Dave Loomis, one of my fellow editors, selected which letters to the editor would appear in the paper. At the time, I didn’t think to ask to see the unedited letters, nor did I think to ask to see the letters he did not select for publication. So I cannot know if the letters that appeared were representative. All I know is that nearly all the adverse letters came from fundamentalists.
My article criticized materialism rather than fundamentalism, So far as I could see, 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 explicitly said. I had written in a very low-key, matter-of-fact manner, sensing that dramatization is falsification, and that descriptions of metaphysical pursuits are very prone to just this error. What could be more matter-of-fact than the reporter’s six questions of who, what, when, where, how, and why? I did try my best to get through to as many people as possible. 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.” In other words, like the medieval Catholic Church, he thought one should talk to spirit only through a licensed intermediary of an “established church,” as if people like me would have been still searching if we had found what we needed there.
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.
A third writer said Ms. MacLaine had “taken the same detour that disillusioned so many in the 1960s. Eastern religions, despite their seemingly profound inner revelations, can lead to a dead end. Ask the Beatles.” (I never did figure this one out.)
A fourth, to cite one last example, said she was “shocked and appalled at the publicity your newspaper gave the seminar,” which she termed a “rip-off,” and said she was “most anxious to learn the name of her new temple and what false idol will be worshipped there.” Ms. MacLaine, she said, had used “various brainwashing techniques such as ‘visualization,’” and was “playing with fire. That fire has a name: a destructive cult.”
What I found disturbing in this last letter was its misunderstanding of, fear of, and therefore rejection of techniques such as visualization. I was to learn in years to come that many fundamentalist Churches fear—perhaps more than any other single thing—individual attempts to commune with spirit in the absence of whatever version of the Bible that Church happens to believe in. Some teach that meditation is dangerous as “Satan can insert thoughts into open minds.” God, apparently, can’t.
The odd thing is that the critics were entirely mistaking me intent and my background, and their assumptions didn’t have much to do with anything I experienced. On the first day, waiting for the seminar to begin, I had asked myself in my journal what I wanted, and had written, “Power. Connection. What God wants.” When I asked what phenomena I would hope to experience, the answer was an out of body experience or some experience of past lives, but when I asked further what I wanted, the answer was to be made spiritually, physically, and mentally whole.
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 become confused by every bit of half-baked theology that has ever come our way. And although I knew I had connected to something at the seminar, I got no sense of a separate individual or group of individuals like The Gentlemen Upstairs as I later experienced them. The Higher Self was a vague concept to me, little more than a smarter aspect of my personal self. It showed me that the long, hard, solitary road wasn’t the only road there is, but it didn’t give me much more to work with.
I belonged to no church, but I had learned to live in faith, which I then interpreted in pretty traditional terms. I lived, or tried to live, listening to God, doing God’s will, leaving it up to God. My prayer was, “Dear God, show me the way.” There are many worse ways to live.
In any case, other things had begun to happen, things that couldn’t really be pursued or described in public.