Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  This process was so self-enlightening that at times I wanted very much to share it, attempting to light a candle for someone rather than tolerate their cursing of the darkness.

  I quickly learned that this is where karma comes m. While pursuing my own awakening, if I was working with balanced principles, I was aware at all times that everyone else was pursuing their own path, consciously or unconsciously. They had their own perceptions, their own truth, their own pace, and their own version of enlightenment. It was not possible to judge another’s truth. I had to simply proceed along my own path, continually reminding myself of the true meaning of “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

  The process of self-realization (or even the theories of reincarnation and karma) does not lend itself to proselytization. It is highly personal, ultimately self-responsible. All one can say, really, is: this happened to me. This is how it feels. If it interests someone else, they must do their own learning, their own reading, their own searching.

  So, I can only say that this feeling of higher awareness is so personal that it is a matter purely of one’s own consciousness. In my life, and in my work, I realized that what I saw in others was that which I did or didn’t want to see in myself. I realized that the perceptions I had of myself were, in the main, perceptions I had of others in the world around me. I was, in effect, only living inside of my own reality, and so was everyone else. Therefore, to desecrate another was to desecrate myself. To denigrate another was to denigrate myself. To judge another was to judge myself. And that’s what it was all about: SELF. If I was happy with myself, I was happy with others. If I loved myself, I could love others. If I could tolerate myself, I could tolerate others. If I was kind to myself, I was kind to others—and on and on. It was a personal evaluation of self that enabled this enlightenment to work for me. Not the evaluation of others. So when I saw people zealously condemning the “sins” of others in the name of God, I found myself wondering what karma they were setting up for themselves. What ye sow, so shall ye reap. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This simple karmic law of cause and effect was predominant in the religious and spiritual teachings of virtually every culture on earth. So many had misinterpreted this law for their own reasons. I “respected” these reasons, whatever they might be, but with the world heading for possible self-destruction, I could only say that we are not victims of the world we see. We are victims of the way we see the world.

  In truth, there are no victims. There is only self-perception and self-realization. That was the star to which I hitched my wagon. As the etymology of the word disaster suggested: dis—torn asunder from; astrado—the stars. To experience disaster is to be torn asunder from the stars, and from the higher truth.

  There were personal events that occurred during my run in New York that provided me with the opportunity of being more aware of how the harmony of the higher dimension works.

  I received a call from a psychic trance-channeler, a friend of mine, who didn’t want to concern me unnecessarily but wanted me to be aware of something. She didn’t know what it meant, but she said, “Do you know someone named Mark?”

  I couldn’t think of anyone except one of my four dancers, whose name was Mark Reiner.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said my friend J.Z. “Someone named Mark will cause some disruption, not serious, but just be aware.”

  Every night during the warm-up period before the overture, I would look at Mark and wonder if J.Z. could have tuned in on something concerning him. I never said anything. I didn’t want to alarm him.

  A few days later, New York went on daylight saving time. It was a matinee day and I was having dinner with friends in between shows. I had forgotten to put my watch ahead an hour. My friends commented that I was unusually casual about lingering over dinner. I glanced at my watch and said, “Oh, I have another hour.”

  Then our waiter passed and inquired why I was off that night. I said I wasn’t off. He pointed to his watch and said, “Then you’re on in five minutes!”

  I panicked. I raced to my limo, where Dominick, my driver, stood tapping his foot, wondering. I am religious about performance deadlines.

  He drove the getaway car in a way Al Capone would have admired. I arrived at the theater to find Mike Flowers ashen-faced and annoyed. I didn’t blame him.

  “You don’t understand,” said Mike. “Mark Reiner has sprained his ankle and can’t go on. You have three minutes to rechoreograph.”

  We used only four dancers. Now there were three. One boy would have to dance two parts!

  I rushed to the stage where the other three dancers were perspiringly attempting to work with a fourth person. I couldn’t place him. He turned around. It was one of my old dancers. He “happened” to be in the audience, heard the news, and rushed backstage. He knew the “choreographer” number! Mark’s clothes fit him perfectly—even his dance shoes!

  “If you want, I’ll go on,” said Gary. “But I’d really like to see the show first. I can be ready tomorrow night. Mark is going to be out for several weeks.”

  The impact of J.Z.’s warning hit me. Yet at the same time, I realized I was protected not only by Gary’s “accidental” presence, but by forgetting the time change. I hadn’t had time to worry!

  We went on without Gary or Mark, rechoreographing as we moved. I explained to the audience what had happened. They loved being in on it. Larry, the dancer now dancing two parts, had the time of his life. The audience wildly applauded him, and when it was all over, I called J.Z. to tell her what had happened.

  “Oh, now I understand,” she said.

  “But how did you know?” I asked.

  “When you’re tuned in, you’re tuned in,” she said. “A psychic is just a little more tuned in to the ‘knowingness’ of his or her higher self than others. That’s why they call us psychics. But the knowingness is there for all of us. We are all psychics, we just don’t know it. If we each trusted our knowingness, we’d each be totally aware. We are what we’re aware of. And that should be our true goal in life.”

  I thanked her and hung up. I sat for a long time, thinking again about the limitation of linear time.

  I could only perceive events that had either just happened or were immediately about to happen. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t view what a past lifetime had been or what a future event would reveal.

  I thought of a canoe floating down the river. From the perspective of the canoe, one could only see immediately behind or immediately ahead. Seen from a perspective above the canoe, that view became a broader and more elongated perspective. One could see miles behind and miles ahead.

  If the river was time, then, and we wished to see the past and the future, all it took was to plug into a higher perspective. Again there was no such thing as reality, only perception. But to plug into that higher perspective required more knowledge of the higher self—our higher selves resided in the spiritual dimension, not in the earth-plane, physical dimension.

  The spiritual dimension was real even though we couldn’t see it or measure it in linear terms. There is a greater reality than our “perceived” conscious reality. That is what has come to be called the new age of thought. A new age of awareness. An awareness that includes the knowledge that there is indeed a level of dimension that operates in harmony and with perfection, waiting for us to understand that being alive on earth is only a limited aspect of what we truly are.

  The sense of knowing that the great unfathomable mystery isn’t really such a mystery was a practical, contributive, earth-plane support system for me. It was not only out there, it was in fact inside me, waiting to be tapped and realized. As above, so below. The two dimensions were mirrors for each other. I was living on the limited earth-plane dimension, but if I trusted that I was indeed unlimited, then I would also be able to tune in and know that Mark Reiner was going to sprain his ankle.

  During my years of searching for spiritual understanding in myself and others, my path has led me through some almost
unbelievable events and relationships. Some included “regular” people. But other relationships were not of the “home-grown” variety. As I have described, I visited accredited mediums who channeled spirit guides from the spiritual plane. I developed relationships with those “entities.” Some were humorous, some purely educational.

  He identified himself as Ramtha the Enlightened One. My relationship with Ramtha was deep, seeming to speak to another time and place. He said he had had one incarnation during the Atlantean time period and had achieved total realization in that lifetime. When I was first told about Ramtha, a very strange soul-memory feeling came over me. As a matter of fact, the first time I heard his name I broke down and sobbed. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. I only knew that the mention of his name brought up feelings that I couldn’t control and touched me so deeply it almost frightened me.

  During our first session, the same thing occurred. He channeled through J.Z. Knight (the same woman who had called me about Mark), J.Z. was a beautiful blonde with a kind of delicate friendliness. Ramtha was a definitive masculine energy of loving forceful-ness. When she went into trance and Ramtha came through, everything about J.Z. changed. The soul energy of Ramtha was in her. J.Z. is about five feet four inches tall and not particularly strong. When Ramtha came through, he picked me up in his arms and carried me around the room, nearly lifting me over his head. I could feel his masculine energy through her arms. I am a heavy, muscled woman weighing usually between one hundred thirty and one hundred forty pounds. Using his energy to strengthen J.Z.’s arms, he had no problem with my weight. (Sometime later I watched him lift a two-hundred-pound man.) As soon as he embraced me and lifted me, I began to cry again. I felt some awakened feeling in my heart that I couldn’t understand. Then Ramtha put me down. He took my hands in his and kissed them. He stroked my face. Then he gazed intently into my eyes. I could feel him pouring through J.Z.’s face. I felt his thoughts. It was unbelievably real. So much so it was disconcerting. I had often experienced the energy of entities from the spiritual dimensions working with Kevin and other mediums. But this was different. Never had it been so profoundly moving to me as with Ramtha. I leaned forward to feel his energy more intensely. I couldn’t stop my tears. Ramtha smiled. Then he began to cry! I felt that I was in another world. My mind clicked off. I wasn’t thinking. I was only feeling. Who was he? Why was I behaving this way? Then something familiar began to well up in my heart. It began first as an abstract intuition. I didn’t obstruct the feeling by trying to figure it out with my mind. I let it happen. The feeling expanded until it took the form of an intuitive thought. As I looked into the eyes of Ramtha, I heard myself say, “Were you my brother in your Atlantean incarnation?”

  More tears spilled from his eyes. “Yes, my beloved,” he said, “and you were my brother.”

  I can only say that what he said felt exquisite. I knew it was true. That was the reason I had been so moved.

  Ramtha and I went on to spend quite a bit of time together. He taught me about light frequencies in relation to the human body. He humorously predicted personal events in my life—that always evolved to be true. He was lovingly stern with me when I allowed my intellectual skepticism to block my growing “knowingness.” He related story after story of our life together, pointing out other people we knew then who are part of my present incarnation. He examined what was karmically necessary for me to work out with those people. He spoke calmly and evenly of why I had chosen to have conflicts with certain people in order to understand myself and them more fully. He specified the areas of my growth that needed more work. He warned me about my blindness in relation to some of my friends and revealed some of the past-life incarnations we had had together.

  He spoke of the vitamins I needed, the kind of exercise I should have, the foods I should stay away from, and even gave me his evaluation of the scripts I was reading.

  I asked questions relating to everything from the personal life of Jesus Christ to whether I would ever meet my soul mate in this incarnation. What I learned from Ramtha would fill another book. But no matter how much I learned from him, he continually reminded me that I already knew all the answers. I mustn’t depend on him or any other spiritual guide for knowledge. I must be my own guide. I should learn to trust and depend on my own capability for awareness. Guru-hopping could be fun, but it only postponed one’s own self-truth.

  Ramtha was amusing, fun, and loved to have a good time when he was in the body of J.Z. Often he would ask for wine, as he had enjoyed it when he was in the body. Several times he got drunk and J.Z. was left with the residue of a hangover.

  His was an activating energy. He was not at all laid back and generalized. He could zero in on your personal life until you felt he was invading your privacy. And there was nothing he didn’t know about me. He brought up events in my childhood that I had forgotten long ago. He questioned me about my most private inner confusions, which no one could have known. He did this not to prove his credibility, but to help ease my conflicts through discussion. It wasn’t possible to conceal anything from him. He knew it all anyway. From the spiritual dimensions there were no secrets, ho games, no need for clandestine manipulation. The point of his spiritual education was to impart the truth that we were God. We were as capable of knowledge as he. There was no pecking order. No one was more advanced or evolved than anyone else. They might be only more aware.

  That became clear later. I had begun to take exception to some of the techniques Ramtha used when he taught. I still do. I feel that he is often too strong and harsh with his predictions of times to come, unaware of how detrimental fear can be. It is my feeling that warning is not as essential as balance and harmony. I told him so and he agreed that we all learn from each other. That he had as much to learn from us as we had to learn from him.

  So Ramtha became a spiritual friend, and he endeavored at every meeting to help me realize that my own higher self was my best spiritual friend. In the meantime he would be there to help me whenever I needed it as long as I didn’t become dependent. (The warning about dependency was common with all the spiritual entities I talked with.)

  Now in New York a few years later, Ramtha came to help me when I was really in trouble. He often worked with other entities on the spiritual planes whom I had learned to trust. In this case, he worked with Tom McPherson.

  I was about three weeks into the run at the Gershwin Theatre. The summer weather hadn’t hit full blast until the third week in May. As always in New York when summer is hot outside, air conditioning is like winter inside. The theater was no exception.

  During the middle of a performance, the air-conditioning system came on full blast and the change in temperature not only caused my muscles to seize up, but I felt my throat go dry, cold, and finally very raw and sore. The last thing I needed was a summer cold while I was performing. I got a shawl from the wings and finished the performance, but I felt the die had been cast unless I took some preventive measures immediately. I called a doctor I knew, waking him up, and he prescribed an antibiotic which I rushed to have filled at an all-night drugstore. I hadn’t taken any medicine for years. Why I made the mistake of doing it then, I don’t know.

  By the next afternoon I was so weak from the antibiotics that I could hardly stand. My throat felt better, but my legs were gone. How could I perform?

  Dominick picked me up at my apartment, but I couldn’t walk. He lifted me into the car.

  “How’re you going to work like this?” he asked.

  I sighed, very depressed. “I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be better when I get there. Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I dragged myself to my dressing room. Maybe if I could get through a warm-up, I’d be all right. It worked in reverse. The more I stretched and jumped to prepare myself, the weaker I became. The rapid blood flow only spread the antibiotics more fully through my system.

  The orchestra was tuning up. I put on my opening costume and went to the stage. I
did one plié and collapsed behind the curtain off to the side of the stage where no one could see me. I was conscious as I lay there, but I couldn’t move my body. It was terrifying. I couldn’t even speak.

  I heard Michael Flowers calling for me. I couldn’t answer. I heard people yell from my dressing room that I wasn’t there.

  Then, as I lay there, I knew I wouldn’t be able to go on unless I had help. What kind of help? I put everything out of my mind and I called on Tom McPherson and Ramtha.

  “Come in and help me,” I pleaded desperately. “You have my permission to infuse your energies with mine. Please come above me and pick me up.”

  I waited … I tried not to doubt. They would be there if I allowed it. Slowly, I felt my arms energize. A permeating glow ran through them. I found I could lift them. Then I felt a current in both of my legs, a kind of mellow, activating current. I moved my right leg. It didn’t feel leaden anymore. I lifted it slowly over my head. It stretched easily. Then the left leg. The same ease was there.

  I carefully pulled myself to my feet. I felt a dizziness. I looked above me, attempting to see what I felt. I visualized the light aura of Ramtha and McPherson mingling with mine. The dizziness left me. I shook myself all over. I felt my energy come into an alignment. I walked to the backstage wings where everyone milled about, trying to locate me. Michael saw me first, walking toward him.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “You look different. Where were you?”