Excerpts

Chapter One The Journey to My Guides We shall ascend the mountain together. We shall climb to the highest peaks and there the magnificent view of all of life shall be our reward. I always say that my mother gave me birth and my mother gave me rebirth. On the first occasion she gave me physical life. On the second, when I was nineteen, she opened my mind to the world beyond the physical-an experience that led to a transformative understanding of why I'd often felt anxious and uncertain growing up, unable to plunge into life without a deeper comprehension of its meaning. That encounter set me on the path to meeting the spiritual guides and teachers who have since become the most powerful influences in my life, offering me tools and insights through which to navigate both the ordinary and extraordinary challenges of daily living. Let me explain. As a child, I had experiences that no one else around me seemed to share. At night, I saw faces in the dark, and although my father tried to reassure me that they were merely the work of a vivid imagination, I begged him to let me sleep with my light on. Sometimes I had out-of-body experiences: I'd be lying on my bed, when suddenly the room would start to spin, and "I" was on the ceiling looking down at "my" body still on the bed. How can this be? I wondered. Am I the body on the bed, or am I on the ceiling? Who am I? Sometimes I saw light around people. I told my father, a physicist, "Daddy, I can see molecules!"-a word I'd learned from him. He replied that no one can see molecules with the naked eye, and to prove his point he brought me to an electron microscope laboratory at Yale University, where he was on sabbatical, to show me what molecules really looked like. As I watched the microscope screen I understood that he was right, of course. But if I wasn't seeing molecules, what was I seeing? Not knowing scared me. Other times, I was overwhelmed by so many feelings and impressions that I couldn't even begin to sort them out, much less interpret them. In fifth grade, I remember missing an entire math lesson because I was so absorbed by the images and insights I was picking up about my teacher's personal life. I was also distracted by the fascinating nature of this ability. I questioned my friends and other family members to see if they had similar experiences. They thought I was making up stories, so I learned to keep quiet about my unusual episodes. Although I spent a great deal of time feeling misunderstood and confused (spending time alone in nature was one of my few solaces), I always felt loved by my family. But as time passed I grew increasingly anxious. This anxiety was rooted in some ways in a terrible shock that hit my family when I was very young. At the age of thirty-two, my mother woke one morning to discover that she was blind, the first sign of what would eventually be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. The disease progressed rapidly, affecting both her mind and her body. If my mother was sick, I thought, perhaps I was, too. Over the years, as I watched her deteriorate mentally and physically, I wanted to understand why my mother, who was a good person and loved us all so much, suffered so. I asked many such "why" questions, but no one provided me with satisfactory answers. Though I was raised without religion and felt agnostic, I took a tour of churches in our area when I was around ten or eleven, to see if religion could offer any resolution. I didn't find a source of information that felt personal or persuasive, nor did there seem to be much tolerance for my most pressing questions. When I was seventeen, my mother died, paralyzed and unable to talk. The following year, I went to college, where I hoped to find a better understanding of life's meaning in books and classes on psychology and philosophy. I wanted to believe what I heard in lectures and seminars and embrace the concepts in books I was assigned, but I didn't feel certainty or confidence in the material presented. My life would have been easier if I had, but I didn't know if the ideas were actually true. I frequently wrote in journals, continuing to ask myself questions and searching for peace of mind. After my first year in college, I decided to take a leave of absence and travel. Privately, I resolved that during that year of exploration I would find my life's purpose. A friend told me about having had mystical experiences in Cuernavaca, Mexico, so I decided to go there. I was ready to be open to whatever came my way. Spiritual Awakening Before arranging for my leave of absence, I visited one of my brothers, who lived and worked in New York City. At that time, he was dating a woman named Catherine, who called herself a trance medium-which I thought was very odd. Although I did have something of a mystical streak, and had wrestled with questions about the meaning and purpose of life, mediums and clairvoyants didn't really fit into my scheme of things. I'd certainly never met one in person. A few moments after my brother introduced us, Catherine asked me, "Is there anyone who is dead that you'd like to speak with?" Her blunt question startled me, but I managed to reply, "I don't know if I believe in life after death. But if I can, I'd like to speak with my mother." Catherine didn't know about my mother, as she hadn't been dating my brother for very long; because my brother was rather reserved about emotional issues, he hadn't said much about our painful family situation. I didn't tell her, either, because at that point anything to do with my mother had been banished to a private, locked-up room of my psyche-one tinged with the misplaced guilt of a sensitive child with a very ill and suffering parent. That evening, Catherine invited me into her apartment, just two floors below my brother's in the same building on Thompson Street. As she sat down to meditate, I waited and watched as her cats literally jumped off the walls and ran into the bathroom, apparently reacting to something I couldn't see. Many emotions and childhood memories swirled inside me as Catherine went into a trance. My mother had entered a nursing home when I was only eight years old, and as the years passed she became less and less a presence in my life; in many ways I hardly knew her. Then all of a sudden Catherine was lying down, in what looked to me like a paralyzed state, and to my surprise, I saw my mother's face superimposed over hers. The difference in their appearance was unmistakable. Catherine was blond and had a wide, round Slavic-looking face; my mother had a narrower face with high cheekbones and dark brown hair mixed with gray. Then with great effort, my mother spoke to me. I had to bend over Catherine to hear, but it was my mother's voice, without a doubt. "Do not mourn for me," she said, "for I chose what I endured." She then went on to say that no matter how things appear on the surface, "if you look deep enough, you will see there are always reasons and justice." She told me she forgave me for all the things I'd done that were not quite right, because I'd only been a child-a statement that immediately released an enormous sense of guilt I'd unknowingly been carrying. She spoke to me about the process of reincarnation and told me that in previous lives she'd been selfish and arrogant. (Many years later, I had visions of my mother in a former life in ancient Rome, where she'd been an aristocrat with significant power, and had ignored the suffering of many people around her.) During her incarnation as my mother, she continued, she'd learned through her own suffering that we are all connected, and that if we ignore the struggles of others, we ignore our own. That was the justice to be found in the suffering she endured in her most recent life: She'd acquired the capacity to experience and express genuine compassion. For me, her statement, If you look deep enough, there are always reasons and justice, was a revelation. It meant that life had order; it wasn't just chaos and cruelty, as it had often appeared to me. Faced so immediately and intimately with reincarnation-and the opportunity for learning that comes with it-I found that life all at once began to make sense. There were reasons why things transpired as they did. I began to feel more pleasure in being alive. Communicating with my mother on a spiritual plane also brought into sharp and dramatic focus the sensitivity I'd experienced since childhood. After that session, Catherine went upstairs to spend the night with my brother, while I stayed in her apartment. But I realized I wasn't alone: Entities and spirits could be all around me, and know my thoughts. For the first time, I grasped that no aspect of my life was completely private. Initially that awareness felt frightening and embarrassing, though now it feels comforting to be completely seen and never feel alone. Unable to sleep that night, I read a book on palmistry I found on Catherine's bookshelf. The next day, I was amazed to discover that when I looked at people's palms, I could see visions of their soul's journey-an ability, I later learned, known as "hand scrying." On the bus back to college, I sat next to a woman who was obviously troubled. I plunged ahead. "Let me look at your hand," I asked her. She agreed, and I saw visions that enabled me to tell her about her life. I continued to have more such clairvoyant experiences, which further opened me to phenomena I hadn't previously been conscious of or that once had frightened me. As I recalled my childhood episodes, I was able to look at them from the new perspective that my mother had brought to me. I was certainly a spiritual novice at that point, beginning to be aware of my abilities, yet untrained in how to integrate them into my life. Not long after my first experience with Catherine (she and my brother had broken up by then but we were still friends), we visited an artist who had a collection of sculptures in his large and luxurious apartment. As the afternoon wore on the three of us found ourselves having a wide-ranging and amiable conversation. Suddenly, though, I found myself able to feel the unhappiness of this man who appeared to be surrounded by ease and privilege. Despite his talent, success, wealth, and apparent comfort he seemed lonely, embittered, and lost. Thinking it might help him, I began to talk about the experiences I'd had with my mother. I mentioned how much grief and guilt I'd suffered during her illness and death, and how that burden had lifted. I ventured further, telling him what I had begun to see and understand, and what I saw about his life. To my surprise, he wasn't at all interested to hear what I had to say; in fact, he was quite hostile. "Who do you think you are, the Chosen One?" he asked. "You've been put on earth to tell people what their problems are, and what gives you the right to do that?" I turned to Catherine, hoping for rescue, but she was as confused as I, and eventually we made as graceful an exit as possible. I went home that evening troubled. Did I think I was special, "chosen," put on earth to impart truths that others would rather not acknowledge? The idea seemed distasteful, arrogant. It hadn't been my intention to show off my specialness, but instead to offer something that could be useful. Clearly, I didn't know how. Surprising Encounters Not long afterward, I went to Cuernavaca as I'd originally planned and attended a school started by Ivan Illich, a former Roman Catholic priest who promoted the idea that education isn't confined solely to formal classrooms and structured class periods; rather, life itself is a school. I stayed in an old mansion on a beautiful estate, which I shared with an interesting group of people from around the world who were drawn to Illich's idea of "de-schooling" society. While in Cuernavaca, I spent many afternoons at an English-language bookstore. At that time, I gravitated toward books that discussed spiritual topics, most of which advocated meditation, and after asking around a bit, I located a place that taught yoga and meditation. I attended only one class, but it was a fascinating and unusual experience, because the teacher and all the students in the class spoke Spanish, a language I didn't know. Very carefully, I observed everyone and followed along. The first part of the class was devoted to practicing yoga postures; then the men headed into the men's locker room and the women into the women's locker room to take showers. I shadowed a friendly older woman who spoke some broken English, and while we were getting dressed she explained that we must be clean and fresh before meditation. After we all returned to the large open space, everyone sat in lotus position and closed their eyes to meditate. The teacher gave what I assumed was some formal instruction, which I couldn't understand. I relied on my memory of what I had read about meditation-simply that meditation is an inner stillness, a holding one's thoughts at bay, so that was what I did. I discovered that I was a natural meditator. I was able to keep my mind still for long periods without much effort, just as I had as a child, when, for instance, I'd stare out a window with my mind free of thoughts. After that one afternoon, I started to sit in stillness as a regular practice. One day at the English-language bookstore, I met an American man, an actor who was interested in making a film based on a book called A World Beyond, by a then-famous medium named Ruth Montgomery. Montgomery was living in Cuernavaca at the time, and after this man explained who he was and showed me some newspaper clippings to verify that he had been on Broadway, he asked if I knew her. I didn't, but without thinking, I told him that as a child I'd had experiences leaving my body, and if we could find a quiet place to meditate, I thought I could do so again and locate her. I have no idea what possessed me to tell him that; I suppose I felt cocky and confident. Excerpted from The Infinite View: A Guidebook for Life on Earth The Missing by Ellen Tadd, Eric Swanson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.