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.

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)