Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  “Yes,” said McPherson, “we programmed a harmless yet dramatic small event so as to attract your attention.”

  “But why?” I asked. “Was I the blind ballad singer? And if so, what difference does it make?”

  “What do you feel?” asked McPherson, in that way that all spiritual guides have of forcing you to think more intuitively for yourself.

  “Well, yes,” I said, “I feel I was.”

  “You are correct,” he went on.

  Then suddenly I connected the trouble I had been having with my eyes to what I was realizing. I had been experiencing dark spots swimming across my eyes which at moments made it difficult for me to read. I asked if this was connected.

  “Indeed it is,” said McPherson. “Your higher self understood that you would draw this knowledge to your conscious mind and the memory of the blindness was manifesting through the cellular memory of your eyes.”

  I blinked and tried to recall what I had looked like. I realized that I was “seeing” with a deeper insight. I didn’t see “form,” I “saw” meaning and feeling.

  “You had an inner sight then,” he said, “a highly developed sense of being because you had not the gift of outer sight. It would be well for you to develop more of that inner sight today.”

  Just as McPherson said that, I had a blinding flash of insight in relation to Ikkyu. I could hardly bring myself to express it aloud, but I had long since learned not to limit or block those feelings.

  “Tom,” I said, “I’m having the strangest idea or whatever you call it.”

  “I know,” he answered.

  “Is it true?”

  “Express your feeling,” he pushed.

  “Well”—I swallowed—“I have the feeling that this Ikkyu character was my ex-husband, Steve!”

  Tom smiled through Kevin’s face.

  “Quite right,” he said. “You needed to unravel the threads of your own mystery in order to come to a new understanding and thus a more personal title for your book.”

  “What title?”

  “Well,” said Tom, “to you all life is a dance, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “A dance of energy and lessons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ikkyu’s Red Thread Zen was the personification of the recognition of the dance of male and female energy as we embody both male and female in each incarnational experience. His was a dramatic breakthrough in the puritanical asexual Zen philosophy of his period. He understood that all experience is connected to the female through the red thread of the umbilical cord. That was your Steve. That is why you have been so spiritually connected to him through your present incarnation and also why you and he have had this identification with Japan. This spiritual lineage has transferred to this lifetime, only in this incarnation the roles are reversed. You have been the public expounder and-he has been the learner. Sometimes your insights are too much for him. At those moments he buckles in on himself. Just as in your previous incarnation together his insights were more than others could see. Your inner sight in this incarnation will enable you to be more tolerant of the pace of others who are sometimes blinded by the light. Do you understand?”

  I straightened up in my chair and breathed deeply. The spots in front of my eyes disappeared as did a deep pain in my right shoulder which had been troubling me for two days.

  “The pain in your right shoulder,” said Tom, “has lifted because you have gotten in touch with the incarnation we have been discussing.”

  “Why did I have the pain?” I asked.

  “It was inflicted by another Zen master and was beyond your understanding at the time.”

  “Did Ikkyu hit me?”

  “No,” he answered, “another monk struck you because you and Ikkyu were responsible for upsetting traditional Zen beliefs.”

  I rubbed my shoulder, unable to locate where the pain had been a few minutes before.

  “All body pain,” Tom continued, “or even disease, for that matter, is nothing but unresolved, unreleased karmic impurity. When the karma is understood, the energies in the body flow freely. The more karmically free one becomes, the less pain or dis-ease one feels in the body.”

  “But Tom,” I said, not understanding why I was suddenly feeling frantic, “how can people free themselves from pain and disease if they don’t know how to get in touch with their past-life karma? I mean, not everyone has you or other guides like you to talk to.”

  “It is very simple, really,” said Tom quietly. “Very simple. If everyone was taught one basic spiritual law, your world would be a happier, healthier place. And that law is this: Everyone is God. Everyone. The greatest threat to Earth is spiritual ignorance. There is a hunger for this understanding. The human race is experiencing a thrust in this direction with the revival of religious fervor. But each religious faction is judgmental and intolerant of the other. Release the zealous judgment. When everyone is aligned with the knowledge that each is part of God, the consciousness of civilization will reflect peace—peace within. Recognize that within each individual is the divine cosmic truth that you term God.”

  I gazed at Tom McPherson’s energy coming through Kevin’s body.

  “So you’re saying that if we just know that we are totally and individually part of that God-force, we will experience no more pain, trauma, or disease?”

  “That is quite correct,” said Tom quietly. “Enlightenment can come to anyone, regardless of how despicable they might seem to be. Each individual is working through his or her own soul conflict. Each person deals with his own trauma at his own pace. No one can possibly know or judge another. For each soul in the universe is part of God.”

  I sat still.

  Then Tom said, “Do you know what a koan is?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “A koan,” said Tom, “is a question which a Zen master will pose to his student to inspire him or her to think more deeply about his own reality. ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ That is a koan. ‘If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it?’ That is a koan.

  “Koans are intended to stimulate insight. The title Many Happy Returns was a koan for you. It stimulated investigative thought because it inspired and amused you. When it was jerked away from you, even deeper insight occurred. Now, with the dance of consciousness you have experienced you know more about yourself. To know self is the only thing worth knowing. Everything flows from that.”

  We both sat silently. I wondered what Tom as a spiritual entity would really look like if he had form. What was form? What were bodies? What were we? Were we simply coagulated thought? Were we physical manifestations of our own consciousness?

  “Well, Tom,” I finally said, “I guess you are my new koan. If you had form, what would you look like?”

  “Quite right,” said Tom. “And I can assure you I would seem different to each soul who posed that question. Reality is what one perceives it to be. If you have no more questions, I will be leaving now.”

  I nodded. “And if you leave, you will only appear to be gone?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Tom. “Nothing is ever gone. Everything and everyone is present always. Remember that in the days to come. The more you are conscious of that, the more awareness you possess. The more awareness you possess, the closer you come to knowing your higher unlimited self. The more you know your higher self, the closer you are to all other higher selves and to the Light which is the God-force.”

  A shudder went through Kevin’s body. Tom McPherson left. But I was indeed to remember, and be grateful for, Tom’s words “in the days to come.”

  * * *

  I received a call from Christopher Adler, my friend of so many years who had written the lyrics for my show and who had thrown that magnificent “light and life” birthday party for me. In the years of working together we had become very close. Now he was distraught. “Something is terribly wrong,” he said in a kind of controlled panic. “I am having ghast
ly stomach pains and I have a high fever, edema (water retention), and no energy, none. And the doctors don’t know what’s wrong.” He said he was going into the hospital for tests.

  I called Chris Griscom in Santa Fe immediately to see if she could tune in to anything specific. She was shocked.

  “Oh my, my friend,” she said after a long silence of communicating with her higher self. “The young man has disease all through his body which I see as having begun about three years ago. Shirley, it doesn’t seem possible for him to make it.”

  I was stunned. Christopher was so healthy and vibrant.

  “Well, what can he do?” I asked.

  “He has to accept that he had elected to have this experience, which is not going to be pleasant. If he understands the role of his own karmic free will in this, it is just possible that he can begin a healing process.”

  I didn’t know what to do; whether to call Christopher or not.

  I called Kevin and J.Z. and asked them to check with McPherson and Ramtha.

  They came back to me with the same projections. The ramifications of disease in Christopher’s body were truly monumental.

  I spoke with Richard Adler, Christopher’s father, with whom I had also worked all these years. Neither of us could take in the dreadful swiftness and apparent finality of what was happening to Christopher.

  A few days later Christopher called again. “It’s lymphoma, Shirley,” he said, trying not to cry. “I have lymphoma all through me. I have cancer. I can’t believe it. They took out all they could but now I have to go through chemotherapy for five weeks. I don’t understand why this is happening.”

  I couldn’t speak. What in God’s name could I tell him?

  Then, in a strong voice, Christopher said, “Listen, I need a spiritual game plan. I’m frightened. I know we’ve talked about your spiritual stuff and how it relates to our earth-plane life, but I really need to understand it now.”

  I talked to Chris Griscom and Kevin and J.Z. again. All of them said chemotherapy would thwart the body’s natural healing processes because it would destroy so much besides the lymphoma. But they added that given his karmic prognosis it probably wouldn’t make that much difference anyway.

  I talked to Christopher’s doctors. They said they knew there was truth in my spiritual approach to my friend’s terrible problem, but they didn’t understand it empirically and preferred to go through with their medical procedures. I understood that. So did Christopher. So did Richard.

  What followed was weeks of visits and phone conversations; for Christopher the nauseating sickness of the chemotherapy and his confusion about whether to adopt an attitude of “fighting” the disease, or giving in to it.

  I tried to encourage him to believe that he could beat the lymphoma but not from a “fighting” point of view. I talked with him more along the lines of understanding and believing that his body was perfect if he could only focus on the reality of that perfection. He was thirty years old, his heart was perfect, so could the body be perfect if he “knew” it.

  The Adler family began to prepare themselves for the worst yet continually supported Christopher in his battle. I went to New York for a week to be with him. During this time I had a “vision dream”—the kind we all have from time to time that seems so real it feels like an experience.

  I walked into his hospital room where I had seen him lying in desperation, confused and determined.

  This time, as I entered, he was fully dressed, his arms stretched out to me. He looked healthy and happy. He put his arms around me and we began to dance together. I looked around. We were dancing in a bubble of pure white light. He leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Now I am ready to talk about my mother.”

  I woke up abruptly. I knew his mother had died when he was very young and that he had been devastated by her leaving.

  I called Chris Griscom and asked her about the literalness of my realistic dream.

  “Yes,” she said, “my guides have told me that he needs to work out a long and complicated relationship with his mother that has gone on for centuries. This is his way of doing it.”

  “Well,” I asked confusedly, “does the dream mean he’ll survive? Or will he go?”

  “He’ll go, Shirley,” she said. “The white bubble of light around you is his acceptance of coming into the light of understanding after he goes on to the higher dimension.”

  I hung up. I wasn’t prepared to accept that explanation. I wanted Christopher to live in the body as much as he and his family wanted him to.

  I went into my room to do some yoga. In the middle of my yoga session my higher self began to speak to me in a clear and succinct voice.

  “Why do you feel,” it said, “that you have the right to insist that Christopher stay alive in the body when he has other issues to work out on a higher dimensional level?”

  I stopped my postures stock-still. “What do you mean?” I asked out loud.

  “Just what I said,” H.S. answered me rather strongly. “You know he will never really die anyway. Let him proceed with his course at his own pace. One person can never really understand what another is actually doing or why they are doing it.”

  “But,” I protested, “he says he wants to stay alive in the body.”

  “Part of him does,” said H.S. “But it is clear that his higher self needs to go on or this would not be happening. He is leaving because he has chosen to leave. That may be difficult for you to understand because you value life in the body so highly. But you are the contradiction. Allow him to pass over gracefully. That is his lesson to all of you.”

  I stood staring at myself in the mirror. Suddenly the personalization of the so-called death experience made sense. I had never really had anyone close to me “die” before. Now I was understanding in the most visceral way that Christopher was not really going to be “gone.” He was just going to make a transition into another dimension. And the more I or anyone else insisted that he stay alive in the body, the more difficult we were making his transition for him. What he would do was up to him. The doctors would play their roles. Aspects of Christopher himself would continue to struggle, but the real Christopher would make his own decision when and whether he would go.

  After that experience with higher self I ceased to struggle about Christopher. Grief I felt for the loss of a dear friend and for the family who would miss him, but I no longer had a sense of outraged despair.

  He apparently made his decision about six weeks later. I was playing my show in Los Angeles, thinking about him whenever I began the lyrics to his opening number. One night I went home to bed early. As I was sleeping a blazing white light filled my head. It woke me up. I thought the sun was shining into my room. I sat up in bed. The room was dark but I was enveloped in a shower of light that I felt surrounded me as well as emanated from inside my own mind. I knew it was Christopher. The light stayed with me for the rest of the night and for days thereafter.

  When I received the call from Richard I told him I already knew.

  Whenever I stepped out onto the stage and began to dance in the light of my own spot, Christopher’s light seemed to mingle with it. I could feel him enjoy what I was doing and what he had been so much a part of creating.

  I felt that he had somehow gone home to a place where all of his questions had finally been answered and he was reassuring me that his “spiritual game plan” was well into play. He was released from his confusion and pain and terror and knew exactly what he was doing.

  We all adjusted to his leaving in our own ways.

  As for me, whenever I think of him I see him dancing in a shower of light, looking down on me while I dance in mine.

  Epilogue

  To be skeptical of all I have described is understandable. I was suspicious, too, at first, except for one thing. I knew it happened to me. Perhaps I wanted it to happen, yet what I experienced led me to understand even more fully what the new physicists and ancient mystics were attempting to reconcile in their own mind
s: the reality of consciousness. Aside from suddenly seeming to speak the same language, they seemed to be on the brink of agreeing that even the cosmos was nothing but consciousness. That the universe and God itself might just be one giant, collective “thought.” And that every bit of information stored in our own consciousness was cross-referenced with every other bit of information, not only in our consciousness but in everyone else’s. That the “reality” of the physical universe was really only holographic memory patterns in our own minds. That time period upon time period lives on in the memory patterns of our mental and bodily consciousness.

  The hologram of that consciousness enables us to feel one with the universe and one with everything we’ve experienced. We are in “reality” multidimensional beings who each reflect the totality of the whole.

  I believe my intense search for self was motivated by the intuitive certainty that in myself lay the reflections of all there was. That all my curiosities regarding the outside world were in truth curiosities I had about myself. If I could know me, I could know the universe.

  As the new physics and the ancient mystics now seemed to agree—when one observes the world and the beings within it, one sees that we are in fact only dancing with our own consciousness. Everything we feel, think, and act upon is interrelated with everything everyone else feels, thinks, and acts upon. We are all participating in the dance.

  When I began to see the world with karmic consciousness, the knowledge that we all create our own paths of our own free will made me recognize the cosmic justice in everything. I understood that there was a purposeful good in all occurrences if I allowed them to provide a path of experience and understanding.

  The total understanding and realization of my self might require eons for me to accomplish. But when that awareness is achieved, I will be aligned completely with that unseen Divine Force that we call God.

  For me to deny that Divine Force now would be tantamount to denying that I exist.