Shirley MacLaine – Many Lifetimes

At 88 years old, Shirley MacLaine has not only had many past lives, but she has enjoyed many incarnations in this lifetime as an award-winning actress, dancer, honorary Rat Pack mascot, best-selling author, metaphysical student and teacher, political activist, and let’s not forget, Warren Beatty’s older sister.

Oprah has called her “one of my greatest teachers,” and I think many people feel the same way.

I had the pleasure of spending an hour on the phone talking with Shirley MacLaine, who is a big believer in reincarnation and life after death, while she was at her home in New Mexico.

I was surprised to find her so down to earth. One thinks of someone who has been labeled an icon for so many years as unapproachable, but Shirley was so sweet and kind. It was a lovely conversation.

She liked that I had seen her sing and dance at Caesars Palace years earlier, and that I had also seen her friends Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. perform there as well.

We talked about a lot of things including her childhood, politics (George W. Bush, Dick Chaney, George McGovern), how Marlon Brando introduced her to social activism, her adventures around the world, and her Chakra Sky jewelry collection.

She shared her thoughts about a world that irritates, confuses, provokes, and delights her with its beauty, humor, and hope for the future.

Shirley MacLaine’s Memoir

In her memoir, Above the Line: My Wild Oats Adventure, MacLaine discusses her experiences filming a low-budget, independent film in 2016 called Wild Oats with Jessica Lane and Demi Moore.

Shirley says her agent advised her not to do the film. The male leads weren’t even cast. The financing was shaky at best, and the script had been rewritten countless times.

And yet something about Wild Oats lured Shirley MacLaine to the film’s location in the Canary Islands—and straight to the center of one of the most thrilling and paradigm-shifting adventures of her life.

The making of the film read like a screwball comedy, as cast and crew faced unpredictable daily obstacles with ingenuity, grit, and personal sacrifice. Yet the chaos led Shirley to a new understanding of the demise of one of history’s most elusive and intriguing places.

Scholars have theorized that Spain’s Canary Islands are the remnants of the lost continent of Atlantis. As the movie set descended into pandemonium, Shirley found fascinating corollaries between the island’s cataclysmic fate and our own dangerous trajectory, and wondered if we can learn lessons the citizens of Atlantis failed to comprehend.

Shirley, who is always seeking bold new truths, discussed what she discovered about her past life on Atlantis with Matt Lauer (who has since been fired from NBC for sexual harassment).

MacLaine is Hollywood Royalty

As Hollywood Royalty, Shirley has starred opposite a long list of leading men including Frank Sinatra, Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, Peter Sellers, Anthony Hopkins, Jack Lemon, Michael Caine, and Jack Nicholson.

During her illustrious 56-year career, she has starred in more than 63 films and earned four Oscar nominations for Some Came Running (1958), The Apartment (1960), Irma LaDouce (1963), and The Turning Point (1977), before winning for playing Debra Winger’s mother in Terms of Endearment (1983).

Here is a video clip of Shirley MacLaine’s acceptance speech. It is intelligent, emotional, philosophical, and utterly brilliant.

It was Rock Hudson who presented Shirley MacLaine with her Oscar for Best Actress in 1983. It was profoundly sad back then that gay men, especially handsome, leading men like Rock Hudson, were forced to live inauthentic lives rather than be honest about their sexuality. Two short years later, in 1985, Rock Hudson died from AIDS.

It was Rock’s friend, Elizabeth Taylor, who worked diligently to bring the disease out of the shadows and into the light, help educate the public, and find a cure.

Throughout her career, MacLaine continues to work with the most popular actors —playing Nicole Kidman’s mother in Bewitched (2005), and Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette’s grandmother in In Her Shoes: (2005). She’s been in Rumor Has It (2005) with Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Costner,  earned an Emmy nomination for playing fashion icon Coco Chanel in the 2008 made-for-TV movie by the same name,  and was in Valentine’s Day (2010) with Ashton Kutcher, Julia Roberts, and  Jamie Foxx.

LIFE LESSON: Most actors, who have been adored and catered to, have a hard time as they get older and their parts get smaller. But Shirley is comfortable in her own skin, even as it wrinkles and sags. That’s something we should all learn because as a society we are obsessed with youth rather than valuing the wisdom of our elders. I respect and admire Shirley for remaining curious and engaged, for seeking knowledge and understanding of this life and the hereafter.

Shirley is a prolific writer, who has filled 12 books with her life experiences, including I’m Over All That (2011), in which she writes about her love affairs with two prime ministers, scientists, journalists, and co-stars.

She says of her only husband, Steve Parker, who she was married to from 1954 to 1982:

I believe the people who hurt us the most are true servants to our learning. I believe it’s time to give up the role of victim and pay tribute to those who open our eyes regardless of how harsh their methods might be. They are masters who stimulate us to know ourselves. Steve was a master for me. Because of him I became free of blinding dependence upon a man. When a dreadful experience occurs, I ask how I contributed to this reality. If I have the power to create or allow unhappiness and misery, I also have the power to un-create it.”

LIFE LESSON: It’s hard to look at those who have hurt, angered, and disappointed us as our teachers. But how can we otherwise learn important lessons? If you believe in reincarnation as Shirley MacLaine does, maybe they volunteered to take on the role of the bad guy in order for us to grow.

Excerpts From An Interview

Here is an excerpt from my interview with Shirley MacLaine, which you can find in the Interviews section of this website.

MR: How did you come to believe in reincarnation?

SM: I suppose I got my metaphysical leanings from my parents. Mother told me she was at her father’s side when he died, and his last words were, ‘Oh, it’s so beautiful.’

My father told me about an out-of-body experience he had when he cracked up his car. He left his body and met his father and mother again. He saw the light of God around them and knew that was his real home. He wanted to go into the light, but a voice stopped him and said he needed to go back to Earth and finish the work he’d agreed to do.

My dad never told anyone about his experience until I brought home my first metaphysical book. He was glad to talk to someone about it. I knew how he felt. It had happened to me in Peru when I sat on a mountaintop in the Andes and left my body to witness the Earth below me. I wondered if I was crazy, or if I was liberated from limitations. Dad told me he’d seen his best buddy appear at the foot of his bed at the exact moment he died in World War II. I asked if he thought anyone ever really died. He looked at me with a quizzical expression, but didn’t say anything.

Probably one of the reasons why reincarnation makes sense to me is because I understand how each one of us is so many people. I don’t mean multiple personalities in the sense of a psychological disorder. I mean each of us has had multiple experiences in past lifetimes that equip our souls with memories and intuitions that can’t be explained any other way.

How did I know and recognize streets and temples when I first went to India? Why did I find myself speaking Portuguese when I was in Brazil? Each human being can point to any number of similar experiences, specific moments that make them wonder why and how they know what they know.

When one understands karma and reincarnation, then the physical re-embodiment of the soul is paramount. I believe that every human soul is in control of his or her destiny, depending on what each human needs to work on the next time around. The soul lives on and the learning of self continues.

MR: When you were 60. you spent 31 days walking 458 miles alone along the Santiago de Compostela Camino, an ancient pilgrimage in northern Spain that you write about in your book, The Camino: A Journal of the Spirit. What was that like?

SM: The Camino is sacred ground that millions of people including Charlemagne, Chaucer, and St. Francis of Assisi trekked over the last 5,000 years. Its meridians are aligned with the Milky Way.

While walking the Camino, one of the things I remembered was being a Muslim gypsy girl, who migrated from Morocco and was living with the Coptic Christians in the hills of Spain. I remembered a cross I wore that was supposed to protect me from Muslims and Christians.

One day in present time, I was guided to a jewelry store in a small village on the Camino. I looked in the window and saw that cross that 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. The cross was the only thing I bought on my journey, and I take it with me whenever I leave home.

My life often seemed like a story with no beginning and no end. I felt like I was an historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. I could imagine I had lived in former centuries and encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had been born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me.”

– Carl Jung

We may live other lifetimes, but let’s make this one count!