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.