OUT ON A LIMB

Media:	Paperback
Author:	Shirley Maclaine
Publisher:	Bantam
Release date:	01 October, 1986
List price:	~~$7.50~~
Our price:	that is 100% off!

OUT ON A LIMB

Average rating: Stars

A significant voyage of self/discovery

Shirley Maclaine's books have all been bestsellers and rightly so. She bares her soul in her writing, besides displaying exemplary courage and honesty in her confrontations with the esoteric side of life.

So much has been said about Shirley Maclaine's books that anything more seems superfluous. However, this book could be of renewed interest to those new readers who have, or have had an interest in Sweden during the late seventies and early eighties. This is because the identity of the politician she had a love affair with, is revealed in her later book, 'The Camino'. That information makes this book and its sequel, 'It's All in the Playing' more significant and evocative of the times.

OUT ON A LIMB - Shirley Maclaine

Shirley MacLaine as New Age Catalogue

After reading chapters 18 and 23 from Shirley MacLaine's 1983 Out on a Limb, I've come to the conclusion that Shirley's belief system is some sort of New Age stew. Her belief system appears to be a hearty mix of various philosophies and religious traditions. Within the chapter sampling, Shirley refers to UFOlogy, ancient Mayan religion, Christian apocalyptica, Buddhism, Indian epics, Tibetan writings, Eskimo mythology, and even the popularist science of Carl Sagan. She appears to use different belief systems as a spiritual shopping list.

After visiting her website, I see she embraces an numerous other New Age elements including Feng Shui, aromatherapy, chakras, ley lines, colour therapy, holism, astrology, angels, numerology, dream divination, etcetera. It looks like she has all her bases covered, and the end result looks like a big bunch of mumbojambalaya to me!

The direction Shirley MacLaine appears to be travelling in these excerpts seems awfully close to my understanding of Erich von Däniken's theories. He believes ancient Earth was visited by extraterrestrial astronauts, and so does Shirley.

The excerpts I read are thematically almost identical to the Castaneda excerpts I pored over not too long ago. A reluctant student is shown by a spiritual adept the ways in which that student's views on reality are blinkered. Then, by means of misadventure, knowledge is gained despite initial recalcitrance.

I guess this is a pretty common theme.

Shirley is a highly entertaining writer. Her prose is smooth and enjoyable to read, and she has a charismatic personality. This goes a long way toward explaining her immense popularity. Nevertheless, I still think she's a crackpot!

Shirley Maclaine - OUT ON A LIMB

Tremendous courage to show this on US TV!

I've had OUT ON A LIMB on video tape since the original showing in 1987. Tonight for some reason I pulled it out to watch after an absence of at least 10 years (I have hundreds of video tapes so it was easy for this to recede into the darker corner of the closet).

I am most amazed at Shirley's incredible courage (others might call it arrogance or gall) to present material that is so antagonistic to the mainstream middle American mind set. After watching this excellent time capsule of New Age Thought from the mid 1980's, I felt a wee bit sad, since I realize this mini-series could never be shown on network TV today! After decades of Republican rule and the subtle but merciless pressure of right wing Christian religion in the US, the beliefs that Shirley presented in this film are much MORE controversial today than they were back in the benignn 1980's. How dare she have an affair with a married man? How dare she claim to be God? How dare she hobnob with channelers who are in the hands of Satan? I can hear all the babble on TV and right wing talk radio if that poor woman were to try this today!

Even if every concept presented in this film is false, it is a tremendously rewarding adventure.

However, I do have to state that after this film was made, Shirley admitted on a talk show that the book/film are NOT literally true! She created composite characters like David to represent her spiritual research. So it might come down to her NOT having any personal metaphysical adventures at all outside the confines of her book reading, but she created such adventures, e.g., having an invisible alien drive a truck in Peru that she and the make-believe David were in, to jazz up the topic a bit. I think a lot of people lost faith in Shirley when she made the confession that her books are NOT literally true!

Nonetheless, Kevin Ryerson is a trance channeler and is still out there charging $275 for a 90 minute consultation. Why go to law school when you can charge prices like that for your services?

I may seem like a skeptic. Well, I am skeptical of some of the more cartoonish aspects of the so-called New Age. We have grown more jaded since 1987. However, there are underlying spiritual truths within the film/book that make it worthwhile, although this film/book certainly contains no revelations that cannot also be found in a bounty of spiritual oriented books on the market today.

So in one sense, you may enjoy this film/book as a nostalgic throwback to a time when the New Age was "new", not the butt of comedians and the horror of fundamentalists. To call someone "new age" now is considered practically an insult, like calling someone a "liberal". That shows how reactionary and scared our culture has become since those heady times.

Take time from worrying about terrorism and the fact that George Bush believes that his fundamentalist Old Testament God is telling the US to invade other countries. Pop OUT ON A LIMB into your VCR or read a copy of the book. It may make you wish you could time travel back to those exuberant times!

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