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Lulu's Back In Town
Lulu (23 years old), a couple of months before her passing on April 15, 2019 (click to enlarge) To be a devotee of Adi Da means a complete transformation of one's life. There is no part of life that remains conventional. Everything becomes sacred, everything is touched by the Divine. Things one couldn't even imagine (and so never would expect) become possible and start happening, even miraculously. And the more we cooperate with this Divine Power, and the more we participate in and serve its Emergence here, the more the dense, solidifying forces of the physical dimensions loosen up, and the more miraculous and psycho-physical our lives become.
I'll illustrate this with a story about the "pets" (to use the conventional term) in one's life. Lulu's Passing Being has no size. We often think of our "pets" — our non-human friends — as small (when we compare their physical size to our own), but their being certainly is not small, no smaller than our own. My dear cat friend Lulu was a great being, appearing in a little body. And she brought us great joy so often. She was a "Lulu" of a cat from the start, which was why I gave her that name. (Lulu: "one who is remarkable, wonderful, amazing, outstanding, or precious." Use: "a lulu of", as in "a lulu of a performance", "a lulu of a good time".) She arrived at our doorstep in the winter of 1997, and refused to be ignored! She would sit on the kitchen window ledge outside, see us inside, and meow to get us to see her small face pressed against the window. She did this, day after day. There were many stray cats in the neighborhood, and we already had a cat, so at first we tried to ignore her. But no other cat did what she did! And we kept seeing that pleading face at our window pane until we finally let her in. Even then, we initially tried to give her to others. But, in each case, some reason would come up that would prevent us from giving her away, even ridiculous reasons like: "Oh, she is missing a toe on one foot? Well, I could never take a cat who is missing a toe!" In retrospect, it was obvious that circumstances were conspiring to keep Lulu with us, and we were very happy that it worked out that way. And it is very clear that, on some level, Lulu knew she was meant to be with us; that's why she kept persisting at the window.When Lulu passed on April 15, 2019 at the auspicious and grand old age of 23 years old (the equivalent of 108 human years [1]), it broke my and Mary's hearts. Lulu had been my steady companion for almost all of those 23 years, sharing my office space as I worked, and always loving and enlivening me (and I did the same for her as best as I could). While I could tell you many stories of my happy times with Lulu during her lifetime, this is a story about Lulu after her passing from this life. We placed her body in our Communion Hall. To have a Hall that has been Empowered and spiritually charged through years of invoking Beloved Adi Da's Presence is a rare and precious resource, one of the great gifts that comes with steady practice of the Way of Adidam. Such a room feels different (even to those with relatively little spiritual sensitivity) — when you walk in, it feels as though you are walking into a Field of Force: Adi Da's Blessing Force. Such a room is a resource we can avail ourselves of any time of day or night, a place to step out of life's hustle and bustle and enter what is literally an alternate dimension. And it is especially useful during times of transition, when one of our human or non-human friends passes. After placing Lulu's body in there, the Hall was very quiet for three days. Even though her body was in the Hall, I felt Lulu's presence throughout the house. She was still trying to stay with us. Then, early on the morning on the fourth day, I walked into the Hall, and instantly felt something completely different: an amazing circumstance! The words spontaneously popped into my head: "Grand Central Station!!!" [2] In addition to Beloved Adi Da's steady Eternal Presence pervading the entire Hall, I could now feel many beings of light in the hall, aiding Lulu's transition. It truly was as crowded as a busy train station! I also felt an enormous ascending force, that almost lifted me off the ground. I knew then that I was catching the very moment of Lulu's transition out of this dimension, and I was so happy to feel all the help she was receiving. She was a unique, amazing being, and clearly had many "friends in high places". I called Mary to come into the Hall and she felt the exact same thing. A couple of hours later, it was over. Lulu was gone (along with all her non-corporeal friends). Adi Da remained, Eternally Present. We buried her body shortly after. Lulu's Visits After Her Passing But then a couple of days later, our dear Lulu returned! It was the middle of the night. I was thinking of Lulu, and wishing her well in her journey, wherever she might be. Suddenly, Lulu was there! I felt her inside my body. I called out, "Lulu?!" And strong waves of loving energy coursed up and down my body, as she signalled "YES!!". And for the next few days, she took up residence in my body, and I literally worked to make room for her there (on the level of energy), so that she could stay there comfortably. She was not a constant presence, but would often come (into my body) when I called. It was as though she was just in "the next dimension over", and all I had to do was call, for her to slide across dimensions. . . and my body was serving as the portal. And then we would have an incredible exchange of loving energy, and we were as close as could be. I smiled, remembering how, in life, she had often pressed up against me as though trying to merge into me. I said to her, "You finally figured out how to get inside me!" And she emphatically and humorously replied YES!! with her loving energy. After a few days, the visits diminished in the force of her presence. . . and then at some point, I couldn't feel her energy anymore. But the love remained, and I no longer felt any separation between us. It always feels like she is "just next door". I had learned that the connection between us is unbreakable, and she would feel my love in some way, any time I sent it her way. * * * There is a direct connection between practice of the Way of Adidam and my experience of my dear friend's presence in my body. In each moment of practice, we turn the body-mind to Beloved Adi Da. We allow the body, mind, breath, and feeling to be absorbed in Him. And in those moments, He, in turn — because we are absorbed in Him — acquires our body-mind, enters it, and re-patterns it in many different ways. I am certain that that re-patterning of my body-mind by His Blessing-Force was what enabled Lulu to share my body-mind for the time that she did. I was used to letting Beloved Adi Da into my body-mind, and that created space for Lulu to do the same. The rest of this miracle was due to Lulu herself. I have never met a person who possessed a stronger will than Lulu. When she wanted something, she made it happen. A day before she died, she suddenly received a burst of energy from my hydrating her in a special way. She then did something she hadn't been able to do for almost two years, but clearly had just been waiting to be able to: she marched — yes, marched, ill as she was — down the front steps of our house, and strolled around the front yard — something she used to love to do. Seeing what she did brought tears to my eyes. What an incredible being! What an amazing force! She was determined to make good use of that little burst of energy while it lasted — even if it was the last thing she did (and it was) — to fulfill her deep desire to be in her favorite place. And so Beloved Adi Da's Grace and my practice provided an opening in my body-mind for Lulu. But it was Lulu who was looking for such an opening. And it was Lulu who found it, passed in, and let me know she was here! That was — and is — my amazing, loving friend, Lulu.
Lulu's Return: The Most Wonderful Danavira Mela Present Lulu had been with us while we were living in Northern California. In May of 2021, we moved to Virginia. Our first few months were consumed with all the details of unpacking and settling in (including staying in a rented house while looking for, and finally finding our permanent house). But by the time December rolled around, we were settled enough to consider inviting a new cat into our lives. So on December 17, we visited the local SPCA (an animal shelter). Our hearts were touched by all of the cats, all in cages, and many reaching out to us with their paws, through the bars. It was hard to pick one, when so many of these cats needed homes! But one cat drew me, a cat named Yami. She was sitting there, looking at me, and she was purring like crazy. Mary was drawn to her too. It was a quiet but strong pull — not so much at the level of activity, as at the level of the heart. And so we asked the shelter attendant if we could adopt Yami. The attendant said Yami was scheduled to be spayed in a couple of days, but we could come by again the day after her spaying to pick her up. We could hardly wait! But I did have one concern, and sought help about it the night before we were going to pick up Yami. In October (two months earlier), Mary and I had happened to be consulting a psychic on a particular matter. While (as Adi Da has communicated) psychics come in all varieties, in terms of accuracy, self-understanding (which affects accuracy), etc., this particular psychic friend of ours had an excellent track record with us, and we had come to trust what she said. In the midst of our consultation, we happened to mention Lulu's passing a couple of years earlier. Our psychic friend immediately interjected, "Does Lulu have a very sassy personality, and always takes charge wherever she goes?" We confirmed: Yes, that was Lulu! The psychic said, "I am connecting with her right now, and either she is ready to reincarnate or has already reincarnated, and has a great desire to return home to you." This was joyous news for us, a possibility we had not even been conceiving! And it matched our experience of Lulu’s desires: she hadn't wanted to leave us. She had persisted in her body for as long as possible (23 years), to remain with us. She had taken as long as possible to transition from her body (four days) because she didn’t want to leave; and she had found a way to return to be with me after death, because she wanted to be with me. But the psychic was not able to provide any further details, and so at some point, we reluctantly moved this possibility to the "back burner". But now that we were about to adopt Yami, I got in touch with our psychic friend to ask for her help once more. I told her how I hadn't forgotten what she had said about Lulu. And so I wanted to be sure that taking Yami into our home wouldn't in any way prevent or obstruct the possibility of Lulu returning to us, further down the line. I sent her pictures of Yami. Her response was extraordinary. "OMG, Chris. . . 'YAMI' IS LULU! Yami's pictures are exactly how Lulu looked in my vision of her! Her name 'Lulu' is confirmed to me, and the energy is an exact match to the being I touched in with before. You intuited this yourselves, and that is why you chose her to adopt. I feel so much love coming from her to you. THIS IS DEFINITELY HER! She is here to be with you, Chris. And she is meant to come to you and Mary for this holiday season to bring joy and laughter and rebirth into your new year. She is beautiful and perfect for your new home. What a sweet girl! So happy you will have your girl with you for Christmas!" I was stunned. So was Mary. And then I fully embraced this reality, and was overwhelmed by my love for Lulu, even as I remained in awe of this incredible, completely unexpected miracle. I felt enormous gratitude to all the powers that, together, had made this happen, from Beloved Adi Da, to all the light beings that had helped her transition out of her last life (and now were surely helping her re-incarnate), and to Lulu herself, whose immense love, strength of will, and persistence were perhaps the biggest part of this perfectly timed Danavira Mela gift. What was involved in making this happen was extraordinary. First: getting the time and place right. "Yami" was listed as four months old. So she would have been born in August. Cats have a gestation period of a little over two months, so she would have been conceived in June — only a month after we arrived in Virginia! And at the end of that month (living in our rented house), we had decided that this area of Virginia was where we wanted to live permanently. And that's exactly when Lulu chose this area to incarnate! True to her character, she wasted no time whatsoever setting the wheels in motion, once the picture of where we were going to be was clear. Then there was Lulu's getting to the SPCA shelter, from wherever she was born. Like most of the cats in the shelter, she was "a stray". In our earlier October conversation with our psychic friend (when she had first mentioned Lulu's desire to be with us again), we mentioned the SPCA as a place we might look. Lulu would have been two months old at the time. I wouldn't be surprised if that information about the SPCA shelter had gotten passed to Lulu, or to her non-material helpers, and she was somehow guided to the shelter. Mary and I were incredibly excited when we went to pick up Yami/Lulu the next day. As we drove home from the SPCA, I had Lulu on my lap in a portable cat container as I sat in the back seat. It was the strangest feeling, because I suddenly recalled that, the last time I had Lulu on my lap in the back seat of the car was the last day of her previous life. She was in great pain, and we were bringing her to the vet to be euthanized, and our hearts were breaking. And now here we were again, and the very opposite thing was taking place! We had dropped her off into the Mystery, and now we were picking her up again from the Mystery. I recalled how Adi Da described "Raymond's problem" (named after Raymond Darling, the main character in Adi Da's dramatic work, The Mummery Book) of the loss of the loved one. Adi Da said that the worst thing about conditional existence was that it was a place of separation, death, and endings: the loved one always dies. I remembered my deep pain at the death of Lulu. And yet Adi Da has also communicated how no one ever dies, they are just transformed. As He said humorously, "Everybody lives forever, but no one remembers!" We were receiving a rare gift. While there are endless births, deaths, and re-connections, it is seldom that one comes face to face in life again with a loved one who has died earlier in the same lifetime, with one's memories of the loved one fully intact. I recalled how Mary and I met. It was December of 1996. A movie was being shown in the lobby of Huge Helper at the Mountain Of Attention. The room was filled with devotees. I grabbed a chair, and as I walked over to where all the already seated devotees had placed their chairs, I saw the back of the head of one female devotee. I felt a strange pull and deep attraction. . . and even though all I could see was the back of her head, I felt compelled to sit right behind her! She later told me she had experienced something very similar that evening when she happened to see me (for the first time in this lifetime) walking down the stairs from the second floor (where my office was) to the lobby and felt an inexplicable love for me. In retrospect, it was a truly magical evening, like something out of a fairy tale, or a Rogers and Hammerstein musical:
That was the beginning of our relationship in this lifetime, and we have been together in all the decades since. It's clear we had been together in previous lifetimes. "Everybody lives forever, but no one remembers." Not the details. . . and yet, when the heart-connection is strong, there can be a recognition, like my recognition of Mary, or her recognition of me. Lulu expressed that recognition instantly at the SPCA through her intensely happy purr at seeing us. And we, in turn, expressed our recognition of Lulu, as each of us (independently) chose her out of all the other cats in the shelter. And incredible circumstances for re-connecting are somehow mysteriously arranged, with surgical precision. Mary was living on the opposite side of the world (Australia), and circumstances conspired to bring her to me at the Mountain Of Attention in Northern California. Just so, circumstances conspired to bring Lulu to the shelter near us in Virginia.
At the time of my writing this, Lulu has been home with us only a couple of days, and we have a lifetime to get to know each other again, and so the story of our ongoing relationship with Lulu is a work in progress. I may very well have more to add over time. But already further signs have confirmed repeatedly that she is indeed Lulu. I'll just describe one very obvious (and humorous) sign. I mentioned earlier that Lulu and I had a very loving relationship, and were as close as could be — in life, and even between lives. Mary and Lulu also had a loving but sonewhat different relationship. In Mary's words, "Lulu was a special cat. Surprisingly wise, and, while she loved both of us, she loved Chris in a very special way reserved only for him. There were things she allowed Chris to do with her that I was not allowed. She was very loyal to him. Whenever I was out of line, Lulu would give me a sideways glance or a piercing look that would put me in my place and remind me to get it together. She was a wise being." Caring for our cats had been a major part of Mary's life, and Mary loved Lulu deeply. Lulu loved Mary just as deeply. But because Mary maintained the house (and Lulu, being a cat, would often make messes around the house), took Lulu to the vet (which Lulu hated), and took care of Lulu in other sometimes challenging ways, Mary and Lulu often also came into conflict with each other, with Lulu sometimes feeling Mary's anger at her — hence she had mixed feelings toward Mary. These differences in how Lulu related to each of us are important for understanding what I am about to describe next. After we brought her home from the SPCA, Lulu had settled in our house for the night. We had set her up in one of our bathrooms. We were eager to visit with her in the morning. When morning came, Mary went in first, and Lulu and Mary began interacting. Lulu would approach Mary, remembering her love for Mary; but then she would hesitate and back away, remembering the mixed feelings between them. And when Mary reached out to touch her, Lulu would claw Mary or bite her. There was no anger on Lulu's part. It was more like she was communicating, "I won't let you hurt me this time." Mary knew this was a karmic price she had to pay, and accepted it as part of the process of healing the relationship between them. She knew she had to earn Lulu's trust in this new life, and she now was willing to do whatever was required. In the beginning, she just let Lulu bite and claw her until she bled in many places. But I laughed when, at some point, before going in to visit Lulu, she would put on large, heavy work gloves, so that Lulu could bite her and claw her to her heart's content, as strongly and deeply as she wanted, without further harming Mary. When it was my turn to approach Lulu, there was the smallest hesitation on her part, for a couple of seconds. But then she smelled my hand, and, within seconds, we were relating to each other as we always had. I was scratching her behind her ears — one of our favorite activities together in her last life — and she just loved it and leaned into it. She pressed her entire side into me, and I scratched her below her chin, another favorite, as she purred madly. She never once bit or clawed me. At one point, she put her mouth around my hand, and I just allowed it. She held it firmly in her mouth (as though to show she could bite me) but then did not. She had done that occasionally with me in her past life — I always had taken it as a show of trust on both our parts: me letting her put my hand between her teeth, and her not biting. This time, however, she went even further, and did something she had never done in her last life: she extended her paw to place it on my hand, and her claws were not extended! Her paw was so soft and gentle. She simply wanted to reach out and touch me, in the same way I wanted to reach out and touch her. The intimacy touched me deeply. When I came out of the bathroom and described what had just happened to Mary, she could hardly believe it! So the next time I visited Lulu, I had Mary come in quietly a few minutes later, to watch us unobserved. Lulu was curled in a ball in her little brown bed (the same one she had used in her last life), so that she could maximally relax and enjoy the whole body massage I was giving her. "I can't believe it!" Mary said. "She relates completely differently to you!" And that is why I am sharing these intimate details (with Mary's permission), so you can really see why we are so certain this is indeed our dear friend Lulu, returned to us. * * * In Tibet (before the Chinese Communist takeover), after the Dalai Lama dies, and the requisite time has passed for his reincarnation to be born and grow to the age of a young boy, the entire country is scoured by senior Tibetan monks (usually those who knew the last Dalai Lama intimately) for young boys who might be his reincarnation. One of the tests used was to present the candidate boy with a bunch of objects, some of which were personal, beloved belongings of the last Dalai Lama, to see how the candidate boy would respond, and whether he would gravitate toward the correct objects. The environment we set up for Lulu contained several such objects that she had intimately associated with, and were filled with her smell, including a rug and her little brown bed. She had normal responses to all the other objects in the room, including a new scratching post, which she really enjoyed. But she went absolutely crazy around the rug and the bed, sniffing them like mad. And she then climbed into the bed and used it from then on. If she just had been reacting to smelling "a cat" on these items, but had deemed it to be a cat other than herself, she would never have sat in the bed. Cats are very finicky that way. It was only because she deemed it to be her own smell that she jumped into the bed. (You can see Lulu in her brown bed, both in her last life and this life, in the above pictures.) Lulu had passed the "Dalai Lama" test! * * * The wonderful thing about this rare gift — of being able to consciously relate, with full memories, to a beloved departed one who has returned while we are still alive — is that it offers all of us a second chance. Lulu came to be with me, so she and I will use our new lifetime together to deepen our already very loving relationship. But for Mary, Lulu's great love for her (in spite of the mixed feelings) is giving Mary a chance to "reset" their relationship. That has been Mary's full intention this time, and in these first couple of days with Lulu, she has been living that intention, and only showing Lulu the sign of love. And Lulu is responding in kind! She is now letting Mary touch her and pet her with only an occasional biting or clawing. As our psychic friend had felt so strongly and accurately, Lulu is a being who is filled with love. She already was a very loving being in her past life. But she has undergone a transformation, and has come back literally overflowing with love. She has just been waiting for Mary to show she wouldn't hurt Lulu, in order for Lulu to relax and fully show her great love for Mary, without defenses. And that is happening very swiftly. * * * In describing how His Divine Incarnation came about, Adi Da put it most simply: "Love is how I got to here." Lulu is not a Divine Incarnation. But it is so clear that love is how she too got to here again. And her immense love has opened our hearts to her: we have both fallen in love with her. Being shown the reality of reincarnation in such a direct way (and watching Lulu's old, dying body be replaced by her new, young body) is truly extraordinary. But it does not take away from the great grief we would feel if, tomorrow (or twenty years from now), she should suddenly die again. And there is one great lesson being revealed to us about life, death, and reincarnation: the heart-connection is what survives across lifetimes.[3] Regardless of whether we have memories of a past together, our great love for each other in the present (based on those heart-connections) is the test of our existence in this place, and all that really matters in the end.
from Dick Powell, Lulu's Back In Town (1935)
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from and/or photographs of Avatar Adi Da Samraj used by permission of the copyright
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