human potential

Six cousins. On the left: Margaret, John, and Frank.

On the right, Anne Marie, Francis and Charles Reilly.

We need to look back to my childhood, which was dominated by asthma, and by the woods behind the house and across the street, and, after age 11, by books and by a good deal of daydreaming, Also there was farm work, and the other-worldly result of reading so many stories of all kinds and there was the security of family, often disregarded and overlooked until well after the support had been taken away by time and life.

 Asthma comes in several forms. You may experience wheezing, or coughing, of moment-by-month inability to draw in breath, or a combination of two or more symptoms. None of it is conducive to your getting a night’s sleep, or even rest. Lying down makes everything worse. You can’t rest while sitting up unless you have adequate support for your head. It occurs to me now, my parents probably didn’t realize the mechanics of the situation. All they could see (and initially it must have been terrifying) was that I could not breathe, and it would go on by the hour, frequently all night. What could they do but sit by the bed (mom, mostly) and wish they could help? This continual background presence shaped my life in various subtle ways, as will become clear as we go along. They were long nights.

The woods. As with so many things in my life, the environment I grew up in didn’t easily fit into any one category, being neither urban nor rural nor suburban. Our house was on two and a half acres of land, far enough out of the center of town to have tracts still covered in trees. Behind the house, and across the street, were patches of woods. It was a jolt, late in life, to realize that before I had books, I had the woods. I spent a lot of time playing in those woods, probably enacting cowboy daydreams. I learned very early that wooded land is not the same, energetically, as land without trees. I wished I was living in Daniel Boone’s Kentucky. I thought: What was I doing growing up in Southern New Jersey?

Farm work. Dad was working the farm that belonged to his parents, about four miles away from our house, so I didn’t exactly grow up on a farm, but I did grow up with farmwork, and it was interesting, except that it always went on too long. Picking daffodils in early Spring for the cut-flower market wasn’t exactly fun (the knees of your corduroy pants wet and muddy, hands cold and stiff) except when we did it along with our Reilly cousins, but we got paid a little for each dozen picked, and that was useful. Picking strawberries, the same. Later in the year, when the weather was more pleasant, there would come time to pick peonies, and tomatoes, and other things. And the older we got, the more we were allowed to do. At age 10, I got to drive the tractor, steering it down the row while my father and my 16-year-old brother rode the planter attachment, putting in tomato transplants. At the end of the row, my brother would climb up onto the tractor, turn it around, and then I’d drive it down that row. At the end of the day I knew I had actually been useful, surely a good experience for any child. And of course as the years went on, I did more and more tractor work, cultivating, plowing, discing. I always liked doing it, but I always knew it could not be my life. My life was going to be books.

Books. My Aunt Nonnie (Donata) gave me a Tom Swift Jr. books for my 11^th birthday, and that opened the world of books for me. It led me naturally to the books my father had had as a child, “series” books like The X-Bar-X boys, the Radio Boys, the original Tom Swift series, the Hardy Boys, Ralph of the Roundhouse, etc., etc. I can’t say they were a good influence. I was isolated enough and innocent enough to take these formulaic books as realistic portraits of the world, even if a world already long passed away. It didn’t help me deal with the world I actually lived in.

Family. When I came to study astrology, years alter, I realized that no two of the eight of us had the same sun sign. My brothers and sisters were earth or water signs (my father, air; my mother, fire.). I was the only fire sign among the kids. Is this why, whenever there was a squabble, I was always half of it? (That’s what my father said once, and I have reason to believe it.) I was a stormy petrel, but not by inclination. I think it must have had to do mostly with my lack of self-awareness.

Difference. A happy childhood? Yes, I suppose. But even then, a different childhood. Was it that asthma periodically removed me from the daily routine world? Was it that the habit of daydreaming enhanced my ability to see things differently? looking back, it seems to me it was never in the cards for me to have a normal life (not that I wanted one). It’s like the tag line to old joke: “Just lucky, I guess.”

 

On the Friday after the seminar, before my article appeared, I called my brother Paul in California, and told him that I had had a dream in which Bub said, “The first 40 years were mine. These are yours.” I was 40 years old at the time. So far, he’s right on target.

But what had happened in 1987? Had the seminar really changed anything? Certainly it had not, as I had hoped it would, changed everything. But my expectations – my hopes –  showed my inexperience. Only much later did I realize that transformation, like aging, like maturing, like anything worthwhile, comes gradually. You don’t return from visiting a sacred site instantly and utterly transformed. Transformation comes about more like infection. The change comes gradually, perhaps unnoticed except in retrospect.

That change came in little bits, not obviously connected. I think of Stephanie, and Starborn, and Suni Dunbar, of Fran Slocumb, and dreams, of a “New Age” party in Virginia Beach, and Jess Stearn, and of John Nelson and Bob Friedman. They were all results of my deciding to follow the hint provided by my miraculous healing.

• At some point Stephanie was seated next to me at the seminar. She described her psychic experiences and I was fascinated. This would have important, and unfortunate, consequences. At the time I had never heard of the concept of “trans channeling.” (Not “trance channeling,” but “trans channeling.” It means contact that begins on a 6^th chakra level and moves immediately to the 2^nd. This is a formula for lots of trouble for the unwary!) From being interested in her as a psychic, I moved quickly into believing that I was in love with her, and began an epistolary relationship. She lived in western Pennsylvania. I was living in the Hampton Roads Virginia area. I had a wife and children, and was not prepared to rip up my life and begin again. So what kind of future did this promise? But I was experiencing (though not yet realizing) that I was not one thing, but several, not all of whom talked to each other
• Starborn. I never figured out how he did it, but somehow John Nelson mailed me a copy of his first novel quickly enough that it arrived in the morning mail at the office on the day after my article ran, He suggested that I might want to review it. I did read it, though I didn’t review it, and remembered the author’s name. John would become a good friend, but the immediate effect of this overture manifested later that year, with an introduction at a party.
• Suni Dunbar. I was invited to join a group of seminar attendees who wanted to meet on a regular basis, I think once a month, and I accepted. The first meeting wasn’t impressive, but I was too inhibited to say that Few people there seemed to really know what they were talking about. (One woman was talking about Kundalini, apparently thinking it was a physical snake. I very tentatively said that I didn’t think it was a snake, and I later learned that one of the women muttered, “Oh, so he does know something.”) Of all the women there – as I remember it, everyone there was a woman except me – the one who drew my attention was a woman named Suni Dunbar. She was old enough to have been my mother; it wasn’t a romantic attachment. But there was some link there, and we both knew it. The group soon ceased to mee, but Suni and I got into the habit of my going to her office in Virginia Beach every so often for a lunchtime talkfest.
• Fran Slocumb and dreams. Fran was a Jungian analyst. She sponsored a brown-bag luncheon to discuss Jung’s concepts, which had interested me ever since I stumbled across Modern Man in Search of a Soul in 1970. I seem to remember that I was invited because Suni and she were friends. In any case, after that luncheon, I had a dream. in three pieces. The first two laid out the roots of my major emotional problem. The third part consisted of Fran’s face smiling at me. I can take a hint. I called her up and arranged to begin a series of weekly sessions of dream analysis.
• A “New Age” party. In mid-summer, I was among those invited to a party in Virginia Beach to meet author Jess Stearn. A man came up to me and introduced himself as John Nelson, and I said something about his book. “Oh, so you did read it,” he said. “Let me introduce you to my publisher.:” And there, standing next to him, was a fairly short man with interesting eyes that seemed to have a quizzical expression, as if – I told him much later – he was saying, “Well, so you finally showed up.” And this was Bob Friedman, who would open so many doors and present so many challenges. Ahead of us was a long, complicated, productive, infuriating, satisfying, difficult, enlightening relationship.

These threads came at me one by one, seemingly unconnected, and only over time did they weave together, but the pattern they wove was a far cry from anything my life had been, or would have been, if I hadn’t spent a night watching a TV special, and then experiencing a healing, and then risking $300 to see what else might be in store. I had always wanted an extraordinary life. Earlier ventures hadn’t gone all that well. Now life was offering another opportunity. I couldn’t see its shape or its scope, but there was something there.

 

Remembering Bub

Newspaper reports talked about a heroic death in an unsuccessful attempt to save a seven-year-old from a fire. His viewing filled the funeral hall with people; the funeral Mass was con-celebrated by nearly a dozen priests; attendance at the funeral was among the largest in years. I can imagine Charlie Reilly looking on with amusement and delight at the dramatic and moving reaction to the abrupt end of his brief life.

But it isn’t drama and spectacle to his family; it is amputation, so unexpected, so unimaginable, as to be still nearly unbelievable.

When you lose a limb, at first the nerves in the area cannot report pain, and so there is only shock. Then, for a time, there is a sort of numbness, which functions as a sort of gradually deflating cushion. Then, the injured stump begins to throb, and the throbbing gets stronger, and the pain begins and gets worse. From that point, there is only the twofold necessity of learning to function without the amputated limb, and outliving the pain.

Journalists throughout the Delaware Valley knew Charlie, and I imagine that quite a few of them sat down at their typewriters to try to bring him back to life, if only for a few minutes. Many of them knew him far better, and were far more closely associated with him, than I. But I have a special point of view, for his mother and mine are sisters, and so we were cousins, and so I knew him when he was a boy called Bub.

When we were younger, and ethnic identity seemed more important than it does now, I remember being aware of the Irish quality which was so strong in him. Whereas both my parents were of Italian descent, he was a volatile mixture of Italian and Irish, and to me that Irish quality seemed so strong….

In retrospect, it seems stronger than ever. I think of Brendan Behan, or Jimmy Breslin, or an American Republican version of George Bernard Shaw. Such was the intensity of life, the devouring of the moment, and of the people around him. Such was — one suspects — the recurrent feeling of lostness, a feeling carefully concealed and denied. Such was the projection of an image of tough, hard-headed realism, covering an interior sensitivity and vulnerability.

(I am aware, writing this, that it may seem maudlin for a relative to compare a relative to Behan and Breslin and Shaw, particularly when the relative neither sought nor achieved the fame and accomplishment that these luminaries did. But they serve as examples everyone knows, and besides, I was convinced that Bub had a streak of greatness in him; I always thought that if he ever got down to writing seriously he would turn out stories of first-rate quality.

(Too late, now, to hope that he will someday take off that year he occasionally talked of — the year to do nothing but write. Now we can only hope that somewhere in all those boxes of papers, he left the stories he was working on as much as 20 years ago.)

Such accounts of Bub as I have seen have praised his energy, his drive, and his ability. All of this he had, in great amounts, but it was not for these that I valued him, but for the sense of “aliveness” he radiated. I think of the song in which Frank Sinatra says his life seems to him like “vintage wine, from fine old kegs; from the brim to the dregs.” Most of us seem to me to live as though only half-awake; we’re stuck on the middle registers of the emotional scale. Bub hit all the notes, from the very high to very low, and his intensity produced an almost magical effect on his friends.

Very few people reacted to him neutrally. He was well-loved and well-hated. And he was well aware of it, and encouraged it by his great flair for self-dramatization. I think of a night in 1966, when I was 20 and he was 27.

My parents and I were in the small Salem County community of Penn’s Grove when our car broke down.

He was editor of the paper there, and we called him and he met us, and by his presence turned the rest of the evening into magic — at least for me.

First he called a garage owner he knew, and the men interrupted his supper to pick up the car. Then, with the car in the garage, the four of us went out to eat. As soon as we walked in the door, it was, “Hey Charlie,” “how ya doing, Charlie?,” “Hey Reilly, what’s up?” from all sides. He knew everybody, and you’d swear he was an old drinking buddy of half the town. Which maybe he was.

All through dinner he regaled us with stories of his life there. He relished the telling of his stories, going into great detail. They all centered around his activities, which in a lesser storyteller would have seemed mere egotism; he raised it to a sort of personal mythology, in which he was sometimes hero, sometimes jester.

So he told how he had uncovered a numbers operation in a dry cleaner’s shop by counting the number of “customers” per hour while sitting outside in his car. “That’s the place I go to get my clothes cleaned,” he said with a laugh. “She calls me Snoopy now. I go in there and she says `here’s Snoopy,’ and I say `how y’ doing, Money?’”

I said I was surprised he still dared patronize the place. That big pixyish Irish grin of his: “The first time I went back there after the story ran, I expected her to give me my suit back with a big iron mark on it, but she didn’t.”

And he talked about a run-in with the mayor over something or other. In the middle of his complaint, the mayor asked Bub what he had ever done for the town. “I knew he had bought his car in Wilmington, so I say `well, Mayor, at least I bought my car here.’” And he talked about the threats to “wrinkle his face” which followed his stories on local corruption, and how he had started to carry a gun, just in case. (Those stories later led to a grand jury investigation.)

And he told how the mayor had told him, one time, that he was canceling all the city’s legal advertising because of some story or other. “I said, `mayor, you just made the front page. If that’s your decision, I can’t do anything about it — but hang on for the ride.’”

And on and on, all through dinner, keeping us amused, fascinated, interested in everything. He was always `on.’

Then we went back to the garage, and my father couldn’t believe it was so low. Turned out the man had charged for the part he had replaced, but not for the labor. “But it’s Sunday night” my father protested. The man smiled. “I wasn’t even open,” he said, and gestured with one hand toward Bub. “But for him…” and he would not take any more. That’s the kind of effect Bub had on people.

I keep thinking of how he went back into the fire to try to rescue that kid, and I think I understand the various things in him which set him in motion.

First, there was courage. It was an integral part of him, like his brain and his story-telling and his readiness at any minute to move. (One night my father said to him, “Bub, did you hear about the stick-up on the Walt Whitman Bridge?” Before he could get to the punch line, which is “some kid threw it there,” Bub was on his feet, moving to the phone to contact his newsroom. And then laughing at how he’d been victimized.)

Beyond courage, there was a certain recklessness, maybe a seeking after excitement, or a compulsion to test himself against all possible pressures and adversaries, or simply a delight in action. (His addiction to sports in all manifestations may be a part of this.)

And beyond recklessness, there was his involvement with others. He had a sensitivity which he denied in words and demonstrated in actions, as for instance in the scholarships he silently provided which put at least two black kids through school.

Beyond the courage and the recklessness and the sensitivity, I am convinced, was an absolute inability to believe that anything could kill him. Even more than the rest of us, I think he thought he was indestructible. (And, lest you think that such a conviction detracts from the courage it took to return to the burning building, imagine yourself imagining third-degree burns while standing on the roof before reentering.)

And now he is dead at 39, and already our treacherous tendency to warp the past through hindsight is beginning to make the shortness of his life seem almost inevitable, as though all that living on coffee and cigarettes and nerve endings had already given him a full life. But it is not so. It’s just that the living bury the dead and find ways to live with the fact.

Bub

At one point, Shirley MacLaine had told us to contact our soulmate. I had always thought of soulmates as romantic connections, but to my surprise the soulmate who showed up was my cousin Charlie Reilly, known to his family as Bub. He was seven years older than me, and to me he seemed a larger-than-life adventurer, going from one thing to another, laughing, fighting, and turning anything that happened to him into an entertaining story. I admired him greatly, if more or less from a distance.

Besides, I owed him.

In the early 1960s, Bub was drafted into the Army, and one day, on leave, he stopped by to chat. My mother (“Aunt Vee”)  and I talked to him about this and that as he and mom drank coffee. I can’t remember anything we talked about, but it was perhaps the only real conversation he and I ever had. Later, in a letter to my mother, he said that he had been surprised at how mature I was. My mother didn’t want me to see this, for fear I would get a swelled head, but in fact I desperately needed that indirect reassurance., and silently clung to it.

A few years later, he was responsible for my getting my first real job after high school. He was even the person who introduced me to drinking coffee! And he was the first newsman in the family That had its effect.

In all,  I didn’t have any difficulty in thinking of him as a soulmate. I lived in hope that he would write novels. Assuming that he could make the translation from speech to print, what lively things his novels would have been!

But it was not to be. Before enough years had gone by to diminish the effect of so much difference in our ages, his life and mine had gone in different directions, and we were rarely in the same place at the same time. Also, political and other differences assured that he and I would have required time and effort to get on the same page. Before that could happen – if it ever could have happened – he was dead at age 39, killed by fire, attempting to rescue his girlfriend’s little boy.

After the Higher Self Seminar, I went back and found a poem I had written in the immediate aftermath:

Night Snow

His possibilities dead, behind him

He leaves crystallized rationalizations

And a thousand cigarette butts and

Tickets to every sporting event within a day’s drive.

And memories. And plastic idols. And discarded

Unnoticed bystanders, captured by the smile.

Too late! Too late! Too late!

 

Bewildered by the terrific din

Of cessation of that eternal motion,

The survivors stand amazed, forlorn,

Numbly gathering shards of reminiscence,

Exchanging reassuring myth of

Inexplicable catastrophe,

Lest they be forced to rectify their lives.

Too late! Too late! Too late!

 

You terrible others, why do you not mourn

Possibilities foresworn? The death

Was only culmination of the life. Not

That he died, or died too soon, but that he

Retreated from himself, hammered up a legend,

And died unable to return. Every

Silent nighttime falling snowflake calls,

Too late! Too late! Too late!

As you can see, a sense of irretrievable loss, of chances thrown away, of a life perhaps wasted. That’s the mental world I lived in, in those difficult 1970s.

Bub died in December, 1978; Joe, in September, 1979. From here, half a long lifetime later, the years between the two deaths and the Higher Self Seminar seem few, but in January, 1987, the deaths seemed a long time past. When Bub died, I was 32, editing a free-distribution paper in my home country. I wrote a sort of eulogy, which I will publish here as the next installment of this memoir.

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.

In that article, I didn’t hide behind the journalist’s facade of pretended impartiality. I was more willing to be called a fool than I was to pretend that nothing had happened to me. Yet I made no attempt to describe meeting my “higher self,” because for a general audience a thirdhand description would be worse than none at all. (Thirdhand, in that they would have had to interpret my interpretation of my experience.) It is one thing to describe a thing to someone who may use that description as a guide or as a trail marker. It is quite another, futile, thing to describe it to those who will then judge its validity offhand, without having had the experience and without making any attempt to have the experience.

Between the end of the seminar and the appearance of my article the following weekend, I was busy absorbing and applying the lessons and the promise I had received from the internal events of the weekend. For instance, my brother Joe.

Joe had died at age 30 in 1979, eight years earlier, and I had never done the mourning his death required. Now I knew that things left unresolved between us could perhaps be fixed. All day Wednesday, beginning at daybreak, as a sort of background to my waking life, I had an image of myself riding the unicorn,  “across the dark water,” flying to find him.

Early on Thursday, we alit., coming down not near another willow tree as I had expected, but on a seashore, barren and featureless. On the sand was a giant tortoise with arms and legs and head inside the shell. This was Joe’s unicorn. A very appropriate image: pulled in, withdrawn, self-protected from a hostile world.

I had been very unjust to Joe, his whole short life. For whatever reason, so many things about him irritated me, and this was long before I became able to cast a critical eye on my own judgments and reactions. Only after he was dead could I see his virtues. The priest delivering his eulogy, a family friend, had called him “the upright man,” and I had realized, in a sudden instant reassessment, that this was precisely what he had been. The things about him that irritated me really didn’t matter. I had lived with the upright man, and had not recognized him. Now I was wanting to make amends, but he was withdrawn within himself.

I said how sorry I was for how I’d been to him when we were children, and how I’d tried as adults (in every way but actually saying it, I realized now) to make up for it. I said how sorry I was for how it worked out. I started to say we’d go now, and then realized that I was talking and not asking. So I asked what he would prefer.

That old, patient, infinitely experienced turtle head came out then, not slowly but all at once, and I embraced it around its neck (which was bigger than I was) and kissed it. I had to first overcome a certain revulsion against appearance – just as in life. I decided we would stay a while, and was still there when I recorded the meeting in my journal.

That same day, I went up to the newspaper’s library, and as I came through the door, one of the women there had said, “Look, it’s Frank DeMarco!” The newsroom budget for Sunday had mentioned that I would have a piece on the Shirley MacLaine seminar. It was my first experience of how much underground interest there is in the subject. Also on Thursday, I made a point of having lunch with Bill Wood, my boss, to tell him about the article that was going to appear on Sunday. I didn’t want him to be blindsided, but I had delayed as long as I could, fearing that he would prevent it from being published. Already, without my quite noticing it, I was putting publication of my experiences ahead of everything else: job, “respectability,” relationships.

On the Monday following, I went to work braced for a wave of criticism or ridicule. Instead, I got lots of reinforcement. Reporters and editors talked to me (carefully!) in the hallways, showing intense but strictly private interest, even fascination. Lots of people were interested, but few were willing to be known as interested.

This one article introduced me to the New Age community throughout Hampton Roads. In 1987, they had never seen a newspaper article give first-hand and favorable coverage to a metaphysical event. A local radio host asked me to appear on his show to talk about the seminar. A fellow journalist at another bureau said she was interested in her inner self, and asked if I could suggest a starting place or a book. Another colleague, an older man, called to say that he and his wife had “a certain amount of experience” in the field themselves, had liked the article, and admired my courage in letting it be published. Again, an experience of people’s trepidation. It wasn’t long before I found out why. The criticism followed in a second wave.

“In the Spirit” appeared on Feb. 1, 1987.

In the spirit

Shirley MacLaine Isn’t the only one out on that limb

                                                             by Frank DeMarco

I was among those who paid $300 to attend Shirley MacLaine’s two-day seminar in Virginia Beach on “Connecting with the higher self” last weekend. Let me go out on a limb a bit myself: That weekend already has changed my life.

I know, from talking to others, that I was not the only person there who had questioned his own judgment for plunking down $300 to attend. It left many wondering, as the session started, if we had been ripped off. Someone questioned Shirley MacLaine about it, and she said she had struggled with the question of money and had finally set the fee so high in order, as she put it, to eliminate those who “might want to have a spiritual tea party with a celebrity” after reading her book or seeing her recent TV special, “Out on a limb.”

Correct decision. Those who came despite the fee were those who had a strong inner need to be there.

I deal first with the seemingly peripheral issue of money because when I tell someone I attended, the first (usually incredulous) response I get is: “You paid $300?” Which is to say” “You were that gullible?” Well, yes, we were tilling to risk being that gullible. We went not in blind sleep-walking assurance, but in confidence mixed with hope — and hope implies doubt. But doubt was removed — for me at least — before we trooped out again at the first intermission.

These preliminaries dispose of two of the six journalistic questions, when and where. More important are the other questions: who, what, how and why.

Who: What kind of people attend such a seminar? Misfits and failures, surely? Aging hippies? The insecure young, looking for something — anything — to believe? From my own unscientific survey of the 600-some in attendance, these generalizations:

Many were between 30 and 60, with a fair number of elderly but few if any in their 20s. In all age groups, women seemed to outnumber men by at least six to one. Professional people were in abundance, including, among others I met, a management consultant, a fashion designer, a teacher and a real estate agent (though the most impressive was a factory worker). Many had come from considerable distance: I met some from Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and many from the Washington, D.C. area.

By a show of hands, about half of those attending described themselves as experienced students of metaphysics; the rest considered themselves beginners. Some had been aware of their psychic abilities virtually from birth, other had acquired (or recognized) such powers over time, and still others were unaware of, or skeptical of, such gifts.

And this is a good place to underline the fact that doubt was not absent among attendees. Many wondered if the mental images produced by exercises in visualization were “just their imagination” rather than an authentic communication rom their higher self (or super-conscious, or racial unconscious, or God, depending on what system of understanding you care to force it into). Exercises with strangers that resulted in startlingly accurate insights into other people’s motivations and fears left some wondering if they’d merely “guessed.” The search for truth proceeds, in metaphysics as in other areas, be perseverance in the face of self-doubt until skepticism is overwhelmed by evidence internal and external.

If this description gives the impression that these were “just folks,” well — that’s about it.

What: Three beliefs central to the seminar are stumbling blocks for those who are not familiar with ancient teachings in both East and West. These are: connectedness (the view that there are no accidents in life); reincarnation (that the soul does not die, but repeatedly alternates between dimensions we see and those we don’t); and the existence and function of chakras in the human body (that the physical dimension is connected to the spiritual in specific parts of the body, the workings of which can be experienced).

On reincarnation and the existence of the chakras, an extensive literature exists, and this is not the place to discuss them. But some thoughts about connectedness and coincidence may be in order.

What do you believe — that life is accident, or that it is a seamless web in which even apparent coincidences have meaning? Western man for hundreds of years has mostly chosen to look at life as a series of accidents: hence, his frantic efforts at gaining control — over others, over matter, over everything but his own being. Hence, today’s superb technology — particularly in warfare — accompanied by spiritual desolation. But the world is not meaningless coincidence.

Sez who? Well, says Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, for one. Jung decades ago coined the word “synchronicity” to describe internal and external events that are linked by time and psychological significance but are otherwise unrelated. (Meaningful coincidences, in short.) He also published studies of alchemy, astrology and the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination, and a book on the UFO phenomena — yet he can hardly be dismissed as a nut, a fraud or a gullible fool.

I cite Jung, not as support for whatever Shirley MacLaine has said or may say, but merely as one example of a towering figure in mental science who saw the world in the same way the participant in the seminar see it: as pattern, not as chance and accident, however it may have appeared to Hampton Roads’ police departments after the roads froze last Sunday night.

How: The mechanics of the seminars included question-and-answer sessions, meditations, explanations and exercises, each activity adding to the experience.

For instance, the first long question-and-answer session helped many to change focus from Shirley-as-the-center-of-the-experience to myself-as-center-or-the-action as the flow of questions moved beyond the material of the book or the TV show to more individual concerns.

But Q&A can be carried only so far. Once it had broken the ice, it was time to proceed to real work. And meditation and visualization — for those who’ve never tried — are real work. As clergymen know, groups engaged in such work together become more than the sum of the individuals involved. And in show-business professional MacLaine, participants had the assistance of a central figure directing the meditation who knew how to employ sound-effect techniques to good advantage to aid visualization.

Her explanations of theory I found a little too long — perhaps because this was familiar ground — and some of her theoretical structure I thought wrong. But the disagreement meant little: As the late economist E.F. Schumacher used to say, it’s amazing how much theory you can dispense with when you get down to doing real work. The real work, for me, were the meditations and exercises, a couple of which were mentioned under “who.”

The seminar had little to do with sitting at someone’s feet to pluck pre-digested pearls of wisdom and much to do with practicing meditations and visualization exercises. The seminar was named, not “Talking about the higher self” but “Connecting with the higher self.” And of the 600-some participants, the great majority, on a show of hands, succeeded in making the connection. About half did so for the first time, among them — to my delight — me.

(Being neither superman nor guru, I am very much aware how exposed this public statement leaves me, and the awareness gives me redoubled respect for Shirley MacLaine’s courage in going public. Even though she lives in California and is of a show-business background – two very tolerant cultures – I suppose that few people enjoy being called kook or worse.)

Questions such as “What did it feel like?” and “How did you know you weren’t imagining it all?” are very natural. But describing the experience would convey neither the reality nor the basis of conviction. Reading about meditation isn’t the same as practicing it. For those interested, the mystical traditions in Christianity and other religions have for centuries provided descriptions of how to begin.

Why: The comments I’ve seen in print on the TV special that aired the week before the seminar seemed to miss the point. What was important was not the construction of metaphysical systems, nor UFOs nor the acquisition of psychic powers. And it certainly had nothing to do with establishing a cult to worship at the shrine of the arch-priestess Shirley. The last thing the world needs is another cult or another instant guru.

What it does need is thousands — millions — getting in touch with their higher selves. Only the experience, not some theory or conviction, can change lives — and our lives need changing.

America, the land of immigrants that became the world in miniature, has for too long placed its faith in technology, in politics, in weapons and in organization. But neurotic, resentful, fearful people cannot construct a better world: We as a society have been approaching the matter from the wrong end. Improve ourselves — heal ourselves — and the systems will improve more or less automatically. And this can only be done as individuals.

Besides — as every religious teacher has known — everything begins within the solitary individual, and each individual human soul is worth more than “world peace” and “social justice” and “progress” and all the other chimeras people organize for, work for, and finally, kill for.

America brought materialist trends to an extreme; it is fitting that counter-movements should first catch fire in this country. Shirley MacLaine has begun one such counter-movement, perhaps the most genuinely democratic yet seen. By helping participants to gain access to their own inner guides, this movement may help thousands to become new centers of spiritual growth. Instead of guru, to whom members abdicate their critical faculties and wills, she is attempting to be the facilitator, “on tap, not on top,” in a one-time experience that shows people how to get out of their own way, then leaves them to do it, and goes on to others.

I shake my head in wonder that I was among those who were there at a meeting which — as a beginning — may prove to have been historic.

I wish all my investments would turn out so well.