"Then what is the difference between you and God?" I asked.
"None," (said my higher self). "I am God, because all energy is plugged in to the same source. We are each aspects of that source. We are all part of God. We are all individualized reflections of the God source. God is us and we are God."
"And you are me."
"Precisely."
........
"The God energy is no judge of persons. In fact, there is no judgement involved with life. There is only experience from incarnation to incarnation until the soul realizes its perfection and that it is total love --
"You must understand that there are trillions of souls with histories pertaining to other spheres in the cosmos. The earth is not the sole sphere which supports life. Life exists throughout the cosmos...Some souls have never incarnated, choosing only to oversee the creation of life, evolving it from the spiritual dimensions. Other souls waited until the physical forms had evolved to a crystal base before incarnating. These souls never lost touch with their divine light because crystal makes it possible to resonate to a higher level of divine consciousness...
"It would be unfortunate if human souls regarded extraterrestial life as higher and more advanced than themselves simply because they transverse the universe. For you see, each soul is its own God. You must never worship anyone or anything other than self. For "you" are God. To love self is to love God."
........
Chris put three very fine, thin gold needles into my Third Eye point in the center of my forehead. She gently twirled them to stimulate the utmost effect. There was some pain...Chris put more gold needles into my upper shoulders and behind my ears. She gently twirled them..."Now breathe light into the needles. That helps ease the memory pain while stimulating the actual memory..."
"Now relax," said Chris. "Let your mind go. Don't evaluate and don't let the left brain judge what you are thinking. Give your right brain more space. As a matter of fact, don't think. Just let the pictures come..."
Chris slid the sheet away from my torso and put two more needles into the center of my chest.
"Now breathe more light into these," she said. "...allow the pictures in your mind to unfold."
"Where will the pictures come from?" I asked, interrupting the flow immediately.
"They will come from your own higher self, your higher consciouness, your unlimited soul - whatever you want to call it," she said. "All of your previous lifetimes of experience reside in your God self. That is what serves as your counselor, your guide, your teacher...Try to listen to it..."
I felt my mind begin to drift away from its own consciousness. I tried to relax it into blankness, for I had learned some time ago that you don't force anything when your goal is to be peaceful in your center.
Suddenly, and with rapid speed, I realized I was seeing quick montages of pictures... I saw myself as a pirate with a peg leg, limping along a waterfront with a knapsack over my shoulder....I saw myself hanging from my little finger. I felt pain in the same finger. I saw myself as a nun with black scuffed shoes (my perspective focused on the shoes). I saw a particularly horrible image of myself with a hatchet embedded across my left eye.....(I saw) the civilization of Atlantis..... I was on a battlefield. I couldn't make out where or when. I had a sword and some metal material running around my shoulders. There was another warrior advancing toward me. The warrior stabbed me in the stomach. As I fell forward, the picture changed completely to another time period. I walked up to another warrior and stabbed him in the back. Both times the warrior was my mother!
Then I saw myself as a ten-year-old child who had been run over by a horse-drawn cart. The cart had rolled over my feet, crushing them. The feet had to be amputated. I had learned to navigate quite easily with the stumps. I was not unhappy about my fate.....
The scene changed again. I was in a monastery. I was a young Buddhist monk wearing a saffron-colored robe. An older monk came to me to say good night as I lay on a stone floor of my religious cell.....
........
My higher self (H.S.) conducted incarnational scans and isolated which lifetimes it was necessary for me to relate to. Often I saw overlapping pictures, one image tumbling over another. The H.S. would stop-frame an incarnation in time and show me an aspect of it. I couldn't always understand what the pictures meant, but somehow I understood the emotional reasons for seeing them. The lifetimes often came up as moveable paintings.
I was dancing in a harem, attempting to spiritualize the movement.
I was a Spanish infant wearing diamond earrings, and in a church.
I was a monk meditating in a cave.
I was an infant lifted by an eagle and deposited with a primitive family in Africa, where I became frustrated because they were not as advanced as I.
I saw myself as a child in a swing looking up at the sun.
I was a ballet dancer in Russia. I lived in a home which had a veranda. I wore velvet skirts and played the balalaika. I sat in a swing with books and a pen and paper. I loved the sunshine of the Russian spring and searched for strawberries that had been buried under the snow. There were no other people in the Russian incarnation.
The picture flashed to Brazil, where I was involved with voodoo of some kind, misusing the power of the occult.
The picture flashed again. I was on the Arabian desert with a caravan, looking up at the stars.
Again a flash - I was doing Chinese tai-chi.
Then another: I was a Japanese woman in a brightly colored kimono shuffling along cobblestone streets in the morning light on my way to a Buddhist temple.
Another: I was swimming in a cave. An alligator slept on a riverbank nearby. I knew it, and was afraid.
Then an incarnation came up that upset me so intensely that I didn't want to go on.
I was a young boy of about eleven. As I "looked" closer, I realized I was an Inca youth in Peru. I was being trained by tribal priests to use my Third Eye power. In an attempt to accelerate my perceptions, they had chiseled a shallow hole in the center of my forehead.
It was horrible.....
As each incarnation came up, I experienced some kind of emotional body pain. I say emotional because of the memory it aroused... (H.S.) said that each of the incarnations I had viewed ended in a painful death.
........
There were two notable incarnations, never to be forgotten, that helped me see more clearly today...
The scene opened in the wild, desolate Gobi Desert near Karakorum... Inside one of the tents, I - as a young woman - lived with my father, mother, and two other sisters. We were Mongolian nomads and subjected from time to time to the raids of roaming bandits. The bandits were merciless, inflicting indescribable cruelties upon their victims if their demands were not met....
I was about sixteen and in the full flush of puberty....
...I heard a rider in the distance thundering across the sand with more speed than usual. When he came into view, I saw it was one of the feared bandits...I realized he was there to steal a woman. ...he swept me out of the tent and flung me onto his black stallion...
...The pictures of my new life with the bandit tumbled over each other as a jumbled montage...I was sleeping on the furs in the tent. By now, I was pregnant... Out of the silence, someone entered the tent...it was the young man from the village who had tracked me down and had come to claim me for his own.
As soon as he saw that I was pregnant, he became furious...He fell down on me and proceeded to violate me... In the full throes of our sexual embroilment, someone flung open the front entrance flap. It was the bandit...
...The young man suddenly cowered in front of the bandit and, as though to save his own life, he lunged at me. Holding me around the neck from behind, he very deftly slit my throat. The bandit looked on with an implacable expression tinged with sadness.
........
The last incarnation I saw was the most dramatic in relation to my life today.
It began in Russia during the time of the czars. I served in some meaningful capacity at the royal court. It was a life of luxury...there were huge velvet skirts....
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.....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...
The picture switched back to Russia...
Whole families were wiped out (by disease) until finally there was no one left...
The pictures stopped. I didn't need to see any more.
........
Then H.S. spoke again. "This is your perfection," it said. "This is the harmony you seek...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...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."
Shirley MacLaine
Dancing in the Light
(c) 1985 by Shirley MacLaine
Bantam Books, Inc.
New York, N.Y.
...I have sat in the halls of kings...been fool and jester, man-at-arms, clerk, and monk; and I have been ruler above all at the head of the table - temporal power in my own sword arm.....
...I have worn the iron collar of the serf about my neck in cold climes; and I have loved princesses of royal houses in the tropic-warmed and sun-scented night...
...I have been...scholar and recluse. I have poured over handwritten pages of huge and musty tomes in the scholastic quietude and twilight of cliff-perched monastaries...
...and I have led shouting rabbles down the wheel-worn, chariot-rutted paves of ancient and forgotten cities; and, solemn-voiced and grave as death, I have enunciated the law...
How did these things come to me? Surely I could not have manufactured them out of nothing...
I am Darrell Standing, born and raised on a quarter section of land in Minnesota, erstwhile professor of agronomy, a prison incorrigible in San Quentin, and at present, a death-sentenced man in Folsom.
........
I began my concentration of will...I directed my will to the little toe of my right foot, and I willed that toe to cease to be alive in my consciousness. I willed that toe to die - to die so far as I, its lord, and a thing entirely different from it, was concerned. There was the hard struggle...But there was no flicker of doubt to disturb my faith. I knew that that toe would die, and I knew when it was dead. Joint by joint it had died under the compulsion of my will.
The rest was easy, but slow, I will admit. Joint by joint, toe by toe, all the toes of both my feet ceased to be. And joint by joint, the process went on. Came the time when my flesh below the ankles had ceased. Came the time when all below my knees had ceased.
Such was the pitch of my perfect exalation that I knew not the slightest prod of rejoicing at my success. I knew nothing save that I was making my body die. All that was I, was devoted to that sole task. I performed the work as thoroughly as any mason laying bricks and I regarded the work as just about as common-place as would a brick-mason regard his work.
At the end of an hour my body was dead to the hips, and from the hips up, joint by joint, I continued to will the ascending death.
It was when I reached the level of my heart that the first blurring and dizzying of my consciousness occurred. For fear that I should loose consciousness, I willed to hold the death I had gained, and shifted my concentration to my fingers. My brain cleared again, and the death of my arms to the shoulders was most rapidly accomplished.
At this stage my body was all dead, so far as I was concerned, save my head and a little patch of my chest. No longer did the pound and smash of my compressed heart echo in my brain. My heart was beating steadily but feebly. The joy of it, had I dared joy at such a moment, would have been the cessation of sensation...
Time and space, insofar as they were the stuff of my consciousness, underwent an enormous extension...
And then, with flashings of light, I was off and away. At a bound, I had vaulted prison roof and California sky, and was among the stars. I say "stars" advisedly. I walked among the stars. I was a child. I was clad in frail, fleece-like, delicate colored robes that shimmered in the cool starlight...
I trod interstellar space, exalted by the knowledge that I was bound on vast adventure, where, at the end, I would find all the cosmic formulae and have made clear to me the ultimate secret of the universe. In my hand I carried a long glass wand. It was borne in upon me that with the tip of this wand I must touch each star in passing...
Long I pursued my starry quest. When I say "long," you must bear in mind the enormous extension of time that had occurred in my brain. For centuries I trod space, with the tip of my wand and with unerring eye and hand tapping each star I passed. Ever the way grew brighter. Ever the ineffable goal of infinite wisdom grew nearer...
........
...I was aware, drowsily, that I was falling asleep, and that it was delicious sleep...I was aware of clean, soft bed linen against my skin. I was aware of bodily well-being. Oh, it was delicious...
I awoke...Everything was the natural and the expected. I was I, be sure of that. But I was not Darrell Standing. Darrell Standing had no more to do with the being I was, than did Darrell Standing's parchment-crinkled skin have aught to do with the cool, soft skin that was mine. Nor was I aware of any Darrell Standing - as I could not well be, considering that Darrell Standing was as yet unborn and would not be born for centuries.
...I spoke in French...I was Count Guillaume de Sainte-Maure...
........
Now that I had learned the trick, the way was easy...my journeys from San Quentin life into other lives were achieved almost automatically as time went by...
........
I was a child, a boy of eight or nine...my name (was) Jesse... pondering upon Brigham Young, who bulked in my child imagination as a fearful, malignant being, a very devil with horns and tail and all...
........
I was once Adam Strang, an Englishman. The period of my living, as near as I can guess it, was somewhere between 1550 and 1650...
........
...later named Yi Yong-ik, the Mighty One...
........
My name was Ragnar Lodbrog. I was in truth a large man. I stood half a head above the Romans of my legion...
........
...There is no death. Life is spirit, and spirit cannot die. Only the flesh dies and passes, ever a-crawl with the chemic ferment that informs it, ever plastic, ever crystallizing, only to melt into the flux and to crystallize into fresh and diverse forms that are ephemeral and that melt back into the flux. Spirit alone endures and continues to build upon itself through successive and endless incarnations as it works upward toward the light. What shall I be when I live again? I wonder. I wonder.
Jack London
The Star Rover, 1915
(c)1963 The Macmillan Company