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I of my own knowledge…
Of God and Shirley MacLaine
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by Frank DeMarco |
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It was 1987. I was living in the Norfolk, Virginia, area, age 40, in my first year as Associate Editor for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, happily writing editorials, columns and book reviews, living, or trying to live, according to my silent prayer, “Dear God, show me the way.” Yet I was unable to write the books I wanted to write, and I had other problems, including, notably, chronic intense back pain.
My chiropractor one Tuesday she showed me that my x-ray films showed a thinning of pads in the hips and heavy calcium deposits on the bones. On the x-rays it looked like frosting! And nothing could be done. I was beginning to become an old man, and I was only 40. So along with the pain came depression, of course.
My wife suggested that I might want to watch “Out on a Limb,” actress Shirley MacLaine’s two-part TV special. I dislike and distrust television, and I didn’t have any particular interest in Shirley MacLaine’s spiritual searchings. But I was in pain, without anything better to do. Why not watch a little TV? So I watched the first night’s three-hour program. The longer it went, the more intensely interested I got — and the damnedest thing happened. When I got up at 11 p.m. to go to bed, I suddenly realized that for the first time in days, my back didn’t hurt! (What’s more, the arthritis of the spine disappeared. I had years of back pain yet ahead, but never again from arthritis.)
It would be years before I learned the “how” of what had happened, but even at the time I took it as a wake-up call. The first of MacLaine’s Higher Self Seminars was going to be held in nearby Virginia Beach (in honor of Edgar Cayce). It would cost $300, no small amount then, but I decided to attend. And so I was one of the 600-plus people who filed into the Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach that Saturday morning.
The newspaper ad had said that the seminar would offer: “Group meditations, techniques in visualization, chakra-raising sessions, questions and answers relating to past-life recognition, how we create our own reality, and the final connection with the Higher Self.” I saw, clearly enough, the expert manipulation that had been used in the wording of the ad, but what she offered, she delivered. In the very first visualization exercise, her voice led us to visualize crossing a river to where the Higher Self would be waiting. To my astonishment, there indeed was an image, one I never would have consciously chosen.
My Higher Self appeared as a unicorn! A unicorn, a magical, mythological beast. For the first time, I realized why my father–who could be symbolized as a loyal, dependable work horse–had always been so dismissive of my beliefs. He thought I was “really” a horse too–and what was he to make of a horse who thought he was a unicorn? My unworldliness had worried him. By telling me (against my active resistance) “the way things are,” he had tried to protect me. The gift of the situation, besides all the practical things he did teach me, was that living with him provided me with an understanding of skeptics and cynics. On the other hand, I realized that weekend, I’m not a horse. I am what I am! I am different, and that difference is to be prized.
I had asked myself in my journal, that morning, what I wanted from the seminar, and had decided that “what I’d chiefly want is to be spiritually, physically, mentally whole. I’m so tired of being a fragment, and a crippled fragment at that.” That weekend of healing brought me part-way toward wholeness—which means, health.
When I got home, I wrote up a 2,000-word piece for my newspaper’s Commentary section, to appear the following Sunday. I didn’t try to describe meeting my “higher self,” because it is futile to describe such things. Yet I didn’t hide behind the journalist’s facade of pretended impartiality. I was more willing to be called a fool than to pretend that nothing had happened to me.
But I admit, I had qualms when, on the Friday before publication, I saw the article in page proofs! They had titled it “In the Spirit,” and had made my suggested headline (“Shirley MacLaine’s not the only one out on a limb”) into a subhead. “Oh God,” I thought, “what have I done?” Nothing in the piece was phony or shallow. But it was so open and unprotected! I suddenly wasn’t so sure I wanted it so widely distributed.
On the Monday following, I went to work braced for a wave of criticism or ridicule. Instead, I got reinforcement. Reporters and editors talked to me (carefully!) in the hallways, showing intense but strictly private interest, even fascination. It was my first experience of how much underground interest there is in the subject.
This turned out to be my introduction to the local New Age community, because in 1987, a newspaper article giving “inside” (and favorable) coverage of a metaphysical event was unprecedented. The article drew some favorable phone calls, and a local radio host had me on his show to talk about the seminar. But it wasn’t long before we received a wave of letters to the editor. A few were positive, but far more were critical. And although my article had criticized materialism, rather than fundamentalism, nearly all the adverse letters came from fundamentalists rather than from materialists. (Maybe science-worshippers considered the subject beneath their notice.)
I was bemused. My piece hadn’t attacked their religious beliefs even implicitly. Contacting your higher self needn’t be done within a Christian framework, yet certainly may be, and has been for nearly two thousand years, as I had explicitly said. And I had written in a very low-key, matter-of-fact manner, sensing that dramatization is falsification. Yet here were people saying that getting in touch with our higher selves was the work of the devil.
One man wrote that as “a person’s spirit becomes open, the susceptibility to demonic influences increases. I know this to be true because at one time I touched on the occult and received a very bad experience.” He suggested that searchers “do it under God’s guidance by way of a qualified person such as a pastor or priest in an established church.”
As if people like me would have been still searching if we had found what we need in an established church!
Another said Shirley MacLaine “offers more abstraction and vagueness to a large group of desperate souls in search of a quick fix in their spiritual lives.” He said she “came to town to peddle an ancient, rehashed version of sorcery and nether-world indulgence.” He added that she had been his favorite actress, but was “now someone who must be avoided at all costs. The Holy Spirit demands it.” This name-calling was justified, presumably, because he knew what The Holy Spirit demands.
Another said she was “shocked and appalled at the publicity your newspaper gave the seminar,” which she termed a “rip-off.” Ms. MacLaine, she said, had used “various brainwashing techniques such as `visualization’” and was “playing with fire.” I was to learn in years to come that many fundamentalist churches teach that meditation is dangerous as “Satan can insert thoughts into open minds.” God, apparently, can’t.
Well, I knew I could trust the Higher Self, and knew I could trust God. But each of these labels came with its own emotional nuances, and they didn’t fit all that well together. It’s too easy for the idea of God to overwhelm our experience of any larger spiritual reality. Higher Self was a pretty vague concept, but that didn’t really matter. I didn’t know just what I had connected to at the seminar, but I did know that I had connected to something. I now had something that I didn’t just believe, but knew first-hand. It was a start. And because I had honestly and openly reported what had happened to me, I set out upon the path that brought me to a vastly expanded universe.
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Frank DeMarco,
Author, publisher, editor, & psychic explorer.
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Frank DeMarco holds an M.A. in History from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in History from George Washington University.
His work as co-founder and (for 15 years) chief editor of Hampton Roads Publishing Company brought him into close association with many brilliant and insightful minds, including psychics, remote viewers, channelers and mystics, and showed him the human side of extraordinary abilities.
In 1992, his psychic abilities opened up at a Gateway Voyage at The Monroe Institute in central Virginia. Since then he has been engaged in first-hand exploration of the nature and limits of all things psychic, especially including such areas as healing and guidance, direct access to knowledge, communication with past lives, and the integration of the spiritual dimension into everyday life.
His autobiographical work Muddy Tracks: Exploring an Unsuspected Reality describes the first stages of his discovery of the key to expanded awareness, and offers pointers for those just beginning their quest. In his weblog, www.frankdemarco.
wordpress.com, he shares the journey and the results of continuing explorations. His blog, “I of my own knowledge…” investigates what individuals can know first-hand about the purpose and conduct of life.
Contact info
blog: http://frankdemarco.
wordpress.com/
email:
muddytracks@
earthlink.net
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