Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  If the sole yardstick to my time with Chris and her needles was entertainment, I would have to say it was the most dramatically involving experience I had ever had the privilege of viewing. And, as always in the best entertainment, it all had real meaning.

  The last incarnation I saw was the most dramatic in relation to my life today.

  It began in Russia (there it was again) during the time of the czars. I served in some meaningful capacity at the royal court. It was a life of luxury: sleigh rides in the deep snowy countryside with sleigh bells celebrating our smooth speed. (I could feel the icy weather and hear the bells as I recalled this incarnation. It was as though I were there again.)

  There were huge velvet skirts, muted tones of color, long tables of caviar and vodka. French was spoken with Russian accents as the people of the court talked of Impressionist paintings and the sophistication of Europe.

  Abject poverty riddled the countryside as well as the mainstream of society, while the elite attended symphonies, the ballet, and opera. The poor lived in shacks partially underground in a desperate attempt to gain warmth.

  I saw all the images in a generalized, abstract way. They served to establish the basic conditions in which my involvement occurred.

  The Russian Orthodox religion was powerful within the royal court. Satan, personifying evil, was a real and terrifying symbol. The prevailing philosophy was that the poor were trampled by Satan because that was their destiny. The rich were rewarded by God. That was their destiny. However, the members of the royal court felt inferior to Europeans because they were ashamed of the primitiveness of their peasant country. As they hobnobbed with French intellectuals, they spoke or how the peasant class was not ready for democracy. They were “savages” who needed to be ruled in order to protect them from themselves. They were capable of killing without thought, more animal than human. I saw those same judgmental, elitist people devouring legs of lamb with both hands while seated at luxuriously set banquet tables.

  Moreover the settling of arguments was not done with analytic diplomacy. There was usually art eruption of physical violence, then much laughing and crying. Passions ran rampant.

  I lived my life protected within the seclusion of the court. I had a son I adored. He was my life. He was about six years old as the picture stop-framed. He had high cheekbones (a physical attribute I recognized immediately) and tawny-brown skin. I recognized him as Vassy. (So he had been my son in a previous incarnation.)

  Then the picture changed to the backwoods of the United States during the Civil War period. I was a woman living alone in a log cabin with my young son. Again, the son was Vassy! He was very upset with me and seemed to be preparing to run away from the log cabin where we lived. He bolted from the door half in jest and half in earnest. I ran after him. He ran to a cliff where he was used to playing, but lost his footing and fell over.

  The picture switched back to Russia.

  Vassy, who lived at court with me, was a shy Russian boy who felt deeply about the plight of the poor. Often he would leave the court to play with friends on the outside, taking with him precious objects which he would present to his friends so they could sell them for food. I was aware of his Robin Hood tactics and said nothing.

  A new picture came up. A man from a village outside asked to see me. I agreed. He was representing a group of the poor and stood before me outlining the desperate conditions under which he and his family lived. He said his people needed help and recognition from the royal court to ease the burden of their impoverished existence.

  I listened and was moved, but felt helpless to do anything. The man asked if I could work out a way to sell some of the royal treasures so that other unfortunate human beings could survive. He said he would take responsibility for the disbursement of the funds so that it wouldn’t have to become royal policy. He was genuinely distraught, and had displayed a great deal of courage in asking to see me in the first place. This man was Steve, my ex-husband.

  I listened and sent him away with the promise that I would give his problem serious consideration.

  I then contacted him and took to donning a peasant robe to disguise myself. I left the court on numerous occasions and met the man so that he could familiarize me firsthand with the conditions of life that he spoke about.

  The peasants welcomed me into their pitiful shacks, offering me their homemade wine and what food there was. I accepted what they offered and enjoyed myself at the same time. I listened to their stories and sang their songs with them. My son came with me and introduced me to his poverty-stricken friends, giving them money every time he left. I found his childish gestures of charity embarrassing. The problem was so ovewhelming that small gestures seemed paltry.

  Yet the poor became a contact point of loving reality for me. I enjoyed their company and wanted to help them. I was then forced to consider whether or not I had the courage to see it through.

  I went to someone in a position of great power in the court. His rank was not clear. I only knew it was the soul of my present-day father. He was sympathetic, but unmotivated to rock the boat. He said the fate of the poor was their destiny and he had been told by his spiritual counselor that to interfere with the karmic destiny of anyone would be a spiritual crime. His spiritual counselor was the soul of my present-day mother. I was seeing how complicated our karmic intertwining had been. When I went to her to plead the case for the poor, she said it would be evil and the work of Satan if the royal family interfered with their karma. She said Satan worked in devious ways. One should continually be on the lookout. My son looked on. I could see now she influenced him.

  I felt caught in the middle. I was a product of the Russian Orthodox Church, too, with a deep belief in the polarities of good and evil. And Satan came as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If we didn’t believe in Satan, we were being seduced so as not to recognize him.

  I was confused and felt immobilized. I wanted to help the people I had come to love and empathize with. I saw myself pacing back and forth in confusion. I wanted to listen to my own inner voice, but I was afraid to incur the displeasure of those who might be correct about their evaluation of Satan. And I was also afraid of being ostracized by other members of the royal circle.

  I stopped going to the village, unable to accept the hospitality of the poor in good conscience. The man who approached me in the first place began to lose hope as he watched my dwindling courage and inability to do what I knew was right.

  When he mustered the bravery to confront me one more time, I refused to see him and had him sent away.

  Sometime later, I learned from my son that the man had become discouraged and was ill. His family, as well as many others in the village, had depended upon him. Now he was too depressed and ill to function.

  One by one his family died around him, leaving him helpless to prevent it.

  Still I did nothing to help.

  He became more and more angry with me. Then disease swept his village.

  I was so horrified, I became even more paralytic.

  Whole families were wiped out until finally there was no one left.

  The man could not understand my lack of moral courage. On behalf of all those I refused to help, he vowed to seek monetary revenge against me. He was aware of the principles of karmic destiny when he made that vow. It mattered not whether he would seek revenge in that lifetime or a future one.

  There was another character in this incarnation who was silent but powerfully affected by the conditions of the poor. He was a chronicler of some kind and kept a diary so there would be a written record of events. That writer was my brother, Warren. My mind flashed to his passionate obsession to tell the story of the Russian Revolution through John Reed.

  The pictures stopped. I didn’t need to see any more. I knew exactly what they had meant.

  The karma of my father and mother was clear. Because of spiritually withholding money from the poverty-stricken peasants, they were perceiving in this lifetime that they had money problems
of their own—even though they did not. And both Mom and Dad had deep compassion for the plight of the poor today, identifying with them on a profound level.

  Part of the Vassy connection was clear too. He had been my son in at least four lifetimes (I isolated two others which are not worth mentioning). And in each of them, the theme was good and evil, and love and violent passion versus freedom and respect.

  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.