At Home With a Ghost - 54

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

Me in 1994

The year: 1994. Location: bed. Propped up on pillows, eyes closed, I was in a trance, and I was bored. Meditation seemed like flying coach from New York to Guam with an hour’s layover in Tahiti: that is, a few minutes of halcyon mindlessness hardly seemed worth all the effort of getting there.

Letting go of mind shouldn’t have been so hard for me. I blamed my mantra. I’ll tell it to you right now. I figure this is no longer verboten, since I’m not using it anymore. It was “hirim.” It was pronounced “ee-reem,” with the ‘h’ silent and a wet guttural ‘r’, on account of being purchased in France.

Now, a mantra is supposed to be a shred of nonsense that has no associations whatever, to lure the mind away from its usual perch which is lording it over consciousness. However, every time I’d begin inwardly reciting my mantra, the frog accent sucked my mind into a whirl of associations: remembering that one winter in Paris, 1990; the room where for six sessions I met with my French TM instructor, who was uninspiring, mechanical, and smug. The bastard made me give up smoking grass before he would sell me my mantra; what's more, the mantra was wildly overpriced, given the exchange rate…

…And so on. So much for quieting the mind. To get through the snarled traffic caused by my French mantra, I wound up having to break up the mayhem by head-butting my mind out of the way.

One cool thing happened while meditating in my instructor’s presence. In trance, I was transported to a beautiful pavilion, where his guru appeared and huffed on my third eye. Afterwards, I assumed that my 20-minute twice-a-day meditation practice would feature more thrills of this kind.

Sadly, no. Twice a day I flew to Guam with no movies on board.

Still, I needed those layovers, however brief, in Tahiti. With my thoughts finally quelled, I would suddenly be lifted up, as if by elevator, to a plane where my head filled up with sunlight. But the moment was too brief. Too soon, thoughts returned and blocked the light; I would feel the elevator descending. My Self clamped back on and started whining that mindfulness is actually kind of boring.

One day, just as I began my descent, I asked no one in particular: is that all? Where’s the cool stuff? Where’s the guru?

To my surprise, I got an answer. Not a voice, but rather a thought, instantly imbedded in my mind, and translated into words for my benefit. Weirdly, it was in French.

Vous avez oublié de composer le ‘un’.

You forgot to dial the 1.

I burst out laughing, breaking trance. Eyes open, I knew what the guru meant. I’d been reminded to connect with the One. Not God. The ‘1’ was Unity, the Flux to which all souls and spirits belong, the Everything, the Great What-Have-You. That’s where the cool stuff is.

It’s not somewhere else. No elevator necessary. We’re already there. It’s like waking up in your bedroom, which your sleep momentarily erased. You’ve traveled in your dreams, and forgotten where you came from, but upon waking you realize that all along you’ve been lying in your bed.

Henceforth I would begin my sessions by dialing the One, to wake up in the Flux. The idea was to breathe, since breath itself is fluctuation. Different from reflexive breathing, I breathed with purpose, putting my full consciousness into it, as if to say Here I Am. Awareness dawned, and I’d wake in the true Here. Our real home, empty of furniture, blazing with blank light.

It also became my habit, on my way back from that place, to pause for a lesson from my guru, to ask questions and receive answers. Clearly the teacher was not some Indian guy. It was I, with my little third eye. I had held these answers all along, was born with them, and was now learning how to access them, as if a locked drawer had suddenly become unsprung. I suppose this source is what’s called our Higher Self by some. In any case, it was inseparable from my being.  

For example, in one session I asked how to handle my persistent digestive problems. In answer, I was shown a bar of soap on a shelf. I was told to wash every part of my body with it – inside as well as outside. I reached it down from the shelf. The wrapper said Appomattox Soap. This I took to mean: in order to end the Civil War in my body, I would have to surrender to the Union (the ‘1’ again), and maintain peace by faithful physical and spiritual cleansing.

But the lesson wasn’t over. I felt suddenly invaded by a heavy paralysis. I couldn’t move a limb. And then some presence took hold and lifted me free, to observe my body from above. The splendor was dazzling. It shimmered like a palace, richly appointed, to be lovingly maintained. I had never truly felt the beauty of our mortal housing, and when I was gently placed back inside my body, I was able to revel in it for the first time. I emerged from this meditation with tears flowing down my face.

Another time, the message I got was: “Food dies.” I wrote the interpretation in my journal: “To fill up the stomach is to feed life that dies. To fill up with Spirit is to feed the life that lives.”

The most memorable of all my lessons came when I was shown a park scene. A light wash of green and blue suggested trees and sky. Vague calliope music played in the distance; amusement rides, horses and ponies, chattering people were sketched in pencil, like a rough draft for an animation sequence. That’s what this life is, I was told, a beguiling sketch that will lead, in the end, to a majestic finished creation – or Creation itself.

After I emerged from this meditation, I went for a walk in Central Park. The carousel music was playing, passersby chattered, love was everywhere, and my nostrils filled with the aroma of flowers that weren’t there.

The last experience I’ll relate here was also on the subject of creation. In one of my trances, it was depicted as a luminous shower, as if a ladle of pure radiance had overturned. I was shown that to be a creator oneself, a single step sufficed: simply step under the shower and be a part of it. Stand still and receive. True creation is co-creation.

While I noted this lesson in my journal. I understood it, but not how to apply it. That would come later, with the death of Harry Nilsson.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 52

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)


Spielberg had a one-line idea for a movie: a mother, who’s struggling with loneliness after her kids’ departure for college, suspects there is a ghost in her house. To flesh out his story, Steven brainstormed with production heads Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald for several days. Nina faxed me a transcript of the meetings, so I could get a sense of what they wanted.

It was a fun read. There was clearly a lot of excitement in the room as these three movie machers spitballed ideas. (I’d love to quote some of the dialogue, but this was 1995, when fax machines used that quaint roller paper where the printed text vanishes like disappearing ink after a few years.) Notably, they wanted to defy horror movie convention by designing a ghost that was not threatening or murderous or tragic. Instead, this ghost used to be an ordinary housewife in life, who continued to go about her chores after her death. Her manifestations would take the form of, for example, the house filling up with the smell of cinnamon cookies baking, even though there was nothing in the oven. Bathwater taps turning on by themselves. Rugs rolling up. (Trash taken out?)

Further, no one believes the mother character when she insists there’s a ghost haunting the place; even her husband thinks she’s merely suffering from empty-nest syndrome. Nevertheless her relationship with the ghost deepens, as the dead housewife reveals herself to the living mother more and more openly. The two women touch across the dimensional divide, and help each other to let go and move on.

Steven was intent on making the ghost glimpses as realistic as possible. This would not be Poltergeist but rather Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to convey the awe and wonder of contact with the other side. He believed in ghosts himself but had never had any personal experiences with them, though he’d always wanted to. It was time to bring in a writer to convey that right balance of sweet and spooky onto the page.

I told Nina it wasn’t a stretch for me, because I’d had plenty of experience with ghosts. “Fantastic,” she said. “I’m going to run down the hall right now and tell Steven! He’ll be so jealous.” I was hired immediately and flew out to LA to meet everybody. In the single confab I had with Steven and the DreamWorks, they kept saying what they loved most about the story was it was so unexpectedly small and intimate.

This was October. Steven wondered if I could turn out a script in two months, because if it was good he’d like to shoot the film in February. I’d been warned by an A-list screenwriter friend that Spielberg always had a gazillion projects in development and ended by filming only one or two (and he typically didn’t release the other scripts to any buyers because if he wasn’t going to direct those films he didn’t want anyone else to, either). Still, even though eight weeks was going to be a marathon, I wanted to come through for him.

Only one thing mitigated my enthusiasm. I worried that if I began writing about ghosts I would attract them back into my life, which I’d established as a no-fly zone since my marriage. Then I’d be back in the supernatural soup, which was a lot to manage when you have responsibilities like a husband and a child and a deadline. So I sent a silent request via the ether: any spirits intending to trespass were not welcome, unless they had ideas to contribute for plot and dialogue.

For two months I was a nervous wreck, holed up in my office, deaf to my family; my daughter left claw marks on the locked door. I chain-devoured family-size bags of Werthers butterscotch, courting both cavities and gas. And though I stuck to the story concept as explained by Steven, Laurie and Walter, a thought kept nagging at me: This doesn’t feel like a Steven Spielberg movie. This was no theme park ride. It was gently spooky, a lovely lyrical entente unfolding between a needy human and a housebound ghost. Would he really abandon his usual MO to make a very small film, a miniature instead of a mega-epic?

I turned the script in on time. Initially it was greeted with congratulations and a complimentary fax from Steven (which I would also love to quote, but that paper too turned blank in a year). Then we all got on the phone together for his notes. His big problem was that the film felt kind of…small. He missed the climbing graph of fear and tension. The ghost should be more frightening. (Like, a scary housewife.)

I got to work on revisions, throwing in some gaspy moments, like an unseen hand suddenly roiling the bathwater as the mother lies soaking in the tub, a fire spontaneously erupting, a door opening onto thin air, and the reveal of a horrific trauma in the ghost’s past. But it still didn’t feel like a Spielberg movie.

In the end, it wasn’t. I waited for notes so I could complete the polish on the script. The word came back that they didn’t know what they wanted. I had done exactly what they thought they wanted. It turned out they wanted the wrong thing. Laurie and Walter wondered if the basic story could be sexier. But sexy wasn’t Steven’s thing, and he moved on to Jurassic Park. I had to move on as well. I was juggling two other script jobs, and a film I’d written and would direct (The Hairy Bird aka All I Wanna Do) had gotten its financing. I asked DreamWorks for, and received, an honorable discharge.

(Years later, I ran into Steven at the sixth grade graduation of our kids from the Ethical Culture School. “By the way,” he grinned, “we’re making your movie.” I phoned my agent: was this true? – “Oh, he’s just saying that. I haven’t heard anything.” Three years after that, What Lies Beneath was released, with Robert Zemeckis directing; it had been rewritten as a sexy ghost story with a scary husband.)

Back to 1996: my breakneck writing marathon was over. As I re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down in my life, my nerves were a tangled mess. For one thing, I badly needed to withdraw from Werthers. And I had no idea how to create calm for myself, in the moments when I wasn’t working or mothering. Unless…

Suddenly I remembered that I had a mantra. My family and I had lived in Paris back in 1990 while making the film Impromptu, when I decided to take up meditation. I received private lessons at the local Transcendental Meditation center. I loathed my teacher, who delivered his instruction robotically (in French of course) with a sneer and eyes half-closed; they flew open whenever I interrupted with a question, as if he had received an unpleasant jolt. I felt he was much better suited to be a waiter than a spiritual teacher. But I was committed to six lessons before he would give me my mantra.

Finally the day came, and I arrived at his office for the induction ceremony, bearing the symbolic offerings of some oranges and a white silk cloth. We were seated on the rug together half-lotus style (an excruciating position for my knees), when he leaned over and whispered two syllables in my ear. I am pledged never to tell anyone my mantra, but I will say that it has a guttural French r in it.

He announced we would end the ceremony by meditating together. I closed my eyes, feeling impatient to leave and be rid of him, and started silently chanting my new and personalized mantra. And then, suddenly, my thoughts fell away and I found myself seated on the wide wooden floor of an open-air temple. Hanging from the columns, gossamer yellow drapes wavered in the breeze. A cobra came toward me, sliding over the floorboards in silken undulations and pausing in front of me. Though I was terrified of snakes, this one’s presence seemed perfectly natural and in the order of things. As the cobra lifted its head, a man’s face appeared inches away from mine, blotting out the snake: a long-haired, bearded Indian man; he smiled, opened his mouth, and blew lightly between my eyes.

And with that, the temple disappeared. I was back on the rug with my waiter-teacher, who was looking at me inquiringly. “Alors,” he said, “was that agreeable for you?” I told him what had happened, describing the Indian man and how he huffed on my “third eye.” My teacher’s expression changed to something human like surprise. He got up, fetched a framed photo from a desk drawer, and wordlessly showed it to me. “That’s the man,” I said in amazement. The longhaired gentle-faced Indian man in the photo was my teacher’s guru.

At home, twenty minutes twice a day, I began my meditation practice with great optimism. I felt singled out for specialness by a guru I’d never met, and consequently I expected mucho magical mystery tours whenever I went into trance. Nothing much happened, however. My two daily sessions dwindled to one after a while, and then I stopped altogether, for the same reason so many do: after a while, calm is boring.

But then came Spielberg and the “Untitled Ghost Story” saga: now, in my crazed state, I needed nothingness like nothing else. I dusted off my French mantra, cranked my knees into half a lotus, closed my eyes…. And so began the greatest spiritual adventure of my life.

Unless you count my first acid trip.

(To be continued.)