Dancing in the Light (44 page)

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 were 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.

“We humans should never forget our capacity to connect with the collective spirit of animals. Their energy is essential to our future growth. The animals are on the earth for a reason and our disrespect for them has become alarming. They are totally without ego. Animals would teach us if we would listen. Pulsating in their collective consciousness are the lessons of the past. They are dumb and unable to speak for a reason. They communicate on other levels, which are there to help us hone our levels of perception with nature.”

As this delightful recall receded from my mind, I was reminded again of its underlying theme. Respect the quality of life, the unquestioning acceptance of living with nature and animals while pursuing a sensitive progression of intelligence. And while understanding the will of the collective majority, be intricately aware of the needs of the individual.

I breathed a sigh of completion when it was over, because I understood.

An addendum to this tale is worth mentioning, even at the risk of sounding completely outrageous.

First, let me say that I was learning that the
theme
of each incarnation was more important to understand than the specific incarnation itself. The theme of the elephant-princess incarnation, for example, had been the co-existence of the collective in tandem with the individual. I had mastered it on an emotional and spiritual level where animals were concerned. They had been instrumental in my learning it so that I could have an effect on the humans in the village.

But as this particular recall was unfolding, another lifetime swam in and out of my consciousness, as though it were important for me to regard the two in relation to the same theme.

This is what I “saw.”

I saw myself involved with the sociopolitical
questions of the Founding Fathers of the United states.

When I asked H.S.
who
I had been during that lifetime, it said, “It doesn’t matter. The theme of democracy is what was important. You had an incarnation during the writing of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. You were involved, as were many, with the establishment of the New Spiritual Republic of the United States, and along with many others who lived then, you were deeply involved with the question of majority rule and respect for the rights of the individual. You drew on your lifetime with the elephants because your soul memory remembered your accomplishment of the same theme. You see how the holographic picture works?”