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Never in the existence of humanity has so much writing been produced and so much communication been generated as now. All of it is meant to transmit information, thoughts and ideas to other human beings. The purposes for doing so can vary considerably though, such as for instructions, record keeping, teaching, creative story telling, entertaining, reporting events, expressing opinions and beliefs, or even expressing the word of God, etc. In all these cases the communicator has to consider his responsibilities, which are different for the different applications. For instance for record keeping it would be accuracy and for reporting events it would be truthfulness. For some of the quoted examples the responsibilities are quite considerable as in the case of teaching or expressing the word of God.

Teaching often involves  young receptive minds which are likely to uncritically accept everything which is transmitted. Therefore, are we teaching the truth about reality or opinions about reality, i.e. our perspective? Considering how much most teachings have changed with time, we must assume that much of past and present teachings are based on opinions and beliefs. The question is though: Was or is it ever stated as such? Or in other words do we point out the alternate views too and the need for the student to apply his own mind? Taking it a bit further into the media world, do newspapers and TV stations state their affiliations and political stands of view so that we are protected from drawing the wrong conclusions? Do societies and their governmental organs express balanced views which allow for positive change? It certainly was not the case under fascism and communism. It does not appear to be true for capitalism either considering recent world economic events.

Possibly the greatest responsibility is carried when we consider what we call ‘the Word of God’. Although at the core are spiritual teachings, the messages were invariably received by human minds, understood by human minds, transmitted by human minds, and finally interpreted by human minds. To say it is the true word of God can only be an assumption and not a proven fact. We should rather say: This is our interpretation of what we believe we understood. This is obviously a huge difference because in the first case exclusivity is claimed, dogma is created, and discussion is virtually forbidden; in the second case the message is accepted as very important but subject to scrutiny and discernment and is left as our responsibility to wrestle with and make our own. But let me add her quickly – being aware of my own responsibility now –this is entirely my opinion and belief.  

I was prompted to explore this issue because of information I had received when writing my book ’75 Lives of Haran – New Insights into Reincarnation’. I had been made to understand that communication always affects other consciousnesses and is therefore a huge responsibility to consider. One of the great sins is to mislead in particular the ignorant and vulnerable which would involve serious karma. As we all know this is often conducted quite blatantly. Maybe it is time to take our responsibilities more seriously.

Haran

haran@global.co.za

http://haran.magix.net/website

CAN WE CHANGE THE PAST?

Our first reaction would be ‘impossible, it is a closed book, it happened’. However, we do believe that we can change the future; and here I do not talk about generating our future through our decisions, but about changing our future, such as not getting involved in an accident. This appears possible because some people have intuition or visions of the future, and knowledge of it allows us to make decisions to prevent getting in the predicted situation. We thereby changed the future and generated a feed-back loop from the future to the present and back to the future. Why should this then not be possible with the past? I was confronted with this question from some past life regressions presented in my book ’75 Lives of Haran – New Insights into Reincarnation’, and here are my thoughts on the matter.

Spiritual teachings tell us that time as we understand it does not exist and that everything actually happens simultaneously. According to this, time is simply a construct for our linear mind to cope with reality. Therefore, the past and the future do not exist and everything happens in the now. All of this is extremely difficult if not impossible to grasp. However, quantum physicists quite happily create higher dimensional realities through mathematical formulae which are entirely outside our comprehension and which even they can only describe via analogies. Therefore, the principle of entering unknown and difficult to comprehend territory is not foreign to us.

Coming back to the posed question, when everything happens in the now, then we only have to accept that everything is not only interconnected forward but also backward, and everything influences everything else. Another way to imagine interactions with the past are based on the concept of alternate lives (see my discussion ‘The enigma of alternate lives’). Normally, we would just observe or experience a past life in regressions, but sometimes we seem to be able to interact with it in such a way that the life from then on follows a different route and thereby changes the present. If we consider the existence of alternate lives then we must assume that both the original version and the alternate version pre-existed already before we observed it, we just shifted our observation to the alternate version which has already become our time-line. Therefore, instead of creating a new time-line in the past we may just be observing a pre-existing one. Thereby the causality in our time-line is maintained. Both scenarios could explain how it is possible to change the past.

Haran

haran@global.co.za

http://haran.magix.net/website

THE ENIGMA OF ALTERNATE LIVES

The issue of alternate lives appears to have first been brought up by Jane Roberts in her Seth books and more recently again by the Kuthumi channelings of Michelle Eloff (www.thelightweaver.org). My understanding of it is as follows. Every choice we are faced with in life results in at least one avenue which is not being followed. In case of major decisions this means that potentially a completely different life could have been lived and other experiences could have been made. Don’t we sometimes think ‘I wonder how my life had turned out if I had taken another decision then’? Take for instance the spouse you decided to marry, or the profession you decided to pursue, or the job offer you decided to turn down.

The teachings say that these alternate lives do exist at another level of reality. Complicating things even further, these other lives by themselves are also confronted with choices and decisions and therefore generate further alternate lives. Since we all do it, other realities are created for us to interact with. This generates entirely different histories which explains why information from past life investigations can be in conflict with what we understand as ‘our’ history. Our history simple represents one specific time-line from myriads of other time-lines we are not consciously aware of. Also, no matter which time-line we find ourselves engaged in, they all appear as the only reality to the consciousness experiencing it.

The principle of alternate lives therefore creates a mind-boggling array of life experiences which would appear to cover any variety possible. And in this may be the explanation for its existence. We just need to imagine how the power that created our world of physical reality, call it God or All-That-Is, might want to explore this world via our consciousness. Why should it just be the narrow windows of life we are aware of? Would it not make a lot more sense to think that it should be everything possible? This could even include the fantasies which we engage in and then abandon, or the fiction books we write, or the scientific fictions we create. All these may be creations which continue to have their own lives.

 The above is one of the issues I was confronted with when I worked on my book ’75 Lives of Haran – New insights into Reincarnation’.

 Haran

haran@global.co.za

http://haran.magix.net/website

THE NEED FOR AND BENEFIT OF GUIDANCE IN OUR LIVES

As human beings we are often dependant on guidance in our lives, particularly when we are young.  However, this guidance is only as good as our parents and teachers, which means mostly imperfect. As we grow up further, this role is taken over by personal experience, which is – as we all are painfully aware – a tough teacher, and this does not even guarantee that we understand and accept the lesson, at least not immediately. 

Therefore, there is an ongoing need for guidance, which all spiritual teachings tell us is always available, however, we have to ask for it, which means we must at least become aware that we require a higher perspective to discern the hidden patterns in our life experiences and the effects of the universal laws which govern our physical existence.

One source of this higher guidance is past lives research which reveals the bigger picture, the purpose of our other lives, and the lessons learned. Thereby we obtain the tools to understand our present life and regain control of how to live that life consciously.

From my own explorations (see my book ’75 Lives of Haran – New Insights into Reincarnation’) I distilled a number of insights which may also be relevant to you. Here are some examples:

-   Don’t make limiting assumptions about yourself and your capabilities. If we engage life as a victim we can never fulfill our aspirations. We need to fully and unconditionally accept that our happiness is in our hands, and only in our hands. Only once we have tried out new challenges do we realize what we are capable of.

-   Don’t reject your role in life as unsatisfactory or unimportant. All roles are necessary and form an integral part of all life. You explore completely unique life aspects which no other consciousness can repeat.

-   Don’t judge others just because they don’t see life your way. The difference between us is mainly the beliefs we built up from our life experiences.

-   Although life is very much about learning, accepting responsibility for our decisions, and coming to understand the difference between wanting something for short-term self-gratification and needing something for long-term well-being, i.e., not having a personality perspective but a soul perspective, life is also about enjoying it, living it, experimenting with it, and celebrating it and our achievements. We need to do that more often, and in a more conscious manner.

 Haran

haran@global.co.za

http://haran.magix.net/website

Anyone Seen A White Hat Lately?

By Rand Bishop

Back in the innocent Eisenhauer ’50s, we kids had no trouble choosing which character to root for. It was always the cowboy in the white hat: The Lone Ranger, Kit Carson, or squeaky-clean, gosh-and-golly Roy Rogers. Then, in 1957, a pockmarked dude named Paladin rode into town to obliterate the line between TV hero and villain. Flashing his “Have Gun. Will Travel” business card, this high-priced, Western mercenary became an instant hit for CBS. That’s when, for me, things got a whole lot more interesting.

I’d already developed a fascination for the film-noir gumshoes of the ’40s. Those inhabitants of a mysterious, urban underbelly were not devout churchgoers. Sam Spade and Mike Hammer drank hard liquor, chain smoked, and womanized. But, to this kid, an edgy private eye personified manhood, with his bent-rimmed fedora, cig dangling from a permanent snarl, and two fingers of straight whiskey in a chimney glass. Still, even with their devilish ways, these cats usually ended up on the side of right. In this day and age, right is not quite so clear-cut.

Episodic comedy, too, has featured its share of scoundrels. Ralph Cramden is the first TV cad I recall. Self-absorbed, short-sided, even abusive, this blowhard blustered his weekly threat to wallop Alice “to the moon!” Yet, at the end of the day, the endearing brute always embraced his tolerant, supportive spouse, with a contrite, “Baby, you’re the best.”

Nowadays, sitcom characters don’t learn their lessons in a tidy half hour. Seinfeld sidekick George Costanza set the bar for hilarious egocentrics. Ricky Gervais took Costanza four steps further by creating the bizarrely self-involved Michael Scott and Dwight Shrute of The Office plus Andy Millman and Maggie Jacobs in Extras.

Now, cable dramas make the black-Stetsoned Paladin look like an Eagle Scout. My newest favorite TV hero, Dexter Morgan, is a meticulous serial killer. Go figure. The critically acclaimed Breaking Bad features a fatally ill meth dealer. Edie Falco portrays cheating, drug-addicted Nurse Jackie, and in Weeds, Mary-Louise Parker brings a pot-peddling housewife onto our 50-inch flat screens. The list of sociopathic TV leads could fill an entire page. What it boils down to is this: with literally hundreds of channels and a plethora of programming to choose from, it’s pretty much impossible to find a white hat anywhere. And, I have to admit, that’s part of what keeps me switching on the tube.

***

Rand Bishop is a Grammy Nominated, BMI Award-winning songwriter, and the author of Grand Pop, a darkly comic novel/mock-memoir penned from the point of view a modern anti-hero (Eloquent Books, 2010, ISBN 978-1-60860-629-0). Other Bishop books include Makin’ Stuff Up, “a songwriting course wrapped in a memoir” (Weightless Cargo Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-61523-165-5) and the forthcoming Absolute Essentials of Songwriting Success (Alfred Publishing, 2010). For information go to: http://www.randbishop.com

Funny in a Sad Way

Life is a funny thing – strange words you might think. And you might question. Funny as in ‘Ha! Ha!’ or funny as in strange. Let me clarify. Funny in a sad sense; I mean it to mean a contradiction in terminology.

Our lives are filled with inconsistency; our emotions towards life are Jack in the Boxes, never static, always on the move, up and down, up and down, our lives are in constant motion, and each of us have numerous facets, many of which we hide even from ourselves, and yet, we are all very similar. We are filled with contrary emotions when it comes to love.

For some, love is like a butterfly, flutter, flutter, flutter and it is gone, and we move on, but that is applicable mainly to the love of a man and woman. With children, it is somewhat different. That love represent more of the chrysalis – cocoon type of love, and parents very rarely leave that spot – love of our children is unconditional, giving of ourselves to our next generation, but could that be classed as hereditary? Are we programmed to do it for the survival of our own genes? The way that nature surreptitiously disguises our continual existence and calls it loves.

I have questioned myself many times what love actually is, what are the ingredients that makes up the mix? You can’t eat, smell, hold it. Physical it is not, but an abstraction, a firing in the brain of wanting the object of that love to be near to you.
A longing for that thing or person that fills the mind with warmth, and to have the feeling reciprocated, makes it even better, the bonus, a payback if you like. Though, it is not essential to make love happen, often love is one way, but it does make the emotion that much more powerful and deeper if there is reciprocity. And yet, often, we just fritter it away by our own actions and feel sad when it flies away from us, and often we don’t know how to get it back, lost in a world of our own making.

Some believe love is a physical sexual feeling with a partner, a sense of belonging: to own and control that person. We can hold emotion towards things – animals – inanimate objects. Your home, car, money, prestige, fame, recognition, adulation, have all been loved in some degree over the ages.

From a surgical viewpoint, love is but a chemical reaction in the brain and little else, but for me that is a journey a little far, a too simplistic and naive view of life and love. A living thing – a person, an animal, is more than a chemical. With a person, love can be as deep as a touching of two souls. For those of you who have ridden that horse, you’ll know to what I’m referring – I’ve been there, the ride can be bumpy but well worth the trip – it is one of the great wonders of life. Feelings and emotions are real, as real as beaches, mountains, trees, and far more beautiful.
You wouldn’t give your life for a beach, a mountain or a tree, no matter how beautiful, but you would, and often give it with a glad heart for love, if it meant saving that person whom you love. We all have experienced these feelings, every one of us in some measure – more or less, most people wouldn’t willingly give their life for an object, but would for a person, but here again, nothing is that  straightforward. Millions throughout history have given their life for an ideal, the love of democracy is but one example.

Some demonstrate only a love for money, – sad, but true – and place it above all else, and yes, they would die in the getting of it. Everything pales into insignificance when it comes to money for these people, and quite a few, who have won and lost it, can’t live without it and commit suicide rather than face a future alone without the crutch of wealth to ease their pain.

Can you start to see why I believe life is funny in a sad sense?
Now I’ll get to the crux of the matter – the wonder -to share with you what love means to me. To answer that age-old question, I will refer to my father. A far wiser person than I’ll ever be, and what it meant to him.

But first, I need to set the scene. When I was young and in the garden with my father, with whom I spent a lot of time, he told me when he was young that once he found a thrush’s nest with five little chicks inside. The parents had been killed, and my father removed the nest and chicks and placed them in a box.

They belonged to him, he had given them life, at the least, he had certainly saved them from death, so he reared them, and then he let them go, and of course, they flew away.

“Did you not love the birds daddy?” I asked.

“Of course,” he forcefully replied.

“Why let them go? They would be dead without you, they belong to you, owe you their life.”

He smiled a little, I can see that smile even now, and he said.
“You have overlooked one main point: they never belonged to me in the first place. They belong to the land and the countryside. I was only helping them on their way. It was their time to move on, just as your time will come to fly the nest and make your way in the world. To deny anyone this right is to deny them their freedom.”

“Did you ever see the birds again?” I asked.

He was quite shocked at this question.

“This is their garden; they were born here. This garden belongs to them; they are a part of the garden as much as that tree,” he said, pointing to one of the trees. “If they are still in the garden and you see them every day,” I said innocently, “they are not free, otherwise, they would be gone.”

He lit his pipe, thought for a minute and answered. “Freedom is about the ability to choose where you wish to be, to spend time to suit yourself. To be free, you must be there by your own free will.”

I replied. “By letting the birds go free, you gave them different options, and they chose to stay, so the act of giving them freedom resulted in them staying. They were captives in their own garden, since that is where they wished to be.”
My father smiled at this comment, and looked round the garden in satisfaction. “You’ve got it,” he said. “If you wish to keep something close to you, give it the ability to fly away, but make the staying a lot better.”

So for me love is about giving, unconditional giving, and like the birds in my father’s garden, it will boomerang back to you with a ten-fold happiness.
My father’s words repeated from my first published novel, “Of Boys, Men and Mountains.”

In “The Tour,” my latest novel, I’ve taken love a stage further, contrasted it with hate, greed and jealousy. Lanky, one of the main characters, is unassuming, sees only the good in people, whereas Ron, another main character, is all self, two opposites; their emotions, motivations, the way they see and value life and sex, and how they see and value love. I’ve explored in depth and show the angle by which they see things and the way they play them out to conclusion.

Check out  the story and leave a message on my blogsite http://roytomkinson.blogspot.com, or tweet me on Twitter, @RoyTomkinson, alternatively, contact my publisher and they will pass it on.

www.strategicbookpublishing.com/TheTour.html

http://books.google.co.uk/books

A Thought To Ponder

Time Travel, Parallel Universe Theory, a lot of bunkum, or is it indeed possible?
It is stated that every action much have an opposite reaction. So what is happening in one universe, positive, the same must be happen in another universe, negatively. The entry spot being through a black hole, not only into another universe, but also to travel back in time.

Weird!

You can say that again, you say.

OK, I will.

Weird!

Now let’s get serious: you must have wondered what it would be like to travel back in time. I think every person has at some time in his or her life.

The amount of times I wish I could have told my mother and father how I’d loved them – too late now.

There is a truism, the older you get the less you know. Well, I’m on my way, we all are, the constant is change.

What would you do if you went back in time?

Or, I pose: What Time Era would you wish to visit? And Why?

I’d like to go back to the time of Henry the VIII, one of the most dangerous periods in history, for a woman anyway, well, anyone really, your head was never your own. He would chop it off on the flimsiest of pretexts. He crowned himself the Head of the Church and the repercussions are still felt today, not only in the UK, but also around the world.

This period fascinates me. Indeed, when I wrote my novel The Tour, a part of the story covers that very period. It’s not about the English Court, but about the period of history in 1526-1588 relating to Mull in Scotland, and the warring clans from that period, the MacDougalls and the MacLeans.

Life came cheap, a violent time. Well, if I were cynical, I could say nothing has changed, but that would be unfair. A lot has actually changed, but human nature is still very much the same. My novel is about people, greed, love, their troubles and tribulations. Their beliefs, and way they lived their lives, in the present time and in time past.

Check out my novel, leave a message on my blogsite http://roytomkinson.blogspot.com, or tweet me on Twitter, <@RoyTomkinson> alternatively, contact my publisher and they will pass a message on to me.

www.strategicbookpublishing.com/TheTour.html

http://books.google.co.uk/books