ANGER MANAGEMENT, health, empathy, compassion, patience and understanding, nonviolence, relationships, security, destiny and free will, contemplation and meditation, spirituality: All these are steps to immortality. All these must be mastered now or in the future in our journey to the one soul. And all these are facets of the greatest virtue, which is love.
Love is the ultimate lesson. How can you retain anger if you love? How can you not be compassionate or empathetic? How can you not choose the right relationships? How can you strike another? Foul the environment? War with a neighbor? Not have room in your heart for other viewpoints, different methods, divergent lifestyles?
You can’t.
When my patients have gone through regression and/or progression and have mastered their phobias and traumas, love is what they understand. Many get this message from those who play key roles in their lives. But many hear it from the other side—from a parent, spouse, or child who has died. “I’m fine,” the messages say. “I’m okay. I love you. You don’t have to grieve for me. What lies beyond is not darkness but light, for I am where love is, and love is light.”
These messages might be wish fulfillment, fantasies to ease the pain of loss, but I don’t think so. I’ve heard them too many times from too many people. Love is what we carry from life to life, although in some lifetimes we are unaware of it and in some misuse it. Ultimately, though, it is what keeps us evolving.
For example, Jennifer, having just given birth to her third child, was handed the baby for the first time. She recognized the child immediately—the energy, the expression in the eyes, the immediate connectedness. “You again,” she said. “We’re together again.” The baby was the woman’s grandmother in a past life. They had fought bitterly throughout that life, all the while loving each other, though the love went unexpressed. Now, she knew, was their chance to make amends.
There are all kinds of love, of course: romantic love; the love of a child for a parent and a parent for a child; and love of nature, of music, of poetry, of all things on this Earth and in the heavens. Love continues on the other side and is brought back here by the soul. It is the understanding of all the mysteries. To me it is the ultimate religion. If we could all love in our own way, if we could abandon the rituals that pronounce “Mine is the true path; all others are sham,” if we could abjure the violence, conflicts, and pain we inflict in the name of a specific God—“our” God—when by definition God is universal, God is love, we would not have to wait through innumerable lifetimes to get to heaven.
* * *
Cristina dressed in a style that American women can’t seem to emulate: flamenco-inspired skirts that reach the floor; blouses in bright reds, blues, purples, and yellows; luxuriant black hair pulled back severely and kept in place by ribbons of fantastic hues. When she first came to see me, I was struck by her showiness, but as her visits multiplied, I realized that the colors were compensation for her dark moods and darker thoughts. She was a woman fighting to retain a spark of self even as her family strove to snuff it out. There were dark patches of skin under her eyes, and her hands trembled slightly. Fatigue, I thought. She complained of asthma, and in times of stress it was apparent in her breathing, but it was her psychological problems that induced her to ask for my help.
Full-bodied but not fat, she exuded what turned out to be an ambiguous impression of strength within a palpable sexuality, and from the beginning she alternated between facing me squarely, almost hostilely, and averting her eyes from mine with a Latin demureness that bespoke a strict aristocratic upbringing. I guessed her to be in her late twenties; she turned out to be ten years older. She wore a ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, a large ruby that matched the flamboyance of her clothes, and I wondered if it was meant for decoration or as a proclamation of marriage.
“Divorced,” she said, noting my look. “Two children. I wear the ring because it’s beautiful and because it scares off suitors.”
Her English was elegant, impeccable, yet I could detect traces of an accent. “You are not from Miami,” I said—a statement, not a question.
“São Paulo, Brazil.”
“Ah. And you moved here when?”
“Three years ago. To join my father after my divorce.”
“You live with him, then?”
“No, no. He lives with my mother in Bal Harbour. I’m a few miles away.”
“With your children?”
“Yes. The girls. Rosana is seven, Regina five. They’re very dear.”
“So when you say you came to join your father—”
“To work with him. To be with him in his business.”
“Which is what?”
“Really? You don’t know? I went back to my maiden name after the divorce, and I’d have thought you’d recognize it.”
Of course! Stupid of me. I should have made the connection immediately. Her father was head of a company specializing in high-end clothing. In the past two years it had branched out into a line of younger, less expensive sportswear, which my wife, Carole, later told me was once the thing to wear if you were a teenager. I asked if Cristina’s move coincided with her father’s new venture.
“Coincidental,” she said. “I make no decisions and have no say in planning.” Her eyes flashed with anger. “I’m little more than a servant girl with her own office.”
“And this is frustrating to you?”
“Frustrating? It’s infuriating!” She leaned toward me and spoke with passion that made her tremble. “My God, what I could do if he let me! He makes clothes for women but doesn’t believe women should have the final say in how they look. My eye is twice as good as his. I’m twice as clever. His clothes were a fad, and like all fads, they became obsolete. Already people have stopped buying. My clothes would be timeless.”
Cristina, I thought, could accomplish whatever she set out to do. “But he won’t listen?” I asked.
“He shuts me off like a car engine. I’ve given up trying. To fight him is like fighting an army of the Inquisition.”
“What about your mother? Can she help?”
“She can’t help herself. My mother’s simply a decoration, like a vase of flowers. She shuts up because she knows he could replace her whenever he felt like it.”
“But he hasn’t.”
“Sure he has, a million times. He keeps his women in separate apartments or separate hotels, depending on how serious he feels about them. In his religion divorce is not allowed. I defied it and divorced four years ago. He almost killed me when I did; it’s only when he knew he needed me that he let me come to America.”
“Does your mother know about the other women?”
“She’d be a fool if she didn’t.” Cristina paused. “But then, she is a fool!”
I did not remark on her bitterness. “Are you an only child?”
“Only daughter. I have two older brothers.”
“Do they work in the business, too?”
“Work is the wrong word. They come into the office and go out to lunch.”
“Yet they get the promotions, the respect. They’re listened to.” It was an easy guess.
“My father is too savvy to take their advice. But you’re right about the promotions and the respect. You see, I’m a woman and deserve neither.”
It was a familiar complaint of Latin women, stifled by a culture that had not progressed into the twentieth century. She was obviously the star of the family, yet she was obscured by the cloud of tradition and closed-mindedness.
“Why don’t you leave, strike out on your own?”
It was as though I had accused her of murder. Ashen-faced, she pushed back from her chair, stood, and then collapsed back down. She began to cry, dissolving under what seemed to me an obvious question. “I don’t know,” she wailed, all sophistication gone, suddenly defenseless. “Please, please. I need your help!”
The change in her was so sudden that beyond a mumbled “Of course I’ll help,” I felt awed. “Tell me the problem,” I said. “Be as precise as you can.”
She looked at me through tear-filled eyes and breathed with difficulty. “You have to understand one thing: I love my father. No matter what I tell you, that’s the underlying truth.”
Love him and hate him, I thought. Hardly a unique emotional conflict.
“When he came to America, leaving me and my husband and babies behind, I felt relieved. My brothers went with him, and it seemed that by their going, I was rid of all the constraints, all the pressures imposed on me by a tyrannical Brazilian patriarch of the old school.” She laughed ruefully. “Men a thousand, women zero. He never hit me, never was cruel. On the contrary, he gave me everything I wanted, and that was the trouble. I never earned them—or, rather, I earned them by being obedient. When I was still a little girl, I realized I was smarter than my brothers. By the time I was twenty, I knew I was smarter than my father, too. I worked for him for a while in Brazil, helped the company grow—really helped—without taking any credit for it. But it didn’t do me any good. I was diminished, shunted aside, not only by him but by my brothers who were jealous of my brains and my mother who was his slave. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t just. So I married the first man who came after me without realizing he was just as tyrannical—and he hit.”
By now the tears had stopped. Her voice was level, though I could feel the intense emotion behind her words. I had no doubt that she was reporting accurately. Cristina was a woman pitted against an age-old culture with age-old beliefs, and as strong as she was, they had bested her.
She took a deep breath. “Okay. My family’s in Miami, he’s in Miami, and I’m in São Paulo with a terrible husband and two babies I adore. My father opposes my divorce, but I go through with it anyway. I had no choice; he was hitting the girls, too. And only when it’s final do I tell Father. From him, silence. Many months, silence.
“And then all of a sudden he calls. ‘Come to Miami. Work with me in the company. You’re alone. I’ll take care of you.’ So I came. I thought he was taking pity on me—generosity and compassion from a man who had never shown them. The line for teenagers was my idea, and I was thrilled when we began to work together again. I fed him other ideas. He ate them like chocolates. But pretty soon I realized nothing had changed, that he was using me, that my brothers were the beneficiaries of my talent—that he was a greedy, self-serving, cold-blooded villain.”
“And yet,” I pointed out, “you say you love him.”
The thought crossed my mind that he might have abused her sexually when she was young, but I dismissed it; she exhibited none of the symptoms. No, the abuse was psychological. By putting her under his domination, he created a kind of Stockholm syndrome in her soul wherein the captive falls in love with the captor. He tormented her, but there was no one she could turn to, no one she could trust. It was the most insidious kind of sadism. She had no choice but to love him.
She seemed exhausted by her narrative, and I asked her if she wanted to rest. No, she said, it was better to get the whole story out. “I struck out on my own. I moved me and the children out of the house to where I live now and told him I was going to start my own line of clothes.”
“Did he get angry?” I asked, visualizing his rage.
“Worse. He laughed. He told me I’d never get financing, that nobody would give money to a woman. He said if I did manage to start a business of my own, he’d disinherit me and the girls. ‘You can walk the streets for all I care’ is what he said. But I went ahead anyway. About a year ago I quit his company, wrote my own marketing plan for another, and rented an office. I talked to wholesalers and retail buyers.”
“Without any money?”
“Well, I’d saved my salary when I lived at home, and I got a small business loan from the bank. But I didn’t have nearly enough, even with the loan, and these first months have been tough going. Still, I made a few sales. The buyer for Bloomingdale’s in Miami bought my line of office wear. She said I had accomplished ‘miracles’ in a short time. I was on my way. Of course, when my father found out about it, he stopped speaking to me. I had hope for my new life, but the anxiety is tremendous. I have nightmares, so I’m afraid to sleep. I shout at my children. I’m eating out of nervousness. I’ve gained ten pounds, all on junk food. My breathing gets so bad, I sometimes think I’m going to die.”
“You say you ‘had’ hope. Has it gone?”
She bowed her head. “Yes.”
Again she dissolved, and she gasped out her answer through her tears. “My father has asked me to come back.”
His company was going bankrupt. With all its fame and despite the fact that stores were filled with his merchandise, he was in deep financial trouble. Although his up-market clothes still sold—it was his strength in that area which accounted for his initial rise—the lower-end part of the business was failing. Cristina was right when she said customers had stopped buying. Orders for the following year were down 40 percent, a calamitous decline.
“He’s on the verge of bankruptcy,” Cristina said after she had explained the facts, “and he’s asked me to come back and save him.”
“And that’s why you’ve come to see me?”
“Yes. Because I can’t make up my mind about what to do, and it’s driving me crazy.”
“Oh, you’re not crazy,” I assured her, “just stuck. Sometimes when decisions are monumental, it prevents us from making them at all.”
She looked at me gratefully. Although what I had said was neither profound nor original, I had pinpointed the problem. “Maybe it will help if we go through your options.”
“Good,” she said, her composure regained. Her words came quickly now. She had already sorted through the choices in her mind. “First, I can go back to my father and help him as he has asked. That would mean giving up my life for him, a kind of suicide for a family cause. Second, I can stop working and remarry. I’d choose carefully this time. This time it would be for love—and have more children, like millions of my sisters around the world. My parents would approve, my culture would thank me, and I suppose I could make myself a happy but unfulfilled life.”
She paused, obviously visualizing it, and shook her head sadly. “Or I could go on with my own clothing line.” She brightened. “It would work, you know. Dr. Weiss, I didn’t tell you this before, but when it comes to business decisions, I’m psychic. Don’t smile. Really. I know I’d succeed. It’s only in life decisions that I mess up.”
Many successful business people have Cristina’s gift. They call it “gut instinct” or “flying by the seat of their pants” or “playing a hunch,” but it is actually a kind of psychic power. Again, I didn’t doubt that Cristina possessed it, and it seemed to point to the right path.
“What’s the downside?” I asked.
She sighed. “Many. Compete with him in his own business? My family has cast me out already, even my mother, and if I go on, they’ll never forgive me. Frankly, I don’t know if I could forgive myself. It’s such a betrayal of them—of him—that I’d feel I deserved his anger and any punishment that came with it.”
“But isn’t that what you’re doing now? Competing with him?”
“Absolutely. And that’s what has made it so hard to sleep and filled me with such anxiety.” She saw my surprised expression. “Oh, it isn’t the business part of it that worries me. I’ve already performed miracles, as the Bloomingdale’s buyer said. I told you I’m psychic. It’s that if he goes bankrupt, my success would literally kill him.”
“I don’t understand, then, why you started your own business at all.”
“Because I was angry. Because he betrayed me, and I wanted revenge. Because—” Here she stopped, and the tears started. “I don’t think I could have gone on with my business. When it was successful, I think I’d have given it to him. Actually, some great part of me didn’t want it to succeed. I’d already planned to give it up before I came to see you.”
“There are a number of factors here,” I said sympathetically. “You’ve been betrayed, but you will feel guilty if you strike back. You’re angry, but you’re afraid of the consequences. You’re psychic, but you can’t figure out the future. Men have only hurt you, but you’re willing to remarry. You love and hate your father simultaneously. Does that sum it up?”
She laughed despite herself. “Tell me, Doctor, what are my chances?”
“We must see if we can look into the future,” I said. “But to do that, let’s go to your past.”
* * *
Her first regression was a short one. All she could tell me was that she lived in an Islamic culture of North Africa; she couldn’t place the date or describe her surroundings. She knew that she was male, a writer of verse, and that she had a father, also a writer, of whom she was extremely jealous, for he outshone his son in recognition, prominence, and income. The parallels to her present life were so direct and obvious that she felt what she saw might have been nothing more than a fantasy.
The second regression was more interesting.
“It’s the Middle Ages. Twelfth century. I’m a young man, a priest, very handsome, living in the mountains—it looks like south-central France. There are deep gorges and valleys, so traveling is difficult, but many people come to me. They are in need of my ability to give physical and psychological succor. I believe in reincarnation and inspire others to believe in it also, which is a great comfort to them. People who are diseased—lepers and sick children—seek me out, and when I touch them, many of them are miraculously cured. Of course I am a beloved figure. No one else has my talent.
“My father in my present life is a farmer in this one, and he lives not a mile away. He’s everything I’m not: greedy, godless, acquisitive, a misanthrope. He’s the richest man in the region, but his money and land don’t tempt the free-spirited village girl he covets, though he would give them all for her love. She loves me and is willing to accept only spiritual, platonic love, for I am true to my vows of celibacy. ‘By loving you I show my love for God,’ she tells me.
“An invading army from Rome has been able to ford the gorges and has surrounded the village. They attack. I am captured. The farmer denounces me to the authorities, claiming I practice black magic. When they hear stories of my power to heal and my certainty of lives to come, they believe the farmer, and I am burned at the stake. It’s an agonizing death, for along with the flames, the smoke makes it impossible to see my beloved who, weeping, has come to watch me die and to give whatever solace she can. Moments after I die, she hurls herself down a gorge and is killed instantly.
“In death I am able to look down at the village to see what transpires. The farmer’s jealousy of me, which I barely recognized when I was alive, never disappears. He has to settle for a loveless marriage and grows more bitter, more cruel. In my life review I can see myself come back in a future life to help the farmer, now a blacksmith, with his life lessons, but I am not able to give him much help. He will come back again and again without progress. I feel I’ve failed, and I’ve failed because deep in my Christian heart I hate him. He killed me and, worse, the woman I loved. I rejoice that he was bitter, unfulfilled, and miserable. I know my thoughts are wrong, but I can’t help it. It would be a lie to pretend anything else.”
When Cristina left that day, I made a note to see if her asthma got better, for I felt that the priest’s death by fire and smoke was linked to it. (This is fairly common; breathing problems often have past-life causes.) In fact, it was markedly improved by our next session and is not nearly as debilitating today.
I made another note: “Jealousy is what hooked farmer and priest together in another life and probably in this one. In this life, Cristina’s father was presented with the opportunity to redeem himself for the jealousy and treachery he displayed toward her in past lives. He could have supported her psychologically by recognizing and acknowledging her talent, and he could have rewarded her by promoting her in the company. He chose to do neither. Perhaps yet another lifetime will be needed for him to learn compassion and altruism.”
* * *
In her next and last regression Cristina found herself in a small town in England in the 1800s.
“It’s an exciting place to be,” she told me. “For the first time in history, men are going off to work, leaving their houses to go to offices or factories, while women are put in sole charge of the home. It means a new kind of society, different relationships between husband and wife. But I’m lucky: I’m still young, twenty, not married, and have taken a job in a textile plant so I can make some money. Once I get there, I think of all sorts of ways to increase production and reduce costs simultaneously. My supervisor is impressed and asks my advice all the time. He’s terrifically handsome, and he says he loves me. I sure love him.”
The supervisor in that life was once again her father in this one. I led her forward in her past life, noting a marked change in her expression. She was no longer a happy, carefree girl but a bitter, disillusioned woman. The supervisor, it turns out, betrayed her.
“He didn’t love me after all. He pretended to so he could steal my ideas and take them as his own. He was promoted. His superiors called him a genius. Oh, it’s horrible! I hate him! One day I confronted him in front of his boss and begged him to confess that ‘his’ ideas were really mine. The next day he accused me of stealing five pounds from a coworker. I was innocent, totally innocent, but the girl backed him up. She was probably his mistress, and he told her he loved her so she would take his side. It’ll serve her right when she finds out what a bastard he is. I was arrested, sent to prison for a year, humiliated, and abandoned. In jail I developed pneumonia. It didn’t kill me, but it weakened my lungs, and I had coughing spells for the rest of my life.” (Another parallel with her present-day asthma.) “I couldn’t get another job but was forced to beg. I had promise, real promise—all my coworkers at the factory thought so—but what good did it do me? It destroyed me.” She began to cry.
“Did you ever forgive him?” I asked.
“Never! Hatred of him was the fuel that kept me going. ‘I’ll see him dead before I die,’ I told myself. But it was a promise I couldn’t keep. I died before I was forty, unmarried, childless, alone. He probably lived to be a hundred. What injustice! What a waste of my life on this Earth.”
Not really. The tragedy of that past life and of her life as a priest was preparation for this life and her lives to come. When I brought her back to the present, she remained in an altered state that I could not precisely define.
“The Bible tells us that the sins of the father carry on to the third or fourth generation of descendants.” (I looked it up. She was paraphrasing Exodus 20:5.) “But that doesn’t make sense. We are our own descendants, reincarnated as our grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren throughout our many lives. And at any point we can erase those sins, because they don’t exist in another, they exist in ourselves. My father was in all my lives. I recognized him as my father, a farmer, a supervisor. And in each life I’ve loved him, then hated him. His sins have followed him down through the centuries.”
She leaned forward, inspired. “But so have mine. It wasn’t—isn’t—his sins I must change. It’s my own. I’ve hated him for millennia. Hatred is a sin. Each time that hatred eradicated the love I felt for him at the beginning. But what if it’s different this time? What if I can eradicate hatred with love?”
* * *
Cristina’s extraordinary insights did not, of course, answer the question of which choice to make—employee, housewife, or competitor—in the next months. At the time of our working together I was just beginning my progression work and was using it selectively. Cristina’s strength and intellect made her an excellent candidate, I thought, and I suggested we try going forward.
She agreed readily. “We’re only going to look at possible futures pertaining to your choices,” I told her. “I want to avoid glimpses of serious illness, loss, or death. If you find yourself going in that direction, tell me, and I’ll bring you back.”
I started by asking her to see herself if she had stayed in her father’s company. “I’m sick, physically sick,” she said at once, but despite my admonition, she stopped me from bringing her back. “It’s a sickness born of frustration. The job is stifling me literally and figuratively. My asthma is worse. I can’t breathe. It’s like being in England two centuries ago. I’m in prison.”
Her vision of herself as a housewife was equally bleak. “My children are both grown and have moved away. I’m alone. I never remarried. My head feels empty, like my brain has shriveled up from lack of use. I see my inventiveness as belonging to other lives, not this one.”
As for starting a competitive business: “I’m successful. My father is bankrupt, and I’m a multimillionaire. Nevertheless, I’m miserable. It all feels angry and vindictive. I’ve lost by winning. My family and I never see each other, never speak. We sit in our rooms, separated by silence, spending our days with hatred.”
When I brought her back, I expected sadness. Instead, jubilation!
“There is a fourth choice,” she cried, “one I didn’t see before: Start my own business but not in competition with my father.”
“Won’t that be risky?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. Marketing and design skills apply to all businesses. Cookware! Ceramics! I’m a good cook and an okay potter, so at least I’ll know what I’m talking about, though naturally I’ll get expert advice. I have an in with the stores that might sell them and a record with my present start-up that’s the equal of anybody’s. I’ll go back to the lenders who helped me get started and tell them I’ve changed my plans, but not to worry. I’ll come up with a new marketing plan, a new business plan—I’m an expert at those. I’ll design stockpots, casseroles, coffee cups, dinner services. I’ll work with clay, with steel, with silver. And nobody will say I’m out to beat my father. Why, when it succeeds, he’ll be proud of me and love me at last.”
Her enthusiasm was so boundless that I didn’t have the heart to point out the pitfalls. I was sure she would succeed—but win her father’s love? Something profound would have to change in both of them before that was possible.
She left effusing gratitude, but I remained unsatisfied. True, I had helped her solve her dilemma, but there was more work to be done. I thought back to her insight about the transmission of sin and wondered if she would take it further. I was therefore pleased when a few months later she called for an appointment.
She had had rocky going, she told me. Her new plans were not met with the support she had expected. She had yet to find her own “design voice.” She had had to change her children’s school from private to public. She was worried about money, afraid she’d have to go back to her father after all, if only to support her children. Yet she described her problems with an ebullience lacking in her earlier visits; the darkness under her eyes had also disappeared, and she breathed far more easily. I pointed this out and asked her why.
“I’m in love.”
I was astonished. When she left, I figured it would be a long time before she would let love in—she was too angry at men, too determined to be alone—yet there was no mistaking the light in her eyes.
“Tell me.”
“Ricardo’s wonderful. Won-der-ful! I met him at a reading group. We discovered that we share a love for Don Quixote, maybe because we both tilt at windmills. He’s a commercial flier, a freelancer who hires out to international companies operating between here and Latin America. He’s been to São Paulo and even knows the street where I lived. He speaks Spanish and Portuguese, and when I told him about you, he said he’d read one of your books in Portuguese when he was last in Brazil because he couldn’t get the English-language edition. It was your first one, he thinks, the one about you and your patient—I’ve forgotten the title, too—though I’m afraid he doesn’t believe all of it. Do you mind?”
“Of course not. I’m glad you’re happy. But I’m surprised, really, that you’re in love.”
She looked at me with enormous gravity. “I’m surprised, too. I asked myself how it could happen, and so suddenly, and I believe I have the answer. It’s because of what we talked about earlier. The moment I realized I was a sinner as well as my father and that my sin is hate, as it has been through all my past lives, then my hatred of him, of all men, vanished—and into my life walked Ricardo. I know it sounds all too pat, but it’s true!”
She put her hands on my desk and leaned toward me. “It’s the strangest thing, Dr. Weiss. When I look at him, really look, I see the good part of my soul. He’s me, I know, and I’m him. But it seems impossible.”
I explained that when a soul is fragmented from the One, it can enter more than one body simultaneously and that her feeling wasn’t “strange” or even particularly unusual. She and Ricardo were destined to meet, I told her, and now their free choice would determine what would happen to them in the future.
“I have an idea of what that might be,” she said, smiling radiantly.
So did I.
* * *
There remained the question of whether her new business would succeed or fail. I asked her if she wanted me to lead her into the future, and after considerable hesitation—in her current euphoria, she didn’t want bad news—she agreed. Only instead of going a few years forward, she went twelve hundred! Usually when people progress into the distant future, they’re not sure of the year, but Cristina was positive: 3200.
“The earth is very green,” she said, “much greener and more fertile than it is now. The forests are lush, the meadows filled with flowers. But funnily enough there are no animals. Why, when there’s so much food for them to eat? There aren’t many people, either. They can communicate with one another telepathically, and their bodies, less dense than ours, are filled with light. They live in small groups, not cities, in lovely houses made of wood or stone, and they seem to be farmers. I can see liquid or liquid light pouring into the plants; sometimes the liquid pours into the people themselves. The people are extremely spiritual. I can’t see any illness, any real anger, or any violence or war. There’s a certain translucent quality to everything, a permeating light that connects everyone and everything in peace.”
“How did it make you feel, seeing the world this way?” I asked when I had brought her back to the present.
She beamed. “Calm. Comfortable. Joyous. I look forward to living there.”
“I wonder why you went there instead of the immediate future.”
She considered the question. “Because it’s more important. I can handle the years in this life by myself. My business will flourish like the trees and plants two millennia from now. With Ricardo to love, how can it fail?”
She was right, of course. Within eighteen months her goods were in upscale stores across the country, and when Carole and I went to Russia, we saw them in St. Petersburg. She was also doing a burgeoning business on the Internet. She invested some of her profits in her father’s business and saved him from the threatened bankruptcy. Ricardo and she married, and I pretty much lost contact with her. But one morning she called me. I could hear the elation in her voice.
“I had to tell you, Dr. Weiss, because it’s thanks to you that it happened. Last night Ricardo and I were at my parents’ for dinner. We go often; they like him. Anyway, as we were leaving, my father drew me aside and hugged me. Hugged me! It felt wonderful. And then for the first time in my life or his, he told me that he loved me.”
* * *
Love is an absolute quality and energy. It does not stop with our death. It continues on to the other side and returns here again. It is the epitome of the spirit’s quality—and the body’s. It is life and the afterlife. It is our goal, and all of us, in this or future lives, will attain it.