Rob Schwartz Interview

Summary

The conversation explores the idea that souls plan major life challenges, relationships, and circumstances before birth for growth, healing, and service. It also examines spirit guides, soul groups, reincarnation, and the possibility that difficult roles may conceal deeper purposes.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can people choose their life circumstances before birth?
• What are spirit guides, and how do they help us?
• Do souls reincarnate with the same people in different roles?
• Why do some people experience severe suffering, illness, addiction, or homelessness?
• What is the relationship between the soul, individual personality, and universal consciousness?

Key takeaways

• Difficult life experiences may have purposes connected to growth, healing, or service.
• Spirit guides may change as a person’s choices and needs change.
• Soul groups are said to exchange roles across multiple lifetimes.
• A person’s outer behavior may not reveal the maturity of their soul.
• Compassion can replace harsh judgment when unseen purposes are considered.
• People should not be pressured to adopt beliefs that do not fit their path.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and check out all the previous ones under the Past Interviews menu.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site, and then there’s a page about other ways of donating. If you’re a regular listener, you might consider being a regular donor. I’ve just finished listening to NPR’s fundraising campaign, and so maybe $5 a month, or whatever is comfortable for you if you listen regularly. But that’s totally up to you.

My guest today is Robert Schwartz. Rob is a hypnotist who offers spiritual guidance sessions, past-life soul regressions, contact-a-deceased-loved-one regressions, and between-lives soul regressions to help you heal and discover your life plan. Rob has written a couple of books, Your Soul’s Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born and Your Soul’s Gift, which has a similar subtitle. Rob certainly didn’t start out intending to do this, at least not in his ordinary conscious recollection at the time. Although it turns out he did start out planning to do this if you go back far enough, and we’ll be talking about that during the interview.

I find this topic fascinating. About 15 years ago, I read a couple of books on a similar topic by Michael Newton, and I found that reading those, and reading Rob’s and listening to his interviews, broadens your perspective. I think it instills greater patience, greater tolerance, greater compassion, and all kinds of good qualities, so I think people find it valuable.

Feel free to send in questions, because the stuff that Rob is saying might be considered controversial or challenging. It might push some people’s buttons, and you should feel free to question it. I think Rob will be capable of answering those questions. So, welcome, Rob.

Rob: Thank you, Rick. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here.

Discovering a life purpose

Rick: Yeah. Let’s start by kind of establishing your credentials, as it were, because you’re going to be saying all kinds of stuff with a great degree of confidence and certainty that many people would consider extremely hypothetical or even improbable or whatever. They might be wondering, well, who is this guy to be saying this stuff? How does he know, and how could he know with such confidence? So let’s kind of lay down a foundation to begin with of how you went from not even knowing that any such thing existed as the stuff you now focus your life on to being an authority on it.

Rob: Well, let me begin by mentioning that my website is yoursoulsplan.com, and if people go there, you can read large portions of Your Soul’s Plan and Your Soul’s Gift for free.

Rick, it’s been a very interesting and long journey. I was originally in the corporate sector. I have an MBA and, for a number of years, was doing corporate writing and marketing communications, which I found to be very, very unfulfilling. I used to say to people at the time that I had the feeling that if I were to fall off the face of the earth, my clients would hardly even notice that I was gone. They would just plug somebody else into that role and carry right along.

At the same time, I had the very distinct sense that there was some kind of calling, some kind of higher purpose for my life. I just didn’t know what it was, and I wasn’t even sure how to figure out what it was. So I started by trying very conventional routes to figure out my calling in life: career counseling and so forth. None of that really made any difference.

Back in mid-2003, in May of 2003, I decided to do something that I had never done before, and that is, I had a session with a psychic medium.

The Psychic-Medium Session That Changed Rob’s Life

I come from a very conventional background. I wasn’t even sure that I believed in mediumship, but I thought, why not spend an hour of my time and a little bit of money? If nothing comes out of the session, there’s no harm done. So I did this on May 7, 2003. I had my first session ever with a psychic medium, and the reason I remember the date is that this was really the day on which my life changed.

The medium started by introducing me to the concept of spirit guides, which I had actually never even heard of at that time. She explained to me that a spirit guide is a very highly evolved, nonphysical being with whom we plan our lives before we come into a body, and who then guides us through our lives after we get here. Through this particular medium, I was actually able to talk with my guides.

Now, they said a lot of amazing things to me that day. One of them was, “You planned your life, including your biggest challenges, before you were born.” I’ll tell you, I just shook my head and said, “Well, why in the world did I do that?” And they said, “You did this for purposes of spiritual growth.”

I probably would have dismissed all of this as some kind of delusion on my part, except that the guides knew everything about me without me telling them anything. They knew what my biggest challenges had been, again without me saying that, and they were able to explain in some detail why I had wanted, before I was born, to have those very difficult experiences.

“You planned your life, including your biggest challenges, before you were born.”

Well, as you can imagine, if you’re talking to beings who know literally everything about you without you telling them anything, that gives them a fair amount of credibility. So, when they—

Rick: In fact, I recall you saying they even knew about some prayer that you had uttered in your own mind, not even verbally or orally, five years before or something. They told you about that.

Rob: Yeah. Five years before the session with the medium, I had been going through a very difficult time in my personal life. One day, when I was home alone in the privacy of my own home, I said a prayer to God. As you pointed out, I didn’t even say it out loud; I thought it silently in my mind.

The prayer was, “Dear God, I can’t get through this alone. Please send help.” Well, five years later, in this session with the medium, by that time I had completely forgotten that I’d sent that prayer. But my guides knew about it, and through the medium, they reminded me of it. Then they said, “Your prayer was answered,” by which they meant that additional nonphysical guidance had been sent to me. So that also was something that gave them a tremendous amount of credibility in my mind.

In any case, after this session was over, I thought about this pre-birth-planning perspective constantly for weeks afterward, and it had quite a profound effect on me. The main effect that it had was that it created a deep healing, because it allowed me, really for the first time in my life, to see a deeper meaning or a deeper purpose to the challenging things that had happened. That created the healing.

It was at this point that I first started to think about writing a book about it. To make a long story short, I ended up leaving the corporate sector and spent the next three years of my life on a full-time basis writing Your Soul’s Plan. That led to a completely new life for me.

Rick: I think of the vast numbers of people in this audience—my audience—and probably most of the people are on board with the notion of life between lives and spirit guides and all that. But, of course, there are a lot of people in the world who just think that we come into this life, and life is rather accidental and arbitrary, and there’s no sort of deep intelligence governing it, and certainly no disembodied souls guiding it. They think that when you die, that’s lights out; that’s the end.

We won’t dwell on that perspective a lot, because again, most of my audience probably doesn’t think that way. But do you have anything to say to such people? If you sat next to one on the airplane, what would you say?

Rob: I probably would not say very much, because I have no desire whatsoever to persuade anyone of anything. In my belief system, if someone does not believe in an afterlife, they planned before they were born to be someone who does not believe in an afterlife. That must mean that that path is perfect for them at this time, and I don’t want to do anything to pull anybody off their perfect path.

Rick: That’s a good answer, and they must be kind of pleasantly surprised when they die, actually—not expecting anything to continue, and yet, whoa, here I am, still.

Rob: Well, it makes me think of Steve Jobs. When he passed away, those who were surrounding his deathbed reported that he said, “Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow,” and he was coming into the great unconditional love of the afterlife.

Rick: Yeah. Well, he was probably somebody who expected that, because he was a practicing Buddhist and had done psychedelics. He was kind of a seeker.

So, spirit guides: Are they assigned to us on a one-to-one basis, or do they multitask? Maybe one spirit guide will have a dozen people that they keep an eye on? How does it work?

Rob: Well, I think both parts of your statement are correct. You have a number of different guides over your lifetime. Some will probably be with you for the entire lifetime. Others come and go depending on your free-will decisions.

For example, let’s say that you decide to undertake a particular form of schooling in order to go into a certain career. That decision may draw to you a guide who has expertise in the area that you’ve decided to go into. Then, if you later leave that field, that guide may no longer be needed as a guide, and you’ll call to yourself another guide who has expertise in whatever it is that you’re now going into.

Rick: I see. So, have guides been human beings in past lives, and will we all probably be guides in future lives?

Rob: Many guides have been human beings in past lives, but not all of them. Many people will go on to become spirit guides, but again, not all. It’s an honor to be chosen for that, and, of course, it’s something that you have to want to do. No one’s going to interfere with your free will and force you to be a spirit guide.

Rick: Okay. So, not everybody has to be a spirit guide in the course of their evolution—or maybe they do eventually—but they could also be many other things in various circumstances and dimensions and so on, right?

Rob: That’s right. The universe is so vast. It’s infinite, and so there’s an infinite number of experiences to choose from. Anything that you want to experience, you can find out there somewhere.

If being a guide is something that serves your highest path, then you’ll choose that. If something else produces the greatest growth, the greatest healing, or the greatest evolution, then you wouldn’t be inclined to choose being a guide.

Rick: It’s said in some traditions that celestials live very, very long lives, probably hundreds of thousands of years in human years. Is that your understanding?

Rob: That is my understanding. It’s also my understanding that human beings used to live much longer physical lives than we do now—several hundred years—but over the millennia, humanity fell into the, I won’t call it a trap, but the repetitive pattern of making low-vibrational, ego-based decisions. As the collective consciousness lowered its vibration through those kinds of decisions, the physical body started to live for shorter and shorter periods of time.

Rick: Yeah, Hindus say we’re in Kali Yuga, in which people’s lives are much shorter than in other ages.

Speaking a little bit more spiritually, let’s talk about spirit guides. Somebody sent in a question. Someone named Christina from Ohio sent in a question about the realm between lives: Do souls—and this would include spirit guides, I suppose, since those are souls—ever experience romantic love with two souls who perhaps share a soul group and have shared many reincarnations together? Do they ever experience romantic love in that other dimension, or is that strictly an earthly experience? We don’t need to limit this question to romantic love. Do spirit guides have lives outside of being a spirit guide? Do they have other interests and activities, and so on?

Rob: My understanding is that you do experience, if you choose to, a romantic love in nonphysical form, but apparently it’s a very different kind of experience in that it’s not based on monogamy the way we have done things here. Our society is set up to believe and to teach us that it’s one partner for one other partner, and if you go beyond that, you’re breaking a sacred trust.

It isn’t that way on the other side, as I understand it. We all love each other unconditionally, and we love each other very freely. So, if you choose to experience what we call romantic love with another being, there’s no jealousy on the part of others with whom you are experiencing that. You are free to do that. It’s a very different paradigm.

Rick: Of course, there are cultures in our world who have modeled themselves in that way, so it’s kind of a cultural thing.

You talk a lot about the soul, and from my understanding of how you define the soul, let me just lay it out and then see if I’ve got it right in terms of what you understand. There’s what you could call universal consciousness or being, which is all-pervading, unbounded, nonchanging, and impersonal. It’s kind of the root foundation of our existence, and ultimately we are that.

Then there are expressions that are more individuated, which we might call souls. Then there’s the individual life that we are born into, which is actually just a small suitcase from a mountain that we might call the soul. That’s actually a metaphor used by various traditions: We can’t bring all of our karma into one life, so we take a suitcase from the mountain, or a bucket from the mountain, and live it out in one life. Is that a fair sketch of the layout as you understand it?

Rob: Yeah, I think that’s a very good description. Another way of putting it would be to say that the soul is a spark of God, and the personality—you, me, and everyone watching this interview—is a spark of the soul. The personality is a portion of the soul’s energy placed into a physical body, but it isn’t the entirety of the soul’s energy. The soul is a vast, multidimensional—

Rick: And do we each exclusively have a soul, or do many people share one soul? There could be many sparks emanating from this spark of God.

Rob: My understanding is that the soul has a number of sparks or personalities. It would be unusual, although it’s possible, for a soul to have more than one incarnation going on Earth at the same time, but it’s not unusual for the soul to have more than one incarnation going on on different planets in different dimensions at the same time.

Rick: So, when people speak of soulmates or twin flames and that kind of thing, if that’s a legitimate idea, are they saying that you and your soulmate might actually be sparks from the same soul, that you actually share the same soul fundamentally?

Rob: I’m not an expert on twin flames, but my understanding is more or less what you just said: You and your twin flame are the two halves of the soul. You can be on Earth and your twin flame can be with you in another physical body, or you can be on Earth and your twin flame can be back in the nonphysical realm.

Rick: Okay. Others also speak of soul groups. I think that’s the phrase you use, where there might be—I think I heard the number 17 or some such number—people who kind of cluster together and reincarnate together over many lives, playing different roles, sometimes reversing roles, and so on. Do you want to elaborate on that just a little bit?

A soul group, as I understand it, is 17 to 25 souls, somewhere around there, who are at the same stage of evolution, which is another way of saying the same vibration, the same frequency. You and the other members of your soul group take turns playing every conceivable role for each other.

Rob: A soul group, as I understand it, is 17 to 25 souls, somewhere around there, who are at the same stage of evolution, which is another way of saying the same vibration, the same frequency. You and the other members of your soul group take turns playing every conceivable role for each other.

You will be mother and daughter, father and son, brother and sister, best friends, mortal enemies, teacher and student. At the soul level, there’s no judgment of any of these roles, even the so-called negative roles. They’re all viewed as opportunities for learning and healing.

Rick: So, “same level of evolution” is an interesting phrase, because many people might think, “There’s no way I’m at the same level of evolution that my parents were at. They seem so superficial and judgmental, and negative, and abusive, and everything, and I’m not that kind of person, so I must be at a different level of evolution.”

Rob: Yeah, you really cannot assess soul age or evolutionary stage accurately by looking at the superficial aspects of somebody’s personality. The reason you can’t assess it accurately is that these kinds of roles are scripted before birth.

So, if you feel that your parents are unenlightened or unevolved, for example, most likely you asked them in your pre-birth planning session to play that kind of role for you, because you felt that would best foster your evolution in this lifetime.

Rick: So, in other words, somebody might be an abusive drunk or something and seemingly not very highly evolved, but they could actually be a very highly evolved person or soul playing that kind of role.

Rob: That’s exactly right, and I’ll share with you an interesting and funny true story. I’m sure many of your viewers know who Edgar Cayce is. For those who haven’t heard the name, Cayce, who’s now back on the other side, is regarded by many people as the greatest psychic American medium who ever lived.

Late in Cayce’s career, after he’d read for thousands and thousands of people, he was visited by two wealthy sisters from New York City. The sisters said to him, “Mr. Cayce, we are at the end of our rope in regard to our brother. He lives under a bridge in New York. He drinks too much. We come from a wealthy family, but he long ago squandered his share of the family fortune. We’ve done everything we can think of over the years to help him turn his life around, and nothing has worked. Mr. Cayce, what can you tell us? Can you say anything that will help us help our brother?”

Upon hearing this, Cayce did what he always did, which is he went into a trance. He went into the Akashic Record, which is the complete nonphysical record of everything relevant to the Earth plane, including the pre-birth planning. Then he said to the two sisters, “Your brother is the single most highly evolved soul about whom I have ever obtained information in vision, and the three of you agreed before any of you were born for him to do exactly what he’s been doing so that the two of you could learn to be more compassionate.”

Well, as you can imagine, this was not exactly the response the sisters were hoping for, but that’s how it works. That’s what’s really going on here on planet Earth.

“Nothing on Earth is as it seems. Nothing is as it appears.”

Rick: Yeah. If we do choose our lives, it would take a noble soul to say, “All right, I’m going to live this miserable life in order to benefit others.” It would almost be like a bodhisattva kind of gesture.

Rob: Well, service to others is a component of every single pre-birth plan I’ve ever looked at. Very often, the souls who are taking on big challenges—challenges that require a lot of courage, like planning homelessness, alcoholism, drug addiction, or certain illnesses like AIDS—are often very highly evolved souls.

They’re taking on those challenges partly for their own growth and learning, but also in service to others, in the same way that the brother was helping the two sisters learn compassion.

In my first book, Your Soul’s Plan, the very first story in that book is about a man who planned before he was born to have the AIDS virus. The reason I put that as the first story in the first book is that we, as a society, have so many harsh judgments about people who have AIDS.

We say things like, “He or she must have been promiscuous,” or, “He or she must not have used protection.” Some people actually believe that AIDS is God’s way of punishing homosexuals for being homosexuals.

But what we found when we researched this gentleman’s pre-birth plan is that he was a very highly evolved soul, extremely courageous for planning to have the AIDS virus. When we went into his pre-birth planning session, we heard him talking about how he wanted to be a teacher of compassion. He felt that, at this time in linear history, society was tremendously judgmental, and he wanted to give people an opportunity to put judgment aside and feel compassion in their hearts.

But what we found when we researched this gentleman’s pre-birth plan is that he was a very highly evolved soul, extremely courageous for planning to have the AIDS virus. When we went into his pre-birth planning session, we heard him talking about how he wanted to be a teacher of compassion. He felt that, at this time in linear history, society was tremendously judgmental, and he wanted to give people an opportunity to put judgment aside and feel compassion in their hearts.

Here is somebody whom we, as a society, judge so very harshly, and yet he was coming in motivated by love, motivated by altruism, to be a teacher to the rest of us.

Free will, evil, and the meaning of karma

Rick: It’s interesting in the Vedic literature. There are a lot of stories of beings who either made some mistake or did something—or let me retrace. There are beings who had the opportunity to have a close relationship with Krishna or Rama, or one of these avatars, only if they took on a demonic body and served a demonic role.

They were extremely highly evolved beings, and they ended up battling with Krishna or Rama—in the case of Ravana—and when they finally got killed at the end of the story, they ascended to heaven and became enlightened, because they were very highly evolved souls to begin with. They had had this laser-like focus on God, even though it was a focus of hatred and opposition, but that was their path.

Rob: When I did the channeling sessions for Your Soul’s Plan and Your Soul’s Gift, it was interesting. Regardless of who the channel of consciousness was that we were talking to, very often they would say something like, “Nothing on Earth is as it seems. Nothing is as it appears.”

That speaks to the kind of story you just shared, where you think that one thing is going on, but what is actually happening underneath the superficial level is something very, very different.

Another example would be, let’s say you’re walking down the street one day and you pass a homeless person sitting in a cardboard box on the corner. If you have a thought like, “Get a job,” that kind of thought very much misses the mark, because it’s quite possible that that homeless person is a very highly evolved soul, perhaps much more so than you, who has agreed to be there at your request so that you could have the opportunity to put judgment aside and feel compassion in your heart.

That’s what’s really going on in our world, but because we, as a society, don’t yet recognize that that’s what’s happening, we still have all these tremendously harsh judgments of people who have certain kinds of experiences, like homelessness and AIDS.

Rick: So, you would say, I believe, from my reading and listening to you, that any really significant relationship or event that happens in a person’s life was preplanned—or at least 70% of them, maybe all of them—and that both parties, if there are multiple parties in this event, prearranged it. Even though there might be this sort of antagonist-protagonist relationship, you’re actually in cahoots from the start. You planned on doing this. So, take it from there, because I have more to say and ask about that, but I want to just elaborate on that.

Rob: Well, that’s a very good description of what is happening here on Earth. Before you come into body, you make decisions about what you would like to learn here. So, let’s just take a common learning. Let’s say that somebody wants to deepen in compassion. You set that as your broad intention, and then, in discussion with your guides, you work on a specific life plan that will help you to deepen in compassion.

Learning Through Opposites in Prebirth Plans

The soul learns best through opposites. So, the typical prebirth plan is what I refer to in my books as the learning-through-opposites plan. What does that mean?

It means that you choose to experience the very opposite of the thing you want to learn, and the reason you do that is that it gives you both the opportunity and the motivation to learn what it is you want to learn.

So, if you’re trying to deepen in compassion, a common way to go about doing that would be to choose to incarnate into a nuclear family in which you will be treated with a profound lack of compassion. The lack of compassion in your external environment is supposed to drive you within, where you will hopefully, over time, develop self-compassion. Then, having done that, later in life, you take the compassion that you have gifted to yourself and turn it outward in service to others. In broad strokes, that is a very common type of prebirth plan.

Rick: So, would you say that there aren’t really evil people on the other side, so to speak? It’s not like there are good guys and bad guys. There are souls all striving to evolve and wanting to work out their karma and so on, and they take on roles when they come to Earth that may appear evil or good or whatever. But before coming to Earth, there isn’t that polarity between good and evil. Is that true?

Rob: Well, I should say here that, in the second book, Your Soul’s Gift, I talk extensively with Jesus through one of the channels with whom I collaborated on that book. I ask him about evil in one of the channeling sessions, and I say to him, “I don’t believe that there is no such thing as evil. There are just people—souls who are in pain—and the expressions of the pain are what we call evil.”

He says, “Yes, that’s essentially correct. Pain expressed is what you, as a society, refer to as evil.”

So, the people who are acting in evil or negative ways fall into one of two broad categories. Sometimes they are, on the other side, very light-filled, evolved souls who are agreeing, at your request or someone’s request, to play a negative role so that you can grow and learn what you want to learn.

The other broad category of people who are playing negative roles are less evolved souls who are carrying back into body some kind of unhealed pain, which is often foreseen to lead them to act in evil or negative ways. But the intention there generally is that they’re bringing the unhealed pain back into body with the hope of healing it, not with the intention of expressing it.

Now, they know in advance that, very often, they may not be able to heal it, that it may get expressed, and this is all understood in the prebirth planning. The other souls with whom they’re incarnating agree to that possibility. They say something like, “We hope that you will be able to heal this as-yet-unhealed pain, but if you are not successful in that attempt and you act in ways that are negative toward me, I’m willing to take that chance because I will work with that. I will use that to foster my own growth while I’m in body with you on planet Earth.”

Rick: Okay. I don’t know if you’re Jewish—you have a Jewish last name. Have you ever—okay—

Rob: I am Jewish.

Rick: What about the Holocaust? Was Hitler basically a noble soul who agreed to this odious role on Earth in collaboration with six million Jews? This is the extreme example, or acid test, of your whole theory. What’s your commentary on that?

Rob: So, I have to preface my response by saying that if you read channeled literature about Hitler, it is contradictory. I’m going to share with you what I was told by a source that I trust and respect.

I asked about Hitler very early on, when I was starting the research for my first book, and what I was told was that, believe it or not, he planned before he was born to be a great spiritual leader, and his soul equipped him with certain gifts that were intended to facilitate that: gifts of oratory and rhetoric, and gifts of charisma. As I understand it, there was a specific option in his prebirth blueprint for him to use his artwork to spiritually inspire people. You might know that he liked to paint and was apparently pretty good at it.

So, this was the intention, the plan that Hitler carried into body. Now, we all have free will. He used his free will to respond to painful things that happened in his childhood and go in the exact opposite direction of where his soul wanted him to go.

You can always do that. Everyone has free will, and you can deviate from your prebirth plan as much as you want, anytime you want. So, he took those gifts that were intended to help him be a great spiritual leader and went 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

Now, the other question that is often asked about Hitler is, “Well, what happened to him? Where is he now?” My understanding is that he is back on the other side, is aware of the pain that he inflicted on so many people, and, as a form of self-punishment, is apparently perpetually recreating his own physical death, which apparently was very painful.

Now, it’s important to understand that he is not being punished by God or some being or council external to him. He is punishing himself in this way, but he is loved unconditionally by God, just as all of us are. He is surrounded in the nonphysical realm by guides and angels who are beaming light to him. He just can’t perceive it yet.

Eventually, he will see that light, he will move into it, he’ll stop punishing himself in this way, and then, presumably, at that point, he will realize he’s got a lot of karma to balance and will start coming back into body.

Rick: Interesting. So, you said something like he’s repeatedly inflicting the experience of his death on himself as a form of punishment. Of course, there are a lot of people in this world who have done horrible things, none as notorious as Hitler, but millions of them. This would imply that there is some sort of hell realm in which people relive or experience the consequences of their actions on Earth—in other words, suffer in order to somehow work out karma.

Rob: Well, that actually is consistent with what people who have had near-death experiences report. A number of them have gone to, seen, or made contact with the realm in which beings are punishing themselves in different ways and inflicting pain and suffering on each other.

But it’s important to understand here that this hellish realm is not something that God or some great external spiritual power created as a means of punishing those who do “bad things.” This is a realm that is self-created by the beings who have chosen to put themselves there.

Their guides and angels come to that realm and encourage them to leave it and join them in the light. But because of the way they’ve treated others, they feel unworthy of moving into the light, and so they choose to stay in this realm. But they’re not being forced to stay there. They can leave at any time they choose to. They just don’t feel worthy yet of leaving.

Rick: Interesting. Of course, all the world’s spiritual traditions speak of a realm or realms like that. Some traditions speak of multiple levels of hell and multiple levels of heaven, and so on.

There was a story in the Mahabharata where, at the end, Arjuna—or maybe it was Yudhishthira—found himself in heaven, but the bad guy was there, Duryodhana. He said, “Well, what’s he doing here? And where are my brothers?” Whoever it was said, “Well, your brothers are in hell.”

He said, “Well, I want to go and be where they are. I don’t want to be here in this heaven if my brothers aren’t here.” So, he went to hell, but then very soon, the whole situation reversed. They went back to heaven, and Duryodhana was nowhere to be found. He had gone to hell.

The moral of the story was that Duryodhana had a little bit of heavenly karma to work off. Yudhishthira had a little bit of hellish karma to work off. But once they had worked it off, they went to where they actually belonged and stayed there for a long time.

Rob: Yeah, and none of that is very surprising to me. I think that, again, this is consistent with what people who’ve had near-death experiences report. But again, I want to emphasize that these are self-created punishments, a self-created realm.

As I understand it, God is not punishing anyone for anything that they have done, and God loves all beings, including Hitler, unconditionally.

As I understand it, God is not punishing anyone for anything that they have done, and God loves all beings, including Hitler, unconditionally.

Rick: Yeah. And are they any more self-created than the Earth? It seems to me the Earth is a self-created realm. It’s a collaborative situation. We’re all creating it, but each of our individual contributions goes to comprise what we find on this planet.

Rob: The Earth is very much a self-created realm and, in many respects, an artificial realm. It’s very different from our lives on the other side, but it’s set up to foster, to maximize, growth, learning, and healing.

There are very good reasons that it’s like this, but it’s a consensual reality. We all agree, when we are in the nonphysical and before we come into body, that we would like to participate together in this kind of realm, and that we’re going to limit our perceptions, for the most part, to information that comes in through the five senses.

Because we all share those same five senses, we are perceiving the same reality consensually.

Rick: This question came in from Elizabeth in Colorado. She asks, “What is your definition of karma, and what does it mean to live a karma-free life?”

Karma as Unbalanced Energy and Incompletion

Rob: My definition of karma is unbalanced energy or a sense of incompletion around a particular experience. So, let’s take a simple example. Let’s say that two people have a past life together in which one was ill and the other person was that person’s caregiver.

When those two people transition back into spirit, they’ll have their life review, as we all do, and they may or may not have a sense of incompletion around the caregiving relationship. “May” is the key word there, and it’s up to them to decide, “We’re complete with that experience,” or, “We’re not.”

Nobody external to them is saying, “You have karma here.” Now, if they look at the caregiving relationship in the life review and decide, “We’re complete with that kind of experience,” then there is no karma.

Rob: On the other hand, if they feel incomplete with it, the feeling of incompletion is the karma. So, what would they do in that case? Well, the easiest thing to do, the most simple, most direct thing would be to simply trade places. So, now the one who was ill plans the life challenge of caregiving, and the one who was the caregiver plans the life challenge of illness. By trading places like that and having the opposite experience, their intention is that they will get to a place of completion in regard to the caregiving relationship, and once they do eventually get to that place of completion, then there is no karma and they move on to do something else.

In terms of what is the karma-free life, a karma-free life would imply that somebody felt complete with every previous experience that they had, and there are such people who come into body. There’s somebody in Your Soul’s Plan, in the chapter about the pre-birth planning of drug abuse, who is the story of a soul who plans, before coming into body, to have a heroin addiction. Having put that plan in place for reasons of his own, he goes to another soul with whom he’s had many past lives and whom he loves very much, and who loves him very much, and he essentially says, “Would you agree to be the mother who shepherds me through this very difficult experience?”

What we find out as we continue in that pre-birth planning session is that this soul has no karma. This soul is complete with all previous Earth experiences, but out of her great love for this other soul, she chooses to come into body and serve as his mother while he goes through this very difficult heroin addiction. But she didn’t have to do that. There was no karma. She felt complete with everything she had done here previously.

Rick: Yeah, in the Vedic tradition they have the concept of avatars, who are sort of embodied incarnations of God, who have nothing to work out personally but who just come here for the benefit of humanity. I suppose the bodhisattvas in Buddhism are a similar concept. So, it’s not like they have individual karma to work out. They’re just here to serve and give.

Rob: Yeah, very much so. I think Sai Baba, when he was here, was a good example of that. As I understand it, he was an avatar who had no previous karma and was just here to serve—

Rick: Yeah, there’s controversy around him, but I don’t want to get into it. So, as I understand it, by design, we don’t remember, when we come in, that we prearranged a lot of stuff. We don’t remember what our soul’s plan is, or even that there is such a thing or that we have made one. Why is that?

Rob: I think there are a few reasons. One is that by completely forgetting what life on the other side is like, completely forgetting your life plan and even your identity as an eternal, nonphysical being, what that does is make everything that happens here on Earth seem a lot more serious and intense than it actually is. In other words, if you remembered your pre-birth plan and your identity as an eternal soul, you would be very much aware that life on Earth is nothing more than a play on a stage. But because we forget who we really are, it seems very real, and it seems very serious and important and intense.

There’s a lot of value in that, because when it seems that way, you experience very intense emotions, and a lot of the growth and learning on the Earth plane comes through experiencing intense emotions, learning how to relate to them and work with them skillfully. So, you don’t want to deprive yourself of the experience of intense emotions by remembering everything about your pre-birth plan.

Another reason I think the amnesia is so important is that it’s very much like the difference between an open-book test and a closed-book test in school. If it’s going to be an open-book test, you tend not to study hard. You think you’ll just look up the answers in the textbook during the test. But if it’s a closed-book test, you tend to study harder, and therefore you learn more.

Well, if you come in remembering your pre-birth plan in its entirety, it basically makes life like an open-book test. You just don’t learn as much. Then, I think also, a lot of the growth and learning on the Earth plane comes through the experience of asking a lot of questions, deciding which questions are important enough to pursue, and then actually pursuing the answers to those questions. If you remembered all of your pre-birth plan, you would have no questions, and then you would be deprived of that very valuable learning.

Rick: So, in doing what you do, aren’t you kind of messing up the system because you’re helping people remember their pre-birth plan and all that?

Rob: I knew that would be the next question. I asked about this very early on when I started researching Your Soul’s Plan, and this was long before I was doing hypnosis. I asked in one of the channeling sessions what happens if I put a particular person’s story in the book and they recognize themselves. Does this pull them off their life path in some way?

The response I got was, “You don’t have to worry about this at all, because if somebody recognizes their story in your book, that means that it’s for their highest good to encounter your book. Anybody for whom it’s not for their highest good to encounter your book either will simply never hear of it, or, if they do, they’ll think this is a lot of nonsense and they’ll very quickly move on to something else.”

So, coming to the hypnosis, where I do between-lives regressions and people find out all the details of their pre-birth plan, the people who are having that experience are the only ones who are best served by it. Someone whose highest good is not served by getting answers to questions about their pre-birth plan either will never hear of the work that I’m doing or, again, if they do hear of it, they’ll think that’s a lot of nonsense and they’ll quickly move on to something else.

Rick: You hear stories of people who do remember their past lives. Often it’s little children who haven’t gotten clouded over so much. Also, yogis. In the Yoga Sutra, one of the siddhis, or attainments, is said to be the ability to remember your past lives. So, we’re saying that either very innocent people or perhaps very highly evolved people have the tendency to be able to remember. Would you think that perhaps, in an enlightened world, if we ever achieve such a thing where the predominant level of consciousness is very high, remembering past lives and between-lives periods and all that will be kind of the norm?

Rob: I do believe that, and what you’ve just described is, as I understand it, what it’s like when we’re back home on the other side in the nonphysical realm. We do remember our past lives. We have complete, full access to all of that information, and that’s because we’re at a higher vibration when we’re back on the other side, and because having access to that information is for our highest and greatest good.

But when we come into body, most people are best served by not remembering that and not having access to that information, and that’s the main reason why they don’t have access to it while they’re here.

Rick: Yeah. I remember there’s that line in the Gita where Lord Krishna is telling Arjuna that we’ve had many lives, both of us, and I remember them all, but you remember them not. He goes on, but it sort of seems to be characteristic of a high level of evolution to have access to that kind of information if you want it. Isn’t it?

I want to just add that if people have questions, there’s a form at the bottom of the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com through which you can submit questions during the live interview, but not afterwards.

Okay. So, one fellow named David sent in a bunch of interesting questions. I didn’t have a chance to condense them as much as I’d like, but if we decide pre-birth to do something most would consider pretty undesirable, such as having a terrible accident, being a terrorist or a murderer or pedophile, or a victim of such things, is it necessarily a right decision to do these things, or can we be making mistakes?

Yeah, why don’t you highlight some of these for me, the David Watermyer stuff starting at the bottom. I can even send you the file if you want. Go ahead. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Rob: That’s all right. Well, it’s important to understand that the judgment that it’s a mistake is a very human reaction, but the soul has no such judgment of anything that we do. The soul views everything that happens on the Earth plane as an opportunity for learning, for expansion, for healing.

So, if you are a terrorist and you hurt people, the soul has no judgment of that. The soul would conclude that you had lessons to learn and unexpressed pain to heal, but it wouldn’t be viewed as bad or evil or sinful.

Spirit just doesn’t look at it that way. There’s a story in Your Soul’s Plan, my first book, in a chapter about the pre-birth planning of accidents. There’s a story there of a woman who is blown up in a bomb explosion.

In her pre-birth planning session, we heard her talking to the soul who was going to be the bomber. This was a soul who was very troubled and had a lot of unhealed pain that was being brought back into body for the purpose of healing it. It was foreseen that this soul would have trouble doing that and would be likely to do something like plant a bomb.

But it’s not viewed as a wrong decision, because the woman who was eventually blown up in the bomb explosion had this attitude in the pre-birth planning session: “If this happens, I’m going to use it to foster my growth,” which is exactly what she did.

And if this other soul is successful in healing that pain and the bomb explosion never takes place, then I’m going to create backup plans in my life plan in which there will still be some kind of very severe accident, because I need to have that experience in order to heal myself so that I can then go on and become a healer to others. That’s the experience that she was looking for.

Rick: Just out of curiosity, and somewhat tangentially, was that, by any chance, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber who planted that bomb, or don’t you know?

Rob: It was not.

Rick: It was not. Okay. Yeah, I remember hearing you say in one interview that if we could see a sort of flowchart of all the possibilities in this life, it would be complex beyond our comprehension. Even though maybe 70% of the things that happen to us—or all the significant things, at least—are chosen, there’s 30% wiggle room of free will, or our choice, as we go along.

Nonetheless, the whole, like you said, backup plans—the whole sort of “if A, then B; if not B, then this”—becomes this vast, vast thing that it would take some intelligence much more profound than the human to really comprehend.

Rob: Yeah, one of the mediums with whom I worked on both books reports that when she goes into somebody’s pre-birth planning session, spirit shows her something that looks to her like an incredibly vast and elaborate flowchart. It’s so huge, so vast, so elaborate that it’s really beyond human understanding.

What that flowchart represents are all the so-called backup plans that the person is putting into place. So, when we talk about someone having a life plan, or a Plan A, they do have a Plan A, but there’s also a Plan B, C, D, E, F, and on and on and on—so many backup plans that, again, it’s beyond human understanding.

Free Will and Backup Prebirth Plans

The reason that those backup plans are created is because the personality has free will. The soul wants the personality to have free will. The soul wants the personality to use that free will, because that’s how true learning occurs. And so these backup plans are put into place so that you will have the kinds of experiences you need in order to reach your pre-birth intention.

Rick: Yeah. When you think about the complexity, imagine the organization that it took to get everybody into the Twin Towers on 9/11—all the life paths that had to lead to them having jobs in those buildings, or being on the plane that crashed, or any kind of other mass casualty like that. All the years of life lived up to that point were sort of a chain of events leading to their being in that circumstance for this thing to happen, which presumably, since it’s so significant, was supposed to happen. But just imagine the complexity of having to organize that.

Rob: Well, and this is why spirit guides serve such a valuable role, because it is possible for you to use your free will to get pretty far off track in terms of accomplishing your pre-birth intentions. So then your guides work overtime, so to speak, to bump you back onto a path where you can learn what you had planned to learn.

There’s actually a type of pre-birth agreement between two individuals that is sometimes referred to as the bump contract. What that means is, if somebody before they’re born is concerned that they’re going to get off track and not learn what they want to learn, they create a pre-birth agreement with another soul to bump them back onto the path of desired learning.

The way that you can recognize whether or not you have a bump contract with another person is that it’s usually a very brief but very intense relationship that has a major impact on the direction of your life. That person was bumping you, so to speak, back onto the path of greatest learning for you.

Rick: Back to the thing about group casualties. Do you have anything more to say about that? There must be some—you say soul groups, or maybe 17 or 25 people—but 3,000 people in the Twin Towers, or some huge number in some other catastrophe. It seems like there’s something more significant to that, like six million Jews in the Holocaust. There seems to be some huge group karma that is being played out in circumstances like that.

Rob: Well, it’s more of a group intention, is the way that I would put it. I’ll talk about a large-scale event that I know something about. You may remember that a few years ago, there was a tsunami in Southeast Asia, and that tsunami killed approximately 100,000 people.

I’ve asked about that in the channeling sessions I’ve done for Your Soul’s Plan and Your Soul’s Gift, and what I was told was that those 100,000 or so souls wanted, before they were born, for planet Earth to get to a certain vibration or frequency by a certain point in linear time. They said, “If it looks as though the Earth will not get to that vibration by that point in linear time, then we agree to give our lives in a large-scale natural disaster, because we know that the result of that disaster will be all the governments of the world putting aside their differences in order to funnel aid into this region of the world.”

You might recall that’s exactly what happened. After that tsunami struck Southeast Asia, all the governments of the world temporarily put aside their differences and coordinated in order to funnel aid into Southeast Asia. That decision to do that was a massive outpouring of love and compassion, which raised the vibration of the entire planet tremendously. That was exactly the desired effect that those 100,000 or so souls wanted to have by giving up their lives in a large-scale natural disaster.

There’s an old expression: “Where you stand depends upon where you sit.” This is a very good illustration of that, because if you are a human being who sits, so to speak, in that third dimension, then where you stand on the tsunami is that it was a terrible tragedy. Certainly, from a human perspective, it was. But if you are a spirit guide who, quote-unquote, sits in a higher dimension, then where you stand on the tsunami is that it was a great blessing to Earth. From that perspective, it was.

So there you have two diametrically opposed perspectives, and yet both are correct from your viewpoint of—

Rick: It is interesting how disasters and catastrophes tend to bring out people’s compassion. Just in the last couple of weeks, when they had all that flooding from the hurricane in North and South Carolina, all kinds of people poured in from all over the place.

There was this whole group of people with airboats and other kinds of boats calling themselves the Cajun Navy who came up from Louisiana to help. You just see all these scenes of people really full of heart, which perhaps they don’t experience as fully in their day-to-day lives, but having that enlivened by the disaster, they’re able to somehow help with it.

Rob: Yeah, I think that’s a very good example, and it’s exactly the same kind of thing that’s going on. The outpouring of love and compassion elevates the frequency of the entire planet.

Rick: All right, here’s a short question from somebody here in Fairfield, Iowa: What about Trump?

Rob: Good question. We’re all wondering about that. I think there are a couple of things going on there. One thing that I think is happening, and that I hope is happening, is that I think this is a turning point, or can be a turning point, for humanity.

In other words, I think that 100, 200, or 300 years from now, something like that, humanity will look back on the Trump experience and say, “That was the point at which we decided we no longer wanted to make fear-based, ego-based decisions. We saw it wasn’t working, and we shifted direction.”

I have a friend who is a hypnotist, as I am, and he does a particular form of hypnosis in which, when the client is in trance, the client’s soul or higher self speaks through the client. He told me a story recently in which he had a client who said, “I want to know what’s going on with Trump, and if I go into trance, I want you to ask my soul what is happening with him.”

Well, he did go into trance, and the hypnotist asked this person’s soul what was happening with Trump. The soul responded by drawing an analogy in which a person—Trump—was pushing a wheelbarrow that was filled with manure and dumping it, cleaning out the land. The idea was that although the manure smells horrible and is an unpleasant experience, something beautiful will then grow out of it. So that’s what this person’s higher self was saying was happening with Trump.

The other thing that I think is going on there is that, as I understand it, human society has been out of balance for millennia, skewed too much toward the masculine and too far away from the feminine. I think Trump is a very good illustration of that imbalance, and I think the reaction against Trump is going to swing us back toward the feminine.

In fact, this is already happening. In terms of the congressional election in November, there are now more women running for Congress and even for state- and county-level government than have ever run before. That is, in large part, a reaction against Trump, and it’s shifting us back to a balance between feminine and masculine.

Rick: Interesting. It’s interesting as a general principle how some bad thing that happens is often apparently necessary for a lesson to be learned and for the kind of opposite good thing to become more stabilized and more normal. It’s kind of like we can’t just jump to the good thing. We have to sort of get to it in reaction to its opposite.

Suffering as a Tool for Spiritual Growth

Well, this is something that I asked Jesus about in the channelings for Your Soul’s Gift , and what he said was that suffering is not necessary for learning and growth. You can learn anything you want to learn and grow in any ways you want to without suffering, but it is a very effective tool for stimulating growth.

Rob: Well, this is something that I asked Jesus about in the channelings for Your Soul’s Gift, and what he said was that suffering is not necessary for learning and growth. You can learn anything you want to learn and grow in any ways you want to without suffering, but it is a very effective tool for stimulating growth.

My understanding is that there are some souls who actually learn best by having their hearts broken open through painful experiences. If you are a soul who learns best that way, you would be inclined to come to the Earth plane because it’s set up to provide you with that kind of learning.

“Suffering is not necessary for learning and growth, but it is a very effective tool for stimulating growth.”

Rick: Yeah, heartbreak, definitely. The phrase almost literally explains what happens, which is that your heart opens. It wouldn’t have opened if it had just had to melt, because it wasn’t melting. But, okay, it’s not melting—let’s break it. Then it’s open, and maybe it’ll tend to stay open, or at least more open, having broken like that.

Rob: Yeah, I think that is very much how learning is done here on the Earth plane. It certainly is not always pleasant, but it is very—

Rick: Yeah, and you’ve spoken to—I’m sorry, were you about to say something more? You’ve spoken to a lot of people who have had their hearts broken through children committing suicide, and all kinds of terrible things that have happened to people, and they’ve come to you for help and guidance.

So maybe it would be good to just dwell on this point a little bit longer, since I bet it takes up a fairly significant percentage of your activities, dealing with people who have had their hearts broken in various ways.

Rob: Yeah, the two books, Your Soul’s Plan and Your Soul’s Gift, and also the focus of my hypnosis practice, are very much about helping people to understand the deeper spiritual meaning and purpose of their biggest challenges.

People often say to me, “Well, why don’t you write about joyful experiences and how people learn through joy?” I definitely believe that people learn through joyful experiences, but the need for understanding is in regard to the painful experiences.

In other words, when something quote-unquote good happens, very few people stop and ask the question, “Why is this happening to me?” They just enjoy it, right? But if something quote-unquote bad happens, then you say, “What is this all about? Why is it happening?” I think that’s where the need for understanding is.

I think also that this is very much my specific pre-birth mission: to bring understanding around suffering.

✨ Relationships, sexuality, and self-love

Rick: Yeah. In a few minutes, we’ll get into going through some of the chapters in your book, just as little springboards for discussion. I’ll just read the chapter titles, and we can talk about some of the different issues that people deal with.

But here’s a more philosophical question from Madhu in Bangalore. He wants to know: Could you explain or comment on the concept of parallel reality?

Rob: My understanding is that there are a number of parallel universes in which there are parallel selves for all of us, and they’re having, to a large extent, the same sorts of experiences that we’re having here.

But there’s some major difference—a decision point where the you in this dimension goes in one direction, and then there’s a you in another dimension that goes in the opposite direction. The reason the universe is set up this way is because the soul wants to experience everything, including the ramifications of very different choices.

So, for example, in Your Soul’s Gift, there is a chapter about a woman who plans before she’s born to experience a rape. We talked with Jesus about this, and the woman’s name is Beverly. I asked Jesus, “Are there parallel Beverlys in parallel dimensions who did not experience the rape?” He said, “Yes, there are.” I said, “Well, how many Beverlys are there?” His answer is very interesting. He said, “About four.” I said, “Well, how can it be about four? Doesn’t it have to be a discrete number?” Then he drew an analogy. He said that the soul is like the trunk of a tree, and the various personalities are like the limbs of the tree.

The limbs of the tree grow, and then they die and fall off the tree. Then other limbs grow, die, and fall off the tree. That cycle keeps repeating itself again and again over time. He said this is basically what’s happening with the soul. Personalities are formed, and then the lifetime ends, and the personality ends at the end of the lifetime. But then new personalities are created by the soul, and so there’s this very dynamic process of growth that is happening by having multiple selves in multiple dimensions.

Rick: It’s interesting. Just as you were asking that, a question came in from Kay in New Mexico, which is very relevant to what you’re just saying. She said, “Do the personalities of the soul remain or become an integral, cumulative part of the soul personality progressively through any and all lifetimes?”

I think what she’s saying is, do we keep augmenting the personality, or the sum total of what comprises the soul, as we go through different lifetimes and experience different things in various personalities? Are we like an amoeba that takes in little food particles and grows as a result of doing that?

Rob: Well, my understanding is that the personality has an eternal core, an eternal nature or character. In any given lifetime, there are personality quirks, traits, or characteristics that are just part of the personality on the superficial level for that particular lifetime, but the eternal core lives forever.

So, when you leave an incarnation, that eternal core remerges with the soul, so to speak, and brings back all of the wisdom, love, and learning that took place during the lifetime. Then that eternal core will reincarnate with a different set of external traits, quirks, or characteristics that will be perfect for—

Rick: So, let me make sure I have that straight. We have the soul, and you’re saying there’s some core. When we incarnate, the core, plus some package of traits from the soul, goes to make up that particular life. So, it’s like the core is almost a movable part that comes into each—or maybe it’s not moving. Maybe it’s just some fundamental substrate that is omnipresent and always there. But in any case, it’s always there as we’re living a life, in addition to some package of qualities or traits from the soul. Can you clarify that?

Rob: Yes, I think that’s a good way to put it. There’s a system, a body of channeling literature known as the Michael system, which talks about soul archetypes. Here, Michael is not a reference to Archangel Michael. Michael is a collective or a group consciousness, and they’ve been channeled by various individuals around the world, talking about how life plans relate to soul age.

According to the Michael system, there are certain broad categories of souls. One of the categories is King. Warrior is another category. Priest is another category. I, myself, am in the priest category. So, I would go from lifetime to lifetime with this core of priest-like qualities, and that would be surrounded by different characteristics or traits that were part of each individual lifetime.

Rick: Sounds like the caste system in India. You have the Brahmin caste, or the teachers and priests; you have the Kshatriya caste, who are the warriors and administrators; you have the Vaishya caste, the businesspeople; and the Shudra caste, which are the servants. The whole thing has been corrupted and distorted, but there was some original idea that people are roughly classified into these different kinds of aptitudes.

Rob: It’s very similar to that. Speaking from personal experience, as a priest, I have tended across an arc of many lifetimes to do things that are priest-like in nature. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m literally a priest in many lifetimes, but I would be doing things that are interesting or related to spirituality.

Just to give your listeners a feel for how it works, a young priest would do something like look for an evangelical congregation to lead. A mature or older priest would do something like what I’m doing in this lifetime: work related to pre-birth planning. That’s essentially how it works.

Rick: Speaking of spiritual traditions and priests and all that, at least in Hinduism and Buddhism, there’s the idea that you want to get to a point eventually where you don’t have to come back to Earth anymore, where you don’t reincarnate anymore. I think some of them have the attitude that you merge, like a drop in the ocean, and there’s no semblance of you anymore, in any way, shape, or form, on any level.

Others say, “Okay, you don’t have to come back to Earth anymore, but you’re still going to exist just as much as you do now, but you’re going to do things in higher realms.” What’s your whole take on the notion of getting off the wheel of reincarnation altogether?

Rob: Well, my understanding is that you don’t actually have to reincarnate, but from the nonphysical—excuse me, the nonphysical perspective—you very much want to, most of the time.

In other words, our perspective when we get back to the nonphysical is very different from what it is here, and I think there are a few key differences. One is that, from the nonphysical vantage point, we’re very much aware that a lifetime is actually very brief. Now, it might not seem that way when you’re in a body, especially if you’re suffering; it can seem interminable. But from the nonphysical vantage point, you know that it’s very brief. It’s here and gone like a clap of thunder.

Also, from the nonphysical vantage point, you’re very much aware that nobody is permanently harmed by anything that happens here. You might or might not have that awareness when you’re in a body, but you do have it from the other side.

The other key difference, I think, is that from the nonphysical vantage point, you’re very much aware that the learning and wisdom from an incarnation become part of you, part of your soul, literally for all eternity. So, from that vantage point—that a lifetime is actually very brief, no one is permanently harmed by anything that happens here, and yet the wisdom becomes part of the soul for literally all eternity—it actually does make sense that you would want to come back, and that you would also want to take on big challenges once—

Rick: So, you don’t really ascribe to the notion that at some point all souls are going to get off the wheel and not get reincarnated anymore?

Rob: No, actually, I do subscribe to that notion, because I think after a certain point in your evolution, you start to realize that what you want to learn is best learned somewhere else other than Earth. When you make that decision, then you choose—

Rick: Okay, then do you think that you eventually cease to exist in any way, shape, or form, like the drop merging with the ocean and being indistinguishable from it? Or do you think that we all eternally retain some sort of individuation, however cosmic it may be, and continue to evolve and function on some level?

Rob: I believe that both things are true, and that may sound contradictory. It is probably contradictory from the vantage point of the human perspective, but there are paradoxes like that that exist in the universe.

So, I believe that you remerge with the One the same way that a drop of water would remerge with the ocean, and yet, at the same time, you would retain the individuality that you had cultivated over many lifetimes, both physical and nonphysical.

Rick: Here’s a question from Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California. He asks, “Fundamentally, who is it that is experiencing this cycle of various births, life lessons, death, and planning sessions? Does that one have any attributes, or is it formless and unperturbed by any of this grand drama?”

Rob: I think that that one does have attributes. That’s where we come back to the Michael system again. Souls fall broadly into these certain categories of attributes, like King or Priest and so on, and it’s that essential core that is going through this planning process, coming back into a body, going back to the other side, and then starting all over again.

Rick: Okay. Hopefully that’ll answer Mark’s question. Mark, if it doesn’t, ask a follow-up question.

I had this thought before we started, and I Googled something, because I was thinking: How many people are born and die on the Earth every day? Approximately 100 people die each second, and more than twice that many are born each second. So, about 150,000 die each day, and roughly 360,000 are born each day. That’s 55 million deaths a year or 131 million births a year.

So, I guess that begs the question: Are there multiple councils of elders who are dealing with a person dying every second or so, or less than every second? Otherwise, they would have to be very brief planning sessions. Is the work divided up? Are there a whole bunch of different councils that can manage the flow of people coming and going?

Rob: My understanding is that every person has their own individual, what you could call, soul council. Then there is the council of elders that is overseeing the process of reincarnation on planet Earth, and so they are overseeing the individual soul councils.

When I do, for example, group regressions as part of the workshops that I conduct, in a group between-lives regression, people are going to talk to the council of elders. That’s possible because consciousness is nonlocal. The same council can be talking to the same people at the same time. It’s really not a problem at all. It’s mind-boggling from a human perspective, but I think on the other side, it’s actually—

Rick: So, you’re saying that councils have a sort of hierarchical structure, the way maybe the legal system in the U.S. does, where you have the Supreme Court, then you have federal courts, then you have state or local courts, and so on? They each have their jurisdictions, and maybe if a lower court can’t decide something, it gets passed up to a higher court for their consideration.

Rob: I think, in rough terms, that that is a valid analogy.

Rick: Now, I didn’t Google this, but I have Googled it before: the number of Earth-like planets in the galaxy and the fact that there are two trillion galaxies in the universe, in the known universe, and undoubtedly trillions and trillions of Earth-like—or not Earth-like, but habitable—planets out there. So, the universe basically is teeming with life.

It’s very small-minded to just be thinking of the Earth, although this is our home. But from the soul perspective, or the between-lives perspective, which, as you’ve been saying, is actually broader than the incarnate perspective, does one take into account the cosmic scope of things?

Does one limit oneself to living lives on Earth for the most part, or do we move readily between different planets and areas of the universe? Perhaps other planets become more suitable for incarnation once we reach a certain stage, or if we need to learn certain lessons that we could learn more readily there than here?

Rob: My understanding is that you’re doing both of those things at the same time. In other words, once you start incarnating on Earth, you tend to come back quite a few times, because there’s so much here that you want to experience and learn. And yet, when you’re not incarnate on Earth, you take incarnations on other planets, and you have nonphysical lifetimes. You have to remember, there’s no linear time in the nonphysical realm. So, you can do all of these things simultaneously, and it’s really just not an issue.

❤️ God, pets, and nonphysical relationships

Rick: Interesting. Okay. I’m going to open up the table of contents of your book, Your Soul’s Gift, and each chapter is dedicated to a particular topic. Let’s go through them, but not necessarily in order.

Before I do that, another question came in from my good friend Dan in England, who actually manages these questions and sends them in. He says, “You use the word God a lot. How would you describe God? I feel that there is nothing but God, that everything arises from God, that God is fundamental to all, and nothing else really exists in an ultimate sense. Another way to talk about this fundamental reality is using words like love or consciousness. I feel that it reduces God to talk about anything other than God existing in an ultimate sense. What are your thoughts?”

Rob: I very much agree with that. Sometimes I use the term God to make a point, but I think of God as what the Buddhists would call the ground of all being. In other words, everything is divine: every object, every person, every plant, insect, and animal. Everything that’s in existence is part of God, because God is the—

Rick: I think, as Dan’s question indicates, it’s not only the ground. It’s the substance. If you actually analyze anything closely enough, there is that divine intelligence playing in that particular form, quite evident, although a little bit hidden in plain sight.

Rob: Yeah. An analogy that is sometimes used for this is that it’s like beads on a necklace. Each person is like one individual bead, and that string that connects all of them is God.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good.

Rob: If you just look at the beads on the surface, that’s all you see. But if you look more deeply, then inside the string—

Rick: Yeah, and I think we might add that the beads are God too. In other words, if God is omnipresent, then how can there be anything that exists independently of God, that isn’t completely permeated by God, and that, in fact, isn’t comprised of anything but God? So, if things seem to be happening to you or to other people, we can think of it as God interacting with itself and creating all this play. For what? For the sake of whatever—you can finish the sentence.

Rob: Well, I think from God’s perspective, so to speak, God wants to experience everything. Through each individual, unique soul, there’s an infinite range of experience that is available.

Rick: They call it lila in Sanskrit, the play of creation, and it’s said that the purpose of the whole thing is the expansion of happiness.

Rob: Or the expansion of unconditional love.

Rick: So, we’re going to take some chapter titles and use those as little springboards for discussion. Let’s jump right in. This will be an abrupt segue, but let’s jump right into a discussion about pets.

Rob: The story in the pets chapter is about a soul who plans, before coming into a body, to be a dwarf. In this lifetime, she’s four feet eight inches tall, and she puts this plan into place for reasons of her own. But then her guides warn her and say, “This is going to be a very difficult experience, particularly when you’re a child, because you will be smaller than all of your peers. They will tease you and ostracize you. They’re going to make your life very painful. You need to put some kind of supports into place to get yourself through this difficult experience.”

She chooses to do that by creating pre-birth agreements with a number of future pets. So, into her pre-birth planning session, a number of cats come in, dogs come in, and a horse comes in. There’s even a rooster named Crooked Beak. All of these beings speak to her very intelligently and very lovingly about how they will love her unconditionally, even as others tease, torment, and ostracize her. They will give her the unconditional love that will help her get through this experience, so that she can learn what she would like to learn by being a dwarf.

Rick: So, when you say that the pets worked that out with her ahead of time as a prearrangement, what kind of souls are the pets themselves? Could they just as easily have been born as humans, or are they lesser-evolved souls that have to go through a number of animal incarnations before they can begin to have human incarnations?

Rob: My understanding is the latter, and that they’re in a process of evolution. They will move up, so to speak, to being human, but there are sometimes deviations from that.

For example, I have a very good friend who planned for this current lifetime to be a woman who was not going to have any children. There were two other souls with whom she had shared many lifetimes who wanted to join her in this lifetime as her children, but they didn’t have that option because that wasn’t part of her plan. So, they actually planned to come back as her pets.

She is a healer in this lifetime, and they incarnated as dogs whom she would bring into the healing sessions. Her clients often comment, “These dogs are so loving, and they seem to have a wisdom of their own.” They had been her children in previous lifetimes and wanted to do that again, but couldn’t, so they chose this other form of expression.

Rick: Anything’s possible, I would say. What more do you want to say about pets? You mentioned before the interview that you’d like to really delve into this a little bit. Let me ask you a question that’ll help you out here.

Rob: Well, just that they’re—

Rick: A lot of people think that when I die, my loved ones are going to be there, my pets are going to be there to greet me, and so on. But that kind of implies that they’re going to hang around and not be reincarnated again, and things would get a little out of sync, it seems to me.

Do we all have to wait for everybody in our soul group, including all our pets and whoever or whatever else is significant, to finish dying so we can all convene on the other side and then make a plan for the next life?

Rob: That’s one of those questions that I think we’re not really going to understand the answer to until we get back to the other side. But I can tell you that in the between-lives regressions I do with clients, when they get to the council of elders, they often ask the council to call in deceased loved ones and deceased pets. They’re able to talk with those pets, and then sometimes they’re told that the pets have reincarnated, or that people have reincarnated, and yet they’re there in the meeting with the council, talking to them. So again, an example of conscious—

Rick: So, just to emphasize the point: when I die, my mother may be there to greet me, but she may also have already incarnated again someplace, and yet she can be there to greet me at the same time. There’s no conflict or contradiction there.

Rob: That is my understanding.

Rick: Okay. I guess that would make sense in light of—I’m sorry, go ahead.

Rob: I was going to say, you asked if there was any—

Rick: Well, just before you do that, I want to say that would sort of jibe with what you said earlier about the soul being a sort of larger thing, and this life being a spark of it. So, my mother’s soul could still be there, with a spark of it having gone on and reincarnated, but predominantly who and what she is would still be on the other side to greet me. Okay.

Rob: Exactly. That’s exactly what I was—

Rick: So, go ahead and say what you were going to say.

Rob: Well, in regard to pets, pets are doing a lot of things in service to us that are not well known or well understood. For example, it’s my understanding that cats have the ability to heal holes or tears in the human auric field. So, when you have a cat sitting on your lap and it’s purring so lovingly, if there’s some kind of rupture or distortion in your auric energy, the cat has the ability to repair that simply by sitting in your auric field.

Another thing that sometimes goes on with pets is that when a family member dies and transitions back to the other side, as I understand it, they can leave a small portion of their energy in the physical body of the pet. So, it’s a way of keeping part of their consciousness, part of their being, with you, their loved one, even though most of who they are is going back to the other side.

Rick: Yeah.

Rob: It’s very interesting—

Rick: It’s fun to talk about this stuff because, if you have an open mind, it just stirs it up a little bit. You start considering things that you wouldn’t ordinarily think about from day to day.

I take everything basically as a hypothesis, which means it’s an interesting thing to investigate. You don’t have to either reject or accept it adamantly when you first hear it. It’s like, “Oh, that’s an interesting idea. Let’s think about that.” Obviously, we choose our hypotheses. We can’t necessarily investigate them all, but personally, I think that if you really have a scientific attitude, and not a dogmatic or fundamentalist one, then there’s no chance of atheism, because that is a fixed position. You’re not open to the possibility that it’s wrong. You’re not being scientific.

As with all the other topics we’re raising here, all of this should be seen as hypotheses that are worthy of consideration and investigation.

Rob: Now, I’ll give you one more thing in regard to pets. It’s my understanding that if the owner of a pet has repressed certain emotions—anger, for example—the pet can pick up the repressed emotion and then express it on behalf of the person.

So, if you’ve repressed anger and you’re not processing it because you’ve repressed it, the pet can pick up that energy, express it on your behalf, and therefore process it on your behalf.

Rick: Poor mailman.

That’s true. Pets are like stress solvents or something. They soften the atmosphere and soften the heart. My wife and I have had pets for most of our marriage, and it’s definitely a therapeutic thing. It sort of helps. I don’t know how to put this, but I think it’s made our relationship a lot richer and smoother just having these little beings to interact with and take care of.

A question came in that will take us off the topic of pets. We’re all good?

So, this comes from a woman in Austria who has been a friend of mine for a number of years named Saguna Mueller. She asks, “What if you were told by a psychic that you are a highly evolved being and that you accepted specific hardships in order to be of a certain service? You might even be told the type of service, and you might agree and recognize this as your soul purpose. But what if you just can’t handle it, say, because of illness and intense physical pain? What would you tell such a person?”

She’s referring to herself. She has great intellectual gifts and so on, but she’s had such intense physical challenges that they’ve really handicapped her ability to use those gifts.

Rob: What I would say is that pre-birth plans get amended all the time, on a regular basis, and there are a couple of ways that happens. One is that when you’re asleep at night, you leave the physical body, and in your astral or spirit body you travel to get together with the other significant people in your life. You essentially talk about whether we’re learning what we came here to learn. If the answer is yes, that’s great—just carry on. But if the answer is no, then you talk about how you need to amend the plan so that you can learn what you came here to learn.

The other way that you can amend a pre-birth plan is simply by asking your guides, your higher self, or your council to amend it. If you feel that it’s too difficult, tell them that. Speak out loud or speak silently to them in your mind, pray, and just tell them, “It’s too hard. I don’t feel that I can do this. I would like it to be less difficult. Please arrange for that.” This is actually a very common request that people make when I do between-life soul regressions with them. When they get to the council, they will say, “This lesson has turned out to be too hard. There’s too much suffering. Can we make it easier?” The council is very amenable to hearing that.

Rick: I’ve heard that it also sometimes works the other way: Before you come into this life, you say, “Lay it on me. I just want to learn a lot and really work it out.” Then the council, or whoever, says, “No, you can’t have that much. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. We’re going to give you this much.” There’s some negotiation that takes place, but you’re actually asking for more rather than less.

Rob: That’s my understanding as well. In researching pre-birth plans for Your Soul’s Plan and Your Soul’s Gift, I came across a number of individuals where that happened. They were very, you could call it, ambitious before coming into body, and their guides and various advisors told them, “You are planning too much. This is not a good idea.”

In some cases, they then agreed with that and modified the plan. In other cases, they said, “I hear you, but this is what I want to do. I feel I can do it, and I am going to continue with this plan.”

Rick: Okay. Sounds like, one way or the other, ultimately it’s our choice. You’ve made your bed; you have to sleep in it.

Rob: It is.

Rick: All right, picking another chapter from your book. There are some pretty intense things that happen to people, as we all know—suicide, rape, incest, and things like that. Some people, either victims of or parents or friends of victims of this kind of stuff, might get pretty upset to hear you, or anyone, say that the person actually chose this. I know we’ve kind of covered this point, but I think it might deserve revisiting just because it’s a radical notion. People might be very uncomfortable with it, and I think they might need a little bit of extra help understanding the possibility that it might work that way.

Rob: Yeah. In particular, the chapters about the pre-birth planning of incest and rape are very, very sensitive and very, very challenging material, for obvious reasons. I talk at length with Jesus in one of the channeling sessions about this, and what he says is that the idea that a soul may have planned an experience like incest or rape should never be mentioned to the soul’s incarnate personality unless you feel fairly certain that they’re going to be receptive to that idea.

If they are receptive to the idea, it can be tremendously empowering and tremendously healing. But if they’re not at a place where they can receive that kind of thinking, then it’s counterproductive to even mention it, and therefore not a good idea at all.

Rick: Can you give some examples of people you’ve dealt with personally who were the victims of such things, who actually tuned into and accepted the understanding you presented to them? How did they make that transition from perhaps anger and bitterness to acceptance, and what kind of change did it bring about in their lives?

Rob: Well, I think the two people who are the subjects of the incest and rape chapters are very good examples of that. They came to understandings of their pre-birth plan before they ever worked with me for the book. They were getting information through their own sources about their pre-birth planning, and essentially what it allows the person to do is, one, feel compassion for the perpetrator, because then they understand that this person is acting out of tremendous pain. When they see the pain this person is in, they do feel some compassion for them.

That’s not to say that they excuse what was done. That isn’t the case. But it’s possible not to excuse it and yet feel compassion for the person at the same time.

Rick: Yeah, “Forgive them, Father, for what they do,” Christ said as he was crucified.

Rob: Right. But the thing it does is—it empowers the person. You know, when you believe or feel yourself to be a victim, that’s very disempowering. The implication of being a victim is that you are powerless or helpless in some way. But if you come into the understanding that you’re actually a very powerful soul who planned these difficult experiences before you were born, that shifts your vibration tremendously.

The vibration of victim, as I understand it, is literally the single lowest frequency or vibratory state a human being can be in. It tends to be self-perpetuating because when you believe that you are a victim, you vibrate at the frequency of victim. When you vibrate at the frequency of victim, you are energetically stating to the universe that you are, in fact, a victim.

Whatever energetic statement you make to the universe, the universe always responds in exactly the same way. It always responds by saying, “Yes, that’s right—you are.” So, if you state energetically to the universe that you’re a victim, the universe says, “Yes, that’s right, you are a victim,” and then it brings to you more experiences that seem, on the surface, to confirm that you are, in fact, a victim.

The way to break out of that negative, self-perpetuating cycle is to come into the awareness that you are the powerful soul who planned the experience, whatever it might be. That awareness alone, even if you don’t know anything about why you planned it, pulls you out of the frequency of victim, so that you don’t continue to magnetize those kinds of experiences to yourself.

Then, if you also come into some understanding of why you planned the experience, that’s actually even better, because then you can go about learning those lessons in a much more conscious and presumably much less painful manner. The “why” is what my two books are all about, and that’s also what the between-life regression is about. People get in front of the council and ask, “Why did I plan this? Why did I agree to this very painful experience?” Once they have the answer to that question, they can go about learning those lessons in a much more conscious manner.

“The way to break out of that negative, self-perpetuating cycle is to come into the awareness that you are the powerful soul who planned the experience.”

Rick: Earlier we were talking about, for instance, the tsunami and how those souls chose to die in it in order to be a catalyst for an upwelling of compassion in collective consciousness. For some reason, I’m drawn back to that thought—and the Jews in the Holocaust, or the Rohingya in Myanmar these days, or the victims of Pol Pot or Stalin, who killed 20 million people. Many of these things go largely unnoticed by humanity. The massacre in Rwanda that happened during the Clinton administration was hardly a blip on the news media’s radar.

So, aside from the reaction that collective consciousness may have to an event like this, is there some kind of benefit to the victims of these massacres and holocausts? Do they somehow have an affinity or collective destiny as a large soul group that is being served by what they have gone through?

Rob: The answer to that question is one that I have not researched yet. I have really not looked at large-scale events. I know something about the tsunami because it came up in the channeling, but in general, I have not yet researched large-scale events. I think that’s something that I will be getting to. I just have not—

Rick: I think it’d be interesting. I understand you’re writing a third book, and maybe that could be part of it.

Rob: I think that’s going to wait for the fourth book. I think there are going to be two more, and that will probably be the fourth book.

Rick: Yeah, but the reason I think it’s important is that a lot of that stuff really makes people doubt the existence of God, or it raises big doubts and questions in people’s minds that such mass, large-scale calamities can happen to humanity. How could there be a loving God, and who could allow this kind of thing to happen, and so on?

If you could somehow put a perspective on that, to help explain it in the way you’re explaining individual circumstances, I think it would be a really useful contribution.

Rob: I do too, and it’s something I certainly plan to do. I just haven’t done it.

Abuse, sexuality, and gender

Rick: So, I guess another big one we haven’t talked about too much is relationships. Everybody cares about relationships and sexuality, and they want a loving relationship. They don’t want an abusive relationship. Fifty percent of everybody who gets married gets divorced, as I understand it, and an even higher percentage of second marriages break up. Ninety percent of all pop songs are about love and relationships. So, it’s a big thing for people. What more can you say about that whole area and pre-life planning that we haven’t already discussed?

Rob: Well, there is an entire chapter in Your Soul’s Gift about the pre-birth planning of an abusive relationship. The story there is about a woman who, in this lifetime, is named Catherine, and she had a past life with another soul whom I’ll just call Steve, which was in prehistoric times.

He was her son in that lifetime, and when he was an infant, he was killed. She was not able to protect him, and she carried guilt about not being able to protect her child back with her at the end of that incarnation into the nonphysical. She wanted to have another lifetime with him in which she could make that up to him, so to speak, and care for him and protect him in ways she wasn’t able to in that lifetime.

So she asks him if he will incarnate as her romantic partner. When she makes this request, her spirit guide takes her aside and says, “He is bringing back into body unhealed energies which are very likely to make him an abusive partner. Are you sure that you want to do this?”

She essentially says, “Yes, I want to be the one who loves him and helps him to heal, and if he’s not successful in healing, I’m willing to take that chance, because I’m willing to work with the abuse to foster my own growth.”

So, the plan that is put into place is that they will have this romantic relationship. It’s foreseen that it’s very likely that he will be emotionally and physically abusive, and what is not known is whether or not she’ll be able to help him heal.

As it turned out, she tried to help him heal but was not successful in doing that. He continued to be abusive, and then she left the relationship. That’s exactly the way her soul wanted her to handle it.

The soul is willing to let the personality enter into abusive relationships for some period of time in the hope that things can be turned around, but the soul does not ask the personality to remain indefinitely in an abusive situation. If it can’t be turned around, the soul’s hope is that the personality will have the courage and enough self-love to leave that abusive situation.

Rick: That’s a good point that bears repeating. So, it’s not like one should say to oneself, “All right, well, I’m just learning lessons here, so I’ll continue to suffer this abuse for the rest of my life, till death do us part.” The appropriate and evolutionary thing to do might be to get the hell out of there and find a different path for yourself.

Rob: That’s exactly right. You might choose to stay for some period of time if there was doubt that things could be turned around, but when you feel certain, or fairly certain, that things will not be turned around, what your soul would like you to do, again, is have the courage and enough self-love to leave the abusive situation.

Rick: Yeah. I know my parents stayed together for many, many years. My father was an alcoholic and abusive, and so on, saying, “Well, it’s for the sake of the children.” Meanwhile, we’re lying upstairs listening to him scream at my mother. I’m not sure how much that benefited us, but that was the ’50s, and it was hard for women to just up and leave and get the proper support and everything.

Rob: There’s also another story, a chapter in Your Soul’s Gift about sexuality. This story is about a man who plans to discover his homosexuality within the context of a heterosexual marriage, and it’s set up this way as a challenge to self-love and self-honesty. In other words, his soul is hoping that once he acknowledges his true sexual nature, he will have the courage and enough self-love and self-respect to announce this to his wife and leave the heterosexual marriage.

In fact, that is what he does. He’s able to do it that way. It’s tremendously challenging, of course, both for him and for his wife, but it fostered a lot of growth for both of them.

Rick: What do you have to say about homosexuality and perhaps transgender issues? I have a friend who recently transitioned, or whatever the verb is, and might get surgery. She’s taking hormones and all that stuff. My sort of ignorant, uninformed reaction is, “Well, why not just wait until the next lifetime? If you want to be a woman, you’ll be born as a woman.”

But then I thought, all right, well, if you’re born with a cleft lip, you’re going to have it repaired, you know? You’re not just going to say, “It’s God’s will that I should have a cleft lip.” But then again, something so obvious and major as your gender seems not to be accidental.

So, I’m just kind of working through this myself and trying to understand it better, because not being in her shoes—I’m not her—I don’t understand it, obviously, as well as she does. From your perspective, and considering all the stuff that you talk about, how do you understand that kind of thing, and the whole LGBTQ world in general? It seems to be more common now than it was years ago, or perhaps it was just repressed then and hidden, and now it’s coming more into the open.

Rob: Well, when the soul is planning a lifetime, it’s as though the soul has a history book in front of it—the history of planet Earth—and the book has literally no beginning and no end. The soul is flipping through the pages, looking for the point in linear time that is optimal for learning whatever lessons the soul wants to learn.

So, if the soul is planning to have some kind of transgender experience, the soul could pick a point in linear time in which medical science has not gotten to the point where you can have hormones or surgery, and then you would be stuck, so to speak, with whatever gender you had incarnated into. Or the soul could pick a point in linear time like now, where you have access to hormones and surgical procedures that can change things.

This is something you would know before coming into a body, and you would choose whatever experience most fostered the lessons you wanted to learn. I think what’s happening nowadays with a lot of people who are going through the transgender experience is that you have, for example, many people who have had a preponderance of lives as a woman, and they incarnate into a male body, bringing in a preponderance of female energy. They identify more strongly as female than male, and they know that they’re going to go through this transgender experience.

It’s a challenge to self-love. It’s a challenge to courage. It’s an opportunity for the other members of the family to deepen in compassion, put judgment aside, and learn unconditional love. There are abundant lessons for everybody involved. It’s a unique kind of learning opportunity.

🩺 Suicide, healing, and the choice to remain

Rick: When I asked you about Trump a while ago, you said, well, two or three hundred years from now, we may look back at that as the turning point at which fear and the male-dominated society were shown to be as bankrupt as they are as a way of running the world, and that we turned the tables at that point.

Do you have any sense of the future of humanity over the coming decades or hundreds of years, not just your personal opinion, but through your work and talking to councils of elders and spirit guides and all that stuff? Do they have a vision of where humanity is headed—whether we’re all going to exterminate ourselves through global warming, or whether a golden age of enlightenment is coming, or anything along those lines?

Rob: What I hear is that it isn’t known what’s going to happen, that we’re really at a crossroads, and we can go in basically one of two fundamentally different directions. One is that we do, in fact, end up destroying ourselves and the planet, and the other is that we move in the direction of unconditional love. We’re at that crossroads right now.

You may know that the planet itself is going through an ascension process. It’s moving up in vibration, moving up in dimensions. The heavier vibrational energies—things like fear, anger, and hatred that have been with humanity for such a long time—now need to be transmuted, and it isn’t clear yet from spirit’s perspective whether or not we are going to succeed in doing that.

We might or we might not. So, this is a critical lifetime for the evolution of a lot of souls and for the planet as a whole. The decisions that we make are going to send us in one of those two directions.

Rick: I suppose if it’s the “not make it” direction, then we’re all just going to have to pack up and move off to some other planet, and it won’t be Mars.

Rob: Well, the soul, of course, is an eternal being. So, even if humanity were to destroy itself, we’re talking about the physical experience, not the soul. The soul is eternal and will continue its role somewhere else.

Rick: That’s what I meant by “pack up and move on.” I didn’t mean our bodies. Our bodies would be toast.

Okay, so is there anything else that you’d like to address before we wrap it up, either using chapters in your book as a springboard or just anything that comes to mind? As I ask this, a couple more questions come to my mind, but from your side, is there anything else you’d like to say?

Rob: Well, I’d like to talk just briefly about the suicide chapter. There’s an entire chapter in Your Soul’s Gift about the pre-birth planning of suicide, and the story there is about a woman named Carolyn, whose only child, a son named Cameron, hangs himself from a rafter in their attic right after he graduated from high school.

So, it’s at a time when she thought he was going to be headed out into the world and doing great things, and she was actually the one who found him and had to cut the rope to bring his body down.

We worked with the channel who channels Jesus, and I asked him at the beginning of the channeling session, “Is suicide planned before birth?” He said it’s never planned as a certainty, but it is planned as a possibility or a probability, or occasionally as a probability so high as to be almost certain. He says that was the case with Cameron.

Cameron was bringing back into the body unhealed energies from past lives, which he knew would cause depression and anxiety, and it was foreseen in his pre-birth planning session that his suicide was highly likely. But he was one of those ambitious souls that we talked about earlier. He wanted to attempt to transmute all of these unhealed energies in one lifetime.

So, he brings them back into the body, finds that he’s not able to tolerate them, and takes his own life. Then, in the channeling session, Jesus steps aside, Cameron comes in, and he reassures his mother that he’s fine on the other side.

He talks about the home he’s created for himself and the work that he’s doing now, which is to help other teens who have taken their lives make the transition back into the nonphysical realm. Then he steps aside, Jesus comes back in, and we have a discussion in which a particular piece of information comes forward that I consider to be the single most healing piece of information I found in all the years I’ve been doing this work.

What Jesus tells us is that every suicide that could have been prevented was prevented. The reason this is true is that if the suicidal person has the slightest openness or willingness to change their mind, spirit knows that, and spirit stages an intervention.

“Every suicide that could have been prevented was prevented.”

So, in other words, if someone listening to this interview has lost someone they love to suicide, there was literally nothing you could have done to prevent it, because, again, if the person had the slightest openness or willingness to change their mind, spirit would know and would stage an intervention.

So, I would invite anyone who has lost a loved one to suicide to read this particular chapter in Your Soul’s Gift and really take in this perspective, because if it is internalized and fully understood, it can bring tremendous, tremendous healing and really alleviate any guilt or self-blame someone might feel about not preventing suicide.

Rick: There was a guy I interviewed a few years ago named Wayne Weirs, who committed suicide more recently. He had had an accident in which he fell and experienced a lot of severe pain, and he thought, “Well, this body is just not doing it for me anymore. I’m going to check out and be reborn into a fresh one.”

If someone has that attitude, if you were advising somebody who was contemplating suicide, would you have such a cavalier attitude as he did and think, “Oh, yeah, cash it in and get a new one”? Or would you do everything in your power to convince them to stick it out and work through it, and not take their own life if they could at all make that choice?

Rob: I would do everything I could to get them to stick through it and not make that choice, but that’s because I believe that life is sacred, and that’s the level of consciousness that I’m working with at this time in my own evolution.

But it’s interesting that you raised this question, because in the channeling session with Jesus in that chapter, we talk about this very point. What he says is that in an enlightened society, the suicide counselor would discuss suicide as a viable option with the suicidal client.

The reason he says an enlightened society would handle it this way is that when something is taboo, it has a particular attraction. So, if suicide is taboo, then people who are depressed are drawn to it, attracted to it, and then they actually get even more depressed because they see themselves being drawn to suicide.

He says, in an enlightened society, the counselor would talk with the suicidal person about suicide as a viable option, and, paradoxically, that would create a sense of liberation in them. It would no longer be taboo. They would therefore no longer be so drawn to it, and that, paradoxically, would allow them, one would hope, to continue to choose to stay in the body and not take their own life.

Rick: There’s a big debate about euthanasia and the fact that the lion’s share of healthcare costs goes to extending life in its final stages, when there is no quality of life anyway. They’re trying to legalize it in as many places because not doing so seems to rest on the assumption that—I don’t know what—but that this is the end of our existence, or that we should extract every possible day of life from a nonfunctional body.

But it seems that in the enlightened society you mentioned, if there were some kind of suicide council, they would ascertain whether a person could still have some quality of life, whether they could still evolve, and whether they could overcome the challenges that were tempting them to commit suicide. There would be some kind of wise judgment made, so it wouldn’t all be on the shoulders of the person who is suffering.

Rob: Well, it’s my understanding that when souls first started to incarnate on Earth, thousands and thousands of years ago, when they were done with the experience, when they wanted to return to the nonphysical, they would simply choose consciously to leave the physical body. They had the ability to do that at that time.

Rick: Yeah, that’s one of the things Patanjali mentioned also in the Yoga Sutras: You can just ascend if you want to.

Rob: Yeah, exactly. Well, that is a form of suicide, but because you’re not actually harming or killing the physical body, it’s viewed very differently. But in an enlightened society, you would understand that there really is not such a big difference between that kind of exit from a physical body and suicide as it’s currently practiced. It’s just a choice to leave.

Rick: Yeah. I remember when the Buddhist monks were immolating themselves in protest against the Vietnam War, or whatever they were protesting. My teacher at the time said, “It’s such a waste. Their life had so much potential, a greater potential to offer, and they just cut it short.” But it kind of sounds, from what you’re saying, that they might have made a bigger impact on collective consciousness by doing what they did.

Rob: It’s certainly possible. That’s the kind of thing that you won’t really know until you get back to the other side, and you can be shown in your life review how your actions affected the rest of the world.

Rick: Yeah. Here’s a follow-up question from Saguna Miller in Austria. She says, “You mentioned self-love and courage to get out of a certain challenging situation. You were saying that in the case of relationship abuse, which had been your first soul purpose, is this a form of failure—stepping down from a higher purpose—or is there really no hierarchy like that? Isn’t it actually reversed, in a sense of pride, if we wanted to hang on to our initial purpose, if it turned out the situation is simply too much? The word stubbornness comes to mind there. We’re just sort of hanging on for dear life.” But anyway, I think you can get the gist of her question.

Rob: Yeah, it just depends on what your pre-birth intentions are. What did you intend to learn, and can it be best learned by staying in a relationship, or can it be best learned by leaving the relationship? Also, what form of service did you agree to undertake on behalf of the other person? Can that form of service best be performed by you staying in the relationship, or is the highest form of service for you to leave the relationship, because then it propels the person in the direction they actually wanted to move in? It’s all determined by what your pre-birth intentions are.

Rick: Well, in conclusion, there are a couple of nice little comments that came in from a couple of people. Someone named Jan, who didn’t reveal the location, said, “God, the Substance of All Form,” the title of one of Joel Goldsmith’s books, “seems to sum up this oneness and wholeness. Loved this discussion. Thank you.” And Ivan from Bulgaria says, “Probably the best interview so far,” and that’s saying something, since I’ve done 470 of them. So, thank you, Ivan and Jan, and thank you, Rob. I really enjoyed this.

Rob: Well, it’s been a pleasure, and I want to thank you for what you’re doing to raise consciousness on our planet. It’s a wonderful form of service to have this show.

Rick: Yeah. It feels like it, and it feels like I’m being of service in a way that I find very gratifying and for which I’m very grateful. It’s nice to feel like you’re sort of an instrument of the divine in some way, shape, or form, rather than just an instrument of your individual purposes.

Rob: Yeah, I have the same feeling about my work, and I think that’s what it’s all about.

Rick: Yeah. Great. So, your website is yoursoulsplan.com, is it?

Rob: Yoursoulsplan.com. If people go to the books page, they can read large portions for free. If you go to the events page, you’ll see the schedule for upcoming workshops. And you could tell your friend in Austria that there will be a workshop in Austria. I believe it’s the last weekend of January.

Rick: Great. Well, she’s probably hearing that right now. I’ll make sure she knows. So, people can go to your website, and they can sign up for emails and stuff. I’ll be creating a page on batgap.com for this interview, and I’ll link to your books and your website, and so on.

For those who live in Fairfield, I’ll be donating these books to the local library. I know you encourage people to donate your books to their local libraries so that people can get them. So, they’ll be there, but I think I might lend them to my sister first, because she’s fascinated with this. If they don’t show up right away, that’s why.

But anyway, thanks so much, Rob, and thank you to those who’ve been listening or watching. I attempted to interview my friend Steve Briggs about a week or two ago, and we had technical difficulties, but I’m going to redo that one on Monday, and that should be coming up. After that, of course, there will be many more. As the years roll by, in a year it’ll be the tenth anniversary of my doing this, and it’s been a wonderful thing to be doing all these years. So, thanks, Rob.

Rob: All right. Thanks again, Rick.