Archive for August, 2009

Dissidents and Dictators

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Exiled from his homeland, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, also a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has sought independence for his people since the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1949. His attempt in 1954 to make peace with China’s leader Mao Zedong failed, and five years later, during the brutal suppression of the Tibetan uprising in Lhasa by Chinese troops, he was forced to escape into India, where he has been based ever since.

Like blossom against a brick wall, Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama are witnessing to the world on behalf of peace and truth in the face of the greed and brutality of powerful politicians.

But in our world not only dictators in charge of governments display such qualities. Drug lords—both those in charge of the powerful armies in Colombia and Mexico and also those thugs in charge of street gangs in many of the world’s larger cities, terrorize defenseless people in their bloody quest for power and riches.

Then there is another tier of power and greed best illustrated by corrupt officials—from bribe-taking policemen in Russia, to powerful politicians in African nations accepting large payments from foreign corporations, to lobbyists in the US Congress making substantial political contributions to influence votes in upcoming legislation, such as health care reform. Such bribery may seem relatively harmless to some: “It’s the way things are done,” people say. In reality the difference between Joseph Stalin and a corrupt representative in the US Congress is only the degree of negative power they exercise.

Can we root out such negativity from the world and free Suu Kyi; people in Tibet, Colombia, and Mexico; powerless poor in Africa; voters in America? Yes, if we have the will we probably can, usually at a stiff price in lives. Pol Pot’s regime ended and he fled into the jungle; Hitler died in his bunker; Saddam Hussein was toppled from power; Idi Amin Dada sought refuge in Libya. But can we set the whole world to rights permanently? This is the dream of the social reformers, the peaceniks, the environmentalists, those who claim to stand for righteousness. As the Christian hymn pleads: “When wilt thou save the people? Oh God of mercy, when?”

For the past five years I have been working with the Masters of the Spirit World (senior spirit guides channeled by Toni Ann Winninger). They have had a lot to say on this matter. The first issue for them is the most central: they say our eternal soul is a little fragment of Source energy. This divine creative energy is shared by all the souls in the universe—a divinity of which our own soul is a part. They say that a God who is outside of us, to whom we can turn for help in time of trouble, simply does not exist. Confronting dictators is a choice that Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama and some of us make, as part of the lessons our higher self has chosen to learn. If putting the world to rights and toppling dictators is the thing we decided to do, we must draw on our inner resources for that task.

The Masters’ second issue is this: the main purpose of our soul’s journey to planet Earth is to grow wise from the experience of negativity. We may choose in advance of our coming  here to be positive and suffer negativity (abuse, illness, oppression), or we may choose in advance to play a negative role. The forces of the universe do not control the choices we make. The Masters told me on one occasion that if every incarnating soul chose to be a dictator … well, there’d be a lot of dictators around on Earth! In my interview of Adolf Hitler,* that is exactly what his soul claimed. A massive agreement among incarnating souls took place in advance, he said, that some of them would be the nasty Nazis, and others would be their victims.

In my interview of Anne Frank,** the young WWII diarist who died in the Nazi’s Auschwitz concentration camp said: “We set up the parameters whether it be that we wish (as I did) to go through degradation, physical pain, or deprivation, or else that we wish to be one of those who are experiencing total control over others and a total lack of what may be considered human compassion. We choose which roles we play, and it isn’t a single God but the energy within us that makes the decision of what the lessons are going to be.”

Woden says: If you are new to all this and find it a bit tough to swallow, that’s OK. Just stay tuned for more details!

*In Talking with Leaders of the Past

**In Talking with Twentieth-Century Women

Both books, and also individual chapters for downloading, are available. See “Literature.”

Sexual Reorientation

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Worldwide, discrimination, the legal prohibition of homosexuality, religious opposition, hatred, and even death continue to be suffered by gays and lesbians. The fear that drives people in some societies to legally execute practicing homosexuals reminds one of the massive witch hunts from the middle ages in Europe until the turn of the eighteenth century. Last century, Nazi genocide in the Third Reich deliberately eradicated some 60,000 gay men—yet in my conversation with the soul of Adolf Hitler,* he admitted to his having personally engaged in gay sex during his lifetime.

Homophobia such as that expressed by leaders in some fundamentalist Christian churches and anti-gay political movements has been amply disproved by several of them admitting to having had homosexual affairs. Anti-gay rhetoric is apparently a psychological cover-up for personal homosexual feelings.

The Masters of the Spirit World teach us that human gender and sexual orientation result from the basic choices our souls make in their preparation to come down to planet Earth. At Home on the other side the non-physical soul is without gender, being wholly energetic in its composition. The fact of people’s being humanly gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender represents the response of nature to the soul’s desire to learn life-lessons relating, for example, to personal ambivalence or to the understanding of what it feels like to be subjected to discrimination and hatred. Sexual orientation is not so much a deliberate choice by the soul as a natural response to the soul’s selection of certain life-lessons. In a similar way, because of our soul’s other choices, we may be born with a physical defect, or be a child prodigy, or have polio, or be born into an unloving family—all ways in which the universe sets up experiences for us to undergo.

As our spirit guides make abundantly clear in The Masters’ Reincarnation Handbook (see Literature), souls choose to incarnate on Earth because our planet is a classroom where lessons are intensified by its structured duality of positive and negative forces. We have come here from the realm of unconditional love to experience negativity as part of our chosen lessons. That choice is true in some form or another for everybody.

Gay people do have more than one human choice they can make. They can go through a supposed reorientation or pretend to themselves that they are sexually “normal;” they can spend a lifetime covering up their feelings and activities, and even deliberately marry someone of the opposite sex; they can hide their feelings under a smokescreen of homophobia; or, on the other hand, they can come out as homosexual to some degree or another and take their part in the caring gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community. The way we handle our life-lessons is up to each one of us. The Masters insist there is no “right” way of learning a spiritual lesson of any kind. We all have complete freedom of choice.

So, what happened to the young man who came to me for hypnotherapy? I told him why I wasn’t prepared to give him a supposed reorientation treatment. He replied that he was very sad because I was the first person to whom he had ever come out. My response was to sing the praises of the loving, worldwide gay community where he could certainly find understanding and support at a depth I was unable to match, being a heterosexual. He should seek to find a caring gay man or gay group to whom he could come out in safety. His reaction was one of bitter disappointment, but he perked up a bit when I told him that I was honored to have had the experience of counseling him, and that there would be no charge for my advice.

*(Talking with Leaders of the Past. Also in a single chapter download for Adolf Hitler—see Literature)

Genius Boys

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Jay Greenberg started playing the cello at two years of age. Today, aged 15, he has already composed more than 100 classical works of music. You may have heard the CD of the London Symphony Orchestra playing his fifth (that’s 5th!) symphony. Believe me, an orchestra like the LSO wouldn’t make a recording like that if it weren’t a first-rate composition. Jay’s no slouch—he composes on computer. None of the pen-and-ink stuff for him that Bach, Beethoven, and the boy-genius Mozart got away with!

Then there are the Indonesian Chinese Boedihardjo boys. The older boy, Horatio, arrived at Oxford University aged 13, but his brother, March Tian, turned up at Hong Kong Baptist University to study mathematics at the age of nine. These youngsters really blow your mind, don’t they?

Those four boys represent the tip of the genius iceberg. All over the world genius is displayed by girls and boys. Some are well-adjusted kids; others are savants who possess a fiercely focused ability in just one academic or artistic field but, unfortunately, have major social-skill deficiencies. There are hundreds, if not thousands of such geniuses alive today.

What unlocks genius like that?

I had a conversation* about this issue with the soul of Albert Einstein, himself a genius who changed the whole course of modern physics when he published four outstanding mathematical papers in1905. Speaking of his own skills, he said that he had not completely severed himself from his past lives. That seems to be the case with little Kieron, whose genius really looks like an inherited one. Most of the time, nearly all of us start our life completely unaware of any past incarnations. That’s a deliberate policy the universe has established to protect us from abusing such knowledge by cheating on our life-lessons.

Einstein also said that genius is pre-arranged. Before incarnating, each soul meets with its council of advisors to decide on the life-lessons it will undertake during its next life. He said, “The effect that genius has upon a person is to isolate them, so geniuses, in order to be able to sustain themselves, have to possess a foreknowledge of what they are doing—even though it is unconscious.” Feeling that connection, said Einstein, helps to make real the love their souls have for themselves, so helping them to avoid self-destructive behavior.

Interestingly, I also talked with the US World War II general George S. Patton, who was an acknowledged military genius. He was well aware of his past lives and had applied ancient Roman military thinking in the Battle of the Bulge to great effect. But Patton had a truly self-destructive personality, and his foolhardy mission during the battle of Meuse Argonne cost the lives of five of the six soldiers he took with him on a sortie.

Human life is much more of a pre-planned activity than most of us realize. It is essential that we should know it is our own soul who freely agreed to the lessons we undertake, and who always retains freedom of choice whether we will learn them when they occur in our lives or put them off until another incarnation.
*(recorded in Talking with Leaders of the Past—see Literature)
See Kieron’s pictures at::

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1203226/Pictured-Incredible-watercolour-paintings-boy-aged-just-SIX.html

Worried Man Blues

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

“It takes a worried man to sing a worried song…”

The Carter family first recorded this sad song in 1930. As a boy I knew the classic 1940 Woody Guthrie version of it. He really sounded like the convict in chains! Today, it seems like the whole world is singing the “Economic Worried Man Blues” loud and clear. This is a hell of a recession we’re in, and it’s truly global.

I was out of work and went bankrupt during the 1980’s recession in Britain. I had to sell off my car, and I lived in a little basement apartment, supplied by a Bristol charity, in the St. Paul neighborhood that had experienced race riots the same year. Charity and the British welfare state’s provisions were my lifeline. I don’t need to wonder what my life would have been like without them—I know it would have been hell.

As we watch people throughout the world losing their homes, jobs, retirement savings, and personal pride, we become conscious that over one third of the world’s men, women, and children go to bed hungry every night, if they even have a bed. Yet the same economic system generates, at the other end of the global spectrum, mind-boggling wealth—for a relative few individuals.

Most, though not all of these immense riches do not come to the wealthy because they have actually made something that has benefited humanity. No, much of it comes from fees and bonus payments gathered by those “playing the market” who sell financial contracts, place informed bets in the currency and commodities markets, and the like. They do not work with bent backs in the rice fields, or labor for long days shelling cashew nuts, or trawl the waters off the coast of Australia day and night, so that others (like me) may eat and be satisfied.

There are some of the wealthy who truly have a conscience and try their best to give back to society some of the profits and advantages they have. But, taken as a whole, little trickles down from the really wealthy to help the poor. Trickle down economics is an exploded myth.

So what can spiritual people do about it?

We must take the teaching of the Masters of the Spirit World to heart. They say * that the current crisis situation is not an accident. In fact it is much less haphazard than it seems. We who are souls living in human bodies at this time have chosen in advance the lessons that come with hunger, loss of jobs, homelessness, and, yes, also wealth and financial irresponsibility. The precise details of the experience we are having were not planned by us, we chose the lesson we wanted to learn, not how we would experience it.

This is not a spiritual escape system. Far from it. If we are an economist we may be able to help create a better world financial system. If we are a mother we may be able to stretch a slender budget to help a neighbor in terrible need. If we are wealthy we may discover a conscience. But at the heart of the matter is a simple fact. We do not really own wealth. We do not truly have power over other people. Life is not what it seems.

Powering the body- shell of the worried man singing his worried song is an independent, eternal soul having an experience—good or bad—a life-lesson. And when that lesson is learned, the soul goes on to the next lesson, and the next, until all the lessons it planned for this current life have been learned, and it is time to leave the shell of the worried man behind—and go Home. There are no accidents: we are here for a purpose, and the Masters counsel us to be grateful for the lessons that are made for us to deepen our wisdom about the nature of life.

*(The Masters Reincarnation Handbook – see our Literature page)