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Out on a Limb – Shirley MacLaine
"So, are you religious, Kevin?" I asked.

He choked involuntarily on his tea 'Are you kidding? What church would have me? I'm treading on their territory. I say folks have God inside them. The Church says it has God inside of it. There's a phrase in the Bible which states that one should never countenance spiritual entities other than God. Most Christians go by that. But then the Bible says nothing about reincarnation either and it's quite well known that the council of Nicea voted to strike the teaching of reincarnation from the Bible."

"How do you know that?" I asked.

“Well, most serious metaphysical students of the Bible know, that. The council of Nicea altered many of the interpretations of the Bible. The man Jesus studied for eighteen years in India before he -returned to Jerusalem. He was studying the teaching of Buddha and became an adept yogi himself. He obviously had complete control over his body and understood that the body was only the house for a-soul. Each soul has many mansions. Christ taught that a person's behavior would determine future events-as karma, as the Hindus say. What one sows, so shall he reap."

I didn’t question these rather sweeping assumptions. I offered Kevin a cookie. He seemed to like sugar. He ate it in two bites. I thought about the similarity between the Cayce readings and Ambres and Buddha and the countless numbers of people who had been professing the same kind of belief.

"So," I said, "what's going.to happen here?"

Kevin swallowed another cookie. 'All right," he said, "right. Now. . . two, three, or maybe four spiritual entities use me to channel information. The first who usually comes through to greet people calls himself John. There are some of us who-feel that he is the most highly evolved of all the disincarnate entities. He speaks in a biblical lingo that is sometimes hard to follow. If you prefer or if John senses a difficulty in communication, another entity comes through. He calls himself Tom McPherson because his favorite incarnation was that of an Irish pickpocket a few hundred years ago. He can be very amusing. Lots of folks like working with him. Others find him too humorous to take seriously. Some folks prefer their spiritual guides to be solemn. Then there's Dr. Shangru, a Pakistani of a few hundred years ago, well-versed in medical matters, and Obidaya, whose favorite incarnation was that of a Jamaican who understands modern-day racial problems."

I felt my mind trying to turn off again. It sounded like a comic strip with a collection of unlikely characters. But wait a minute, I thought. This only bore out everything I had been reading. If these entities are entities from the "astral plane," then they would have individual personalities just as we in the body had.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Let me adjust. You say this Tom McPherson was an Irish pickpocket? Does that mean that was all he ever was?"

"No," said Kevin, "as I said before, it's just that his pickpocket personality was his favorite incarnation. He teaches from the vantage point of that lifetime."

"Oh," I said, “okay, why did he like being a pickpocket?"

'Ask him," Kevin replied. "But I think it's because of his sense of humor."

“Okay, so do you hear these entities when they speak through you?"

"No," he answered. "I am 'not aware of my conscious mind. But I can speak to them on the astral plane when I am sleeping if I want to. And I can feel them guiding me when I'm in a consciously aware state."

"Do you believe everyone has spiritual guides?" I asked.

Kevin looked surprised. "Why sure," he said, "that's what the soul does after it passes out of the body. Souls that have died, so to speak, help those who are still in the body. Why, that's what spiritual understanding is all about."

"What is what spiritual understanding is all about?"

Kevin sat up in his chair and leaned toward me. "Haven't you ever had the feeling that you were being guided to do something by a force you didn’t understand?"

I thought of all the times in my life when I thought I was listening to my intuition which seemed to almost compel me to make a certain decision or meet a person or go to a place, I thought of my experiences in Africa with a force that seemed to protect me when I travelled alone, or the time in Bhutan in the Himalayas when I felt impelled to inquire and investigate what the lamas were doing as they sat meditating in their monasteries 18,000 feet high above the clouds. I had seemed to recognize some similar force way back then, nearly twenty-five years ago. That force had motivated my curiosity and my drive to question what I couldn't see.

"Yes," I said now to Kevin. "I must admit I've felt guided by some kind of force throughout my life. What does that mean?"

"It means," said Kevin, "that, along with your own intuitive certainty, you were being guided by your spiritual friends and guides and teachers. You might have defined it simply as a force but now I'm suggesting that you become more aware in your understanding of what was really going on."

I stood up. "What does it feel like to know that spiritual entities speak through you?"

"Sometimes," he said hesitatingly, "sometimes I’d like to be a gardener instead of the custodian of the garden. But maybe that's my karma. We all have our roles in life, don’t we? Maybe mine is to be a human telephone."

Kevin suddenly looked so vulnerable sitting in his upright position with his tea cup balanced on his beige knee. I wondered what his life was like, what he did on Saturday nights, how he felt about politics. Had others who had gone through their spiritual questioning also gone through the same personalization of what they learned? I didn’t realize it then but Kevin Ryerson would come to be one of the telephones in my life. And, on this Friday night in Malibu, I was about to talk to some new friends. . ,

Real or not, I once again was reminded that each person experiences his own reality and no one else can be the judge of what that reality really is. But it wasn't simply a matter of believing what one wanted to believe. It was more a question of taking care to refrain from being so skeptical that one automatically shut out challenging ideas and new perceptions.