Rick Archer: 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 new 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.
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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, in 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, and 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 up 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, it broadens your perspective, and I think, it instills greater patience, greater tolerance, greater compassion, all kinds of good qualities, and so I think people find it valuable. And feel free to send in questions, because the stuff that Rob is saying is might be considered controversial, challenging, like it might push some people’s buttons, and you should feel free to question it, and I think Rob will be capable of answering those questions. So welcome, Rob.
Rob Schwartz: Thank you, Rick. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here.
Rick Archer: 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, and 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 anything, that any such thing existed as the stuff you now focus your life on to being an authority on it?
Rob Schwartz: 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, marketing communications, which I found to be very, very unfulfilling. I used to say to people at the time that I had the feeling 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, but 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, and 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, and so 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.
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 a little bit of money, and if nothing comes out of the session, there’s no harm done. So I did this on May 7th of 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, and she explained to me that a spirit guide is a very highly evolved non-physical being with whom we plan our lives before we come into body and who then guides us through our lives after we get here and 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 which was they said you planned your life, including your biggest challenges before you were born, and I’ll tell you, I just shook my head and I said, “Well, why in the world did I do that?”, and they said you did this for purposes of spiritual growth. Now, 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, and 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. 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 Archer: In fact, I recall you saying they even knew about some prayer that you had uttered in your own mind, not even verbally, orally, five years before or something they, they told you about that.
Rob Schwartz: Yeah. Five years before the session with the medium, I had been going through a very difficult time in my personal life, and one day when I was home alone in the privacy of my home—my own home, I said a prayer to God, and 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, and then they said your prayer was answered, by which they meant that additional non-physical 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 afterwards, and it had quite a profound effect on me, and 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, and that created the healing. So, it was at this point that I first started to think about writing a book about it, and to make a long story short, I ended up leaving the corporate sector, spent the next three years of my life on a full-time basis writing Your Soul’s Plan, and that led to a completely new life for me.
Rick Archer: I think of the vast numbers of people in this audience, in my audience, 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, and 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 Schwartz: 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 Archer: That’s a good answer, and they must be kind of like pleasantly surprised when they die actually, not expecting anything to continue and yet, whoa, here I am still.
Rob Schwartz: 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 Archer: Yeah. Well, he was probably somebody who expected that, because he was a practicing Buddhist and had done psychedelics, and he was kind of a seeker. So spirit guides, are they assigned to us on a one-to-one basis or do they multitask, and maybe one spirit guide will have a dozen people that they keep an eye on or, or how does it work?
Rob Schwartz: 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 freewill decisions. So, 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, and 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 Archer: I see. So have guides been human beings in past lives, and will we all probably be guides in future lives?
Rob Schwartz: Many guides have been human beings in past lives, not all of them, and 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 Archer: Okay. So, not everybody has to be a spirit guide and 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 Schwartz: 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, and 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 the greatest evolution, then you wouldn’t be inclined to choose.
Rick Archer: It’s said that in some traditions that the celestials live very, very long lives, probably hundreds of thousands of years in human years. Is that your understanding?
Rob Schwartz: That is my understanding. It’s also my understanding that human beings used to live much longer physical lives than we do now, several 100 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, and 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 Archer: Yeah, Hindus say we’re in Kali Yuga, in which people people’s lives are much shorter than in other ages. Speaking a little bit more spiritually, spirit guides. Somebody sent in a question. Someone named Christina from Ohio, sent in a question about in the realm between live. Do souls, and this would include spirit guides I suppose, those are souls, ever experience romantic love with to souls who perhaps share a soul group have shared many reincarnations together ever experience romantic love in that other dimension or is that strictly an earthly experience? And 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 Schwartz: My understanding is that you do experience if you choose to a romantic love in non-physical 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, and 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. Very different paradigm.
Rick Archer: Of course, there are cultures in our world who have modeled themselves in that way. So, it’s kind of a cultural thing. So, 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 you see if I’ve got it right in terms of what you understand. So there’s, you can say universal consciousness or being which is all pervading and unbounded and non-changing and impersonal, and it’s kind of the root foundation of our existence, and ultimately we are that, and then there are sort of expressions that are more individuated, which we might call souls, but and 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, which is actually a metaphor used by various traditions that 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. So is that a fair sort of sketch of the layout as you understand it?
Rob Schwartz: 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 and me and everyone watching this interview, is a spark of the soul. So, 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, multi-dimensional—
Rick Archer: And do we each exclusively have a soul or do many people share one soul, like there could be many sparks emanating from this spark of God?
Rob Schwartz: 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 different planets in different dimensions at the same time.
Rick Archer: 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 Schwartz: I’m not an expert on twin flames, but my understanding is more or less what you just said, that it’s you and your twin flame are the two halves of the soul, and 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 non-physical realm.
Rick Archer: Okay, and then you speak, 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 of people who kind of clustered 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?
Rob Schwartz: Soul group, as I understand it is 17, 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, and you and the other members of your soul group take turns playing every conceivable role for each other. So, you will be mother and daughter and father and son, brother and sister best of friends, mortal enemies, teacher and student, and at the soul level, there’s no judgment of any of these roles, even the quote/unquote, negative roles. They’re all viewed as opportunities for learning and healing.
Rick Archer: 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 Schwartz: Yeah, you really cannot assess soul age or evolutionary stage accurately by looking at the superficial aspects of somebody’s personality, and 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 that would best foster your evolution in this lifetime.
Rick Archer: 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 Schwartz: 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 and late in Cayce’s career after he’d read for thousands and thousands of people, he was visited by two wealthy women sisters from New York City, and 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?” Well, upon hearing this, Cayce did what he always did, which is he went into trance. He went into the Akashic Record, which is the complete non-physical record of everything relevant to the earth plane, including the pre-birth planning, and then he said to the two sisters, “Your brother is the single-most highly evolved soul about whom I have ever obtained 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.
Rick Archer: Yeah. If we do choose our lives, it would take a noble soul to say alright, I’m going to live this miserable life in order to benefit others. It would almost be like a bodhisattva kind of gesture.
Rob Schwartz: Well, service to others is a component of every single pre-birth plan I’ve ever looked at, and very often the souls who are taking on big challenges, challenges that require a lot of courage like planning homelessness, for example, or alcoholism or drug addiction or certain illnesses like AIDS, they are often very highly evolved souls, and they’re taking on those challenges partly for their own growth in 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 plans before he was born to have the AIDS virus, and 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, 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 find out 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, and when we went into his pre-birth planning session, we heard him talking about how he wanted to be a teacher of compassion, how he felt that 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. So, here is somebody that 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.
Rick Archer: It’s interesting in the Vedic literature, there are a lot of stories of beings who either made some mistake or did something and or let me retrace. There are beings who have sort of had the opportunity of having 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, but 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, they became enlightened, because they were very highly evolved souls to begin with, and because 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 Schwartz: When in the channeling sessions I did 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. Speaking to the kind of story you just shared, where you think that one thing is going on and 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 Archer: 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 pre planned, or at least 70% of them, maybe all of them, and that both parties, if there are multiple parties in this event, pre-arranged it, and even though there might be sort of this antagonist-protagonist kind of apparent 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 Schwartz: 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. So, 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. The soul learns best through opposites. So, the typical pre-birth 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, and then having done that, later in life, take the compassion that you have gifted to yourself, and turn it outward in service to others, that in broad strokes is a very common type of pre-birth plan.
Rick Archer: So, would you say that there aren’t really sort of evil people there on the other side, so to speak? It’s not like they’re 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 which 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 Schwartz: Well, I should say here, in the second book, Your Soul’s Gift, I talk extensively with Jesus through one of the channels with whom I collaborate on that book, and 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’s just people, souls who are in pain, and the expressions of the pain are what we call evil, and he says, yes, that’s essentially correct. Pain expressed is what you as a society referred to as evil. So, the people who are acting in evil or negative ways, they 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 quote/unquote 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 it’s often foreseen is going to lead them to act in evil or negative ways, but the tension 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 pre-birth planning and 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 Archer: Okay. I don’t know if you’re Jewish, you have a Jewish last name. Have you ever? Okay—
Rob Schwartz: I am Jewish.
Rick Archer: What about the Holocaust? Was Hitler basically a noble soul who agreed to this odious role on Earth in collaboration with 6 million Jews? This is like the extreme example, or acid test of, of your whole theory. What’s your commentary on that?
Rob Schwartz: So, I have to preface my response by saying 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 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. So, gifts of oratory and rhetoric, gifts of charisma. As I understand it, there was a specific option in his pre-birth blueprint for him to use his artwork to spiritually inspire people. You might know 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 freewill. He used his freewill to respond to painful things that happened in his childhood to 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 pre-birth plan as much as you want anytime you want to. 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 him, he’s not being punished by God or some being or counsel external to him. He is punishing himself in this way, but he’s loved unconditionally, by God, just as all of us are. He’s surrounded in the non-physical 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 Archer: 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 so 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, and in other words, suffer in order to somehow work out karma.
Rob Schwartz: Well, that that actually is consistent with what people who have had near-death experiences report, a number of them have gone to or 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, quote/unquote, bad things. This is a realm that is self-created by the beings who have chosen to put themselves there, and 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 Archer: Interesting. Of course, all the world’s spiritual traditions do speak of around realm or realms like that. Some traditions speak of multiple levels of hell and multiple levels of heaven, and so on, and 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 and he said, well, what’s he doing here, and where are my brothers, and whoever said well, your brothers are in hell, and 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, and the moral of the story was that he, Duryodhana, had a little bit of heavenly karma to work off. Yudhishthira had a little bit of hellish karma to work off in the other part of this, but once they had worked out off, then they went to where they actually belonged, and stayed there for a long time.
Rob Schwartz: Yeah, and none of that is very surprising to me. And 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 him, God is not punishing anyone for anything that they have done, and God loves all beings, including Hitler unconditionally.
Rick Archer: 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 Schwartz: The Earth is very much a self-created realm and in many respects, in artificial realm, and it’s very different than our lives on the other side, but it’s set up to foster, to maximize growth and 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 non-physical 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, and because we all share those same five senses, we are perceiving the same reality consensually.
Rick Archer: 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?
Rob Schwartz: 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 is 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.
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 is the story of a soul who plans before coming into body to have a heroin addiction and 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 who 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 to experience, but 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 Archer: Yeah, in, 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, and I suppose the bodhisattvas and Buddhism are similar concepts. So it’s not like they have individual karma to work out. They’re just here to serve and give.
Rob Schwartz: 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 Archer: 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 pre-arranged a lot of stuff. We don’t remember what our souls plan is, or even that there is such a thing or that we have made one. Why is that?
Rob Schwartz: 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 non-physical being, what that does is that it makes 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, and 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 and 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 Archer: 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 Schwartz: 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, and does this pull them off their life path in some way, and 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, and anybody who 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 the 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 Archer: You hear stories of people who do remember their past lives. So, often it’s little children who haven’t gotten clouded over so much. Also, yogi’s. In the Yoga Sutra, one of the siddhis or attainments is said to be the ability to remember your past lives, and 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, that remembering past lives and between lives, periods and all that will be kind of the norm?
Rob Schwartz: 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 non-physical 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 Archer: Yeah. I remember there’s that line in the Gita where Lord Krishna is telling our Arjuna that we’ve had many lives, both of us, and I remember them all, but you remember them not, and 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 Schwartz: That’s alright. Well, it’s important to understand that the judgment that it’s a mistake, that 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 like them, and there’s a story in Your Soul’s Plan, my first book, there’s a chapter about the pre-birth planning of accidents, and there’s a story there of a woman who is blown up in a bomb explosion. Well, in her pre-birth planning session, we heard her talking to the soul who was going to be the bomber, and this is a soul who was very troubled had a lot of unhealed pain that was being brought back into body for the purpose of healing it, and 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, her attitude in the pre-birth planning session was 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 Archer: Just out of curiosity and somewhat tangentially was that by any chance, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber that planted that or don’t you know?
Rob Schwartz: It was not.
Rick Archer: It was not. Okay. Yeah, I remember hearing you saying in one interview that if we could see the sort of, like a flowchart of all the possibilities in this life, it would be complex beyond our comprehension, that even though maybe 70% of the things that happen to us are, or all the significant things at least are chosen. There’s 30% wiggle room of freewill or our choice as we go along, but nonetheless, the whole, like you said, backup plans, the whole sort of, if A then B, then if not B then this, and it just it becomes this vast, vast thing that it would take some intelligence much more profound than the human to really comprehend.
Rob Schwartz: 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, and 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, and the reason that those backup plans are created is because the personality has freewill, the soul wants the personality to have freewill, the soul wants the personality to use the freewill, 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 Archer: 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 plane crash or any kind of other mass casualty like that all the years of life lived up to that point where sort of a chain of events leading to their being in that circumstance for this thing to happen that presumably, since it’s so significant, was supposed to happen, but just imagine the complexity of having to organize that.
Rob Schwartz: Well, and this is why spirit guides serve such a valuable role, because it is possible for you to use your freewill to get pretty far off track in terms of accomplishing your pre-birth intentions, and 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, and 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 on to the path of desired learning, and 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 on the path of greatest learning for you.
Rick Archer: 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 3000 people in the Twin Towers or some huge number and some other catastrophe. It seems like there’s something more significant to that like 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, there seems to be some huge group karma that is being played out in circumstances like that.
Rob Schwartz: Well, it’s more of a group intention is the way that I would put it, and 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, and they said if it looks as though the earth will not get to that vibration, by that point in linear time, then we agreed 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, and 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, and 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 than where you stand on the tsunami is that it was a terrible tragedy, and 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, and from that perspective, it was. So there you have two diametrically opposed perspectives, and yet both are correct from your viewpoint of –
Rick Archer: 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 in from the hurricane in North and South Carolina, just 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 and just see all these scenes of these people just 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 that they’re able to somehow help with.
Rob Schwartz: 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 Archer: Alright, here’s a short question from somebody here in Fairfield, Iowa. What about Trump?
Rob Schwartz: 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 or 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. So, 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 saw what is happening with Trump, and 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 being 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, and 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, and, in fact, this is already happening when in terms of the congressional election in November, there are now more women running for Congress and even 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 Archer: 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.
Rob Schwartz: 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, and my understanding is that there are some souls who actually learn best by having their hearts broken open through painful experiences, and 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.
Rick Archer: 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, and then it’s open, and then maybe it’ll tend to stay open or at least more open having broken like that.
Rob Schwartz: 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 Archer: Yeah, and you’ve spoken to—I’m sorry, we’re 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 sort of dwell on this point a little bit longer, since I bet you it takes up a fairly significant percentage of your activities dealing with people who had their hearts broken in various ways.
Rob Schwartz: Yeah, the two books, Your Soul’s Plan and Your Soul’s Gift, and also the focus of my practices of hypnosis, the focus is very much on helping people to understand the deeper spiritual meaning and purpose of their biggest challenges, and 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 that’s where the need for understanding is, and I think also that that is very much my specific pre-birth mission is to bring understanding around suffering.
Rick Archer: Yeah. In a few minutes, we’ll get into like 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 Schwartz: 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, then there’s a you in another dimension that goes in the opposite direction, and 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, and we talked with Jesus about this, and the woman’s name is Beverly, and I asked Jesus, are there parallel Beverlys in parallel dimensions who did not experience the rape, and he says, yes, there are, and I say, well, how many Beverlys are there, and his answer is very interesting. He says about four, and I said, well, how can it be about four, doesn’t it have to be a discrete number, and then he draws an analogy. He says that the soul is like the trunk of a tree, and the various personalities are like the limbs of the tree. Well, the limbs of the tree grow, and then they die, and they fall off the tree, and then other limbs grow and die and fall off the tree, and that cycle keeps repeating itself again and again over time, and he says, 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 Archer: 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 acute cumulative part of the soul personality progressively through any and all lifetimes. I think what she’s saying is do we kind of like keep augmenting the personality of 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 Schwartz: Well, my understanding is that the personality has an eternal core, an eternal nature or character, and then in any given lifetime, their personality, you could call them quirks or traits, 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, re-merges with the soul, so to speak, and brings back all of the wisdom and love and learning that took place during the lifetime, and then that eternal core will reincarnate with a different set of external traits or quirks or characteristics that will be perfect for—
Rick Archer: So, let me make sure I have that straight. So, we have the soul, and you’re saying there’s some core, and 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 that comes into each—or maybe it’s not moving. Maybe it’s just some fundamental substrate that that is omnipresent and always there, and– 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 Schwartz: Yes, I think that’s a good way to put it. There’s a system, a body of channel 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. So, 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 priests-like qualities, and that would be surrounded by different characteristics or traits that were part of each individual lifetime.
Rick Archer: Sounds like the caste system in India. You have the Brahmin caste or the teachers and priests, and you have the Kshatriya caste who are the warriors and administrators, and you have the Vaishya caste where the business people and Shudra caste, which are the servants, and 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 Schwartz: It’s very similar to that. So as 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 mean necessarily that I’m literally a priest in many lifetimes, but I would be doing things that are interested or related to spirituality, and 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 Archer: 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, and 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, you’re getting off the wheel of reincarnation altogether?
Rob Schwartz: Well, my understanding is that you don’t actually have to reincarnate, but from the non-physical, excuse me—the non-physical perspective, you very much want to most of the time. In other words, our perspective when we get back to the non-physical is very different than it is here, and I think there are a few key differences. One is that from the non-physical 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 body, especially if you’re suffering, it can seem interminable, but from the non-physical vantage point, you know that it’s very brief. It’s here and gone like a clap of thunder.
Also, from the non-physical 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 body, but you do have it from the other side, and the other key difference, I think, is that from the non-physical vantage point, you’re very much aware that the learning, the wisdom from an incarnation becomes 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, from that perspective, 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 Archer: 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 Schwartz: 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, and when you make that decision, then you choose—
Rick Archer: Okay, then you do 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 Schwartz: I believe that both things are true, and that may sound contradictory, and it is probably from the vantage point of the human perspective, but there are paradoxes like that that exist in the universe. So, I believe that you re-merge with the one the same way that a drop of water would re-merge with the ocean, and yet, at the same time, you would retain the individuality that you had cultivated over many lifetimes, both physical and non-physical.
Rick Archer: 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 Schwartz: I think that that one does have attributes. And that’s where we come back to the Michael system again. Souls fall broadly into these certain categories of attributes like King or your priest and so on, and it’s that essential core that is going through this planning process, coming back into body, going back to the other side, and then starting all over again.
Rick Archer: 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 and approximately 100 people are born—100 people die each second, and more than twice that many are born each second. So, about 150,000 die each day, 360 roughly are born each day. That’s 55 million a year or 131 million births a year, and so I guess that begs the question, are there multiple councils of elders who are dealing with this person dying every second or so or less than every second, because otherwise, they would have to be very brief planning sessions. So is the work divvied up? Are there a whole bunch of different councils that can manage the flow of people coming and going?
Rob Schwartz: My understanding is that every person has their own individual what you could call soul Council, and 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. So, when I do, for example, group regressions as part of the workshops that I do, in a group between-lives regression, people are going to talk to the council of elders, and that’s possible because consciousness is non local. So, 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 Archer: So, you’re saying that councils have a sort of a hierarchical structure the way maybe the legal system in the US does where you have the Supreme Court, and then you have federal courts, then you have state courts or local courts and, and so on, and that 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 Schwartz: I think, in in rough terms, that that is a valid analogy.
Rick Archer: Now, I didn’t Google this, but I have Googled it before about the number of Earth-like planets in the galaxy and the fact that there are 2 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, and so the universe basically is teeming with life, and it’s very kind of 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 this the cosmic scope of things and does one limit oneself to living lives on Earth for the most part, or, or do we move readily between different planets and areas of the universe perhaps because other planets become more—we become more suitable for incarnation on some planet other than Earth, once we reach a certain stage, or if we need to learn certain lessons that we learned more readily there than here.
Rob Schwartz: My understanding is you’re doing both of those things at the same time. So, 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, you have non-physical lifetimes, and you have to remember, there’s no linear time in the non-physical realm. So, you can do all of these things simultaneously, and it’s really just not an issue.
Rick Archer: 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, and let’s go through them, but not necessarily an 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 we’re 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 Schwartz: I very much agree with that. Sometimes I used 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, every thing is divine, every object, every person, every person, plant, insect, animal. Everything that’s in existence is part of God, because God is the–
Rick Archer: I think as Dan’s question indicates it’s not only the ground. It’s the substance God is if you actually analyze anything closely enough, there is that divine intelligence sort of playing in that particular form and quite evident, although a little bit hiding in plain sight.
Rob Schwartz: Yeah. An analogy that is sometimes used for this is it’s like beads on a necklace. So, each person is like one individual bead, and that string that connects, all of them is good is God.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s good.
Rob Schwartz: And if you just look at the beads on the surface, that’s all you see, but if you look more deeply than inside a string—
Rick Archer: 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 independent of God, there’s not completely permeated by God, and that, in fact, is not comprised of anything but God, you know. So, if things seem to be happening to you or to other people, we can sort of 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 Schwartz: Well, I think from God’s perspective, so to speak, God wants to experience everything, and so through each individual unique soul, there’s an infinite range of experience that is available.
Rick Archer: They call it Lila, in Sanskrit, the play of creation, and it said that the purpose of the whole thing is the expansion of happiness.
Rob Schwartz: Or the expansion of unconditional love.
Rick Archer: So we’re going to take some chapter titles and use those as like little springboards for discussion, and let’s jump right in. This will be an abrupt segue, but let’s jump right into a discussion about pets.
Rob Schwartz: So, the story in the pets chapter is a soul who plans before coming into 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, and they will tease you, they will ostracize you. They are going to make your life very painful. You need to put some kind of supports into place to get yourself through this difficult experience, and 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, a horse comes in. There’s even a rooster named Crooked Beak, and all of these beings speak to her very intelligently and very, very lovingly, about how we will love you unconditionally, even as others tease you and torment you and ostracize you. We will give you the unconditional love that will help you to get through this experience so that you can learn what you would like to learn by being a dwarf.
Rick Archer: So, when you say that pets sort of worked that out with her ahead of time as prearrangement, what kind of souls are the pets themselves? Could they just as easily have been born as humans or are they kind of lesser evolved souls that have to go through a number of animal incarnations before they can begin to have human incarnations?
Rob Schwartz: My understanding is the latter and that they’re in a process of evolution, and they will move up, so to speak to being human, but there are sometimes deviations in 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, and there were two other souls that she has shared many lifetimes with 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, and so they actually plan to come back as her pets. She is a healer in this lifetime, and they incarnated as dogs, who she would bring into the healing sessions, and her clients often comment on these dogs are so loving, and they seem to have a wisdom of their own. They were her children in previous lifetimes wanted to do that again, but couldn’t, and so chose this other form of expression.
Rick Archer: 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 Schwartz: Well, just that they’re—
Rick Archer: A lot of people think that okay, 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 anything else is significant to finish dying. so we can sort of all convene on the other side and then make a plan for the next life?
Rob Schwartz: 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 in the between-lives regressions that I do with clients, they often, when they get to the council of elders, they asked the counselor to call in deceased quote/ unquote, deceased loved ones deceased pets, and they’re able to talk with those pets, and then sometimes they’re told that the pets have reincarnated or people have reincarnated and yet they’re there in the meeting with the council talking to them. So again, an example of conscious—
Rick Archer: 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 Schwartz: That is my understanding.
Rick Archer: Okay. I guess that would make sense in light of— I’m sorry, go ahead.
Rob Schwartz: And well, I was going to say, you asked if there was any—
Rick Archer: Well, just before you do that, I just want to say, that would sort of jibe with what you said earlier about the soul being a sort of a larger thing, and that this life is 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, is still on the other side to greet me. Okay,
Rob Schwartz: Exactly. That’s exactly what I was—
Rick Archer: So go ahead and say what you were going to say.
Rob Schwartz: Well, in regard to pets, pets are doing a lot of things in service to us that are not well known and not 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 is going on with pet sometimes 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 pet, 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 Archer: Yeah.
Rob Schwartz: It’s very interesting—
Rick Archer: It’s fun to talk about this stuff, because if you have an open mind, it just sort of stirs it up a little bit. You kind of start considering things that you wouldn’t ordinarily think about from day to day, but 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, but it’s like, oh, that’s an interesting idea, let’s think about that and 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 one or a fundamentalist one, then there’s no chance of atheism, because that is a that’s a fixed position. You’re not open to the possibility that it’s wrong. You’re not being scientific. So, and as with all the other topics we’re raising here, it’s like all of this should be seen as hypotheses that are worthy of consideration and investigation.
Rob Schwartz: Now, I’ll give you one more in regard to pets. It’s my understanding that if the owner of a pet has repressed certain emotions, let’s say anger for example, the pet can pick up the repressed emotion, and then express it on behalf of the person. So if, for example, you’ve repressed anger and you’re not processing it because you repressed it, the pet can pick up that energy and express it on your behalf and therefore process it on your behalf.
Rick Archer: Poor mailman. That’s true. Pets are like, they’re like stress solvents or something. They kind of soften the atmosphere and soften the heart, and I think that 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 and so on. A question came in, that will take us off the topic of pets. We are 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 and she asks what if you were told by a psychic that you are a highly evolved being and that you accepted to take on specific hardship to be of a certain service. You might even be told the type of service, and you might agree and recognize this as your sole 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 it’s really handicapped her ability to use those gifts.
Rob Schwartz: 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 traveled to and get together with the other significant people in your life and you essentially talk about, are we 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 do 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, 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, and 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 just to be too hard, there’s too much suffering, can we make it easier, and the console is very amenable to hearing that.
Rick Archer: I’ve heard that it also sometimes works the other way that before you come into this life, you say lay it on me, I just want to sort of learn a lot and really work it out, and then the council or whoever says, no, you can’t have that much, just don’t bite off more than you can chew, we’re going to give you this much, and there’s some negotiation that takes place, but you’re actually asking for more rather than less.
Rob Schwartz: That’s my understanding as well, and 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, their various advisors told them you are planning too much, this is not a good idea. In some cases, they then agreed with that, and they 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 Archer: Okay, sounds like one way or the other, ultimately, it’s our choice, you know? You’ve made your bed, you got to sleep there.
Rob Schwartz: It is.
Rick Archer: Alright, picking another chapter from your book. There’s some pretty intense things that happen to people, as we all know, suicide, rape, incest, things like that, and 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, and people might be very uncomfortable with it, and I think might need a little bit of extra help understanding the possibility that it might work that way.
Rob Schwartz: Yeah, the, 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, and I talk at length with Jesus in one of the channeling sessions about this, and what he says is the idea that a soul may have planned an experience like incest or rape should never be mentioned to the soul to the 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 Archer: Can you give some examples of people you’ve dealt with, personally, who were the victims of such things, who actually kind of tuned into and accepted the understanding you presented them, and how they made that transition from perhaps, anger and bitterness to acceptance, and what kind of change it brought about in their lives?
Rob Schwartz: Well, I think the two people who are the subjects of the incest and the rape chapters are very good examples of that. They came into 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, to feel compassion for the perpetrator, because then they understand that this person is acting out of tremendous pain, and 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 to not excuse it and yet feel compassion for the person at the same time.
Rick Archer: Yeah, forgive them father or what they do. Christ said crucified.
Rob Schwartz: But the thing it does is–right. It empowers the person because 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 at and it tends to be self-perpetuating, because when you believe that you are a victim, you vibrate at the frequency of victim, and when you vibrate at the frequency of victim, you are energetically stating to the universe that you are, in fact, a victim.
Well, 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, that awareness alone 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, and the why is what my two books are all about, and that’s also what the between-lives regression is about. People get in front of the council and they ask why did I plan this, why did I agree to this very painful experience, and once they have the answer to that question, they can go about learning those lessons in a much more conscious manner.
Rick Archer: 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 and Myanmar these days or the victims of Pol Pot or Stalin 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 on the news media’s radar. So, aside from the reaction that collective consciousness nets may have to an event like this, is there some kind of benefit to the victims of these massacres and holocausts? Do they have somehow have an affinity or collective destiny as a large, large soul group that is being served by what they have gone through?
Rob Schwartz: 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 Archer: I think it’d be interesting. I understand you’re writing a third book, and maybe that could be part of it.
Rob Schwartz: I think that’s going to wait for the fourth book. I think they’re going be two more, and that will probably be the fourth book.
Rick Archer: Yeah, but the reason I think it’s important is a lot of that stuff really makes people doubt the existence of God or it really raises big doubts and questions in people’s minds that such mass large-scale, calamities can happen to humanity, you know? How could there be a loving God and who could allow this kind of thing to happen and so on? And so, if you could somehow put a perspective on that, that would help to explain it in in the way you’re explaining sort of individual circumstances, I think it would be a really useful contribution.
Rob Schwartz: I do too, and it’s something I certainly plan to do. I just haven’t done it.
Rick Archer: 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 and 50% of everybody who gets married gets divorced, as I understand it, and even higher percentage of second marriages break up, and 90% of all pop songs are about love and relationships. So, it’s a big thing for people. So, what more can you say about that whole area and pre-life planning that we haven’t already discussed?
Rob Schwartz: Well, there is an entire chapter in Your Soul’s Gift about the pre-birth planning of an abusive relationship, and the story there is a woman who in this lifetime is named Catherine, and she had a past life with another soul who I’ll just call Steve, which was an 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 non-physical and 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, and 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, and 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 then what is not known is whether or not she’ll be able to help him heal. Now, as it turned out, she tried to help him heal was not successful in doing that. He continued to be abusive, and then she left the relationship, and 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 this abusive situation.
Rick Archer: That’s a good point that bears repeating. So, it’s not like one should say to oneself, alright, well, I’m just learning lessons here, so I’ll continue to suffer this abuse for the rest of my life till death, do I part, that the appropriate and evolutionary thing to do might be to get the hell out of there and find a different path for yourself.
Rob Schwartz: That’s exactly right. You might choose to stay for some period of time if it was in 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 Archer: 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, and meanwhile, we’re lying upstairs listening to 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 Schwartz: There’s also another story, a chapter in Your Soul’s Gift about sexuality, and 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, that he will have the courage and enough self-love and self-respect to announce this to his wife and leave the heterosexual marriage, and, 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 Archer: What do you have to say about homosexuality and perhaps transgender issues? I have a friend who recently transgendered or whatever the verb is, and might get surgery, and is taking hormones and all that stuff, and my sort of ignorant, uninformed reaction is like, well, why not just wait to 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 the hair 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 hair lip, but then again, something so obvious and major as your gender, it seems is not accidental. So I’m just kind of working through this myself and trying to understand it better, because not being in her shoes, now her, I don’t understand it, obviously, as well as she does. So, from your perspective, and all the stuff that you talk about, how do you understand that kind of a thing, and the whole LGBTQ. world in general and the fact that 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 just coming more into the open?
Rob Schwartz: Well, when the soul is planning a lifetime, it says 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, and 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 have 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, access to surgical procedures that can change things.
This is something you would know before coming into 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, 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 and put judgment aside and learn unconditional love. There are abundant lessons for everybody involved. It’s a unique kind of learning opportunity.
Rick Archer: When I asked you about Trump a while ago, you said, well, two, 300 years ago, we may look back at that as the turning point at which fear and sort of the male-dominated society were shown to be as bankrupt as they are and as a way of running the world and that we turn the tables at that point. Do you have any sense of the future of humanity over the coming decades or hundreds of years even, not just personal opinion, but in 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 Schwartz: What I hear is that it isn’t known what’s going to happen, that we’re really at a crossroad, and we can go in basically one of two fundamentally different directions. One is, we do, in fact, end up destroying ourselves in the planet, and the other is we move in the direction of unconditional love, and we’re at that crossroad 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, and so the heavier vibrational energies, things like fear, anger, hatred that have been with humanity for such a long time, these things 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 Archer: 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 Schwartz: 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 Archer: That’s what I meant by pack up and move up. I didn’t mean our bodies. Our bodies would be 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 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 Schwartz: 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 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, and he says it’s never planned as a certainty, but it is planned as a possibility or a probability or occasionally a probability so high as to be almost certain, and he says that was the case with Cameron. Cameron was bringing back into 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 body, finds that he’s not able to tolerate them 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, the work that he’s doing now, which is to help other teens who have taken their lives make the transition back into the non-physical realm, and then he steps aside, and Jesus comes back in, and we have a discussion in which 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, and what Jesus tells us is that every suicide that could have been prevented, was prevented, and 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 spirits stages and intervention.
So in other words, if someone listening to this interview has lost someone they love to a 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, read this particular chapter in Your Soul’s Gift and really take in this perspective, because if internalized and fully understood, it can bring tremendous, tremendous healing, and really alleviate any guilt or self-blame someone might feel it not preventing suicide,
Rick Archer: There was a guy I interviewed a few years ago named Wayne Weirs who committed suicide more recently. He had had an accident which he had fallen and had 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 and get a new one or would you like, 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 Schwartz: 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 you raised this question, because in the channeling session with Jesus in that chapter, we talk about this very point, and what he says is that in an enlightened society, the suicide counselor would discuss suicide as a viable option with the suicidal client, and 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 body and not take their own life.
Rick Archer: There’s a big debate about euthanasia and the fact that the lion’s share of the of the healthcare costs goes to extend life in its final stages in which there is no quality of life anyway, and they’re trying to legalize it in as many places, because it’s just, not doing so is sort of rests on the assumption that, I don’t know what, but that that that is the end of our existence or something that we should extract every possible day of life out of a non-functional body. So, but it seems to be that in the enlightened society, you mentioned, if there was some kind of suicide council, they would ascertain whether that one could still have some quality of life, whether one could still evolve, whether there could be one could overcome the challenges that were tempting to commit suicide, and there’d be some kind of wise judgment made, so it wouldn’t all be on the shoulders of the person who’s suffering.
Rob Schwartz: 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 non-physical, they would simply choose consciously to leave the physical body. They had the ability to do that at that time.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s one of the things Patanjali mentioned also in the Yoga Sutra is you can just you can just ascend if you want to.
Rob Schwartz: 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 out of a physical body and a suicide as it’s done currently. It’s just a choice to leave
Rick Archer: Yeah. I remember when the Buddhist monks were immolating themselves in protest for Vietnam War or whatever they were protesting. My teacher at the time said, it’s such a waste that their life had so much potential, greater potential to offer, and they just cut it short, but it kind of sounds from your what you’re saying that they might have made a bigger impact on collective consciousness by doing what they did.
Rob Schwartz: 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 Archer: 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. We’re saying that in the in the case of relationship abuse, which had been your first soul’s purpose. Is this a form of failure stepped down from a higher purpose or Is there really no hierarchy like that? Isn’t it actually reversed, 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 Schwartz: 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, and 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 it 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 Archer: Well, in conclusion, there are a couple of nice little comments that came in from a couple of people. Someone named Jan, didn’t reveal the location said, God, the substance of all form, title of one of Joel Goldsmith’s books seems to sum up this oneness wholeness. Loved this discussion. Thank you. And Ivan from Bulgaria says, probably the best interview so far, and that’s saying something I’ve done to 470 of them. So, thank you, Ivan and Jan, and thank you, Rob, I really enjoyed this.
Rob Schwartz: 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 Archer: 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 sort of an instrument of your individual purposes.
Rob Schwartz: Yeah, I have the same feeling about my work, and I think that’s what it’s all about.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Great. So, your website is yoursoulsplan.com, is it?
Rob Schwartz: Yoursoulsplan.com, and if people go to the books pages, 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, there will be a workshop in Austria. I believe it’s the last weekend of January.
Rick Archer: 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, and 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, and 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–to 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. So, if they don’t show up right away, that’s why, but anyway, so thanks. 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 so that should be coming up, and after that, of course, many more as the years roll by in a year, it’ll be the 10th anniversary of my doing this, and it’s been a wonderful thing to be doing all these years. So Thanks, Rob.
Rob Schwartz: All right. Thanks again, Rick.