Dancing in the Light (47 page)

Chris chuckled quietly. “A little karma going down,” she said. “It happens in every family. But look at the karma your mother, as the bandit, and your father have to work out. I mean, she really abused her power unmercifully in that lifetime even though it was the code of the desert to steal women. How do you feel about that?”

I thought about it, trying to be as objectively honest as possible. “Well,” I said, “somehow I feel more interested in what happens between the two of them. I always have. It’s as though I haven’t particularly held any subconscious grudge against either of them, but instead have agreed to come into this lifetime as their daughter to help them work out their problems with each other. Is that possible?”

“Yes,” said Chris, “and gracious! You chose such a magnificent entity in your mother in order to work through many issues which were necessary for you. She has taught you to love without judgment. She has reminded you that each of us has been a tyrant at one time or another. She has been through it all and is blossoming in that understanding, just as you will. Your father is still straddling the fence between understanding the latent power he possesses and putting it to use, but he will. They are
both going to progress rapidly because you are. The two of them have an urgent and intense karmic tie, but the enlightenment of one individual soul elevates every other soul on the planet. Your mother was your chosen one to learn through. She exuded the ideal which best served what you needed to learn. That is why she attracted you as a potential parent.”

That was putting it mildly, I thought. What rang so true, in terms of myself, was my observation of Mother’s apparent powerlessness in this present lifetime. Whatever her reasons were for drawing that victimization to herself, I didn’t want that to happen to me. So even though she drew a great deal of frustrated helplessness to her this time around, she served as a lesson for me to avoid the same fate. For that lesson, I would be eternally grateful. I had certainly chosen a superb teacher. As far as my parents together were concerned, they expressed their repressed emotions to each other much more fully when I was around than they did when alone with each other. My lesson in all of this, then, might be to simply sit back, be patient with their karmic intensity, and let them argue and flail away at each other until they finally got it all out. Their love for each other was obvious. But that kind of love was not what the experience of life was all about. It was about forgiving
self
so each of them could fall in love with their own beings.

A few other points about the desert incarnation.

Since I was a child, I have felt a mystical attraction to the desert—not the Mojave Desert or the Sahara Desert, but the Gobi Desert. It was always a desert with Mongolian inhabitants that fired my imagination. They were wild and rough, answerable only to the God whom they worshipped with fear and awe. The howling wind was their constant companion and the expanse of the heavens above their only reminder that they weren’t alone. Why I would romanticize the Gobi Desert after having experienced
such a lifetime, I don’t know, unless perhaps I had worked through my problem with the people who had victimized me and had as yet not worked through the trauma with the birds, the sun, and slow death.

There were so many threads that bound that lifetime to my present one that it is virtually impossible to look at and understand all the connections.
And
what had happened to me on the desert was the result of events that had preceded it.

For example, after the Mongolian experience with the young man who slit my throat, I wondered what I had done to him previously that required me to go through such a violent and slow death.

I asked my higher self. What came up was an incarnation in Rome. I was a Roman soldier who had incarcerated a woman and her daughter. They slowly starved to death in a cell after having contracted leprosy because of the filth. The woman was the soul of the young man. And the young man was my ex-husband today!

The karmic law of cause and effect was staggering in its implications. The drama never seemed to end. I marveled at the rich canvas of human history. What movies could be made out of karmic drama! If only Hollywood would become interested in how karma works for each member of the human race. It would no longer be simplistic good guys versus the bad guys stuff. It would be all of us in the soup of emotional conflict together. I longed to see a film where poetic justice was spread over several lifetimes. Then we could learn something about how the harmony of life’s purpose works. Violence would not be minaless; it would have meaning. And when the meaning was understood, it would become far less provocative and dangerous. Perhaps people would find themselves monitoring their own behavior, knowing that
they
were the final judge of their actions and master of their own destiny.

Human understanding would accelerate immeasurably if each of us had the certain knowledge that
whatever we visit on another, good and bad, would be experienced by us. Again, I thought about leadership. Each person in a position of power must feel the loneliness of not seeing the “meaning” when facing a decision that involves the possible death of others. It isn’t the death that is the issue. It is the robbing of the vehicle of experience—the body—which is the highest cosmic crime. The only route to God is through the earth plane, the karmic experience which occurs in the body. To kill another is to terminate the soul’s opportunity to find God.

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.