Seeing the dancing lights in the blue eyes before me I knew that my thoughts were shared.
"I'm glad," Lea said, "that you have learned that Macro love is not limited to one person."
"I still don't understand it, Lea," I replied, "how I can love you both in such similar and yet different ways. Then to realize, by actually experiencing your feeling, that you really have no jealousy even as you observe me comparing your physical and mental attributes with Carol's."
Lea nodded her lovely blond head. "I know," she said, "that you would not be able to believe this possible if you had not developed telepathy. But then, it's easier for twin souls because it would be impossible for me to be jealous of myself."
"Oh, Lea," I cried out, taking her in my arms, "how am I going to do it? I have only three months. The possibility of losing you is more than I can handle. I never want to live separated from you again."
"But, Jon," she laughed softly, "have you never heard that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?"
"How can you take it so lightly?" I asked.
"Because, Jon," she replied, "I know that the only separation possible exists at the micro levels-never at the Macro ones. We can be separated by time and space, but never in the Macro depths of our minds."
"All right," I stated, "there's my greatest motivation for developing Macro awareness-so I will never have to feel separate from you again."
"The reason I asked you here today," she said, "is that both Rana and I feel you are ready to remember a few of your past lives."
"Terrific!" I said, "When do we start?"
"Right now," she replied. "Sit down and we'll ask C.I. to provide the stimuli for Macro contact."
She picked up my thought and said, "Macro contact can be achieved without either sexual union or even touching. This is fortunate because if we joined sexually now it -would diminish your desire for Macro contact so greatly that it would probably be impossible for you to attain third-level awareness in the short time allotted."
"Then, you mean we can't share Macro immersion until I demonstrate third-level awareness?" I asked.
"Not and be able to permanently bridge the time barrier that separates us now," she replied. "But that only means we have less than three months to wait, and we can do that since it means a lifetime of being together thereafter in the Macro society."
As she finished these last words, C.I. began the now familiar visual and audio stimuli which helped produce such vast mind expansion. Very quickly I found myself flowing like a river through infinite space until I was joined by Lea and we were again one mind and one soul.
Then in my mind I heard Lea say that we would be going back in time until we reached a point where my soul had incarnated into a prehistoric Chinese culture.
Suddenly I found myself both experiencing the body of a thirty-year-old Chinese slave trader and simultaneously, observing from outside that body. I knew that I was a cruel and vicious person who took pleasure in the ill treatment of the slaves whom I owned and traded. Scene after scene of brutal, degrading treatment of others passed before my eyes and I felt sick with self-hatred and shame. Then I died and suffered the miserable existence of sharing the low astral planes with similar depraved personalities like myself until I was born again into one of the earliest Egyptian dynasties.
I became aware of this next incarnation when I again saw and simultaneously experienced myself as a giant black Numidean slave working in the stone quarries of the Pharaoh. Unfortunately my physical vitality was tremendous, so I lived scores of years in extremely hard labor with many cruel slave masters who seemed to delight in laying their whips upon my massive back and shoulders. Finally, and mercifully, I died.
While I had the impression that there were other lifetimes in between, the next incarnation that I became aware of was in a later Egyptian period. I was a Pharaoh who succeeded in freeing the slaves in his land during his reign. I saw myself trying to rule wisely and well, but being constantly frustrated by the corrupt and treacherous priesthood. Finally my royal wrath could no longer be contained and I killed the fat and foppish high priest along with as many of his lesser priests as I could get my hands on. But my bloody actions divided my country, and I, too, was murdered at the end of a long civil war.
Again I had the impression of many incarnations intervening before I saw and felt myself wearing the robes of a cardinal in the early Renaissance church of Rome. I was a fanatic at insisting that sins be driven out of human flesh by torture. Gleefully and with "holy vengeance" I devised newer and better torture methods, such as-my God-chopping off my victim's limbs a section at a time. While I frequently used the burning stake, I usually reserved it for women who refused me their sexual favors. I was indeed a monstrous hypocrite. Because the pope was weak and I was rich and ruthless, I became the most powerful priest in the church. Fortunately for the people of Italy, who lived in fear of me, the plague favored them by carrying me off prematurely.
This death was followed by a hideous period, on the lowest astral planes. Since my selfish desires kept me from rising to higher levels, I was forced to associate with the most loathsome and distorted personalities.
Then brief impressions of other lives flashed by until once again I became aware of a vividly clear incarnation as the daughter of a poor stone-cutter living in a Spain shuddering from the excesses of the Inquisition. I was the eldest in a very poor but large family of eight daughters including myself. I worked long hours to support my aging parents and my many sisters and probably would have lived a long life of this menial drudgery if I had not had this one heretical obsession: I refused to accept the idea of eternal hell. My family spent many years trying to force me to recant this heresy until my sisters, in order to save my poor soul, called upon the officers of the Inquisition for help. My obsession was stronger than the pain of many ingenious means of torture and, in a last desperate attempt to save my soul, I was burned at the stake surrounded by the faces of my sisters praying for my redemption.
The pain and fear associated with this past flaming death caused me to wake up with a scream in the year 1976. It was 4 a.m. and Karl was asking me if I was all right. After assuring him that I was okay now, I fell back to sleep and awakened in my C.I. chair back in 2150.
Lea was bending over me wiping the sweat off my face with a damp cloth. Seeing my eyes open, she lowered her face to mine and gently kissed my lips. Then she said, "Now you know one of the reasons why micro man doesn't want to remember past lives."
"My God," I exclaimed, "if they are all as horrible as mine, I don't blame anyone for not wanting to remember them!"
"Oh, they aren't all horrible," Lea assured me. "You had many lives that were rather peaceful and uneventful. But you didn't learn much from most of them. The five incarnations that you've just relived formed a learning pattern which illustrated to you the consequences of cruel treatment of others. Your soul selects an opportunity for you to grow on. If you waste the opportunity in one life, your soul balances that with an opposite opportunity in another life."
"That's a hard way to learn," I complained. "Does everyone have to learn that painfully?"
"Everyone who chooses the spiritual devolution of the soul ends up with total delusionary amnesia of their past and, thus, has no Macro awareness of the perfect order maintained by the soul in selecting learning opportunities. If you can't remember your macrocosmic oneness with all, you will desire micro power to alleviate your fears of loneliness and weakness. Micro man treats others selfishly, cruelly, to increase his feelings of power, adequacy, and security," was her answer.