- If there's one thing friends of Wanda the Arkansas Angel
have learned to expect, it's the unexpected.
-
- Awhile ago she called Gwen the Beautiful and me with
an invitation so unusual there was no way we could refuse.
-
- "My friend Dolores Cannon is putting on a program
at the Unity Church this weekend," Wanda said, "I think you and
Beautiful would love it."
-
- Visions of artery-clogging food and strained socializing
danced in my head. "What kind of program?" I said warily.
-
- "Dolores is Shirley MacLaine's past-life regressionist,
regressioner - whatever it is," Wanda said. "She charges hundreds
of dollars to take people back to whoever they were centuries ago. But
she's doing a mass regression at the church for $10 a person. Don't you
and Beautiful want to know your former lives?"
-
- I don't know which intrigued me most, the idea of learning
about any past life I might've had, the concept of a "mass regression"
with dozens of people turning into Cleopatra or Mozart or Clark Gable at
once, or the big discount. Whatever it was, I heard myself say, "Yes!"
and jumped in with both feet.
-
- The following Saturday, Gwen and I joined about 20 people
in the meeting room of the little church in Conway and listened as Ms.
Cannon explained that we should all get comfy on the floor so she could
do the thing she does and take us back, back, back in time.
-
- "All you've got to do is relax and listen, and let
your mind wander wherever it will," she said.
-
- I'm as open-minded about this kind of thing as they come,
but I can honestly say I had some reservations. I waited for someone else
to voice a doubt, or at the least the dry sound of scoffing. But the only
response was a chorus of "Amen."
-
- In this place, at this time, Ms. Cannon definitely was
preaching to the choir. There was no point in me doing anything but lying
back and letting myself become part of the show.
-
- Ms. Cannon spoke in a soft, soothing voice that nevertheless
carried throughout the room. "You're in a beautiful, blooming garden.
At the other side of the garden is a gate. You walk to the gate, open it,
and go through to the woods. In the woods, you walk along a path leading
to the foot of a mountain. Along the way, you admire the singing birds
and distant animal sounds ."
-
- There was more, but I didn't hear it. I was walking along
the path, which ended abruptly, revealing that I was at the top of a mesa.
At the edge of the mesa was another path. Narrow and steep, it wound down
to a cave.
-
- I entered the cave. And found myself standing at an altar,
speaking to about 50 people who were gathered before me. My listeners were
dressed like South American Indians. Aztecs, I thought. The people were
smaller than I was, but that didn't seem unusual because I was about 7
feet tall, not counting the high, feathered headdress I wore.
-
- One of the reasons I was so tall was that I wasn't human.
I had a face and arms, but a long, scaly body and brilliantly feathered
wings.
-
- My speech to the Aztecs was short. After many years as
their teacher, I was saying good-bye. I was leaving in the large, disk-shaped
spaceship that I knew hovered overhead even though I couldn't see it from
inside the cave.
-
- As I finished what I was saying, I began rising upward,
pulled by a beam that took me through the mountain and up, up, up toward
the ship.
-
- And then, before we reached the ship, the vision was
gone, and I was back on the floor of the church, where Dolores Cannon was
asking everyone what they'd experienced, and who they'd been while in the
light state of hypnosis she had induced.
-
- Gwen saw my dazed look. "What is it?" she said.
-
- I told her what had happened. "You were Quetzalcoatl,
the feathered serpent of the Aztecs," Gwen said. "You were a
god."
-
- "An alien actually."
-
- Ms. Cannon was listening to us.
-
- "I know those aliens," she said. "Shirley
wrote about them in her autobiography."
-
- "I haven't read her autobiography," I said.
-
- On the other side of me, Wanda spoke up.
-
- "I was Cleopatra," she said. "And now
for sure I'm gonna read Shirley's book."
-
- So am I.
-
- Although probably not for the same reason.
-
-
- Copyright C 2008 by Larry Brody. All rights reserved.
-
-
- Author Larry Brody's weekly column, LIVE! FROM PARADISE!
appears on his website, www.larrybrody.com. He has written thousands of
hours of network television, and is the author of "Television Writing
from the Inside Out" and "Turning Points in Television."
Brody is Creative Director of The Cloud Creek Institute for the Arts, the
world's first in-residence media colony. More about his activities can
be seen on www.tvwriter.com and www.cloudcreek.org. He welcomes your comments
and feedback at <mailto:LarryBrody@cloudcreek.org>LarryBrody@cloudcreek.org.
Brody, his wife and their dogs, cats, horses and chickens live in Marion
County, Arkansas. The other residents of the mythical town of Paradise
reside in his imagination.
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