Many Lives (3 page)

This time there wasn't anyone to stop me. As I walked into the garden I noticed a side entrance to the palace. The door was open so I went inside. I noticed the floor of the room I'd stepped into. It looked remarkably old and worn to me. I was alone in the room and, as I took in my surroundings, my eyes were drawn to the bust of a man resting on a cabinet. It was a very modest figure of a naval officer. I felt the colour rise to my cheeks as I looked at it. I felt an overwhelming sense of connection to the man that the figure depicted. I knew this man. I didn't know his name and I also didn't know how I knew he was an officer in the King's Navy. What I did know was that I had loved that man.

Surprised and taken aback by the strength of the feelings and thoughts that had surged up inside me, I stepped outside again. Standing on the gravel path, I thought I'd head back to the main garden and look for the others. All at once I found myself
looking up towards a window on the third floor. ‘That's where I used to be,' I thought. ‘That's where I was. I used to live here.'

Images started to tumble into my mind and in a flash my awareness shifted and I was no longer there in the present day but in another time, and as another person. I was a member of the court of the King during the
ancien régime
. I wasn't part of the inner circle of servants and maids-in-waiting but for some reason had been sneaked into the King's apartments to watch his
petit lever
. I'm not sure in what capacity I was part of the court but there had been an occasion when I had been part of the select few who watched the ceremonial custom of the King waking and dressing in the morning. I'd seen him stretching and yawning and going about his
toilette
. I had been there.

The vision passed. I looked around. I was standing alone by the door I'd gone through, hearing a murmur of visitors' voices coming from the front of the palace. I made my way back around the building and began scanning the groups of people for Geoff and the others. As I stood there, calmly looking for my friends, I felt my awareness changing again. Looking at the magnificent palace in front of me, my sight began to blur and a new set of images began to form in my line of vision.

I could see myself sitting at a rickety table in a wood-panelled room, playing cards with a group of gentlemen. The cards are long and thin and rather unusual-looking. The room is filled with a dusty light and the smell of sweat, pomade, body odour and cologne. I'm in my early twenties, delicately powdered and wearing a slightly worn, faded pink brocade. The men I'm playing with are engaged in a philosophical debate that I'm listening to but not expected to take part in. There's a small, thick drinking
glass on the table; blown rather than cut, and with tiny bubbles in the glass. Around me I can see people with powdered wigs and walking sticks, and women with fans showing cleavage. I'm not wearing a wig and I'm aware that my dusky pink dress isn't as fine as the dresses worn by the other women in the room. I'm neither a servant nor a whore, but I'm not very high up on the social ladder. I'm some kind of courtesan; a girl brought into the salon to entertain gentlemen, play cards, enjoy a glass of wine with them, and flirt a little. The whole scene is pervaded by a relaxed atmosphere, with an air of genteel entertainment and pleasure. A door opens to my left, through which a grand and glamorous, tightly-corseted and white-wigged lady enters. That's where the vision ended.

I can't say how long it lasted; maybe it was just seconds, a matter of minutes, or maybe longer. All I knew was that what I had seen was as real as the world I came back to. I had been there, in that salon. Whether or not it was the same person who witnessed the King's
petit lever
, I have no idea.

The thing about these moments is that they usually come complete in themselves, and without answers. Yet somehow they are answers in themselves: answers to questions that run through our lives that are sometimes as trivial-seeming as why a five-year-old girl would know how to wield a fan, perfectly. And of course, the floor of the room with the bust looked rather sad and old and worn in 1960, compared to how it would have looked 300 years earlier.

The amazing thing was, from that moment I instinctively knew information and facts about French history from that period. When I heard it, the name Madame de Rambouillet was
immediately familiar. I knew she had been the woman that had walked into the room at the end of my vision. It was in her salon that I had been playing cards.

Some time later, after a French history test at school, my teacher came up to me. ‘How did you do so well?' she asked. ‘I know you did absolutely
no
revision.'

‘I didn't need to,' I replied. ‘I already knew it.'

Things often happen when you least expect them, catching you totally unprepared. They can be a bit shocking. I call them
inevitabilities
.

April 1991, six o'clock in the morning; I'd just arrived to work at a studio in Los Angeles. Walking across the parking lot my eyes suddenly met those of a guy dragging cables across the tarmac. In an instant we both knew we had to talk to each other. A spontaneous wave passed between us and there and then we gave each other a hug. It was like a lightning strike; a bolt of energy between us that came as if from nowhere. I could see he'd been totally shocked. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

We met later and I asked him what he'd felt. ‘Relief,' he said. ‘In the instant we saw each other I thought, “there she is”.'

I later discovered he was a cameraman-director, but that day he was working on an infomercial for a friend. What he'd felt, and seen, completely corresponded with what I had.

‘We were children,' he continued. ‘We were a little boy and girl running down a hill. There were windmills in the background.
We're dressed in old-fashioned clothes. There's a carriage and we're parted and the wheels are very big. We never see each other again.'

It was exactly what I'd seen: the scene was 17th-century Flemish, and the carriage's wheels would have seemed big – we were children. I looked at him. ‘And now, here we are… '

It led to three years together and a lifelong friendship.

I know that we come in and out of each other's lives across incarnations, and sometimes when we meet people again who we've known in a previous life, we go through the opposite relationship dynamic with them. You might meet the same soul again that you've had a relationship with in a past life but you may well not have the same relationship with them this time around. Sometimes you might be drawn together again to pass on, or receive, a message.

A few years ago I met a man at a friend's party. I didn't find him attractive but I knew there was some kind of connection between us that I had to explore. I found him perfectly amicable and felt comfortable in his company, and over the period of a few weeks we went out together a couple of times and started to get to know each other. During one of our dates I suddenly had a vision. When I experience these visions, although it appears out of focus I can still see the room I'm in or wherever I happen to be, but the vision is completely there in front of my eyes, like it was in Versailles.

My vision was of a sweet working-class couple on a tandem bicycle in a country setting, arriving at their destination and then having a picnic. The boy was dressed up in a brown suit and wearing a cap. The girl was wearing a pale blouse and a long
skirt, slightly hitched up. The historical setting was pre-First World War. I have no idea if people rode tandem bicycles then but that's what I saw them on. Their picnic was modest but full. They had little pieces of cotton with beads covering their food dishes.

Dramatically and violently I'm pulled out of that scene and thrown into the trenches during the First World War. I can see dressed legs and bits of body flying through the air and blood spattering. The boy who had been on the picnic is there; covered in blood, in anguish and totally disillusioned. He's about to die.

So, there I am, having this terrifying vision. I'm huddled in a corner, frightened. I'm in war. I'm in the trenches. I'm weeping. I say to the man I've had a few dates with: ‘You don't have to be here any more. You must know that in this life you don't need to be frightened. It won't happen to you again.'

I have no idea what happened to the girl. I assume I was her, but I didn't ‘get' her – I got the boy. To the best of my knowledge the man I was with had been the boy I'd seen in the vision, who had died in the trenches in the First World War.

It was as if I was the messenger from his guardian angels sent to tell him that he didn't need to be afraid any more. He'd carried that sense of terror with him from that incarnation and it continued to disable him. He was being haunted by a basic fear of everything. I had to tell him it wasn't real; that it was from a life before this one and that he should drop it.

For me, the amazing thing was that after that there was absolutely no chemistry between us. For him, I was completely insane. He thought I was frightful, but I didn't feel responsible for how he felt. Our connection was about the message I had to give him.

From the moment we met I knew there was something between us; I just didn't know what it was, and I had no idea it was going to happen like it did. I knew our connection wasn't on the level of an intimate relationship but I had to follow my feeling, in the same way that I had to follow whatever it was that led me to that room in Versailles. I just needed to give him the message that he need no longer be permanently suspicious and frightened.

For some reason I'd never been to Egypt. Something had stopped me from going – a feeling inside. I hadn't wanted to go. When I eventually went with my friend Lisa Voice, I really felt nothing for the pyramids, but when I saw the temple of Abu Simbel in southern Egypt, even though it had been displaced – moved from its original location when the Aswan Dam was built – I immediately felt at home. I wasn't a Cairo kid or a Luxor baby; I was from the outer territories. When I looked at them, the hieroglyphs didn't seem alien. I'm never going to be able to translate the Rosetta Stone, but I could read them. They made sense to me.

It is thoroughly disappointing that I wasn't Cleopatra. All I can say about my Egyptian incarnation is that it was lowly and fearful. Unlike other incarnations, I have no sense of detail, just a sense of wariness about it. The only thing I feel is that I was an Israelite, in Egypt as a slave.

My having resisted going to Egypt before, despite having had plenty of opportunities, suddenly made sense. Particular people and specific places resonate with us as echoes across our many lives.

When I was 36 I ‘died' and was brought back. The experience was profound. It changed the course of my life. Up until then it had been a head-on rush: a brazen and fearless adventure in which I'd gone from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and back again; powered by adrenaline, sheer will, focused intention and hard work. From my earliest childhood I'd launched myself headlong into the wonder of life's possibilities, and up to the point of my near-death I'd been physically driven. If there was a wall to climb or a window to climb out of, I was onto or out of it. As a teenager I just upped the pace and by the time I was carving out a successful career as an actress in my twenties and thirties I was skiing down mountainsides, leaping off cliffs, diving, running, jumping; all the time thinking, ‘If I die now I'll die having the most fun.' And then I did die.

After my near-death I went to see three psychics. Each of them told me the same thing: that up to that point I'd been living very much on the physical plane but the second half of my life would be far more focused on the spiritual. I took what they said; particularly since each one had given me the same message but, at the time, I didn't know how it would pan out.

Not so many years later, what they'd said all began to fall into place.

I went to Hollywood in 1985 and was very soon on the spiritual journey they'd described, but I felt frustrated with myself. I didn't seem to be able to find a spiritual home; somewhere I could settle. I couldn't understand why I seemed to be such a dipper and diver, so I went to see Dr Ron Scolastico, a spiritual counsellor. Entering a deep trance state Ron accessed
what he called The Guides. Before going into trance he'd told me to think about the question I'd come to him with, and not to tell him what it was but to keep it in the front of my mind. He began speaking in a very odd voice and, as I later said to myself, if I'd just spent $75 watching someone act it was money well spent because he kept it up for well over an hour. I don't think he was acting, though. I genuinely believe that he was channelling – that his Guide was speaking through him. He had absolutely no idea of my question but the answer I got from his Guide was bang-on-centre-target.