A Past-Life Dream Shows the Future
By JO
I met my husband in 1986 while living in New York City. Oddly enough, my parents immediately began pressuring me to marry him.
This was totally out of character with their usual "hands-off" approach to my life. I was an independent and sometimes rebellious daughter who had proven I could run my own life. But I was strangely acquiescent to their suggestions. I allowed my mother to choose the church, pick the most convenient weekend for the wedding, and rule in favor of a tiny ceremony.
In fact, only my parents, my fiance, and a close friend were present. My four siblings and other close friends were strangely excluded.
I had asked the Inner Master before the wedding if I was doing the right thing. The image I got was simply a green traffic light. So I trusted my guidance and went ahead with the plans.
When we arrived at the small church in Brooklyn, the priest ushered us into a small office. He had never met us, but he obviously felt a need to fulfill his ecclesiastical duties. He spent the next forty-five minutes explaining the many pitfalls of marriage, especially with the added pressures of living in New York City. The ceremony finally took place, and we left for dinner at a favorite restaurant.
Two months later my youngest brother came to visit. We took him for a walk after dinner to show him the small, old church where we married. A few blocks from the church I saw the priest who'd married us.
I walked up and cheerfully said, "Hello!" The priest, who was dressed in street clothes, drew a blank.
"Don't you remember us?" I asked, sweeping my arm toward my husband. The priest said, "No, should I?"
I blurted, "You married us about two months ago."
Now he was embarrassed and tried a joking tone, saying, "You must have been dressed differently."
We laughed nervously together and left. My face was burning, and my mind spinning. How could he not remember us after that long lecture? It was a disturbing waking dream, whose symbolism I had not begun to grasp. But in time I would.
Over the course of the next few months, my new husband became extremely possessive. He even began to accuse me of having an affair. I became afraid to go out with friends for fear of accusations. Even though I was doing my spiritual exercises every night and trusting the Mahanta, I felt a prisoner in the marriage. I knew there had to be a lesson. I finally asked the Mahanta to show me why I was in this situation.
About three nights later I had a profound dream.
I was flying above a white clapboard farmstead. There was a crude fence around the yard. As I flew closer, the image froze like a still picture and then released so I could approach. This happened several times until I found myself in the body of a black woman, around thirty years old, who was sitting on the grass, crying.
I immediately knew who she was and had access to all her memories, feelings, and experiences. I was married with two young sons, age eight and ten (my husband and children were in the yard). I was known for my ability to sing beautifully. And I was very, very unhappy. Then more unfolded as I observed and participated in several memories of that lifetime.
I went back in time until I was about eighteen, living in a small rural area farmed by a community of black families. It was the late 1800s. My father was reasonably successful and known in the community as a strong and religious man.
At this time, I was meeting a young man by a river almost every day. He worked on a nearby farm. We would sit for hours watching the river and talking.
We never kissed or even held hands, but I was desperately in love with this handsome young man. I knew he felt the same about me. My days revolved around the time I spent talking with him. It seemed he could see right through to my innermost self. But one day, before we even got to express our true feelings, my father announced I was to marry the son of a friend of his, also a successful farmer. I protested, thinking of the young man whom I met by the river. But my father would hear none of it.
In the next scene I was in a country church pleading with the minister, telling him I could not marry this man. He was not the one I loved! The minister turned a deaf ear to my cries.
I knew the young man by the river had heard of my marriage. Thinking I did not love him after all, he left town brokenhearted. My pain and sorrow increased with each year of my loveless marriage, as I poured all my heart and love into a memory. I stopped singing and neglected my husband and sons.
The dream rolled forward until I found myself back in the body of the adult woman at the start of the dream. It was about twelve years after the wedding. I was crying because a man had come to the back door that morning. He had a dirty blanket over his head and was asking for food. He was obviously a vagrant, and having just baked some biscuits, I put them in an old cloth and passed them to him. Something in his eyes brought me up short. Embarrassed by his bold, intense look, I went back into the house.
Later, I had the most painful realization that the vagrant was my true love from years before. He had come not to get food, but to see how I was faring. His look of intense love had startled me. Then the dream ended.
I awoke the next morning and wrote the dream down. I had spent that lifetime in somewhat useless pain and grief. The love I had in my heart was locked up for only one unavailable person. As a result my husband and sons had received very little from me.
How did this relate to my present situation? Did I need to give more love to my husband in this life? Maybe he was the arranged-marriage husband from that time.
But who was the man I truly loved? It would be a while until the ECK showed me the full scope of the dream.
Meanwhile, my husband's jealousy and temper raged out of control. It was like living with a complete stranger. About this time, I also became very ill and was hospitalized with a severe blood infection. I had a 40 percent chance of survival. I had no will to live under the conditions of my marriage as they were. But during my hospitalization I had a near-death experience that put my life into precise and sharp perspective. I lost my fear of death—ironically, my fear of living.
Trusting the ECK, I took control of my life. It took a few months, but I finally moved out and sought a divorce, which was finalized just ten short months after the wedding. The karma we shared seemed to evaporate once I made the decision to leave.
Odd things happened: We were let out of our apartment lease, our bank account dissolved (due to a bank error), and I found a new job which took me into a new set of daily circumstances. The ECK swiftly carried me into a new life.
All this time, I remembered the dream and was determined to discover why I'd entered such a destructive relationship. I saw that a disturbing pattern had developed. Why had I never seemed to find the kind, gentle love I longed for?
Apparently some part of me felt I deserved a bond that was not kind but possessive, jealous, even destructive. But Divine Spirit was giving me a chance to break this pattern.
First, I had to give myself the kind of deep love I imagined. I sang HU every night and developed more trust in my guide, the Mahanta, I learned to love myself as Soul, a divine spark of God, and I slowly began to heal.
Nine months later, I attended the 1987 ECK Worldwide Seminar in Houston. I was waiting with friends for a table at a restaurant when another group of seminar attendees arrived. We didn't know them, but we invited them to sit at our table.
I felt an electric shock go through me when I first saw one of the men. Though I'd never laid eyes on him before, I wanted to shout, "What are you doing here!" I was filled with an odd mixture of joy, laughter, and incredulity. The feeling passed as we sat down to dinner, but during the next few days at the seminar, this man and I kept bumping into each other.
One evening after sitting and talking in the hotel lobby, we exchanged addresses. I promised to keep in touch with him, but I had no interest in anything other than a friendship. Over the course of the next year, we met at Eckankar seminars, spoke on the phone, and wrote letters. We spent hours talking—I could tell him anything. I remember thinking what a dear friend he had become.
One year after meeting him, during the 1988 ECK Worldwide Seminar, it finally hit me: I had a deep love for this man. I moved to Iowa where he lived, and Paul and I were married.
I had forgotten about the past-life dream until one day when Paul and I were talking about his recurring neck problem. He had gone to several chiropractors, but it wasn't until he had a dream about a past life that the source of the problem was revealed.
In his dream he had been a black man, a vagrant in the late 1800s. He died when a group of white men found him sleeping in a shack and hung him.
I felt my own past-life dream come back into my consciousness with a zing! Paul was my love from that previous life! The long talks by the river mirrored our long talks in this life.
I also realized my mother in this lifetime had been my father then, forcing my marriage in both incarnations. My husband in that difficult lifetime had indeed been my jealous first husband in this one. Ten months in an emotional prison was the price I had to pay for a life where he received no love from me. My two sons from that lifetime are now my two younger brothers. They had arrived in our family while I was a teenager, and I was able to help raise them and nurture them in this lifetime—as I hadn't in that one. I have a very deep love for them, and they've always felt like my own children.
The priest who couldn't remember my marriage in New York City, despite having performed it himself after giving us a forty-five-minute lecture, seemed to mirror the minister who had married me in my past life. That minister had turned a blind eye and deaf ear to my pleas of not wanting to marry.
Despite the difficulty of the first marriage, I am grateful for it now because it brought me to a greater understanding of myself. I now know that all experiences point to one great spiritual lesson: how to give divine love first to yourself and then others. And this has led me to a greater love of God.
It also brought me together again with the man by the river!
Excerpted from the 1997 Eckankar Journal, copyright © 1996 ECKANKAR. All rights reserved.
