Dancing in the Light (6 page)

“So what do you think of all this, Daddy?” I asked, never having anticipated that my
parents
would be people I could talk to about this stuff.

“Well,” he said, loving the introduction of metaphysics into our relationship, “I think we should stay open-minded about everything there is to learn. You may be blazing a trail here, to make it more acceptable to discuss. I mean, read your Plato, or Socrates, or your Freud and Jung for that matter.
How do we know unless we explore? Of course, we can’t explain it in presently acceptable terms, but who knows how those terms will change? Nobody believed there were microbes crawling around on the skin until someone came up with the microscope. We are each our own microscope.”

I got up and stretched and went to look out the familiar sun-room window. Had I sensed this capacity for metaphysical truth in both my parents while growing up? Were they the reason I now found such speculations easy and thrilling to comprehend? Had Ira and Kathlyn Beaty been silently instrumental in the forming of this bent of mind I now had? I knew I had responded more to their feelings than to their words during the years we had lived together—emotional truth being more vivid and influential to me than intellectual truth. But never, not once, had I consciously speculated that they might be thinking about the same possibilities I was. I thought I was the only one.

Mother watched me at the window.

“You know, Shirl, remember your old Bible?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why?”

“Well,” she answered, “you were always reading it and underlining your favorite verses. I have it here, if you want to see it. You have been interested in this spiritual side of life since you were a little girl.”

“Really?” I asked, not remembering.

“Yes, you were never much on religion or church or any of that stuff. You wanted to know what was underneath what they were teaching. You really liked reading about Christ. I remember you used to call him a spiritual revolutionary.”

“I did?” I asked.

“Sure,” she answered proudly. “Your friends were going to church and you were reading books about religion. You know, both you and Warren could read before you ever went to school. Your daddy and I read to you every night until you began
to be able to do it yourselves. You were insatiably curious. Your minds were always clicking over.”

Yes, I remembered the books, and the discussions that Mom and Dad shared with us.

Mother always encouraged self-reflection and reverence for nature. I remembered the many times she would suggest a long walk by the stream near our house so that I could commune with myself in the company of the birds and trees and rushing water. During an unhappy interlude in a young teenage love affair, she would say, “Shirl, stop worrying about your boyfriend and what he’s doing. You should be out in the wind and the rain. Go stand under a tree and then wonder and think about yourself. You’re too young to be so intensely involved with ‘going steady.’ There’s a magical world of nature out there that you’re missing. You’ll know more about yourself if you allow nature to be your teacher.”

And Dad, as a teacher himself, regarded education as a dedication. He believed knowledge was power. Knowledge was freedom. To help inspire a young mind to search for truth had been the cornerstone of his life. He not only lived up to that dedication in his chosen profession as a teacher and principal and superintendent of schools in Virginia, but he brought that dedication into the home. There was no question I could ask that he would casually brush away.

Daddy lit his pipe and crossed one leg over the other as though he were about to launch into a lecture.

“Monkey,” he said, “do you know the definition of the words ‘education’ or ‘educate’?”

“No,” I said, “I’ve never thought about it.”

“Well, they come from the Latin words
ed
, out of, and
ducar
, to lead.
Educar
, to lead out of, or to bring out that which is within. What does that mean to you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it means to lead out of yourself the knowledge you already know.”

He smiled gently. “Yes, it could. But what do you mean?”

“Well, if we really never die, if we just leave the body like you did, and then if we do continually come back or reincarnate into new bodies, then we must have done that many times. If we have done that many times, then we each must have tremendous knowledge and experience from lives we’ve led before. So maybe the ancients realized that education was just helping people get in touch with what they already knew. And maybe our higher selves already know everything. Isn’t that what Plato and Socrates believed?”

Daddy thought a moment. “Yes,” he said, “I think you could put it that way. Plato professed to know that other civilizations such as Atlantis existed. Maybe he was having an imaginary vision or maybe he was speaking from former knowledge of those times. I’m not sure what the difference is. Possibly imagination is simply a form of memory. Most of our great thinkers have professed to have had an intuition or guidance that they couldn’t describe, something they ultimately called a force or God or a higher recognition of truth that required a quantum leap of inspired faith. As Carlyle put it, ‘The unfathomable SOMEWHAT which is not WE.’ Or as Matthew Arnold said, the ‘not ourselves’ which is in us and all around us.”

I had never heard my father talk like this. Was this the man whom I had mentally dubbed a prejudiced bigot when he, perversely, insisted on calling black people “niggers”? Was this the man I believed had rotted his brains with booze so much that he reduced me to tears?

“Art is the same thing,” said Mother. “Who knows where great art comes from? Who knows what inspiration and talent are?”

“What do you think they are, Mother?” I asked.

“I think,” she answered, “that everything comes from God.”

“And what is God, then?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “But I know it’s there.”

Daddy cleared his throat with a commanding
hurrumphhh.
He always did that when he was vitally interested in something.

“What are you getting at, Monkey?” he asked with genuine curiosity on his face.

I chose my words carefully. I wanted to convey what I was thinking as succinctly as possible even though I realized there were not many words that could define what I felt.

“Well,” I began, “since so many new ideas are surfacing these days, I’m wondering whether they are, in fact,
new
, or instead are really rather ancient. I’m wondering if all the old masters weren’t actually more in touch with the ‘real’ spiritualization of mankind, meaning that they understood that the soul energy of man is eternal and infinite. That
they knew
that the soul goes on and on. That it never dies and in fact cyclically reembodies itself in order to learn and grow while alive in the body on the earth plane.”

“You’re talking about reincarnation, then,” said Dad.

“Yes, and if the soul is the repositor of all its accumulated knowledge and experience, then education is only the process of drawing out what it already knows.”

Dad flicked some lint from his shoulder, a ploy to give himself time to consider a point.

“Well,” he said, “I understand that nothing ever dies. High school chemistry proves that. Matter only changes form. So I could even go along with your belief that the body becomes the eternal soul after death, but I don’t know if I can go along with reincarnation.”

“But Dad,” I said, feeling my voice rise as it had whenever, as a child, I wanted to get a point across to him, “you actually had the experience that your
soul was
separate
from your body. How can you say the body
becomes
the soul?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you have already experienced death, then you know that death is only the experience of the soul leaving the body, right?”

“Right.”

“Then if the soul is separate from the body, why not stretch a little bit further and contemplate what the soul does after it’s been out of the body for a while. Or if there’s no old body to go back to.”

“Well, Monkey, the way I felt about that white light that Ï saw, I’m not sure I’d ever want to leave it to come back again.”

“Oh,” I said, understanding that his version of the white light was so glorious, there would be no future necessary after that.

“So, you’d just hang around up there basking in the glow forever?”

“I think so, yes.” He laughed. “I certainly wouldn’t have to worry about the dust in my room, would I?”

“Oh, Ira, be serious now,” Mother chimed in. “Shirl,” she said, “if you believe that we have all lived before, then you and your father and I have lived before too?”

“Yes,” I answered, “that’s what I believe. And I think that our family, and every family for that matter, is a group of souls very closely connected because we have been through many incarnations together. I think we
choose
to be together, to work out our drama. We choose our parents, and I think the parents choose the children they want to have before they ever come into an incarnation.”

“You do?” said Mother, astonished at the thought and realizing, at the same time, the implications of what I’d said. “You mean you believe you chose to have your father and me as your parents?”

“Yes,” I answered, “and I believe that we all agreed to be a part of this family unit before any of
us were born. That’s why I feel your marrying Daddy seemed inevitable to you. Your higher self knew as soon as you met him that you had already agreed to have Warren and me for children with him.”

“Oh, my goodness,” exclaimed Mother. “You believe all of this was preordained?”

“Yes, and not by God, but by each of us.”

“Oh my. I have to fix myself a drink,” said Mother. “Ira, do you want a glass of milk?”

“Look at that,” said Daddy. “The boss won’t even let me share in a drink with her after we planned our lives together from the spiritual plane.”

I laughed and thought of all the incarnations they must have had together. If there were ever two people who were joined at the hip, acting as catalysts for one another’s learning process, it was my mother and father. They had a kind of George and Martha
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
relationship. They couldn’t live happily with each other, and they couldn’t live happily without each other. From my very first memories, I felt there was a profound experiential drama going on between the two of them. They could push each other’s buttons more effectively than anyone I had ever witnessed. But then they were my mother and father. So of course I would be affected as intensely as all children are by their parents. Surely the human drama with our parents (or the reverse, a total lack of it) is the most influential element in our lives? The drama within the family unit had to be the underpinning for the way we regarded life in the world from then on.

Yet, if the purpose of life was to experience, the better to appreciate the growth and understanding of the soul, then everyone we met, to a greater or lesser extent, was a means to that end. To realize oneself fully meant the necessity of experiencing all the possibilities available to the human condition.

The lessons in living which triggered our most profound reactions dealt with our feelings toward authority, helplessness, loss of control, material comfort,
survival, manipulation of fear, restriction of freedom, attitudes toward possessions, attraction to the opposite sex, attraction to the same sex, closeness of living, passion, violence, and love.

What better place to learn those lessons than within the family unit? The family constellation was a microcosm of the overall human family. Work out the problems within the family and you might very well have the capability, training, conditioning, and tolerance to work out problems on a global level.

Families are all about karma.

Therefore, one’s karmic requirements began at birth within the association of parents and siblings. Within the family environment was every human conflict that could ultimately lead to a willingness, or a nonwillingness, to wage war. Most attitudes of, and toward, violence and hostility are spawned in the family. Just as attitudes of love and compassion are. No one knows better than parents and children how to set off the trigger points in each other. Feelings of suspicion, fear, and doubt are a direct result of family attitudes. Those who “brought us up” to know ourselves chose to help us with life’s lessons. Nowhere could a teacher be more effective than in the body of a parent. If the parent and the child chose to make it so.

The reverse was true also. Don’t we learn as much from our children as we ask them to learn from us?

Ideally, parents and children could help each other with their self-realization. What we would do then, out in the world, would be an extension of that realization. In actuality, too often the pattern gets skewed or dulled, so that growth and the ability to cope with one’s self and the world don’t develop.

Mother brought two wet martinis and a glass of milk from the kitchen.

“I know he’ll go sneak some Scotch anyway.” She shrugged. “So he can put it in the milk.”

I took a sip of the martini and watched my mom and dad as I would a good situation comedy. More
and more I saw them from the karmic perspective, but when I was growing up, the intense emotional environment in the home had had several effects on me.

First, I was the amused, sometimes astonished and confused, child witness to their dramatic and theatrical human interplay. Often I didn’t understand the intricacies of their scenes, or the meaning of the outcome, but I learned on a subtle level to read their emotional tones and their detailed shifts in mood and expression.

Unconsciously, I was receiving an exquisite education in the nuances of manipulation.

Therefore I believe it was inevitable that I would, later on in life, put this understanding and knowledge to work in an art called performing.

Second, the spectrum of expression that I saw exhibited at home, both positive and negative, inspired me to want to express myself. My parents were locked in their own battles of interplay so intensely that Warren and I needed to seek out our own turf for expression. Mine, at a very early age, was dancing class but escalated later into the expression of acting and writing.