Dancing in the Light (40 page)

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 the stone floor of my religious cell. As I looked up into his face, he made the sign of the cross over my face and smiled. The older monk was Vassy!

In my conscious mind, I remembered how Vassy always made the sign of the cross over my face whenever we left each other.

By now, I was feeling emotionally exhausted. I was having difficulty assimilating all that I saw. I guess I needed more time to process the experience.

“I believe we’ve done enough today,” said Chris.
“Ask your higher self if there is anything else you should know.”

I directed the question again.

“Yes,” said my higher self, “you must be careful of your diet during this time period.”

I didn’t know what that meant. I asked for specifics, but I was beginning to feel uncomfortable on the table. I couldn’t concentrate. My lower back hurt and I needed to stretch my legs. I couldn’t get any more answers. It was as though I were out of touch. I felt as though I were blocking.

“All right,” said Chris, “they say that’s enough for today.”

She put down her paper and pencil and leaned over me. Lightly, but with sharp movements, she extracted the needles from the meridian points. The Third Eye needle had already popped out.

“You certainly are rejecting the Third Eye area,” said Chris. “I wonder what that’s all about.”

“I don’t know,” I said, rather confused.

“Well, we’ll see.”

I got up from the table and slowly stretched my muscles. I felt half in and half out of this world, but still conscious of both levels of reality.

“It’s imperative,” said Chris, “that you take an apple cider vinegar bath tonight. Natural apple vinegar helps the body clear the negative energy from some of the events you recalled.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can I have a drink when I get home?”

Chris stopped to think. “Well, if you feel you must, it’s probably all right, because it will help you get out of the way of your left-brain intellectual perceptions, but alcohol slows down the vibration of the body and it will make it more difficult for you to get in touch with those higher frequency dimensions. Be sensible about it. You know what you’re here for, so listen to yourself.”

I dressed and we went back to her house, where her five-year-old daughter waited to be fed.

I sat at her long wooden table drinking apple juice, eating grapes, and reflecting on what had happened. I had so many questions, yet I knew my skepticism wasn’t productive. There really was a difference between what I had just experienced and free association. This experience definitely felt structured. I also had come up with images which genuinely shocked me. In free association with psychotherapy, the thoughts were random and always related to experiences of familiar territory that had been part of my life in this lifetime. Yet the gnawing doubt that I might have been making it up persisted.

“Go take your vinegar bath,” said Chris. “Don’t ponder too much. Relax in the tub for at least twenty minutes. Go to bed early tonight and we’ll continue tomorrow.”

I climbed into my car and drove back to Santa Fe with the incarnational images tumbling over and over in my mind.

I stopped at the market for the apple-cider vinegar and went home straight to the bathtub. The body has an affinity for higher octave frequencies, Chris had said. Be careful how you treat it. As the body clears out the trauma of the physical memory, the residue spins off. Cleanse it. Let it go. I looked down at my legs and feet as I sat in the bathtub. Those legs and feet had a memory of their own? Each cell in the body had a memory imprinted by the soul itself? If so, it could be that each of us had carried an emotional blueprint through incarnation after incarnation and the blueprint was what manifested in body and face. So when we thought we
knew
someone upon first meeting them, we were actually recognizing the soul as it shone through the face, with each incarnational experience being part of the development of soul
and
body.

As I lay in the tub thinking, I wondered how long it would be before scientists would find ways to
verify the evolution of the soul in the same way that they had verified the evolution of the body.

I thought of all the books I had read—and tried to understand—on quantum physics … the new physics, they called it. It sounded very much like ancient Eastern mysticism.

A few quantum physicists were saying that it looked as though subatomic particles actually possessed a consciousness. With photons, for example, they observed a “reality” whereby activity seemed to Be occurring on as many as twelve different dimensions. We were used to defining reality in terms of what our senses told us, that is, our conscious experience, plus measuring in terms of height, width, depth, and abstract dimensions like linear time—but Einstein had already taught us that time in fact
has
no dimension.

Therefore all serious attempts to describe “reality” are forced to speculate on the metaphysical
(beyond
the physical). That could mean then that our perceived physical world is not the only reality, or perhaps not the
whole
reality.

Quantum physics was saying that what we perceive to be physical reality was actually our cognitive construction of it. Hence reality was only what each of us decided it was.

Ancient Hindu wisdom claimed the same thing, that each individual was recognized as being the center of its own universe—which is not arrogant when it is understood that each individual is a manifestation of God and therefore personally involved with Divine Energy.

The new physicists were saying that the key to understanding the universe was in understanding ourselves, for we alter the objects we observe simply by observing. We are then not observers but participants.

Werner Heisenberg, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, shook the scientific world by saying that “at the sub-atomic level there is no such thing as the
exact science.” Such was the power of our consciousness that we couldn’t observe anything at that level without changing it. “What we observe,” he said, “is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Therefore, quantum physics leads us to the only place there is to go—ourselves.”

Einstein said that past and present and future time were all the same because they converged in our consciousness
now.
Time existed in toto.

I looked over at the wooden chair beside the bathtub. Science said that something is organic if it has the ability to process information and to act accordingly. The wood was made up of cells which were made up of atoms which were made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons, which were made up of subatomic particles, one of which was photons.
And photons were vibrational energy which had consciousness.
It was the “consciousness” of the photon which interacted with the consciousness of the scientific observer. The dancers and the dancing were one.

I remembered reading that when Werner Heisenberg asked his professor and friend Niels Bohr how we could ever understand the makeup of the atom if we didn’t have the language for it, Bohr replied, “First, we have to learn what the word ‘understand’ really means.”

When the Buddhist masters implored their students to describe the sound of one hand clapping, they were really inspiring their students to get more in touch with their own thought processes where linear dimensions were concerned. Eastern systems of thought had always understood the limitations of linear dimension.

Maybe what I was experiencing with multidimensional consciousness was part of the quantum physics reality. My body was made up of subatomic particles and each one of them possessed a consciousness. When the subatomic consciousness was stimulated, I saw their translation into images.

Yogis who had learned to raise their consciousness could see their past-life incarnations as well as incarnations of other human beings. They saw their reality in light vibrational frequencies—which was exactly what the new science said photons were.

Quantum physics said that all particles exist as different combinations of other particles. That the cause and effect of that interaction created force. Could that process also be termed the karma of subatomic interaction?

According to Mahayana Buddhism, the appearance of reality was based upon the interdependence of all things. The ancient Indian vedas claimed the same truth.

The old physics taught us that we were essentially unrelated to events in the physical world of atomic and subatomic structure; that they interrelated regardless of our existence as human beings.

The new physics was teaching us that we were inextricably involved. That not only were we involved, but that such atomic structure might exist
because
of our consciousness.

As John and McPherson and Ramtha and the Eastern mystics had said, “Nature follows mind.”

No wonder we human beings felt so isolated from the physical reality of our environment and science. No one much was helping us realize that not only were we part of it, but we were responsible for its existence.

I lay in the water thinking about enlightenment and what it meant. Wasn’t it the process of removing veils of ignorance and judgment and preconditioned prejudice from our concepts? Wasn’t it the attempt to understand personal truth so we could reach a higher level of consciousness?

Was physics about the same process? It would seem so, particularly if the physical world came down to a question of the consciousness of the atom! At the very least, spiritualism and mysticism were concepts to be taken seriously by explorers in the “physical”
world. Broadly speaking, the two paths were converging toward the same truth—the truth of expanded consciousness and hence, finally, to the realization of the God-force.

Enlightenment was a state of being. Subatomic structures were also a state of being. This did not make the two states of being one and the same, but it surely created some sense of identity between the two.

I remembered Niels Bohr saying, “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum physics cannot possibly have understood it.”

So, to be open-minded was the first step toward enlightenment.

The wind began to blow outside the bathroom window. I knew the wind was there, but I had never seen it. How would I describe the wind except to define the effect it had on something else? No one has ever seen atoms either. But we know they are there, interacting with cause and effect.

The great thinker and scientist Giordano Bruno, to whom Sir Isaac Newton paid so much respect, was burned at the stake as a heretic because he envisaged multitudinous solar systems, saw parallel planets such as ours, envisaged life on other worlds, and publicly stated what he believed.

René Descartes saw visions which left him helpless to continue to relate to linear dimensions as he had before. His conclusions were reduced to: “I think, therefore I am.”

Aristotle believed that the mind, spirit, and soul were more important than the “physical” world.

As I lay in the now tepid water, I wondered if the mind could be located in parts of the body other than the head. Under the needles, I almost felt that my legs and arms and torso could think. What did that mean? As a dancer I sometimes felt that my
body
was remembering a long forgotten combination of steps.

Wilder Penfield, famous neurosurgeon and brain researcher, claimed, after exhaustive research, that, in his opinion, the mind was not lodged in the brain. The mind had no specific centered location within the body. The mind appeared to be everywhere—in muscles, tissues, cells, bones, organs. There seemed to be no separation between the one mind and other consciousness within the body. It all operated psychically.

Was this why it was possible to stimulate cellular mind memory and come up with a past-life experience?

Did we perhaps have several levels of subconscious perception going on at the same time? When the needles stimulated the subatomic structure of the cells, were they then stimulating an interior memory of cause and effect? If subconscious experience, which admittedly controlled a great deal of exterior behavior, also included karmic cellular memory, could we then consider that that “interior” karma governed a great deal of our exterior karma? It seemed a logical possibility and led to the concept that the new age of consciousness-raising was really all about becoming more aware of the interior truths in our subatomic structure.

Maybe this was the realized state of being in the achievements of Jesus Christ, and Buddha, and the Indian avatars and yogis of today. The avatars claim to have raised their electromagnetic frequencies in order to resonate to a higher level of awareness. That was why they could see “reality” beyond the accepted linear dimensions. The Indian masters claim that when they reach that state of being, they cease to feel the need to manipulate others or even to recognize negativity. There is no conflict in them, interior or exterior. They are one with themselves and the perfection of the universal God energy and hence can control individual energies.

I remembered the lama-priests I had seen in Bhutan. In icy, subzero weather they came to a frozen
lake, submerged themselves in a hole cut into the ice, and meditated until the ice around them melted and steam rose from their bodies. They explained that they had simply raised their vibrational frequencies. Were they accelerating the electromagnetic energy of subatomic particles in their bodies?

They claimed the faster they accelerated their frequencies, the closer they approached the Divine God-force which they described as a white light so bright we couldn’t see it. They said that an individual’s electromagnetic frequency can alter the state of physical reality and that the human mind could alter the “fixed” reality of fire burning and ice freezing by changing its attitude toward that fixed reality. The important point, they said, was that there were
no
fixed laws where consciousness was concerned. That we could use our power of consciousness energy to manifest positive or negative reality for ourselves. It was all up to each individual.
We
were responsible for our reality.