Brando (51 page)

I bought my own instrument to measure galvanic skin response and began experimenting with it at a time of considerable stress in my life. A doctor giving me an insurance physical for a new movie told me that my blood pressure was too high: 170 over 114. When I told him about the stress I was under, he said, “Well, no wonder you’ve got high blood pressure.” He prescribed medicine to lower it, but I decided to see if I could do it on my own by meditation. With practice, I discovered that it was a very effective way to relax and reduce stress. I consulted a Hindu swami and others versed in the practice, read more about it and eventually began meditating daily. After a while, I was able to lower my blood pressure simply by thinking about it: now, when I’m in a stressful situation and feel my blood pressure start to rise, I can usually turn it down at will to as low as 90 over 60. I don’t meditate every time I feel under stress because some stress is positive; if I’m playing chess, for example, my stress level goes up, but it’s a pleasant experience. Stress is also heightened during sex, but it too is pleasurable. Negative stress occurs when you’re stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the airport and realize you may miss your flight, or when you
instinctively mistrust somebody who has just entered the room. When my stress increases in such circumstances, I now simply turn it off, as if it were a light switch.

During one of my first sessions with the biofeedback expert, I put on some headphones and he played a tape with sound waves recorded at the same frequency as my brain waves—though I didn’t know this at the time. I lay back and relaxed, but before long I felt myself being pulled apart like a wad of chewing gum stretched until it was an invisible filament. That’s what was happening to my mind: I was splitting in two, and it scared me. I felt panicked because I was losing control, and I started to resist it because I hate that feeling. When I was mentally back together, I asked myself, Why were you so frightened? Was it because you thought you were going to go mad? Was it going to make you die? Would it make you become a homicidal maniac? Or were you afraid you were going to slide into this state of mind and never return? None of these things was likely to happen, I decided, so I told myself to give in, surrender to it, experience the fear, let it take control of me, ride along with it and see what happens.

The next time I put on the headphones, I didn’t resist and allowed myself to glide past the feelings that had made me so fearful the first time, and to travel along with them. After a few moments, I suddenly felt like a supersonic plane hurtling through the sound barrier. But once I was past the initial turbulence of that panic, everything became smooth and I was in a state of mind that can only be described as ecstasy. It lasted forty-five minutes, persisting even after the doctor returned and turned off the tape machine. I was in a dream talking to God. I felt peaceful, serene, utterly in repose, and I told the doctor, who seemed a thousand miles away, “I’ve never had such a sense of quietness or of beauty, tranquillity and peace in my entire life. I feel as if I had died and gone to nirvana.”

The doctor said I had experienced
satori
, a state of consciousness
that Zen masters consider one of sudden enlightenment. In diminishing intensity, the experience continued for three days before I was again in a normal state of mind.

Now I try to meditate twice a day for an hour or more. On only three occasions have I ever again achieved the sensation of satori, but it is always a pleasant, comforting experience. During the past few years, meditation has helped me enormously in dealing with a number of problems in my life. Through repetition, old emotional habits are replaced, and instead of getting excited, angry or anxious, I become calm. Repetition is as important to meditation as it is to many religious rituals. Catholic priests may order their parishioners to say ten Hail Mary’s after confession; in Africa, Haiti and other places, religious masters put their followers into trances by exposing them to the repeated rhythms of drums so intense that the sounds go right through their bodies to become a part of them, and people surrender to the rhythm as they do during meditation. The mental processes are too subtle for me to understand or even to identify, and scientists haven’t been very successful at deciphering them either. But in the theater I’ve seen how susceptible the human mind is to suggestion, and have wondered if there are related forces at play. As already observed, one of the strongest features of the human personality is how easily given it is to suggestion. If he’s in a well-written play that is performed skillfully, a good actor can affect the body chemistry of an audience. He can increase the flow of adrenaline, make people feel sad, make them cry, make them angry or apprehensive. As an actor, you try to use the power of suggestion to manipulate people’s moods, and that’s not a lot different from what happens during a religious ritual.

   It took the Vatican more than three hundred years to admit that Galileo was right, and some things about the world haven’t changed. I am constantly amazed at the depth of intellectual
prejudice in Western culture. Nothing is a fact unless it comes out of a petri dish. A certain type of political correctness discourages inquiry beyond certain limits; prejudice against responsible scientific research in certain fields—parapsychology, for example—is appalling. But nothing beats the apathy and skepticism regarding the mental disciplines of the Eastern religions. For at least two thousand years, yogis and swamis have been certain of the power of the mind over the body, as demonstrated by their ability to put their bodies in a kind of suspended animation that enables them to survive being buried underground for hours or even days. Their accomplishments cry out for more research, but to many Western scientists these powers and the insight that the swamis, yogis and other students of the mind have attained are merely tricks or scientific oddities.

This hasn’t changed since the first British colonials landed in India and observed the extraordinary yogic disciplines; they all but ignored them because they considered Western culture the font of all wisdom and knowledge. Even now, if a scientist such as Linus Pauling acknowledges that Eastern religions have developed extraordinary mind-body relationships in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, he is considered a flake. This isn’t surprising because that’s what usually happens when bright people with achievements in one field challenge the status quo accepted by specialists in others. Even Einstein, when he expressed opinions in fields other than his own, was thought of as an eccentric; Arnold Toynbee was told to stick to history and not venture into areas of science he knew nothing about because his ideas didn’t conform to concepts that were in vogue at the time. Still, during the next century, as science shifts from its twentieth-century preoccupation with exploring the physical world to the far more interesting world of the mind and neurogenetics, this attitude will change. As Francis Crick has pointed out, brain chemistry is responsible for human thought, behavior
and character—everything about us. I believe that we can control the mind, and that man will demonstrate a capacity to do things beyond his wildest imagination. I don’t know yet what the limitations of my own mind are. I haven’t reached them yet, but I won’t stop searching for them until I die. It is territory different from anything I’ve ever explored before—uncharted waters—and I feel like an explorer. In many ways it is the most exciting expedition I’ve ever undertaken.

   The more I have meditated, the more I have been able to control not only stress in my life, but pain. If I have a headache or stub my toe, I’m often able to locate the pain with my mind and will it away. So confident am I of this ability that when I decided a few years ago to be circumcised, I asked the doctor to do it without a pain-killer. I assured him that I could eliminate the pain using mind control during the operation. He was skeptical but said it would be an interesting medical experience, and he scheduled the operation. But when I arrived at the hospital, what seemed like its entire medical staff was waiting to witness the event. The prospect of seeing a movie star circumcised without anesthesia must have been a hot topic of discussion in the doctors’ lounge. I didn’t welcome the presence of uninvited guests, and since I go by instinct, I went home.

Later a different doctor agreed to do the operation without pain-killers, but he became frightened and an anesthetist was waiting for me when I kept my appointment. He said that because of medical ethics he couldn’t circumcise me without using a pain-killer. Disappointed and angry but tired of the delays, I let the anesthetist give me a shot in my back. Nevertheless, I still wanted to show the doctors what I could do, and I told them to take my blood pressure. I had already meditated, brought my blood pressure down more than twenty points, and even put myself into one of those moments of satori that I rarely achieve. To this day, I’m sure that if they hadn’t given me the shot, I would have felt no pain.

THE NINE YEARS
during which I didn’t make a movie afforded me the luxury of time to get to know my children better, as well as myself. I was beginning to come to terms with myself with the help of Dr. Harrington, and I spent much of that time under the thatch roof of my hut on Teti’aroa with my feet sticking out the door, looking through the shell curtains at the vivid colors of the lagoon; like the sunsets on Teti’aroa, they change constantly, depending on the sun and clouds. I sat like that for hours at a time contemplating my life, assessing my values, examining every little bird of thought that flitted through my mind.

My life on Teti’aroa is very simple—walking, swimming, fishing, playing with the children, laughing, talking. I feel a tremendous sense of freedom there. At night there isn’t much to do except look at the stars, which I love to do, and most days I don’t wake up until about eleven, when I hear the fluttering of wings over my hut and birds plummet out of the sky, hit the lagoon in a quick splash and with the grace of ballerinas grab a fish for breakfast.

There is fresh fruit off the trees for my breakfast, then a walk on the beach. Or I may spend an hour or two with my ham radio, talking to strangers around the world, telling them that
my name is Jim Ferguson—the name of my childhood playmate—and that I live alone in Tahiti. Nobody knows I’m a movie star, and I can be like anyone else.

Once when I was on Teti’aroa, for two or three weeks I would be drunk every day by lunchtime. I’d go down to the pool hall, shoot a few games and have a wonderful time. But it was a momentary lapse; I’ve never come close to becoming an alcoholic. It’s never taken more than a drink or two to put me into a tailspin, and that’s usually when I stop. There has been a lot of alcoholism in my family, but fortunately those family genes passed me by.

I’ve looked on Teti’aroa as a laboratory where I could experiment with solar power, aquaculture and innovative construction methods. I built one of the first sawmills in Polynesia that could turn coconut trees into lumber, and felt a great sense of accomplishment. I savor the smallest details on the island. Once I filled a hundred-foot-long piece of galvanized pipe with water, left it in the sun and produced steam through solar heating, which was very satisfying. Even the least achievement on Teti’aroa delights me. One of my most rewarding triumphs was to restore a rusted two-inch iron plug for a pipe. The salt air had corroded it so much that the threads seemed to be gone. I rubbed and rubbed it with a wire brush but couldn’t dent the thick crust of oxidized metal. Then I remembered having read somewhere that lemon juice helped dissolve rust because of its high acid content. I picked a few limes off a tree, squeezed the juice, mixed it into a slurry with salt and rubbed it on the fitting. The acid ate through the rust and made the plug shine, revealing the lost threads. What a wonderful feeling! It was a small thing that gave me great happiness.

In its prime the hotel had twenty-eight bungalows, a kitchen, a couple of bars, a dining room and reception area. Over the years I have spent millions on it, though it has never been profitable. Some of the money was lost because of hurricanes, some to wishful thinking and unfulfilled dreams, some to projects
started and never finished, some to thieves. A lot of people robbed me—a few who worked for me, others who were con men and came to the island promising to do things they never did, took my money and then disappeared. One operator promised to produce lobsters in the lagoon through aquaculture, and I invited about twenty scientists to the island with their wives. There was a lot of wonderful talk about harvesting lobsters that came to nothing. Storms frequently struck the island; every time we finished a new building, it seemed that another hurricane came along and damaged it. But I enjoyed all of it. Ever since I was a kid I’ve relished having projects, and I didn’t want to spend all my time lying on the beach. We did a great deal on the island to protect the environment, including saving a lot of hawksbill turtles. They were depositing their eggs on the island, only to lose most of them to predators. We fenced the area, created a basin where the eggs could hatch safely, and fed the young turtles until they were large enough to have a chance of surviving at sea.