HOW I CAME TO THIS: PART THREE
A SPIRITUAL TURNING POINT
Dixie Yeterian, circa 2004

If you’d talked with me back in the 1960’s and asked me about reincarnation, I would have probably told you that I didn’t believe in it. I came from a very strong fundamentalist Christian background in which the whole idea of reincarnation, of even thinking about it, was forbidden. But by the 60’s, I’d pretty much withdrawn from religion in general. I had decided that if there was a God, he was cruel and I didn’t want anything to do with him, because I’d seen so much that I would call “evil” done in the name of religion as I was growing up in the Pentecostal Church.

I had the same idea about reincarnation back then that I assume most people in my community during that time period had and that was that the concept of reincarnation was really about some far off Eastern religion in which you couldn’t kill a fly because it might be someone’s uncle. That was about as much as I knew about it, until I had a series of experiences that forced me to rethink things.

The first experience was when my daughter was two months old. I woke up in the middle of the night and my mother was standing at the foot of my bed, shouting at me. It was the sound of her voice that woke me: “Dixie, the baby, the baby! Get the baby!” It never occurred to me to wonder how my mother, who had recently passed away, could be standing by my bed shouting at me. I jumped out of bed and ran to my daughter’s crib to find her extreemly unwell, I scooped her up in my arms and called out to my husband. We rushed her to our small town hospital and then from there, she was immediately flown down the California coast to UCLA Medical Center.

When we landed at UCLA, they took her straight into a room and put her on an exam table. There were a lot of doctors gathered around her. When they took her diaper off, to my horror I saw that it was filled with blood. I cried out. One of the doctors turned and said, “Get that woman out of here." I felt a hand reach out and grab my arm as they began to pull me out of the room.

Someone, a nurse I think, rushed me down the hall and into a room that was so small, it could have been a broom closet. As the door swung shut, I found myself alone in this tiny empty room with only a little bench to sit on. It was pitch black. They had forgotten to turn the light on, but I was so shaken up it didn’t matter. As I sat there in the darkness, I could hear my daughter’s screams from down the hallway and I could hear the muffled sounds of the doctors urgently shouting orders. I clasped my hands together and I began to pray.

Now mind you, I’m an atheist at this point or an agnostic or something that didn’t really believe God existed or as I said, if he did, I didn’t want much to do with him. But of course in times like that, no matter what your beliefs, you start praying. As I sat there, hands clasped together in prayer, the most amazing thing happened within what seemed like seconds. The room became filled with this brilliant light. It was just brilliant. It should have been blinding but it wasn’t. And music - I couldn’t describe it. It was absolutely stunningly beautiful music and I felt this sense of being lifted up into this light. Nothing was said to me. There was no presence. I just felt this incredible happiness, incredible joy and I absolutely knew without a doubt that my daughter was going to live.
I have no idea how long I was there in that light listening to that music and having this sense of ecstatic joy; when I heard in quick succession the sound of the door knob turning and the flick of the light switch. It was the glare of the fluorescent lights that brought me back into the reality of where I was, hands still clasped together, sitting on that bench in that tiny room. I opened my eyes and looked up to see my husband standing in the doorway with one of the doctors.

The doctor said, “Well, Mr. and Mrs. Yeterian, we’ve done what we can on our end. She’s in the hands of the surgeons now, but I need you to prepare yourselves - she’s probably not going to survive the surgery.”
“Oh, no, she’ll be fine.” I said.
“You need to hear what I’m saying now. We’ve taken her into surgery, but she’s so weakened she’s probably not going to survive the surgery and even if she does survive it, she probably won’t survive the next 24 hours.”
I repeated to him, “Oh, no, she’ll be fine. I know it.”
He looked at me gravely and said “If she survives the surgery and the next 24 hours, then she might have a chance.”

I kept saying, “Oh, she’ll make it, she’ll make it,” and I had this big smile on my face as I was saying it because I knew absolutely without a doubt that she was going to survive, and she did. She survived the surgery.

In the days following the surgery we were told repeatedly that she was too weak, that she was too sick and that she wouldn’t survive, that we should ready ourselves, but I never believed it. I knew without a doubt she was going to survive. And she did.
That experience turned me around. It made me absolutely know with complete certainty that there is Spirit in this dimension and that not only is there a God, which I now have the realization is much greater than any man has the potential of describing or defining, but there is a Spiritual force, and it is intimately involved in our experience. I know that. This doesn’t come from belief or faith, it comes from experience.