Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  I had come to respect deeply the spiritual understanding of peoples whose greatest teacher was nature. Of course, I respected the intellectual prowess of modern man as well. But when I began to integrate spiritual recognition with my intellectual education, I felt like a complete person for the first time in my life. That “something” that had been missing was the awareness of my spiritual self. Yet how could I prove it? It was not to be measured by scientific means. I was barely able to describe it. It was transcendental, untranslatable into words. It was an integration one just had to experience to understand. And after experiencing it, life was never the same.

  I hadn’t come to Santa Fe as a tourist. I came to work with a woman who administered past-life recall treatments through the process of acupuncture. She had learned to work with Chinese techniques, using acupuncture needles which unblocked nerve channels to release past-life experience. Placing the needles at strategic meridian points, it was possible to accelerate incarnational information. Just as acupuncture needles could be used to physically block off connections which the brain might otherwise signal as pain, so they could be used to unblock connections, having the effect of opening channels of recall in the brain. According to traditional Chinese wisdom, the human body is imprinted with every incarnational event the soul has experienced. When the needles are placed around the third-eye area (the middle of the forehead) or the psychic meridian points (the right and left shoulders), or the galactic points (around the ears), the patient begins to experience scenes and memories and vignettes of lives they have lived in the past. The needles are very, very fine, producing almost no sensation when first piercing the skin. But as the patient lies relaxed and nonresistant on the table, the needles begin to have the effect of pentathal. It “feels” as though it is impossible to lie to yourself. Pictures begin to unfold in your mind’s eye as the needles stimulate memory patterns locked in the cellular memory of the physical body.

  Chris Griscom is a very experienced acupuncturist in psychic therapy. She has administered to hundreds of patients over the years with rather amazing results. At first, I had undergone the treatments just to see what would happen. I knew I had had many incarnations, which I had been told about by McPherson, Ramtha, and others of the channeled guides, but until I worked with Chris, I hadn’t gotten in touch with anything I could say I had experienced myself. I had tried meditation, transcendental and otherwise, but nothing happened that I could be “sure” of.

  Along the path of my spiritual search, I felt a longing more and more to understand why I had lived before and what I could learn in this present incarnation in relation to those past lives. For me, it was as Einstein said: “Knowledge is really nothing but experience.” I wanted the experience. Since each of us is what we are consciously aware of, I wanted to become aware of more. I was intensely curious as to what raising my consciousness might reveal of my higher unlimited self.

  So I had been working with Chris for some time. I had lain on her table with her needles delicately quivering from various areas of my body and allowed myself to let the imagery flow into my mind. It was difficult for me to accept at first. As the needles stimulated the cellular memories in my body, pictures of different time periods and events filtered into my consciousness. I thought that I must be “making the pictures up.” I thought it was all my imagination until I stopped to reflect on what indeed imagination actually was. Each time a vignette of experience swam into view (the effect was similar to watching a film unfold in the mind’s eye), I wondered where it came from. I knew the mind was capable of the most rococo creative fantasy. But then, what was fantasy? For quite a while I questioned the legitimacy of my imagery. Why was I picturing a desert, a caravan, a sixteenth-century monastery, a Peruvian Indian village, an African mother, and so on. I wasn’t consciously aware of having created the images. They just happened. Yet I protested to Chris that I was creating the images in a free-associative way. She agreed. But she said I was creating the images because they had come out of my own experience. That was imagination. The acupuncture pressure points opened up the paths to the intuitive right-brain area (yin). The left brain (yang) must not be permitted to close those paths. And when I dispensed with the objections of my finite mind and got out of my own way, the pictures became more specific. They were rich in texture regarding clothing, body movement, sound, emotional attitudes; but, more than anything else, and increasingly, the images that came up were imbued with a conscious understanding on my part of why I was remembering them today.

  As I said, Chris was experienced in past-life regression. She explained that the higher unlimited self always puts the earth-plane self in touch with those memories that are the most beneficial in clearing problems one is experiencing in the present incarnation. Since we have all experienced many, many incarnations (in many forms from the beginning of time) the unlimited higher self scans the blueprint of the soul’s history and chooses the emotional experiences which relate to karmic trouble spots. Rarely are the recalled experiences pleasant because there would be no point in going over territory that has already been resolved. The purpose of living is to clear the soul’s conflict. The purpose of getting in touch with past-life experience, then, is to isolate the areas of emotional discord so that the conflict in relation to today’s incarnation can be understood. All of life is based on the totality of the soul experience. What we might feel as “evil” behavior only enables us, the “victim,” to realize ourselves more fully. Thus the Buddhist theory of “bless your enemy, he enables you to grow” suddenly makes sense.

  In the beginning, I found the sweeping benevolence of what I was learning unacceptable. I believed that there was evil behavior in the world. Examples were legion—in history, and around us in our lives every day. I felt that evil behavior needed to be resisted, fought against, defied, and stamped out. But as I proceeded to experience more and more of the “evil” visited upon me in the past, I found I wasn’t reacting judgmentally to what had happened to me. I realized that instead it had been a learning process. A learning process that I had chosen to experience.

  The learning process which is karma is not punitive. It simply follows the laws of science—for every effect there was a cause—so that in the human condition, karma translated as experience, all experience. Karma begets karma. But every act of reconciliation, rather than retaliation, is a karmic step forward. Positive karma begets positive karma. It is an ongoing process until we have ultimately been through the panoply of all human experience and recognize the total reality of our relationship to all there is.

  Chapter 15

  I settled into a routine in Santa Fe. My house was sunny and pleasant with many windows and an enclosed patio where I did my yoga in the open air. The house was decorated with Spanish furniture and Indian artifacts. Over the fireplace hung an Ojo de Dios, or Eye of God. It is a hanging decoration made from yarn and sticks. The center is the eye of God and is made in the shape of triangles which form a square around the circumference. It looks like a bird’s-eye view of the Great Pyramid.

  The Eye of God had been adopted by the four cultures of New Mexico—Indian, Mexican, Spanish, and Anglo—and hung in nearly every house. Some historians believe it dates back to Pharaonic Egypt, others believe it was brought from Peru. The Yacqui Indians of Mexico were thought to have introduced it to the American Southwest. In any case, all cultures used it now in a dominant spot in the home, symbolizing good fortune, good health, and long life as—the native Indians claim.

  Each day I woke up to Ojo de Dios about eight o’clock, did my yoga and my mantras, had some breakfast (fruit, toast, and decaf coffee), and drove the forty-five-minute trek to Chris’s home, which was located on a historic landmark in a small town called Galisteo.

  The old Santa Fe Trail led into the modern freeway, which in turn led to a turnoff that I followed into the flatlands of the sprawling New Mexican desert. Indian pueblos dating back to A.D. 1250 dotted the countryside, with cottonwood trees swaying above them. Ristras
(red peppers tied together) hung in the sunlight from every available rafter.

  The Sangre de Cristo Mountains loomed gently in the morning light. The mountains, a part of the Rocky Mountain Range, had been named by the Spaniards. The blood of Christ, they were called, because of the reddish cast on their snow-covered peaks at sunset. The Rio Grande River flowed twenty miles west from its source in Colorado to its ultimate eighteen-hundred-mile-distant destination, the Gulf of Mexico. I imagined the Pueblo, Navajo, and Hopi Indians—whom archaeologists feel inhabited the areas as long as six thousand years ago—roaming the surrounding plains. The Spanish explorers first came to the area in 1558 (sixty-two years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock), and their influence was predominant everywhere. Adobe structures, looking like natural humps of clay, blended into the hills, serving their inhabitants as cool protectors in the summer and warm protectors in the winter.

  The morning air was crisp and dry. And I was moving eighty miles an hour on the ramrod-straight open road before I realized it. Geological formations in and around the mountains and mesas in the distance were not obscured by vegetation. Cloud formations splashed against the turquoise sky reminded me of the jewelry I loved to wear whenever I was here. “The sky-stone” the Indians called their gem-stone, and they used its vibration against the skin to be in harmony with nature.

  Coming into the sleepy clay-baked community of Galisteo, where about two hundred inhabitants lived, I saw adobe (oven-dried brick) dwellings with flat roofs right out of Biblical times. The town was situated on a knoll in the valley with an extensive view in all directions. The waters from the mountains converged into streams which were now dry in the heat of the summer. A horse and two stray dogs blocked the main thoroughfare—a dirt road winding past a store marked “Groceries.” It had a creaking screen door.

  Three small children waited for a dilapidated orange school bus. Mail to the community was delivered to rural P.O. boxes along the highway.

  Carefully I maneuvered around the animals and followed the dirt road across a wooden bridge, gusting dry dust under my rear wheels. There were no street signs where dirt roads converged. One used landmarks and directional navigation.

  I remembered that Chris’s place was on the other side of the central community, veering to the left. Passing hollow metal shells that were once cars, and burros ambling lazily along side paths, I made my way to what I remembered was a wooden fence surrounding her house, set apart from the others in the community because of rangeland around it.

  She was waiting for me, waving in the stark sunlight, surrounded by high untended shrubs and sagebrush. I recognized the chaparrals and cottonwood trees towering over her house. They had grown taller since my last visit. And Chris had grown too. In fact, she was eight and a half months pregnant.

  With a happy waddle she met my car and we embraced. I patted her stomach and asked her if she had made contact with the soul inside. Indeed she had and it was a boy. Chris was of medium height, with dishwater-blond hair which framed her full, open face in soft waves. Her clear blue eyes literally shone from the depth of her being and gave you the feeling she could see through to the depth of yours. Better still, she assured you that you had nothing to hide. Her lips were plump and moist, which bothered her today because she said she had been exposed to the sun for too long while running the rapids the previous week! She spoke with a soft lilt. Her gentleness was powerful and commanding.

  “Hello, my friend,” she said. “It’s been a long time and I’ve missed you. But I know how you’ve been doing.”

  Chris had no television and rarely read newspapers or magazines. She proceeded to outline, chapter and verse, my life in the past few months as though she had been living it along with me. One adjusts very quickly in spiritual circles to the truth that there are no secrets. Everyone involved with spiritual progress develops their psychic capacities. They plug into the spiritual energy and “see” whatever they wish to attune to. The more developed they become, the more they “see.” They tune into the electromagnetic wavelength of another person and soon the process becomes similar to that of a radio.

  Chris ushered me inside her home. Soon we were eating grapes at her long wooden dining-room table, bringing each other up to date with our lives on both the physical and spiritual planes.

  She had been working with several groups of serious clients—patients from various parts of the U.S. who were making quantum leaps in their spiritual development. The more they understood their past-life complexities, the more clearly they functioned in their given endeavors today. The past-life information was not limited only to events and relationships either. It included teachings relating to the human mind, electromagnetic frequencies of accelerated thought, the transitional experience of moving into higher consciousness, and how the body made its adjustment to spiritual enlightenment. The body, being the temple for the soul, went through subtle physical changes as each stage of spiritual development was reached. It became more pliable, more flexible, and more sensitive to its environmental stimuli.

  Chris and I talked of how psychic energy was experienced as electromagnetic frequencies moving through the mind and body and how the consciousness of everything expands as a result. Moving through our auric fields, psychic energy is perceived by others, not so much as discernible light, but more as a feeling of well-being which is communicated to other human beings who may not realize what is actually occurring.

  “So many people,” said Chris, “are moving so swiftly into their understanding of these dimensions. It has changed their lives and the lives of those around them. Their lives are becoming more positive in every way.” She looked down at her bare feet. “The world may seem to be in a polarized mess right now, but there are new human beings ready to make a breakthrough. The bell doesn’t toll until the time is ready. And the time is now. People are beginning to understand that. Their spiritual understanding is so much more powerful than their intellectual understanding. That is what will prevent us from blowing ourselves up.”

  As we sat together, I was once again reminded of my own pursuit. From the time I was small, my curiosity motivated me to search for what I could only define as the missing link. What was it that had compelled me to travel so much for years and years, uncovering whatever I didn’t understand in each foreign culture? Now I understood. I had been searching for a missing dimension in myself that I hadn’t yet touched. I hadn’t realized that what I was looking for was in the backyard of my own spirit. I could sit happily for days having a discussion such as the one I was having now with Chris.

  I explained that I was particularly interested in pursuing previous lifetimes with my parents.

  “Oh,” she said, “that’s very important. Our parents set the tone for how we’ll ultimately relate to the world. They know our trigger points intimately and unless we can resolve those points with family members, the same fate awaits us in adulthood.”

  “Well, Chris,” I said, “don’t our families cause those conflicts in us just because of what goes on? I mean, I see so many reasons for my own insecurities in my parents. So what’s the big deal in tracing down past-life stuff? Why do I want to do it so much? ”

  “Because,” she said, “when you realize that you chose them in order to work through certain emotional problems yourself, you don’t blame them anymore. When you learn not to blame your parents, you learn not to blame anyone else. Family life is the most intense of environments. Each member of the family is keenly intuitive about the behavior of the other. We feel victimized by the family because they start with us when we’re infants. Sometimes we get stuck in the emotional behavior pattern of victimization. Then we choose mates that will perpetuate that addiction to victimization. If we’d just realize that the family choice is one each of us makes in an attempt to clear ourselves of the problem, we wouldn’t extend it into our adult lives. But because we are not aware of our own responsibility in the matter, we abdicate the potential for growth.”

  “So,” I
said, “the household is the symbol of basic, fundamental emotional drama that we chose to work on?”

  “Yes,” said Chris, “and we use families to translate emotional symbols at an early age. For example, a child always relates more to the tone of voice than to the words themselves. The intuitive interplay hones his perceptions so that he can be more discerning in the world. If a child chose a domineering father, it’s because he wants to work out a problem with domination. [Shades of my father.] If a child chooses a passive mother, perhaps the task is to allow the mother to experience what it is to be dominated. [Shades of my mother.] There are so many inner scenarios involved with each human soul. Only the soul knows why it has chosen its drama. And the more the soul understands, the less problems of confusion it will feel.

  “You see,” Chris went on, “if we taught our children that they chose us as parents, the child would learn early on to take more responsibility for his fate. That is why enlightenment is so crucial. We are not operating with enough knowledge in our society. This way the child either gives up because of the authority he experiences, or he becomes rebellious. But his soul intuitively knows that he can’t legitimately blame the parent for his situation, whatever it might be. A damaged child chose to experience that. And if he can’t resolve it, he carries it forth with him. He’s stuck in victimization and is using it to perpetuate the pattern. A recognition of his own responsibility in the matter would unlock the pattern and he could let it go. But how can he do it if he isn’t taught why he’s there in the first place?”

  “Very tough,” I said. “Sometimes I look back and can’t remember how I got into this myself. No one really taught me, although certain individuals set me on a path that helped me search out myself. And when what I learned ‘felt’ right, I knew I had it.”