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The doctrine is sometimes a little hard to apply. The woman in the audience (women outnumber the men two to one) does not feel healed. "No one else goes through what I do," she says.
From the back, another small voice says,"I do."
MacLaine moves into a visualization exercise aimed at cleansing the third eye (the one behind the forehead) of negative thought patterns. More questions:
"How do I deal with the vibration of joy and ecstasy that I get when I meet my higher self?" a woman wants to know. "Mine is a naked cupid."
"Ecstasy is a new frequency which we are just beginning to define," MacLaine says. "It is complete surrender and trust, the key words for this new age."
"With all due respect," says another voice, "I don't think you are a god." (That is another New Age doctrine, that everybody is God, co-creator of the universe.)
"If you don't see me as God," says MacLaine, blithe as ever, "it's because you don't see yourself as God."
If this seems to make very little sense, it nonetheless pays handsome dividends. MacLaine's five books of self-exploration and self-promotion have run to more than 8 million copies. Her third volume, Out on a Limb, which tells how she discovered the spirit world, became a five-hour TV extravaganza that was aired earlier this year. Her fifth volume, It's All in the Playing, published last September and a best seller for more than two months, is mainly about the making of the TV version of Volume 3, including conference/seances on how her astral guides feel about being cast to play themselves on television. And so on.
MacLaine's New York Hilton session was part of a 15-city national tour (estimated earnings: $1.5 million) to spread the New Age gospel. Next year she plans to open Uriel Village, a 300-acre retreat in Baca, Colo., where customers will be able to get weeklong sessions of meditation, past-life regression therapy, and sound and color healing, among other things. "I want this to be all mine, my energy, my control," says MacLaine. "I want a big dome-covered meditation center and a series of dome-covered meeting rooms because spiritual energy goes in spirals. We'll grow all our own food and eat under another dome. I want to turn a profit with this so I can build another center and another. I want to prove that spirituality is profitable."
For all its popularity, the New Age is hard to define. It includes a whole cornucopia of beliefs, fads, rituals; some subscribe to some parts, some to others. Only on special occasions, like the highly publicized "harmonic convergence" in August, do believers in I Ching or crystals gather together with believers in astral travel, shamans, Lemurians and tarot readers, for a communal chanting of om, the Hindu invocation that often precedes meditation. Led on by the urgings of Jose Arguelles, a Colorado art historian who claimed that ancient Mayan calendars foretold the end of the world unless the faithful gathered to provide harmony, some 20,000 New Agers assembled at "sacred sites" from Central Park to Mount Shasta to -- uh -- provide harmony.