Authors: Shirley MacLaine
The Camino was lonely when I was walking it in the present, but it was also peopled with memories of many incarnational experiences from the past. I remembered being a Muslim Gypsy girl who had migrated from Morocco and was living with the Coptic Christians in the hills of Spain. I remembered a cross I wore, which, when I presented it, protected me from the Muslims and the Christians alike. At one point in my present day walk, I was guided to a jewelry store in a small village along the Camino. I looked in the window and saw the cross I remembered from several hundred years before. I went in and questioned the proprietor. He gave me the same information I remembered from the past-life memory; it had belonged to a Gypsy girl (me) from Morocco and she had used it for protection. I bought the cross (my only purchase on the trek) and always take it with me when I leave home.
What I was learning about religion around the world as I traveled was that it afforded each denomination and culture an opportunity to bypass responsibility for itself and assign that task to God. Since each culture has its own history of violence with an “enemy,” it is easy to make that enemy an adversary to their God. Since we all anthropomorphize God in our human image, let’s make God’s adversary a pitch-forked human-looking fellow, too: even better—someone who bears a resemblance to our rival tribe or long-held enemy. This evil
Devil we’d made was not only what made us humans unhappy, it was what made “our” God unhappy. We invented this outside evil and could justify any behavior toward him by saying we were trying to protect our God. We humans weren’t capable of becoming God-like enough to neutralize the entire conflict.
Therefore, I gave up religion a long time ago. I’m over all that religion thing and have been ever since I put my experiences with my own karma (past-life recollections) together with my strong sense of self-responsibility.
As I conversed with people everywhere, I found that most of them had had a déjà vu experience. Rather than relating to such things as life-learning experiences of reality, they generally put them aside in the category of paranormal: beyond comprehension and, in some cases, crazy-making. It was as though they thought God wouldn’t like it . . .
Empress Theodora had exercised her authority well. She wanted to be the judge in the Justinian time period of what was real and what wasn’t. The great Greek philosopher Origen had been teaching the meaning of reincarnational karma all his life: “What one sows, so does one reap.” “All energy returns to its source.” Scientific spirituality . . . more the truth than anything else I’ve come across. So we humans, both individually and collectively, continue to follow the dictates of our religion and/or culture, making the same violent missteps in violence and war, when in reality no one ever dies, they just change form. The soul goes on to another level of understanding until it is ready to return to its physical
reembodiment journey again. Therefore, war itself is crazy. No one ever dies, they just incur more karma.
It has always made so much logical sense to me. And such a journey of the soul does
not
rule out God: the God of light, the God of love, and the God of balance and justice. The laws of karma make cosmic justice a reality. One may not reap what one sows in the same lifetime, but he or she will reap what has been sown eventually—even Hitler. (Hitler is everybody’s favorite monster to question or elucidate the reality of soul.) I remember visiting with Mother Teresa in India at her home for the dying. She said her reason for devoting her life to helping others was when she realized she had a part of Hitler in her. Those were her words. She became a saint because she exercised her self-responsibility, not because she was somehow completely good and pure. (No one is.)
Once on a plane from India, I was seated next to Jawaharlal Nehru, the great Indian statesman. A fly had worked its way into the cabin. I went to swat it, and he stopped me. “You never know. That fly could have been your grandmother!”
Yes, there was much for me to learn in India. The Hindu religion had a lot to teach me in terms of the spiritual sciences: yoga, meditation, diet, reincarnation, and the power of passive resistance. When I left India to visit the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, I knew I was in for many lessons.
First of all, I contracted a parasite (some people have told me it must have been cholera) and was sick for two weeks while living in an open lean-to in the middle of winter.
I thought I was going to die and reverted to the only thing I understood to prevent myself from freezing to death: mind over matter. I meditated on an inner sun within my solar plexus. I concentrated very hard the way I do when I become a character I’m playing. Just as I believe I’m the character, I believed I possessed a very healing inner sun, an inner intense light. Soon I realized I was perspiring and felt perfectly warm. To this day, whenever I feel very cold, I still do that. It takes practice, but more to the point, it takes a self-responsible attitude and firm belief that I create and control my own reality. Sometimes that reality becomes the reality of what I’ve lived at some other time and place.
I have developed an understanding that I am part of the web of God and light, and if I just let go and let God, I will tread the path of my own designated destiny. I am responsible for my life and destiny because I signed up for it before I came in. I chose my parents and all my relatives in order to learn some cosmic and spiritual life lessons this time around. With this understanding, I don’t blame any of them for what happened in my childhood or what happens to me as an adult. I find myself always aided by a synchronicity of events and people. If I need to know something and don’t know where to go, I find someone popping up in my life who informs me of that very thing. If I want to find someone but don’t know how to reach them, they often call me out of the blue. If I feel physically sick, I ask my higher self what caused it. And I always get some kind of answer. I’ll take that over a fear-based religion any day.
T
his repeating what you just said business is developing into a national sickness. I guess people feel they are not being heard. Or maybe they repeat what they say in order to decide whether they really mean it.
Just as I am ready to respond to what someone has said, he or she repeats it. And whenever I ask a question, for example: “Can you tell me where I can get a good meal that is organic?” they say, “You want a good meal that is organic?” . . . beat, beat . . . “You want to know a place where you can get a good meal that is organic?”
I usually answer with something like, “Where did you hear that?”
I go berserk and I can’t help myself. Is this what they call echolalia? People only seem to want to hear the echo of what they think and say.
T
he Soviet Union in
1962
was an example of extreme imbalance, which was necessary to get over as soon as possible. The imbalance in Russia was so extreme it could actually seem comic. I was in Romania for the premiere of
The Apartment,
and on a whim I decided to go, via Intourist, to the Soviet Union. Intourist, the official state travel agency of the USSR, was a joke. It was entirely staffed by the KGB. The people who were assigned to “manage” me and my girlfriend Lori’s trip spied on us, tried to blackmail us, and finally, because we missed a train from Leningrad to Moscow, stole my luggage, leaving me without a passport, clothes, or any travel papers.
Lori and I got ourselves smuggled into Leningrad University, where the students were having anti-Catholic week. What was funny was they mixed up Catholic values with Nazi German values. I laughed out loud even though I never have been a fan of the Pope and what he stands for. There
were posters throughout the university equating Hitler with the Pope. There were official discussions and seminars on said subject, and while I was there, there were also two days and nights of off-the-record conversation in the barracks with black bread and a few bottles of scotch someone else had smuggled in to sustain us.
The students weren’t really all that curious about Nazi religious propaganda, or about the outside world in general. That’s what surprised me more than anything. Where was their curiosity? Had it been squelched along with their individual freedoms? They were interested in what I could tell them about the latest rock-and-roll music, which at least said something about their preferred art form.
The stifling suffocation of curiosity and inquiry overwhelmed me after a while. It produced an even more profound urge toward rebellion in me, and when we finally snuck out of the university to return to our hotel, I was told we no longer had a room and that my luggage had been removed by the authorities. Rather than sleep on a threadbare sofa in the freezing cold lobby of the rundown hotel, I made myself purposely uncomfortable on the icy floor. Benny Goodman and his orchestra were in town, so of course he was being followed by a Western reporter. The two of them entered the lobby, recognized me attempting to sleep on the floor, and wanted to know what was going on. I told them the entire story, including a coda which made headlines in the Russian
papers later: “I want to come back to the Soviet Union in the winter and dance the can-can nude in Red Square.”
Two years before, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, had visited the set of
Can-Can
on a tour of the Fox lot. He watched us dance it and then quipped to the U.S. papers, “The face of humanity is prettier than its backside.” I countered by saying, “He was upset because we wore panties.” (The can-can was performed in France without underwear; that was why it was considered risqué.) Later on, after seeing
The Apartment,
Khrushchev sent me a note. It simply said, “You’ve improved.”
As you might imagine, my Soviet adventure was one I longed to get over, but I found I couldn’t. It felt as though so much of Russia itself was buried inside a deeper memory somewhere inside me.
Years later, I had a complicated, loving relationship with a Soviet director I will call Vassy. He was from an elite Russian family and longed to come to the West to work. I was his unofficial sponsor and found him to be exhilarating, adorable, impossibly difficult, deeply religious, unbelievably chauvinistic, and a profound believer in evil. We fought and argued about everything (I believe now just for the sake of the challenge). We hiked, laughed, and saw movies, and I learned to cook Russian food—kasha, beets, garlic, cabbage—and of course, to drink vodka. Vassy was a very well-educated artist who managed to get hold of caviar and God knows what else, and yet he dried his socks on a teakettle.
He was certain he had lived many times before (with me, actually). Most of his leading actresses and one of his wives looked like me. He attended many channeling sessions with me. It was through Vassy that I came to know of the Soviet government’s acceptance of the presence of UFOs and of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth, and he was instrumental in my visiting Billy Meier in Switzerland, whose abduction story is the most provable UFO case on record. Through Vassy, I met Roald Sagdaev, the head of the Soviet Space Agency at the time, and was told that UFOs were documented fact, alien spacecraft had visited earth, and that a cover-up was in place so as not to alarm the human race.
Vassy and I were compatible in so many ways, with the exception of the obsessive belief he had in the existence of evil. He could not wrap his mind around the possibility that humans determined their own negative reality all on their own. He called it “evil interference.” When we argued vociferously, he would often take my shoulders, shake me, and say “Shirlitchka, you are being possessed by the Devil.” He couldn’t accept that the “Devil” was my own negative thinking running amok in my own mind.
He believed we humans were put on Earth to fight and win the battle against EVIL (when he said it, it always sounded like all capital letters to me), the Devil, Satan, call it what you will. When I tried to reason with him by explaining that the Aramaic translation of the words Satan and Evil was simply “that which is not well for you,” it made no impact. The etymology
of words is important, but he was unshakably convinced (through his religion) that the Devil existed as an outside force. For a sophisticated man from such an intellectual, worldly family, I felt he should have gotten over a belief in the Devil a long time ago. He couldn’t do it. When we parted ways, he gave me his family Bible and said it should remain with me. It has, and it always will.
When considering our American relationship with Russia today, I find my experience of having lived with a Soviet invaluable. Vassy considered himself part Muslim. His first wife was Muslim and he was extremely drawn to Islamic history and considered part of the Russian soul to be Islamic. I understood what he meant because so much of the Soviet Union was Muslim. He talked of how his country was an amalgamation of two religious cultures.
Since the Berlin Wall came down, I’m not sure much has really changed on the inside of the Russian people, in their soul. Despite the decades of living under the Soviet regime, many Russians remain as much in thrall to religious orthodoxy as their ancestors. I feel that any deep belief in orthodox religion can be a bridge to understanding each other, but it is also very likely a bridge down a path of destruction. Vassy’s core belief that Evil and the Devil exist as literal entities that can be fought and defeated was impossible for me to countenance. He knew most of the Soviet leaders and said they all secretly wore crosses around their necks, even though they claimed that religion was the opiate of the people. That told
me that they, like Vassy, also believed deeply in the Devil. Violent, hateful acts could always be excused as the work of the Devil. It was as if taking responsibility for our own behavior was not an option since that could all be left up to God. For me, the most troubling aspect of Vassy’s belief system was that he felt we humans should devote our lives to protecting God (Allah) from this so-called Devil. Only destruction and violence can follow such a belief, I believe.