Endorsements

 

“Ever wonder why some spiritual teachers rub you the wrong way?  Why some New Age teachings seem really wrong?  If you have, then Are You Seeking the Light or Just Dancing With the Dark? Is for you!  With honesty, candor, and maturity, Peter Newton reveals the cosmic forces of good and evil that affect New Age teachers and all ET channels.  He explains the importance of discernment and listening to the inner voice – and gives us the tools to help evaluate the information that comes our way.  I strongly recommend this book.”   

--Scott Mandelker, Ph.D., From Elsewhere: Being ET in America, Universal Vision: Soul Evolution and the Cosmic Plan 

 

 

“Peter Newton has written an excellent book, based on his considerable personal experience as a spiritual seeker, that should be “must” reading for anyone who is experiencing resistance, difficulties, and psychic disturbances and greetings along the metaphysical journey’s path.  In clear language he elucidates how psychic greeting works and what to do about it. I recommend this book wholeheartedly.”    

--Carla Lisbeth Rueckert,  A Channeling Handbook

 

 

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Chapter 1, Early in Life
 

My first encounter with a church was the Congregational Church in Alston, Massachusetts. It was a few blocks away from the apartment that my mother and I shared on Warren Street in Brighton, both Brighton and Alston being part of Boston. It was the fall of 1954. I was nine and had just come to live with her full-time. Prior to then, she had boarded me out with families in the Boston area and would come to get me to spend weekends with her. They didn't have day-care centers in those days, and all her relatives lived in towns outside Boston that required a subway and train ride to get to. She never drove or owned a car.

My mother had divorced my dad when I was around two. This action that no doubt saved her sanity also got her ex-communicated from the Catholic Church that she had been raised in. It was ironic. Here she was a single mom in a day and time when society in general frowned upon single moms, and her church disowned her too. She herself didn't go to the church she sent me to. I suppose she felt a bit alienated with organized religion, but apparently felt that I should attend Sunday school. I went there for a couple of months, and then, without any warning, she had a massive stroke and died the week before Christmas.

I went to Denver to live with my mom's sister and her husband when tragedy struck again. My father, who had been living in Florida, found out that my mother had died and petitioned the Massachusetts courts for custody of me. He won. My father, and his new wife, a waitress,  were both alcoholics and bragged to their friends about the Social Security survivor's check that came with me and that paid their rent each month. My stepmother died eight years later in her late thirties of cirrhosis of the liver. They moved frequently, and I often attended three or four schools in a year. I endured a considerable amount of physical and mental abuse from the two of them, but I was never in one school long enough for teachers to notice. I joined the Air Force at 17 to get away from them. During the years I lived with them, neither ever expressed the slightest interest in any religion or spirituality.

I mention all of this not to elicit sympathy, but to give you some idea of the influences early in my life. Nothing in our lives of any significance takes place by chance. My troubled childhood served to give me strength, which I've summoned whenever needed.

"God does not play dice with the universe." Albert Einstein (bite-size einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything From the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century, compiled by Jerry Maher and John P. Holms, St. Martin's Press, 1996, P.56)

The value systems I received were all instilled in me by my mother and her relatives. Her mother was from Germany and her dad was from Sweden. My mom was very close to her dad and her Swedish aunt, and she and I spent many weekends with them and their families. Were they churchgoers? No, actually very few of them were. They were, however, a fairly close family that to this day care about and, for the most part, know how to love one another. They imparted the values to me that were commonly passed on to children of my day (I was born in 1945) by the many different ethnic cultures that came to America from Europe at the turn of the last century.

Joining the Air Force at seventeen was good for me. I served four years, worked on jet fighters, got a high school equivalency diploma and was honorably discharged as a sergeant during the Vietnam War. After leaving the Air Force in late 1966, I came back to St. Petersburg, a city I had loved and spent the most time growing up in.

I got a job with Dictaphone Corporation as a service representative. With the job came an education as to how society really functioned in the workplace. In those days Dictaphone had a corner on the dictation market, and I went into hospitals, police stations, insurance companies, courts and multitudes of other businesses, daily, for a half-a-dozen years. I witnessed things such as one doctor chewing out another for misdiagnosing a patient, who as a result of the misdiagnosis was now lying on an autopsy table. I saw a seemingly mild-mannered psychiatrist have a temper tantrum when the patients had left his office. I saw an insurance company in St. Petersburg scurry to have its agents cancel property insurance as fast as its people could dial the phone. (Race riots racked St. Pete in the summer of '68 and parts of the town burned.) I saw that same insurance company pay its insurance adjusters bonuses for paying out the least in claims, and then overheard the conversations as the adjusters made "deals" that short-changed the insured. That job showed me the good and the bad about how people acted in their workplaces.

I then worked twelve years at a job that showed me how people acted and treated each other in their homes. I worked for Sears selling installed home-improvement products and went into thousands of homes. The homes I visited made up a cross-section of society. I remember one Saturday morning giving a fence estimate to a millionaire who owned a TV and several radio stations. He was friendly and unpretentious, but seemed lonely and unhappy. His home was huge and musty-smelling, and felt as though there wasn't much love in it. I went from his mansion, only a few miles away, to a happy home filled with love. It was a black family who was so poor that as I was sitting on their couch, I could literally see the ground through the large cracks in their floor. I learned countless lessons about life, people, and society in general in those two jobs.

During those two jobs I was married and divorced. My dysfunctional childhood from the age of ten on had left me clueless about how to give or receive love, or how relationships were supposed to work. One of the most positive things that happened in those years was the birth of my son, Doug, in 1971. He and I have always been very close.

Because of the nature of many things I have discovered about spirituality that I will be talking about in the rest of the book, I anticipated that you would want to know some of my background. I kept it brief and think you will realize that I have not come from a religious or spiritual background. The thoughts and opinions I express in this book are strictly my own.

Chapter 2, Starting to Awaken
 

My first real spiritual stirring took place in 1973. I was in a novelty store in Tyrone Square Mall in St. Petersburg when I came across the Desiderata for the very first time. As I stood there in the garishly lit store reading those profound words of wisdom, a spark was ignited within me that burns to this day to know the truth about Spirit. The Desiderata talked about having a right to be on Earth and the freedom to view God as I would choose to. The entire document is just a little over 300 words and contains what I have found to be many universal truths and profound wisdom about all aspects of life. For many years the myth existed that the Desiderata was found in a church in Baltimore in 1692, author unknown. It was really written by a man named Max Ehrmann who lived from 1872 to 1945 and wrote and copyrighted it in 1927. Regardless of when he lived, no doubt the words of wisdom have impacted many. The words in the Desiderata got me thinking about what I was doing here on Earth. I mean, how did I get here, and where did I come from? Conventional Christian teachings I had been exposed to prior to reading the Desiderata would have me believe that life was a single go around. Living only once and then going to either heaven or hell just never ever felt even remotely right to me. My knowingness told me that that concept was and is false.

Up until that day in the mall, my interest in spirituality had been confined to watching Hollywood's version of Christ through movies. I always admired and was quite fascinated with the "Christ" portrayed in these movies, but, again, the heaven or hell concept was the main thing that kept me from going to a church. I believe I watched every movie that Hollywood ever made about Christ several times each. The more I learned about Christ, the more he became my hero, and the more I wished that I could feel comfortable with the heaven or hell issue. But I simply couldn't. I have to admit that I was also turned off in those days by many of the "religious" people that crossed my path. I found many of them to be judgmental and hypocritical, far from the loving person that Christ was portrayed as being in those movies I so fondly loved watching.

In the early- to- mid '70s I did try a Congregational church for about six months, which I considered to be a middle-of-the-road Protestant church. The church and minister were both short on "fire and brimstone," but I didn't feel comfortable or the least bit inspired there. To me, it seemed as though the members of the church were just going through the motions of going to church. It was as if they were there because it was expected of them.

Shortly after trying the Congregational church I encountered a book that really accelerated my search for the truth about God and spirituality. I was involved in a long-term relationship with a woman in her early twenties who had an older, close relative tell her a story in strictest confidence. This relative told her about being in a car accident and leaving her body -- what is nowadays commonly called a near-death experience. Now, you have to picture this older relative as a woman who was brought up very conservatively and lived and acted very conservatively. She was approximately twenty years older, a professional woman, and telling her story to the woman I was involved with because, as she told her, "She had to tell someone." When this older relative told her story, I hadn't come into the picture yet. There is a good chance that it wouldn't have been told if there had been a possibility that it might be shared.

She had been in a small car that was broadsided at an intersection in Clearwater, Florida, and found herself floating above the car and watching the paramedics free her from the car. She had some of the typical near-death experiences, such as seeing the bright light and being told it wasn't her time yet. When the story was related to me, I was fascinated and wanted to know more about what happened, but, since the story was told in confidence, that wasn't possible. I remember thinking to myself that both women were very sincere and honest and that nothing was gained by either one of them in the telling of this story. Could it be real?

My answer came fairly quickly. A few months after being told about this experience, I came across an excerpt of Dr. Raymond Moody's Life After Life in Reader's Digest.

I was astounded, for here were literally the exact same things being described about people who had "died" but come back. I immediately went out and bought the book and couldn't read it fast enough. It was the mid '70s and I remember the feeling that I had as I was reading this book. I had the distinct feeling that I was "remembering" how things really are. The book resonated with me and brought me a lot of peace of mind about death and my own mortality. In the years since reading Life After Life I have come across other books on this subject, and I've met several people who have had NDEs (near-death experiences). I'm totally convinced that the soul lives on after death, and that reincarnation is the reality.

Chapter 3, The Beach House Lessons
 

In 1978, I went through a divorce that left me emotionally drained. Like many of us, I had wanted to have the 2.5 children we were all supposed to have in those days and live happily ever after. Alas, my wife spread her wings and set out to find the bright lights. When she served me with papers, I went to see a St. Petersburg divorce attorney that I knew from my years with Dictaphone. Tom, who I first met in '67, early in his law career, was himself divorced. Despite his wealth and popularity, Tom always was an unpretentious person, unlike some of the attorneys whose machines I serviced in those days. We hit it off the first time we met.

While talking with Tom about the papers I had been served, I told him I intended to take my share of the money from my house about to be sold and buy "toys." I told him that I was going to buy a brand new sports car and a Hobie Cat catamaran sailboat. He told me that he had just bought a beach house on one of the local beaches to "kick around at on the weekends," and asked if I'd like to keep my Hobie at his beach house. I immediately said yes, and he had his chauffeur/handyman get a key for his beach house made for me.

The house was located on Sunset Beach, which is part of Treasure Island, one of the connected islands on the Gulf next to St. Petersburg. A classic bachelor's pad, it had several bedrooms and all the conveniences, including a hot tub that adjoined a big back deck overlooking the beach. I taught Tom what I knew about sailing, and he and some of his friends taught me the finer points of losing one's self in wine, women and song, as the saying goes. I was driving a new Datsun 280ZX, had a new sailboat, plenty of women to date, and could come and go and entertain dates at the beach house whenever I wanted to.

Over the Christmas holidays, I went in Tom's limo with his entire office staff to the airport where a chartered Lear jet flew us to Freeport in the Bahamas. When we got there, limos took us to several adjoining suites at the Bahama Princess Towers, where we stayed for a long weekend.

Initially I enjoyed the new lifestyle presented to me, but I kept feeling like something was missing. I tried to convince myself that I was happy, or surely should be happy. The fact of the matter was that this new lifestyle wasn't bringing me any happiness or peace of mind. As I spent more time around Tom and his friends, I discovered that they weren't particularly happy either.

Like a lot of people, we thought that buying and having new "toys" would bring happiness, and it never does. One adopts the erroneous philosophy that I will be happy when...I buy the new car, make "X" amount of dollars, and the list goes on forever. One of the examples of being ego driven instead of spiritually seeking occurred just after I bought my new 280ZX. Tom had a Cadillac convertible and a limo, but he didn't have a sports car, so he promptly went out and bought a new Corvette. His 'Vette was only a few days old when he invited me to drive it from his home on Park Street to the beach house. We were only a few blocks from his house when I bottomed out his brand new car on the rough red bricks of Park Street. I remember apologizing to him for driving the 'Vette over the bump in the road hard enough that it bottomed out. He said, "Don't worry about it." What struck me at the moment, though, was the look on his face of embarrassment, as if he, not his car, had bottomed out. The following week he bought a new Mercedes 450 convertible that wouldn't bottom out at that spot in the road.

After a year and a half of keeping my sailboat at Tom's beach house, I needed to get away from him and the negativity of the lifestyle, so I moved my sailboat to another friend's place. Giving Tom the key back to his beach house was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. How do you tell a friend you care about that just being around him and most of his friends was bumming you out? I never looked back or regretted my decision to leave that environment.

I didn't truly understood Tom and his personality until many years later. In early '92, about six months before Tom died of a heart attack at 56, the St. Petersburg Times wrote a several-page profile. The writer spent several days with him and really captured a lot of what he was about. Tom was a man who basically lived for the enjoyment of doing his job. He enjoyed being the most successful and well-known divorce attorney in the area, and he confessed he didn't have a "life" outside of his law practice.

In my opinion, the reason that Tom didn't have a life outside of work was because of his lack of belief in any higher power. He had zero interest in anything spiritual. I tried on many occasions to talk with him about the subject but never got anywhere. The furthest I got was giving him a gift of a little plaque with the Desiderata on it. He read it once and then hung it in a bathroom. Later in this book I will be talking about spiritual systems of service to self or service to others. Most people choose one or the other, and once in a while a man like Tom comes along who tries to live his life sitting on the fence.

I knew this friend and acquaintance, who left behind an estate worth eight million, for 25 years of my life. I will remember him as a man who sometimes acted happy on the outside, but was truly sad, lonely and hollow on the inside.

I learned invaluable lessons about life and my own self at that beach house. I learned firsthand that money and status can't begin to buy happiness or peace of mind. I saw that when one ties one's self-worth and happiness into things and possessions, the lifestyle always requires bigger and better to achieve an artificial form of happiness. I learned that lives without Spirit in them are lives with something painfully missing.

Chapter 4, Fell in Love With Christ but...
 

In the fall of '80, after learning that no amount of wine, women and song, or possessions, would bring any happiness into my life, I turned to Christ. A buddy who I played tennis with and had known years earlier when he and I were in marriages that didn't work, had also been trying my failed road to happiness. He had reached the same conclusions that I had, only in different ways, and had come to accept Christ at a local fundamentalist church. Shortly after he did this, he immediately started to sell me on the concept of how accepting Christ had brought him tremendous peace of mind.

Within about a month I had followed suit. I had wholeheartedly joined and immediately immersed myself in the church and congregation and began to experience a feeling of peace of mind and great comfort. I remember getting up in front of the congregation and spelling out to them in a "testimony" my past experiences that were not admirable. I also got baptized in a large "dunking" tank that was built into the front of the church.

About six months after I became a member, the pastor and board of directors of this 300-member church decided to have a capital funds campaign to raise money to buy additional land alongside of the church because the congregation was growing. The pastor asked me to be in charge of the promotion committee, with the main goal of putting out a brochure to the congregation. I ended up putting out a brochure on a shoestring budget that really got the job done. In fact I even received a letter from the church's home office thanking me and recognizing my efforts. The reason I mention this is because I want you to understand that for almost one year's time I was really into this church and being a fundamentalist Christian, until...

I started having doubts about many things. The fundamentalist viewpoint about reincarnation was one of the things that got to me. They believe that each soul lives only once and that at the end of that soul's time on earth the soul goes to a heaven or a hell. I had a very hard time with this viewpoint because each time I heard this rigid philosophy there was a part of me that said, "No way!" It just didn't feel right, and my "knowingness" told me it wasn't the truth.

This first surfaced when, after being a member for about a year, I was expected to get involved with what the church called EE -- Evangelism Explosion. It was a practice at this church where two women and a man or two men and a woman would go out into people's homes in the community to "witness for Christ." This group of three people, once inside someone's home, would start things off with asking their main question: "If you died this very minute, do you know that your soul would go to heaven for sure?" I ended up viewing this practice as what it was: a scare tactic, pure and simple. Was the intent to really witness for Christ or simply build up the membership of the congregation, or both? I never tried to answer that question because the scare tactic question bothered me to no end.

It wasn't just EE that got to me. It was also hearing people in that church debating whether people of other fundamentalist churches were really saved because "that" church only sprinkles when they baptize, they don't immerse like we do. There simply was too much smugness and elitism going on around me. Often, I witnessed the same people doing a lot of judging on Sundays, then going out into the business community during the week and doing things that I didn't feel were particularly Christian, or in the fairest interest of others.

I ended up ultimately knowing I had to break away from that church, and I did. It was kind of like my beach house days, in the sense that my senses and what I've learned to call my "knowingness" told me to leave and not look back. Leaving that church, and its people, was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I truly loved the Christ that I had found, but even that couldn't hold me there. I also knew that the members of that church didn't associate with people who weren't members and that I would lose a lot of friends, and I did. The buddy who had talked me into joining the church had remarried, and he and his wife were among those who didn't know me after I left.

Chapter 5, Searching for the Answers When Joyce Arrived
 

I left the fundamentalist church with my love for Christ totally intact and with a very strong desire to know the truth about him and all aspects of spirituality. I already had one Bible but found myself buying another, one in which the things Jesus was supposed to have said were highlighted in red. Over a span of several months, I read the New Testament, about Christ and what he said, over and over trying to come to conclusions. I finally surmised that the most important things that Christ was trying to tell mankind were really just three things. Two of the things he stated as commandments, and I think the third should also have been one. They are quite simple, but yet such essential things, that many overlook them. Christ told us to love God, and to love our fellow man. The part that I think is just as essential is to forgive others and, therefore, not to judge them.

While I was examining what Christ was about, I re-examined my decision numerous times to leave that fundamentalist church. Each time I did, I came to the same conclusions. I could not lie to myself and tell myself that we live once and once only. It made no sense to me from a logical or a feeling perspective. There were other reasons why I left, but if I had to name the main one, it would be the fundamentalist lack of tolerance and understanding of reincarnation.

It was the early summer of 1981 when I met the person who has been the greatest influence in my life. I was working for Sears selling home improvement products when she called Sears for a roof estimate. I was one of six people who sold roofing for Sears that potentially could have been sent to her house. Her name was Mary Joyce von Cappelen Kruse, a very spry 81-year -old who was still driving in the daytime. She lived by herself in a simple wood house in the middle of the city, without a lock on the front door. No lock on her front door was my first clue that she was different.

I was standing in her yard discussing the merits of selecting a light green shingle over the all-white shingle when she looked over my shoulder into the distance and started saying something that got my attention. She told me, "You have a son who is about ten years old who lives with his mother up around the Tennessee area." (My son was ten, and living with his mother in Tennessee at the time!) She continued on, "You and your son are very, very old souls, who, along with other very old souls, have chosen to come to Earth at this time, to aid mankind in the spiritual changes that will take place in your lifetimes." When she got through speaking she acted as though nothing had happened, and I was speechless. Since she acted as though nothing had taken place, and I was totally at a loss to know or explain what had just taken place, I too acted as though nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. I finished writing up her roofing order and left quickly. It wasn't as though I was scared or threatened by her or what she said; I was perplexed and clueless as to what had just transpired. The word dumbfounded also comes to mind.

I went back to Sears and asked if anyone had inquired about me and was told no. The roofing estimate card with her name and address had been shuffled together with other people seeking an estimate for a Sears' roof. They were then given out to the six of us, literally at random and on an even basis. I tried to forget what had happened, but could not forget the words that had been spoken to me and, again, how did she do that? The next day I found a neatly hand-written note underneath my apartment door when I got home. (My name and address were listed in the phone book.) The note thanked me for being courteous and taking care of her roofing needs, and oh, by the way, could we be friends? I didn't know what to think at that point. For several days I pondered what was going on, and who was this woman? I was curious and wanted to know how she had known what she did, and why she said what she had said.

The next day I was adding this event to my pondering when I got some answers. Now, before I tell you what I made of all this, I have to tell you that I have learned through my many years of spiritually seeking that there really aren't any coincidences and that Spirit can and does communicate with us in some very subtle ways. I also need to add that all my life, whenever I've wanted to know the answer to something with enough desire, the answer usually comes within a few days of my asking the question. The answers don't always come in words, but more often a combination of words and feelings. Again, I'll use the word knowingness, for I often simply just know something, and can't even tell myself how I know. At least, that's how it has always worked for me. Okay, back to the answer I received.

What came to me was that my choice of Christ, and the things that he stood for and expounded upon, was not ever going to leave my life. A change had taken place in me. I knew that no amount of money, or material things of any kind on this Earth could ever tempt me to accept a different system. I knew that if I felt this strongly in my beliefs, and I was able to receive information (Jan and a Pisces) that was beyond logic in being able to do, that it was possible that this Joyce was receiving her information from the "good guys" too. I literally felt like I had received a sign from God that it was okay to call this 81-year-old woman who wanted to be my friend, so I did. I don't know who the quote is from, but I've heard that "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear." This is exactly what had taken place, and it was to be the second time in my life that this had happened to me.

Chapter 6, "Life is Like a Bank Account"
 

I called Joyce and we became instant friends. She and I communicated on a depth I had never experienced with anybody else. She was 45 years older than I was, and so the relationship was always platonic. Although I came to her as a student, she always treated me with a respect that transcended who I am in this life. She was among the most remarkable people I've ever met. Her strength of character and personality were formidable, and one sensed this in her presence. Yet conversely her depths of humbleness and humility were always astounding to me. She was born in Ohio and grew up in Illinois and Wisconsin. She and her husband, a school teacher came to St. Petersburg in the early 1920s. (He died in the mid-'70s.) They raised four successful children of their own and thirteen foster children. She did this in a day and time when there weren't social service agencies and the like, so she received no financial remuneration of any kind. The thirteen children were kids that one way or another found their way to Joyce. She always found a way to feed and clothe them and make room in her little wood-frame house on Queen Street that I found her in. The list of people she had helped through the years was amazing. I met all four of her children and got to know several of them fairly well. She was in many ways the "Mother Teresa" of St. Pete and truly walked her talk of her spiritual beliefs.

Joyce was an example of service to others and practiced the unconditional love that Christ talked about. Catch was, she was totally turned off by organized religion. Like myself, she had broken away from the guilt, fire and brimstone that many churches offered. She studied spirituality and metaphysics her entire life, along with astrology.

Her relationship with God, which she preferred to refer to in a broader definition as the word "Spirit," was a close one. Let me explain her use of the word Spirit that I chose to adopt years ago, which I use in this book. Joyce recognized, as I do, that there is a Divine Power or Force that is the Creator of all. She, like myself, preferred to call God the Creator. Most of the time she would use the word Spirit, which in her way of thinking was God plus all of his subordinates such as the angels and the spirit guides.

Joyce was a brilliant woman who formed her own opinions even when they were counter to the mainstream thought of her day. She was a voracious reader of everything she could get her hands on that pertained to spirituality. She had also studied religion at the college level when Stetson University first came to St. Pete. She was an ordained minister of a church called the Universal Church of the Master, of San Leandro, California, but I never heard her refer to herself as a reverend and never saw her use the title. She told me she got ordained so that she could go into the local jails and prisons to help people. The authorities in St. Pete back in the ‘30s and ‘40s would harass metaphysical people for doing counseling if they weren't an ordained reverend affiliated with a church, she said.  Joyce never charged anyone for her help or counseling her entire life. In fact, she wasn't very keen on those that did. Her attitude was that if a psychic, for instance, had a "gift," he or she should share it as much as possible. She recognized they needed an income and said that they should charge modest amounts, or take a love offering. A love offering means the person pays what they can afford or think the service was worth.

One of the first books that Joyce suggested I read was The Lost Years of Jesus Revealed, by the Rev. Dr. Charles Francis Potter. This little paperback published in 1958 was, and remains today, a real eye-opener and served to give me some of the answers that I was seeking. In this book he talks about the Jews who preceded Christ, known as the Essenes, who are credited with having written the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although there have been numerous books written about the Dead Sea Scrolls, I find Dr. Potter's no-frills early edition to be on the money, and in plain English. If Christ was not an Essene, or taught by them, then at the very least, they and their Teacher of Righteousness influenced him. Space doesn't permit me to go into every aspect of this awesome little book, but if you ever suspected that the Bible has been tampered with intentionally by mankind, then read this book. You won't be disappointed. Dr. Potter names what was added and deleted, the date, place and by whom, and all the information he cites can be found in other sources and verified as accurate. If you are the kind of person who has a bumper sticker that says something to the effect of, "God said it, it's in the Bible, and that's the end of it," don't bother to read Dr. Potter's book; it will offend you.

Joyce believed in and participated in metaphysics in St. Petersburg for many decades when it was a very unpopular thing to do. She told me several stories about how people with more rigid spiritual views than her own had tried to make things difficult for her and had done so through the years. For the most part, she really would not let it get to her. She would always tell herself that that was where they were at and that was okay.

She spent many hours a day in her 80's praying and meditating. Towards the beginning of our relationship I got an idea of just how well she was able to manifest things. To manifest something is to put forth a prayer or affirmation to Spirit, or God, or whatever name you find comfortable to refer to the Divine Force in the Universe. In this prayer or affirmation, you state what you want to have happen, and then expect it to happen. The expecting it to happen is having faith that it will take place.  A few years after meeting and knowing Joyce, I started to date a woman that I would end up being with for seven years. When she and I first started dating we would go out to eat at local restaurants, every weekend, in the middle of the tourist season here. Now, if you are a native and live in St. Pete and choose to go to certain restaurants that the tourists go to, you know you will have to hunt for parking and have a long wait to be seated. Well, that just wasn't happening. Every week we would go out to eat, and, lo and behold, a parking place would appear at the front door out of nowhere. Instead of a long wait, tables would seemingly appear to open up out of nowhere. This was going on for months and completely baffling the two of us until one day that we had Joyce over for dinner. Joyce, with a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eyes, asked us after dinner if we were having any luck finding parking places when we went out to eat on the weekends. In a flash we both knew she was responsible for our remarkable streak of good luck! She said she was just trying to make things easier for us, and indeed she had done so. Her actions helped convince me of the power of positive affirmations.

Joyce never had a regimen of teaching me spirituality; she would present things as the opportunities made themselves available. For instance, one day in the late '80s I was working at home on one of my Native American sculptures. (I left Sears in '85 and had decided to pursue making my living as a self-employed sculptor. I started carving wood about the time my son was born in '71. Remember I said earlier that twice I had a teacher appear when I was ready? In '79, an American master wood carver, who lives in St. Augustine, made me his protege. He had spent three-and-a-half years studying the art/craft in Oberammergau, Germany, and trained me to be an artist on the many weekends that we worked together. In the '80s, I was one of a handful of American wood carvers to be nominated and accepted into the Guild of Master Craftsmen International of the United Kingdom and was also asked to start Florida's first ever statewide wood carving competition and exhibition. This annual event, put on by the Florida State Fair Authority, provided me some income, and I was also teaching wood sculpture at St. Petersburg Junior College. There were also private students that I taught, and of course I was trying to sell my Native American sculptures at art shows throughout the state. So this was where I was at when this lesson of Joyce's took place.) I looked across the street from the studio that was in my house and noticed an elderly neighbor attempting to change a flat tire on his car. I put my sculpting tools down and walked across the street and offered to help. The neighbor was thrilled that I was changing his tire, because it was really a bit more than he was able to do. It only took a few minutes to get his spare put on so that he could drive down to the tire store and have it fixed. As I started across the street to where I lived, the neighbor and his wife both thanked me for my help. If they hadn't thanked me it wouldn't have bothered me very much, as I was glad to help, and besides, I had only spent about ten minutes of time at that. Later on that day, I told Joyce about changing that neighbor's tire when she told me her "life is like a bank account" story. She told me that back in the ‘20s, when she was working as a bookkeeper at a local bank, a strong thought/message had come to her. She said that every time you help someone you make a deposit for your soul, and that every time you harm someone or something, you make a withdrawal from your soul's account. Naturally, at the end of your life you want to have more deposits than withdrawals. "So Peter,” she concluded, “In reality, in a way, you should be thankful for the opportunity for changing their tire, because it gave you the opportunity to make a deposit for your soul." She was totally right and in an instant I recognized that what she had said was completely profound. It was to be about a half -a -dozen years later that I recognized that what she was talking about was a system of service to others. This was one of the main concepts that Christ and Buddha were trying to tell us about.

Joyce also turned me on to the writings of, and about, Edgar Cayce. She felt that Cayce was sincere and that he was giving messages to mankind. In her opinion, he was tuned into the Akashic record (a record of all things that have ever or are likely to take place in our Universe), something I would find confirmed years later in The Law of One. (Much more about this awesome book later on.) Like everything else, she waited for me to find Cayce on my own, and then to ask. That's how it was with all the things she taught me. She strongly believed in the individual's rights of free will and never tried to push something on to me. It just wasn't her nature to do so.

One day, in the late summer of '92, a few months before she died, she told me it was time to tell me some things that she had withheld from me for years. She told me that she had been instructed to withhold these things from me until a time in the future when she would be told to tell me, a time when I would be ready to hear them. She started off by telling me that I had not incarnated on the earth very many times, and that I had mostly been a Native American when I had. She also told me that I was one among a handful of the oldest souls in our Universe in physical form on the earth at this time, and that the spiritual "End Times" talked about in the Bible would take place within my lifetime. She told me that I would have things to do to ensure that the Dark would not have unfair advantages on the earth during the End Times. She said that I would be shown what to do and how, and when to do it, and that I should never worry about these matters. Last, she told me that my mother, who died when I was nine, was an angel, and had come to her several times in her meditations before the day that I had come to her house to do her roof estimate. She said that my mother had asked her to teach me what she knew and to look after me.

Joyce died on October 12, 1992, on my mother's birthday, at almost 91 years of age. Although she was my best friend, and irreplaceable in my life, she and I were glad that she died when she did. The quality of her life deteriorated rapidly in the last few months of her life. She had had a series of small strokes that she had to struggle to recover from each time, and just to communicate had become difficult towards the end. Just shortly before she died, she told me she was ready and that "she had her bags packed." Said she would reserve a seat alongside of her on the switchboard for me. She used to jokingly say that she could picture the two of us as spirit guides/angels working side by side. She always had a great sense of humor and never took herself too seriously. Regardless of who or what I am, or may ever be as a soul, I know that I have been blessed to have been loved and guided by her.

 

 

Chapter 7, Meeting the Tampa Group and the Entity Called FORM

     A few months before Joyce died, by a series of coincidences, I was led to a group of about a dozen old-soul types who gathered to meet once a week over in Tampa. I had met two women at a Unity church in Tampa on a Sunday and they had struck me as peace-loving, evolved souls who knew how to love. Imagine my surprise when a man I met in Clearwater, on the following Tuesday, introduced me to a group in Tampa, and there were the two women I had just met! I knew that Spirit wanted me to meet this group of people because two separate ways to be led to them were shown to me. I was sure that had a friend not introduced me to the man in Clearwater, then I would have gotten to know the two women better at the Unity church in Tampa. Either way, I knew I was supposed to be a part of this Tampa group that I had just met.

The group consisted of about a dozen people. They were about half male and half female, and the average age would have been late thirties or early forties. Every member of this group was very dedicated to expanding their consciousness and to growing spiritually. They were all highly intuitive and several had a gift for healing people. A couple of them were also able to see colored auras around people. They all knew that they were old souls, somehow connected, and were very harmonious with each other. They welcomed me and I immediately felt very comfortable with them.

 They met once a week at the apartment of one of the group members to trade information on a variety of subjects in the realm of spirituality. There was a definite searching or seeking for the truth going on within these people as there was with myself. Meditating as a group was always done at these meetings and would bring an immediate sense of peace from the treadmill-running pace of the work world we all brought through the door with us. One of the things that was wonderful is that you could actually feel the love energy in the air around this group. Any spiritual group who meets with a goal of expanding their love and peace will also experience this. Often, if someone was feeling physically or emotionally low, we would put him or her down in a chair and stand around them and think and radiate love towards that person to heal them. If you were the person sitting in the chair, you could easily feel the love energy and feel yourself healing. Now, I want to point out that any, and I do mean any, group of people can do the same thing with regard to channeling love energy. You simply hold your hands out towards the person in the chair (they can be standing also) and visualize a column of pink healing love energy being directed by your hands directly into the person you are healing, while at the same time thinking love thoughts towards the person. If you go at this with a negative or doubtful attitude about it working, it won't work. One of the most important things I can tell you in this book is this: Anytime you are praying, trying to manifest something, or doing a healing on someone, you must believe that it will work, or nothing happens.  Sometimes you won't be able to believe at first, so in that case, you fake it until you make it. The more that you are around others that know how to believe the less that you will need to fake it, for you will start to believe also. Now is not the place in this book to expound on why it is so important to believe; I will save it for later on, but I will tell you that when you have belief, you are having faith. This is one of the important things Christ was trying to teach mankind.

One of the things that I discovered very quickly as a common denominator type thing with the group, and other old souls I was to meet later in the Tampa Bay area, was that eating red meat falls away from us as we grow spiritually. It was strange: several months before joining this group, I had turned down a free steak dinner on my birthday in favor of a local fish called grouper. That was when I had started really noticing that I had very little desire for red meat. In fact, it just didn't digest the same in my body any longer. Within two months of my birthday, I had stopped eating beef, pork, and lamb and had resorted to eating fish, chicken and turkey instead. It wasn't something that I had made some kind of a conscious decision about; it simply just took place in my life. I found that nobody in that group was eating red meat, and, like myself, it had just simply fallen away from each of them.

The group ran itself quite harmoniously without the need for one person to be in charge, although one could see that a few in the group were thought of as perhaps older or wiser and were looked up to. One of these, a woman named Margaret, lived here in St. Pete, like myself. She and I became friends. I remember our first conversation because she was one of the ones who saw auras. She told me that she knew who I was by looking at my aura. "So who am I?" I replied. She proceeded to describe my aura, but not just the aura itself. She told me that there were geometric shapes that "floated" above my head that told her that I was an extremely old soul. She went on to explain that she was hearing the word "watcher" being told to her by her intuition when she asked herself what these shapes meant. Margaret then said, matter of factly, "I think your main job in this incarnation is to counter the forces of darkness." By now, being told this kind of thing didn't rattle me, though it did increase my curiosity. Another of the leader types told me similar things about myself, and I filed that away, too.

Once a month the majority of people in the group would gather together to listen to a channel, and they invited me to join them, which I did. Before I tell you about the experience let me explain a little about channeling. A channel is a person who changes his or her consciousness by going into a deep form of meditation, or trance. When channelers are in this state of mind, they then allow an entity, or personality, to speak to them or through them.  There are a few channelers that are able to stay conscious when they channel, but they are very rare and usually have been channeling for a very long time.  When the personality speaks through them they usually will have a different voice than their own. Usually the channeler's mannerisms, such as hand gestures and posture, will also change.

We drove to an apartment complex in the Tampa Bay area where we were admitted to a fairly large, modern apartment where the channeler lived. He appeared to be in his forties, quite outgoing and friendly. After about 15-20 guests showed up an