Travels (47 page)

Then, slowly, I began to ask a different question. Not what the differences were. Instead: What is the best way to think about men and women?

And I came to a surprising conclusion.

My old girlfriend was right.

The best way to think about men and women is to assume there are no differences between them
.

* * *

I had already concluded that the best way to think about disease was to imagine that you caused it. Maybe that was literally true, and maybe it wasn’t. The point was that the best strategy in dealing with your illness was to act as if you had control over it, and could change its course. That enabled you to stay in charge of your own life.

Similarly, I now thought the best way to think about the sexes was to imagine there were no differences between them. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. But it was the best strategy.

Because, as I saw it, the biggest problem between the sexes was the tendency to objectify the opposite sex and ultimately to become powerless before them. Both men and women did this about the opposite sex.
They
were this way or that way.
They
had this tendency. There was nothing we could do about the way
they
behaved.

When I looked back, I realized that in many instances I had failed to take action with a woman because I assumed there was nothing I could do about her conduct.

For example, whenever I lived with a woman, I knew she talked in intimate detail about our relationship with her girlfriends. I always hated that. I hated running into one of her girlfriends and thinking,
This woman knows all about me
. It felt like a terrible invasion of my privacy, of our privacy. But what could I do? Women talked with one another. Women had these special relationships.

But if I had been in a close working relationship with a man, I would have complained immediately if I found out he was talking about me with another man.

So why couldn’t I say to a woman, “It makes me feel terrible that you talk to your girlfriend about us. I feel really betrayed, and I feel dismissed, too. Why do you take the most intimate parts of our relationship to a stranger? It makes me feel awful. You ask me to open up to you, but I know you’re going to get on the phone tomorrow and tell all to some friend. Can’t you see how that makes me feel?”

The answer, of course, was that I could say it. I just never had, because I had thought that women were inherently different from men. And in formulating that difference, I had also objectified women. They were different. They didn’t have the same feelings I did. They were
they
.

Seeing Headhunters
 

I went to Borneo to see the Dyaks, the indigenous headhunters of that island. After hours of flying over trackless jungle, in progressively smaller planes, I finally landed at a small inland town called Sibu, on the banks of a broad, muddy jungle river.

I checked into the Paradise Hotel, which proudly advertised hot and cold running water. I went out into the town and arranged to visit a Dyak village. I was told there were authentic villages, where the people still lived in the traditional longhouses, within two hours’ travel from Sibu by boat.

I was excited to hear Dyaks were so close. I wanted to leave at once, but a boat could not be arranged until the following morning. So I was obliged to spend the rest of the day in the town.

I walked around Sibu restlessly. The air was humid and stifling. The town was small and not very interesting. I was quickly bored. I had come to see Dyaks, and now I was stuck in this tedious little town, its streets lined by the stalls of Chinese merchants. I wandered over to an open-air market near the river. The large crowd of Chinese and Malays was dressed in shorts and tee shirts, typical Western clothes. There was not a Dyak to be seen. I was annoyed to be standing in the kind of crowd I could see any day in Singapore. I wanted to see Dyaks, damn it!

A little girl in a white dress stared at me while she sucked her thumb. I glared at the girl; she became frightened and reached for her father’s hand. I looked at her father’s hand, then his arm.

Starting at the elbow, the man’s arm was covered in dark-blue tattoos.

Then, in the V-neck of his shirt, I saw more tattoos. I knew that Dyaks used tattoos for clan identification. Then I saw that the man’s earlobes were pierced and pendulous; they hung down almost to his shoulders.

This man was a Dyak!

I looked at the crowd at the market, and now I saw that nearly everyone had tattoos and hanging earlobes. I had been depressed about not seeing Dyaks while I was standing in a crowd of them!

A few years earlier, during a trek in Nepal, my Sherpa guide took me to the top of a hill at a place called Ghorapani, pointed to the view and said, “The Kali-Gandaki Gorge.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I was sweating and tired. It was cold. My feet hurt. I could hardly pay attention to this view.

“The Kali-Gandaki Gorge,” he repeated, significantly.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

What I was seeing wasn’t even a gorge, it was just a big valley with snowy mountain peaks on both sides. Spectacular, but all the mountain views in Nepal are spectacular, and I was tired at the end of the day.

“The Kali-Gandaki Gorge,” he said a third time. Like I still wasn’t getting the point.

“Great,” I said. “When’s dinner?”

It wasn’t until I returned home that I found out what the Kali-Gandaki Gorge is.

The Kali-Gandaki river cuts between the peaks of Dhaulagiri to the west and Annapurna 1 to the east—respectively the sixth and tenth highest mountains in the world. Both peaks rise more than four miles above the river below, making a canyon so enormous that the eye can hardly see it for what it is. It is four times as deep as the Grand Canyon, and far wider: between the two peaks, you could roughly fit twenty Grand Canyons.

The Kali-Gandaki Gorge is the deepest canyon in the world.

That’s what it is.

I’d like to go back and see it sometime.

Life on the Astral Plane
 

The phenomenon of trance mediumship had interested me for some years. Broadly speaking, a medium is someone who goes into an altered state of consciousness and then delivers material not otherwise available to him or her.

Some mediums become only lightly dissociated and retain their characteristic personalities, although they may claim to speak for a spirit guide or someone from “the other side.” Other mediums enter a deep trance, during which they appear to be taken over entirely by a new personality that has a different name, voice, gestures, and pattern of speech. These mediums are said, in popular parlance, to be “channeling” the personality that takes over.

A century ago, mediums usually claimed to channel dead figures of greater or lesser eminence. Modern mediums are more likely to claim they channel extraterrestrials, or disembodied entities from the future, or individuals who have been reincarnated many times throughout history. So the phenomenon of channeling seems to be influenced by the broader social context in which it appears; indeed, historical studies suggest that channeling becomes prominent during times of social upheaval, and toward the end of each century. As we approach the end of our own century, it is perhaps no surprise that channeling should once more become controversial, and widely discussed.

In any case, I was eager to witness this phenomenon firsthand, but I
had no opportunity until 1981, when I heard that “Dr. Kilarney” was in town. Dr. Kilarney was a nineteenth-century Irish physician channeled by a woman from Utah. I had never heard of Dr. Kilarney, but I quickly arranged a private session. It was pretty expensive, and the man I talked to on the telephone seemed very concerned about how he would be paid. It gave me a funny feeling. Nevertheless, I arranged a session the following day.

The medium turned out to be a short, slovenly woman wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. She was staying in a little house in Torrance, California. She seemed edgy, and hovered near her husband, a big, hulking fellow. They both wore a lot of Indian turquoise jewelry. I gave them my money, and then was led into a tiny back bedroom. The woman sat on an unmade bed, closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths, opened her eyes, and said, “Begorrah, and how might you be on this fine day, my son?” in a corny Irish accent.

I had spent many months in Ireland, shooting a movie, so I’d heard a lot of Irish accents. Dr. Kilarney’s accent immediately struck me as fake. And her vocabulary was entirely contemporary, even though the Irish still use a lot of nineteenth-century slang in their speech. All in all, Dr. Kilarney sounded like someone from Utah pretending to be Irish.

So the persona of Dr. Kilarney wasn’t convincing at all. On the other hand, the medium was clearly transformed. Her posture was erect, her eyes were bright, and her gestures were strong and direct. She had a very different energy, and the energy didn’t waver. It remained exactly the same. But the information channeled wasn’t very satisfactory. I was advised to be tolerant of my girlfriend, to meditate regularly, to work hard at my writing, and to take more vitamin C. I was also advised to do a series of rebirthing sessions with the woman’s husband, and was handed a schedule of fees as I departed.

Thus my first personal experience with a trance medium left me entirely unconvinced. If there was anything to this phenomenon, I hadn’t seen it.

In 1982 I attended a session with Ramtha, an entity channeled by a woman named J. Z. Knight. At this time Ramtha was already famous. The medium sank her head onto her chest for a few moments, and when she looked up, she was evidently different: her voice was deeper and stronger; she was tremendously vigorous and went around the room, giving advice confidently to the fifty people there. Again I was impressed by the powerful, direct manner of the medium, but this time the information seemed direct and clear as well.

I was already persuaded that psychic readings were possible, so the
idea that someone might do fifty psychic readings in succession, for a whole roomful of people, didn’t strike me as inconceivable. But Ramtha’s energy was not the same as the energy of the psychics I had seen. Most psychics were shy, passive, or diffident. Ramtha acted like a member of the Joint Chiefs—you felt a tremendously commanding presence before you. And in the end you remembered that commanding presence long after you had forgotten exactly what was said.

But there was another quality to seeing Ramtha. There was the considerable fee, and the strict timetable, and the theatrical flourish with which the medium entered and left the room. This was star treatment and star expense, and it provoked a lot of uneasy questions about spiritualism and commerce.

So I still didn’t know what to make of this trance-medium business. And then, in 1984, I heard that a trance medium named Gary was doing readings for people in Los Angeles. I arranged to meet him.

Gary was a shy, quiet, athletic man in his thirties. He explained that his method of working was not what people usually imagined when they thought of trance mediums. When he went into a trance, he said he accessed something called the Akashic Records. By looking into these records, he said he had access to any knowledge in the world, past, present, or future. This was how he explained it.

In practice, Gary lay down on a sofa, took a few deep breaths, and entered a seemingly light trance. When he began to speak, his voice was sleepy, but otherwise not strikingly different from his normal voice. He didn’t open his eyes, and his body remained reclining. Gary did not dramatically take on a new persona. He just lay on the sofa and talked to you. But in his trance he spoke with uncanny confidence and disturbing psychological acuity. After he got through confronting me for an hour, he’d come out of the trance, rub his eyes, blink, and ask mildly if things had gone all right.

I liked Gary, and saw him several times, and then went on to other things.

But then, in the fall of 1985, Gary decided to teach other people how to channel for themselves. This interested me, and I arranged to learn under his direction. As it turned out, it happened quickly.