Dancing in the Light (48 page)

But the most revelatory experience was with the man from the village. My parents may have reaped money problems from that lifetime. But theirs were nothing compared to mine. As I have said, the man who had vowed monetary revenge was my ex-husband Steve. During our marriage, he had felt the need to take large amounts of money from me. And during the property settlement he demanded even more. I had never understood the basis for his desperation about money until now. He had vowed revenge against my father in the Mongolian lifetime and against me in the Russian incarnation.

In the Russian incarnation, paralyzed by fear, I had run counter to my own convictions, denied him help, and, as a consequence, there had been terrible results for him and his family. In my present lifetime I believed I was experiencing the karmic reaction, reaping the fruit of my own weakness in the past. It all fitted.

I wondered if such a belief could be helpful to the millions of people who found themselves bitter and angry at having been ripped off, cheated, and, to all appearances hurt for no reason.

There is always a reason. We are all participants in our own karmic drama from lifetime to lifetime. It is simply a learning process and if we can only persuade ourselves to think of it that way, a lot of the knocks become easier to take.

When I understood what I had just seen, I felt the tears come. To understand the
reasons
for Steve’s apparently negative attitudes was moving beyond words. I didn’t open my eyes. I focused in on my higher self again. It was more clear than ever.

I saw H.S. peacefully standing in the center of the me that functioned on the spiritual plane. It stood quietly and balanced. Then an astonishing thing happened. My higher self held out its arms as if to welcome another being. This new persona approached
H.S. and I realized it was the higher self belonging to Steve. But it had the appearance of a very old man. H.S. embraced the old man, who looked steadily down at me.

“I hope I have helped you learn,” the old man said with deep compassion and sadness. “My purpose has been only that. I love you beyond all understanding and we both agreed to lead the life we have led in this incarnation. We have been together through experiences that are too numerous to remember. You know that. And through each one, we have taught each other and learned from each other. All that you have put me through and all that I have put you through was done in the name of love. And the love for each other was only a lesson in the love and realization of self.”

My heart flooded with emotion as I began to resolve all the confused tearing feelings I had had about him. He smiled sadly again. Then something happened that will stay with me forever.

H.S. lifted its arms in a welcoming gesture. Moving slowly into my higher dimensional picture floated the essences of several other people. I say essences because the forms were not literal, yet I could see that they were the soul energies of the higher selves of my mother, father, brother, Vassy, and Sachi. They seemed to vibrate with individualized light, manifesting aspects of themselves that I recognized today. They held themselves in their own light, quivering in a subtle dance of individualized radiance.

I was nearly unable to deal with what this made me feel. I began to cry again. I felt such an outpouring of love from them. It was so perfect. They meant so much to me, They were surrounded in their own light. Two other light beings joined them—Ramtha and Tom McPherson. They stood on either side of my small group. And the tears continued to flow.

Then H.S. spoke again. “This is
your
perfection,” it said. “This is the harmony you seek. Your
tears recognize a truth you have been seeking. Know that it is there for you, and do not lose it by struggling so hard to find it! But remember always that seeking, not struggle and fighting, is part of the path. Seeking is a necessary part of the whole, and in the imperfect world that we ourselves created there must always be a search for harmony. That is the purpose of the imperfection—and therefore the paradox, the imperfection that makes the perfect balance. Do you understand? Do you understand how we are all connected in love and light and purpose?”

I was crying so hard I was glad I only needed to answer in my mind.

“Yes,” I answered, “I understand.”

Apart from insights into my relationships with family, friends, and lovers, it would be difficult for me to define accurately the effect my time with Chris, and achieving connection with my higher self, have had on my life. But there are perhaps three significant areas in living where my growing spiritual maturation has assumed major importance for me: first, in energy control and resource; second, in reality perception; and third, in experiential reality.

As for the first, my energy is “phenomenal.” People tell me this—and I surely know it in every phase of daily living and work. Secondly, more and more I am convinced of the truth of Flaubert’s statement: “There is no such thing as reality. There is only perception.” And that perception of one’s own reality relates directly to the third—experiential reality.

Now, when I encounter something that seems too negative or confusing to deal with, the knowledge that I have chosen it for my own learning experience makes it less difficult to cope with. The task then becomes an attempt to investigate
why
events occur so that the pieces can be fitted into the larger picture.

Shortly after I left Santa Fe, two events occurred which exemplify, for me, the process of how one relates to life in the light of spirituality.

Chapter 19

I
had started right away to draft
Many Happy Returns.
Somehow the title itself inspired me to touch what I wanted to say easily. I found that if I entrusted the writing to my higher self, I could work nine to twelve hours a day without tiring. In fact, it didn’t feel like work. It felt more like free-flowing expression. I was beginning to understand how the creative principle of trusting one’s own higher knowledge worked. I was simply getting out of my own way. I wrote the first draft in five weeks.

Then an apparent roadblock occurred.

I had returned to Los Angeles, and during a session with Kevin Ryerson (the medium for the spiritual entities Tom McPherson and John), they informed me that there was a problem with the title of my book. They said a book exploring the past lives of Edgar Cayce (the celebrated American medium) was about to be published and was entitled
Many Happy Returns.
They added, however, that I would find a better title that related more personally to my own life and lives. I was unhappy, but waited for a new title to emerge. I went back on the stage.

I was playing the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco when Kevin Ryerson came to see my show. I walked out on stage for the opening number in my usual red sequined pantsuit. As soon as I began to
move, I noticed a long red thread dangling from my sleeve. Having had experience with sequined material, I knew it was dangerous to pull on the thread because each sequin was attached to the same thread. The wardrobe woman was very conscientious, so I couldn’t understand why this was happening.

After the opening number, I stopped, asked for some scissors and remarked that if I pulled the dangling red thread the whole costume would unravel. As it turned out, my remark was a metaphor for what transpired.

Kevin came backstage. Under his arm, he toted a pamphlet. “I think we have an interesting piece of synchronicity here,” he said. I, of course, didn’t know what he was talking about until I read the material he had brought with him. “Read this,” he said. “Then we must talk.”

I quickly scanned an article investigating the life of a Zen master in the fifteenth century called Ikkyu. He had been a phenomenal poet, inconoclast, and a religious reformer who, although an emperor’s son, had spent most of his long life (eighty-eight years) as a wandering medicant (healer) monk. He became the greatest calligrapher of his time and was remembered as a legendary lover who had his most passionate love affair in his late seventies. Ikkyu was as full of contradictions as the time period in which he lived, a period of political upheaval, not unlike ours today, with riots, civil wars, plagues, epidemics, famine. Yet, at the same time there was a radical renewal of the arts, a cultural renaissance rivaling the Italian Renaissance. Ikkyu’s influence on the period was immeasurable. He became a folk hero, making his greatest contribution to the Japanese culture as the Father of
Wabi
, which, loosely translated, means the beauty of simplicity and the absence of materialistic ostentation through “things.” He was a Chinese as well as Japanese poet.

As a Zen master, however, he challenged Zen philosophy, which not only ignored but almost denied
the existence of women and therefore the importance of love and sex between men and women in human life. He called his acceptance of human sexuality and respect for the female energy Red Thread Zen, acknowledging that life itself would not exist if not for the umbilical cord that connects us to the feminine. He excoriated celibacy, and declared that his intimate relations with women deepened his own enlightenment. Although he had openly experienced relationships with many women, it wasn’t until his midseventies that he claimed he had found the great love of his life. She was a blind singer of Japanese ballads and was forty years his junior. On his deathbed, he dedicated his last poem to her.

I do regret to cease pillowing my head in her lap
I vow eternity to her …

As I read the material, I felt a strong sense of familiarity. Kevin said he had felt “compelled” to give it to me, that it must have something to do with my own past-life experience. Somehow in my intuitive higher mind, I felt that perhaps I might have been the blind ballad singer.

A few days later, we had another session. McPherson and John came through. I questioned them about the synchronicity of the red thread on my sleeve and the Red Thread Zen of Ikkyu.

“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?”