BAD THINGS HAPPEN AT NIGHT
The Past Life Fear of Rejection

During a session with Steve, a young man from L.A., we explored an incarnation he had in Pennsylvania a hundred years ago. Back then he was also male, a rather naïve boy who fell in love with an older woman. The events that I uncovered from that life turned out to be the root cause of a huge fear of Rejection.

The past-life fear of Rejection is caused by a traumatic event in which your soul experiences what it perceives as abandonment. By far the most common scenario is one in which death occurs on a battlefield far from home, surrounded by chaos, noise, and confusion. With no loved ones to help ease the transition to the next plane, the soul feels a profound absence of compassion. (It’s for this reason that, with their last breaths, dying soldiers will so often call out for their mothers.)

There are many other causes, of course. A fear of Rejection can be the result of abandonment by parents, long-term imprisonment, being shunned by a lover, or being ostracized or neglected by the community. If you’ve been a leper in the past, you’ll show all the signs of rejection in the present.

And those signs are usually pretty strong. You might, like many of my clients, recognize one common symptom: an occasional and unexpected wave of loneliness. It can wash over you in quiet moments without any apparent trigger.

Or you might feel like you don’t belong. The typical sufferer is a bit of a loner, reluctant to join groups or clubs, and even when he or she does belong, they’ll feel like an outsider looking in.

The soul is reluctant to join any kind of organization because its belief is, “If I don’t belong, I can’t be rejected.”

When I spoke to Steve, I could tell rejection was big. And I knew all I had to do to shift the fear was to discover the past-life cause. “A part of Steve’s soul is disgusted by touch,” my spirit guides told me. This seemed troubling considering he made his living as a massage therapist. “Don’t worry,” they said, “This work will shift the fear.”

We explored the past life further. The young Pennsylvanian who is now Steve fell madly in love with a beautiful older woman. “She didn’t respect herself, so couldn’t respect him,” my guides said. He wrote love letters and poems. She laughed at him behind his back.

The young man caught the woman he worshipped in flagrante delicto with another man. In a fit of anger he attacked his rival, but was beaten badly. To make matters worse, the woman pretended not to know him, and they both accused him of being a burglar.

He spent years in a prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. At night, when the lights went out, he suffered terribly from physical and sexual abuse at the hands of older prisoners. Relief finally came when he died from TB after months in solitary confinement.

The memory of this lonely life and death manifests in many ways. Aware that terrible things can happen during the hours of darkness, Steve’s soul makes sure he protects himself at all times.

He told me how he’d always slept with a nightlight, and would lock the door to his apartment and the door to the bedroom itself. To say he slept with a nightlight might have been an exaggeration. He suffered from chronic insomnia, sleeping only a couple of hours every night.

Worse still was Steve’s discomfort with being touched. He couldn’t spend the night with his girlfriend. He had to be in bed alone and, needless to say, that wasn’t helping his romantic life one bit.

I spoke to Steve a few weeks after his session. In that short time, everything had changed. The first sign of a shift came after Steve took a quick nap in the late afternoon. He woke up in the early evening to find he’d not only left the bedroom door open, but the front door, too. “Not a smart thing to do in L.A.,” he remarked.

No longer afraid of what could happen during the hours of darkness, Steve’s soul has given up trying to protect him from threats that no longer exist. His sleep has improved and, for the first time, he’s been able to have his girlfriend spend the night with him. “Not only did she share the bed with me,” he said, “But she slept with her head on my chest. I never thought it was possible.”

All we had to do was remind Steve’s soul that its fears were irrational and based, not on anything likely to happen in this life, but on events in a completely different incarnation. Now it will recognize that falling in love is not automatically going to result in rejection by his lover, or that he’ll be vulnerable to attack when the lights go out.

Rejection is the most damaging experience any soul can suffer. In extreme cases it results in serious detachment from the world. The fear of rejection is the underlying cause of narcissism and sociopathic behavior. In most people, thankfully, the symptoms are more often just a sense of isolation or loneliness.

My spirit guides described Steve as “a sweetheart who needs to be loved.” Now that we’ve identified and overcome the underlying block to allowing another person to get close, he’s on the way to truly being the person he’s meant to be in this life.

DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!

The past-life fear of powerlessness is invariably the result of imprisonment or slavery. I spoke once to someone who had been locked up in a prison in South Africa in the early part of the 20th Century. In this life, Coleen is Caucasian and female. In that past life, however, she was a young, black man, who was arrested for burglary and given a heavy sentence...

Like many of my clients who have suffered similarly, Coleen has a past-life fear of Powerlessness. It shows up in almost everyone who has been imprisoned or enslaved.

Not surprisingly, one of the fear’s most noticeable resonances is a kind of “don’t fence me in” attitude. Coleen reacted with a laugh of recognition when I told her the motto of someone with a fear of powerlessness is “Don’t tell me what to do!”

“Just ask my husband,” she said. “He claims that if he asks me to do something, I’ll do the opposite. I have to admit he’s right.”

The karmic motivation, the impetus the soul manifests to help a person deal with the fear, is empowerment. The advantage of having this motivation is that it creates a greater than normal awareness of the importance of freedom.

Freedom is, in fact, the ultimate goal your soul seeks to reach by overcoming the effects of the fear. The downside is that a person in the throes of the fear can be inflexible, contrary and controlling.

As with any past-life fear, there’s a way to heal its effects and help others at the same time. The key is to help maximize freedom for others. You can probably see the potential difficulty when the individual dealing with the fear becomes controlling. It’s hard to honor another person’s need for freedom when you’re telling them what to do.

After a soul has encountered the limiting and distressing effects of incarceration, it will often react with panic when it encounters reminders of the past. In my book, The Transformation, I tell the story of a client who died of a heart attack in a past life after she panicked on being thrown into a tiny cell. She told me how, only a few days earlier, she’d told her husband she thought she’d have a heart attack if she were ever imprisoned.

I asked Coleen a couple of questions I’ll often bring up when I encounter someone with her kind of past.

“I don’t imagine you can watch a prison movie?” I said.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “Anything to do with prisons makes me cry.”

And, although I could guess the answer, I asked her, “”Do you think you’ll ever take a tour of Alcatraz?”

“No. There’s no way. I think I’d die,” she replied.

If you recognize this fear in yourself, you might want to be conscious of its impact on those around you. It’s one thing controlling your environment, keeping everything in its proper place, but quite another to control the lives of those around you. By learning to give another person autonomy, you help them to exercise self-empowerment, and that will lead both of you to your soul’s goal of freedom.

THE SOUL OF ANDERS BREIVIK

Anders Breivik, the man who recently killed scores of people in Norway has a soul like everyone else. The problem, and why he could callously take the lives of scores of other souls, is that his soul is severely damaged. He suffers from a past-life fear of rejection that has acted to detach him from the collective consciousness.

The fear is quite common, and not everyone who has it is a potential killer. Usually it will do little more than create a sense of not belonging, of being on the outside looking in, or making someone a bit of a loner.

But in extreme cases, the detachment causes a person to become narcissistic, sociopathic, and arrogant. Separated from their soul's guiding voice, they are unable to feel empathy for others. They live in fear of "the other," which, depending on their particular prejudices will manifest as anger toward those of other races, beliefs, religions, sexual orientation, or political persuasion.

The fear of rejection is caused by deep, soul-level trauma from a past life experience of abandonment, cruelty, and isolation. In many places in history, rejection by the community meant death. Imagine being a peasant in Medieval England and discovering you’ve contracted leprosy. You’d find yourself ejected from your community, with the loss of your family, possessions, and freedom, relying on charity for your survival.

Such a lifetime inevitably results in a fear of rejection being created. From then on, your soul will equate rejection with intense suffering. In subsequent incarnations, the fear may go virtually unnoticed until some incident rekindles the memory of rejection.

I would expect Breivik to have had some major triggers in his early life. He will have felt a huge loss of love when his parents divorced, and will have suffered deep hurts from seemingly trivial events that his soul would have perceived as terrible rejection.

These early emotional traumas would not have been enough to create the separation between his conscious self and his soul. But having a huge fear lurking in his past, they acted as triggers.

When a trigger is encountered, the soul feels tremendous anxiety, causing overwhelming emotions to surface. Then the conscious mind blocks the emotions for protection, leaving the individual firmly locked in the Illusion.

Living completely behind the Illusion, with no access to his conscience, Breivik created a worldview with little basis in reality.  Disconnected from his soul and the collective consciousness, he could act coldly and rationally (according to his twisted logic), and justify his actions using the same warped reasoning. Evidence for his delusional thinking and narcissism can be found in the pages of his 1,500 page manifesto.

Many people have asked me what such a young soul was doing in Norway, a Level 10 country. The answer is surprising. Breivik is a Level 10 soul. And the reason he doesn’t look it is because his soul has been sidelined by the fear of rejection.

Breivik’s violent attacks have been described as Norway’s 9/11. The cynic in me wants to say, “Oh, really? An inside job, followed by a cover up, two wars, and a clampdown on civil liberties?” There are similarities, of course. Both events have been traumatic, not just for the victims and the citizens of each country, but also, thanks to our collective consciousness, for people in all parts of the world. The long-term impact of Breivik’s actions on Norway’s collective consciousness will, however, be very different due to the population’s higher average soul age.

In the short-term, the difference can be seen in the way the government of predominantly Level 10 Norway has reacted in the aftermath of the attacks (which stands in stark contrast to that of the USA’s predominantly Level 5 government after 9/11). Instead of cries for vengeance, there have been appeals for restraint. Prime Minister Stoltenberg has called for “more democracy, more openness and greater political participation.”

Ultimately, the way to prevent acts of mass violence is to create a society in which the fear of rejection is not created or triggered. And that requires more caring and compassion, greater economic and educational opportunity, and greater respect for life’s less fortunate souls. Ironically, Norway is one of those societies, which is the reason recent events are such an anomaly.

Anders Breivik’s soul will feel tremendous regret about the lives he took. It will spend many future lifetimes balancing the karmic debt. His conscious self, however, will never experience remorse. Though, in theory, it would be possible to cure the underlying fear of rejection, in practice, a sociopath like Breivik will never genuinely seek help.  Imprisoned behind the Illusion, acting entirely from his ego, he sees nothing to be fixed.

THE LONDON BUS OF MISSIONS

In London they joke that you wait hours for a bus, and then three all come along at once.

The London bus principal applies to the mission of reliance. In my sessions, I can go weeks without seeing it, then I’ll come across it several times in the space of a couple of days. Then it’ll disappear again for a while.

In The Instruction I described a client’s son who was born with part of his brain missing. His mission of reliance is all about learning to rely on others; something he has little choice in. Having to depend on others is unavoidable for him in this life, and having this mission ensures he gets maximum growth from the experience.

Sometimes when I speak to a client with the mission of reliance, they’ll be calling me from a nursing home, or they’ll be confined to a wheelchair. One way or another, they’ll be forced to look to others for assistance.

But sometimes a mission of reliance turns up in someone who is not only able-bodied, but also fiercely independent. They have no limiting physical or mental issues. For this kind of person, the mission is all about self-reliance. They choose the mission before entering the physical body at the time of birth. And once here, they’re noticeably self-sufficient.

The child with a mission of self-reliance says things like, “I’ll do it by myself,” and insists on being allowed to make their own mistakes. It can be infuriating for the parents who want their child to look to them for support.

Once the child grows up, the most common characteristic is an inability to delegate or to ask for assistance. Recently, I asked a client with a mission of self-reliance if she had difficulties asking others for help. She laughed and said, “I can’t ask anyone for help!”

The “risk,” or negative aspect associated with a mission of reliance is “obduracy,” which is defined in the dictionary as: “difficult to manage; stubborn.” When Grandma won’t let social services past the front door, it’s possible she’s slipping into the risk.  When your child adamantly refuses to accept your help, even when things are clearly not working, it’s likely he or she is doing the same thing.

In a relationship, the person with self-reliance will often fail to incorporate his or her partner in the decision-making process. They’ll book a trip or start redecorating the kitchen without thinking to run it by their partner first. They tend to act autonomously, as if they have to do everything themselves.

At work, the mission can create problems when the individual who acts independently forgets to go through the proper channels. They might make decisions that are not theirs to make. And they’ll very often take on too much in the erroneous belief that no one else is going to do it as well as they can.

The underlying belief is: “The only person I can really depend on in this life is myself.”

Two things seem to unite people with a mission of self-reliance. The first is an expectation before coming into this life that they’ll have to pretty much “go it alone.”

That’s why I’ll see the mission in adults who grew up lost in the middle of a large brood of siblings, or whose parents were distracted by careers, alcoholism, mental illness, or divorce. In most cases, the child was left to his or her own devices, and the mission came in useful.

The second is a recent past life in which there was no one to turn to for support. Nine times out of ten, this will be a life as an orphan.

The past life as an orphan is an experience a soul can draw on to help bring self-reliance to the fore. A typical example comes from Margaret, a recent client of mine, who was abandoned by her parents in India, sometime in the early part of the 20^th Century.

In her past life, Margaret was a boy, and fortunate enough to be rescued from the streets and given work as a servant. Though he had a home and food, he was denied an education, and suffered continual abuse throughout this short and very disappointing lifetime.

Now Margaret has used her experience in India, along with the mission of self-reliance, to first deal with her chaotic upbringing in an alcoholic household, and then a string of abusive relationships. She has remained strongly independent, but at a cost.

The downside is that she has never learned to place her faith in anyone else. Choosing men she could never rely on has reinforced her belief that she has no one to count on but herself. Now that she recognizes the mission of self-reliance, and has explored her prior incarnation in India, the challenge is to find a more balanced relationship with a partner in whom she can depend.

When I tell someone who has been an orphan in a previous lifetime that a “spiritual act” that can heal the trauma from the past is to do anything to help abandoned children, the most common reaction is something like, “I’ve always wanted to do something to help orphans!”

One of my clients is healing her past through humanitarian work with young girls in the Dominican Republic.  Many others sponsor children in developing countries. Several have been drawn to Africa where they can make a significant difference in the lives of AIDS orphans.

At the time of writing, another of my clients is about to undergo surgery for a tumor on her brain. She recognized the mission of self-reliance as soon as I mentioned it, and acknowledged it would be quite a challenge for her having to depend on her husband during her recovery.

If you want to know if you have the mission of self-reliance, the markers are simple. Number one is a stronger than usual sense of independence. Number two is a reluctance (or even a complete inability) to accept help from someone else. And number three is that as a child you’ll have been unusually self-reliant.

During my client sessions last week, the London bus of missions turned up on three separate occasions. It will probably lie low for a while then reappear in a week or two with several of its friends, much like the Number 74 to Baker Street.

CHOOSING A MISSION OF LOVE

“I don’t even leave the room without telling my children how much I love them,” one of my clients told me. Another said she makes sure she tells her children she loves them “at least fifty times a day.”

What makes these individuals so openly loving is something called a mission of love. Chosen before they were even born, it gives each of them a lifelong focus on giving and receiving love. It puts compassion on the front burner. And it ensures that those around them never have to question whether or not they’re truly loved.

Missions give each incarnation a particular focus. By choosing several missions, your soul will seek out related experiences in this life. A person with a mission of control, for example, will be learning lessons in the responsible use of authority, while someone with a mission of change will be
continually seeking ways to improve themselves (and sometimes the world). A person with both might become the leader of a charity devoted to helping life’s less fortunate souls.

By choosing a mission of love, your soul has decided that you’ll be learning big lessons in compassion. It knows life may throw some major love-related obstacles in your path, and it wants to make sure you turn even the harshest experience to your advantage.

One of my clients was born into a family in which the father was disinterested and detached. He ended up leaving and starting another family. For Jessica, the youngest daughter, losing her father at the age of five was heartbreaking. He never called or visited. Her letters to him were never
acknowledged.

Having a mission of love, Jessica used the experience to learn the importance of love. “I would never hurt anyone the way my father hurt us,” she told me.

Like most people with a mission of love, Jessica is what might be called “touchy-feely.” She needs to both give and receive love. She finds it easy to say the words, “I love you.” Something she never heard from her father. Her soul has taken the harsh experiences of her childhood as a reminder of the vital importance of being able to manifest love.

You can tell if you have this mission by the extent to which compassion plays a role in your life, and how much you find yourself seeking ways to experience love. You will have come into this world with a plan to have a family as a way to express the mission.

If you don’t have family as a focus of your mission of love, you have many other options. Animals are here to teach us compassion. Children, too, are sponges for love. That’s why having a pet or helping children can be so satisfying. One of my clients, someone with no children of her own, has become a devoted aunt to her brother’s three kids.

One of the most satisfying ways to fulfill a mission of love is to get involved in volunteer work. Spiritual acts, those things we do to help to help other souls, allow anyone with a mission of love to find fulfillment.

As the Transformation elevates our consciousness, taking human beings in a new, more spiritual direction, you can expect to see greater signs of the mission of love. Increasing numbers of souls are choosing this mission as a kind of “default mode,” as opportunities grow for compassion to become the focus of an individual’s life.

If you want evidence of this shift in consciousness, just look at how easily you can express love compared to your parents. And if you have children, just notice how much more open they are than you or previous generations.

Love is your soul’s highest aspiration. A mission of love is a means to that end.

REINCARNATION, REACTORS, AND REDEMPTION

It’s old news, but I only just heard about it. Apparently the Chinese government, in an attempt to control the selection of future Dalai Lamas, has banned reincarnation. (At least without government permission.)

Good luck. You have as much a chance of banning reincarnation as you have banning breathing. It’s a fact of life, and it’s not going to go away because you make it illegal.

New Dalai Lamas are, by tradition, chosen after the previous holder of the title has died. A qualified successor is found by older monks, then taught what he (it’s always a boy) needs to know about the job. The system has worked pretty well for centuries. Now the Chinese authorities want to get involved.

The political reasons are so obvious they’re hardly worth going into. Since Chinese troops invaded Tibet in 1950, and the 14^th Dalai Lama left the Potala Palace for India a few years later, the Chinese government has gone to great lengths to suppress opposition to its rule. It has accused the Dalai Lama of being a political, not religious figure, bent on destroying Chinese national unity. Once he’s gone, they clearly don’t want another one like him.

Reincarnation is not new. It’s been around literally forever. It’s how we humans develop knowledge through earthly experience. Thanks to reincarnation, we come back time and time again until we reach a point at which we no longer need to be here. It may take well over a hundred lifetimes before our souls feel there’s nothing more left to learn.

If you’ve ever wondered about the deep divisions that seem to separate us, you’ll find that it all comes down to reincarnation. Younger souls, with fewer lifetimes behind them, tend to be more conservative, religious, and materialistic, while older souls, those with at least half their lives completed, lean toward being progressive, spiritual rather than simply religious, and less caught up in the race to accumulate wealth.

Tibet, a place conducive to old soul values, was invaded by younger souls from China. Level 5 souls are drawn to positions of power, and that’s why you’ll find them in charge of the world’s armies. In the case of China’s People’s Liberation Army, what you have are Level 5 leaders (following orders from predominantly Level 5 civilians) in charge of Level 3, 4, and 5 troops.  

With fewer incarnations in their past, younger souls have still to learn that violence solves nothing, and that invading other countries creates resentment, fuels nationalism and results, more often than not, in an equal and opposite reaction. Older souls, having more earthly experience, gravitate toward nonviolence, preferring diplomacy and cooperation to violent coercion.

As the soul ages, it gradually develops a stronger sense of concern for the future. Knowing it will keep returning to the Physical Plane, it wants to do its part to create a healthier and safer environment for future generations. And in its last incarnations, the awareness that we’re all connected pushes it to work for a better future, not out of concern for itself, but out of altruism.

The inability to truly connect with the future is a major reason younger souls will seek immediate gratification, with little concern for long-term consequences.

We have affordable food, cars, electronic gadgets, computers, and suchlike because the true cost is not factored into the price we pay. The hidden environmental costs, for example, are invariably ignored in the pursuit of profit.

Recent events in Japan illustrate this only too well. Without knowing how to safely store spent fuel, or what to do when the unexpected happens, profit-motivated corporations built nuclear reactors that now, after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, threaten not just Japan, but the entire world.

Building nuclear reactors on fault lines where major earthquakes are not just likely, but guaranteed, is a folly of the greatest magnitude. The San Onofre nuclear plant, just a short distance from Los Angeles, is supposedly secure behind a 25-foot tsunami wall. Its owners assure us that it can withstand a 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

The quake that hit Japan was 9.0. The tsunami that followed (according to the International Herald Tribune) was at least 76 feet high.

And in case you think that the industry knows what it’s doing, let me tell you that Bechtel, the company that built the San Onofre plant, managed to install a 420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel backwards!

Are these people insane? No, just greedy. There’s big bucks in the nuclear industry. Not because it’s particularly successful, but because we, the taxpayers, underwrite the overruns and, through massive subsidies, we make the whole business pretty much risk free. At least to its investors.

The true cost of nuclear power is impossible to calculate. Will the industry invest in hospitals and medical care for generations of human beings exposed to dangerous levels of radiation? Will Southern California Edison build a new city and pay to relocate the inhabitants of Los Angeles if or when the San Onofre plant blows? Of course not.

The true cost is not factored in because younger souls have a real problem seeing beyond this lifetime. Unaware that this is one of many lives, or that the laws of karma mean they’ll return to the “scene of the crime” to experience the effects of the problems they created, they may behave recklessly, focused on short-term profit and little else.

If you’ve been following the news from Japan, you’ll have realized that it’s hard to get an accurate assessment of the dangers from the damaged reactors. One expert who studied the Chernobyl disaster said of the current crisis, “There’s an awful lot of misinformation, I think, being put out.”

Since the same corporations (CBS, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC) that bring you the news also build nuclear reactors, don’t expect the truth to be piped into your home anytime soon. The truth might impact the bottom line.

The truth is that nuclear power is immensely risky. Not a single reactor would ever have been built if the public knew the dangers. Consequently, the industry relies on lies and cover-ups to push through its agenda. In Japan, the government and the nuclear industry created a short animé cartoon film in which a character called Mr. Pluto reassures viewers that plutonium, a highly toxic substance, is totally safe. Just to prove the point, he even gives a cartoon kid a glass of plutonium-laced water to drink.

In the U.K, back in the 1950s, the government assured the public that there was no danger from nuclear power. So confident were they in their assessment that they built the Dounreay reactor just about as far away from the Houses of Parliament as was possible. (It was housed just up the road from where I grew up on the most northerly and remote part of Scotland.)

Now the reactor is being shut down. Beaches around the area are closed due to contamination, and the owners have been fined for illegal dumping. During its lifetime, there was at least one major blast, and numerous accidents were covered up by the Official Secrets Act.

I asked my spirit guides for their take on what’s happening in Japan. “The Soul World is one-hundred percent opposed to the use of nuclear energy,” they said. “There have been many more accidents than have ever been reported. The risk to humanity from the use of nuclear power is considerable. The disaster in Japan has poisoned the food and water in the region and will impact humans for millennia. This is spiritually unacceptable. All energy should be renewable--without exception.”

I got a chill when my spirit guides said that there is a serious danger that nuclear accidents will result in the planet no longer being viable. In other words, we could lose the only home we have.

On the subject of the San Onofre nuclear plant, my spirit guides were emphatic. “The reactor should be shut down immediately.”

Currently, heroic souls, both young and old, are fighting to prevent the risk of catastrophic explosions from the damaged Japanese reactors. Many of them are balancing karma. In the past they might have been involved in the decision to build nuclear reactors. They might even have been a part of the Manhattan Project, America’s effort to develop the atomic bomb during World War 2. Now, thanks to their soul’s desire to understand the principle of cause and effect, they will be part of the solution and not the problem.

Reincarnation allows the soul to balance experiences, fix damage, and pay back debts from prior misdemeanors. It lets us learn from our mistakes. It makes personal evolution possible. Over many lifetimes, the process shifts our perspective from “me to we,” until we’re finally ready to move on.

Which takes us back to the Dalai Lama. This particular old soul is on his last life. He is finally ready to return to the Astral Plane (from whence he came) for the last time. The Dalai Lama, himself, has stated that he doesn’t expect to return after this incarnation. That, however, is no reason for the Chinese authorities to drop their guard.

Old souls will continue to reincarnate regardless of efforts to ban the practice. And in a chaotic world of greed and short-sighted materialism, it’s those wiser, older souls (like the Dalai Lama) who others will look to for guidance. All of which bodes well for humanity, but not so well for totalitarian and militaristic younger souls who will continue to see their authority challenged and undermined by those they lack the experience to understand.

The nuclear industry will need to watch its back, too. In the future, souls who’ve been negatively impacted by the effects of nuclear fallout will return to actively lobby against destructive energy policies, in favor of wind, tide, solar and other safer, more reliable, and sustainable forms of power. And there’s not a thing the nuclear industry (or the Chinese government) can do about it.

Ever wondered why you don’t remember your past lives? Well, try this exercise: Close your eyes and cast your mind back through this current lifetime. Focus on the deaths, disappointments, rejections, betrayals, failures, grief, and other assorted traumas. Feel all the sadness, anguish, and deep emotional pain you’ve suffered over the years. Then multiply those emotions by a thousand.

You really don’t want to remember your past lives--at least not in all their gory details. It would be debilitating. It can be hard enough just dealing with this life alone. But throw multiple tortures, imprisonments, and bereavements into the mix and you’d probably have to spend the rest of your life under sedation. Thank goodness for the amnesia that blocks us from easy access to our prior incarnations.

The veil between this life and those in the past is there to protect us. So much so that many of us are not entirely certain we’ve even had a past life. Yet, all of us are impacted in some way by what I call “past-traumatic stress,” the memories of negative experiences we carry from previous incarnations in the form of physical and emotional issues that appear to have no rational cause.

When it encounters a trigger, a reminder of pain and suffering from a prior existence, your soul reacts with panic. Unable to clearly separate one lifetime from the next (your soul is conscious throughout both life and death) it senses danger and does its best to get you to take heed.

Triggers remind your soul of the original incident that caused the fear. Your spouse cheats on you. In an instant you’re taken back to a time, 200 years ago, when you were similarly stabbed in the back. And if that original event led to premature death or some other misfortune, your soul will assume the same thing could very well happen again this time around.

It’s the triggers your soul associates with death that cause the most radical responses. Encountering a major trigger can be like stepping on an emotional landmine. One minute all’s well with the world, the next you’re in fight or flight mode with adrenaline surging through your veins.

By revealing the most salient details of a past life—the major incidents and traumas, and especially the circumstances surrounding their death—I’ve been able to help many of my clients overcome problems as diverse as the inability to ditch an abusive spouse, infertility, migraines, and low self-esteem, as well as a host of phobias, ranging from public speaking to flying.

Phobias are death-related fears; the result of unresolved traumas that your soul associates with sudden, premature, or violent death in an earlier incarnation. A fear of public speaking, for example, is a phobia of judgment, and stems from a death in which you’ve been judged. Perhaps you were condemned by a court of law and executed. Or maybe you were judged by the color of your skin or your race and exterminated as part of a genocide or ethnic cleansing.

Just recently, I spoke to a client in Norway about her fear of flying. This particular fear is actually several death-related phobias rolled into one and not, as you might imagine, a sign that the individual has previously perished in some kind of aviation disaster.

Anne had suffered from her fear of flying for almost thirty years. It started when she lived in the States and had to take a flight from Florida to Connecticut. ”We had really bad turbulence,” she told me. “I can’t remember any of it. I must have repressed it. But my cousin who was with me told me later how terrified I was. It started to get worse when I had my child, and has gotten worse over the years. It got to the point where I didn’t fly for over ten years.”

The symptoms Anne suffered were severe. She would experience a feeling of overwhelming panic. “I feel sure I’m going to die,” she said. “I have trouble breathing and my heart beats so hard and fast I can’t hear a thing around me. I can’t control my body—I shake all over. Nobody can talk to me or touch me. I might floor them if they did!”

It took one session to annihilate the fear, though neither of us knew it at the time. It was only a month later, when we had our next session together that I got the full story. A few days after we’d talked, Anne discovered she’d have to make a trip to London. In the past, the panics would have started as soon as she knew she’d have to get on an aircraft. This time there was nothing.

“I didn’t really expect anything to change,” Anne admitted. “I’d had the fear so long I thought I’d always have it. But when I was told I’d have to take this trip, I realized the symptoms had completely gone. I had no anxiety before or during the flight. I even slept on the plane.”

What happened to Anne was not particularly unusual. Many of my clients have remarked on how quickly a long-held fear can evaporate. Even the most stubborn of phobias will release its grip when your soul understands that its origins lie not in the present, but in the past.

Earlier this year I taught a workshop at Kripalu in Massachusetts. The subject was all about healing past-life fears. On the first evening, I was alone in the classroom preparing for my introductory talk, checking the microphone, making sure I had all the course material in the right order, and so on. I figured I had plenty of time to center myself with a quick meditation.

As I sat silently in the center of the room with my eyes closed, I heard the door quietly open. I squinted out of one eye to see a man walking softly toward me. From his clothing and physical appearance, I guessed he was Indian. I stood up and stretched out my hand. At the same moment, he raised both of his hands in a gesture of prayer. “Please help me,” he said, his voice quivering with emotion. “I feel like I am going to die.”

I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, have all weekend to work on whatever fears you have,” I said breezily.

Tears started welling up in his eyes, and to my astonishment, he dropped to his knees in front of me. I wasn’t sure how to respond. I glanced around the room feeling rather self-conscious, and was relieved to see we were still alone. “I am so sorry,” he said. “But I am desperate. I have come from India for you to bless me.”

“You’ve come all the way from India for this weekend workshop?”

“I came because I know you can heal me. I have panic attacks all the time. I know they are from a past life. I can’t live this way. Please, please help me.”

I took his arm and helped him to his feet. All sorts of thoughts were going through my head. What if I can’t help him? What if he has to go home in the same state of distress as he’s in now? What does he mean by “bless me?” Does he think I’m some kind of a guru?

The introductory talk went well. Kumar sat as close to me as possible, and I noticed how, every so often, he’d start hyperventilating, breathing rapidly through clenched teeth. He was clearly in deep distress, and my heart went out to him. But with thirty other people in the class, I worried that if I gave him all the attention he seemed to need, I’d be neglecting the rest.

When the talk was over, he waited until everyone else had left the room and once again fell to his knees with his hands together, begging me for help. I promised him that I’d talk to my spirit guides as soon as I could, but that finding the time was going to be a problem with my very full schedule. (In my work, there’s no such thing as a “quick question.” I have to get into “the zone,” then connect with my spirit guides to make sure I receive the information in enough detail for it to be of any use.) I suggested he get some sleep, and we’d talk in the morning.

Both he and I were suffering from jet lag, though my sleepless night on the red-eye from Seattle was clearly nothing compared to his marathon flight from a city halfway across the globe.  My guides told me to get a good night’s rest, too, and we’d talk when the time was right.

The following morning, Kumar was waiting for me when I arrived in the classroom. I’d been on the phone from the moment I awoke, and still hadn’t found a wide enough window to explore what had to be a particularly traumatic past-life experience.

He looked worse than he had the day before. We went through the same routine, and I told him he really didn’t have to get down on his knees to make his point. He apologized saying, “I am sorry, it is our way.” I promised that I’d have the conversation with my guides as soon as I could, and explained once more that uncovering the events of a past life in sufficient detail to create healing took time.

As part of the workshop, I explained to the class how each fear can be identified by its “resonances,” specific symptoms that come to the surface when you encounter a trigger of some kind. And every so often I’d glance at Kumar to make sure he was okay, and not displaying too many of his own resonances. He looked like he was doing okay, but at some point in the afternoon he started hyperventilating again. When it seemed to be getting out of control, the young woman sitting beside him kindly took him outside for a breath of fresh air. 

Five minutes later, there came a terrifying cry of anguish from the terrace outside the room. I paused for a few seconds waiting, perhaps, for someone in the room to shout, “Don’t worry! I’m a doctor,” before accepting it was my responsibility to deal with the crisis. I dashed outside to find the young woman standing anxiously by the door, and Kumar several feet away, holding his head in his hands and moaning with despair.

“I am in so much pain! You must help me. I haven’t eaten for days,” he cried. “Last night I awoke every hour with a panic. I feel like I am dying.” By now, all I could think of was getting to my room and calling in my spirit guides, but there were still several hours to go, and I didn’t feel I could abandon the rest of the class on his account. Being surrounded by a roomful of people was causing Kumar tremendous anxiety, yet he eventually began to breathe more normally. Finally, he told me he was ready to come back into the room.

When the class was over, I had to go straight to a book signing. I was relieved to see that Kumar had been taken under the wing of Tom, one of the participants in the workshop, whose calm and compassionate demeanor made him the perfect person to help soothe Kumar’s anguish.

Once the book signing was over, I had less than an hour before I was scheduled to deliver a talk to a large group of visitors to the center. I dashed upstairs to my room and brought my spirit guides in. What they said was this: “The life was in the early part of the last century. Kumar was a boy in New York. His father was a striking worker who took his son to the front lines of the dispute. When the police attacked the strikers, the boy was crushed to death in the panic. The father bore significant responsibility. He should not have taken the boy with him when he knew violence would occur.”

And that was it. It hadn’t taken more than five minutes, and my guides assured me that this was all the detail I needed. I wanted to tell Kumar as soon as possible. Fortunately, I didn’t have long to wait, since Kumar and Tom just happened to be taking a leisurely stroll past my room at the same moment I opened the door and stepped into the corridor.

“I have it,” I said. “We need to find somewhere quiet. As the three of us walked out of the building onto a small terrace, Tom said something to Kumar that revealed a high level of intuition: “I get the sense you were crushed to death in a previous life.”

We sat down and I went straight into the story. The moment I began telling him about his life and death in New York, I saw Kumar’s entire demeanor change. He straightened up a little and stared into the distance, as if he was remembering something from the past. On a soul level, of course, that’s exactly what was happening. The whole conversation lasted just a few minutes. Kumar rose to his feet and smiled. “Thank you, thank you,” he said softly.

I was surprised to see Kumar turn up at my lecture that evening. It wasn’t actually a part of the workshop, but a chance for other guests to the center to learn a little about my work, and there were twice as many people in the room as there had been earlier. He didn’t seem in the least bit anxious, and sat serenely in a chair at the back of the room until I’d finished.

Kumar was, once again, the last to leave. He handed me a small gift and pressed his hands together in the, by now, familiar gesture of prayer. But this time, instead of begging me for help, he couldn’t thank me enough. I gave him a hug—hoping it would encourage him to stay on his feet—and complimented him on his remarkable recovery. 

It was no surprise to find Kumar waiting for me in the classroom the next morning when I arrived for the final part of the workshop. I asked him how he’d slept. “I awoke several times with a panic,” he said, “But instead of going to here, (he indicated a level somewhere above his head), it stopped here (he lowered his hand to just above knee level.) I can eat again. I can sleep. I feel so much better. Thank you, thank you.”

On the first evening at Kripalu, I had offered a free session to the person who’d traveled the farthest to be there. To no one’s surprise, went to Kumar. So, a few months later, we had the chance to speak again.

“How are you feeling now?” I asked

“I am cured,” he said.

He told me how he’d felt so good after what happened at Kripalu that, instead of flying straight back to India, he took a trip to New York (his first visit in this lifetime) to spend a few days with a relative. Apart from one moment of mild panic in the PATH station when he got to Manhattan, he has had no further panic attacks whatsoever.

When I told Kumar about his traumatic death, it was as if his soul said, “Wait a minute, I get it! That was in the past and I no longer have to worry about being around people any more!” And, from that moment, the panics subsided.

Most of my sessions are by phone, so I’ve rarely had the opportunity to witness such a rapid healing take place. When clients have described overcoming their fears using words like ”immediately,” I’d assumed it meant later that day, or perhaps a week or a month later. And in many cases, it probably does. Not everyone undergoes such an instant shift and, of course, it’s going to be a lot more noticeable when you’re dealing with debilitating panic attacks than when you have a mild case of low self-esteem, or a not particularly significant fear of loss.

What I’ve found is that there are few fears that won’t loosen their grip on you in some way when the past-life cause is uncovered. Sometimes a fear will spontaneously disappear after a few months, while another will gradually dissipate over a period of time. Some are a little stickier to shift than others. And a lot will depend, naturally, on how strong the fear is in the first place.

By reminding your soul that whatever caused the fear in the first place is in the past, not the present it will recognize (to paraphrase Shakespeare) that “the past is not necessarily prologue.” Once Kumar’s soul understood this, it could breathe a sigh of relief and release the seemingly irrational belief that death was just around the corner every time a crowd of people gathered.

It’s been 19 years since Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Supreme Court. If you’re old enough to remember his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, you can probably recall how his onetime assistant, Anita Hill, came close to losing him his appointment after she revealed some pretty sordid facts about his behavior toward women.

Hill described how Thomas would brag openly about his sexual abilities, make suggestive comments about female staff members’ breast size, and discuss pornographic movies involving, amongst other things, bestiality and rape.

She also accused Thomas of making the infamous (and bizarre) comment, “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?”

Confronted by Hill’s allegations, Thomas reacted with fury, calling the process “a high-tech lynching for uppity black people.” Though Hill willingly took a polygraph test and passed (twice), Thomas declined. Which seems a little odd for someone undergoing a high-tech lynching. You’d think he’d have jumped at the chance to prove his innocence. (Very strange, too, to use the “lynching” analogy when Anita Hill is also black.)

Thomas went on to join the Supreme Court, and was one of the five justices responsible for the bloodless coup d’état in 2000 that put George W. Bush in office. He’s always been one of the most conservative justices, coming out against affirmative action, for example (despite having previously benefited from it), and in favor of the recent ruling that allows corporations to anonymously pour unlimited amounts of money into political campaigns.

For many years after the hearings, Hill was subjected to “character assassination,” a term used by author David Brock, when he apologized for lying about her in his book, The Real Anita Hill. He would later describe his role as having been that of a “witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine.”

Hill became a professor of law at Brandeis University, and eventually all the unpleasantness of Thomas’s Senate hearing became just a distant memory.

At least it was until Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, had to go and stir it all up again. In case you missed the headlines, “Ginny” Thomas called Anita Hill recently, leaving a voicemail message asking her to apologize to her husband. Here’s what she said:

“Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginny Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. Okay, have a good day.”

The call was made on the same morning in which Ginny Thomas’s name was plastered all over the pages of the new York Times for accepting huge anonymous donations to her conservative group, the Liberty Foundation. (The problem, in part, is that Ginny’s husband was one of the five justices who made the receipt of huge anonymous donations actually possible.)

But why, after nineteen years, would Virginia Thomas call Anita Hill? Didn’t she have enough on her mind that morning? What did she hope to accomplish? To untangle the confusion, I’ve asked my spirit guides to shed some light on the matter.

I’ll begin by identifying the major players by their soul ages and soul types. Before I do, however, I want to state as clearly as possible, that when it comes to soul ages, old is not inherently better than young, though young souls, particularly those caught up in the corrupting influence of traditional power structures are far more likely to be in thrall to the Illusion. From behind the veil of Illusion, the focus is always more on “me” than “we.”

Clarence Thomas is a Level 5 Hunter with a primary Thinker influence and a secondary Helper influence. It can be expressed simply as: Level 5 Hunter, Thinker, Helper. As a Hunter type, he will be task-oriented, ambitious, and like the hunter in the tribe, able to work alone or as part of a team. At this young-soul level, Hunters are about as mainstream as you can get. They respect the established rules, and seek always to maintain the existing status quo.

A primary Thinker influence makes Thomas analytical but not, at Level 5, an original thinker. The Hunter inflexibility at this stage is pronounced. You have as much chance of changing a Level 5 Hunter’s mind as you do of reversing Planet Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

His Helper influence will impel Thomas’s soul to be of service, though his Illusion-based identification with authority is unlikely to cause him to support the underdog.

Yet, that is, in part what his soul had expected of him. In this life, Thomas was born an African-American in Georgia. But it wasn’t so long ago that he got to see another facet of southern life as a “good-ol' boy” in the state of Mississippi. (It’s not unusual to have several lifetimes in the same part of the world. It allows a soul to undergo various lessons related to a particular culture.)

In his past life, Thomas was the son of a judge who persecuted blacks. And though he, himself, was not as culpable as his father, his soul’s life plan this time around was to redress the balance in some way. Sadly, the Illusion has acted to cut him off from his true purpose.

Through his power and influence he could have made his current life one of immense benefit to others. Instead, he has chosen the path of comfort and conformity, his focus firmly on the “me,” not “we.”

Anita Hill is a much older soul. She is a Level 9 Spiritualist, Thinker, Educator. At this stage of her spiritual evolution she has a strong need to do something bigger than herself--to influence others in a positive way. As a Spiritualist, she wants to do the right thing, and that’s why her personal integrity will always be of immense importance to her.

The Thinker/Educator combination is like having a double Thinker influence. It’s seen in academics, and those who enjoy both acquiring and imparting knowledge. It will make her fair and balanced in her judgments. I like Anita Hill.

Virginia Thomas, on the other hand, scares me! Not because she’s a Level 5 soul, or that she’s a Spiritualist, Hunter, Creator. What disturbs me is the way the combination of influences impact one another in someone so in thrall to the Illusion. Everything I said about her husband’s respect for the establishment applies to her, too. Her involvement in the Liberty Foundation may look a little fringe-like, but it’s rock-solid conservative at its core.

The Tea Party and organizations like the Liberty Foundation allow people like Thomas to pretend they’re mavericks, but the bottom line is that they’re doing very well just the way things are, and they don’t want it to change. (Why the less well off are drawn to these groups is a whole different matter, and one I’d like to address in a future article.)

Why Virginia Thomas gives me such an uncomfortable feeling is that when a young soul Spiritualist—especially one who is caught up in the Illusion--gets his or her teeth into something, they do it with the kind of righteousness you might associate with a fire-and-brimstone preacher.

From behind the Illusion, inexperienced younger souls shoot from the emotional hip rather than seeking out facts (which might weaken their resolve). They’ll reduce a complex argument to black and white, and fight for their cause (whatever it might be) with passion and conviction. Calling her husbands confirmation hearing a battle of “good versus evil,” is a perfect example of young-soul Spiritualist outrage at perceived injustice.

When you add the impact of the Hunter influence to the mix, you risk getting someone who is both righteous and intransigent. Great if it’s Mother Teresa of Calcutta, obsessed with the care of lepers, but a little unnerving if it’s the wife of your nemesis calling unannounced to give you an early-morning wake-up call with a chirpy, “Have a good day!”

Then there’s the Creator influence impacting the Spiritualist. What you’ll get in a person like Mrs. Thomas is a great deal of sensitivity. Unfortunately, when someone is caught up in the Illusion, that sensitivity is rarely extended to anyone beyond the individual herself. She will have been genuinely hurt by the “torment” her husband went through. (Much more than he, I would imagine.) And that young-soul Hunter in her is not going to forgive and forget very easily.

Does Ginny Thomas believe her husband is truly innocent of the charges made by Anita Hill? The answer is probably not. But since he’s not likely to offer her an apology, even behind closed doors, she has to vent elsewhere. So, what does she do? She blames Anita Hill for humiliating her husband, and that way she has somewhere to channel her frustration without upsetting the domestic balance of power.

Young souls respect authority figures. Lacking Physical Plane experience, they look to strong Gods to keep them spiritually safe, and powerful military rulers to protect their physical selves. As I describe in The Instruction, the tendency to identify with those in power is one of the main reasons why so many people will vote against their class or economic interests, and why the police will beat up striking workers, not their bosses.

There’s also a young soul tendency to see big differences everywhere: black and white, Christian and Muslim, straight or gay. They tend to see what separates us, not the humanity that unites us. This block to recognizing true equality extends to gender. Younger souls consider women to be inferior to men, which was evident in the savage way Anita Hill was attacked by the powerful males, like Senator Orrin Hatch, who supported Clarence Thomas’s nomination.

Whether she knows it or not, Ginny Thomas looks up to Clarence Thomas. In her soul’s eyes, he is a powerful man and that makes him her superior. And when he is perceived as foolish, weak, or ignorant, she will, by extension, feel foolish, weak or ignorant.

So, by calling to “extend an olive branch,” as she put it, was she truly seeking peace between the Thomas’s and Ms. Hill? Not really. Actually, not at all. Her message was passive-aggressive, to say the least, and, coming almost two decades after the event, not a little disturbing.

Calling Hill’s office number at 7:30 am on a Saturday was not with the intention of actually talking one-on-one, and if Thomas really wanted to bury the hatchet (somewhere other than between Hill’s shoulder blades), she might have considered writing a letter instead.

During his Senate Confirmation Hearing, Justice Thomas played the martyr when he complained of a high-tech lynching. In fact, he was afforded protection and privileges few others would have received. Witnesses who could have supported Anita Hill’s version of events were not allowed to testify, and in some cases were even intimidated. Evidence concerning pornographic movies was kept out of court.

Clarence Thomas stuck rigidly to his role as victim, rather than telling the truth and confessing to behavior that would have risked derailing his political ambitions.

Will his wife have the humility and courage to apologize to Anita Hill for harassing her? Or will she continue, like her husband, to play the martyr, convinced that she’s the one who’s being hard done by? Doing the right thing isn’t going to come easily, especially when her beliefs are reinforced by those around her.

Already Virginia’s supporters are blaming Anita Hill for over-reacting by going to the authorities with the voicemail message. She’s even been accused of being some kind of a publicity seeker. Yet, who do you think was responsible for the story getting into the papers in the first place? Ginny Thomas, of course.

Should Ginny Thomas have called Anita Hill? No. But Clarence Thomas should have. And here’s what I think he should have said:

“Good morning, Ms. Hill, it’s Clarence Thomas here. I want to apologize for everything I put you through. It was bad enough to sexually harass you in the office, but to lie about you under oath, and to keep that lie alive for almost twenty years is utterly shameful. I’m deeply sorry for having allowed others to question your honesty and credibility, and for all the pain my selfish behavior has caused you. I hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Have a good day.” 

If you have a past-life Fear of Failure, you might have real problems beginning a task. Then, once you do, you may become obsessive, feeling you must get it finished urgently. Some people swing between the two.

A lot of people with this fear are afraid of making decisions in case they make the wrong one. Nila is one of them.

In Nila’s recent past, she was a five-year-old boy named Manuel, living with his father and stepmother in Mexico City. He’d been put in their care after his birth mother had to spend time in a mental institution.

When Manuel was told he’d be returned to his mother, he was distraught. He didn’t want to leave the home he loved to be with someone who was volatile and distant.

Hoping to make himself sick so he could stay, he drank a toxic liquid he found in the garage. He burned his esophagus, and died in great distress with damage to all his major organs.

When I told Nila about what had happened to her, she saw the resonance with this life immediately. In fact, it couldn’t have been more obvious.

“When I get stressed, or when I’m around a chemical like Comet, I stop breathing,” she said. “My throat just closes up. Usually, I can get a little air through my nose, but one time I was in the shower, and I couldn’t get any air at all. I was hysterical—I thought I was dying.

“My husband has had to call 911 a few times, but after a minute or two I’d be okay, and he has to call them back. I cough a lot after, and can’t talk. I gasp and my eyes water; I’d be hoarse for a couple of hours. I’ve been to doctors, but they can’t find anything wrong.”

As I said earlier, a major manifestation of the fear has been a problem making decisions. Like a lot of people with a deadly mistake in their soul’s past, she fears the consequences of making the wrong decision. I asked her if she recognized that symptom.

“Do I find it hard to make decisions? I can’t make decisions! I hate to make them. I’ll just kind of surrender.”

Since the big mistake she’d made in Mexico had been to ingest the substance that killed her, I asked if she had problems with giving the kids medicine, or even taking remedies herself.

“I was so afraid of making a mistake, I used to write down everything I gave the kids. I was terrified they’d get kidney failure from too much Tylenol or something. I never take conventional medicine myself; just natural herbs and supplements.”

Nila had just left her husband. I asked her how she’d made that decision.

“It was tough,” she said. “I’d wanted to leave him for years, but I just couldn’t act on it. Then I found out he’d cheated on me. And he lied about it, over and over. I might have gotten over the unfaithfulness, but it was the lying that got me. I lost all respect for him.

“I tried staying together for the kids, but I got so depressed I wished I was dead. Then I realized that, here I was, doing it for the kids, but if I didn’t leave, I wasn’t putting them first.

“Now, after fifteen years of a bad marriage, I’m resurfacing, stronger than ever. I feel happy; I feel in control. I feel like a weight has been lifted.

I was in Seattle’s Children’s Hospital one morning, when a woman ran into the emergency room, looked anxiously around the room and called out in desperation, “My baby! She’s not breathing right. Someone please help her!”

Within seconds, a small team of emergency room staff swung into action. The doctor in charge told the nurse to hook the baby up to the monitors. Another doctor, the team leader, took the mother aside and asked her a few questions. “Sally’s had a fever for three days,” the mother told her.

“The baby’s crying, and breathing is erratic,” one of the staff said. “Call Dr. Stone immediately.”

Another voice said, “Her heart rate’s fast. Call a code.”

A young resident doctor did as he was asked, keeping his head down, and repeating every instruction he was given. Every so often he’d tell the rest of the team what he was doing, and how Sally was responding.

Dr. Stone called out, “0.2 milligrams Atrophine going in the I/V.”

Beside her the nurse turned to a tray of drugs and repeated, “Point two milligrams, Atrophine.” And a few seconds later, she handed the doctor a syringe, repeating the dose and medication again.

After administering the Atrophine, something was clearly still wrong. I could hear Dr. Stone’s voice above the urgent beeping and buzzing of the monitors. “Her heart rate’s above 200, and she’s not getting enough oxygen.”

The resident put a breathing tube down Sally’s throat. “I can see the vocal chords. Breathing tube placement is confirmed,” he informed the team.

“Her heart’s still not pumping properly,” Dr. Stone said. “We need a defibrillator to get the heart going.”

“Charging defibrillator. Everyone clear”

“All clear!”

The shock caused Sally’s tiny body to jerk.

Sally’s mother looked on anxiously as another shock was administered.

The resident doctor finally looked up from Sally and said, “Her hands are still cold, but I feel strong pulses and she’s reverted to normal sinus rhythms.”

Dr. Stone pulled off her mask, looked at the team, and congratulated them on a job well done.

At that point, Dr. Rubens, the program director, stepped out in front of the auditorium and said, “The simulation you’ve observed replicates the kind of emergency we see here every day. The SimBaby is designed to respond just like a real baby, and is operated by computer from behind this screen.”

I’d been invited by Dr. Rubens to join a group of journalists to watch the kind of simulation that’s used to train medical staff to better deal with real emergencies. What I’d witnessed was cooperation at its best. In this exercise, each member of the team was working with the others with only one goal in mind: to save the life of their patient.

In the past, a nurse was often considered a lesser part of the team than the doctors. There have been many times when a nurse has watched a doctor make a mistake, but has been too afraid to speak up.

In this system, the nurse is an equal. As an integral part of the team, she is not just expected, but obliged to speak out if she sees a mistake being made. In this respect, she is just like a copilot or navigator is to a pilot.

The reason for repeating each instruction was to ensure there was no misunderstanding that could cause a tragedy to happen.

As the human race moves into an era of higher consciousness, the awareness that cooperation is essential to our spiritual growth will speed up our progress. Working together toward a higher and more spiritual purpose will become our species’ default mode.

In the Transformation, personal fulfillment will be enhanced by a stronger sense of shared purpose, and the knowledge that when we work together to achieve a goal, we will be judged by our contribution, not our rank or status.

As Dr. Rubens put it to me, “When we work in open collaboration with others--when we support their goals, and they support ours, we all achieve more than we ever could alone.”

What I find most interesting about Michael Jackson is that the life he lived was not the one he intended.

When his soul planned this life, the intention was to be an entertainer, and part of a group. It was never intended that he should be come a leader, and thrust into the spotlight on his own.

It will probably come as no surprise to learn that Michael was an old soul. He was, in fact, Level 10.

His soul type was that of a Creator, his primary influence was Performer, and his secondary influence was Spiritualist.

Whenever you get the Creator and Spiritualist together you get someone who has one foot in this world, and one in the next. In Michael it resulted in a kind of otherworldliness. He must have found it hard to deal with the practical aspects of life, like balancing a check-book, and other activities that more grounded souls take in their stride.

Many people who sing or dance are Creator types. Being a Creator makes a person highly sensitive, and that trait was enhanced in Michael by his Spiritualist influence. It’s a combination I often see in people who are psychic. The Performer influence helped Michael to be comfortable in front of a crowd.

Gentle, easy-going, old-soul Creator types can often end up being used by more aggressive younger souls. Michael would have been an easy mark for those who wished to take advantage of his trusting nature.

In Michael’s missions for this life, I found he had the Paradox: the combined missions of Connection and Avoidance. This meant that he wanted the company of others, but he needed significant chunks of time to be with himself. Without sufficient “downtime,” a person like Michael can become totally overwhelmed.

He had Missions of Healing and Change, and though I usually see Change as an internal (secondary) mission, in Michael it was roughly a 50/50 split. It means he knew he’d touch people’s lives, and his soul would make sure his message was positive.

Michael was heavily impacted by past-life fears, particularly Intimacy, Betrayal and Self-Expression.

For a sensitive child, as Michael must have been, a disapproving look can cut like a knife. For Michael, the beatings and strict discipline he received from his father would have been devastating. A lot of Michael’s later quirks are undoubtedly related to having had his past-life fears triggered by his dad’s behavior toward him.

Having had his past-life fear of Betrayal triggered in childhood, Michael’s trust in adults was virtually non-existent. (Hence his preference for the companionship of children.) He felt let down, too, by his family’s inability to protect him from his father’s violence.

Like a lot of people with a past-life fear of Self-Expression, Michael was confident on stage when playing a role, but shy, and reluctant to speak his mind when having to be himself.

And like many people who’ve had a fear of Intimacy triggered in this life, Michael found it next to impossible to form truly deep, meaningful relationships. He suffered from huge, and often long-lasting pangs of loneliness. Looking to children for some kind of substitute for intimacy was, to say the very least, inappropriate.

According to my guides, Michael did not abuse anyone. He did, however, have huge boundary issues. He put himself in a position most adults would immediately recognize as inappropriate, never fully understanding how he might be perceived.

I don’t think anyone can be blamed for thinking Michael might have been a pedophile. A 40 year-old man having sleepovers with underage boys? You’d have to be some kind of innocent not to be aware of how bad that looks.

And that’s what Michael was: innocent in both respects. A naïve adult living in a bizarre child’s world, not guilty of the charges made against him.

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, naturalist and author of what is probably the most groundbreaking book in history, The Origin of Species.

Until Darwin, there was no scientific explanation of how we and all the other creatures on our planet got to be here. There were simply a host of different creation myths and religious views, the Christian one, of course, being that God created the world and everything in it over the course of a week.

In 1831, Darwin embarked on an exploration that would take him to some of the most remote parts of the globe. As a naturalist on board H.M.S Beagle, he collected specimens of thousands of plants and animals.

After a five-year voyage that took him around the world, Darwin returned to England. He continued with his research, going through his notes and specimens until he came up with a theory to explain what he'd learned.

As we all know, the theory of evolution demonstrates that all living creatures stem from the same source, and evolved over millions of years through the process of natural selection.

When The Origin of Species was finally published, it created quite a stir. Darwin became one of the most highly respected scientists in the world. He met some resistance from those who felt his ideas were inconsistent with their religious beliefs. His theory of evolution has, however, stood the test of time. Last year, the Church of England offered an apology "for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still".

When he died, Charles Darwin became one of only a handful of individuals to have had a state funeral, something normally reserved for royalty.

On a soul level, Darwin was old. In fact, he was well into Level 10. His soul type was that of a Thinker, which is hardly a surprise. Thinkers make great scientists, and frequently have a "collector mentality", a useful trait in someone who spent five years of his life collecting specimens.

Darwin had a Spiritualist influence. Imposing the Spiritualist on the Thinker was his soul's way to create an internal desire to "make a difference" through his work. His soul hoped to change the world by revealing the truth about it.

With his Creator influence, the first of two secondary influences, Darwin was able to enjoy the beauty of the world he explored. And he used his Educator influence to help synthesize and impart his knowledge.

As a gentle old soul, Darwin was appalled by the slavery he encountered on his voyage. He and Captain FitzRoy had huge arguments about it. At one point, Darwin was permanently banned from dining with the captain, although he was allowed back to the table when tempers eventually cooled.

On the subject of slavery, Darwin wrote to his sister, "What a proud thing for England, if she is the first European nation which utterly abolishes it. I was told before leaving England, that after in Slave countries: all my opinions would be altered; the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the Negro character."

Like many Thinker types, Darwin had a mission of Examination. Whenever you see a Thinker with both a secondary Educator influence and a mission of Examination, you're looking at someone who is bookish, methodical, and has an eye for detail.

It was in his caution regarding his feelings toward Emma Wedgwood, the cousin he'd eventually marry, that the dispassionate academic came out. Before proposing, he wrote two columns in his journal. The first was headed "Marry." The second, "Not Marry."

Under the "Marry" heading he wrote, "Constant companion and a friend in old age... object to be beloved and played with... better than a dog anyhow." In the second column, he wrote, "Less money for books" and "a terrible loss of time."

Emma turned out to be better than a dog. They married and were together until Charles died in 1882. Their only major source of disagreement was to do with their very different beliefs.

After the death of their daughter, Annie, from scarlet fever, Charles lost the last vestiges of his faith in Christianity and declared himself an agnostic. (Most atheists and agnostics are rational Level 10 Thinkers.) Emma, however, remained a devout Christian.

It says a lot about Charles Darwin that he recognized the discomfort his scientific findings created in Emma. He always tried to express his understanding of the world as diplomatically as he could, in order to respect her feelings.

Louis Braille

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille who invented his raised dot system of reading and writing as an improvement on “sonography”, a method used by the French military to communicate silently at night.

Using variations on just six dots, Braille showed how his system went beyond simply representing single letters, and also allowed for subtleties such as punctuation, numbers, and even whole words.

In 1952 in a speech to the faculty of the Sorbonne in Paris, Helen Keller described Braille’s invention as being like a magic wand. “The six dots of Louis Braille,” she said, “have resulted in schools where embossed books, like vessels, can transport us to ports of education, libraries and all the means of expression that assure our independence.”

The Braille edition of The Instruction is available through a company called Read How You Want, and is also available through them in their EasyRead Super Large print format.

You can find more information on their website here.