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.