Free of Charge

SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIPS
The plus and minus of being in love, seen from the Other Side.

by Peter Watson Jenkins

About this book Human chemistry and Source Physical attractionspiritual meaning Twin flames, true or myth? The complex life of soul mates Partners in abuse Feeling the way out of danger Loving the departedtransition In control of your own life The life purpose of love

~ Celestial Voices ~ 1

Spiritual Relationships
2011 Celestial Voices, Inc. Published by Celestial Voices, Inc., 13354 W. Heiden Circle, Lake Bluff, Illinois 60044 Peter Jenkins <contact@mastersofthespiritworld.com> All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the express prior written permission of the publisher. Brief quotations may be used for review purposes only.

Dedicated To those people who believed they had met their Twin Flame, but were sadly mistaken. Acknowledgments My thanks are due to Toni Ann Winninger and the Masters of the Spirit World for their comments on the contents of this booklet and their helpful suggestions; and to my wife, Sonia Ann Ness, for her careful editing. Sources Material for this book has been my reading of the books of the Masters of the Spirit World, and their many answers to questions posed by fans worldwide and published on their blog, http://www.ReincarnationGuide.com. Very precious and helpful to me have been personal conversations with our friends and guides at Home on the Other Side. 2

ABOUT THIS BOOK I've been working since 2003 with the Masters of the Spirit World, a large group of spirit guides on the Other Side. I've been talking with them, asking questions, discussing book projects, interviewing both the whole group and individual souls. All this has been possible because they had called my colleague Toni Ann Winninger, a former criminal prosecutor from Chicago, Illinois, USA, to become their channeler. It's possible that I also got a little push from the Masters into working with them, but I'm not psychicalthough, when I'm writing, I know that they help me. The Masters have had an Internet blog since 2007, and more recently a Facebook page, "Reincarnation Guide." They have helped us produce a number of books, including a guide to their teaching, Exploring Reincarnation. To safeguard their work from unwanted interference, we set up a publishing house, Celestial Voices, Inc., where neither their channel (Toni), nor the editor (me), nor our copy editor (my wife Sonia), would tell them what to say! This book was shared with the Masters for their comments because we always want to make sure that their teaching is represented fairly. I've been monitoring a whole slew of questions emailed to us from all over the world, sent by the Masters' fans, often on the subject of love and relationships. I thought some explanations in a little book might be of assistance as people keep asking the same questions, and the Masters have so little space to give their answers. I hope you enjoy reading what I have to say and find it helpful. If you don't understand something, please email me, and I'll consider revising this book as we go along. Peter Watson Jenkins

HUMAN CHEMISTRY AND SOURCE Old MacDonald had a farm... and on that farm he had some pigs, cows, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, miceand every darn one of them had babies. People call the place where spirits/souls live the "Other Side," or the "Fifth Dimension," but I say "Home," with a capital "H." There, souls float around in amorphous masses (little clouds) of energy. They don't have a bodyno mouth, nose, earsand with no gender, they don't have any sex organs either. But when souls come down to planet Earth, they have to take a gender for that lifetime. Over many lifetimes, souls experience being both male and female. Back Home again, they are able to revisit the people they have been in previous lives, so they can have a genuine sense of masculine and feminine characteristicsbut at Home they don't breed with one another because souls don't have children; only we human beings do. Despite speculation by some "experts," there really is no sexual activity back Home. They don't need it. They are clouds of energy, usually without body shape, surrounded by the beautiful energy of unconditional love, which, they say, is much more fulfilling. The main reason for this interesting difference between our spiritual Home and planet Earth is the nature of the place in the universe where souls all live. Home, as I just said, is a place of unconditional love, a perfect state composed of the essence of Source energy, the creative force in the universe. Source is not a person but pure energy, and all souls are equally of the same energy because, when they were "broken off" from Source, its energy became individualized in them. Souls are not "children." They are independent fragments of the same energy as Source; they share its nature and are in constant contact. It is important to point out that, when incarnating (taking a body) on our planet, the genderless soul enters into a hormonedriven mammal with a big sex drive to enable it to mate and 4

reproduce. Physical love is based on hormoneson what we sometimes like to call the "chemistry of attraction." Source's unconditional love is the essence of each soul, but we must understand that it is the human body, not the incarnate soul, that is chiefly involved in mating; souls are not directly involved in creating, or responding to, biochemical attraction. What we learn from this difference between souls and human beings is that we should never mistake our body's animal attraction for its spiritual "destiny." The human mind seeks to elevate this "heavenly" experience of falling in love sexually into something it wants to believe is eternal. In one sense we are perfectly correct to judge love in a spiritual way, but human beings often fall into the trap of grossly overestimating the spiritual worth of a specific sexual attraction. Human mating is essentially a reproduction-enabling game, even though, at its best, it really does feel rather heavenly.

PHYSICAL ATTRACTIONSPIRITUAL MEANING Women are more likely to see destiny, spiritual purpose, divine blessing, from the outset of a heavenly relationship. They are much more conscious of relationships and also of their parental hopes and feelings. When things go wrong in a love match, women in general are more reluctant than men to break with their partners, often because they have given the mutual bond a strong spiritual overtone, plus a duty laid on them to nurture and sustain the relationship at all cost. Men can also be very romantic, but in general they are not very consciously seeking a spiritual relationship when they are first attracted to a female. For males, their powerful inner sex drive makes the physical conquest of the female, and not family or spiritual togetherness, their main compulsion. They are much less likely than women to express a spiritual connection as their understanding of the relationship. 5

Just as brief love affairs are seen as having failed in spiritual terms, often people's sexual timidity causes their relationships to be unsatisfactorythey may be scared by the raw animal quality of sexual encounter, and baffled by finding themselves living in the house and sharing the bed of a relative stranger every day. Human chemistry is a fragile thing for many, and no amount of our spiritualizing romance can overcome our awkwardness in bonding and our frigidity in relationship. Both men and women are subject to the misfortune of "true love" running cold. Such coldness may well lead one or both to look elsewhere for sexual fulfillment out of sheer frustration. Stress, inexperience, lack of chemistry, and past errors being repeated by mistake, all may conspire to drag a relationship down. And, as we will see, that's only one aspect of failure in a relationship. Our spirit guides look on humans' sexual bonding, falling out, separating and divorcing, in a very matter-of-fact way. We are here on planet Earth to learn lessons in negativity, and a very large proportion of these lessons are derived from our problems of relationship. Sexual encounter is delightful, and marriage may be truly fulfilling, but this area of our lives is frequently fraught with negativity, difficulty, frustration, and abuse. This is not accidental. Bad things happen to us even though we know ourselves to be good people, because we ourselves have planned in advance to suffer them. More on that issue later in the book.

TWIN FLAMES, TRUE OR MYTH? Of all the mistakes made about relationships, few are more frequently repeated than ideas about "Twin Flames." All that I can hope to do, whenever that happens, is to explain the situation, so that one more intelligent person (like you, of course!) will understand the facts. The myth is now so widespread as to be funnya lovely myth that will never, ever go away, that's for sure! 6

Twin flames are not mythical creatures. They really do exist. Here's how: Source broke off fragments of its energy to become what we call souls, which were first detached in pairs. At that point there was a conscious bonding between the two halves of each pair. Their relationship is described by our guides as akin to that of human Siamese twins. Each feels truly incomplete without the other. The bonding of the twin flames had the effect that, when they were eventually separated, they retained a sense of isolation in being apart, matched by a equally strong desire to be reunited not only in the purely energetic realm of Home, but also on Earth, or elsewhere, when they were away. In practice, if ever these twins do meet while they are incarnate on Earth, their desire to bond is overwhelming, and they are in grave danger of being overly distracted. They will neglect the work they came to do and, having discarded a whole lifetime of experience in favor of being only with their twin, they will subsequently need to repeat their (wasted) carefully chosen tasks in another life. Twin flames are usually very careful to ensure that they do not meet on Earth. The Masters indicate that such meetings are very, very, very rare. Twins may choose to live on separate continents, or incarnate in separate generations. They do not want to hand themselves failure in their mission to Earth because of the certainty of extreme distraction. Such is the power of twins' mutual bonding. Nevertheless, claims that "I have met my twin flame" come in emails to me thick and fast. However, there is often a sad additional comment: "Unfortunately, something has gone wrong." The perfect relationship isn't all that perfect after all. But, they complain, wasn't this potentially perfect relationship destined by heaven to be theirs? To start with, if you have a relationship that is failing, clearly it has not been made with a twin flame. Twin flames may be so locked in a spiritual/physical embrace that they forget to live the 7

life they planned, but their relationship with each other is "purrfect." So, if you have any doubts whatsoever about your mate, forget the twin idea. No, you have not met your twin. If you actually think hard about twins, the myth we love to repeat always sees the twin as belonging to whichever sex we desire physically the most. But, remember, there is no gender, no sex, no male or female at Home where we belong. None! So the real twin in any given human lifetime is equally likely to have chosen to be the "wrong" sex that we don't desire. Most of us would not like that at all. Part of the difficulty we have is that people use the description of their twin flame in the same way they talk about soul mates. They get that wrong as well! There is a persistent desire to ascribe our love relationships as belonging to our destiny as people. It's the "made in heaven" syndrome. We are so terribly sure that there really is a Mr. Right, and there surely must also be a Perfect Woman. Sorry, some relationships are planned in advance, but love matches ordained from above are not part of our human experience. We make all the choices ourselves. A nice universal matrimonial agency arranging things doesn't exist, and so we are not destined by any fate, good, bad, or indifferent. However we do know that the universal law says we are always free to choose our path, whether at Home or on a mission to Earth or one of the other planets. The law about Freedom of Choice is entirely opposed to predestination. There is no Mr./Ms. Right. You are in charge of your life, and the people whom your hormones helped you to meet are in charge of their lives as well. Buyer, beware! Yes, twin flames do exist. It is what we say about them that is largely myth. You can feel the absence of your better half from your life in moments of isolation and loneliness. But please don't expect to meet your twin down here. Were that to happen, it would be wonderful and all-consuming, but that life of yours would probably be thrown into a shambles. Nobody wants to throw away a lifetime of valuable experiences, though it does 8

sometimes happen. Of course, if you were to disappear with your twin like that, your spouse and the kids would never understand why you went away so suddenly, and you would be faced by their anger. You'd probably lose your job, friends, and lots of things you enjoy. So don't even think of meeting your twin flame until you get Home (with a capital H). If you are one of the very, very, very few who do meet up... please let me know what it's likeif you have the time or the inclination to write, which I doubt. Still, nobody will give up the Twin Flames myth; I know that!

THE COMPLEX LIFE OF SOUL MATES Who are soul mates and why are they important to us? The Masters of the Spirit World have been quite precise about our spiritual companions. What soul mates mean to us is the subject of much human speculation, a lot of which is also incorrect. We need now to put the record straight. The Source's action of breaking off millions of souls has now ceased because, apparently, the trillion souls now in existence are enough. The manner of detaching souls, two by two, as fragments or bundles of Source energy, was a continuous process. Despite the huge numbers of spiritual energetic entities involved in this creative action, each soul maintained an individual identity and felt a degree of closeness with souls detached immediately before and after it, recognizing the nearest as part of a sort of family group. So, each soul counts the soul group, to which it feels a sense of belonging, as totaling about 144 souls. This is not a discrete group but is counted by the individual soul itself as half (71-72) of those fellow souls who came into separate being before it did, and half (72-71) of those who came after the detaching of that individual soul. All souls are equal; all souls are loving; all 9

souls share equally the essence of Source. But in terms of sheer familiarity, the 144 is considered the overall group a soul will work with most closely. This number of soul mates is further broken down in size: some 18 to 24, coming from anywhere within the entirety of the 144, work from time to time with the soul both at Home and on Earth, and about half a dozen souls frequently incarnate in the same lifetime and work closely together. Being a soul mate, from a practical standpoint, mainly means choosing to be teamed up together over many incarnations. The grouping of souls seems to follow an approximate mathematical progression: about six close souls partner us (often more than six are on Earth when we are, but are not actively involved with us); a group that varies from 18 to 24 is our main back-up support system; and 144 is our total soul group. Members of our advisory group, or Council, numbering 12 souls, are rarely drawn from our soul group. They are a mix of archangels, masters, and experts in various areas. Soul mates at Home may also act as spiritual guides during a lifetime, giving advice to an incarnate soul. This is only a general look at how souls work togetherthere are many variations. In the way things work out, an individual may sometimes come for a life on Earth without any of its soul mates being in contact for most or even the whole of that human lifetime. At other times there may be several soul mates involved intimately in the souls major life lessons. The biggest role that soul mates play is when they incarnate together and agree in advance (the Masters use the more formal word "contract") on a course of action they will each follow for mutual benefit during their human lives. This contractual situation is of fundamental importance in our understanding of the intimate roles soul mates play in each other's lives. One of the guiding principles in the universe is that each soul has total 10

freedom to choose its own path at all times. Souls are fragments of Source, the essence of which is unconditional love and whose creativity is expressed in the existence of the universe. When we think of ourselves as souls, we need to put aside the concept of our being inferior to a great divine being who is both creator and judge. In fact, sharing in equality with all other souls, we are all part of the creative force, the energy of Source. Source never judges what souls do. This universal freedom of choice rule applies no less to a soul's time during an incarnation than when at Home. But this freedom raises an interesting issue. Since all souls are forever free to decide what to do, how is it possible for a soul to depend on any other soul to give practical assistance when needed? Well, it is a truly loving act to promise help for another soul. When making an agreement between two or more souls in advance of the incarnation taking place, each soul freely undertakes to bind itself to the course of action it has chosen. This does not mean these agreements are always fulfilled exactly as planned, but souls' willingness to take part in a contract helps to make such planning successful in a universe that has no organizational hierarchy, and no enforcement of contractual performance. What are these contracts about? We discover, for instance, a soul who needs to have encouragement from a soul mate to help it escape the effects of a serious illness. The world-famous Olympic gold medalist for sprinting, Wilma Rudolf, was infected by polio as a little girl. She was in leg irons and could hardly walk, but with the help of her mother and an older sister she grew stronger, took off her leg irons, learned to run, and eventually ran like the wind! If it had not been for the mother and sister helping little Wilma, we would never have heard of her. The helpers had agreed in advance with the soul who became Wilma. They had bound themselves by contract to do that job. 11

Less successful in its outcome, a contract was made to help a famous sportsman. It started when Babe Ruth, the U.S. baseball star, was a little kidone of eight childrenwhose parents kept a tavern. He ran wild, stealing, playing hooky, chewing tobacco, and getting drunk on whiskey. At the age of seven his parents sent him away to a Catholic boarding school for boys, where Brother Matthias, the Prefect of Discipline at St. Mary's, advised and punished him to encourage him to recover from his wild ways. The treatment was only partly successful. Babe Ruth, who was famous as a bad boy on and off the baseball field, did not learn his lesson well. When we interviewed him he said about the soul of Brother Matthias: "He's actually a soul mate of minea soul mate being someone who has the most impact on you, and with whom you make a contract." Already we have seen soul mates being involved, over many lifetimes, in working together. We have seen them playing helpful roles in the human lives of their spiritual companions, more or less successfully. It seems not unreasonable for us to anticipate that soul mates will be the people we choose as those who give us the greatest helpas parents, children, husbands, or wives. Not unreasonable, you say, but there is more to it than that. PARTNERS IN ABUSE As you read about Wilma Rudolph and Babe Ruth, you may have noticed that the soul mates involved with them were there to help them better themselves. Theirs was a positive reason enshrined in the contract they drew up in advance of coming down to Earth. That is far from being the end of the story. Most contracts involve a negative element. Babe Ruth was meant to be helped by frequent caning to be a better boy. At the time, however, he must have thought it was a nasty thing for Brother Matthias to use violence like that. Most people in our society would agree with him. Thrashing isn't fashionable today in many societies. 12

In a short essay it is not possible to give enough room to every issue involved in spiritual relationships. A detailed account of the reason why souls come down to Earth is contained in our book Exploring Reincarnation. Let me simply say that souls come to Earthwhich is a duality, possessing an equal amount of positive and negative energiesin order to experience negativity. By doing so they hope to realize more fully the nature of their own essence of unconditional love. Most soul mates involved with us in mutual contracts are here with us on Earth in order that either (1) we will give them a negative experience, or (2) that they will give us a negative experience, or (3) that we will both be involved in giving each other a bad time, or (4) that both of us will partner each other when meeting a negative experience coming from elsewhere. They may also act as sounding boards, teachers for us to understand how to work through the lesson, or stimulators to get us past a stalemate. Earth is a training camp for souls. The training is to help us evaluate and handle negative experiences. So we need people we trust who will give these lessons to us, and they need people they trust to provide the same. Bad things happen to good people because their souls have planned them in advance. We all have amnesia of what went before we arrived here, so we don't remember doing the planning. Sometimes in hypnosis people are assisted to see themselves planning for a future life, but in general this planning stage is well and truly hidden. What sort of experiences do we count as negative? Well, it might be an earthquake where thousands of souls have agreed in advance to be involved. It might be a revolution where millions of people take one side and millions more are opposed to them. This is all agreed in advance by the souls involved. But it may be more intimatea bullying father, a rebellious child, an abusive husband, a jealous wife. Negative experiences come in all shapes and sizesand probably the most frequently 13

experienced nasty things that happen to us take place at work, in our wider family, or in our most intimate relationships. Here's the bad news. Because we rely most intensely on the small group of soul mates who are with us frequently in life after life, when we meet them on Earth in a human body we have an instinctive recognition of their spiritual energy. They are familiar to us, and often attract us romantically quite strongly because of our bonding with them in the spirit. But these, our friends, are also the very people we trust most to deliver negative experiences to us. So we fall in love with them, call them our twin flame (!), claim we are destined by God (!) to be together with them, and are supremely sure they are simply perfect for us. And we are quite right: they are "perfect" because we have already contracted with them to make us cope with abuse, alcoholism, philandering, depressive illness, cancer, sleep apnea, or what have you. They are our handpicked foes. "I was very attracted to him when we first got together. But now he shouts at me, orders me about like a slave, and even hits me. What should I do?" I'm not saying that everyone who falls in love with a soul mate is going to be bitterly disappointed. Genuine love matches involving soul mates do frequently happen. But a large proportion of blissfully happy marriages are between souls from different groups and have nothing to do with our being close to someone within our group of 144 soul mates. One could regard powerful attraction as a danger sign. But no! When you think it over, it is not really a danger sign if we asked someone to give us a negative experience: that's what we are here to undertake. But wait! In some cases the attraction could be dangerous, and our lesson could be discerning whether a relationship is in our best interest. It is mainly that we should go inside to examine our circumstances, see how we really feel about them, and discover what is happening to us, and why. 14

I said in the beginning that sexual attraction is a great deal to do with chemistry: that we are two mammals mating, using the hormones, and pheromones, and social tricks, and beguiling words, and pre-rehearsed quotations of poetry, and plentiful supplies of chocolates, booze, and comfortable beds, to capture a mate. Does that then mean there is no real spiritual element involved in falling in love and marrying? Of course there is! I'm not saying there is no such thing as love. The choice of mate is made by our higher mind. It is a soul thing. But it is easier for the soul to choose one of its own soul mates because they feel so familiar, even though that soul's contract may say that our mate must give us a bad time. However, when describing the impulse you feel to enter into a loving relationship with someone else, you should know that it is incorrect to ascribe it to a destiny ordained by God or the angels in heaven. This is because we always have freedom of choice and we are never compelled to fall in love with this person or that. When we meet our mate it may even be that despite all the negative possibilities I've mentionedwe made that choice together as souls before coming down to Earth.

THE WAY OUT OF DANGEROUS LIFE LESSONS We will restrict our discussion of life lessons at this point. In this essay we are not discussing world or even hometown social or political movements, or war, or a dictatorship, involving lots of souls contracting together. We will concentrate solely on a single relationship between two lovers who are thinking of marrying, or two spouses (with or without children and other relatives in the home). They met and were strongly attracted. Perhaps they could hardly believe that they had so much in common. Maybe they admitted the reverse: that their attraction was of opposites. Time has gone by and the days have become months or even years. Then one of them says: 15

"He is so boring. He comes in from work and falls asleep until it is bedtime. He never talks to me." The wife has been working hard, as well, at her part-time paid job and looking after the kids. She's tired of being ignored, tired of not being valued as the person her husband once said he loved. Then there's the husband who is doing a job that brings home a fair amount of money, but at what cost! Because jobs are scarce he works very hard and puts in long hours. His strength is really insufficient for the job, but he carries on in order to provide for his wife and kids. He was never comfortable with courtship; the words did not come easily. He thinks that his wife should see how much he cares by the amount of effort he gives to his work. This is a "mild" life lesson. At a deep level the couple is secure. But on the surface they are frustrated, irritated with each other, worried about their future, and rather ashamed they are in this tense relationship. They are experiencing a bundle of lessons that are testing their understanding of love and fairness and recognition of othersall that sort of stuff. One day, when the kids are out with Grandma, they have a tearful talk about their frustration with each other and with life. They get to the root of their fear and anger. They find common ground and the relationship slowly heals. Both have learned how to evaluate their souls' inner compulsion to be loving in the face of difficulty. They have learned their lesson. Now we look at a tougher situation, which is very common: "Actually, we're both seeing someone else." This relationship has well and truly broken down. We can imagine the cause however we like. Each spouse has gone off to find comfort in another's arms. But they refuse to take the logical final step and go their separate ways "because of the girls." Here is a situation where the two souls of the girls were 16

well aware of the possibility of parental problems before they came down to Earth. The husband and wife were two souls (actually soul mates) who contracted together to act in a way that the other would find intolerable. Now they have tripped themselves up, you might say, by their own actions, and by their agreement that the girls "come first." This is a more difficult lesson for both of them. Their love relationship has failed, and they are also failing to understand that their daughters are suffering unnecessarily and will be a lot better off living with one parent and visiting the other. The lesson can be learned by both parties' being realistic about the lack of happiness in the family. But, importantly, they will learn the lesson much more fully when they understand that they are only in charge of one lifetheir own. What is most lacking here is self-love. They cannot sort out the mess with each other or solve the problem over their daughters unless first they love and esteem themselves. We can love others only as much as we are able to love ourselves. "All the men I meet abuse me." Our next situation is of a woman who as a girl was abused by her uncle, abused by the boys she dated at school, and abused by three husbands in turnactually she was only married to one of them; the others didn't "believe" in marriage. She was a sex slave, thinking it was the gift she could give to buy love, but was caught in a web partly of her own making because the men she met at bars saw her as "an easy lay." So, what is the nature of the lesson? Abuse? Of course that is a constant in her life. Before coming down to planet Earth she chose to attract abusers. But the real lesson is much deeper: It is her lack of self-love, and her husbands' lack as well. She is a magnificent soul, full of creativity and sharing in the unconditional love of Source. But she is allowing herself to be dominated by her ego, which tells her that she deserves the abuse she gets, that she is not a lovely person, and that life will 17

never get any better. She accepts what the men have told her and ignores the loving, hopeful, practical suggestions that she hears within her mind but chooses not to act on. Will she finally choose to love herself, and will she discover the difference between real self-love and what she has imagined to be real? If she does, her life on Earth will improve significantly, but if she does not, then on her return Home she will be helped by her guides and peers to work out how things went horribly wrong for her. Intimate relationships can be sadly disjointed to all human appearances. We judge harshly the negative experiences in our family connections because of our high expectations. If one party to a marriage has an affair, initially the other party feels ready to end the relationship by killing the offender or ending his or her own life; such is the intensity of feeling. Most people pull back from the brink, but it does happen that some take revenge for being hurt. Yet, when viewed from the point of view of our spiritual guides, the affair has been a perfect way to express and suffer negativitya classic life lesson. It is a great life lesson to be an abusing spouse because it teaches the depths of misery that abusers have with their lack of self-control. It is patently obvious that the abused are also presented with excellent life lessons. We hate experiences like that. But they are actually why we are here on planet Earth with its mass of negativity. Learning such lessons as those we have just mentioned will frequently involve our leaving the skewed relationship behind. The difficulty we have in splitting up often comes from social or religious pressure, which is not present in the occult spiritual community. Souls on the Other Side understand that when we have finally understood how far a negative experience falls short of our soul's unconditional love, we can get out of the relationship and move on. We don't have to beat ourselves up constantly and forever. Our guides make a big play of their illustration of a poor woman who chooses one abusive man 18

after another and does not know what to do. Her joband oursis to expand love of self and do the obvious thing: get out of that kind of mess forever, as quickly as possible. That's the self-loving thing.

LOVING THE DEPARTEDTRANSITION There are two basic emotions that control our life: love and fear. These are the opposites from which, the Masters tell us, the whole range of our emotional life derives. One of the big lessons that come into our lives from time to time is death. It may be death in the family or among our friends; death of a notable person we have looked up to; death of an animal whose life we have held to be precious. And, of course, we each have to face a lesson that dawns on us slowly when we are little children, only to haunt us increasingly as we suffer illnesses and as we ageour own death. With the departure of others by death we have to face at times a good deal of unfinished business. It is relatively rare to have tidied everything up with our parents, siblings, lovers, children. People spend a great amount of time grieving because of that. "If only we had been able to forgive..." we say. "If only he (or she) knew what I really felt." This awful incompleteness in the face of death can be a heavy blow at times. Sometimes tensions with the ones we truly love keep us from being able to express to them thatyeswe deeply love them, despite the fights and despite the harsh words. Spiritual relationships can be transformed, however, if we change the word by which we describe death (if only to ourselves). While I was working on our book of interviews entitled How I Died (and what I did next), I was helped by the stories that twenty-eight souls told us about dying physically and then continuing on in the spirit until, in the end (which, for some souls, was Earth-years delayed), they arrived at the 19

celestial Home. There is one little word, used in the pages of the book, that made real difference to my thinking. The word is "transition." It is used in our language to indication a change, a going across from one thing to another. It can be used to describe death from a spiritual perspective. A spiritual relationship is not affected very greatly by death. True, there is a break in communication between you and your loved one. But the person who has died is a soul like you. In terms of your eternal existence as fragments of Source, the laying down of the "shell," as the Masters often call our body, is no more than the closing of one chapter in a book. Our essential relationship is not altered. Transition means that our loved one may now be out of sight in a human way, but not cut off from our soul. We will catch up in terms of communication one day, and in the dimension of unconditional love that we both call Home, we will find our loving relationship is a thousand times stronger than ever it was on Earth. That's all very well, I hear someone say, but we still have the misunderstandings, the memory of fights and injustices, to grapple with on our own. Some have lost people on whom they depended for support. Others have lost those who controlled them in the name of being helpful. The one who departed from Earth's third dimension may in doing so have brought welcome relief for us on the one hand, or a devastating loss of direction on the other. Then, see the one who died: even in death that soul has to leave behind its impatience to do certain things in its own way. In death, the drive to control other people or situations may not have wholly gone away. Unfinished attitudes like these keep souls hovering in the interface of the fourth dimension, unable to leave the planet, and unready to find the way Home, which is the fifth dimension. These "lost" souls all find their way Home in the end, but they have to reach the point of wanting toand that can take a very long time on occasion. There is an important aspect to transition that is easy to forget. We can understand the idea that we put down our body and part 20

of our mind/spirit carries on and returns Home. But most of us have been heavily programmed by the religious vision of what it is like when we get to heaven. There is judgment to be meted out. There is a big Book of Life in which our name may or may not have been written, according to some moral test or the degree of our faith in God, who judges us. The weight of religious teaching is concentrated on the idea that we may not be fit to go "up" to the nice place, and must instead go "down" to the nasty place. The teaching we have receivedif not directly from a faith tradition, then indirectly from a society that jokes about St. Peter at the pearly gatesmakes us tremble at the thought that God, the Judge of human beings, will decide whether we did a good job or a bad one. The answer our spiritual guides, the Masters, give is to deny the whole story. In part, they say, it has been cooked up by religious faiths to control us. "God" does not judge us because Source is not a separate divine being, but is love energy of which we are a part, and nothing else exists that we might call divine. Heaven and hell are states of mind in the third dimension of planet Earth. They say there is no good or bad, right or wrong, heaven or hell in the energy of unconditional love at Home. While on the planet we have been like actors involved in a great drama, experiencing vicariously the issues of positive and negative judgments. When we transition we leave the duality behind and know what it is like to be creatures of unlimited love. So when our loved ones transition and are lost to our human sight, we do not need to fear either that they may not end up in "heaven," or that they will make the grade but we will not. There is nowhere else to go to when we are ready to transition Home, so we will meet them there for sure. IN CONTROL OF YOUR OWN LIFE There is one additional issue to deal with relating to the death of loved ones. It is truly a small matter, but it is known to exist, 21

andjust as we hang on to the myths about twin flamessome of us insist on believing that our loved ones have not gone Home. Just as we saw with the myth of twin flames, this myth really does have an underlying basis of fact. There may be something more than meets the eye when loved ones take the road Home. When souls transition, some nip smartly through the fourth-dimensional interface and into the fifth dimension of the Other Sideand some others take their time. Lots of time. And we make an awfully big deal of it. We have a bunch of names to describe souls who fail to go Home at once. The metaphysical term is "discarnate." This implies that the soul is out of (dis) its body (carnate). The term is used in describing souls who have not immediately gone Home after physical death, and hang around in the fourthdimensional interface between Earth and Home as a shadow of their former self. Probably the majority of them stay around for no more than a few days or weeks. The Masters have informed us that "discarnate souls are a very small fraction of those who choose a human existence. Less than one-tenth of one percent of the incarnate souls opt to stay in the in-between phase from human to free soul at Home." (Exploring Reincarnation) We call discarnates "ghosts" and, yes, they exist, and they do walk through doors and walls! Those discarnates who are angry or playful appear as poltergeists, and they use their energy to disturb nature by blowing out candles, switching on electric appliances, moving furniture about, and making themselves a thorough nuisance. The most negative of them take on the role of demons, who can be very nasty to people on occasion. Some discarnates get stuck in physical locationslike the old graveyard where their body was buriedfor generations, and some vividly imagine themselves burning in hell. Most discarnates hang around because they wish to go on controlling the living, their spouse or child, or possibly the new manager at the deceased's old place of business. They also stay because they feel those behind can't get on without them, they are trying 22

to make something "right," they just dont want to leave, or they fear the unknown. They stay ineffectively in their chosen role until, with the help of guides, they eventually conclude that they would do better if they went Home, and express that now, at last, they want to do so. Needing to allow the discarnates the freedom to choose their own path, the spirits back Home may only advise and cajole them. But the instant their decision to return is finally made, everything moves and... Woosh! they go Home at last. The most personal and least understood human situation occurs when a discarnate enters the space of another soul's body and takes up residence there. This really happens, and it is not accidental. The intruder may, for example, be a drunk who died of alcoholism and is still "dying" for a drink. It finds someone who may be high on drink or drugs, or who is very lonely and sad, and says to the victim that it can bring companionship and comfort. The living person agrees to host the discarnate, who hops smartly into the body space and settles down. We have evidence that some of the discarnates deliberately target former relatives whom they wish to influence or control. Sometimes they effect marginal changes in the behavior of the living person. Mostly they just clutter up the place and make the host person vaguely depressed. For a small number, a change in habits results from the intrusion. A teetotaler was recorded by a therapist as having taken to the bottle when a discarnate drunk moved in. Young people on drugs are likely to attract deceased drug addicts. When the discarnate eventually makes up its mind to return to the spirit world it has no great difficulty in doing so. This soul is equal to all other souls and therefore has the same power to choose the homeward path as anyone else. Moreover, a portion of each soul remains at Home when it is away, so incarnate souls are always connected in the energy of Source. What they do discover, when they finally get Home, is that they now have infinitely more ability as free spirits to help their loved ones left 23

behind, by working with other spirit guides for the encouragement of the living partner. Some people are troubled lest a partner fail to return to the spirits' realm of unconditional love. In general this is quite mistaken: the vast majority of souls in transition go Home straightway. Some psychics are involved in the work of helping souls transition, but they have mixed results. There are some true experts who contact the deceased and plant suggestions. Human beings so involved take little account of the Freedom of Choice rule and actively seek to persuade deceased loved ones to go Home. One thing should be clear in all this chatter about discarnates. It is not really a big deal. We are all affected very little by the world of shadows. What we do get wrong quite often is much more personal. It isn't about letting spirits of the dead control usit is about our being willing to take control of our own life. That's the big issue, and it affects our loving relationships. Let it not be pretended that one sex is always the dominant one in relationships. In the most successful relationshipsbetween brother and sister, or friends of the same sex, or two spouses there is a give and take in which both parties take the lead on occasion. In some relationships there is an acknowledgment that they are comfortable with one person usually acting as their decision maker. To a certain degree society takes a role in the intimate relationships of its people. For example, it is desirable in some societies that women control the running of the home and the raising of children, but the chief male is the final arbiter of what the family does as a whole. In such a situation, loving and spiritual relationships have a way of tempering the social norms and preserving a healthy spiritual balance. Life lessons will bring together people who need to experience desired roles. Being in control of our own life is essentially a personal thing. Who we are and what we stand for in society is up to us. We opt out of self-esteem and self-protection all too easily. At times it 24

is the failure of one partner to have sufficient self-esteem that throws a loving relationship out of balance. This usually happens where the weaker party has a background of suffering abuse or criticism. For example, a mother who never wanted to get pregnant chooses to see her unwanted daughter as a person who can do nothing right. She spends the whole of the girl's life criticizing her every thought and move. When, at last, the daughter is able to move out of her parents' house, she discovers a severe lack of self-love and self-esteem. This lesson is capable of dragging her down in many subsequent relationshipsat work, at play, and in her own marital home. Why can't a strong person help a weaker one? Of course it frequently happens and does not always lead to an unhealthy imbalance in a relationship. But the real concern belongs not to the spiritual relationship as such, but to each individual within that relationship. It is our failure to tackle our own lack of selflove that strikes at the heart of the purpose with which we have come down to Earth. We may see ourselves as part of the trillion souls in the universe, constantly dealing with other souls, especially with our most intimate soul mates. But the heart of all our spiritual relationships is strictly personal. It is an issue that we have to face all on our own. LOVE'S LIFE PURPOSEKNOWING OURSELVES My work includes monitoring questions to the Masters of the Spirit World that pour into our website in a steady stream. They come from all corners of the globe, and they talk the simple language of human desirethe need each of us has to understand what is the best way forward in life. About one in eight of the questioners gets straight to the point, asking, "What is my life purpose?" If we really understand our purpose in becoming incarnate on the planet Earth, won't we get our relationships right? Here on this planetwhich the Masters say is the only one in the 25

universe with an equal balance of positive and negative energieswe feel it really helps to know why we are here. Failure to understand our purpose in living is not an option. We are in the middle of a search to understand what having an essence of love really means when contrasted with the worst life can bring us. Let us return in our thinking to Source. Our essence is Source essence. We were broken off from Source energy and given individuality for a reason. That reason translates into our purpose in being here in the only duality existing among the inhabited planets of the universe. I wrote earlier on in this book that "We are here on planet Earth to learn lessons in negativity, and a very large proportion of these lessons are derived from our problems of relationship." But why have lessons in negativity? And why us? The Masters say: "To enrich its knowledge, Source decided to gather information and evaluate all the possible experiences it could ever envision... Relying on its creativity, it developed a way to experience that which was not perfection." (Exploring Reincarnation) Source created the duality of positive and negative energy that rules planet Earth. Source not only created negative energy but also confined it to our planet as a controlled experiment. So that it might understand the fullness of its own magnificent, perfect, positive love essence, Source gave souls an opportunity to search for self-understanding by experiencing that which was neither perfection nor positive love, bringing back from Earth their knowledge of negativity, contrasted with their essence the essence of Source itself. By no means do all souls choose to incarnate on Earth and face negative experiences. This may be something of a fast track to personal wisdom, but it is a tough one. You and I chose to live on Earth, aware of the difficulties we would confront. We chose the specific lessons we would have to learn, and in learning 26

them (this is the main point) we would understand more fully our own essence of unconditional love. So souls take on roles in their human lives, as actors in a play or movie take on character parts. We are on a mission to understand ourselves, and therefore to understand Source, of which we are a tiny fragment. "So," you ask, "what of my spouse who is giving me a hard time?" Both of you are souls, using the bodies you inhabit to explore the joys and sorrows of relationship. Acting the part with real live human bodies allows your soul to witness and to feel the extremes of emotion within your physical life. In a sense you, the soul, are not your body. The brute who knocks down his wife and whips his little kids with a belt is really doing it. The wife whose depression is profound and the kids who are terrified of Daddy are really feeling bad. But their souls, forever above the fray of human relationships gone wrong, are discovering in the energy of negativity who they are not, and also what their perfect love essence truly is like. What does all that mean for the battered wife? The answer is that she should get out in self-love! What does that mean for the lazy child who will not find a job? The answer is to recognize the idle one as a lazybones and kick him or her out of the house so that self-esteem may be challenged. We do not need to suffer a negative experience forever but only for as long as we have not clearly understood the nature of negativity: lack of love, presence of fear, loss of self-regard, and all the multitude of negatives we meet day by day. When we ask the question "What is my purpose in life?" we may be expecting a religious answer ("man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever"), or a humanitarian answer ("feed the hungry, tend to the sick, shelter the homeless"). Source energy was thoughtful and recognized it could not truly evaluate the worth of its love essence except by comparing it with that which it is not. When we experience negativity for our soul's sake, we bring wisdom to Source, of 27

which we are a part. That is why we are here. Spiritual relationships, whether of two lovers, or a family, or a group of friends, or even the wider community, may on occasion involve physical aspects of lifegood and badthat non-physical souls can never experience: a lover's kiss, parental punishment, the smile on a baby's face, an abused spouse's running away, walking together through a lovely wood, crying at the funeral of a loved one. To make sense of these our varied experiences in relationship, we all need to know who we are and why we are here. That, hopefully, may be a little easier now that you have read this book.

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THE AUTHOR Peter Watson Jenkins, MA, MH, emigrated from Britain to the USA in 1982. He is married to Sonia Ness from Chicago. He has two grown children and three grandchildren; she has one grown son. Educated at Cambridge University, England, Peter was a teacher, peace movement leader, minister, and master hypnotist among other things. He works in his retirement as CEO of the metaphysical publishers Celestial Voices, Inc. His witty collection of autobiographic sketches with the unlikely title Disarming Death is available as an ebook from Celestial Voices, Kindle, and other digital book outlets.

Finally a page about books: 28

Celestial Voices' paperbacks and ebooks include: Exploring Reincarnation is our main guide book on the subject. The Spirit
Masters, a group of senior spirit guides, have given us their definitive statement on reincarnation and the journey of the soul. To this is added a commentary by Peter Watson Jenkins, and a set of essays on abortion, health and healing, heaven and hell, homosexuality, life lessons, suicide, and belief in God. In an interview the Masters talk about the spirits' life on the Other Side.

How I Died (and what I did next) The book contains 25 interviews with 28
souls, drawn from all over the world, who recount in graphic detail the story of their death, and then account for the next stage in their existence as souls, up to their arrival at their celestial Home on the Other Side.

Spirit World Wisdom features short essays written for their blog by the Masters in
answer to questions from fans. They cover a range of topics from channeling to health issues, life lessons, questions relating to psychics and channelers, and much more.

The Trilogy: Talking with Leaders of the Past Interviews of the Spirit
Masters and souls of 15 famous men and women born in the nineteenth century: Dwight L. Moody, Pope John XXIII, Bertrand Russell, Oscar Wilde, William James, Florence Nightingale, Margaret Sanger, Eleanor Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, Winston S. Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Charles Darwin, Carl G. Jung, Albert Einstein.

Talking with Twentieth-Century Women Interviews of the souls of 21

famous women from the last century: Jane Addams, Marie Curie, Helen Keller, Georgia OKeeffe, Amelia Earhart, Marian Anderson, Golda Meir, Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Carmen Miranda, Mother Teresa, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Maria Callas, Marilyn Monroe, Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, Barbara Jordan, Wilma Rudolph, Sharon Tate, Selena Quintanilla-Prez.

Talking with Twentieth-Century Men Interviews of the souls of 21 famous

men from the last century: Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Picasso, George S. Patton, Babe Ruth, Ernest Hemingway, Walt Disney, Louis Armstrong, George Orwell, Robert Oppenheimer, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Frank Sinatra, Yehudi Menuhin, Sam Walton, James Baldwin, Peter Sellers, Cesar Chavez, Andy Warhol, Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley, John Lennon.

Please view our book suggestions now at: Celestial Voices, Inc.

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