Shirley MacLaine, 2000, The Camino, Journey of the Spirit, Pocket Books, New York, New York.

MacLaine did the Camino from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, in June and early July 1994. A journey, mostly on foot, of 500 miles. Mostly on foot because to avoid the press, she arranged to be driven through a few of the towns, and walked between the towns. I read it for her description of the walk, and found some of what I was looking for, but the book spends a lot of time on MacLaine’s personal spiritual revelations, both in dreams and when awake. Some of her dreams and insights were right up my alley, some were way out and slid out of the bounds of even my rather accepting and non-critical view of others' spiritual experiences.

On page 6, she mentions a meeting with a pair of women who met with extraterrestrials, in South Africa. When MacLaine asked them when they would meet with them next, they said they didn’t know, it would be when the pink house was painted white. MacLaine had just painted her pink ranch house white, so now they knew it could happen anytime. This reminds me of my waterlilies experience, a Paris hotel room had waterlily decor, and when I returned to the States a woman in Texas asked what this waterlily business in Paris was all about. But, no alien visitations were involved, just a visit by an Earthling that had been dead 700 years (it is a long story, told elsewhere on this site in words and photos).

MacLaine tells of visits by angelic entities and by a soul she has been associated with for a number of lives, and who even now reveals the history and meaning of human life to her. A lot of themes of the New Age are illustrated by her tales. She has deja vu experiences along the way and is directed to an out of the way antique store where she bought a Medieval gold cross that, her inner promptings as well as her spirit-guide tell her was once hers when she was a Muslim girl who allowed herself to be baptized so she could work as a healer among the Christians on this very trail during the days of Charlemagne. Her spiritual advisor, who baptized her, was John the Scot, high-ranking priest in the emperor’s service. Charlemagne in a later life became Olaf Palme, Swedish Prime Minitser in a recent incarnation, according to MacLaine. MacLaine and Palme had an affair, she was devastated by his assassination.

I must give MacLaine credit for being careful to not claim her visions convey absolute truth. She hints that these visions originated within her, even John the Scot is a creature of her imagining. But the she does say several times that imaginings such as these must have a basis in reality.

The first instance of this is on page 10 where she asks: “On my journey westward along the Camino, I felt I was traveling backward in time to a place that began the experiences that made me and the human race what we have become today. Yes, I could say it was a mythological and imaginative experience, but then what is myth and what is imagination? All fancies of the consciousness are based on some kind of memory, or why would they be there?”

That is the kind of question that makes one stare in bewilderment. All imagination is memory? I haven’t encountered that thought before. Don’t think I want to give it much credence either. Does all imagination perhaps touch or reach toward archetypes implanted in us? That is as far as I will go, but to make that stick you have to buy into Jung’s view of things.

So she really believes that in the very distant past of human existence, the civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis in which she imagines/remembers herself performing important roles were real and highly advanced. Advanced, until a time when beings, who were once both male and female at the same time, split themselves into male and female beings. .She tells of her own undergoing such a splitting, and then becoming the mate of the female she split off from her former wholeness. It is an interesting story. My mother really liked it. I did too, even though I sometimes felt disappointed that a book on the Camino experience turned out to be an excuse to explain how humanity and the universe should and could work. Which returns me to a subject MacLaine brings up at the beginning and the end of the book.

Earth upheavals and the human spiritual condition

MacLaine says there is a correlation between destructive earth upheavals and the spirituality, or lack thereof, of its human population. This goes beyond my credibility’s ability to stretch. I believed this once, wholeheartedly, when I was a true-believing Mormon. It was a visionary refrain sung powerfully by early Mormon prophets like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, especially the latter, and it is in line with Biblical innuendo as well. Plagues and tempests and floods are God’s punishments for wickedness, for example. Modern fundamentalist Muslims belive the earth must be cleansed of infidels to please God and stave off his wrath which leads to destruction through natural upheavals. But it is just so much hogwash, in my mind. The good news is that through all previous upheavals of a destructive nature, humanity has survived, even thrived, and there is nothing to say that the destructiveness of natural earth upheavals is going to escalate except prophecies from people about as inspired as you or I.

MacLaine has several illustrations of her lack of spirituality leads to destruction theme. I simply don’t buy it. Look at our modern tidal wave, flood and earthquake deaths. The numbers are staggering. I defy you to show that the affected populations were any better or worse, in terms of their spirituality or spiritual awareness or maturity, then unaffected populations. Earth simply has these natural occurrences, and we get in the way sometimes making them genuine catastrophes. It is very sad, but that simple. If you live somewhere where these things do not happen, you are not being rewarded by God for being good. You are simply somewhere where the earth is more stable.

Let’s get into another theme or two that bothered me a little.

Science is the new religion, and like the religion is displaces it keeps people from experiencing and knowing spirituality

A variant on this theme was central to Paulo Coelho’s book: believing that what one’s intellect delivers is all there is keeps one from knowing the universe through our intuitive faculties. That far I can happily go. Where MacLaine takes us, however, is too far. She says on pages 9 and 10:

         . . . “When the journey of the soul is recognized, a restabilization of the emotions takes place. There was no doubt that my emotions and the emotions of the world were out of balance when I began the Camino. During the journey I began to understand why. Many thought of the Camino as a religious trek. I could understand that because of the surrounding religious icons, churches, and reminders of what the church had established in relation to human life. But I saw how the church had attempted to mold its constituency into its societal perspective, sculpting the domain of feelings away from individual spirituality even as it claimed spiritual superiority. Then I realized that the world of religious domination of earlier times had given way to a scientific world today that sought to shed itself of the spiritual and emotional domination of the past in favor of a world of scientific, technological ‘facts.’

         “Those scientists of human behavior who refused to observe through their own emotions were missing the point of reality. Individual feelings received no respect in their world. They had dehumanized human feelings and emotions, disregarding them in favor of what they term collective observations, which were agreed upon in the world. They didn’t even give themselves permission to be human. If they were not rational and ‘scientific’ in their observations they were ostracized. Even the expression of emotion was unseemly in their world. Though they claimed to be seeking the truth about its inhabitants, in reality they were establishing a new mind-set that refused the capacity to feel.

         “So, in effect, science had freed itself from the domination of the church, only to become the modern dominator of the truth today. The chains have simply changed hands. The new enslaver of truth is science, and we are seeing its effect on human behavior everywhere. Without the recognition of the soul’s journey within us, we are lost and only part of what we were intended to be.”

MacLaine then goes on to say that we were meant to have joy. The religious domination we experienced in the past, and the scientific domination of the present, keep us from joy. She may have a point there, but it is all too simple for my taste. For example, ecstatic mystics in almost every religious tradition broke through this ceiling of corporate spirituality she describes, and which is real. They broke through and gave us some of the most individualistic and powerful revelations of the Divine within us ever uttered or written. At the same time, some of my scientist friends are religious people who claim spirituality. Yet in their laboratories they do such things as measuring the effects of radiation on the structure of a particular kind of matter at a given temperature. They measure the conditions needed to make the material lose its crystalline structure and become amorphous. This has some potentially useful applications. How is it unspiritual to focus only on the facts that are reproducibly produced by varying radiation intensity or temperature? How else would one do science? As far as behavioral science is concerned, how can one possibly get out of compiling innumerable anecdotes if one follows MacLaine’s advice? How can one begin to compile a description of the apparent superstructure of human behavior and motivation except by the approach decried by MacLaine?

If one is silly enough to believe that truth is only found in science, one should become a scientist and see how dynamic and fluid knowledge is at all levels from the atom to the universe. Doesn’t mean we ought to go back to dogma where science does offer insight. But it does mean that only those who do not know science believe it is the new religion. So there, that is my opinion.

Are there religionists who decry spirituality? Are there scientists who do so? Sure. Individual revelation is like any other aspect of human behavior: diverse. Uncontrolled it will destroy, by fragmentation, any religion. Do individual revelations also sometimes come into conflict with science? Sure. Revelation should never be a substitute for what can be determined by disciplined observation and experiment. Religious views on creation should never be paraded as if they were scientific. And science should never be sold as the final truth and the only truth there is.

MacLaine has been contaminated by the New Age enthusiasm for the phase that subatomic particle physics seems to have gone through in the 1970's. It is now well out of that phase and the catalog of subatomic particles is nearly complete. The dogmas of there being no need to look for more particles because the researcher was creating whatever he wished to see by the influence of his subconscious has been swept away into the rubbish heap by the painstaking measurement and cataloging of particle after particle. Does that mean there is no longer room for the existence of a spiritual force in the universe? The enthusiasm for finding that higher-vibration and smaller matter that is spirit was misplaced to start with: it was a materialistic quest for defining the ineffable in terms of forces we could measure and understand. Lucky for our sanity, the ineffable is always, always out of reach of human intellect. It can be experienced and felt, not measured and captured in equations. Enjoy the fact of your spirit and spirituality. Stop doubting it exists because physics hasn’t seen it yet. Be thankful, or it may become another packaged, advertised, commercial commodity.

On pages 174-175 MacLaine mentions physics: “The definition of ‘reality’ changed with quantum physics. The great thinkers of quantum physics know that science and religion exist, however polarized, as methods of explaining the mystery of God.”

I doubt if this generalization regarding the “great thinkers of quantum physics” has more than a handful of persons who would raise their hand and say this was true for them. But physicists are people too. Physics, however, has no tool or instrument wherewith to discern “the mystery of God.” If physicists are trying to discern this mystery, they are doing so as people, and as people have always done so, through their intuitive faculties, not their brains, instruments, and laboratories. No matter how great the instrument or how powerful, the mystery of God is safe from them. MacLaine goes in that direction in the next statement she makes, and I have no problem with it at all except that I am not sure there is any way to know whether the unknowable has any laws to obey:

         “Perhaps there were two realities. The material reality of the brain and the Divine reality of the soul. The Divine reality being the landscape of the soul, which knows and obeys no physical laws.”

What MacLaine says next is important, and echoes the central theme (I think it is the central theme) of the Coelho book: the need to experience life intuitively as well as in thought. I’ll cite MacLaine’s discourse on this theme on page 175 because its ‘bottom line’ matches my own experience and insight:

         “The reality of my soul seemed to want to communicate to me and to my brain and wanted to be understood and acknowledged and factored into my life today. In fact, my soul was entreating me to understand that it was the repository of all my experience down through time and that now as I walked, it was communicating such [past life] events to my brain.

         “I was felling that my brain and my soul had merged and had become a medium for my understanding. My soul was knocking on the walls of my brain, longing to be acknowledged as the possessor of knowledge beyond my understanding. Was my brain beginning to open its doors?”

I mentioned that its ‘bottom-line’ matched my own experience and insights: I learned that I was not my intellect, at one point in my life, and that I also had an intuitive set of faculties that could bring me understanding and insight. Nevertheless, my intellect was important. But a whole life was one lived with intellect and intuition in balance. MacLaine gets close to saying this same thing, in fact she is saying this same thing, but in words and imagery I would not use.

The wild dogs of Foncebadon (something also important in Coelho’s book)

MacLaine has let it be known there is a fear of dogs at play within her, and it with serious foreboding that she enters Foncebadon where there are rumored to be packs of dogs that attack pilgrims. Sure enough, on pages 168-171 we are treated to a “monstrous pack”of dogs that seemed to threaten MacLaine and her fellow pilgrims, but they became confused, apparently by MacLaine’s sending love-imbued heart images toward them. They went their way

and returned to herding cows that they were in the process of bringing into town. So much for wild dogs, I thought, until I spoke with a person who has been traveling in sheep country here in Nevada who said that if the shepherd isn’t there, sheep-herding dogs may well kill a person who may thus be interpreted by them to pose a threat to the flock. In fact, the way he described their pack-behavior, all coming to see what is going on, one starting to act aggressive and the rest joining in, is very similar to how MacLaine described part of the dog’s behavior that she encountered. Luckily the pack lost interest. So she was in danger, especially separated as she was from her fellow travelers. MacLaine observes: “I couldn’t see whether they would test the fear of another pilgrim or whether they returned to herding the cows.” Her fellow travelers did not even seem to notice the dogs. This leads me to think that to a large extent, MacLaine created her own fear-filled reality where the dog-danger business is concerned. People walk through this place every day, probably the dogs are used to that, and though curious, they are likely not the threat MacLaine’s fear suggested they might be. Maybe the love-imbued heart-images that were thrown at the dog that menaced MacLaine awakened its appetite, and seeing that the source of all this meat-imagery was still walking about made it mad?

The person whose job it is to get pilgrims on their way officially (something also important in Coelho’s book)

MacLaine goes looking for a Mme. de Brill in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port who is a very unpleasant character who is mean and rude to all pilgrims (pp. 28-29), offends them all, but they can’t get their official papers that give them entry to the pilgrim refuges, hostels and kitchens without visiting her. One wonders why such a person would have such a job. In the book by Coelho, she has a different name, a similar disposition, but that disposition changes when Coelho says the code words that let her know he is part of the esoteric tradition she also works for. It is simply curious to me that both these books find it necessary to have such a person be the way pilgrims coming on that particular trail have to get their official start. Maybe it is just the way it is, and the two different names simply show there are several doing this work, depending on the time of day, vacation schedules, etc. Maybe they are supposed to discourage would-be pilgrims. But why? It is a great regional source of both income and annoyance.

An interesting portrayal of the nature of God and role of Christ

On pages 182-183 there is another discussion of imagination and reality, which borders on the absurd in my opinion. But I have to give MacLaine credit for taking a thought to its endpoint as far as its implications are concerned. If we conjure up all aspects of the realities that make up our lives, then how can we trust that there is any reality? Her mentor in spirit, the man whom she knew here during the time of Charlemagne when she was a baptized Moorish girl healer wearing a cross says that the road and its pilgrims are conjured up by her imagination as surely as he is. She should have both trust and faith in the realities she has created. MacLaine rightly blurts out at that point: “Then what is God” And her guide answers nicely that: “God is he loving energy with which you create.”

Wow! Great comeback! That answer gave me pause. It may be close to my own belief in terms of God being the force behind and in all creation, God being Creation! Except the role assigned by MacLaine’s mentor to puny humans, that is going too far. And being on a road travelled by Christians, the obvious question comes up: ‘what then of Christ?’ That question is never asked, bu the answer is given anyway on page 183, and it is about as fantastic, to me, as the stock Christian answer (I believe neither, in other words):

“The cross represents the resolution of earth-plane issues. That was the symbolism of the resurrection. Jesus was the master of those resolutions and when he ‘died’ on the cross, he balanced everyone’s issues alive on the earth at that time. He took the collective karma of mankind onto his shoulders during his crucifixion. That was why it was so painful for him. He initiated the consciousness of human life into the vibration of love. That is why it is said that he died for mankind’s sins. To be more accurate, he cleansed mankind’s karma up to that point. Gave them a clean slate, so to speak. He was a true master, and he said, ‘Ye will do as I have done and even greater.’ He said that the kingdom of heaven and God is within everyone.”

So, now we have the true religion explained. MacLaine asks if this energy used by Jesus is the God energy her guide was speaking of, and of course it was, the same energy MacLaine had experienced on her trek at times. MacLaine is not convinced and condenses all this talk between herself and her guide, whom she has conjured up out of her own imagination, as a conversation with herself to reveal to herself what she already knows. (This ‘learning what you already know’ is also a theme in Coelho’s book). The guide tells her to accept this as being as much a fact as anything else, and changes the subject by asking her where her trek is taking her.

Going beyond reason to define the purpose of life

MacLaine answers that this path is taking her to the end of the known world according to legend (pre-Christian pilgrims traveled this route under the Milky Way to reach the end of the earth, Finsterre. They did not stop at Santiago de Compostela as MacLaine did. Her guide than says this is the right answer, and takes her beyond the known world to her fantastic lives in Atlantis and Lemuria already alluded to. Chapter 15 rightly begins by warning the reader she will now tell this story, but it is “off the Camino and to the edge of reason” –actually it goes way over that edge and ought to be read symbolically only. She basically rewrites all human history in this chapter. It is very interesting. It conveys some good insights into human nature and how it can be made more joyful. But fact? No. Imagination without benefit of memory – sorry Shirley, this is simply an attempt at science fiction with a moral overlay. As that, it isn’t bad.

In addition to rewriting ancient history, she also rewrites, in that context, religion: humanity’s relation to God, in what I thought to be a shockingly orthodox way. Here is where she realizes that the splitting of previously whole androgynous beings into male and female partial beings plays an important role in the scheme designed by God (p. 269):

         “If the human being learned to serve, he would also be serving the Divine, and with the separation of the sexes into two beings, the Creator would therefore have more beings to bear witness to it. The male and female were to go forth and multiply, thereby allowing the opportunity for more souls to incarnate on the physical plane, which would provide them a vehicle for working through their karma back to the Divine state of being.”

What a lame explanation! What a disappointment to go through all the pain of the fall of Atlantis and Lemuria just to come to this outcome, which sounds like a paraphrase from some modern theologian who also doesn’t have a clue (because the purpose of life is up to us to create for ourselves, there is no overarching purpose, sentience is its own reason for being, to us recipients it is a gift with no strings, only opportunities to find joy through love and aiding others to find joy).

Having children for the purpose of providing more voices who can testify of the Creator, who is nought but a force we use to create, is really, really unsatisfactory and disappointing.

One thing I skipped over: sex. In mentioning it now I will not give a page number, because I want you to read at least part of the book for yourself. But somewhere in the telling of this splitting of formerly androgyne beings into male and female beings, there is a description of an idealized sexual experience that becomes a physical union, a spiritual union, and an ineffable revelation all at the same time. It was interesting to me because it sets up an ideal for sex/love that is also mentioned in other New Age type treatises I have read, including a Coelho book I have reviewed (Eleven Minutes). But it also gave me some insight into Maclaine’s make-up. She sees a meeting of equals engaged in giving love as a gift to one another as essential to deep, soul-stirring and enlivening sex. An ideal? Yes.  One worthy of contemplation?  One worthy of emulation?  I don't think it can be done just as she described it, we aren't built quite that way.  Some of my writings on the ideal core of Courtly Love hint in this same direction, but in an oblique way, and not in the direct and physical way MacLaine delves into the subject.

The epilogue

I liked MacLaine’s epilogue because it reminded me of my departures from places I had become attached to: you look down as the plane moves up and feel the emotions you experienced while there again, and relive some of the highlights of your visit which are now fond (hopefully) memories. She also revisits the thought with which I started my review with this surprising (to me) set of provocative and interesting questions, followed by a last question that gives within it a most unsatisfying answer (p. 302):

         “Then I wondered: Was what we called imagination truly based on soul memory? Would we ever know the truth of our soul’s past and therefore dream a more magnificent future? Would we learn to trust that once, billions of years ago, the Divine Spirit had been lonely and created us into being, to live as a family of children who loved the Deity with all our hearts and all our souls and our neighbor as ourselves?”

On page 305 MacLaine says from her reliving her Lemurian/Atlantean experience she has learned much about the nature of male/female relationships and how they ought to be rather than are. Good. But in the very next paragraph she suggests there to be a role for ‘extraterrestrial input.’ She says, and I do not doubt this, that “it is foolish to believe we are alone” . . . in the universe. But then she says: “Therefore, I believe it is time for light to shine on possible cover-ups and for us to open ourselves to new horizons by acknowledging the full potential of their existence.” Huh?

She says, in the next paragraph, something I do identify with: “The earth energy itself holds the unexplained mysteries of our spiritual origins.” But then she claims that if we would be balanced and harmonious, so would she. This is where once again my eyes roll up in disbelief. I liked much better, in fact, her very first mention of the relationship between earth and us on her opening page where she writes this, which I find profound and which I partly agree with on an intuitive level even if my intellect says something different (pp. 1-2):

         “Everyone holds his or her own philosophical and religious belief. Spirit is something else. By Spirit, I believe everything that we know and understand to be physically tangible and existent in the five dimensions is in fact the manifestation of a more subtle and nonvisible energy that exists simultaneously. Spirit vibrates at a higher frequency than the physical dimension and is the higher reality. Spirit manifests as life through form.

         “Thus I came to believe that the surface of the earth is the matter and form through which a higher subtle electromagnetic spiritual energy flows.

         “Just as human beings are the physical vehicles for expressing their spiritual and multidimensional selves, so the geological earth is the physical vehicle for manifestation of ancient memories and an alive inner Spirit.

         “Why then, if Spirit flows through the earth and through all of us, is the state of the world so unfortunate?”

At this point MacLaine connects nature’s lack of peace with the lack of peace in the consciousness of humans, which I find to be a highly unsatisfactory proposition. Why does my intellect object to some of the words quoted above? Because they make statements of fact that are, at best useful if meant to be symbolic. Even my intuitive side shrinks from going along with this very physical and materialistic explanation of Spirit as a matter so fine that is exists at a higher vibration than any visible or otherwise detectable form of matter. The idea of earth having a spirit is good Mormon doctrine, as is the idea of spirit being physical but substantive at a finer, more refined level. So I found nothing really revolutionary and new in this. What I found profound was the idea that there is a connection between us and the surface of this earth. Having felt that connectedness myself, I am not just talking gravity), this has great appeal. Earth is mother to us, physically, we are made of her material, and why not in terms of our intelligence or spirit as well?

Earth deserves more respect, as MacLaine suggests many times in her book. Amen to that.

She also makes a statement on page 306 that I liked, but one again it goes way beyond where I would draw my boundaries around such a statement. She says “Perhaps all of it is simple. We came from the Divine; we create with that imaginative energy until we return to it. Lifetime after lifetime.” This proposition is by no means simple, and it is by no means a certainty that we have lived life after life, at least in the way MacLaine imagines/describes such lives.

Page 307 repeats something she has already said before: “We each create it all. And again, the absence of evidence does not mean the evidence of absence. Imagine that.” Sorry, that simply does not compute in my mind, and it does not resonate in my intuition. But the fact that it does both for her means it is her reality, and I should and do respect that. In fact, maybe Shirley has a good point: all of us have and live our own reality. Although we can debate forever how much of that reality we create, it is a very good thing to realize and know that we create the life we feel we are living once we become adults. And if something about that life does not suit us, the power is within us to change, to create a new life for ourselves. Now there is a useful, positive and empowering message that I image (hence it is fact) Shirley and I would whole-heartedly agree on.

A testable assertion

I was a bit snide, at the start of this review, when I wondered if this trip along the Camino was just an excuse to tell past-life stories already fuly formed. In fact, at the very beginning of the book where she tells of the connectedness of earth and human spirit, she prepares us to expect some memory revelations because the Camino she is traveling is aligned with a ‘ley line’ in the earth that facilitates exactly such recall episodes as she conveys. And here we have a testable assertion. Anyone can spend some time on this Camino and see if they think more clearly there and have memories come flooding in in an unusual way. As Maclaine proclaims on her pages 4 and 5:

“It is said that the ‘Camino’ –the road or the way–lies directly under the Milky Way and follows ley lines that reflect the energy from those star systems above it.

         “In Eastern philosophies the spiritual life force of the earth is called prana. This prana is inexorably linked with the life force of the sun, providing energy for all life.

         “The life force is especially strong along lines of energy called ley lines. These ley lines are the essential structure of the earth’s etheric spirit. They are usually fairly straight, varying in width and intensity. A [vertical] cross section of a ley line looks like an hourglass, the narrow middle intersecting at the earth’s surface. The ley energy exists below the earth and above it, equally. This energy emanates at a very high frequency and, when experienced by a human consciousness, induces clarity of thought, experience, memory, and revelation.”

So there we have it. A testable hypothesis, as they would say in science. Will I go test it? Maybe so. But not this trip.  No opportunity.

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