Oprah's super cell conversations presenting partner in Ireland is Oral B, get that dentist clean feeling at home with an oral B, electric toothbrush, the round brush and removes up to 100 percent more plaque than a manual brush, giving you healthier gums and whiter teeth starting from day one. So it's easy to see why it's the number one dentist recommended brand worldwide. You can now pick up an oral B electric toothbrush for half price in Ireland in tons.

And Tesco, a friend is someone that can still help you even when they can't be there in person, like with a friendly new Bank of Ireland third level current account. With it, you get a debit card that's being sourced and actually made from 82 percent corn. How cool is that? And you can also partnered up with your phone to use apple pay to buy things. Even if you don't have your card in you, you can apply for your friendly new third level current account in just six minutes.

Bank of Ireland dotcom forward slash student terms conditions apply. Bank of Ireland is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

Hey, podcast listeners, some of you may know that Oprah began having conversations about the deeper meaning of life in the world around us, even in the early days of the Oprah show.

When you look inward, then you can begin to create another kind of power because we know you love a super soul style discussion.

I went, oh, we opened up the vault of the Oprah Winfrey Show to handpick episodes that will enhance the Super Soul podcast library.

Every experience in our lives is to teach us to learn to love.

Please enjoy this past episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show on Super Cell Conversations. Joining actress Shirley MacLaine is a true original. I know when some people hear her name, they think a great actress, but also some of you might think, oh, a little out there. You know, she believes in UFOs. She believes in past lives. She believes in reincarnation, all of that stuff. And she's been criticized a lot. But I think that she has been so misunderstood.

It is always fascinating when Shirley's here, she was born in Virginia.

Her drama teacher, mom named her after her child star, Shirley Temple. At three years old, she started ballet lessons. That's when Shirley MacLaine knew she was destined to perform. And what more singing and dancing were her first loves.

After high school, she headed to New York. At 19, she was discovered on Broadway.

And given the starring role in Alfred Hitchcock's film The Trouble With Harry, Shirley went on to share the screen some of Tinseltown's most legendary leading men, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and famously with Jack Lemmon in the classic Best Picture Oscar winner, the apartment.

You hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you. Shut up and deal. Shehhi kicked your way through Hollywood. And if my friends could see me now, but may be best known to movie fans opposite another famous Jack in the beloved film Terms of Endearment. Do you want to get me on my back? You just had to ask. Her portrayal of an overbearing mother won an Oscar and has been hailed as one of the greatest performances of all time.

Thank you very much. Shirley has starred in 63 films, but her real life may make the best screenplay. She's written 12 books selling over 20 million copies, many of them detailing her outspoken beliefs about UFOs and reincarnation.

So I'll share this with you all, because maybe you haven't heard me say it, but I have said this to Shirley many times, that when I read Shirley's best selling book out on a limb back in nineteen eighty five, I was filming The Color Purple. It was an awakening for me and really allowed me to begin to see the whole world differently. It literally took God out of the box for me and I began to see God in all things.

So welcome Shirley MacLaine, one of my greatest teacher.

So lots of people think of you, as I said, in many different ways, whenever your name is brought up, I always share that story about me sitting in the tree house on the set of The Color Purple, reading out on a limb on my days off and really having my mind expanded. You know, a lot of the stuff was like Woo for me, but it actually did what great writing when it's brought with an intention to bring light does it really literally opened my mind.

So I do consider you one of my greatest teachers, and I thank you for that. Thank you. I think everyone in this audience considers you the same way.

Well, thank you. So do you consider yourself now sort of as the world is evolving and people are beginning to see things differently and opening up to a to a universal view of the world, a global and universal view of the world? Do you feel somewhat redeemed? Oh, I never felt particularly criticized. Anyway, it was my truth, my journey, my experience, why I didn't feel that way is interesting. All I ever cared about was if they made jokes about me that they were funny.

Mm hmm. I can't stand a joke. That's not funny. And Jay Leno and Johnny Carson and the people they used to call me, their writers would call me and say they're going to make Shirley MacLaine jokes. I would help them write them.

Really.

I mean, I love all these jokes because, you know, frankly, isn't being a live kind of a joke.

I mean, when you come right down to it, I would have to say life itself is an out of body experience.

So especially now so accurate. Yeah. So Shirley has just written her 12th book called I'm Over All That and Other Confessions. Well, I just said, I think it's one of your best ones where she talks about everything family, love, sex and of course, reincarnation, but you're overall that you're over. What are you mostly over? I love some of the lighter ones. I'm over being polite to boring people.

That's that's, frankly, how I learned to meditate, really. Oh, yeah. So this is what you say I'm over being polite to boy, I'm not good at small that small talk. I try to help CMOC. I try to maintain my patience, but it abandons me completely. And I try not to tell the smoker what I'm thinking. I try to meditate. Yeah, I try to walk away. But if I can't, I stand and listen for an inordinate amount of time blinking and nodding.

They go on and on and I nod and blink on and on and return. The trick is to never speak or answer or acknowledge what they're saying in any way. Finally, if they won't stop talking, I go into a trance and meditate. That's great. You're over that. I'm over that. So I read that you never considered yourself a beauty. So aging in Hollywood for you hasn't really been challenging?

No. Face wise, not really. I look the same when I was 16, 30. I think it shifted around the sixty five year mark. You know, the thing that has been challenging for me is as a dancer, because I basically think like a dancer, I'm disciplined. I'm not a diva, I'm not late, I don't do all that stuff. But I worry about my physical weight and my sense of health. I'm not so much from a vanity point of view, but a point of view of health.

You say sex got over you. Well, I've had an awful lot of lovers, but. And I look an awful lot of problems, a lot of lovers and a lot of awful loving. But but but you did say that you didn't have sex affairs, you really did have a love affair. Yeah, I wasn't into sex capades, although I tried it once.

Had three people in one day, I have to be emotionally, how did you arrange it? Now you talk about the three people. One day you don't tell us who the three. That's good. It was on a political campaign where everybody was doing the same thing.

So I just didn't want to be left out. Yes. So how did you arrange that? Like one for breakfast, one for later in the day? And then how did something like that. Something like that. So but that wasn't your style.

My style at all. I was a serial monogamist and had, as I said, many love affairs. But what happens when you get older and very really interested in the spiritual dimension of things? Sex takes on a different a different meaning, a different importance, a different reason for being. You're married for 30 years. Yes. You write in the book about the fact that you and your husband had kind of an open relationship. Yes, we did.

Yes. What does that mean? Oh, I had other affairs and so did he, but we were very good friends. So why stay married then? That's a very good question and why I would never get married again because, well, there's so much involved with marriage that is confining. You say that you actually don't believe in the institution. I don't know. But you it for 30 years.

No, but I was having all these wonderful relationships. That's a good marriage. Yeah, that's a good marriage. That's that's my kind of marriage. But I love the freedom and so did he.

But we were very, very good friends. I was just thinking, you really are Hollywood. You are what? In our imaginations, our mind, our hearts. You are old Hollywood, Hollywood original Holly Wood. Do you see yourself that way? I mean, when you're with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. and all those people, that is the Hollywood that we all grew up.

That is. And don't you wish there would be more of that?

Yes. What's your take on what's your take on how it's changed, right? Everything is so technologically programmed, manufactured, marketed, how you dress, what label, how you sing, the brilliance of the old Hollywood, particularly with the live performers. As I was on stage with a lot of them, they always told the truth about everything. And as a result, there was an authenticity, authenticity about their lives, about what they were afraid of.

I mean, for example, Dean and Frank would be up there and Frank would tell a joke and nobody would laugh. And then Frank would throw it to Dean and say, you tell the joke, everybody would convulse. And then Frank would say, why didn't they laugh at me? And Dean, would you just not funny, Frank.

And that's the truth. I mean, the whole thing. And these guys grew up in the mob joints. And so the audience loved however they could to see this mystique walk out on the stage that had been associating with mobsters. And that's one of the things they joked about.

Tell me this. When you were in it with Frank Sinatra and Dean and Sammy Davis Jr. and the whole long list of Hollywood as we know it, did you know then what it was? Or is it only looking back that you can see? I've no idea who these people were.

You didn't know did you know that it held the level of glamour and Hollywood ism that it now holds?

I was 19, 20, 21. I know who they were and they treated me as a mascot. I just, you know, picked up their masks and shot water pistols with them. And I'll tell you some stories later, OK?

OK, so one of the stories you tell in this book, which is I said one of your best. I'm overall that you say you were often attracted to your leading men. So let's run through some of the.

Oh, OK. Let's just start with what you were attracted to your leading men? Oh, well, hell, yes, yes, yes. OK, so let's start with the Jack Jack Lemmon. No, I wasn't attracted to Jack. No, no. I liked he was a sweetheart. He was like my Aunt Rose. Really.

He was he didn't have that many I don't know that dangerous, complicated, sexual dominating thing. Confusion that I liked helping the men I was attracted to figure out.

I mean, some of my friends said, oh, it's him now. He's your next project. And they thought they were projects, your men. OK, so Jack Lemmon didn't have nor Jack Nicholson, really? No. I think Jack Nicholson has all that dangerous chemistry.

He does not too much for me. Too much. No, he's he's too much. I guess I liked the dangerous chemistry if it was controllable. Oh, is isn't. Yeah.

I would think really he is he is authentically dangerous. A friend is someone that can still help you, even when they can't be there in person, like with a friendly new Bank of Ireland third level current account with it, you get a debit card that's bio sourced and actually made from 82 percent corn. How cool is that? And you can also partnered up with your phone to use Apple Pay to buy things. Even if you don't have your card in you, you can apply for your friend.

New third level current account in just six minutes. Bank of Ireland dotcom forward slash student terms conditions apply. Bank of Ireland is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

So who were you attracted to? Can you share? Well, I guess I'm on the spot now.

Mitchum Mitchem Rob had quite a relationship with Mitchum's, even Montane. OK, but to tell you the truth, I don't know if it's my age.

I can't remember if I had sex with this French guy. I was attracted to some of the directors because the chemistry on a movie set is like, you know that.

Yeah. I mean, you were there in between shots, but you're authentically there to discuss emotion, to be honest about emotion. That's what I always found very attractive in every way. And everyone knows that what happened on a set stays on set and no one talked.

I mean, sometimes it would be trying to think of it happened to me, but I know it happened to several where you're right there and you're in the love scene and you don't stop when the director says cut, because hopefully, you know, you like this co-star and then the director and you hear them talk, let them go. It's good for the character.

Shirley MacLaine has written her 12th book.

Our 12th book is called I'm Over All That and Other Confessions. So let's talk about the state of the world. Well, we certainly can't get over that. No, I mean, we look at it every day. I think that we're all feeling this is it. We're feeling the need to know who we are in a deeper way than we ever had before. And it's challenging us. And here's how the weather, you know, that's you've got to get it together when the weather is very challenging.

This sense of speed is so fast that you can't sometimes feel you can keep up with it. The need to understand different cultures and different points of view and not be mad and angry at that which you don't agree with. And then you start getting into the past in relation to knowing who you are. And that's why the reincarnation thing comes up, because you are the result of everything your soul has learned from lifetime to lifetime to life to this. And two thirds of the world believes this.

So when are we going to wake up? But we're such a mechanistic technological left brain society, frankly, that unless you can prove something, you know, bump on it, it is not real. So we need to open up in a serious way to the recognition of other realities that are not just materialistic.

You say, I'm trying to get over the feeling that the world is falling apart. So when you look at the news, I'm just want to read a bit of this where you say when you look at the news, it's so sad. Sometimes it really is. I can't leave the news on in my house, you know, like people like leave the TV on in their house constantly. I can't do that because all the vibrations coming through that all that energy you say for me, these are very difficult days.

I find myself overcome with sadness a lot of time. If I see innocent animals and children hurt, I feel tears sliding down my cheeks and my chest contracts into a tightness that makes me know I'm holding back on an avalanche of despair. And you talk about the weather and you talk about the news on TV and you talk about the rudeness of so many young people and nobody communicating with each other. This whole thing. I was thinking this the other day, what's going to happen 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now with a generation of children who are brought up, not really speaking, but just sort of on their texting, on their mobile units?

What's going to happen to us as a species?

Well, how do you think there is an alignment occurring? And it is the first time in twenty six thousand years that this has occurred? No. What does that mean? If you have an alignment where this solar system is in direct alignment with the center of the galaxy, that carries with it a very profound electromagnetic frequency, vibration, vibration and gravitational pull, hence the weather. What does that do to consciousness? What does that do to our sense of reality?

I know everyone is feeling this sense of speed, speed, speed, and they don't know what to do about it. I have a feeling I can't prove it, can't prove any of this. That the karmic drama of the laws of cause and effect, what you put out, you get back OK? You do know what I'm talking about, which is the greatest spiritual law, wouldn't you say? So that is my mantra for life. The third law of motion.

It's physics, what you put out for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. So if I was to say what is the foundation of my religious belief? Yes, that is it. Right? That is it. Which is the same as do unto others as you would have them write you. But what it really means is what you do unto others is already done. Yes. Because it's coming back. Whether you believe it or not, it doesn't require your belief, right?

Yeah. And I think what this pressure, this kind of psychic spiritual pressure we're all feeling is about is that your internal soul is telling you get your act together, and that's why the weather is challenging you to do it. Technology is challenging you to do it. Poverty is challenging you to do it. Anything to do with losing your home is challenging you to understand who you are and who you're not. Isn't it the truth, though, that every thing, every life experience that occurs is there for the benefit of your awakening?

If you choose to see it, everything is happening to choose you to awaken to your true self. The thing is, though, hurry up and choose it. Hurry up. Hurry up and get the message. Absolutely. Hurry up and get the message.

Well, she's a legend, no question about that, Shirley MacLaine is here. How does it feel to be a legend? Actually, I don't know what you're talking about, honestly. Really? Absolutely.

I don't you can't wrap your brain around it with all the interest in spirituality every time I've ever tried to talk about it. I get so criticized, you know, but my definition of spirituality is really having an open heart, being able to openly receive the possibility of all that is. So when I speak of spirituality, that is what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about anybody's religion or saying that your religion isn't right. But with all the talk now about open heartedness, let's call it that, about open heartedness and being open to seeing the world differently and being exposed to other cultures and all of that, do you feel that that is an affirmation of what you've been saying?

Yes, because we have all been so many people who we've all had so many lifetimes of different cultures and different religions and different points of view and different wars and different loves and different children. My goodness.

And why if we've been all those many people, do you feel do you believe that it's so difficult for other people to open up and accept other people of the world? Why are we so stuck in it? Because we don't have a spiritual education in our schools. Not a religious education, spiritual education, if they would teach us from the time we're little to meditate and get in touch with all that our soul knows, we wouldn't fight so much.

And I've always been fascinated with why it didn't bother me that much that I was criticized or humiliated or whatever. It really didn't help because you weren't humiliated, because you in order to be humiliated, you've got to feel humiliated. And I really didn't care unless I was hurting someone. There are definitely I want to know I don't know where that came from because I'm from a middle class family. They really did care about what the neighbors thought in the neighborhood.

Oh, you know, where it comes from. It comes from a tremendous sense of your own self-worth. People who don't have a great deal of self-worth based upon how you were raised or what you were taught about yourself. When you have a great sense of your own self value and worthiness, you don't worry about pleasing other people. You don't want to harm other people. Right. But you know that your own value is within yourself and you don't have to get it outside of yourself.

So that's what pleasing is all about. I'm going to say something interesting here.

Go ahead. Hello. When I got into an adult life. Psychiatric help. And they said to me that I had an orphan psychology and orphan psychology. Now let's look at that. And this might help people if you feel you haven't been loved and you feel you haven't been acknowledged, which was not really the case with me, I don't think.

But because clinically it was called that I was free of having to please. The mother, the father, the relatives, I was free of that, so I felt very comfortable with being alone. That's why I live alone now. That's why I never had a conventional marriage. That's why I loved to travel. Yeah, I'd get on Panamerican Flight one traveled by myself around the world. So therefore, if you are comfortable with yourself, which everyone can get to to some extent.

Right, that's when you start getting into who is your real self and therefore you understand waps. There's some realities involved with me that are way beyond my teaching and my background or even my imagination. OK, so let's just talk for a second about the real self that there's the real self and there's that sort of self you're projecting that ego self out there in the world?

I think so, because everyone is a people pleaser and to some extent, yes. And when you have the freedom to be pleasing yourself, you will be nicer with others and you will be nicer to yourself because we all have this unified God in us. And when you take responsibility for having that divine in you. You are a better person and people are happier to be around you. So since you don't really care whether or not people what they think about you, do you feel misunderstood at all?

No, that's their problem and. No, I try to make it seem bleak, understood. I do know that's my task. Now, why did you want to write overall that how did that come about?

I don't know. I was sitting with my editor and I like him a lot. And we were having lunch and he said, well, what are you going to write next? I don't know. And so he said, well, why don't you write about this? I know I'm over all that. He said, Well, why don't you write my name over the wall? Why don't you write and remember? And he said, Well, that's the title.

So I sat down and started. I don't know. I don't plan it. I don't outline it. I let it all happen. That's the biggest thing I've I've learned Oprah in my life is to surrender. I don't fight and struggle anymore. But I have learned to surrender to the very sophisticated divinity.

Oh, that really, I would say, is one of my greatest life lessons to. Thank you, Shirley MacLaine. We could talk all day.

Thank you. I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast you can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple podcast and subscribe rate and review this podcast. Join me next week for another super soul conversation. Thank you for listening.