Shirley MacLaine - Going Within

Bantam Books by Shirley MacLaine
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DANCING IN THE LIGHT
DONT FALL OFF THE MOUNTAIN
GOING WITHIN
ITS ALL IN THE PLAYING
OUT ON A LIMB
YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE
DANCE WHILE YOU CAN
MY LUCKY STARS

S HIRLEY M AC L AINE was born and raised in Virginia. She began her career as a Broadway dancer and singer, then progressed to featured performer and award-winning actress in television and films. She has traveled extensively around the world, and her experiences in Africa, Bhutan, and the Far East formed the basis for her first two bestsellers, Dont Fall Off the Mountain and You Can Get There From Here. Her investigations into the spiritual realm were the focus of Out on a Limb, Dancing in the Light, and Its All in the Playing all of which were national worldwide bestsellers. In her intimate memoir Dance While You Can, she wrote about aging, relationships, work, her parents, her daughter, and her own future as an artist and a woman. My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir, published in 1995, offers a candid and searching look at her forty years in Hollywood and the stars who taught her about show business and about life.

Without beginning, the Law creates.

I f, as Hawking and many other scientists say, the Big Bang explosion resulted in life as we know it today, then the seeds of all things, ourselves included, were present at the birth of creation, and every scrap of matter and energy and blood and bones and thought present in the cosmos today could be traced back to the origins of the universe from one small subatomic particle of light. That makes us each sparks of the same light. It also makes each of us a hologram of the entire event. The energies that fragmented and separated and multiplied as the young universe expanded and cooled continue to operate in the beating of our hearts and the movements of our bodies, as well as in the alignment and behavior of the stars. We and theyall things and everything are a connected whole. That is the meaning of We are one. The evolution of the universe, then, is continuing not only around us but within us. Our thoughts, our dreams, and our awareness are part of that universe, the physical and the spiritual inextricably bound together.

Science says it owes a great deal to religion and the spiritual point of view. Modern science began with the rediscovery in the Renaissance of the old Greek idea that nature is rationally intelligent. A simple system ruled by a single set of laws. Many physicists are now saying that everything that is or can be, was contained within that first single spark of energy, rapidly expanding and ruled by a single primordial law.

What is that law and where did it come from? Are scientists suggesting that everything may come from and return to a dimension and a time and space about which we know nothing?

Of one thing they say they can be certain. That first light-time-spark that created the universe was the first cause creating the effect of expansion. The laws of cause and effect then continued to create evolution. But, as Thomas Aquinas pondered, If we could but find the first effect, we would come closer to finding the first cause which is God. How odd that when confronted with proof of supernal power, the main problem should be what to call it!

Science says nothing preceded the spark of light that preceded the universe because it cannot be traced. Mystics say God preceded the spark of light, that God motivated the spark to ignite into matter, that God is a giant consciousness that cannot be measured or even conceived of because it is, literally, everything.

In the absence of knowledge of the origins of the spark of light, the primary question for science is: how can there be a universe created out of nothing? Why is there something instead of nothing?

There is a prayer I used to read as a child:

Great is God, our Lord. Great is his power, and there is no end to his wisdom. Praise Him, you heaven, and glorify Him sun and moon, and you planets. For out of Him, through Him, and in Him are all things. Every perception and every knowledge.

That prayer was written in the seventeenth century, not by a priest or a mystic, but by an astronomer, Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws that govern the motion of the planets.

In fact, the founding fathers of modern scienceKepler, Copernicus, Isaac Newton, and Galileowere, by and large, profoundly spiritual men. They wanted to believe in an impeccable harmony. Modern scientific research is now close to proving that all creation is ruled by an elegant and single principle. The Grand Unification Theory. The principle of God light? The principle of beauty? The principle of harmony? They say that the universe operates and evolves according to the law of cause and effect; that the universe is nonchaotic. It has symmetry and explicable behavior patterns. It is, as Einstein said, comprehensible. And it is continuing to expand. Therefore, the comprehension is continuing to expand.

To me this relates to human consciousness and my twelve-year-old theory that I and the universe were one.

Einstein and the American astronomer Edwin Hubbell concluded that the galaxies are not expanding into a space that is already there, but rather that space itself is expanding, carrying the galaxies with it. To use a balloon as an analogy: if I painted dots on the surface of a balloon and then blew it up, I would see each of the dots moving away from one another as the balloon expands. If I put myself on one of the dots, become the center of the round balloon and all the other dots move around and away from me. If I let the air out of the balloon, all the dots come toward my dot until they form the ground point of zero, where all dots are in one place at one time. If I blew it up again, my dot would be the center of the expansion. Yet, everyone else on any other dot would also experience themselves as the center of the expansion and the collapse of the balloon. Every dot, then, and every place on the balloon is the center of expansion. The analogy is that we are each the center of a universe that itself is expanding. We are carried with it, and the more consciously aware we are of the expansion, the more we are attuned to the acceleration and movement itself. Therefore, the more aware we are of ourselves, the more aware we are of the universe because, as the expanding balloon proves, from the beginning we each are the universe before and after it expands.

What is the center of the universe? Every place is the center. Who is the center? Everyone is the center. Where is God? God, and the energy from which all has been created, is in everything, because we have all inherited that first instant in time when it first began.

Here we are, then, alive in space with the memory, on some level, of having been born about fifteen billion years ago. We cant see our past, but we can feel it. It is a part of our consciousness. It is a part of our physicality. It is our heritage. It is who we are. It is where we have been, and where we are going.

By looking at nature on a scale of subatomic structures of matter and energy and the fundamental forces that govern the behavior of subatomic particles, we see that they are each reflecting particles of light. Light that reflects a grandeur and a beauty and an extraordinary power that from the beginning created what we now call human history, and indeed the history of the cosmos. From a single kernel of light particle comes everything there is: the hydrogen, the helium, the photons, atoms, protons, electrons, neutrons. Science and physics and Stephen Hawking have traced the universe back to a time when it was about ten to the minus thirty-fifth of a second old. The explosion just after the countdown contact of nothing moving on to something. What went before is the mystery.