I’m Over All That

by Shirley Maclaine

  I’m Over Being Polite to People with Closed Minds

  I must do my best to get over feeling frustrated and impatient with people who are wedded to not thinking.

  I don’t know why they do it. Or maybe they don’t do anything. Maybe they just are in the point of view they won’t give up. And each point of view has been schooled and developed by religion, social mores, and parental influence. Okay, we know all that. Maybe the operative block is fear of the unknown. Fear is taught. Babies are usually born without fear. They have to learn it. And the teachers are expert. Oscar Hammerstein was insightful when he wrote the lyrics to “You’ve Got to Be Taught” for South Pacific: Carefully taught to fear and hate all the things your relatives hate. As I see it, the question is: are these blocks inherent in our DNA? Can we trace them back to our origins?

  For me, it’s not enough simply to say that God created mankind. Many translations of ancient religious texts, including the Torah and the Mahabharata, say Eloheim created all. But the word “Eloheim” is plural. So who were these Gods? And did these Gods carry a sort of DNA karma within their soul memory? If so, then I believe every living sentient being carries some form of karma within.

  So each time I’m with someone who is shockingly closed-minded, I will try to remember they have a soul history I don’t know or understand. I guess that is the meaning of compassion and tolerance. Perhaps the fear of thinking openly is passed down in our DNA. And fear promulgates aggression and ultimately Evil. So is turning the other cheek the solution because it neutralizes the karma of a negative action? Even in the face of hostile, warlike aggression, the key is to understand no one loses his life. He just incurs more karmic experience. He might lose or cause someone else to lose this incarnation but not his life. Life is eternal. So why have war at all? It’s ridiculous.

  Many fundamentalists are just not open-minded enough to think for themselves. Neither are most traditional scientists. They always need hard physical evidence to believe something is true and real. How would they react if it were proved that physical reality itself is an illusion?

  I must remember that closed-mindedness is nothing more than the loss of memory of who we really are.

  I’m Over Conservatives and Liberals

  How does a person know whether they are liberal or conservative? When do these values assert themselves, and when do they start?

  My mother was a Canadian with a decidedly royalist reflex. By that I mean that she revered the British royal family to such an extent that my father was often moved to make fun of her for her devotion. She always bristled, and on it went. Mother was a very loving and sensitive person, but I would have to say that about most things she was conservative. I don’t think she ever thought that much about a label for herself. Her father (my grandfather, whom I never knew) was an accomplished brain surgeon in Canada and a 33rd Degree Mason. Mother never told me about his Masonic ties; I learned about them by reading his obituary in some old Canadian newspaper clippings she had saved. To be a 33rd Degree Mason is no small accomplishment. Simply put, he was well versed in metaphysics and in keeping secrets. Mother certainly inherited his gift for the latter, and because she was an accomplished gardener, she could also grasp my growing belief in reincarnation. She said she could understand living many lives because that’s what her rose bushes did. Same plant, different roses every year.

  Whenever I brought my books home to read to them, neither she nor Daddy had any problems with my expanding belief system. She was a student of the patterns of nature; he’d had an out-of-body experience after a near fatal car crash, as well as a visitation from his best buddy who died on the battlefield during World War II. When Daddy told me about the night he cracked up his car, he described a terrible crash and said he had essentially died. He went through a tunnel (a familiar description in many out-of-body experiences) and encountered his own mother and father, plus friends on the other side. He said he knew he was going toward God and it would be like going home to him. However, he said, a guide of some sort stopped him from going all the way to the end of the tunnel (dying) and said he needed to go back because he had more work to do. The guide told my father that his son (my brother) needed him as well as his wife (Mother), but that I really didn’t. Dad said he obeyed the guide, came back into his body, and felt the pain of his injuries and found himself inside the wrecked car.

  The moment that he had a vision of his war buddy on the battlefield was important to him because it made him realize that the soul must live on after death. When he checked on the time of his friend’s death, he found it was exactly the same time as Daddy had seen him.

  These two incidents stayed with him for his whole life, and he understood my fascination with such things completely. When we had discussions about the afterlife, he said he absolutely believed in its existence because his own near-death experience was too beautiful to deny. What he couldn’t understand was why anyone would want to come back to live another life.

  So my parents were very open-minded to all manner of esoteric subjects due to their own personal beliefs and experiences. When it came to politics, it was another story.

  First of all, Mother had a sister who was married to a communist and was also the editor of the Daily Worker in Toronto, Canada. When Mother decided (at Daddy’s urging) to become an American citizen, I remember Daddy taking the whole family through Washington, D.C., many times, declaiming about the grandeur of its architecture and the meaning of democracy. To Mother, it felt as if he were rubbing her nose in our nation’s revolutionary history and break with England. He was proud of America’s decision to break away from the British royal hierarchy and class-bound social structure. Perhaps Daddy was also attempting to dissuade Mother of any communist leanings just in case she, like her sister, harbored any such notions.

  I remember Daddy didn’t trust Henry Wallace because he was a socialist, and he thought Roosevelt was being too liberal in even talking to Joseph Stalin. Since Dad was from a small Virginia town named Front Royal (ironic name for his hometown!), he was a Mason-Dixon Line southerner who still called black people niggers and saw nothing demeaning in it.

  I was brought up by Dora, our black nanny, and Daddy could always tell (as if by telepathy) whether she was going to be sick or pregnant! He was never wrong. I don’t know what their intuitive connection was, but it was deep. I played with Dora’s kids all the time. I don’t remember Daddy ever having a problem with that, or his being anything but polite and kind to Dora and her family.

  We were middle-class people, living a middle-class life in a neighborhood with a slight variation of architecture in each house. (Very slight.) We lived a “don’t rock the boat” emotional life, which I believe ultimately made me into an eccentric because I felt I had to rebel. I attended school and dancing class every day of my life and babysat for extra money. I didn’t learn much in school (except how to be a fast typist), but I did devote myself to becoming popular. Hence my football captain boyfriend and my time served as a cheerleader. I was a straight A student (so why didn’t I learn anything?) and was a member of a sorority called the Sub Deb Club.

  My favorite subject was geometry. (I felt I somehow knew about pyramids and the inherent brilliance of the mathematics of shapes and forms.) I rode in cars with boys, smoked only where I wouldn’t get caught, and stayed a virgin even though the petting got hot and heavy. My favorite book was called Heroes of Civilization (I still have it on my bookshelf), and my favorite piece of music was the “Pas de Deux” from The Nutcracker Suite.

  I was not particularly religious, even though it said Baptist on my birth certificate, and until I read Cosmic Memory by Rudolf Steiner, I hadn’t contemplated such things as reincarnation and soul searching, but I always did love to think and discuss. At our Sunday dinners, which consisted of meatloaf, scalloped potatoes, scalloped tomatoes, and chocolate cake with hot chocolate sauce, Daddy used to ask me deep questions. I loved lingering over the food and discussing philosophy. Once I asked him why every
thing one did had so much trouble attached to it. I was twelve. He was delighted because he had written a doctorate of philosophy and psychology at Johns Hopkins. He and my mother were teachers, even though I think they loved drama more (they were like vaudevillians together). Daddy and I talked philosophy for hours. He was comfortable with abstract thinking and stimulated me to come up with my own conclusions.

  He was a contradiction. He was a bigoted southerner, yet sobbed in admiration at Raisin in the Sun. He loved Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis Jr., but wouldn’t let me bring either home because of what the neighbors might say. Black people weren’t the only ones. I had a Jewish boyfriend of whom he inquired once, “Where are your horns?”

  He cried at “The Star Spangled Banner” and fervently believed in the freedom of political dissent. He didn’t like the communists because “They’ll take all our money and take us over too.” One of his most advanced accomplishments at Johns Hopkins was a paper proving that color and music had a vibrational frequency that was healing, and that these vibrations corresponded equally to vibrations in the human body. I later learned he was talking about the color and energy centers of the body the ancient Hindus called chakras, but he didn’t know that. He never finished his paper. In fact, he didn’t finish much of anything. He was a brilliant and loving man, but he had no “stick-to-it-ivity.” Hence I became an overachiever. He used to call me “a do-gooder,” always for the underdog. Maybe to me he was the underdog and I wanted to do good for him.

  Everything we do and are starts with family and ends with family.

  I Am Over Getting Over Family

  What gives each of us more grief, and more love, than family? But grief and love produce guilt. So family = guilt.

  If someone tells me they had a happy childhood, I tell them they haven’t really looked at it. I believe we choose the mother, father, sisters, and brothers according to what we need to learn for our own soul’s growth.

  I have learned that each of us belongs to a “soul group”—that is, a conglomeration of souls we know who have known us over eons of time. So each member of that group can be a brother or sister, mother or father, and so on. Each member of the group has varied and intimate knowledge of every other member. Therefore, when an incarnation takes place and we make a choice on a cosmic higher level to be part of a family, each member starts out knowing what he or she is doing within the family. But as we grow from birth we forget why we chose to be members of that family, and because the family lessons are the most difficult of all in life, we play a blame game or we don’t get the lessons at all, kidding ourselves into believing everything is happy and perfect.

  Life on Earth is not meant to be easy. It is meant to be a learning experience. Of course in the final analysis our soul’s goal is peace and happiness, but to get there can be difficult. Each member of the family, on a soul level, understands the baggage of karma each other member has. In other words, a cruel mother is understood on some level to have been treated cruelly at some time on her soul’s journey. A victim has probably victimized another. These past karmic dramas need not always have occurred within the present family. It’s the experience that matters, not the individual driving it.

  The family is the preparation for life. But after the preparation (at age 21 or so), we are on our own. When we look back and blame a family member, it’s a waste of energy and time. We should get over it.

  Of course, psychotherapy helps, but I would recommend some past life therapy so we can pinpoint why such dramas occurred. I have been through many past life sessions where members of my family were involved. They were remarkable. I knew I wasn’t making it up because of the emotion involved. I cried, laughed, screamed, and finally nodded with understanding in my soul as to why certain people and events occurred like they did.

  Past life regression sessions come in very handy while going through a divorce too. And it saves each party anguish and money when they understand the past life karma of it all. There’s no point in my going into detail regarding who did what to whom in my own life. The understanding of the karmic emotion of it all is what is important. The laws of cause and effect are in play all the time, in every moment of our lives. I wish that this law was part of our education. As my father said once, “It’s too bad we have to get close to dying before we understand what it was all about in the first place.”

  As he lay dying, he would visit his mother and father in his sleep every night. The doctors and nurses at Johns Hopkins Hospital crowded around his bed every morning to hear what he told them. They had heard it from many dying patients before. My dad was not on medication that would have produced delusions. The dying process was the “knowing the truth” process.

  My mother, on the other hand, in her last days didn’t visit her relatives as greeters to heaven. She went back in time to when she was a very young girl. She talked to her mother and sisters in the past, working out problems that had occurred. She also was living what had been her dreams and fantasies when she was young. She created the reality of living what she had dreamed of. It was fascinating for me to hear and observe. I was on location with Guarding Tess when she passed away. We were shooting in Baltimore, where she had met and married my father and had conceived me. I believe she chose to cross over while I was there because she knew it was familiar territory to both of us.

  I got a call from her nurse telling me she had taken her last breath, but I already knew it because a few minutes before the call, the alarm spontaneously went off in the house I was renting. Mother’s voice came into my head and told me exactly where to locate the alarm in the house. I went straight to it (on a high shelf in a hall closet) and turned it off. Mother then instructed me to drive to my childhood home in Arlington, Virginia. I called the set, explained what had happened and told them I wouldn’t be able to come in that day. They said, “Go, no problem.”

  I drove to the house in Virginia. In my head, mother’s voice instructed me to go to a drawer that I hadn’t known existed in a cupboard. Inside the drawer, I found an envelope. I opened it and read the letter inside. It was about some unflattering things involving my ex-husband. She then said she hadn’t wanted to tell me because I needed to learn it all for myself.

  Then she directed me to my father’s underwear drawer in his bedroom. She said there would be a valentine under the clothes. There was. She instructed me to keep it. She directed me to another desk where she kept some poems. I never knew the location of any of these things. I found the poems and keep them to this day.

  When I returned to Baltimore and the house I was renting, I opened the front door and the lights flicked on and off by themselves. Then the TV in the living room went on and off. I knew it was Mother saying she was with me. She then said, “Look out at the swans on the lake. I will be with them, watching you till you finish your picture.”

  As I looked out the window, a pair of swans glided into view on the lake.

  I never broke down over either of my parents’ passing, because I knew that was just what had happened—they had passed. They didn’t die. Their souls are with me when I need some advice or have a good laugh at the absurdity of what we believe is the “truth” here on Earth.

  Once on my trek across Spain doing the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage, I got lost. I ended up in some military installation, which was a real breach of security. Mom and Dad came into my head and showed me the path back to the Camino. Then I could feel each of them say goodbye to each other and go back to their own school of learning where they were.

  Family is important because they are our first teachers. We are known to each other. That is why it is so hard to grow away from them. Twins always recognize each other for life. Mothers sometimes remember they were fathers before, and vice versa. The family tree of relatives, of aunts and uncles, etc., is made up of members of the soul group we each belong to.

  When this spiritual knowledge is applied to the problems we have with our families, the psychodramas that we are all a part of become easi
er to bear and certainly educational. Forgive and forget becomes possible because we remember.

  It’s good to clear up the problems with family because, if not, we’ll go around again at a future date.

  I Am Over Going to Funerals

  I never liked funerals. I remember the funeral of a despised Hollywood mogul. So many people attended that someone quipped, “Gee, give the people what they want and they really will show up!”

  I like paying respects to a life well lived, but I know the person we are mourning is not dead. And the idea of getting closure? Why say that? The departed one has just gone on to another level of understanding.

  When someone I love passes on, I go immediately to a place where I spent time with them. I sit there and call them to me, just to know they’re still around. Usually, I can feel them and they feel better that I don’t feel sad. I feel people don’t want to “die” because they know that those left behind will feel sad and bereft. Maybe more of us would go sooner if we knew it would be all right with those who are left behind.

  I appreciate what Dr. Kevorkian does because he respects the desires of those who want to move on and are not afraid to die. But I have one caveat to my agreement with him. Spiritually speaking, I wonder if a life is meant to be lived out to its complete finish because of the soul lessons to be learned, not only by the person passing on, but also those close to him or her. Dying is as important as birth. The way we die is as important as anything we will ever do.

  I personally remember having committed a cosmic suicide by cutting the silver cord attaching my soul to my body. I did it because I couldn’t bear to see what was happening to the Atlantean civilization around me. It was crumbling, sinking, and full of sorrow. I remember soaring above what was occurring in an out-of-body experience and deciding to cut the silver cord. I feel that that was a cowardly decision when I meditate on it now. I should have experienced what everyone else was going through.