I’m Over All That

by Shirley Maclaine

  So the idea that we only live one life is more detrimental than we can imagine. It can justify war, greed, and totalitarian control. But when we understand that what we do in this lifetime will dictate what needs to be cleaned up in the next, human behavior becomes more balanced and sane.

  I so admire the behavior of the Dalai Lama in his relations with China. He has pointed out to the Tibetan people that in past incarnations they were cruel to the Chinese people for various geopolitical reasons and are now suffering some of that return energy.

  I spent two weeks with the Dalai Lama in Brazil during the eco-conference in 1992. I learned a great deal about kindness, patience (not enough, some would say), and humor. It was fascinating to me that so many world leaders were unconsciously afraid of him. They seemed to innately understand that his system of cosmic justice was observing them. The absence of judgment on his part bothered them more than anything. I marveled at how the Dalai Lama stood in front of twenty thousand people and spoke without notes for hours. It was as though he was channeling some divine information (which I believe he was) to people who longed to understand but were not prepared to integrate it into their belief systems.

  Sometimes, seemingly for no reason, he would stop talking and just laugh. He would laugh for minutes at a time as though watching a divine comedy in his head. He seemed to be a simple man, as we ate together, sat together, and traveled together. I have pictures of him that smile down on me from my Wall of Life. He lights up the room as though the pictures are alive.

  I find it fascinating that his beliefs in the soul’s journey through time (reincarnation) never elicit cynicism or derision, but that same belief from a Westerner who works in show business elicits derisive smirks. Maybe it’s only a matter of wardrobe.

  The Dalai Lama probably has less information in his Akashic Records than any other human because he chooses to keep coming back as what he was before. I’ve watched a ceremony where a new Panchen Lama was found because the child knew objects and information from the past. Perhaps this is the way the Buddhists help to maintain a fairly karmic-free individual because he is short on experience.

  The Akashic Records are proof to me that all time is occurring at once. Because when they are accessed, they are not linear. And there is Akashic information about the probabilities in the future for each soul, depending on their free will. All souls exist in perfection as part of the light of the Creator. With physical incarnational experience we accumulate karma. Our soul’s decision to enact our free will and become physical is what is called third-dimensional life.

  I remember one of my first physical incarnational experiences. I, as a cocreating soul with the God Creator, had fashioned a beautiful, gigantic, feather-winged lizard. I remember the iridescent colors of the feathers and the power of its body, which I wanted to fly with. I became so enamored with what I created that I entered its body and commanded it to fly. The experience was so exhilarating I didn’t want to leave and float back to my home, the ethereal. As a soul, I desired to live in the body of what I had created, hence my first incarnational experience. After a while I had the feeling of being trapped. I knew my real soul-home was the nonphysical ether, but I couldn’t get back. Such is the free will of creativity.

  I remembered many other physical experiences determined by my free will creativity when I accessed my Akashic Records. The Records enable us to interact with our spiritual resource and gain insight and guidance and understanding of what we are doing with Earth time and space. This is why I’ve always been so interested in mystics and people who seem to operate with another reality, which I know is as real as that which is accepted. That was why I traveled so much and tried to learn about other cultures and points of view.

  As I am ageing now, I am more interested in traveling within. It is a never-ending journey full of different time zones and physical color. I moved to New Mexico because it is close to the ancient shamanistic traditions of understanding other dimensional realities. When I visit Chaco Canyon, I enter the realm of my own Akashic Records and know that I lived there long ago. This has happened to me all over the world, from Peru to Russia, to China, to Israel, and elsewhere. I believe I have lived in each country I have traveled to. In fact, the purpose of my travels was probably to go home for a while.

  My interest in the unseen realities of life is an act of going home too. That is why I never get bored. Life itself is what lies within. Each one of our times this time around has a vibrational frequency to it. So when we attempt to access the Records we need to say our name—or the name we go by. It’s like having a cosmic internet of information where each one of us can access information.

  This is how I do it.

  I sit quietly in a chair with my bare feet planted on the ground or the floor. I make sure nothing is crossed, not arms, not legs, nothing. I sit up with a straight back and think of nothing. In this world it is easier said than done. If I say my name softly to myself and in my mind’s eye over and over, I soon can achieve a kind of nothingness. Then I ask my Higher Self to access my Records for me in relation to the question I want an answer to. The Records usually only give me answers to my questions, nothing more.

  Sometimes I get past, present, and even future answers because the Records encompass all three and even more. There are future possibilities in the answers, as well as probabilities and even eventualities. You can use your Records for all kinds of purposes: family matters, business growth, creative ideas in art and music, and of course, problem solving with another person. There are some simple rules to observe to get better results.

  Don’t begin a question with “when” because time as we know it does not exist in the Records. The Records are not bound by Earth time or space. So when you ask when will you get married and have children, the answer would probably be “when you find love” or something like that, unrelated to when.

  It is best not to ask yes or no questions. They also are too limiting. The best questions are those that revolve around what, why, or how. It is not possible for negative or dark forces to influence the answers because all of the answers are protected by light, as are the Record Keepers, in order to preserve the integrity and purity of the Records.

  I always hear the answers because I am more clairaudient than clairvoyant. I can be involved with any kind of activity (even driving along the freeway) and ask a question that I will receive an answer about. Sometimes what I hear is funny, sometimes quite serious, and oftentimes I think I’m hearing myself talk back to me. It stands to reason that the voice I hear is like my own because the information is being filtered through my Higher Self.

  When my father was dying in the hospital, my Higher Self voice once said, “Take off his arm tourniquet, the nurse forgot to.” My father couldn’t speak and when I looked under the arm of his hospital robe, his skin had turned blue and he was in pain. When I removed it, he smiled so gratefully.

  Often I ask my Higher Self which way to go in a traffic jam. It’s always the correct answer and I save time (which doesn’t exist anyway, so what was the point?). Still, even the most enlightened of us doesn’t really want to sit in traffic!

  I don’t see energy fields and the like, I feel them. When I meet new people I sense them in a way that tells me I do or don’t want to be around them. And when my friends ask me to comment on something going on in their lives, I fall into a kind of connected trance and usually whatever I say makes sense. At this stage of my life I’m so happy and at peace living alone so that I can explore the “inner otherness” of what it means to be alive.

  When I meditate on the reality that the Akashic Records include all life in the universe, it is mind blasting. They are not just records of human energy, but of energies from all over the cosmos.

  When I think about the alignment of 2012, is it possible that all the negative galactic energies down through 26,000 years will be transformed and erased? In other words, will the karmic laws of cause and effect no longer be there? Will we simply start incurring new karm
a with a more enlightened consciousness as we move into the new age of the Great Cycle?

  I’m sorry that movies depict 2012 as a monumental disastrous event in order to rake in the money. We humans are so propagandized to be afraid that we actually pay money to feel it. The heads of networks and studios have told me that the fear-inducing films are so popular because people are so afraid in their own lives they look for fictional things to fear. It’s safer. Fear is a fictionalized feeling anyway. It seems real but the reasons for fear can be reasoned away, particularly if we understand there is no death. Roosevelt said it best: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

  Entire civilizations are ruled by fear. I think so often of the piece of intelligence that came out of World War II. It was called Project Paperclip. It projected that the human race could be ruled by the fear of four things in the future, in the following order: First, fear of communism; second, fear of terrorism; third, fear of asteroids; fourth, fear of extraterrestrials.

  We seem to be on schedule.

  Fear of asteroids will probably take first place relating to the 2012 alignment, and soon after that will be the extraterrestrials who I believe basically only want to help us. That will be one for the Book. The Book of Life—the Akashic Records.

  I Can’t Get Over My Frustration at Not Being Able to Open Anything I Buy

  I’ve broken every nail and nearly two fingers attempting to open sets of kitchen knives, sealed bottles, spices, makeup, vitamins, perfume, dog food, toothbrushes, hair brushes, and lipstick brushes. I’d like to brush up against the plastic-covering company’s president and plaster him with a piece of my mind, which I’ll probably break next, trying to open a hermetically sealed bottle of juice that could go bad because I can’t get to it!

  I Don’t Want to Get Over the World Leaders I Have Met

  One of the most impressive world leaders I have met is Ariel Sharon. Everyone called him Arik. I was in Israel with some friends, looking into the mysteries of the Old Testament and wondering about Armageddon.

  I visited Arik in his office many times and he was always taking meetings and reading poetry at the same time. I sat beside him as his glass of tea dribbled down his shirt and crumbs of his Danish hit the floor. He was at once an everyman and quite a commanding spectacle, and he knew it. He waded through space when he walked and was a commander of all he surveyed.

  Arik invited me to his ranch in the Negev Desert, where he baked bread for me under the stars. His wife was there, along with friends, as he performed this hospitality for me. He had named all of his animals and his plants, which he tended himself. He spoke of the beauty of the stars quite eloquently but never seemed to wonder what secret they might hold. He was an Old Testament warrior but never spoke of Armageddon. I noticed underneath a shock of hair on his forehead there were facial lines that formed a cross. When I brought that up, he quickly covered the lines with his hair. He knew how interested I was in metaphysics and the hidden codes of the Torah, from which the Bible Code had come later. He put on such a show for me, which I duly applauded and appreciated. He was profound, funny, yet extremely conservative, which was why he was endearing himself to me. Most of all, to me he was the most human of all the Israeli leaders I met. He knew I was an American liberal and he knew that I knew he was putting on a show for me. I only wished he would go deeper under the surface.

  A year later I was playing the Gershwin Theater in New York. When the curtain came down and I was on my way to my dressing room, the stage door elevator opened and out waded Arik. “You were wonderful,” he said. “Thank you.” I was flabbergasted. No one even knew he was in New York, much less at the theater. We talked for a while. He hugged me and left with invisible Mossad guards protecting him.

  My friend Bella Abzug had witnessed the embrace. She was sitting in my dressing room and was livid. “You are anti-Semitic,” she said. “How could you consort with such a warmonger?”

  I was genuinely shocked. Liking a conservative Jew made me anti-Semitic? She really meant it, too. She was my favorite friend but we had our differences. She attended many of my seminars as the “loyal opposition” and asked the harshest and most cynical questions. In fact once during a channeling session she was so “intellectually disturbed” by what was going on that she picked a fight with the spiritual guide coming through. She literally emptied the room. Yes, she had power even over spirit.

  But Sharon was the Old Testament guardian of the supposed End Times. That was why he was so conservative. He and the American fundamentalist preachers agreed on most everything. I was too liberal to agree with their violent end-times prophecies.

  Another impressive leader I met was Mikhail Gorbachev. He reminded me of my father, even the hairline. Whenever we’ve been together at meetings and conclaves he seems as though he looks right through me. I’d love to know what he was really thinking. He knows I know Roald Sagdaev, head of the Russian Space Agency, and maybe he’s wondering what Sagdaev and I have talked about. Gorbachev is friendly but quite stern. I don’t think he knows how to have fun. But I know he likes movie stars. I never met Raisa, his wife, but he has told me he wants a movie done on her life and he wants me to play her. I don’t know how I feel about that. She, from what I know, would not be one of my favorite people. But it might be fun to play a character I don’t like.

  • • •

  A female world leader who impressed me was Deng Yingchao, whom I met when I took a women’s delegation to China. It was arranged by Chiao Kuan-hua, the head of the Chinese delegation in New York, and the sister of the Shah of Iran, Princess Ashraf. I had spent many nights at dinner in the Iranian Embassy in New York. The Iranians loved movie stars and hearing the latest gossip. Ambassador Hoveyda was my favorite of the group, and he was a film critic as well, who was published in Paris. I found myself at dinner one night at the Iranian Embassy with the Communist Chinese and the Imperialist Persians. Princess Ashraf was seated across from me, wearing a diamond around her neck that would have roused Richard Burton from the dead. As she leaned over to eat, her diamond came loose from its chain and landed in the rice pilaf. I quickly looked at her face. There was no expression. Very surreptitiously she retrieved the diamond from her plate, wiped it off with her napkin, and clipped it onto the chain again. No one knew any better except the white-gloved servant who stood with his tray of food, which was partly on fire because it was a special Persian hot entrée. His face betrayed no knowledge of what happened either. But Ashraf saw me see it, and pretty soon I had an invitation to go to China.

  After Ashraf and the Shah were overthrown and Khomeini came in with the Revolution, I was horrified to see that Hoveyda was one of the first persons put to death by being burned in an oven. Such is the drama of leadership and loss of life in this world.

  When I mounted my delegation of women and went to China, one of the first people to greet us was Deng Yingchao, the wife of Chou En-lai. We were at a dancing event as she approached and I didn’t know who she was. She was so unassuming and friendly. She introduced herself and we sat and talked with a translator. She shook hands with all the women in my delegation, and then we spoke together of the need for women all over the world to hold up the Other Half of the Sky. As we spoke woman to woman, I noticed that everyone had tears in their eyes, including Deng Yingchao. Soon her tears slid down her cheeks and she excused herself. I wondered what the Chinese Revolution had been like for her. And now their new revolution was the emancipation and power inclusion of women. I remembered my first reaction to the unisex wardrobe of the women in China. I felt that it was liberating and women as sex objects had become a thing of the past. Deng kept tabs on our adventures in China, and as we were leaving, she sent me a note to help support the other half of the sky in my country. I felt I had glimpsed a little bit beneath the surface of this communist woman.

  I had met Indira Gandhi’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru, when I was in India and then shared a plane ride with him on my way back home to New York. One thing about being
a movie star is that most people want to meet you. So he had asked for me to sit with him on his visit to the U.N. (the year that Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk). As we hovered over New York waiting to land, Nehru looked down at the skyscrapers and the U.N. building and said, “I must keep the doors of my country open but careful that the winds don’t knock me off my feet.” I think he used that line somewhere later, but it was very effective when I heard it.

  When I met Indira Gandhi, she was most curious whether I worked for the CIA because I traveled so much. The Indian papers were full of my adventure in Bhutan when I got caught in a coup d’état. She smiled when I told her how much I loved adventure and I couldn’t be programmed to work for anybody under their rules anyway. We spoke about relations between China and India. Even back then it was a major concern. She said the Sikhs were commissioned to patrol the border for safety and if any blood was drawn it was compulsory for them to kill the adversary. That left little room for mistakes.

  We spoke of my intuitions that I had lived in India in the past. I told her I somehow was familiar with streets and temples. She was not surprised and said all of us humans had probably lived everywhere because we were, after all, a human family. I was happy that she, a woman in a position of great leadership, could still find opportunities to reveal some of her inner self to me, a relative stranger. That’s a case for more women leaders, I’d say.