At the end of 2011, journalist and author Christopher Hitchens crossed over to the Astral Plane after a long illness. As an atheist (or antitheist, as he described himself), the existence of another plane of existence must surely have come as a surprise.

Most atheists are Level 10 Thinker types. Hitchens was no exception. From their left-brain vantage point, such intellectual old souls lack a natural awareness of a world beyond. Since religious dogma doesn’t speak to them, and they don’t trust in the existence of anything that can’t be scientifically proven, they tend to throw the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater.

Hitchens began as a leftie and ended up as a vocal supporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With a self-assurance bordering on arrogance, he regarded those with contradictory opinions with contempt.

In some ways, Hitchen’s arrogance was a result of his soul type and influences. He was a thinker (intellectual) type with a primary educator influence (the journalist) and a secondary leader (authority) influence.

Which combined to make him a know-all with a strong sense of his own importance. And also made him fascinating to listen to. His debates with Scottish politician George Galloway are hugely entertaining (even if one does have to fight the urge to give the pompous twit a well-deserved slap from time-to-time).

He may have been an atheist, but Hitchens was plagued by demons. Not the Old Testament kind, but unhappy and malevolent souls from the Astral Plane.

Alcohol played a significant part in Hitchens’ life and in his shift in politics from left to right. In a near permanent state of inebriation, his protection from malevolent Astral Plane entities was compromised. They could come and go acting to block him from the small still voice of his own soul.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: not everyone who’s in spirit is spiritual. Demons, or malevolent entities, are aspects of damaged souls. These embittered souls have suffered severe damage on the Physical Plane, almost always as a result of injustice and betrayal.

They’ll sometimes attach themselves to those whose defenses are down, often as a result of substance abuse. And though there may be emotional or physiological reasons to explain the shift in personality you see in many addicts, demons play the most significant role.

For Hitchens, the impact of his demons was not particularly dramatic. They blocked his empathy, but not his intellect. But for some people, demons create radical shifts, causing the life of the pub to go home and beat up his wife, or for two people who’d never give one another a second glance when sober to spend the night together after the office party.

You can see demons at work when Grandpa, who never uttered a harsh word in his life, tells the nurses to go @##$%, as the Alzheimer’s causes his defenses to drop. Or when someone with a chemical imbalance hears voices urging him or her to harm another person.

I’ll miss Christopher Hitchens very much. The world is suffering a dearth of great debaters, these days, and intellectuals of his caliber are hard to find. Though I disagreed with him on many points (especially his criticism of Cindy Sheehan), his opinions were always thought-provoking, even if they did offer an object lesson in sophistry and self-righteousness.

I expect, however, that he’s been learning a little humility in these last few weeks as he gets used to the fact that life doesn’t actually end with the body’s last gasp. Once he’s settled in a bit, I’ll see if he’s up for a debate with me.

In the meantime, check out this fantastic battle of wits between Hitchens and Galloway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLKQGwVkczg

You might think the police would identify with the ordinary people, the ones they’re supposed to serve, and protect their rights and interests. Yet we don’t see images on the news of police officers firing rubber bullets at the bankers, the 1% whose greed and malfeasance has brought financial chaos to the country. Instead, they focus their efforts on silencing those of the 99% who protest the injustice.

The reason has a lot to do with soul ages and soul types. Police forces in most cultures are predominantly younger souls. The majority are Hunter, Leader, and Helper types.

Younger souls look to those in power (providing they feel those in power share their core values) as superior to them. Their innate response to the wealthy and influential is to obey their wishes.

They seek order and stability, and they regard older souls who go against social norms as deviants who must be controlled. When they’re sent into action against those their “superiors” identify as threats to the status quo, their knee-jerk response is to obey.

Hunters, Leaders and Helper soul types are motivated to serve. Which is no problem when they serve the needs of the tribe, but a big problem when they take the side of one faction of the community against another.

Traditionally, the rich and powerful have manipulated younger souls to protect them. They use them as proxies to control what citizens think or say, and to prevent them from turning up at their doors wielding pitchforks and flaming torches.

But things are starting to change. As the Transformation gets under way, and a new level of consciousness makes itself felt, the 1% is at serious risk of having their loyal minions turn against them.

In Portugal, off-duty police officers have turned up at demonstrations against austerity measures, to find themselves held back by their on-duty colleagues.

That sort of situation is unlikely to happen here anytime soon. The 1% is careful how they control the media and its message, keeping the focus on the usual scapegoats lest the truth get out. And they’re not above using a little bribery to keep their defenders loyal. JP Morgan Chase recently donated $4.6 million to the NYPD.

But eventually the shift in consciousness is going to make it harder for the 1% to control the police they look to for protection. And then, perhaps, we’ll see off-duty members of New York’s finest take the side of justice and join the 99% in their protests against the crooks who have shafted the people of this country for their personal gain.

What we’re seeing in Occupy Wall Street is a genuine democratic uprising. Unlike the Tea Party, this is not a Fox-backed astroturf group venting its rage in all the wrong places. It’s a bunch of citizens who have come together to protest the way a small group of money-grubbing sociopaths has trashed the economy while stuffing their pockets with undeserved wealth.

Younger-soul Tea Partiers wave their fists at what they perceive to be the enemy: immigrants, a black president, socialism, taxes, federal spending, and suchlike, demanding to see a birth certificate, an end to taxation, and for the government to “keep your hands off my Medicare.”

Supported by the G.O.P. and its subsidiary, Fox News, the Tea Party has been used to promote an agenda acceptable to those in power, keeping citizens at each others’ throats, and distracting its supporters from the real threat to their future: Wall Street banks and multi-national corporations.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is made up of older souls who can see through the propaganda and lies to recognize the true enemy. And I use the term “enemy” deliberately. The bankers have done far greater damage to the country and its citizens than any terrorist or world power.

OWS has no leaders and no agenda. And it doesn’t need one. It’s enough to get out there and let the powers that run the country know that the status quo is no longer acceptable.

No status quo. No quid pro quo, either. Pundits on Fox might ask, “What are their demands?” There are none. And what would they look like, anyway? The 1-percent is hardly likely to redistribute the loot if the other 99-percent agree to pack up their placards and go home.

In time, the energy behind the current protests will help galvanize other groups to press for much needed reform. Of course, it may trigger strong resistance from the young-souls who think they run the country.

As the world moves into a more spiritually connected future, expect to see an equal and opposite reaction from those in power as they endeavor to consolidate their wealth and power.

But be certain that positive change is ultimately inevitable. The older-soul thirst for greater equality and justice will eventually trump the younger-soul greed and arrogance that has caused so much unhappiness and resentment in this country and others.

When the world loses a spiritual old soul like Steve Jobs, it impacts us all through our collective consciousness. We intuitively recognize those souls whose purpose is, at least in part, to inspire us, and when they pass, it affects us deeply.

Recently, my spirit guides described to me the difference between the computer industry’s two leading lights, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

Jobs was a Level 9 Spiritualist, with a Creator primary influence and a Thinker secondary influence. He was on his last life at Level 9, which is always a busy one. Anyone at this stage in their soul’s journey is cramming in experience as they prepare to move up to Level 10. And, like many “spiritual-not religious” Level 9 Spiritualists, he was a Buddhist.

The Spiritualist is inspirational and has a desire at this level to impact the world, to make a difference, and to find meaning in what they do.

With a strong Creator influence, Jobs had the advantage of deep creativity and intuition. It would have given him easy access to the right side of his brain. And his secondary influence, the Thinker, imbued him with curiosity and intellect.

Bill Gates, on the other hand, is a Level 7 Thinker with a primary Educator influence and a secondary Leader influence. All left-brain. And being 50-percent of the way through that level, he’s all about making his mark on the world.

At Level 7, many souls feel the pressure to be innovative. It’s a strange time, when younger-soul drive collides with older-soul introspection to push the creative envelope. In this case, in a more intellectual manner.

The biggest difference between the two men can be seen in their companies’ products. From the boxes they come in to the advertising used to sell them, Apple’s are all about creativity.

Microsoft’s products (in the early days particularly), looked like they were designed by intellectually-centered geeks for the benefit of other intellectually-centered geeks. (No offence to geeks. Where would we be without them?) They were not so much user-friendly as functional, and traditionally more geared toward Thinker and other linear-thinking types.

Apple’s innovative use of icons was a major step in making computers user friendly to right-brained soul types like the Creators, Spiritualists, and Performers.

Years ago, writer and Apple fan Guy Kawasaki said that when someone told him his company used Microsoft’s computers he’d answer, “Aren’t you creative?” The prevailing attitude was that PCs were fine for CPAs and financial analysts, but hardly the hardware of choice in an ad agency or animation studio.

There’s no right or wrong. We humans are multi-faceted creatures. Our preference for one system over another is much to do with our soul type. Just as Apple’s and Microsoft’s products are a reflection of their respective leaders’ personalities.

–Sen. Orrin Hatch, Level 3 Soul

The recent execution of Troy Davis is a shocking reminder that for all our amazing technological advances and great achievements, America is not the civilized society it might claim to be. In a truly civilized society there is no death penalty.

Troy Davis was innocent. But regardless of his guilt or innocence, cold-blooded execution is an uncivilized way to treat any soul.

In a state like Georgia, with a preponderance of younger souls, the death penalty is still used, despite having fallen out of favor in most other parts of the country. Older soul countries gave up on it a long time ago.

Executing criminals makes Level 3 and 4 souls feel safer. For Level 5 souls, however, it’s often more about power, control, and obedience. Older souls may sometimes support the death penalty (as long as it’s not being applied to them), but when they do, it’s more a question of cultural influences, detachment from the collective consciousness, or fear.

The Supreme Court, which once stated that actual innocence is not a reason to overcome the death penalty, failed to help Troy Davis by referring the case back to a lower court. Pity he wasn’t Troy Davis Inc. If he’d been a major corporation he’d be a free man by now.

The karmic consequences will be significant for those involved in this abuse of the judicial system. Anyone who could have stepped in and impacted the outcome will bear responsibility, as well as those who were directly involved. In fact, the person who administered the injection will have less karmic debt to deal with than someone like Barack Obama, since he could have exercised tremendous influence in the case.

Though it’s hard to see anything positive resulting from Troy Davis’s death, it has helped focus attention on the injustices inherent in the judicial process. In this current period of Transformation, as our souls shift from Stage 3 consciousness to Stage 4, the murder of Troy Davis will create a spiritual ripple that will help ultimately to end the death penalty altogether.

One way to help give meaning to this shameful event is to become a vocal opponent of the death penalty. Help show the world that those who conspired to kill Troy Davis don’t represent the views of us all. You can add your name to Amnesty International’s Not in my Name Pledge here.

The majority of those behind the attacks were young souls, mostly Level 5. There’s always a tendency for inexperienced young souls to fall into exploitation, the risk associated with that level. They take what they want, literally unable to imagine the long-term consequences.

Many of the perpetrators were sociopaths, suffering the effects of past-life trauma, particularly the fear of rejection. At its most extreme, this fear blocks empathy and the ability to relate to others.

Cut off from the soul’s voice of compassion by the Illusion, the barrier between this plane and the next, these narcissists became obsessed by their own narrow agenda.

Being surrounded by ambitious and aggressive younger souls like themselves, their warped beliefs evolved into self-righteous zealousness.

Such deeply damaged individuals can lie, torture, and destroy without compunction or shame. In the last ten years, they have spread their violence and narrow-minded ideology to many parts of the globe, killing and maiming innocent civilians as they carry out their preconceived agenda.

The world is far more dangerous place than it was ten years ago, and it’s easy to despair when you see how much the planet has changed in such a short time.

But our souls are evolving rapidly, and over the next few generations, higher values like love, freedom, justice, and peace will prevail. Leaders who destroy and exploit others will be replaced by more worthy individuals, and the purveyors of violence will no longer end up in positions of power where they can so tragically impact the world.

And perhaps, one day, justice will be served, and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and all the other perpetrators of 9/11 will be tried, convicted, and imprisoned for their crimes against humanity.

I told a client once that she’d been a boy in Yugoslavia during World War II. He had been captured and tortured, and was eventually shot in both legs.

I asked her, “Do you have any unexplained pain in your legs?”

She was emphatic. “No,” she said, “Nothing.”

I was surprised. My spirit guides had told me specifically to look for leg issues. I didn’t want to pester her, but I felt there had to be something.

“What about your ankles or your knees…”

“Oh, my knees are shot to pieces,” she said. “I haven’t been able to run since I was twenty.”

(And, yes, she really did say, “shot to pieces.”)

If I go through my notes, I can find an example of an Achilles body part in at least one session every day. Today I spoke to someone who, in a previous life, had been hit in the face with a rifle butt and lost all her teeth.

“I Imagine you have extremely tender teeth and gums,” I said.

“Yes, extremely sensitive,” she replied.

The day before, I worked with someone who died of pneumonia in a recent lifetime. In this lifetime, she has bronchitis annually, and when I told her how she’d died, she revealed that she’d started feeling pain in her chest several minutes earlier.

We looked at a second life-one in which she’d been beheaded. “Do you have neck problems?” I asked.

“I visit my chiropractor a lot,” she answered.

I’ve asked many clients if they have unexplained abdominal pain. (It’s usually the result of a shooting or stabbing on the battlefield.) Two of them told me they’d gone as far as having exploratory surgery, but doctors had found nothing.

And that’s something I hear a lot. A person who has been hanged will have neck and throat problems. Usually they’ll avoid turtlenecks, necklaces and constricting bed sheets. When I ask them about it, they’ll say something like, “My doctor thought it was my thyroid, but they couldn’t find anything.”

I’ll be posting further examples of Achilles body parts to give you an idea of the broad spectrum of physical ailments that can be traced back to events in the past.

Since then, however, dozens of other reasons have been put forward to explain the violence.

Pundits on the right have blamed a culture of welfare dependence, rap music, and multiculturalism. Those on the left point to social deprivation, lack of opportunity, and heavy-handed policing.

From a soul point of view, the problem begins with the past-life fear of authority, which is triggered by feelings of victimization. When authority is abused, it causes the powerless to feel rage.

The other major issue is the soul’s need for meaning. When opportunity is denied it creates resentment. When people have nothing to live for—nothing that gives their life purpose—they feel they have nothing to lose.

Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson, two of the wealthiest and most privileged individuals in Britain, know what the angry masses need: more policing, water cannons, a clampdown on Twitter, and powers for local authorities to evict council tenants involved in rioting.

Nothing yet about creating meaningful jobs, sharing the wealth, anything that might actually solve the underlying problem.

To put it simply, a fear stems from a life in which your life plan was compromised, while phobias are directly related to a traumatic death.

Say you have a past life in which you’re accused of sorcery and put on trial. Such a terrifying experience will create fears that will inevitably turn up in later incarnations.

One of them will be a fear of authority. In this life, your soul will be mistrustful of people in authority, such as superiors at work, men in uniforms, or even the government.

If your trial ends up with you being sentenced to death and hanged, then a phobia will be the result. In this life, a phobia of judgment will give you a heightened concern about what people might say or think of you or, more commonly, a fear of public speaking or stage fright.

Anytime you find yourself being judged, your soul will be instantly taken back to the time of your trial and execution. Fearing (quite irrationally) a repetition of events, it creates a fight-or-flight response to get you out of the situation.

These are symptoms of a past-life fear of Loss. It’s created when you have a lifetime in which you literally lose everything, or undergo severe trauma related to loss.

One of my clients was a farmer in 18th Century Silesia. He came home from a day at the market to find his wife and children had been slaughtered by invading soldiers. Another was a physician in France who lost eight of his ten children to scarlet fever.

These traumatic experiences resurface as a fear of Loss when a trigger is encountered in this life. For older souls, losing someone near and dear will do it.

When the fear is associated with a life of poverty, it manifests as a heightened concern that there will never be enough money to really feel safe.

The soul-level belief is that bad things can and do happen.

For a younger soul, or someone more caught up in the Illusion, actually having money triggers the fear. It might not be a problem when that person is starting out in life. But once they begin accumulating wealth and possessions, the fear kicks in. Now they have something to lose.

An old soul with a fear of Loss usually prefers to have few possessions. “The less I have, the less I have to lose,” is the underlying belief. They show signs like being a minimalist, or clearing out clutter every couple of months.

For the younger soul the belief is that enough is never enough.

The fear of Loss is the reason why the affluent give less to charity than the poor, why multi-millionaires continually lobby for more tax breaks, and why a company like General Electric can get away with making a profit of $14 billion and pay no taxes.

Even old souls will feel anxiety when they have something they could potentially lose. The big difference is that it’s more likely to be triggered by an event like having a baby. For a parent, the fear manifests as an irrational worry that something awful could happen to their child.

The greed that has become such a hallmark of our society is a sign of the prevalence of the fear of Loss, and would be nowhere near as noticeable if there was greater equality and a stronger social safety net.