awesome power? Was one’s inner power the point? Were all the questions and conflicts and triumphs and tragedies in our lives designed by each of us to put us in touch with our own empowerment? If we could create such negativity as war, then we could certainly create its polarity. And to take responsibility for one’s power would be the ultimate expression of what we called the God-force.

  Was this what was meant by the statement I AM THAT I AM?

  Was the search for God pointless because God was within me? Was God within each of us? Was self-search the only journey worth taking, because what we found, we would eventually realize, was our own creation anyway?

  I walked and walked under the stars. The inevitable wheel tumbled and turned in my head. Had I created everything or had it created me? How could either be proved? But if my reality was a question of what I perceived it to be, then regardless of how I looked at it, I made the choice. I was the one empowered with the decision-making process of how to relate to it. So in point of truth, what difference did it make? I was the one choosing how to experience life.

  Chapter 15

  Before John Heard returned to California, we shot our session with Kevin and his entities. Kevin had conducted many workshops on the nature of personal reality. But I don’t think even he was prepared for the exercise of playing himself.

  He stayed at my house and we rehearsed our lines late into the night. Kevin is a centered, balanced person, but when I went into the character of myself ten years ago, he had a bewildering time adjusting to the change in me. His eyes became confused, as though the portrayal of myself as a skeptic was a betrayal of my present-day spiritual understanding. In other words, he believed that I was suspicious of his role as a trance channeler. I reassured him that I was just acting, but it still threw him. The entities knew their lines, but Kevin was having trouble with his.

  The day of shooting dawned clear and bright. The crew didn’t know what to expect. Brad had three cameras set up so that the entities and Kevin wouldn’t have to worry about matching the action. It wouldn’t be a problem in the cutting room later on.

  Kevin and I ran over our lines. He thought it was better not to go into trance until the cameras were rolling.

  Butler decided to direct Kevin-as-himself to be detached and noncommittal about his work as a trance channeler who approached it casually and with no particular intensity of purpose. Kevin took the direction as he understood it. The crew was watching carefully because they knew that in a while Kevin would go into trance, and entities would speak through him—which, to some of the crew members, could simply be Kevin acting.

  But they found him sincere, cooperative, caring, and desiring to be professional. Kevin was literally learning film acting in one day.

  The cameras were ready. The script girl, Kisuna, took her position beside the cameras so she could make notes about actions and lines. Kevin was lit for each of the three cameras. The scene would be played on my back—that is, from behind me, looking at Kevin. We’d come around to shoot me later.

  The soundman had a double load of tape, and the police security on the road kept the noise down to a minimum outside the beach house on Malibu Road. (Not my own place, by the way—an apartment similar to mine had been rented and “dressed” for the actual shooting.)

  The crew had tarped-in the living room with black cloth to block out the sunlight, because the scene was supposed to take place at night. The resulting interior temperature was stifling.

  There were times, during channeling sessions, when the energy of the entities coming through affected the electromagnetic frequencies of the electrical equipment, causing them to jam or the batteries to die—as happened in Sweden with Ambres. I wondered if that would happen to our cameras now.

  Jach Pursel had come into town to watch and be with Kevin. Moral support of one trance channeler by another, you might say. So Jach was on the set. I didn’t tell anybody what Jach did for a living. I thought one trance channeler was about all the crew could handle. So Jach stood discreetly behind the cameras alongside Colin, who was chuckling to himself that we had pulled this whole thing off in the first place.

  The crew seemed remarkably calm about what was to transpire. They were not the same crew that had conducted the screen test.

  The camera crew was interested in the science of energy surrounding the event, while makeup, hair, props, grips, and production people were simply intrigued as to why Brandon Stoddard and ABC would put up millions for this stuff.

  Kevin sat in front of me. He was perspiring under the lights. Tina, the makeup artist, came in and wiped him off. I wondered how she’d feel about wiping off Tom McPherson or John. She rolled her eyes slightly as she turned from Kevin and returned to her place behind the camera. I saw she and Kisuna exchange a hostile look. I didn’t understand. I had noticed that Tina made one or two remarks about Kisuna on the set, but had just put it down to between-scenes byplay. Tina was a petite blonde with a strong personality and professional workmanship who could sometimes be insensitive to other people’s insecurities. I recognized that because I was the same way. She was in charge of the makeup trailer, which included other makeup artists, body makeup, and hairdressers. As far as I could tell, she ran a tight operation by never overlooking anything anybody else did, and thought everyone else should too.

  As Kevin went into trance I wondered about the exchanged glances between Tina and Kisuna. On-the-set nuance in relationships always intrigues me. A movie set is a mini-society. It has its leaders and its followers. It has people who need and love power, and others who simply do their work for the sake of it. Since jobs are difficult to come by, you can sense a priority of survival permeating the ranks of the crews. Each crew member is utterly professional, yet each also watches the professionalism of fellow workers. What I find most interesting is how each member deals with the mistakes or unintended lack of professionalism of a co-worker. No one wants to be responsible for the dismissal of anyone else, yet they all know that the chai
n of a crew is only as strong as its weakest link. And the watchful surveying eye of management is ever present, sometimes even present in the personage of the stooge who has been singled out to report everything.

  The crew is the movie business. As I’ve said, they are artists and mechanics combined. Not one person who makes the deals or handles the money can hold a candle to the artistic expertise required of a lighting technician.

  Yet, as I watched them prepare for our scene I was once again reminded that the crew secures all the time it needs to insure a good take, while we actors are the least prepared and somehow are never given enough time to improve what we do. We can rehearse in our trailers all we want, but it’s not the same when we find ourselves on the set with lights, props, scenery, and camera angles to deal with. Yet we are self-conscious about asking for more time to acquaint ourselves with our roles and the technical adjustments necessary to playing them well.

  A cameraman can stop a take because we actors lean into a shadow. A makeup person can take twenty minutes to redo a face while everyone waits. But if an actor stops and says, “Wait a minute, I don’t feel it yet,” everybody thinks he’s temperamental.

  For those reasons, even though Kevin was cooperative, I wanted him to complain if he felt uncomfortable, ask for another rehearsal if he felt unprepared with his lines. But he, like most of us, felt that the fifty crew members waiting and prepared were more important than what the audience comes to see—the actors on the screen.

  Kevin closed his eyes and began to breathe deeply. The cameras rolled. The clapper boy signified the take for each camera. I looked around at the crew. They were spellbound, and suspicious.

  Within a few minutes John came through and proceeded to greet me according to script and as though it were the first time we had talked together.