Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  I did. Instantaneously I got back: “Because you had mastered the knowledge of weather control in this particular incarnation, but abused your power, you were insensitive to the consequences of your manipulation.” The words came in English but it was the thought behind the words that I felt more deeply. I had mastered the knowledge of weather control?

  My conscious mind raced to my appreciation of wild and stormy weather conditions today. To be in the center of crashing lightning, rolling thunder, and pelting rain gave me as much pleasure as anything I could think of. Could this feeling be related to a former existence?

  The storm image disappeared and in its place were various kinds of craft floating in the air above a desert. They were shaped like huge flower petals with windows and seemed to be the mode of transportation for people who lived on earth. They weren’t necessarily extraterrestrial, but I couldn’t be sure. They made no sound and had no fuel. They were propelled along electromagnetic ley lines like invisible highways of energy in the sky.

  I think it was at this point that I made the decision that even I wasn’t “imaginative” enough to make up what I was seeing. Somehow I was seeing reality although it was no reality I had ever consciously experienced before. I let go completely and just allowed my higher self free expression.

  The next set of pictures peeled off like a sliding set of stills across a huge projector screen.

  I saw myself hanging from my little finger. I felt pain in the same finger. I saw myself as a nun with black scuffed shoes (my perspective focused on the shoes). I saw a particularly horrible image of myself with a hatchet embedded across my left eye. As I lay on the table, my left eye seared with pain. But as soon as the image changed, the pain left. I could hardly voice the pictures in rhythm fast enough to keep up with the images.

  “Just do what you can,” said Chris. “They just want you to see incarnational experiences that relate to what you can learn now.”

  “But,” I protested, “who are they?”

  “Your guides, as well as your own higher, unlimited God self,” said Chris gently.

  “Okay,” I said in frustration, “but how can I be seeing these things and still consciously carry on a conversation?”

  “Because,” she said, “you are operating on two levels of consciousness at the same time and you are going to have to learn to do that for the rest of your life if you are serious about communicating what you learn. You soon will be able to channel your higher self at all times and use it in this earth-plane reality. Both are real. You will just have more dimension to your existence when you integrate the two. And this is something like what it will feel like.”

  More pictures were coming now.

  I saw crystal doors standing in sand—again the desert. The doors were standing like solid portals but nothing grew around them. There was no vegetation. Only stark desert. It disturbed me for some reason. Because there was no life.

  Then I saw a flashback in time which I knew was prior to the desert picture. Somehow I knew they were related. The flashback picture had lush, opulent green gardens with pink and turquoise water fountains. Gracefully lean people moved and walked along crystal walkways. They didn’t talk. They communicated telepathically. Animals and birds, similar to those we have now, scampered along the crystal walkways in and among the people. They seemed to be in tune with one another. I could feel the people playfully command the animals to do something telepathically, and the animals responded immediately. I saw one of the people walk to a tree, pick a piece of fruit, and materialize another in its place. There were buildings made of something white. I couldn’t tell what the material was. The clothing was a crystal fabric of some kind and the same fabric was used as hair decoration.

  “I’m seeing some kind of extraordinary civilization,” I said to Chris. “I see crystal and lots of orange and pink hues like rainbows in the air. What is it?”

  “Ask your higher self,” answered Chris. “Whenever you have a question, address it to your God self.”

  Okay, I would. In my mind I asked my higher self what I was seeing. The answer came in English as though spoken from within my own mind.

  “You are seeing the civilization of Atlantis,” it said. “Very advanced it was.”

  “Why does everything seem to be crystal? Why are the people wearing crystal headdresses?”

  “Because,” it answered, “crystal worn on the body amplifies the higher consciousness, particularly if worn about the head area.”

  I continued to observe in my mind’s eye the longest and most detailed picture I had experienced.

  I guessed it was because I didn’t question it. And somehow I knew it was related to the stark picture of the dry lifeless desert previously seen. I asked my higher self what the relationship was.

  “You were seeing what happened to Atlantis after its destruction. You were also seeing an aspect of the future in your present incarnation,” it said.

  My heart felt as though it had stopped. I silently directed my next question to my higher self in my mind. “You mean, we are going to blow ourselves up and I was seeing the result?”

  My higher self didn’t really answer. It said, “We will show you in more detail later.”

  Immediately, the picture changed again. I was on a battlefield. I couldn’t make out where or when. I had a sword and some metal material around my shoulders. There was another warrior advancing toward me. The warrior stabbed me in the stomach. As I fell forward, the picture changed completely to another time period. I walked up to another warrior and stabbed him in the back. Both times the warrior was my mother!

  Then I saw myself as a ten-year-old child who had been run over by a horse-drawn cart. The cart had rolled over my feet, crushing them. The feet had had to be amputated. I had learned to navigate quite easily with the stumps. I was not unhappy about my fate. I was playing in a meadow and as I looked closer, I recognized the person who was taking care of me was my father today. He had accidentally run over me and felt it his duty to devote the rest of his life to my upbringing. I felt a warm glow as I recalled this picture.

  The scene changed again. I was in a monastery. I was a young Buddhist monk wearing a saffron-colored robe. An older monk came to me to say good night as I lay on the stone floor of my religious cell. As I looked up into his face, he made the sign of the cross over my face and smiled. The older monk was Vassy!

  In my conscious mind, I remembered how Vassy always made the sign of the cross over my face whenever we left each other.

  By now, I was feeling emotionally exhausted. I was having difficulty assimilating all that I saw. I guess I needed more time to process the experience.

  “I believe we’ve done enough today,” said Chris. “Ask your higher self if there is anything else you should know.”

  I directed the question again.

  “Yes,” said my higher self, “you must be careful of your diet during this time period.”

  I didn’t know what that meant. I asked for specifics, but I was beginning to feel uncomfortable on the table. I couldn’t concentrate. My lower back hurt and I needed to stretch my legs. I couldn’t get any more answers. It was as though I were out of touch. I felt as though I were blocking.

  “All right,” said Chris, “they say that’s enough for today.”

  She put down her paper and pencil and leaned over me. Lightly, but with sharp movements, she extracted the needles from the meridian points. The Third Eye needle had already popped out.

  “You certainly are rejecting the Third Eye area,” said Chris. “I wonder what that’s all about.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, rather confused.

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  I got up from the table and slowly stretched my muscles. I felt half in and half out of this world, but still conscious of both levels of reality.

  “It’s imperative,” said Chris, “that you take an apple cider vinegar bath tonight. Natural apple vinegar helps the body clear the negative energy from some of the
events you recalled.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Can I have a drink when I get home?”

  Chris stopped to think. “Well, if you feel you must, it’s probably all right, because it will help you get out of the way of your left-brain intellectual perceptions, but alcohol slows down the vibration of the body and it will make it more difficult for you to get in touch with those higher frequency dimensions. Be sensible about it. You know what you’re here for, so listen to yourself.”

  I dressed and we went back to her house, where her five-year-old daughter waited to be fed.

  I sat at her long wooden table drinking apple juice, eating grapes, and reflecting on what had happened. I had so many questions, yet I knew my skepticism wasn’t productive. There really was a difference between what I had just experienced and free association. This experience definitely felt structured. I also had come up with images which genuinely shocked me. In free association with psychotherapy, the thoughts were random and always related to experiences of familiar territory that had been part of my life in this lifetime. Yet the gnawing doubt that I might have been making it up persisted.

  “Go take your vinegar bath,” said Chris. “Don’t ponder too much. Relax in the tub for at least twenty minutes. Go to bed early tonight and we’ll continue tomorrow.”

  I climbed into my car and drove back to Santa Fe with the incarnational images tumbling over and over in my mind.

  I stopped at the market for the apple-cider vinegar and went home straight to the bathtub. The body has an affinity for higher octave frequencies, Chris had said. Be careful how you treat it. As the body clears out the trauma of the physical memory, the residue spins off. Cleanse it. Let it go. I looked down at my legs and feet as I sat in the bathtub. Those legs and feet had a memory of their own? Each cell in the body had a memory imprinted by the soul itself? If so, it could be that each of us had carried an emotional blueprint through incarnation after incarnation and the blueprint was what manifested in body and face. So when we thought we knew someone upon first meeting them, we were actually recognizing the soul as it shone through the face, with each incarnational experience being part of the development of soul and body.

  As I lay in the tub thinking, I wondered how long it would be before scientists would find ways to verify the evolution of the soul in the same way that they had verified the evolution of the body.

  I thought of all the books I had read—and tried to understand—on quantum physics … the new physics, they called it. It sounded very much like ancient Eastern mysticism.

  A few quantum physicists were saying that it looked as though subatomic particles actually possessed a consciousness. With photons, for example, they observed a “reality” whereby activity seemed to Be occurring on as many as twelve different dimensions. We were used to defining reality in terms of what our senses told us, that is, our conscious experience, plus measuring in terms of height, width, depth, and abstract dimensions like linear time—but Einstein had already taught us that time in fact has no dimension.

  Therefore all serious attempts to describe “reality” are forced to speculate on the metaphysical (beyond the physical). That could mean then that our perceived physical world is not the only reality, or perhaps not the whole reality.

  Quantum physics was saying that what we perceive to be physical reality was actually our cognitive construction of it. Hence reality was only what each of us decided it was.

  Ancient Hindu wisdom claimed the same thing, that each individual was recognized as being the center of its own universe—which is not arrogant when it is understood that each individual is a manifestation of God and therefore personally involved with Divine Energy.

  The new physicists were saying that the key to understanding the universe was in understanding ourselves, for we alter the objects we observe simply by observing. We are then not observers but participants.

  Werner Heisenberg, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, shook the scientific world by saying that “at the sub-atomic level there is no such thing as the exact science.” Such was the power of our consciousness that we couldn’t observe anything at that level without changing it. “What we observe,” he said, “is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Therefore, quantum physics leads us to the only place there is to go—ourselves.”

  Einstein said that past and present and future time were all the same because they converged in our consciousness now. Time existed in toto.

  I looked over at the wooden chair beside the bathtub. Science said that something is organic if it has the ability to process information and to act accordingly. The wood was made up of cells which were made up of atoms which were made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons, which were made up of subatomic particles, one of which was photons. And photons were vibrational energy which had consciousness. It was the “consciousness” of the photon which interacted with the consciousness of the scientific observer. The dancers and the dancing were one.

  I remembered reading that when Werner Heisenberg asked his professor and friend Niels Bohr how we could ever understand the makeup of the atom if we didn’t have the language for it, Bohr replied, “First, we have to learn what the word ‘understand’ really means.”

  When the Buddhist masters implored their students to describe the sound of one hand clapping, they were really inspiring their students to get more in touch with their own thought processes where linear dimensions were concerned. Eastern systems of thought had always understood the limitations of linear dimension.

  Maybe what I was experiencing with multidimensional consciousness was part of the quantum physics reality. My body was made up of subatomic particles and each one of them possessed a consciousness. When the subatomic consciousness was stimulated, I saw their translation into images.

  Yogis who had learned to raise their consciousness could see their past-life incarnations as well as incarnations of other human beings. They saw their reality in light vibrational frequencies—which was exactly what the new science said photons were.

  Quantum physics said that all particles exist as different combinations of other particles. That the cause and effect of that interaction created force. Could that process also be termed the karma of subatomic interaction?

  According to Mahayana Buddhism, the appearance of reality was based upon the interdependence of all things. The ancient Indian vedas claimed the same truth.

  The old physics taught us that we were essentially unrelated to events in the physical world of atomic and subatomic structure; that they interrelated regardless of our existence as human beings.

  The new physics was teaching us that we were inextricably involved. That not only were we involved, but that such atomic structure might exist because of our consciousness.

  As John and McPherson and Ramtha and the Eastern mystics had said, “Nature follows mind.”

  No wonder we human beings felt so isolated from the physical reality of our environment and science. No one much was helping us realize that not only were we part of it, but we were responsible for its existence.

  I lay in the water thinking about enlightenment and what it meant. Wasn’t it the process of removing veils of ignorance and judgment and preconditioned prejudice from our concepts? Wasn’t it the attempt to understand personal truth so we could reach a higher level of consciousness?

  Was physics about the same process? It would seem so, particularly if the physical world came down to a question of the consciousness of the atom! At the very least, spiritualism and mysticism were concepts to be taken seriously by explorers in the “physical” world. Broadly speaking, the two paths were converging toward the same truth—the truth of expanded consciousness and hence, finally, to the realization of the God-force.

  Enlightenment was a state of being. Subatomic structures were also a state of being. This did not make the two states of being one and the same, but it surely created some sense of identity between the two.

  I remembered Niels Boh
r saying, “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum physics cannot possibly have understood it.”

  So, to be open-minded was the first step toward enlightenment.

  The wind began to blow outside the bathroom window. I knew the wind was there, but I had never seen it. How would I describe the wind except to define the effect it had on something else? No one has ever seen atoms either. But we know they are there, interacting with cause and effect.

  The great thinker and scientist Giordano Bruno, to whom Sir Isaac Newton paid so much respect, was burned at the stake as a heretic because he envisaged multitudinous solar systems, saw parallel planets such as ours, envisaged life on other worlds, and publicly stated what he believed.

  René Descartes saw visions which left him helpless to continue to relate to linear dimensions as he had before. His conclusions were reduced to: “I think, therefore I am.”

  Aristotle believed that the mind, spirit, and soul were more important than the “physical” world.

  As I lay in the now tepid water, I wondered if the mind could be located in parts of the body other than the head. Under the needles, I almost felt that my legs and arms and torso could think. What did that mean? As a dancer I sometimes felt that my body was remembering a long forgotten combination of steps.

  Wilder Penfield, famous neurosurgeon and brain researcher, claimed, after exhaustive research, that, in his opinion, the mind was not lodged in the brain. The mind had no specific centered location within the body. The mind appeared to be everywhere—in muscles, tissues, cells, bones, organs. There seemed to be no separation between the one mind and other consciousness within the body. It all operated psychically.

  Was this why it was possible to stimulate cellular mind memory and come up with a past-life experience?

  Did we perhaps have several levels of subconscious perception going on at the same time? When the needles stimulated the subatomic structure of the cells, were they then stimulating an interior memory of cause and effect? If subconscious experience, which admittedly controlled a great deal of exterior behavior, also included karmic cellular memory, could we then consider that that “interior” karma governed a great deal of our exterior karma? It seemed a logical possibility and led to the concept that the new age of consciousness-raising was really all about becoming more aware of the interior truths in our subatomic structure.