Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [165]
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