Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  It wasn’t until after my last session with Chris that I realized what I’d been looking for. Of course, H.S. knew all along, but “I” wasn’t aware of it.

  I had had a good preparation when it finally came. I mean, I understood that I was seeing predominantly violent and traumatic incarnations because within those memory patterns lay the unresolved conflicts I needed to clear.

  There were two notable incarnations, never to be forgotten, that helped me see more clearly today.

  I will relate them in the order that they were revealed to me because the sequence probably has some significance, although I’m still not sure what it is.

  The scene opened in the wild, desolate Gobi Desert near Karakorum. (One of my favorite books in childhood had been The Sands of Karakorum, about a Western couple who braved the deep wind-blown shifting sands of the desert on a journey searching for a lost city where their best friend had disappeared.)

  I saw a caravan of tents and camels starkly alone against the dry, barren ocean of sand.

  Inside one of the tents, I (as a young woman) lived with my father, mother, and two other sisters. We were Mongolian nomads and subjected from time to time to the raids of roaming bandits. The bandits were merciless, inflicting indescribable cruelties upon their victims if their demands were not met.

  Other than the pressing fear of these bandits, the lazy desert life was lean but harmonious. We tended our camels and horses within the caravan and I was particularly interested in weaving brightly colored cloth interspersed with small mirrors which we had picked up at a trading-route junction.

  At this point, it’s important that I begin to identify each character of the incarnation. The father was my father of today. The mother was the present lifetime sister of my father. My middle sister (I was the eldest) was Chris, and my youngest sister was Sachi.

  So there was an immediate connection to the significance this incarnation had for me today.

  The “story” unfolded.

  I was about sixteen and in the full flush of puberty. I was attracted to a young man of about twenty who lived with his family in a neighboring tent. It was understood that he and I would someday marry, but not until my father consented. I was a beautiful young woman who could be desirable on many levels and my father had the cunning of a Mongolian trader. As a woman in that culture I was simply an attractive possession to be bought or sold when the proper time came. And the young man, as well as my father, regarded me in those terms. The young man was my ex-husband, Steve, in this present lifetime.

  My father was dominant within the family circle as all desert Mongolian fathers were, but his lordly role could easily be compromised by bribery, or intimidation.

  One evening, following the meal (chunks of camel meat roasting over a spit as we dunked hunks of dry bread into fermented milk), the family settled in for the night. A thick rug covered the sand floor of the huge tent with multicolored pillows scattered in strategic resting places. Silks hung from the interior of the tent and a pile of untanned skins lay heaped in a corner. There were fur skins being cured outside, waiting to dry in the sun.

  The stars outside looked so close, I could have picked them from the sky like zircon plums.

  I heard a rider in the distance thundering across the sand with more speed than usual. When he came into view, I saw it was one of the feared bandits. Alongside his black Arabian stallion, he guided two galloping camels.

  I quickly ducked into the tent and told my father of the approaching bandit.

  He said nothing, but I could see he was afraid.

  Soon the bandit reached our caravan and made for our tent immediately. He whipped open the front entrance flap and stood before us looking for all the world like Genghis Khan to me. His flashing eyes were like bruised olives and his face was covered with a ragged beard and moustache. His hair hung long and black, tied in the back with a thin piece of leather. He wore black muslinlike robes with a red crimson cummerbund around his waist. He straddled the rugs in our tent and brandished a long, jewel-encrusted sword. He was menacing in the extreme, but we knew he wanted to make some sort of deal.

  The bandit surveyed the interior of the tent. My father smiled ingratiatingly and attempted a friendly gesture of welcome. The bandit ignored him. He surveyed our furs and skins, but moved on to scrutinizing the three sisters. I realized he was there to steal a woman.

  My father realized it too. This was one time when it wasn’t a question of what I was worth, but whether I would live.

  The bandit pointed to me and said he would take me and go in peace. Otherwise, if I wouldn’t go willingly, he would ransack our tent, kill the other occupants, and take me anyway. He said he needed a woman and I was to be his possession.

  That didn’t leave my father much choice. He looked at me.

  I somehow found the bandit rather attractive. I was not at all afraid of him. In fact, I found him adventurous and thrilling. I pictured him on long desert rides under the stars as my protector.

  My father saw that I wasn’t afraid, which made his position and decision much simpler. He shrugged.

  The bandit shrewdly observed the interplay between us and before any other bargaining could take place and without any leave-taking, he swept me out of the tent and flung me onto his black stallion. He replaced his sword in its sheath, seized the reins of the two camels, and vaulted to the back of the horse, encircling me with his arms. He dug his feet into the sides of the animal and urged it into a gallop with the two camels following behind.

  I wasn’t afraid. To me it was an adventure. I knew I would be safe with the bandit because he regarded me now as his possession.

  I realized that the bandit was my mother today.

  The pictures of my new life with the bandit tumbled over each other as a jumbled montage. There were starry excursions alone with him across the wild endless sands and howling winds of the desert. There were groups of other bandits with whom he did business and before whom he proudly flaunted me. I cooked for him over desert fires and shared his bed, a luxurious stack of mountain-animal furs. He talked to me but didn’t really communicate. He regarded me as a comfortable shadow who caused no difficulty or inconvenience, yet was always there. I was reasonably happy but sometimes missed my father and the young man to whom I was supposed to have belonged. I seemed to be extremely passive, not exactly accepting life, but instead adjusting to what I believed was my incapacity to alter it. I had very simple attitudes and responses which carried little emotional involvement.

  That detached sense of being carried over into what happened next.

  Chris stood up and prepared to put another needle into my throat. Up until now, she had not been able to penetrate that past-life scar tissue. My throat was even more resistant to the needles than the center of my forehead had been.

  “They’re telling me I should use a needle here today,” she said as she gently jabbed it into the soft tissue of my throat. This time she succeeded, but it quivered a little.

  “Please go on,” she said.

  I was sleeping on the furs in the tent. By now I was pregnant. I was pleased about the pregnancy because it would give me another human being to relate to. I was sleeping alone because the bandit was away.

  Out of the silence, someone entered the tent. I called out. He answered. It was the young man from the village who had tracked me down and had come to claim me for his own.

  As soon as he saw that I was pregnant, he became furious. His eyes blazed and he yelled at me. He wasn’t angry with the bandit. He was angry with me. I was his possession and now I had been contaminated with the mark of another man.

  He fell down upon me and proceeded to violate me in the harshest kind of lovemaking. As he raped me, he seemed to be eroticizing his own violence along with indulging himself by using me with proprietary and possessive commands. Yet I found I was enjoying the erotic struggle myself, my only concern being the welfare of the baby.

  In the full throes of our sexual embroilment, someone f
lung open the front entrance flap. It was the bandit. He looked down at me with the young man, pulled him off me, and yanked me roughly to my feet. He was not angry with the young man. He was angry with me.

  He dragged me out into the desert. The dawn was coming. The young man followed. Thé bandit took his sword from its sheath. The young man also unsheathed his sword. I knew the bandit was going to kill the young man and then me. The young man, though, suddenly cowered in front of the bandit and, as though to try and save his own life, he lunged at me. Holding me around the neck from behind, he very deftly slit my throat. The bandit looked on with an implacable expression tinged with sadness.

  Blood spurted down my shoulders and arms. Making placating noises to the bandit, the young man bound my hands behind me and tied me to a stake he embedded in the sand. He was using my death to save his own life. The code of the desert required that the woman pay for adultery with her life.

  I, knowing I was going to die, looked over at the bandit. He was sorrowful but stern. I looked up at the young man. He was paralyzed, more with terror for himself than for me. He stood watching, making not a move now.

  Again, I seemed not to react to what was happening to me. I felt no pain on the table, and although the images were horrible, I was watching the other players more than myself.

  The young man turned away from me, leaving me tied to the stake. The bandit shouted to him. The young man put his arms in the air as if to say, “You do what you want.”

  The bandit allowed him to leave. The young man climbed onto his horse, and without looking back, rode away into the sun, leaving me to bleed in the desert heat.

  The bandit sorrowfully broke camp, piled all his belongings onto the horse and camels and rode away too.

  I was left alone on the desert to experience the vicious attacks of predatory birds as I slowly bled to death.

  Now on the table the pains in my throat began. The needle fell out and, once again, I didn’t want to go on.

  How does one deal with a recalled memory such as this? I realized that each of us humans had been through a panoply of horrors, but what was I supposed to learn from this? I had always been afraid of birds. They were possessed of a power that left me feeling helpless. Was this memory what caused such an unrealistic fear?

  “Release the fear,” said Chris. “It will be cleared for good. We can review the rest of it later.” She twirled the needle in my throat.

  I breathed light into the needle. The ache was terrible, a gnawing, pounding ache.

  The picture or myself dying stayed in my mind. The sun was high now. I had nearly expired completely. The scene was too grisly for me to focus on for much longer. At the same time that I felt reluctant to focus, I saw myself decide to leave my body and let go and die.

  The feeling of terror and pain left me as soon as I left my body. I looked down at myself. I tracked the young man after he left me. I saw him return to my father. He told my father that the bandit had wounded me and left me to die.

  My father believed him and upbraided him harshly for not defending me. But there were, after all, two other daughters left who might bring him a more promising arrangement in the future.

  The young man then began to bargain for my youngest sister (Sachi). Sachi refused to be sold to him because she had fallen in love with his younger brother. The younger brother was my brother of today! The two young people went off together, leaving both of the men who had been responsible for my fate to fight between themselves. I heard my young man swear revenge against my father’s soul, and he vowed he would continue until he succeeded in destroying him in a future lifetime.

  The picture rolled away until it disappeared.

  I stopped for a moment. I began to put some pieces together. Then I said to Chris, “You know, what is significant to me here is that my father and my ex-husband disliked each other from the moment they met. It was an almost chemical dislike based on absolutely nothing conscious. They each went after the other in a proprietory way, as though I were to be protected by each from each. I never understood it. And each of them believed that the other was not good for me. I loved them both, but they couldn’t bear each other.”

  Chris chuckled quietly. “A little karma going down,” she said. “It happens in every family. But look at the karma your mother, as the bandit, and your father have to work out. I mean, she really abused her power unmercifully in that lifetime even though it was the code of the desert to steal women. How do you feel about that?”

  I thought about it, trying to be as objectively honest as possible. “Well,” I said, “somehow I feel more interested in what happens between the two of them. I always have. It’s as though I haven’t particularly held any subconscious grudge against either of them, but instead have agreed to come into this lifetime as their daughter to help them work out their problems with each other. Is that possible?”

  “Yes,” said Chris, “and gracious! You chose such a magnificent entity in your mother in order to work through many issues which were necessary for you. She has taught you to love without judgment. She has reminded you that each of us has been a tyrant at one time or another. She has been through it all and is blossoming in that understanding, just as you will. Your father is still straddling the fence between understanding the latent power he possesses and putting it to use, but he will. They are both going to progress rapidly because you are. The two of them have an urgent and intense karmic tie, but the enlightenment of one individual soul elevates every other soul on the planet. Your mother was your chosen one to learn through. She exuded the ideal which best served what you needed to learn. That is why she attracted you as a potential parent.”

  That was putting it mildly, I thought. What rang so true, in terms of myself, was my observation of Mother’s apparent powerlessness in this present lifetime. Whatever her reasons were for drawing that victimization to herself, I didn’t want that to happen to me. So even though she drew a great deal of frustrated helplessness to her this time around, she served as a lesson for me to avoid the same fate. For that lesson, I would be eternally grateful. I had certainly chosen a superb teacher. As far as my parents together were concerned, they expressed their repressed emotions to each other much more fully when I was around than they did when alone with each other. My lesson in all of this, then, might be to simply sit back, be patient with their karmic intensity, and let them argue and flail away at each other until they finally got it all out. Their love for each other was obvious. But that kind of love was not what the experience of life was all about. It was about forgiving self so each of them could fall in love with their own beings.

  A few other points about the desert incarnation.

  Since I was a child, I have felt a mystical attraction to the desert—not the Mojave Desert or the Sahara Desert, but the Gobi Desert. It was always a desert with Mongolian inhabitants that fired my imagination. They were wild and rough, answerable only to the God whom they worshipped with fear and awe. The howling wind was their constant companion and the expanse of the heavens above their only reminder that they weren’t alone. Why I would romanticize the Gobi Desert after having experienced such a lifetime, I don’t know, unless perhaps I had worked through my problem with the people who had victimized me and had as yet not worked through the trauma with the birds, the sun, and slow death.

  There were so many threads that bound that lifetime to my present one that it is virtually impossible to look at and understand all the connections. And what had happened to me on the desert was the result of events that had preceded it.

  For example, after the Mongolian experience with the young man who slit my throat, I wondered what I had done to him previously that required me to go through such a violent and slow death.

  I asked my higher self. What came up was an incarnation in Rome. I was a Roman soldier who had incarcerated a woman and her daughter. They slowly starved to death in a cell after having contracted leprosy because of the filth. The woman was the soul of the young man. And the y
oung man was my ex-husband today!

  The karmic law of cause and effect was staggering in its implications. The drama never seemed to end. I marveled at the rich canvas of human history. What movies could be made out of karmic drama! If only Hollywood would become interested in how karma works for each member of the human race. It would no longer be simplistic good guys versus the bad guys stuff. It would be all of us in the soup of emotional conflict together. I longed to see a film where poetic justice was spread over several lifetimes. Then we could learn something about how the harmony of life’s purpose works. Violence would not be minaless; it would have meaning. And when the meaning was understood, it would become far less provocative and dangerous. Perhaps people would find themselves monitoring their own behavior, knowing that they were the final judge of their actions and master of their own destiny.

  Human understanding would accelerate immeasurably if each of us had the certain knowledge that whatever we visit on another, good and bad, would be experienced by us. Again, I thought about leadership. Each person in a position of power must feel the loneliness of not seeing the “meaning” when facing a decision that involves the possible death of others. It isn’t the death that is the issue. It is the robbing of the vehicle of experience—the body—which is the highest cosmic crime. The only route to God is through the earth plane, the karmic experience which occurs in the body. To kill another is to terminate the soul’s opportunity to find God.