Comparing Ideas of Abraham and Robert Schwartz on Learning
This post answers questions from a reader named, Lindsay, who’s reading Your Soul’s Gift, by Robert Schwartz and really enjoying it. Before reading this book she was reading Abraham as channeled by Esther Hicks, and was having difficulty reconciling these two points of view. Abraham says you can be, do, or have anything you desire, and Rob talks about a spiritual pre-life plan that includes suffering to help you learn and grow.
The Council begins by saying you don’t pre-plan every minute of your life while you’re in spirit. You plan some lessons you want to learn, and some of these are very pleasant and some are challenging. If you’ve chosen a lesson that causes a lot of pain and suffering, you have the free will to change this spiritual plan while you’re in human form.
Abraham says you can be, do, or have anything you want in this life and The Council agrees. They also say this can sometimes take a lot of work and focus. Many people have problems doing this because they figure if they focus for a day or a week that’s enough to change things. Sometimes it takes a lot more focus and time. During this time you’d be learning patience, researching what you want, and getting into it in more detail.
When you’re in spirit and planning to come into a physical body the challenges you wish to go through as a human are difficult, but in the spirit world you think you can handle this. You think, let me see how I can turn this situation around and bring more love into it. And we in spirit, guide you any way we can to help you get through whatever it is you want to learn. In your human form things can be challenging, but in your spiritual form you are learning and growing. When you return to spirit you’ll be able to bring what you’ve learned back with you and all spirits will learn from it.
Robert Schwartz’s books deal with why we pick challenging experiences, what we can learn from them, and how these experiences will affect the people around us. Abraham is lighter. He says you’re in control and you can change your life. Just imagine what you want, see it, feel it, and you can create it. Both of these points of view work, but they are coming from different directions.
Not everyone plans to suffer through their life and not everyone plans to be happy all the time. Life is about experiences. Everything you go through, whether it’s a happy life or a challenging life, is experience to learn and grow from.
When you choose an experience that’s difficult and you’re in pain, you can change this by meditating and remembering who you truly are as a spiritual being. You have all the tools you need to get through this life and change it. If you want a difficult experience there’s a way to get through it. Meditate on this and see your situation the way you want it to be.
The purpose of Robert Schwartz’s books are to demonstrate more understanding of why people suffer. People who are suffering want answers. They ask why they’re suffering and why are they going through what they’re going through. Robert Schwartz sheds light on this. His information is very important to the people who need to understand why life is so difficult for them when they think they would never chose to create these difficulties.
When you read some of Robert’s stories you begin to realize they make sense. At one time or another, in one of your many lifetimes, you will have challenges. It will be difficult for you, but it’s because you wished to experience these challenges.
Listen to the entire audio recording of our session with The Council to hear all their guidance for Lindsay and the rest of us and let us know what you feel about it, or ask your own question.
If you like this post please consider clicking the LIKE button in the section following the recording to let us and other readers know. Thanks.
Why Am I Experiencing Life Long Depression and Anxiety?
This post answers questions for The Council from a reader named, Teri, who asks why her higher self chose to experience chronic lifelong depression and anxiety? Teri says that despite working very hard to be happier, to love myself, and to find meaning and purpose in my existence, I mostly feel ambivalent about being on Earth in a physical body. I never felt I was living a life that suits me. Life feels like just surviving.
The Council says if Teri has ambivalent thoughts about being here and feels like she’s just surviving, the energy your thoughts are putting out will attract more of these situations to you and make what you experience be not enough, sad, and depressed. Depression usually occurs when you don’t understand what’s going on with your thoughts and what you’re allowing yourself to create. There’s confusion about the direction you want your life to go in. Trying to live a life that’ll give you what you want isn’t happening because you don’t understand your depression is really being caused by you.
Stop and ask yourself what you’re thinking about when you feel depressed. Ask yourself why you’re not moving forward, and meditate on this for as long as it takes you to understand that your depression and anxiety are caused by no one but you. The reason you want to experience this depression is that you want to change it. You are in control of the direction your life goes.
In spirit you wanted to experience going off course so you’d read a lot OF books to bring you back on course. Not so much self-help books, but reading books on miracles that happen to people, like Dying To Be Me, by Anita Moorjani. You have experienced miracles in other lifetimes. In your current lifetime you went deeper into the depression and anxiety to change these, but also to show the people around you how to accomplish these changes.
Read books about people that have changed their lives and how they go about it. Read books about angels. These books will give you the push you need to begin to change your energy. Then more things will come into your life that you desire. As you become aware of this energy change you’ll create better and better situations.
Teri says her big dreams and desires are a constant source of longing and suffering because they’re unlikely to come true. The Council says thinking your dreams and desires won’t come true will all by itself keep your dreams from coming true. You have to learn to change these thoughts to where you’re dreams will come true even if you don’t know how they’ll come true.
Teri says she’s spent over 30 years trying to live by spiritual principles. She’s been focusing on and feeling ease and joy, trying to change self-limiting and negative beliefs, trying to manifest her dreams, practicing appreciation, and being of service to others. But this doesn’t change the fact that I still feel depressed and disappointed with myself and the life I’m living.
The Council asks if Teri experienced joy when she was doing these things, or were you doing them with the idea they’d change your life? When you do for others you should get a natural feeling of joy. If you continue to do for others and practice positive thoughts, focus on how you feel. Look for the joy. The more you can do where you feel joy, the easier it’ll become to feel better and better.
Teri says it’s like there’s a clear limit to my potential here on Earth. And The Council says it’s only the limit that you create with your beliefs and your thoughts.
Teri asks if it’s possible that her soul simply wanted to have the experience of hating her life? And The Council says a soul never wants to experience hating it’s life. Your soul goes into a reality and creates things that are challenging with the thought that it will be interesting. I’ll find a way to change this and I’ll feel love again. I’ll find a way to bring love into this reality.
You came into this life to have the challenge of depression and anxiety so you could have the experience of changing it to love. And every time you experience changing something that was difficult for you, the energy goes out to help others who also need to change something difficult.
Listen to the entire 8-minute audio recording of our session with The Council (below) to answer Teri’s questions and let us know what you feel about it, or ask The Council your own question.
If you like this post, please consider clicking the LIKE button in the section following the recording to let us and other readers know. Thanks.
If a Soul Chooses a Difficult Life, Does the Soul Enjoy Suffering?
This post answers questions for The Council from a reader who goes by the name, ImportantOrNotBlog, which are based on an earlier post titled, Some Interesting Questions About Spirit. ImportantOrNotBlog asks if a soul chooses a life of difficulty full of pain and hardship, does that mean the soul enjoys suffering?
The Council says when you choose, as spirit, whatever you choose before you come into your current reality, you always think you’re a spirit and you’ll know how to handle whatever it is you’ve chosen. But when you come into your reality, you forget how to handle what you’ve chosen and how to turn it towards love.
The purpose of of forgetting is to learn how to work with whatever you’ve chosen and be able to turn it around. When you do this, there is major soul growth. This process can be very difficult for some people. But the more you can accept the hardship you’ve chosen, and show patience, and learn to work with your situation and slowly see it improve, you’ll feel stronger about yourself knowing no matter what the obstacle you’ve created for yourself, you’re working on it.
It’s not that the soul enjoys suffering. It’s important to remember who you truly are as a spiritual being in a physical body. As you’re able to bring the feeling of spirit into your physical reality, the easier it will be for you to experience positive changes.
The Council points out that sometimes there are spiritual contracts to teach people around you by your example because in other lifetimes these people didn’t have the compassion you’re learning in this lifetime. Or maybe the people around you were sick in another lifetime and you took care of them, and now they want to experience the other side of the coin and they choose to care for someone in this lifetime.
There’s a lot going on with people who are experiencing difficulties, and these difficulties aren’t only for the person experiencing them, because these people have agreed with the others around them how each one of them will grow from these difficulties. It’s a great blessing for everyone involved with these difficulties to go through them concentrating on compassion and love.
ImportantOrNotBlog says they understand difficult situations are for soul growth, but they ask, to what end? The Council says there isn’t any end, there’s just growth. When you return to spirit and you see the lives you’ve touched, you want to do more. And so you create lives where you have the opportunity to do more so you grow and the people in your life grow. And the more love you bring into your reality, the less suffering there will be.
ImportantOrNotBlog asks The Council if souls exist at different levels? The Council says if you mean is one soul smarter than the other, they respond that in some lifetimes the answer is yes and in some lifetimes the answer is no, but we’re all growing and everyone grows at their own pace. We’re all trying to evolve into spirit so everyone can experience love.
ImportantOrNotBlog closes by asking if soul growth helps the soul get to a higher spiritual level? The Council says they don’t feel comfortable with the word, level, but they say soul growth will take you to a higher spiritual understanding. It brings more love into your world and you grow. And with this love, as it grows within you, you want to share this love, and you’re in a great hurry to get back into another lifetime so you can stretch that love and grow more from it. And you want to put this love into another reality so others can feel this love and grow from it.
Listen to the entire 7-minute audio recording of our session with The Council (below) to hear all their guidance for ImportantOrNotBlog and the rest of us, and let us know what you feel about this guidance.
If you like this post, please click the Like button in the section after the recording to let other readers know. Thanks.
What Past and Present Life Choices Cause Chronic Pain?
This post answers questions for The Council from a reader who goes by the name, InDespair, who says The Council mentions (in a different post) that we choose chronic pain to heal our beliefs from past lives that we’ve chosen to bring into our current lifetime. And InDespair asks, “What beliefs from a past life or lives would cause us to choose enduring chronic pain in our current life.”
The Council begins by saying that chronic pain isn’t always brought in from another lifetime. Sometimes it’s just an experience that’s wanted in your current life.
In another lifetime perhaps you’ve seen someone suffering and didn’t understand it, or didn’t show compassion and help the person who was experiencing it. You may choose to experience this chronic pain in this lifetime so you have more understanding of it, and going forward in this life and future lives, you’ll bring more love to any situation where suffering is involved.
Many people suffer sometimes and they wonder why, and question what they’ve done to deserve this suffering. The Council says they’ve come into this lifetime to have the people around them learn patience and compassion and to understand what you are going through. This pain is chosen to help another soul or family of souls learn from your suffering.
The choice to go through extreme pain, hardships, or anything difficult is always the choice of the individual. Each person planning their reality in spirit will plan what they desire to experience, or they’ll experience something to help another soul go through suffering and have more understanding of it. The experience of suffering is never something that’s forced on an individual.
Some people choose suffering to learn patience and love and to have some understanding of this experience. Many souls choose suffering to teach others, and there’s still learning on your part as you go through this. Is there a wish to turn the suffering around and heal it?
Perhaps you’ve agreed with other spirits that want to learn about someone going through pain and suffering, and you’ll tell them that you’ll go through this suffering for them. And they’ll learn from this to give you such love and understanding that you’ll have the strength and understanding to turn the suffering around and realize that love conquers everything.
The Council says you could’ve experienced pain in a prior life and didn’t know how to change it and make it better. And you wish to go through this pain in your current life to try and change it this time around. Sometimes in other lifetimes the others around you had this pain and you didn’t understand it or didn’t have patience for it. And so you want to experience this pain in your current lifetime to bring in more love and understanding about this.
The Council says it’s up to the individual whether they choose to heal this pain they’ve chosen. Many times a person will heal this pain when the spirit of another person has learned what it needs to learn from this suffering.
Bob asked The Council what’s in it for the person who chooses to experience chronic pain their whole life so others can have the experience of this. The Council says you are showing love to others by helping them experience what they need to learn and grow. In spirit when someone wishes to learn about suffering, and someone volunteers to go through this so others can experience it, it’s because we all love one another. You volunteer to go through this out of love for these people, even if this love isn’t conscious on a human level. And there’s always spiritual growth involved, even if the person going through the suffering isn’t aware of this growth at the time they’re experiencing it.
The Council say sometimes the person going through suffering becomes wiser about being a spirit in a physical body, having choices, and having the power to create in your life what’s necessary for you to also grow. It’s always a two-way street. Everyone learns from the experience of suffering. That’s the plan.
Listen to our entire 8-minute session with The Council to hear all their guidance for InDespair and the rest of us, and let us know how you feel about it.
What’s the Purpose of Nazi Holocaust Victim’s Suffering?
This post answers questions for The Council from a reader named Juan, who asks if the spirits of the Nazi Holocaust victims were aware they agreed to be worked, tortured, and starved to death?
The Council says the spirits of Holocaust victims all volunteered to come into that lifetime to play those roles. They knew in spirit before they came there was going to be a mass crisis to teach millions of people what happens when you aren’t in the vibration of love.
The victims knew ahead of time it was going to be a difficult life, but they also knew that lifetime would create opportunities for learning for every soul who lived during that time. And the history that was made will be passed down to future generations who weren’t there to experience it.
Many spirits who where Holocaust victims held the light for everyone who was there. Many came to be with the children who were victims. These brave souls had no idea what they were going to face in that lifetime, but they knew they’d come through it with as much love and caring as possible.
Juan asks The Council, if the Holocaust victims agreed to the horrors they faced, what was the purpose of going through this? The Council says the purpose was to bring in more love and caring and to learn that no matter how bad things get, you have the choice how you’ll face your challenges. The victims found a way to feel love and take care of each other, and to believe more in something greater than themselves. And this lesson spread throughout the world.
Juan asks if the Holocaust was due to a karmic debt and The Council says there is no karmic debt. It was just souls that realized in this world that’s being created, what can we do to bring more love in?
Juan asks what possible benefit can come from the atrocities of the Holocaust? The Council says the benefit that we learn from the experience, never forget what happened, and learn you are so much more than what you think.
Juan’s last question is, what is the purpose of coming to this material dimension to suffer pain, anguish, and agony. The Council says we don’t come to Earth to suffer these things; we come to have a good time. And even though we go through horrible times, when we decided to go through this in spirit we weren’t afraid of it because we knew we’d be coming home to spirit again. This is something we’re going through to learn from. How will we help each other out while we’re here and what will we take back to spirit with us?
The Council closes by reminding us that you always come into the Earth reality with the thought that no matter what happens, I will find a way to show love and change the reality to a more loving one. What can I do to face these challenges? Will I remember who I really am as a spirit in a physical body? Will I choose joy and love? Will I be compassionate no matter what I’m going through? And when I bring more love into this reality, when my time there is over, I’ll have done what I set out to do.
Listen to our entire 12-minute session with The Council to hear all their guidance for Juan and the rest of us on the Holocaust, and let us know how you feel about it.
Challenges, Suicide, and Spiritual Growth
This post is inspired by a reader named Cait, who says she thinks about ending her life every day because it’s so painful, and she asks The Council if she’s able to break a pre-birth contract she made in spirit once her incarnation has begun.
Cait begins by asking The Council, what if the path your soul chose to achieve spiritual growth actually inhibits your spiritual growth? And The Council says this is never the case. They say your spirit works out whatever challenges it wants to meet while it’s in the physical body, and while this can seem difficult from a human point of view, your spirit knows exactly why it has chosen what it has chosen and what it is trying to accomplish.
The Council says when you begin to accept you are spirit in a physical body and believe you can learn with less difficulty, and can focus on the way you wish your life to be rather than the way it is, this is the beginning of change. You always have the power to turn your situation around. When you plan in spirit whatever you want to experience, it isn’t written in stone. You create every minute of every day, and so you can create something new.
Cait says she thinks about ending her life every day, and while The Council says there is no judgement in spirit for taking her life, they explain there’s growth she can experience from going through these challenges. And if she chooses to pass on these challenges in this lifetime she’ll be postponing them until she chooses to learn from them in a future lifetime.
Cait comments that her life is harmful to her soul, and The Council replies that her soul will never create circumstances that will harm her spiritually. It creates these situations for her to grow from them, to change them, and to bring love into them.
Cait asks how she can get out of her current challenge without killing herself and The Council advises her to refocus her attention and read as many books as possible on spiritual growth that can teach her who she is as a spiritual being.
Cait finishes her comment by saying her higher self doesn’t appear to care about her or her suffering. And The Council says Cait has no idea the love, caring, and support that spirit has for her if she’ll open up to it, even if she only pretends to feel it at first.
The Council recommends Cait read a book written by the spirit guide, Emmanuel and Pat Rodegast, and the energy from this book will help her turn her life around.
The Council tells Cait she’s come to this feeling of desperation and wanting out on purpose to experience an extreme situation so she can find a better way through this. And The Council says she will find it.
Listen to the entire 11-minute recording of our session with The Council to hear first hand all their guidance for Cait and anyone else who’s having difficulty navigating their current circumstances and is looking for a better way to experience them.
Why Must I Go Through Hardships for My Soul to Grow?
This post is about a question from Asher who asks why it’s necessary to go through hardships, troubles, accidents, pain, loss, and more in order for his soul to grow? Asher wishes he could enroll in a cosmic school where spiritual growth is achieved through positive experience.
The Council says it isn’t necessary to go through hardships. They say they’re a choice. They ask Asher if he knows it wasn’t his intention to create a life he finds difficult. His intention was to create interesting experiences, and then by remembering who he is as a spiritual being and looking at these experiences in a more loving way, they become more loving and much easier to experience.
When Bob asks why Asher doesn’t seem to feel this love, The Council says it’s because he doesn’t understand his purpose for experiencing these challenges and who he is as a spiritual being. He doesn’t remember he created these experiences so he could have the fun of learning to change them into more loving experiences.
The Council says when we remind ourselves we are spirit in a physical body, we automatically begin to look at our experiences more lovingly, even if it’s difficult in the moment. And they promise as you meet each challenge and bring in the vibration of love, this vibration makes it easier for others to have a similar experience.
Asher says he feels sad that only the soul benefits from these spiritual lessons and not the human. The Council asks Asher if he realizes the spirit, soul, and human are one, and spirit will not grow unless its human part goes through these challenging situations. They say when the spirit grows it’s because our human part has gone though an experience, changed the way we think about it, and learned from this experience.
The Council reminds us there are many good things we’ve chosen to experience and to be grateful, and this will help change your vibration for the better.
The Council says Asher has created these hardships so he can learn how to go through them, experience them, and change them into more loving experiences by thinking better feeling thoughts.
For those of us who have a difficult time believing we are spirit in our physical bodies The Council says this is the #1 reason many spirits have come at this time to make connections and get the message out to remember who you are as spirit. They say even if we just pretend we are spirit, eventually we wonder what this means and understanding gradually becomes possible.
Why Go Through Pain to Have Your Soul Grow?
This post is inspired by a question from Asher who asks The Council why it’s necessary to go through pain and hardship in order for our soul to grow? He feels sad human beings aren’t capable of anything else and he wishes to enroll in a cosmic school where spiritual growth is a positive experience.
The Counsel says Asher is already in that school and it’s not necessary to create situations where growth only takes place through suffering and struggle. He has the choice to change his life through his beliefs.
If Asher feels the only way his soul can grow is through suffering, that is what he’ll create. But The Council says we come to this world to grow in love, not through suffering. And as we stay in the vibration of love, less struggle will occur.
The Council advises Asher to take his greatest power, which is choice, and change the way he sees this. In response to his comment that humans aren’t capable of anything else The Council replies that humans are also spirit. They are one and whatever you go through, you learn from it together.
This session is only about 5-minutes long, but there’s lots of valuable information in it. Listen to what The Council has to say for the full story.
Copyright ℗ 2015 Bob & Cynthia Dukes
Understanding Your Spiritual Intentions for Your Human Experiences
This post is inspired by a question from Susan, who wants to know why some people (particularly a man she knows) experience childhood abuse or other types of trauma and end up with addictions, unemployed, and homeless; and other people (particularly Susan) move past their childhood trauma and take advantage of opportunities to improve their life.
What humans and spirit consider improvement can be very different
“But what you do not understand here is that your idea of what he needs to improve his life, and what his spirit needs to improve his life, is totally different. Is that understood?”
–The Council
(Text formatted like above throughout the post represents quotations from the session)
This was intriguing and we spent most of the session getting a better understanding of what The Council meant by this. The result was some impressive insights into the relationship between who you are a human being and who you are as a spiritual being. As an added bonus The Council offered some fascinating insights into the subject of multiple realities.
Audio recording
The audio player below (if your browser supports it) contains a recording of the session with The Council to answer Susan’s question. The session is divided into multiple audio tracks listed below the audio player bar. To listen to the entire session select Track #1. The rest of the tracks will automatically play in order. Text above the play bar indicates the track that’s playing (or ready to play if the recording is paused). Copyright ℗ 2014 Bob & Cynthia Dukes
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You have no idea what spirit wishes
The Council continued from their previous comment above:
“So if you [Susan] feel that he has had several opportunities to change his life or perhaps somehow deal differently with his abuse, yes that would make sense to many. But you have no idea what his spirit wishes.
“And what we see here is that it is his wish to be in this lifetime and to experience this addiction, to experience the abuse from what you would consider an unhealthy attitude toward what he has come through.
“What you do not know is that he has experienced this before (or as we would say, now [but] in another reality) and he has experienced it where he is dealing differently with his abuse and (perhaps) handling it in (what you would consider) a much better way [in his current reality]. Is that understood?”