Calling Lilha

Okay, so this post is going to sound a bit crazy. All I can do is recount the events as they happened.

I want to stress here that I do not know that any of this is true. I lean towards it being true, but I simply don’t know.

This is the story of how 7 years ago I began receiving “messages from the universe” about a future partner of mine.

That future partner was my spiritual teacher’s daughter, whom I had never met, and at the time I spoke to my teacher about this, was engaged.

Nevertheless, here is the story…

It all started in the beginning of 2018. At the end of year team dinner with my teacher, she gave us all a little notebook as a present. I thought I’d use it as a positive affirmation book, but never really ended up using it for that. A few weeks later, for the first and only time in my life, I decided I should try this “manifestation” thing. So I took out the notebook and started writing down the qualities I wanted in a future partner. I was 31, and had only had one half-relationship with a girl at that time, so it was a big deal, and was really the thing I longed for most, aside from awakening.

So I started writing. At first it was all the typical stuff: “I want my future partner to be peaceful, loving, kind, fun, intelligent, attractive… etc etc”. Then I started to get more specific. “I want her to be on the same spiritual journey as me, with truth/happiness as the ultimate goal.”

Then I said I wanted her to be “strong-willed, with a strong sense of self.”

This one was interesting to me, because I thought, “Well, I’m interested in enlightenment (typically characterised as transcending the individual self), why do I want someone with a strong sense of self?” But I just wrote what came to me, and this was it.

I then wrote that I wanted her to be “challenging, in a way that motivates me to grow as a person.”

There weren’t too many more points, it was just an A5 page full, so maybe about 12 points all up.

I put it away and largely forgot about it.

I’m not sure how much time passed; it could have been a few weeks or a couple of months. I had just started working full time as a gardener at my teacher’s spiritual centre, and one day at home I was just scrolling through Facebook and came across a post from a spiritual centre in the city called “The Leela Centre”.

When I read this word Leela, I just had this really strong emotional reaction to it. I was like, “Wow, what does that word mean?” I looked it up: it’s a Sanskrit word meaning “The Divine Play”. When I read the definition of it I was like, “I like it even more now, I think that might be my favourite word!”

For the next few days at work I was just saying this word over and over in my head, “Leela, Leela, Leela.” I was listening to talks on the concept of Leela by teachers. I couldn’t get enough of it.

After a few days of this I started to think, “Where have I heard that word before? Has a teacher mentioned it once?”

Then a thought came to me: “Wait, wasn’t Isira’s daughter named something like that?” I had read her autobiography a couple of years earlier and remembered she mentioned she had children. So I went home and looked it up. I scoured through the pages: “Where’s the daughter…?” Then I saw it. Her daughter’s name: Lilha.

When I read that I was like, “Lilha… how do you pronounce that? Is it Lyla or Leela?” I thought to myself, “Well if it’s Lyla I don’t really feel like I have a strong connection with that name. But maybe it’s just a variant spelling of Leela.” So I went and looked it up, and yes Lilha is a variant spelling of Leela.

Okay, so that’s interesting, I thought to myself. I just had this really strong emotional reaction to this word, and it happens to be Isira’s daughter’s name.

I still wasn’t blown away by this at this stage, I was just kind of curious. I said to my friend at this point I was about a 3/10 level of interest. Just curious.

Then one day I was driving home and something occurred to me. Isira had recommended a book for me years earlier called “Astrology for the Soul”, by Jan Spiller. It’s all about what is called your “North Node”, and the qualities you need to develop in this lifetime, and the qualities you need to let go of. I’ve always been a bit iffy about astrology, but Isira said it was an “exceptional” book, and I kind of buy anything Isira recommends strongly.

So I was driving home and I thought, “Hmm, I wonder what Isira’s daughter’s north node is… maybe that could provide some more information on her.” So I looked up her birthday in Isira’s autobiography: 23rd of August, 1995. That makes her north node a Libra.

So I went to the astrology book to look up Libra, and at the time I was kind of having a fun little romantic fantasy: “Oh, I bet it’s going to say she’s an amazing person. Just kind and loving… even her bad qualities, they’re probably not really that bad, they’re just kind of cute.” Like I said, a fun little fantasy.

But then I started to read the Libra north node, and it was, um… not what I was expecting… at all. The complete opposite. It basically said these people have had a lot of incarnations being a real “warrior” type of person, so they have a tendency towards selfishness, and a lack of concern for other people. I was like, “Um… I think my book must be broken or something, this is not right at all.”

After a while of reading this I was like, “Yeah, this doesn’t sound like the person for me at all. Maybe there was a different reason I had a reaction to that name.”

I was about to close the book, and I thought, “… Maybe I should check my north node. Maybe that would be helpful. Instead of just learning about other people I should understand a bit more about myself.”

So I flicked back to where my north node was (Aries). I knew it was at the start of the book, so I was going to flick back to the start, but the page I landed on… it was like my eyes were stuck on a particular sentence. I kept moving to flick back the pages, but they were definitely stuck on this one sentence, and when I focused on it, it was like the sentence zoomed out to my face. It looked, on a physical level, like it got about 3 times bigger.

I read it, and it said, “What these people really need to learn in this lifetime is selfishness.” I was like, “Uh… what the fuck is going on?” I had just been reading the Libra north node, and literally the first sentence of the Libra north node is “What these people need to learn to deal with is their tendency towards selfishness.” And then I flick back to mine and it says, “You need to learn selfishness.”

Because of the way it happened, flicking back to that page, my eyes being stuck on it, and then it zooming out to my face, I was like, “What the hell is going on, this is so surreal.”

So I flicked back to the start of my north node and it said basically that I’ve spent a lot of incarnations being a really helpful type of person, Mr and Mrs Nice. “Debilitatingly selfless,” it said. Yeah, that’s me.

So I started reading through the Libra and Aries north nodes, and everything the Libra north node has is what I need to develop in this lifetime, and everything that I have is what the Libra north node needs to develop. They were complete mirror images of each other.

Okay, this is really strange, I thought. After reading a bit of the Libra north node I was convinced this was not the person for me, and this book is now telling me, “THIS. You need THIS!”

My level of interest then went to, “Okay, this doesn’t seem like a coincidence.”

I wasn’t satisfied with that, however, so I asked “the universe” for more evidence, and there were lots of little other signs that seemed to point in this direction. By themselves I wouldn’t have paid them any attention, but in combination it seemed unlikely they could all be just chance.

I didn’t speak to anyone about this for a while, I wanted to make sure it was a real possibility before I spoke about it, especially to my spiritual teacher – it was her daughter after all!

A lot of other weird things started happening too. I started seeing double numbers *everywhere*. I’d heard people on the spiritual path talk about this before, and always thought that’s interesting but remained skeptical. It had never happened to me, so I didn’t know what to make of it. But it just started to happen to such a degree that again I found it difficult to put down to chance. It was happening sometimes up to about 90% of the day when I looked at my phone and I thought, “this can’t be happening!” I remember one time I went to a cafe for lunch, and the guy said, “That’ll be $33.” Then he handed me my table number – number 33. “Whoah,” he said. In my head I was like, “Oh dude, you have *no* idea. This is like 0.01% of what’s been going on for me lately.” It started to feel like synchronicities were just happening all around me during this time. I still didn’t talk to anyone about it yet though. I still wanted to make sure this was a real possibility before I did.

Then in May of 2018, Isira held a weekend event called The Presence. I went into what happened here in my first blog post, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, so I won’t go over it again, but basically, Isira told me that I had had a “partial kundalini awakening”. That’s another way of saying an “energetic” awakening.

After a few days of *intense* energy in the body, and meditating on this question of Lilha, I went to my teacher.

“Hey, um, Isira… I need to speak to you about something. It’s about a relationship.” “Oh… you’ve got me kind of interested now,” she said. “It kind of has to do with you,” I said. She smiled. Does she know? I thought to myself. Can she read my mind?

It turns out she didn’t know. I’m pretty sure at this point she thought that I was talking about her. That I’d had this intense emotional experience at her event and that I’d developed feelings for her as a result. Needless to say, that wasn’t it.

Later that afternoon, we went to sit in the little cottage at her centre to talk about what was happening. Again, I’m almost certain that at this point she was thinking I was going to say, “Yeah, I had this emotional experience and I’ve developed feelings for you.” Instead I said, “So… I have a feeling that… there’s a possibility that… my future partner… may be…………… your daughter.” I looked up at her, “If your daughter’s name is Lilha.”

She didn’t say anything. I think she was a bit shocked. “Let me just explain,” I said, holding up my hand so she didn’t stop me before I got it all out.

I went through everything that had happened up until that point. Well, almost everything. I didn’t get to finish before Isira said, “Okay Will, stop.” “I’m not finished,” I said. Then she said more forcefully, “Will, listen to me.”

She then went on to basically play down the events and said, “Will, my daughter’s name is not Lilha,” she paused before continuing… “If she had a spiritual name that’s what it would be… she is engaged.” Afterwards in my head I thought, “I don’t care if she has 5 kids, I’m talking about the messages.”

We ended our brief chat and I said, “This is just annoying.” I can’t remember exactly what Isira said at this point, but it was something along the lines of, “Yeah, well, you know we can use these experiences to understand more about ourselves.”

I went back to work.

After about half an hour of mulling over our conversation, I got angry. “This is bullshit,” I thought to myself. “I wasn’t making this up. These are objective events that happened.”

I wrote to Isira and said I needed to go home. I said, “Look, either I’m completely insane, or something or someone is messing with me, and I don’t like either of those options.”

She wrote back and said, “Will, as your teacher, wouldn’t it be best to trust an enlightened perspective on these things rather than your negative thoughts towards this and yourself?”

This was the first time in the 3 years I’d been with Isira that what she said made absolutely no sense. Negative thoughts about this and myself? What the fuck is she talking about? There are no negative thoughts about this, I just want to know what the truth is.

At this point a massive thunderstorm rolled in. I thought later it was kind of fitting because my internal state was quite thunderous.

I wrote back to her, “I trust you as much as I’m able to trust anything, but I’m not making this up. This sequence of events were very misleading if not true, and that makes me angry. But I’m also thinking, maybe you are not telling me the truth. Maybe you are only telling me what I need to hear so I don’t get caught up in attachment about this or anything else.”

She didn’t reply. I drove home.

I messaged her the next day and said, “Isira, I can’t come back to work at the moment. I’m not sure if I can ever come back to Living Awareness now (her organisation’s name). I don’t want to live being crazy, and if this is not true then that’s the only other option.”

Again, she didn’t reply.

The next few days I kept meditating on this even more. I went really deep and tried to be as honest as I possibly could. Every time I tried to consider what Isira said I was like, “No, these messages are objective facts. It referenced a specific person. There was no reason me coming across that message had to involve Isira’s daughter. I didn’t need that part. I could have been given the message about needing to develop selfishness, and the possibility that my future partner would need to be a Libra north node… I could have received that message in any number of ways. But it included someone. It referenced someone specifically.”

Whenever I tried to consider Isira’s words, I felt uneasy, uncomfortable, like it was a lie. Whenever I considered the opposite perspective I felt at peace, comfortable, like everything made sense.

A few days later Isira’s assistant Leelani called me. “Will, would you like to talk about what’s been going on for you lately?” “Yes,” I said, “that would be good.”

“Would you like to do it over the phone or come over to my place?” She asked. “I think in person would be better,” I said.

So one afternoon I went to Leelani’s place. We sat down and she told me to record the conversation on my phone so I could listen back to it later. We spoke for 2 hours. I went into detail about everything that had been and was happening.

At the end, she said, “Okay, so does it all make sense now?” I said, “No, nothing makes sense but that’s probably -“. “Good,” she said, “I’m glad that nothing makes sense, because that’s the mind, and you are not to answer questions via the mind.”

I got in my car and put the recording on and went for a drive. For the first 20 minutes I was like, “Man, Leelani is on fire today! I had no idea she was so insightful!” Then, about 20 minutes in, I realised… “This is not Leelani talking to me, this is Isira.” At one point in the conversation, when she said the word Leela, I actually heard Isira’s voice, as if it were physically her I was talking to. I was parked by a beach at this point listening, and when she said the word Leela, it just took up my whole consciousness, and then at that exact moment a rainbow appeared. I was like, “What the hell is going on.” From that point on I couldn’t hear or say the word Leela without my body having a physical reaction to it, often convulsing and spasming.

I thought to myself, “Man, I need to go home and have a cigarette,” but instead I drove to my teacher’s centre. I didn’t think anyone would be there, I just wanted to go and sit in the garden and contemplate everything that was happening.

Isira was there though. I knocked on the door and her partner answered, Isira standing behind him.

“You were there today with Leelani, weren’t you?” I said.

“I was in presence,” she said. This was basically her way of saying yes.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” I said.

“What do you mean right? She asked.

“I heard your voice,” I said.

Then she asked me to come inside and talk over a bit more what was happening.

I said to her… “I’d never heard myself say it out loud before (everything that was happening). And when I listened back to the recording, it was like… I only heard truth.”

Truth has a particular frequency to it. This is something that everyone senses to some degree, but especially when you’ve been on the spiritual path for a while, you get a heightened sense of when something is true versus when it’s false. It’s like those kinesiology exercises. When you ask someone to hold out their arm and instruct them to resist you pushing it down, and then tell them to state something that is a lie, even something as simple as what their name is, when they lie you can easily push down their arm. When they tell the truth you can’t. There’s a strength that comes along with truth, and that’s what I experienced listening back to the recording.

Isira was silent and just looked at me.

We finished talking after another 40 minutes or so, and I said to her, “You have the best poker face ever.” Her partner in the next room laughed, but she still gave nothing away.

“I think I’m more awake than you give me credit for,” I said.

“Awakeness only sees awakeness, Will,” she said.

“Bye,” I said, as I walked out and went to sit in the garden.

Her partner came out to speak to me, but again I’m sure it was Isira’s voice coming through him.

“It’s like what the Oracle said in The Matrix,” I said to him. “When Neo asked who Agent Smith was, she said, “He is you, your opposite. A result of the equation trying to balance itself out.” He laughed. “I don’t need to date other women,” I said (something Isira had suggested I do initially). “No,” he said. “But if I have a belief that I do then I do,” I said. “Yeah, but that’s just a belief,” he said.

It was clear to me based on my talk with her, that Isira either knew I was right, or very strongly thought I was right.

I drove home and was just processing all that had happened. At this point, I was convinced. This was true.

I won’t go into the full story of what followed – I’ve got to save something for my book! – but it was both incredible and terrifying.

It’s now been 7 years since this all happened, and as I said in the beginning, I still don’t fully know the truth. I’m still just in the same position I was in right in the middle of all this while meditating on the truth of it: When I think it’s true, I feel calm, at peace, relaxed. When I think it’s not true, I’m utterly confused, uncomfortable, and have no idea how to make sense of everything that happened.

Isira told me she would no longer be available for contact soon after this. I knew why – I think she saw that I didn’t really need her help anymore, and that relying on her for guidance would actually prevent me from finding my own guidance – so it didn’t bother me, but I think once I reach my goal of awakening, she will again speak to me.

One thing she kind of intimated to me at the time was: Your attachment to this is the problem. Regardless of the truth of it. If it’s not true, obviously your attachment to it is a problem. If it is true, your attachment to it is still a problem.

Attachment is always a problem. There is no positive benefit to attachment whatsoever, in any context.

So where I am at now with this is: If this turns out to be true, great! If it turns out to not be true, that’s also fine, and I’ll just find another woman to have a deep connection with.

I’m a big believer that when you sort yourself out, the universe responds to this and provides things that are genuinely in alignment with who you are.

Either way, I think I have a great future coming.

Thanks for reading,

Will.