Selected lines from Shirley MacLain's 1986 New Age bestseller 'Out On a Limb'
One afternoon after carrot juice and a tofu burger, a friend of mine with whom I had had a deeply personal love affair happened by and found me under my tree.
Dad was a kind of country philosopher and had almost gotten his degree in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. I guess I inherited the same trait.
Perhaps there was no such thing as death. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I would go anywhere and at anytime he suggested it... but oh, the clandestine trips to London! It had become so suffocating for me.
That night I found myself looking up reincarnation in the encyclopedia.
I remembered someone telling me once that residing in the great brains of the dolphins were all the secrets of some lost civilization called Lemuria.
"So what about Christ?" I found myself asking David. "Who do you think he really was?"
"Okay," he said, straightening his posture as if he had finally found a thread to unravel. "Christ was the most advanced human being ever to walk this planet. He was a highly evolved spiritual soul whose purpose on earth was to impart the teachings of a Higher Order."
"What do you mean, a higher order?" I asked."A higher spiritual order," said David. He obviously knew more than the rest of us about life and death and God. I think his resurrection proved that."
"But how do we know it really happened?"
David shrugged. "First of all," he said, "a lot of people saw it, and reported they were awestruck and terrified. And second, the remains of his body were never found, and third, a legend of that magnitude would be hard to make up."
Sturé trembled. The electrical charge known as Ambres seemed to leave his body. Turid quickly thrust water into her husband's hands. Sturé drank all of it. He slowly came around to his own consciousness and stood up.
"You know," I said, "I'm beginning to feel that I was somehow guided to come here. There's too much happening to me lately to believe in accidents anymore. I think I was supposed to come to Stockholm."
He wore a thin turquoise tie and continued. "I just knew that I must be channeling spiritual guides."
An old friend of mine from Ireland whom I hadn't seen for years described a recent trip he had taken to Japan; he said he was calmly strolling along a street inKyoto when he spotted a Samurai outfit in the window of an antique shop. He stopped as though riveted and stared at the outfit he "knew" had belonged to him. He said he remembered the sword, how the material had felt against his skin and the way he had swaggered as he wore it.
"You know," I said, "I've been thinking. When the astronauts travel out there in space, are there spirits all around the space capsules?"
And the Great Pyramid of Giza stood unexplained.
I took a deep breath.
"Did we come here to see UFOs? Is that why I'm here?"
I could see why the communists had never gone into India.
David reached over and mashed a tear on my chin. "That one traveled a long way down," he said. "It's the same journey we all have to travel before we realize who we are."
She put the stew on the table for us. "Extraterrestrial aliens," she said. "Everyone knows that."
Shit, I thought, it's perfectly straightforward—they are disembodied spirits who believe the world has always been visited by extraterrestrials.
I was consciously aware of my questions as I soared freely above Earth.
Would it ever be possible to travel by the projection of one's own thought? Could thought control and propel physical matter?
And I laughed at the insane, sweet chaos that is Manhattan.
Note: This book is, arguably, amazing.
Love,
Ellie