The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit

Shirley MacLaine is a wonderful writer whose adventure on "The Camino" (a 500-mile trek/pilgrimage across Spain) is both enlightening and entertaining. Her journey of self discovery and her will to share her truth inspires me. I love her courage as she shares wisdom that cannot be proven, but can be experienced. To use her quote, "the absence of evidence does not mean the evidence of absence". Enlightenment seems difficult to explain, but easy to experience. Authors Ariel & Shya Kane explain it well in their books Working on Yourself Doesn't Work: The 3 Simple Ideas That Will Instantaneously Transform Your Life, How to Create a Magical Relationship: The 3 Simple Ideas that Will Instantaneously Transform Your Love Life and Being Here: Modern Day Tales of Enlightenment. Within the pages of these books I have discovered the ease of well-being and how to live in the moment. I am grateful that authors like Shirley MacLaine and Ariel & Shya Kane have done the "footwork" so I can experience Enlightenment while reading a great book at home - without walking on fire or walking 500 miles on the Camino.

"There are many ways to experience one's spiritual education." This quote from Shirley MacLaine sums up this incredible book perfectly. This is Shirley's journey of one finding themselves, or re-discovering themselves on the centuries old Camino - a 500 mile spiritual trek across Spain.I found this book to be wonderfully enlightening, illuminating, and I applaud Shirley for the courage to complete this journey of the Spirit. Shirley says, "The Camino itself helps facilitate the resolution of emotional issues."The reader is treated to flashbacks of Shirley's past lives as she once lived along the Camino, including an amazing past life in Lemuria and Atlantis. I found Shirley's honesty and candor refreshing, and many of her insights hit directly home with me. I do believe that the reader will also gain as many insights as I did and stop and let it all sink in. We are treated to her lessons and fears that she has to conquer as well.I really resonated with her thoughts on fear: "Never ask yourself what it is you fear - instead ask yourself what it is that concerns you. A fear thought, put out, will return, because all energy returns to the sender. Any energy always makes a loop until it regains the source. A concern thought will return also. A that moment discern why you're concerned."I began my spiritual questing with Shirley's first book and have devoured everything she has written. She is not afraid to speak her truth and she is not afraid to seek to deepen her spirituality and then share the rest of that with humanity. I am sure that I am not the only one who she has deeply and positively affected. We are spiritual beings having a human experience and once again we are reminded of our mission - to reconnect to the Divine source - to love - to God.Another wonderful quote, "I had walked the Camino in order to understand what we were capable of as human beings - such spiritual magnificence and such destructive fragmentation of our own souls. Were we all repeating such dramas even today because we hadn't remembered what we came from?"I urge everyone to read this fascinating book. You too, will want to trek the Camino after finishing the book.

Dear future reader of The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit, I envy you. Something magnificently beautiful is waiting for you in this book. Open your mind, forget all prejudices and boundaries and just enjoy one of the most fascinating books published recently. Do not try to define it in any way - it is not like anything you ever read. Elements of documental fiction, New Age spirituality, science fiction are all here mixed together into something uncommon, something fresh and new. You will be tempted many times during your reading of this book to actually accomplish Camino yourself and to have your own "visions" of global truth. But that is exactly what makes this book ingenious - you do not need to. Together with many other readers you will be accomplishing your "virtual" pilgrimage just by reading this book. By imagining the journey and by sharing the powerful emotional thoughts of Shirley MacLaine you will be participating in the global process of mass meditation with the concentration on this wonderful reading and on the actual pilgrimage itself. By means of modern media Shirley MacLaine accomplished unthinkable - she led us through Camino and allowed to understand something very important on this "virtual" journey. She made Camino the center of information attention of all her readers and her fans and in this way allowed thousands of people to reach through time and space and unconsciously receive some very important information, for which people for centuries actually accomplished this strange journey.

One of my friends at work gave me Shirley's new book, and I was thrilled. In the traditional Christian world, Shirley MacLaine is one of those people who would be on the "LIST"---forbidden to any God-fearing, Bible believing Christian. I used to carry Shirley's books around in brown paper bags and pull them halfway out and read them when nobody was looking. Our preacher would be talking about how "Shirley MacLaine has lost her mind," and I'd be reading her books under the pews and thinking, "She makes more sense than the preacher." In Christian college, I got called on the carpet when somebody decided to investigate one of my brown bags to see if I was sneaking alcohol. GOD FORBID, he found something WORSE--one of Shirley MacLaine's novels, which would surely send me to hell faster than booze. Needless to say, my days in the traditional Christian experience were short-lived.I think Shirley MacLaine is amazing! I think she's one of the bravest women alive. She has never been afraid to share her spiritual journeys for the benefit of those who can "receive" them and at the cost of personal ridicule from those who cannot. People are criticizing this book and saying it was not about the Camino but about her own inner journey. I would have been disappointed had it not been. I don't care if Shirley walks the Camino, the Appalachian Trail, or walks to the corner drugstore. I want to know what happened to her spiritually along the way. This is a wonderful book for all fellow "Pilgrims" and "Sojourners in a Strange Land."

"The Camino", Shirley Maclaine's new book, covers a 500 mile walking trip she completed along the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. Blisters and body pain, loneliness followed by relentless press who heard she was making the pilgrimage, vivid dream/recollections and synchronicity are shared in this journal. 40 pages into this book, I announced to my family that I will be making this same trek. Ms. MacLaine is an excellent writer; clean, intelligent, free of the need to prove anything to anyone. She's just saying what she experienced. We come away with a glimpse at the history of the trail from the days of Charlemange. We see her experience of the possible origin of three dimensional human life, Atlantis, Lemuria, ancestral connections to ET's and genetic engineerring that very possibly got us where we are right now. Skeptics will scoff. Students of Spirit will nod. (Remember, in spring 2000, scientists JUST found out that dinosaurs had four chamber hearts that show they were WARM blooded, not cold blooded like the "fact" they have "known" for years.) Whatever your level of listening, believing or remembering, "The Camino" is a wonderful journey that leaves us feeling renewed. Ultreya, Ms. MacLaine!