Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  “We humans should never forget our capacity to connect with the collective spirit of animals. Their energy is essential to our future growth. The animals are on the earth for a reason and our disrespect for them has become alarming. They are totally without ego. Animals would teach us if we would listen. Pulsating in their collective consciousness are the lessons of the past. They are dumb and unable to speak for a reason. They communicate on other levels, which are there to help us hone our levels of perception with nature.”

  As this delightful recall receded from my mind, I was reminded again of its underlying theme. Respect the quality of life, the unquestioning acceptance of living with nature and animals while pursuing a sensitive progression of intelligence. And while understanding the will of the collective majority, be intricately aware of the needs of the individual.

  I breathed a sigh of completion when it was over, because I understood.

  An addendum to this tale is worth mentioning, even at the risk of sounding completely outrageous.

  First, let me say that I was learning that the theme of each incarnation was more important to understand than the specific incarnation itself. The theme of the elephant-princess incarnation, for example, had been the co-existence of the collective in tandem with the individual. I had mastered it on an emotional and spiritual level where animals were concerned. They had been instrumental in my learning it so that I could have an effect on the humans in the village.

  But as this particular recall was unfolding, another lifetime swam in and out of my consciousness, as though it were important for me to regard the two in relation to the same theme.

  This is what I “saw.”

  I saw myself involved with the sociopolitical questions of the Founding Fathers of the United states.

  When I asked H.S. who I had been during that lifetime, it said, “It doesn’t matter. The theme of democracy is what was important. You had an incarnation during the writing of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. You were involved, as were many, with the establishment of the New Spiritual Republic of the United States, and along with many others who lived then, you were deeply involved with the question of majority rule and respect for the rights of the individual. You drew on your lifetime with the elephants because your soul memory remembered your accomplishment of the same theme. You see how the holographic picture works?”

  Yes, I could see it, but it seemed outrageous to connect the two.

  “Nothing is outrageous when it comes to the learning of fife themes,” said H.S., “because the soul learns in many ways. You must learn to decipher what the lessons are in each given experience. You will find yourself repeating the same themes in different circumstances each time until you complete the understanding. That is what you did here. And you will be confronted with the same theme again as the United States continues to deal with its theme of collective and individual rights in the future. This country exemplifies the highest understanding of this theme to date, but there is still much to work out.”

  I was beginning to see the point.

  And so I have no idea who I was or what I was doing during the Founding Fathers’ days. I only know that the spiritual and sociological meaning of what they attempted to establish in 1776 had moved me deeply during my school years and does even today. My political activism in this lifetime has been motivated by a desire to see a return to their original intent.

  Our founders were spiritually inspired men and women seeking escape from the political and religious oppression of Europe. In the personal background of each one was a recognition of the mystical truths relating as far back as Pharaonic Egypt. They desired to spiritualize their New Republic and used ancient symbols to express the roots of their beliefs. They designed the dollar bill with the Great Pyramid of Giza on the back, and the Third Eye above it.

  They were spiritually aware, and in terms of leadership today, it seemed to me essential that leaders also have a spiritual support system which would keep them in touch with the recognition of their own higher knowledge in order to propel society toward a peaceful world.

  Chapter 18

  In the days that followed, each incarnation that was shown to me carried with it a theme and meaning I needed in order to understand myself more fully today. I was shown more than I could possibly relate here. Suffice it to say that I realized I was coming to a point where, if I were to be happy and effective in fulfilling the reasons for my coming into this incarnation, there was now an urgent need for me to clear up my own unresolved conflicts. In order to continue to grow in this incarnation and to expand my awareness of unseen dimensions, I would need to clear out the emotional residue of trigger points that still bothered me.

  It was obvious to me that people who operated only from an intellectual reality were becoming less and less at ease in their worlds. Nothing made “intellectual” sense anymore and, as reason failed them, they were becoming bitter and cynical.

  Our battles and conflicts were not with governments or with our culture or society. They were with ourselves. But I began to see that nothing would really threaten us if we were aware of who we were and what we came from. The more we quickened our soul’s awareness, the less we would be polarized by authority and fear.

  Higher self explained that many souls on the spiritual plane were waiting to come into the earthplane dimension so that they could proceed toward working out their karma. That was why life in the body was so highly valued. Karma was not resolved on the spiritual plane. It could only occur on the plane of experience, the physical plane of mass—the earth.

  H.S. said that each soul knows it will eventually come into the light of understanding even if it takes several hundred lifetimes to complete one theme.

  Life was not about survival. It was about spiritual evolvement. To operate with survival instincts alone, one had to polarize against something. To operate with instincts of evolvement meant there was no conflict because there was no resistance.

  If we proceeded with the knowing awareness that we elect to have each experience, we then approached trauma from an expanded consciousness. When our conscious awareness was expanded, we came into a more perfect alignment with the Divine Source and the trauma disappeared. Tragedy is tragedy because we perceive it as such. Thus we remain on the treadmill of negative blindness, not understanding what the purpose is, not learning. We are judging our predicament and polarizing our energy flow at the same time.

  Survival implies struggling against. Evolvement implies embracing the flow. Since all energy flows to the God source, the alignment induces peace and perfection.

  The nourishment and sustenance of the soul comes from the God source, not the earth source. There is no loneliness of conflict when one is aligned with that energy because one is aligned with true self.

  Each event happens according to what is necessary for the soul to learn.

  The days unfolded like budding flowers as I experienced and understood more and more. And as each session impacted on my conscious mind, I understood that most of the lifetimes shown to me represented my lack of use of spiritual power. Of course, there had been many completion incarnations, but to see them wouldn’t have been useful. The conflict had already been resolved. And even in the completion incarnations I had only completed one aspect of whatever it was I had come in to complete, only an aspect of a wider spectrum of karmic resolution.

  Of one thing I was certain. What I was doing felt right. I wasn’t unhappy or disturbed by what I was learning. Not in the least. As a matter of fact, it was a kind of liberation of understanding to realize that my life today was a result of the lives that had preceded it, that I was the product of many lives and would be again. It made sense. There was a harmony to that—a purpose—a kind of cosmic justice which served to explain everything in life—both positive and negative.

  Perhaps I was searching out more details in my past lives than most people. Perhaps even those who understood what I was doing would prefer to know less about past liv
es than I. Perhaps it was safer to pay lip service to the theory while refraining from becoming too specific. Maybe to others I was too vigorous in my own personal investigation. But that was my truth. It was my way of doing things. Once I was curious about anything, I overturned every rock on the path.

  To those who would insist that my cosmic-justice theory was too convenient, I could only say that it made just as much sense as flailing at the world. To those who would insist there is no such thing as harmony or purposeful good, I could only suggest that they weren’t looking at the grander picture.

  All of life, both its sad spectacles and glorious triumphs, had meaning if one observed it without judgment. Everything happened for a reason. Life was like nature. The beauty was in the being and every event in nature was tied to a chain of interdependent events. I was pursuing a curiosity of the chain of interdependence.

  I would allow myself the freedom of considering any truth that might be hidden, yet nevertheless real.

  So whenever I felt skepticism about my search, I learned to let it go. The truth I was seeking was more important to me, regardless of where it took me. I decided to trust what I felt was my higher self. As I learned what that meant I found myself reflecting on how I had been living my life in this incarnation prior to my spiritual understanding.

  I had so often been anxious about time schedules, promises I had made, responsibility, and pleasing others. My life had often been so busy that I felt I’d never accomplish all that I wanted to or that was necessary. That had changed now. Somehow I had relaxed, trusting that there would indeed be time. With the release of that anxiety I had suddenly discovered I was living totally in the present—no longer calculating how much time I would have to devote to the next problem, nor regretting what I had not given to what was past. Now was what mattered. As I trusted my spiritual power I found that I had more clarity of thought because it was void of anxiety. Therefore I accomplished more in a shorter period of time. It was astonishing to me how the spiritual freedom from anxiety worked. Since I felt that everything that occurred in my life was occurring for a good reason I just let things flow. And as a result my lack of resistance enabled me to manifest just about anything I desired.

  As I worked day after day with Chris and her acupuncture needles, I’d go into an altered state of consciousness even though I was simultaneously aware of my conscious state.

  My higher self conducted incarnational scans and isolated which lifetimes it was necessary for me to relate to. Often I saw overlapping pictures, one image tumbling over another. Then H.S. would stop frame an incarnation in time and show me a picture of an aspect of it. I couldn’t always understand what the pictures meant, but somehow I understood the emotional reasons for seeing them. The lifetimes often came up as movable paintings.

  I was dancing in a harem, attempting to spiritualize the movement.

  I was a Spanish infant wearing diamond earrings, and in a church.

  I was a monk meditating in a cave.

  I was an infant lifted by an eagle and deposited with a primitive family in Africa, where I became frustrated because they were not as advanced as I.

  I saw myself as a child in a swing looking up at the sun.

  I was a ballet dancer in Russia. I lived in a home which had a veranda. I wore velvet skirts and played the balalaika. I sat in a swing with books and a pen and paper. I loved the sunshine of the Russian spring and searched for strawberries that had been buried under the snow. There were no other people in the Russian incarnation. I was looking for Vassy, but there was no one.

  The picture flashed to Brazil, where I was involved with voodoo of some kind, misusing the power of the occult.

  The picture flashed again. I was on the Arabian desert with a caravan, looking up at the stars.

  Again a flash—I was doing Chinese tai-chi.

  Then another: I was a Japanese woman in a brightly colored kimono shuffling along cobblestone streets in the morning light on my way to a Buddhist temple.

  Another: I was swimming in a cave. An alligator slept on a riverbank nearby. I knew it, and was afraid.

  Then an incarnation came up that upset me so intensely that I didn’t want to go on.

  I was a young boy of about eleven. As I “looked” closer I realized I was an Inca youth in Peru. I was being trained by tribal priests to use my Third Eye power. In an attempt to accelerate my perceptions, they had chiseled a shallow hole in the center of my forehead.

  It was horrible. I remembered my reaction to the skull I had seen in the museum in Lima. A searing ache began to throb in the center of my forehead as I lay on the table. One of the gold needles popped out.

  I didn’t want to go any further. I asked Chris if it was necessary.

  “Ask your higher self,” she answered.

  I did.

  H.S. said, “If you want to progress, you must clear the psychic pain buried in this memory pattern. We would suggest you progress even further in learning how to function in two dimensions of consciousness simultaneously. You have carried the scar tissue in your Third Eye for other lifetimes as well as into this incarnation. You should release it. Don’t deny the experience.”

  I breathed deeply. All right. I’d go ahead.

  The picture came in again. I was in a spartan stone cell. A priest lovingly attended me, administering herbs and tonics to my Third Eye indentation. I was in confusion with the acute pain and felt that I was being forced beyond my understanding. He tried to explain. I had some sort of herbal gauze wound around a spongy plug that had been inserted into the indentation. It was humiliating to me as well as excruciatingly painful. I hated both the psychic and the physical violence, but couldn’t control either. The priest held me in his arms, rocking me as he continued to explain that this method would lead me to a higher level of clairvoyance. He said I had been chosen to divert the path of the community from evil. I became hysterical with anger and humiliation, wrenched myself out of his arms and ran from him.

  He made no attempt to follow me. I turned back toward him. The last thing I saw was the priest raising his arms in some sort of melancholy benediction.

  It was at that moment that I realized the priest had been Vassy! And the theme was overcoming evil.

  As each incarnation came up, I experienced some kind of emotional body pain. I say emotional because of the memory it aroused. The pain didn’t always correspond to what I was seeing. I asked H.S. the reason for that.

  It said that each of the incarnations I had viewed had ended in a painful death. It wasn’t necessary to show me the death. What was important was my lack of understanding while I had lived. However, each area of pain I felt related to each death. I needed to move through the bondage of the pain of those deaths and release it. But I also needed to understand that the deaths would not have been painful had I been in alignment with my spiritual power. Pain was nothing but resistance; resistance to the God energy caused by fear.

  Without fear and resistance, death would simply be a transition to another dimension.

  Reviewing the incarnations, I realized there had been an unresolved mystical understanding in each one of them. The theme had been my lack of utilization of my own spiritual power even when placed in mystical situations.

  At least I had recognized Vassy in one of my past lives.

  It was at the end of the week that I recognized others.

  At the end of each day’s session, Chris and I reviewed the meaning. She was always fascinated by the exquisite interweaving of themes. She had been through marathon treatments such as mine with many and warned me to go easy on myself as I was taking in an overwhelming amount of information.

  Each day I left her ranch to drive home slowly in the sunset. I never saw anyone else and reviewed my tapes while soaking in the hot vinegar bath each night.

  My dreams were intense, complicated, and symbolic. I often woke with a headache. I wondered again if I was going too far. But then I just couldn’t do anything halfway.

  I ate fr
esh vegetables and fruit and drank at least eight glasses of water each day. Sometimes I didn’t know what I was looking for in the sessions. Along with learning, it was an adventure within myself which entertained and stimulated me more than anything I had ever done.

  I found new levels of meaning in the simplest act. If a bird sang outside my window, I longed to know the hidden message of its song. When the sun drenched hot on my skin, I wondered if intelligence lived behind the sun’s gaseous rays. I drove alone for hours into the desert night until the moon sank below the granite mountains.

  And when I lay out under the stars, I felt connected to everything above me.

  It was a wondrous time for me.

  Sometimes I found myself crying. Other times I was overcome with joy. I was expressing myself to myself.

  I meditated on the smallest speck I could see until I felt it become infinitely huge. Then I meditated on a mountain until it became a speck. The more I found the center of myself, the further out I could go in understanding.

  I went into the hills and found a big tree. I encircled it with my arms and asked H.S. to tell me the tree’s secret to peace.

  H.S. said, “It is standing still.”

  I began to lose my sense of time. An instant was an hour. Sometimes I would forget where I was. Other times I didn’t recognize landmarks and drove past a familiar turnoff. New York and Hollywood were another planet. The fast pace of survival there seemed denigrating and way off the mark when life’s important priorities were considered. The wind-chased movement of a white cloud seemed infinitely more important. In fact, everything seemed infinite. Nothing had limits or perimeters. Everything had meaning. Nothing was wasted or gratuitous. And somehow all of life seemed to fit into a puzzle of perfection. The world and its chaos fit into the puzzle of peace too. For the chaos, seen in the full flow of time, was just the necessary drama chosen to be played out on this stage called earth.