Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  I slowly walked outside as if I were on air. The colors of the flowers in Chris’s greenhouse were shimmering vibrantly in the sunlight.

  I felt I could dip into the vibrations of their colors and enjoy them as mine.

  I looked at my watch. The time didn’t even register. I felt that I was in the past and present at the same time. I saw everything around me in mathematical perfection. Everything fit. My time on the table was meant to happen. Everything I’d “seen” was meant to happen. There was a reason for everything. A plan. A perfect, gigantic puzzle of perfection and each live entity on earth was a precious part of the puzzle. Life itself seemed only symbolic of the soul, as though it were only thought essence which would never cease, never die. Life was God once removed. And everything was energy. Vibrating, pulsating, vital energy. And that energy was love energy expressing itself in millions of ways until it finally understood the totality of itself.

  I grasped at words that would express my thoughts and feelings and for the first time, I understood that poets were the true translators of God. William Blake’s famous poem came to mind:

  To see a world in a grain of sand

  And a heaven in a wild flower.

  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

  And eternity in an hour.

  Chapter 17

  That night I slept outside in a sleeping bag under the stars. Chris had suggested it because she said that the soul and brain map the celestial navigation of the stars if there is no roof obstructing the view of the heavens. And as we mapped their movements, we learned.

  I found that my sleep was deeper and the rest more profound, as though I were being taught all night, and the contact with the spiritual plane inspired peace and a sense of well-being. I slept less time, but it was the quality of the sleep, not the quantity.

  The following morning, I experimented with connecting to my higher self without the use of Chris’s needles. It was there every time. If I had misplaced something, I asked H.S. where it was. I was always guided in the right direction. It was never wrong.

  I asked H.S. what to eat, who was on the other end of a ringing telephone, what direction an address might be. It was astonishing how correct the answers were. I wondered how long it would last. The answer came: “As long as you can find me, you can find anything.”

  And so my concern that I had never had a really “revelatory” experience evaporated. It had always bothered me that I seemed to be progressing slowly and surely, but without any major revelation. Not so anymore.

  Getting in touch with my unlimited soul was an extraordinary event, a milestone in growth and understanding and an experience that flooded me with joy. I felt that this was some kind of coming of age for me. Yet if anyone else had related that discovery to me about themselves, I guess I would have thought they were “dreaming.”

  I, at least, had a framework from which I could view what had happened to me. On the drive to Chris’s place I thought about how I had been pursuing a search of my own identity from the time I was very small, and how the process of search would proceed from this point. The teachings of the Bible, the Mahabarata, the Koran, and all the other spiritual books that I had tried to understand flooded back to me: The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Know thyself and that will set you free; to thine own self be true; to know self is to know all; know that you are God; know that you are the universe…. The spiritual masters had all said the same thing. They had each taught that the soul is eternal. They had each alluded to having lived many times before, even Christ: “I came before, but you didn’t recognize me.” They had each taught that the purpose of life was to work one’s way back to the Divine Source of which we were all a part. And the karmic events that we encountered along the way were only to be experienced and understood—never to be judged. Each of the great books had warned against judgment, against the moral trap of good versus evil. The laws of cause and effect were the underlying principles of all their teachings: fudge and you will be judged; hurt and you will be hurt; love and you will be loved; give and you will be given to. They taught that circumstances never mattered. They were only the field on which our truth was played out.

  Yet here we were in a world where everyone was engaged in some process of moral judgment. Each person or group believing that their morality was the true word of God, blind to the cosmic harmony that every point of view served the purposeful good in the long run. I saw how we were viewing the destiny of mankind and our individual selves from a limited perspective. From a short-run perspective. We were not seeing the entire forest; we focused on our own individual trees.

  Yet in the immediacy of each individual’s trauma, the seeming tragedy would be eliminated if we went into the eternal nature of our selves and understood that nothing then can be “tragic.” Nothing is wrong. Nothing is wasted, and nothing ever dies—nothing. We were each an eternal universe unto ourselves. And to realize the transcendent wonder of that truth was all that mattered.

  I thought again about energy. It seemed that through the examination of energy, science and spirituality would eventually have to meet. They were two different approaches to the same truth. Each spoke of energy as the glue that held the universe together. Spirituality accepted its existence and science attempted to prove it. Spirit was faith without science. Science was proof without faith.

  The spiritual approach to universal truths and harmony always recognized the unseen dimensions from within consciousness. The scientific approach recognized those same dimensions from without. Yet the new science was close to saying they were the same. That consciousness was everything. Both aspects were necessary for human utilization. Unless we could put these tools of understanding to use, what power could they have for us?

  As I drove and reflected on my having experienced lifetimes both as a male and as a female, I wondered why I had chosen to live life as a female this time around. There had been such focus on the feminine energy of the modern world. The women’s liberation movement, the role of the female in the decision-making process of political power, and the feminine attitudes toward relaxing tension in the world in order to avoid the annihilation of civilization.

  Why had I chosen to express myself through the energy of the feminine, the yin energy? Then I thought the yin energy manifests predominantly from within. The masculine yang energy manifests from without. The yin is intuitive. The yang is powerful.

  The yin energy is also the holder of the unseen, the nondimensional. The yang is the unseen expressed in the seen. The yang is the active energy. Once yin energy is expressed from unseen to seen, it becomes yang energy. Thus women who express their yin energy are expressing in a yang manner. When a man goes within to contemplate the unseen, he is utilizing his yin energy. Both are necessary.

  To be perfectly balanced, didn’t each individual need to equally recognize both energies within their given body? To have a balanced peace in the world, it seemed necessary to have a balanced peace in the individual, which meant the recognition of equally expressed yin energy from within, and yang energy from without.

  I wondered why all the prophets and masters had been men, until I remembered that the prophets were manifestors. They had expressed externally. The female held the knowledge of the unseen, the cosmic secrets, so to speak. The male always used the female as his internal support system, his intuitive counselor. Each was necessary to the other. The female held the unseen truth of what to do. The male activated the power of how to do it.

  We were now in the Aquarian age, which was the feminine age of expression. More men were endeavoring to understand their intuitive capacities and more women were endeavoring to express their own power externally. We seemed to be striving to bring into harmony the seen and the unseen.

  Scientists were striving for the same balanced principle, “sensing” more and more “unseen” elements that could not really be measured. Their existence could only be accepted. The same acceptance was becoming true of the unseen energies of yin and yang. They wer
e clearly there, just immeasurable. They were energies with nondimensional perimeters. What was true in scientific terms could also be true in experiential human terms.

  If, as science says, energy never dies, it merely changes form, then life, which is also energy, never dies. It, too, merely changes form. Since energy is never still, because nothing remains inert, then energy must continually have a changing form. There was no doubt in my mind that the life energy simply changed its form from lifetime to lifetime, just as nature did from spring to spring.

  Yet the only way any of it made sense was when it related to our own personal experience. If you hadn’t felt it, you couldn’t know it. Knowledge was experience. Even Einstein, toward the end of his life, claimed “that propositions arrived at by purely logical means were completely empty of reality.” He went on to say, “It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it. I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research.”

  I drove in the brilliantly clear Santa Fe morning, filled with calm joy. The journey within was the most fulfilling of any traveling I had ever experienced. And the specifics were only beginning.

  In contrast to the dramatic intensity and revelation of the previous day, my next experience with Chris and H.S. was sheer delight. It could have been a child’s fairy tale. While on the table, I stretched out this recall for nearly five hours. I didn’t understand why my higher self had guided me to experience it again until after it was over.

  This is what happened.

  Chris had been guided to insert the gold needles under my chin, just above my throat. The same communication points that “controlled crowds.” I saw why as the pictures unfolded.

  The first image that was guided to my consciousness was so unusual I had trouble with its meaning. I saw myself with a herd of elephants in the bush jungles of the subcontinent of India. Green foliage surrounded clear green-blue water. It was a time period thousands of years ago. As the images progressed, I consciously questioned my higher self to guide the meaning of what I was seeing. I was living with the elephants. Immediately I understood that I could communicate with them telepathically. I was so well acquainted with their habits and feelings that on command they obeyed me. I was about twelve years old with dark eyes painted with tree bark that I had crushed, powdered, and mixed with water. I wore a bright-colored pantalon wrap of some kind and around my arms and neck hung bracelets and necklaces of a brightly colored metallic material.

  The elephants and I were playing a game as we moved slowly from dense, thick jungle surroundings to open, rolling plains spotted with watering holes of still, clear blue water. On my command they would pass me from one trunk to another while I laughed with delight. Sometimes one would swing me up into a tree where I would stay until I was retrieved by another. Sometimes they would gently roll me over in the soft mud before tossing me in the water to get cool and clean with the baby elephants. I was totally carefree and totally trusting of the elephants and they of me. They lifted me up with their trunks and trumpeted to one another, shouting the next command of the game.

  Whenever I wished to take charge of the play, I would communicate what I wanted telepathically. They responded immediately. Sometimes they all galloped for me in vast circles, trumpeting their joy in being alive. I felt the exquisite power of communication on both a collective and individual basis. It was an astonishing sensation of playfully benevolent power.

  I asked H.S. how I’d come to be in this Rudyard Kipling situation. It said that I had lived in a nearby village with my father. He had once been kind to the bull elephant of the herd. My father had since died and my life as a result was in danger. The bull elephant sensed my danger (the specifics of the danger weren’t evident) and scooped me away from the village. He had remembered my father’s kindness and responded in kind. The bull took me to the herd and protected me, handing me to a cow elephant who watched over me. I was a fragile infant but I always felt comfortable with these great, gentle creatures. The level of perception of both animals and humans was keener then than what we know now. So I had grown up with the elephants, visiting the village once in a while to eat cooked food and enjoy the company of humans.

  My higher self identified my name as Asana. My relationship with the elephant herd had become legendary throughout the countryside. I became known as the princess of the elephants and could communicate with a given elephant hundreds of miles away.

  On another level, and in the midst of the recall, I reflected on my fascination with elephants today. I had pictures of elephants all over my apartment in New York and many wooden elephants that I had brought back from India strode across my mantelpiece. I had never understood why I was so drawn to elephants. As far as I could remember, I had never even met one.

  I had seen a painting in a museum of an old bull elephant preparing to die alone among the trees in the Indian countryside and had stood before the painting sobbing to myself. I never understood that either. When I rode the elephant on Fifty-first Street, I was not in the least apprehensive. I felt I knew her.

  Years before I had purchased a whole series of National Geographic pictures of elephants depicting the love and affection they showed for one another. I had plastered them all over my walls and never understood why I had been so moved.

  Suddenly my love for elephants was beginning to make sense.

  As I lived and played among these gentle giants, I felt myself radiate an understanding of what they were feeling. I knew each one individually and respected each one’s pecking order in the herd. I presided over the births of the young, and if one of my friends injured herself, I used more sophisticated human healing techniques to nurse her back to health.

  The elephants became my army of protectors, commanding the attention of everyone in the countryside. Though there was really nothing to protect. We led a free, harmonious, sometimes humorous life. The elephants loved to push my wrist bangles up and down my arms with their trunks. They enjoyed the delicate movements and the sounds the bangles made when they clanked against one another.

  Whenever I commanded them to take me to the village, they encircled the community until I returned to the wilds with them. Sometimes I brought young children to play with us. The elephants were gentle and playful. They tossed the children the same way they tossed me. Sometimes a child was frightened and cried. The elephants didn’t understand. They had never heard or seen me cry.

  Then an event occurred in the village which was a learning experience for everyone involved, including the elephants. A friend whom I loved was killed in an argument. Shocked and miserable, I cried and cried, screaming and wailing with the all-out grief of which children are capable. My hysterics were confusing and distressing to the elephants. From my mind pictures, they understood who the culprit was. The male elephants in the herd wanted revenge. Their anger on my behalf got through to me and, alarmed, I communicated to the females that they should stop the males. It would only lead to more slaughter. Together we persuaded the males to refrain from violence. The males agreed but not until they thundered through the village, trumpeting, and deliberately encircled the dwelling of the man who had killed my friend. The man was terrified. He understood the elephants knew what he had done. Yet he also understood that they were controlling their vengeful instincts.

  The other villagers watched the behavior of the elephants with reverence. They, too, knew the herd could flatten their homes with very little effort. Instead a covenant was established between the elephants of the countryside and the humans in the village.

  The elephants commanded that no violence should occur among the humans themselves, or the herd would stampede through the entire village. It thus became necessary for each villager to maintain peaceful co-existence with all his neighbors. As a result, the level of peace-keeping consciousness rose in the village, peace-keeping became something to be worked at, with disputes being talked out rather than fought over, and with the elephants as
the spiritual monitors. The communication among the people improved, as well as the communication between humans and animals.

  The people of the countryside came to revere the example of the great, gentle pachyderms, while recognizing their own subservience to power. A delicate balance of understanding kept the peace. The villagers knew that each was responsible for the high level of awareness of every other individual in the community. Collectively they were only as strong as their weakest link. And the elephants always sensed who was the weakest link and surrounded that person with patient warnings. They could perceive negative vibrations in a human being quicker than the humans themselves. They would point out which human was liable to cause trouble and I would talk to him, explaining once again the consequences to the community should he continue down the path of negativity.

  As I continued to live with the elephants, I was fascinated not so much with their talent for reasoning as with their talent for the power of being, of living in the moment. They flowed with life, living day by day completely for what it offered, but never forgetting the past. The elephants understood the energy of the moonlight and the meaning of each dawn. Together we held festive celebrations outside the village during nighttime ceremonies. I taught them to dance and they loved to perform for the appreciation of the villagers.

  As the recall progressed, I asked my higher self why I had been able to empathize so completely with the great creatures.

  H.S. said that this lifetime had been crucial for me and so pleasant because I had mastered the art of communicating on a collective level while respecting each individual in the process. I had learned the lesson of democracy, which required individual respect in a collective environment, and empathy with the complication of human intelligence. I had not yet manifested that understanding in this incarnation, but if I would draw on the memory of what I had accomplished in the past, I would evolve again to that understanding this time around. It would be necessary for me to accomplish that understanding in the days to come and that was why I was being shown this particular incarnation. Not insignificantly I was also to relearn the importance of understanding nature through animals. They were completely without judgment and an example of what humans needed to evolve toward in that respect. The elephants were also symbols of “never forgetting,” which was necessary for me to understand with regard to humans. “We must always remember,” H.S. said, “that locked in our memories is the knowledge that we have never forgotten anything either.