Up Till Now: The Autobiography

the entertainment-industry expert on science and outer space. I was the figure of authority. But the program in which I really became involved was the five-part, ten-hour miniseries for Ted Turner’s TBS called Voice of the Planet . It was an unusual format; I played the fictional author William Hope Planter, who was talking to the spirit of the Earth through a computer located in a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas, about the very real problems facing the planet in the future. Those problems ranged from overpopulation to a shortage of water.
    I agreed to do this series when the producer, Michael Tobias, told me, “There’s very little money involved, it’s going to take a lot of your time, and it requires us to go around the world.”
    Go around the world? Several weeks later Marcy and I found ourselves at the Tengboche monastery in Nepal, looking up at Mt. Everest. Buddhists believe the Himalayas are the center of their spiritual world and the confluence of those mountains is in the valley. We had hiked in with a crew of five people and were camped in a small shed right next to an outhouse.
    This was a truly awe-inspiring place. This monastery was on a ledge about fifteen thousand feet above sea level; there were no birds, no wildlife, very little vegetation. Just extraordinary snow-tipped mountains cutting into a radiant blue sky. The only sounds were the wind whistling through the valley and the mellifluous chanting of the fifty monks who lived there, the mmmm-sound of the universe disappearing into the silent valley. It was unlike any place I had ever been in my life.
    Many years earlier, when I had been a teenaged counselor at a B’nai Brith camp, I had walked out of my bunk late at night and looked up. The sky was brilliant with stars and as I looked at those stars I was struck by an overwhelming feeling of insignificance.Suddenly I understood that in the whole of the universe I was meaningless to a degree I couldn’t begin to fathom; smaller than molecules, atoms, quarks, smaller than my ability to imagine. I kept looking up—and then I fell over backward.
    That feeling of wanting to unite with the universe had stayed with me from that night. I’d searched for it. Several times in my life I’d had so-called Zen moments—when I was in perfect harmony with the horse I was riding, making love, or preparing mentally to shoot an arrow—but I’d never truly been one with the universe. I’d never had that mystical experience I’d read about. If I were ever going to reach that state, I realized, it would be at this monastery.
    The first night we were there I went outside into the freezing air, wrapped in my sleeping bag. I sat down and stared into a sky of a billion stars and waited for the spirits of that valley to come to me. And I waited. Nothing happened; finally I was frozen and went back into the shed. Maybe the spirits would come the next night. The second night I did the same thing, and the third and the fourth, staring into the night, waiting for a moment of whatever I was waiting for. It. Finally, on our last night I sat outside again. I waited an hour, and then it struck me. Nothing! Absolutely nothing! I realized nothing was going to happen. Maybe my toes would get frostbitten, but nothing else. So I went back inside.
    Later that night, as I lay in my warm sleeping bag, it suddenly occurred to me why I was in that valley. It is a truth that has never left me. I was there to understand that I didn’t have to be sitting outside in the freezing cold night at a monastery in the Himalayas beneath Mt. Everest to recognize and appreciate the wonderment that exists in every object. It’s with me all the time, wherever I am—even on the San Diego Freeway. It’s in our skin, it’s in our finger, it’s in everything. All you have to do is pause and contemplate that thing, whatever it is, and allow yourself to be astounded at its existence, and you are on the verge of the Zen feeling of being at one with the universe.
    We traveled around the world for Voice of the Planet . The budget was not large enough to afford stuntmen, so I took risks that in retrospect amaze me. I went ice climbing in the French Alps. I wasdropped by helicopter on a plateau on Mt. Blanc. When Michael Tobias asked me to climb a vertical rock wall all I asked was that he get it in one take—although once I was properly roped I agreed to do it several times to get the right shot. It might well have been Jim Kirk who viewers