Practical Immortality 001, for Rob Schwartz: we always are choosing

Feb. 9, 2004

Author Rob Schwartz, who at that time was working on his book Your Soul’s Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born (formerly Courageous Souls), heard through the online reincarnation community that I talked to spirit guides, and contacted me with questions for them.  He thanked me profusely, but I don’t believe he used any of their material in the book, because he was looking for a very specific kind of story; I think he was basically confirming truths about his theme, pre-life planning, with a number of different peoples’ spirit guides. Here’s the interview.

Rob: How exactly do you communicate with your spirit guides?

Karen: Sometimes I go into something of a meditative state, by getting into a comfortable, relaxed position and settling down my mind... but other times, it’s just part of my everyday dialogue.  I ask them questions, and listen for their answers.  They are more “on” when I need them, i.e. when my thoughts are self-defeating and my mood is negative.  This is quite new to me... I couldn’t do it until sometime mid-January... I had only got erratic words before, and very rarely.  I think I used to cut them off due to disbelief, or a feeling that I didn’t deserve to hear them.

Rob: Do you hear their voices as distinct voices in your mind, or do their thoughts appear as your thoughts?

Karen: I hear their words as if they are my own thoughts, but I can tell that they are not my own thoughts because they don’t sound like me; the guides have a different way of thinking, a different personality, shall we say, from me, and they’ll sometimes say the opposite of what I was thinking, feeling or expecting.  They also address me as “you” and by name, which my own thoughts, of course, don’t.  I get only words, have never managed to get images from them.  Hmm... an experiment to try... [Haven’t yet.]

Rob: Who are your guides?  

Karen: Well, I’ve asked them that a few times myself, but mostly they answer that it doesn’t matter, that I shouldn’t get hung up on identity.  They are ego-less, really.  My regression therapist once managed to see them, and said there were four of them.  [More recently, another medium friend of mine identified one by the name of Sebastian.]

Rob: If you would be willing to assist, I would be very interested in getting some information from your guides.  I have attached an outline of the phone interview I conduct.  As you’ll see, there are certain metaphysical questions I’m trying to answer.  Would you be willing to pose these questions to your guides and then email their verbatim responses to me?  This could be very helpful to me.

Karen: I can give it a shot.  I’ve never asked them much in the way of general metaphysical questions, it tends to be much more practical and personal.  For spiritual beings they are very down-to-earth... perhaps they know they have to be to get me to trust them.  (One time they told me, ‘You’re doing okay... go down and check your mailbox, there’s money in it today.’  I thought, ‘Oh, great—if there isn’t, I’ll never be able to trust them again.’  There was, a cheque from a client.  I have trusted them more ever since, as I’m sure they knew I would.)

Guides: Okay, let’s look at those questions...

Rob: Why would anyone plan a life in which he or she was going to do “bad” or “evil” things?

Guides: All souls are not good.  Sensitive to my reaction to this (“Whaaaaat!?”) they add, let’s put it more gently: souls are capable of carrying delusions.  If they weren’t, they’d have nothing to learn, would they?  They are not unchangeably bad or good, or unchangeably anything—they are free to choose at any moment.  That doesn’t mean they will.  Or know they can.
 

If you are worried that maybe you are a bad soul, don’t worry.  If you were a truly bad soul you wouldn’t be worried.

Rob: If the lifetime is not designed by the personality, then the personality has not shown courage in taking on life challenges. If the soul does not suffer, then the soul has not shown courage in planning life challenges. Where, then, is courage demonstrated in the planning of a lifetime?

Guides: There’s too much of a distinction being made here between personality and soul.  The soul cannot feel pain while disincarnate, but while incarnate it most definitely can, because it is joined to a nervous system, hormones, the amygdala, etc.—these things that are capable of returning the input of “pain” (physical or emotional) to a consciousness.  (Soul is pure consciousness.)  Else past-life memories full of emotion or sensation would not be possible.  So, if the soul is experienced, it knows it’s going to suffer by its choices... but it also knows what is to be gained from suffering.  Walking by choice into the suffering so as to obtain the benefit is where courage comes in.

Rob: There is some information to suggest that only advanced souls are able to participate in the planning of a lifetime, and that younger souls have their lives designed for them by elders or spirit guides. Is this correct? If not, how does the process work?
 

Guides: It’s true.  Karen’s incapable of planning her own life and that’s why we do it for her, hahaha.  (Yes, they sometimes josh me.  This is a reference to my having cried out to them, when in the pit of despair, “What do I do?”)

Seriously, it is always suggestions, no more.  Undeluded souls don’t impinge on each other’s freedom, even elder ones dealing with younger ones.  (My guides, while they sometimes speak quite imperatively, do it knowing that both I and they know that it’s all suggestions only, in reality; they never try to intimidate, manipulate, or force.

Rob: To what degree of detail are lives planned? Do souls choose general themes or lessons which then lead to specific life challenges, or do they actually script the specific challenges themselves?

Guides: (scratching their heads at the second question) Why would souls script specific challenges without having chosen a general theme or lesson?  Why would they choose a general theme or lesson without there being a related specific challenge?  I think what they’re saying is that souls see specific challenge and theme/lesson as one.

There’s only so much detail possible.  No one, incarnate or disincarnate, can know the future precisely; there are too many variables.  Souls work with probabilities.  Say for some reason a soul decides to experience childhood physical abuse.  If it wants a pretty sure bet, it will be arrange to born as the fourth child in a family where the parents beat the first three.  It’s not a certainty—the parents might change, or get caught and have the kids taken away, or both die in a car accident—but it’s a high probability.  If for some reason the plan doesn’t play out, the soul can always try again in the next life.

Rob: Please address the issue of free will vs. predestination. If souls choose specific challenges prior to incarnation, then where is free will present?

Guides: In how the incarnation handles them.  That’s always a choice.  The big challenge is to retain the knowledge that, in regard to our actions, we always have choice and are always choosing, even when it seems we have none and cannot.  My guides say—that’s the whole lesson of life, of incarnation, of spiritual growth—right there.

Rob: On the other hand, if we all have free will, then how can a soul get a personality to necessarily experience certain life challenges?

Guides: We have different degrees of free will at different phases of life, incarnate/disincarnate.  A metaphor from within the incarnate life: choosing a career.  At the point of choosing we are free to choose any career.  Once we’ve chosen one and been with it for a while, it’s what’s on our resume and thus we are (relatively) stuck with it. 

Choosing a life is like choosing a career, except that the soul is even more totally free than the young adult.  Certain aspects of the life will be constant and (relatively) inescapable and thus lend themselves to—have a high probability of providing—certain experiences.  Our place of incarnation, for instance—once we’ve chosen that, we have chosen an ethnic background, a mother tongue, a religious viewpoint (probably), a socio-economic level.  By choosing a particular family we are choosing to be raised the way they are likely to raise us, depending on their personalities.  Choose your sex and, short of sex-change surgery, you’re stuck with it for life.  Choose a body that’s genetically pre-determined to suffer an incurable disease, and only death will change that.

Our choice lies in how we handle the pain, whether we draw something positive from it even while experiencing it, or not.  The body of a person in a wheelchair cannot fly; but the soul can, even while in the body.

The ground rule is that only a disincarnate soul has total free will over where it goes and what it does; bodies have natural limitations.  How do we retain enough freedom of spirit to be joyful even within those limitations, that’s the whole challenge.

Karen: It’s interesting reading it back: I didn’t expect them to talk so much about freedom and choice.  I hope it is useful to you, Rob... it’s going to be useful to me for sure, having clarified my own ideas of how these things work.  Thanks for getting me to do this  ;-)

Feb. 14, 2004 : Addendum

Guides: Soul contracts are written in thoughts/concepts, not words.  They can be translated into words, but you’ll get as many different translations as there are translators.

 

Feeling limitation = delusion

Feb. 17, 2004

Guides: If you feel limitation, you are living under delusion.

Fears and desires are closely related, may even said to be one.

[Back then when the guides first said these two things, I found them startling and baffling.  I have learned enough since to understand them, at least a fair amount, and not be confronted by them.  Should I give it away or let you process it yourself?  Tell me in the comments.]

The love of guides, & some PI stuff

Feb. 2, 2004

Karen: Lingered in bed this morning, to talk to my guides.  I did a little re-living... of the non-stop humiliation and attacks on myself when I was a child... and I felt it, felt the tragedy and wrongness of it... and then I realized... they were there all along.  My guides, I mean.

Guides: We tried to comfort you, but in your pain, and in the natural distancing from the spiritual world that happens as a child gets older, you wouldn’t hear us.  We sent you good dreams, optimism, hopes, but you didn’t know it was from us.  We sent you love, but the lack of love from the material world was much more apparent to you.  We watched it all happen, and wept.

Guides have emotions?  Compassion, at least, apparently.  I cried myself, to hear this... to know I always had been loved, even if virtually everyone incarnate around me shat on me.  It’s a big one.  I have to accept it, adjust to it, get used to it.  Let it fit in around me. 

They pointed out how much self-punishing I do... everything from lying in bed in uncomfortable positions to not invoicing to you name it.  They’re good at that.  They’re training me.

I asked... why did you watch and weep, when everything is as it should be, and it was something I chose as a learning experience, presumably?

Guides: You made a bad choice.   

Karen: There it is, from the spirit world itself.  I made a bad choice, joining the family I did.

~

[Practical Immortality segment: From here, they speak a lot about my past lives, and how for the most part I didn’t do what I did in them for personal gain, but for greater purposes... even when it was warlike.]

Guides: What you have suffered from is the myth of separation, which happens to every warrior... look what you’ve written in your novels.  You soaked yourself in the blood of your opponents, and that has an effect.  Everyone who plays the game of dominator power, who takes up a sword to recast the world according to his ideas, pays the price in his soul, and you played it harder than anyone else.  The price is separation from self... from empathy, from conscience, from spirit and higher self; these things should all be one.  The price is feeling evil in oneself, as you do.

But you aren’t evil.  You never were.  You perhaps did things that harmed, but so has everyone; it’s a fact of being human.  You condemn yourself because you hold yourself to too high a standard.  You were only human, that’s all.  It was natural and human to think of being a warrior as virtuous in those times, because that’s what you were taught in your upbringing, what everyone was taught.

You have been self-punishing for so long... it’s been a theme of your lives for centuries, which is why it’s the theme of your novels in this life.  But it’s an injustice you are doing to yourself, and you don’t need to keep doing it.

Karen: The feeling of liberation... I can barely let myself feel, let alone describe. 

Guides: You haven’t been able to become a healer because you haven’t yet healed yourself.  Once you have, you’ll be able to become a healer.

Karen: A healer?  That hasn’t even been in my most recent plans, really... just helping healers, with web design -- except if I think in terms of inspirational writing.

Guides: You will heal with words.   

Everything looks different to me all of a sudden.

~

I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop re this morning... for my mood to worsen again.  It hasn’t.  I’m feeling like nothing can shake it, that my situation is fine, that the setbacks don’t matter, that I’m not at the mercy of anyone or anything.  I haven’t felt this non-crisis-like since... hmm... maybe ever, in this life.  I guess it’s simple, really: I feel as if I am loved.  And it’s a love that, unlike my ex’s, is not intermittent.  I feel expanded, inspired, fearless, delighted at life, seeing beauty in everything... deeply happy.  This is making all my other breakthroughs look like nothing.

Inspirational writing? I asked my guides.  Where am I going to get the ideas?  They laugh.  Just put your fingers on the keyboard, they say, and let us do our thing!

If I do start producing writing this way, I might put it on a blog.  See how much interest it garners. [And here we are  ;-)  ]

You are a legitimate human being

Jan. 28, 2004

Guides: You are legit!  You are a legitimate human being.  You are sustaining yourself, you are contributing, you are legit.  Even if your chimney is clogged, you are legit.  Even if you haven’t snow-blown the driveway yet, you are legit.  Even if you owe money, you are legit.

Karen: Part of me is listening, and part of me is screaming.

~

Feb. 1, 2004

Karen: This morning I was hit with the most awful pain, of feeling, “Choosing [ex name] as a partner was the biggest mistake of my life, and one I’m going to have to live with the rest of my life.”  Gods, I can’t tell you how awful that feels.  And yet... if we were connected karmically already... it isn’t that way, is it?  Sheesh... I think I need to talk to my guides.  Eh?  Guides?  Que pasa?

Guides: Your feet are cold.  You are letting yourself be uncomfortable again.  Go put on some socks.

Karen: See what I mean?  Always totally sensible and practical and on my side.  Insisting on my comfort, before they’ll even talk to me.  Gods, it makes me want to cry.  I never even had parents who did that.  I guess they’re reparenting me, too.

Okay... back... with two, count them, two, pairs of socks on.  This office is always cold in winter, but there’s sun shining in through the window on the footrest under the desk, so it’s hitting my feet... happy, guides? Not only that, but anticipating that they’d next nail me for not having eaten anything yet, I’ve put the bacon on.










Okay, now I’ve eaten also.  [Relationship advice, blah blah blah] When you bullshit, you end up having to weigh the truth alone. 

Anger & fear: each triggers the other

Jan. 23, 2004

Guides: Don’t allow yourself to be motivated by either anger or fear.  Don’t let fear drive you, don’t let anger hold you back.  Because each triggers the other: if you allow yourself to be driven by fear, the anger rises in protest and makes you hold back; if you allow yourself to be held back by anger, the fear rises using urgency as the excuse.  Can you imagine how it would be to work just for money, motivated by neither?

Karen: Ummmmm..... no.  I figure it would be wonderful, though.  A beautiful Nirvana that I must work towards.

Guides: What is the common driver for both?   

Karen: My mother’s voice in my head.  Her criticisms.  Actually my father’s too, and everyone else in my family, as they all picked it up from our parents.

Guides: So, you have to eliminate your mother’s voice in your head.

Karen: Sure!  No problem!  Where do I buy a bottle?

Cultivate your beautiful independence

Jan. 22, 2004

Karen: Is [the person who had just left me after an 18-year relationship] going to come back to me if I make enough money?

Guides: Is that what you want?

[Sound of splash of cold water in my face]

Guides: (I think I was hearing them right!) [Name of ex] is never going to come back to you.  Your paths have diverged.

[This prediction was correct.  Notice it is not actually a prediction; it is a statement of a present fact, your paths have diverged, that has future consequences.] 

~ 

Guides: You need to continue what you are doing: cultivate your beautiful independence.  Draw strength from the power within that you are truly learning you have.  Enjoy your competence, your adulthood, your ability, your success.  Feel the fire within that you feel in flashes, constantly.  Feel the joy of being free.  Above all, feel your adulthood.  That will make you strong.

Value yourself, and be with people who value you.

Karen: I guess it also helped that I slept lots last night... broken about three times, but still lots, something like nine hours.  At one point I really think my guides talked me to sleep.  “You are not giving yourself permission to sleep—see?  Look at the uncomfortable position you’ve put yourself in. Look how tense you are.  Look at the thoughts you are thinking—they are hurting you emotionally.  How are you supposed to sleep while doing all that to yourself?”  So I put myself in a more comfy position, and relaxed, and thought of more positive things... and that seemed to knock me out.  Sleep has become a good place to be, unlike before, when sometimes it seemed to be hell.

First guide words I ever transcribed

Jan. 17, 2004

 Guides: Has your contact with [supposed friend] caused you more pain or pleasure since you visited her?

Me: Pain.  By a country mile.

Guides: Then she's not enough of a friend.  You have a bad habit of clinging to people who hurt you.  Write her off.  It hurts to give up your hopes, but you'll feel better cutting yourself free from that pain.