Dancing in the Light (15 page)

But if they do, it’s pure joy.

Broadway, the big one-woman show, was rapidly approaching.

To work at one’s profession and apply spiritual techniques was an adventure I longed to experience just to determine if it was possible. Yoga had long since become a contributive exercise in my daily life. It helped my dancing as well as my physical well-being. But I wanted to experiment with more detailed spiritual mind techniques.

I began to work with what is known as “affirmations” a few days into the rehearsal period. I found that they were remarkably productive.

Affirmations are spoken resolutions which, when used properly, align the physical, mental, and spiritual energies.

The ancient Hindu vedas claimed that the spoken words
I am
, or
Aum
in Hindi, set up a vibrational frequency in the body and mind which align the individual with his or her higher self and thus with the God-source. The word God in any language
carries the highest vibrational frequency of any word in that language. Therefore, if one says audibly
I am God
, the sound vibrations literally align the energies of the body to a higher atunement.

You can use
I am God
or
I am that I am
as Christ often did, or you can extend the affirmations to fit your own needs.

I needed affirmations which would help reduce body pain. So I would affirm to myself (sometimes silently and sometimes audibly, depending on whether I would disturb someone else) a resolution such as: I am God in action. Or, I am God in health. Or, I am God with ease. Whatever came to my mind dictated my creative requirement. Sometimes if I was not feeling as full of fun as I wanted to feel, I would say, I am God in fun. Or, I am God in humor.

What happened was remarkable. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not experienced the results myself.

Call it concentration, or call it
believing
, it makes no difference.
I felt no pain.
My perception, and therefore my truth, was altered if I uttered
I am God in happiness
to myself. The result was a feeling that was real. I uttered each affirmation three times. The vedas claim that three times designates mind, body, and spirit. In the middle of the grueling dance number when I wondered, after double days of two shows a day, whether I could finish, I would chant to myself along with the music,
I am God in stamina
and all the pain melted away. One has to try it to believe it. During workout classes when the “burn” was nearly intolerable, I chanted under my breath three times,
I am God in coolness.
The burn was less. Then I would go on to chant gently,
I am God in strength
, or
I am God in light.
The effect is stunning.

If, as happened, there were days when I had either not had enough sleep the night before, or something occurred to jangle my mood, or just the pressure of performing itself caused me to be out of my own center, I would, as soon as I opened my
eyes in the morning, begin my affirmations and in five minutes or so I felt better.

Before performing I always did them during the overture and continued right on through my entrance. I felt the alignment occur all through me and I went on to perform with the God Source as my support system.

I began to use this technique in other ways too.

There were many times, over the course of my life, when I was asked to be a public speaker. Either to accept an award or to be a keynote speaker at a political rally. Public speaking terrified me. I always felt the need to have a prepared text to refer to. Either I would write the speech or a professional speech writer would do it for me. I couldn’t feel comfortable doing it spontaneously. This discomfort began to ebb away too. I began to work only with an outlined idea in my head. If I carried notes with me, I found that little by little I didn’t bother referring to them. I realized that it was what I was feeling that communicated to the audience more than the words anyway. The words, frankly, got in the way if I was in sync with my feelings. A pause or a decision-making moment was infinitely more effective than the studied intellectual twist of a well-planned phrase. Again, I was learning to trust in the moment and with my affirmation. My higher self was my guide.

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?”