Interpolation (2)

When I realised I was seeing things that other people didn’t, how come I labelled some as hallucinations (the ones associated with my breakdown) and others (all the rest of them) as clairvoyant?  You must be wondering! In writing this record, I have started to wonder myself. 

When they were happening, there was no question in my mind, no wondering about the nature of the experience – though, with both kinds, I was astounded to be having such an experience at all. (Except when I was a little kid, and didn’t realise my experiences were anything out of the ordinary.) My judgment and response were instantaneous, engaging my whole person; no need to think about them at all. 

I look back now and try to identify differences in the nature of these two kinds of seeing what others didn’t.

For one thing, the hallucinations were bizarre. They were basically of things that don’t and couldn’t happen. The psychic visual images were of things belonging to the world of reality, even when they weren’t concrete in this world at the time. World War II warships did exist, and had existed in the place where I saw them, even though not at the time when I saw them there. But a fellow tram-passenger’s face breaking into bits and reassembling itself as a Picasso-style image? No, we don’t encounter that in our everyday reality, ever (except in works of art).

And really, that’s it. The only other criterion I can offer is my own reaction itself – the fact that I did perceive them differently in my own mind, feel them differently in my bodily reaction, and relate to them differently in my response and understanding. 

It’s somewhat like the difference between a dream state and waking consciousness. In a dream, sooner or later you know it’s a dream, if only when you finally wake up. It feels different, even if you can’t define how.

10. The First Re-awakening: Indonesia. 2. Java.

For all its charm and beauty, I wonder belatedly if it was Bali I was responding to, or an earlier time in Java, when perhaps it was more like the Bali we encountered. This is just guessing, but it results from things I experienced when, on our third visit to Bali, we took a side trip to and through Java.

Before we went to Indonesia, we had thought Bill might have to conceal his Dutch origins, as the Dutch had once colonised Indonesia. Far from it! The older people we met were delighted to recall the time of the Dutch, credited them with things like building roads, and wanted to sing old Dutch songs with Bill. (It was the Japanese they hated, who had occupied them during the Second World War.)

Bali was a holiday island for other Indonesians as well as for the rest of the world. We met a charming elderly Javanese couple staying at the same hotel as us in Bali, who were delighted by Bill’s Dutchness. They ended their holiday before ours finished. When they heard that on this trip we planned to visit Java too, to see the weaving at Jogjakarta and the great temple of Borobudur, they invited us to pay them a visit in their home in the town of Semarang. We were thrilled to accept and work out when. 

That visit to Java started the enquiries which led me to believe very definitely in reincarnation! Though that wasn’t immediately how I explained to myself the startling things I experienced. 

After we finished the sightseeing we’d planned – and were even more thrilled and fascinated by it than expected – we set out for our afternoon tea with our friends in Semarang. We were in the south of the island and Semarang was in the north, but on the map the distance didn’t seem great. Unable to find suitable public transport, we hired a taxi. (Everything in Indonesia at that time was cheap in Australian money.) We hadn’t realised that the roads were hilly and winding, and not always in good repair. The journey took us longer than we’d expected. I’m usually an excellent traveller in any kind of vehicle, but I started to get a headache – I thought from a combination of the hot weather and the fumes of the rather ancient taxi – so I huddled down in a corner of the back seat and didn’t join the conversation.

At one point we passed a small open hut close to the side of the road – basically just a roof on four poles, with a dirt floor –  in which a young woman stood looking out at us while her two infants, dressed in nothing but nappies, sat on the floor behind her, playing together. Her eyes and mine met and held for a longish moment as we drove past. In that moment, I had the strange sensation, in fact a conviction, that I knew everything about her life and the life of children like hers growing up there. It was just a flash, but it seemed to contain everything. I could not now tell you many details of that knowing; perhaps I could not have done so then either.  It wasn’t exactly an intellectual knowledge, more visceral somehow, as if I myself had experienced that kind of life and knew it inside-out, in ways that go deeper than explanations.

I didn’t say anything to the others. I wouldn’t have known how; I couldn’t make sense of it myself. My headache gave me a good excuse to keep quiet and deal very inwardly with the astonishment and mystery.

As we finally approached and entered the town of Semarang, I had the even more startling experience of knowing what we were going to see around every corner, before we got there – streets, buildings, vegetation … and sure enough, what I saw was exactly as anticipated every time. Again, I kept very quiet about this. It was enough to try and cope with it myself, let alone try to articulate it. Also, I quite frankly didn’t expect anyone would be able to believe me. However, it was so for quite some time – until suddenly it stopped, about half or two-thirds of the way through the town.

During our visit to our Javanese hosts, I asked ever-so-casually if there were old and new parts of Semarang. Yes there were, and sure enough it turned out that the newer part, where our friends lived, began just where my pre-knowledge had cut out. I didn't explain why I asked; I was still trying to come to terms with it privately.

Our friends took us for a little tour of the place. We stopped and got out of the car a while, to take in the harbour. That was the next surprise! I saw it as it was, and at the same time I saw what I recognised as two big grey World War II American warships, one anchored slightly behind the other. I somehow knew they were not there physically, and that no-one else could see them, yet I was seeing them as if physically: superimposed on what was here-and-now present. They looked solid enough. 

Back at the house, I asked, again ever-so-casually, ‘Did the War come to Semarang?’

‘It came everywhere!’ our host said – which was not very specific, but I didn't want to push the point. I didn't want to have to get into explanations about something so inexplicable. So I had to wait to look it up in the encyclopaedia when I got home. There was a picture of the harbour, with three of those exact warships anchored there, though positioned differently from the ones I’d seen.

It didn’t make sense to me that it could be a past-life memory. I was born in 1939, shortly before the beginning of the Second World War. By the time there were warships in Semarang harbour, I was already alive as a child in Tasmania.  How could it be a past life I was tuning into? Even if perhaps reincarnations did not take place in chronological order, I still couldn't have been in both lives in the same time, I told myself.

And yet it felt as if I had experienced that view of the harbour personally; as if it was a vivid memory.

And the woman by the roadside? Had I had a flash of past-life memory about a life like hers and her children’s? Or was it some kind of telepathy between us? (And if so, how come?)

Many years later, one of my friends, Jenette, who was also one of my greatest spiritual teachers, acquainted me with her view: ‘I see my soul as MUCH bigger than what sits in this chair. I see it as multi-faceted, pushing one focus of itself out into this reality.’

It’s the only view I’ve come across which, in the light of my personal experiences, makes sense to me. Rather than ‘past lives,’ I think of ‘other lives.’

Aftermath

At the time, though, I was bewildered. I really did think I must be going mad after all. Of course, being me, I didn’t let on to anyone. I wrestled with it alone. I kept trying to find some rational cause which would explain what I’d experienced, and just nothing seemed to fit. I became withdrawn; I had terrible headaches almost constantly – and I tried very hard to conceal these symptoms from my family and friends, to keep functioning despite them. This private torment went on for months.

Then one day, at the end of my tether, I took a good look and decided: 

‘I’m still functioning in my life; I’m not doing any harm to myself or to anyone else. If I am mad, it’s obviously a fairly benign kind of madness. So, as I can’t find any rational explanation for these things, I might as well believe the irrational.’

Whew! Suddenly everything lightened. The headaches went away immediately. The mental confusion and churning brain left me. I concluded that it was the effort to resist believing in my own experiences that had been driving me mad.

My stock joke became, ‘Now I’ll believe anything!’

No, not quite. There are a lot of charlatans out there! And perhaps a lot of deluded and/or gullible people too. I still rely on my empirical experiences, and I still look to see if there are mundane explanations for those experiences. But I became open to the possibility that some things are in the realm of what we call paranormal, and are no less true or real for that, even if they can't be explained in terms we consider rational.

I learned to trust my ‘inner knowing.’ And in fact, it doesn’t let me down.

9. The First Re-awakening: Indonesia. 1. Bali.

In the early years of my marriage to Bill, he and I had much the same position on things supernatural.  We were agnostics, I guess – not only about the existence of God, but all sorts of other things as well: angels, fairies, ghosts, demons, ETs, clairvoyance and clairaudience, precognition, prophetic dreams, reincarnation, spiritual healing, psychic abilities ... We were prepared to consider the possibility that such things might have some basis in fact. Like many other people, we were somewhat fascinated by the possibility that any of them might really exist, but we thought it unlikely. 

We delved into Colin Wilson's massive tomes, best-sellers at the time, The Occult and Mysteries, which seriously examined the possibility that the paranormal was real, with lots of research and historical background – but which came to no definitive conclusion. Which meant that we didn't either. 

Bali

Bill had dreamed of visiting Bali since he was a child reading his grandfather’s books on Dutch Indonesia. 

He had also dreamed of becoming a professional diver. He already ran a scuba diving school when I met him, but only as a weekend sideline while working with his father and elder brother as a builder. When our Firstborn was still a babe in arms, he arrived home one day with the news that he was about to become an abalone diver. 

He had been driving home when he heard on the car radio that the State Government had unfrozen abalone licences, which for some months no-one had been able to acquire. So he drove straight into the city and bought the first one issued! I thought he’d gone mad, but I also thought a good wife did not interfere with her husband’s dreams, so I managed to smile instead of screaming. 

I was wrong and he was right. He remained an abalone diver, and a very successful one with a comfortable lifestyle, until his retirement by the time both our sons were university students. 

His payments from the abalone cannery were big enough to be exciting. He announced that we could take an overseas holiday. He had long dreamed of visiting Bali.

We had three longish family visits there. Here's a recent haibun (a combination of prose paragraphs and haiku) on the subject.

It Wasn’t Me Who Had the Epiphany

I kept bursting into tears! It was our first visit to Bali – me, Bill, and our two little boys. It was 1974, the tourist boom just beginning. We visitors would collectively alter that Paradise beyond retrieval … but we didn’t know so then. It was still unchanged. A naked family, showering under a roadside run-off, waved unembarrassed as our taxi passed.

the setting sun

falling slowly into

a wide flat sea

‘Island of the Gods’ the tourist books called it. We agreed. Enraptured as I was, why was I constantly bursting into sudden tears? 

We read the histories. Some postulated combined ancestry, Indian and Chinese. Later writers say those influences arose more from trade visitations. We could still find old Chinese coins, with holes in the middle, dropped in the street. I brought home three to use with my I Ching.

Suddenly Bill got it. ‘It’s the Indian in you!’ 

My maternal grandmother was mixed-race Anglo-Indian. (I have to add ‘mixed race.’ There are other definitions of the term, from the time of the Raj: one meaning completely English but living long in India, the other meaning completely Indian but thoroughly adopting British culture.)

He was right. It burst on me as revelation. It wasn’t the people but the artefacts. I was re-experiencing things I’d grown up with, lost along with my childhood. I was eating out of bowls I ate from in my grandparents’ home, I was surrounded by reminiscent ornaments, I was admiring familiar designs on cloth … 

There were connections with Chinese artefacts too. My mother’s family had put in there on the long boat trip from India to Tasmania, and bought some pieces. 

I’ll pass to descendants the carved Indian-silver containers and vases, the polished bamboo bowls with Chinese dragons painted around their outsides.

My Dutch-born husband wanted to visit Indonesia for the soul connection to an ancestor who had lived there and left diaries. I didn’t care. I hadn’t been out of Australia; I was happy to go anywhere. How odd that it was I who fell into connection with my Asian roots (who never got seventies Bali out of my blood for evermore). But …

I never returned 

to the isle of the gods –

vanished

6/1/26

I fell in love with Bali as one would with a person! Even aside from the family memories it evoked, there was the extreme natural beauty. Then, I saw people living in a way I had always thought, deep-down, we all should live. They were spontaneous, authentic, respectful and kindly in their day-to-day interactions with each other. 

Back home after our first visit, the two things I hated most were wearing shoes, and that no-one spontaneously smiled at me in the street.

Having our little boys with us helped. They were pre-school age and very blond. The Balinese thought them as beautiful and exotic as we thought their bright-eyed little dark kids. There were lots of mutual exclamations of admiration. I soon discovered that both mothers and children don't need a common language – they already have one. Having our children with us opened many doors. We made real friendships, cemented over our repeated, fairly lengthy visits. (We didn’t just go for a few days and travel all over, packing in lots of sights. We liked to allow time and leisure to sink into a place.) 

The third and final time I flew home on the plane, I cried quietly all the way (and it was a long flight!) because I had an absolute inner knowing that I would never return. And it was true. Life happened, and as things turned out I never did travel back there. (It's most unlikely that I ever will now. Due to ageing, I don't even travel within Australia any more.) But, more than that, it is as I say above. I soon came to realise that even if I had physically revisited, the Bali I fell in love with was no longer there to return to.

These epiphanies and revelations, however, are not what I class as the re-awakening of all that I had shut down so determinedly in childhood.

That began when I saw a youngish, cheerful-looking Balinese man sitting cross-legged by the roadside, with a sign offering to read people's palms for money. Partly from curiosity, mainly ‘just for fun,’ I sat down with him, handed over his fee and held out my hand. Then I got the shock of my life.

He did look at the lines on my palm. But simultaneously – I kid you not – a tunnel of white light opened up, going directly across the short space from his third eye to mine. I was so stunned, I didn’t say anything or display much reaction at all. Besides, it wasn’t scary. I felt safe and peaceful, and very alive. 

He spoke in quite simple English, and repeated his words a few times in several different ways to make sure they were understood. But somehow the message was also being conveyed, with a feeling of deep knowing, via that third eye connection.

His first words to me were startlingly accurate. 

‘Ah, you are … artist. And a little bit philosopher.’  (I’m not an artist with paints, but poetry is an art form.) He’d never seen me before in his life. That is not run-of-the-mill fortune-telling stuff, nor an educated guess! (Conventional palmistry could account for it, by the shape of my fingers. But I had some knowledge of palmistry, and I didn't think my fingers fit that description. Anyway ... )

He told me,

‘You have strong mind, strong heart and strong spirit.’ Then there was something about me worrying that I might not succeed in my task, but he didn’t identify what that task might be. (I thought he must have meant my poetry, but now I think perhaps he was talking about what I might call my energy work, or my work for the Universe – of which, more MUCH later.) He simply assured me:

‘With strong mind, strong heart and strong spirit, you WILL succeed.’ There have been many times when it’s been good to remind myself of those words.

He asked if I had any questions for him. Just one: I asked him if my marriage would last. It had been through some ups and downs by then. He considered this for a little while, then told me,

‘Don’t worry. You can make your marriage work.’

So it was all up to me? I had been privately hoping for reassurances that Bill would always be the husband I wanted him to be, but the young man – perhaps picking that up – reiterated, in case of any doubt, and phrasing it a little differently:

‘YOU must make your marriage work.’ 

(OK, I decided that if I could and if I must, then I would.  And I did, for nearly 20 more years, until finally I chose not to do what it was going to take at that point. Having suffered from my parents’ divorce, there was no way I was going to put my kids through anything like that. Nor was I going to subject them to parents in an acrimonious or loveless union. And it wasn’t as if Bill was a bad person! But after the kids were grown up …)

On that third visit, we had a woman friend from Australia accompanying us, on her first visit to Bali. I raced back to our hotel, to urge both her and Bill to come and consult the fortune teller.

The only thing I remember about his reading for Bill, which I listened to, is that he picked up on Bill’s burning ambition to become a millionaire by the time he was 50 (which was no secret to anyone who knew him, but this guy didn’t know him). He said,

‘All your life, you get up, go to work, come home; get up, go to work … always until you die. The same, not different.’

It turned out he was right.  At the time, though, Bill wasn’t very impressed. He brushed off questions as to what he’d experienced during the reading. (Did he not have the same experience as me, or did it scare him perhaps?)

I didn’t listen to what the fortune-teller told our travelling companion, so as not to infringe on her privacy, and she never confided it. But she did later remark, rather shaken, on the tunnel of white light from his third eye to hers!

‘I thought it was only me who saw that,’ I said. True to form, I had kept quiet about it until then.

It was immensely reassuring to know I wasn’t the only one. 

Interpolation

(It seems I may need a few interpolations now and then, which insist on interrupting the 'what happened next' ...  at least during this process of composition. )

I’m good at writing poetry and good at writing non-fiction. I’m bloody hopeless at writing writing fiction! My very few attempts at novels soon bored me silly. (If I can’t even interest myself …) I did manage to get a couple of short stories published long, long ago. They were in fact scarcely-disguised autobiography.

So I want to say this is a good indicator that I’m not making up the weirder stuff I’ve been writing, and will write here. 

That, however, doesn’t of course prove those things true. It might just indicate that I believe my own delusions. That’s the definition of a delusion, after all. Or that – as I am fond of saying – magic is just science for which we haven’t yet found the scientific explanation. (The esoteric community always has a triumphant chuckle when science finally endorses facts we’ve always known.)

There are some things I simply can’t explain in any rational way.

For instance —

When I was given this Buddha many years ago, by a friend who had been visiting Asian countries, he begged me to always put it high up. He told me that Buddhists are strict about placing statues or other depictions of Buddha at the highest possible point in a home, with the idea that nothing should be placed higher. I promised, and have done my best in every home I’ve inhabited since. 

A friend pointed out that in his present location he looks ‘rude.’ I do see what she meant, but that thing in front of him is actually a lotus he's grasping. In any case, I can’t turn him frontwards, where this would be more apparent. I have tried!

It doesn’t matter how many times I turn him to face the front, nor exactly where I place him on top of that  highest cupboard: he always, gradually, turns — without any human agency — to face the window, the source of light. Other items placed there do not move.

There may be some scientific explanation. I just can’t fathom what it might be. Whereas, it does make sense to me that Buddha would always face the light.