Soul Theft: How Religions Seized Control of Humanity's Spiritual Nature

Soul

Theft

How Religions Seized Control

Of Humanity’s Spiritual Nature

by Bill Missett

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200

Bloomington, IN 47403

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Phone: 1-800-839-8640

© 2009 by Bill Missett. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 7/6/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4343-9819-2 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4343-9818-5 (sc)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Copyright 2008, Bill Missett

All rights reserved.

This book contains previously copyrighted material

from Awakening The Soul: The Trilogy, and Awakening

The Soul, Books 1-3, all copyright by Bill Missett

Contents

Preface: A Profound Sense of Betrayal

CHAPTER ONE

Slipping Into Darkness

CHAPTER TWO

Restoring Our Future

CHAPTER THREE

Why We Can’t Remember

CHAPTER FOUR

Suppressing Our Spiritual Nature

CHAPTER FIVE

How Science Was Silenced

CHAPTER SIX

The Deception Disintegrates

CHAPTER SEVEN

Your Spiritual Tools of Life

Credits and Permissions

References

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank, first and foremost, my wife Patrice – my soulmate and inspiration, best friend, best critic and publishing angel – for her many perceptive contributions to this book.

I would also like to extend special appreciation to my late friend Joseph W. Dunn, Jr., for his endorsement, encouragement and advice. To fellow author, writing coach, and spiritual adventurer Robert Yehling, my deepest appreciation for his many contributions and excellent editing.

I would also like to give a bow of thanks to these special people in my life – Kat Woodfine, whose mystical vision first opened my eyes; Susan Houk, who handed me Seth Speaks some 30 years ago, and said, I think it’s time you read this.; to all of my spiritual teachers, particularly Rosa Avila; to my recently departed spiritual mentor, Bahbe Majeski, who kept me pointed in the right direction for many enriching years; to Dr. Garnet Beach, for her assistance, encouragement and endorsement, and to fellow author and friend Victor Villasenor (rejected by 260 publishers before striking gold with Rain of Gold) for setting a sterling example of perseverance.

Last, but certainly not least, to all the channeling personalities and authors who helped educate me and awaken my soul, with a special tip of the hat to Jane Roberts and Seth, to Ken Carey, and to all my Spirit Guides and Teachers, particularly Thomas Aquinas.

I also wish to acknowledge the effectiveness of the Holosync Solution (TM) Awakening meditation program. I feel this remarkable program was instrumental in unleashing the creativity which produced the original Awakening The Soul books. Information on the Holosync programs can be found at www.centerpointe.com

(This, the fifth book in the Awakening The Soul series, is the story of the discovery of what you are about to read. By the time you get to the end of this book, you will understand what Western Religions have done to the world. This realization grew to the point where it became obvious this most vital information needed a wider, more immediate audience for greater exposure than just to those actively seeking spiritual awakening. These historically-documented truths, many presented here for the first time, are something every contemporary Christian, Jew and Muslim should know.)

Preface: A Profound Sense of Betrayal

Most of us have lived our lives comforted by reassuring psychological security in God, country and family, believing that each will remain a trustworthy mainstay in our lives. Yet, many of us have also experienced the bitter deceit caused by those who betray that trust in family or patriotic values we hold so dear. We know how deeply it hurts us to be betrayed by any authority figure.

But betrayal by God? No, never!

Impossible you say? Think again. Some of those who pose as God’s representatives on Earth, and particularly those who pose the most publicly and forcefully, are perpetuating the greatest betrayal of them all. We have all been victimized by this betrayal, and are still being victimized, unwittingly or intentionally, by those men of God.

This does not apply to those representatives of the Eastern religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism or Jainism. We are speaking of the past and present leaders of the primary Western religions − Christianity, Judaism and Islam − the dominant religions in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. They are the primary perpetrators of this massive betrayal of humanity.

They and their predecessors have stolen our true spiritual nature from us.

How could religions steal our spiritual nature? They didn’t physically take that nature away from us. They divorced us from our spiritual heritage by declaring each spiritual trait off-limits, frequently using intense terror tactics to suppress their presence in our lives. These men of God banned our spiritual nature item by item to control us. This was originally accomplished by declaring that each our of God-given personal spiritual experiences, traits or abilities was heretical, evil, sinful, demonic, secret or no longer occurring.

These bans were frequently enforced at the threat of death, instilling deep fear about exercising or displaying our God-given spiritual talents. Millions died for expressing or revealing these forbidden spiritual beliefs, talents and abilities. Thus, we have been forced for centuries to deny and suppress those mystical experiences that form our very own spiritual nature. We have been brain-washed into believing this spiritual deprivation is normal and proper. This has created the wide confusion and doubt surrounding everything psychic or metaphysical or paranormal, each in reality an example of suppressed evidence of our spiritual nature.

This suppression wasn’t executed by our current religious leaders, but rather by their predecessors. However, today’s Western religious leaders keep most of those spiritual barriers in place by upholding many of those ancient bans on experiencing our spiritual nature. The denial of these spiritual traits is ingrained into our consciousness to such a degree that we think it’s correct; that’s the way it should be. That’s how forcefully and completely our spiritual awareness has been erased from our psyches. This is the direct result of almost every active aspect of our spiritual nature being placed off-limits to humanity by Western religions, primarily Christianity, primarily the Roman Catholic Church. Judaism and Islam also contributed to this suppression, but to a much lesser degree. Several Protestant religions and individual Catholic dioceses have restored use to some of these spiritual traits, but many more are still off-limits.

Although all of us can still experience the rarified feeling of being spiritual or mystical, most of us are completely divorced from our true spiritual nature by the taboos placed upon a wide variety of spiritual experiences by religions. Most of us have little or no knowledge about these God-given spiritual traits, abilities, experiences, or events. We are also woefully ignorant about how we could vastly benefit from their restored presence in our lives. Most aren’t curious about their spiritual nature because their religions taught that each example of our very own spiritual nature is somehow evil or wrong.

This revelation was discovered almost by accident while researching a broad range of spiritual experiences for the recently-published Awakening The Soul: The Trilogy. (In the world of spirit, however, there is no such thing as an accident. Everything happens for a reason.) Much of this book is drawn directly from those volumes, condensed wherever possible.

The sense of betrayal has grown as this realization, and all its many profound implications, sank in and took root in my consciousness. It is very disturbing and deeply saddening. We find that we have been betrayed, in the deepest and most personal sense possible, by the men who said they were from God. Take note that the perpetrators are all men, the patriarchal fathers of our dominant Western religions. These same men also fully suppressed and denigrated women while eradicating the ancient Goddess culture and its feminine divinity. At the same time, they were also sequestering all aspects of our common spiritual nature. The realization of the deep implications this betrayal bears for all humanity is shocking.

To understand how this occurred requires only one simple yet profound shift of perception:

All the mysterious metaphysical phenomena humanity continually

experiences are in reality examples of our spiritual nature at work.

This realization dramatically alters the impact of what Western religions did in making all those experiences we call metaphysical phenomena off-limits to humanity. The Church demonized our spiritual nature as part of a massive campaign of thought control enforced by fearful dogma and intrusive, vindictive doctrine. The Church reinforced this fear of our spiritual nature through the mind-controlling terror induced throughout the Western world for 1,500 years through the mass public burning of heretics, its brutal Crusades, Inquisition, and Witch-Hunts. All this mayhem against fellow human beings was executed by the Church in the name of God.

Two other factors are also responsible for obscuring awareness of our spiritual nature: the ancient forgetting of that nature and its consequences, which Christianity calls The Fall of Mankind and our own self-created Egos, which block our individual perception of spiritual experience. The Church decisively trumped those two factors, however, by declaring that all of humanity’s still-recurring spiritual experiences were banned as evil, demonic, heretical, or just no longer occurred outside the Church.

The primary evidence presented here comes from the recently-published Awakening The Soul: The Trilogy: Book 2: Our Suppressed Spiritual Nature. The original book also contains chapters on The Fall and The Ego to fully explain how we lost awareness of our spiritual nature. Those chapters are not included here, and the extensive evidence for each type of Church spiritual suppression has been condensed for easier reading.

After laying out the extensive historical evidence of this spiritual theft, the concluding chapter of this book issues a call to arms. This is a clarion call for the spiritually disenfranchised millions who embrace no religion, who have abandoned formal religion, or feel a deep spiritual void in their lives. They are challenged to reclaim their spiritual nature on their own, and to use those heightened abilities to help save themselves and the world. Many are desperately seeking that spiritual understanding and fulfillment, but very few know they can achieve it on their own without involving religious leaders and their dogma.

This invitation challenges those millions to restore their true spiritual nature through their own efforts, for we need those heightened spiritual abilities − now − to cope with the chaos on Earth if we are truly to save this planet. You won’t find most of this information within Western religions, for the infallible Church does not admit its extensive mistakes, and it dominates the doctrinal thinking of the Western religious hierarchy today.

Those inclined to dismiss these challenging claims are invited to ponder Schopenhauer’s famous axiom:

All truth passes through three stages.

First, it is ridiculed.

Second, it is violently opposed.

Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer

German philosopher (1788 - 1860)

This book contains revelations that will startle most Christians, even those very familiar with their religion’s history. It explains in shocking detail why so many of us feel like poor lost Souls on planet Earth.

The core of this book is taken from the newly-published Awakening The Soul: The Trilogy, which contains all three volumes of the work. The three volumes were originally self-published in a rather unusual manner. The first book published was the last numerically in the trilogy, Book 3: Restoring Your Spiritual Nature. It presents remarkable channeled instructions to heighten anyone’s spiritual nature and restore awareness of the presence of God within his or her Soul. Its contents originally were the last five chapters of a manuscript of some 850 pages until I excised them to become the core of Book 3. Upon examining the remainder of the manuscript, I realized I could also break the remaining two-thirds into two parts as well, producing a three-part presentation. That’s how the trilogy was born, following the original manuscript’s structure. The basic theme of each volume remains the same: 1. Evidence of our spiritual nature; 2. How we lost awareness of it, and 3. How to get it back.

While planning the outline for the original text, I knew it was necessary to first fully explain our spiritual traits and abilities to inform readers who possessed little knowledge about their spiritual nature. Hence, the material in Book One: Proof of Our Spiritual Nature was designed as the original opening segment to provide that background knowledge. The second book in the trilogy published, it matured considerably since it was conceived, for it now lays the foundation for a new paradigm for science and spirit. This is achieved through the realization that all metaphysical phenomena constitutes evidence and proof of our true spiritual nature. They are mysterious only because we have forgotten their source , and only now are regaining an understanding of their importance in our lives. More than 80 differing examples of human spiritual experience are presented and explored in Book One, many instances familiar to most.

I had also planned a few small intermediate chapters to inform readers on how they had lost awareness of their spiritual nature, which is how Book 2: Our Suppressed Spiritual Nature began to take shape. The extensive evidence revealing the theft of our spiritual awareness by Western religions was discovered during research into that nature. That volume, the largest of the three, provides most of this book’s core chapters.

After 20 years of investigation into the many mysterious examples of metaphysical phenomena and psychic awareness, I came to the realization that everything I was studying had one simple, common answer: they were all various aspects of our spiritual nature, shared by all humans. They were mysterious simply because we had forgotten about them and their common source, our Souls. The Awakening The Soul Trilogy is based on that primary premise, fully demonstrable through history, religion, science, psychology and parapsychology.

As the original manuscript began to take shape in the middle 1990’s, I incorporated a great deal of research material that I had acquired over a 10-year period for a planned weekly newspaper column on the emerging personal spirituality. As I researched the material for Book One: Proof of Our Spiritual Nature, I kept running across references about how religions had suppressed these various spiritual abilities and traits. Curious, I began specifically looking for further evidence of this suppression, and discovered abundant confirmation of my suspicions.

I was shocked at what I found. While innocently researching the why behind our spiritual amnesia, I stumbled upon the primary reason why we felt so spiritually deprived. In the midst of my research, I turned over another rock to see what was there, and out crawled a sordid dark truth into the light. The rock I turned over was the rock that the Church supposedly was built upon. Its actions are shocking, in a history never before cast in this light.

Taken individually, these acts of suppression do not look damning. When considered together, however, they constitute a massive, enduring pattern of suppression of our God-given spiritual abilities by the very religion that was supposed to be guiding us to higher spiritual awareness. This total mind control deeply affected Western civilization, for the Church blocked huge amounts of our spiritual, cultural and historical memory. That became quite obvious during the years of research for this book. While this abridged version contains substantial evidence of this suppression, the evidence presented here is far from complete. The original version of this text, presented in Book 2: Our Suppressed Spiritual Nature, reveals much more additional supporting evidence, such as 35 historical examples of how the Church denigrated or persecuted Jews. Those extensive categories have been reduced to just a half-dozen examples of each for this abbreviated volume.

Since I am neither theologian, scientist, philosopher, historian, or psychologist, I sought the findings and opinions of learned men and women in these various fields to authenticate the premise of this book. I quote them extensively throughout, letting their words make the case that is presented.

My credentials are those of an experienced investigative journalist with the proven ability to research facts and formulate them into an easily understood presentation. During the quarter century I spent as a daily newspaper editor, we utilized a learned ability that taught us how to cut through the chaff of any complex issue, and to reveal the true heart of the story, what it really meant. Several tried and true journalism axioms guided this learning process, the first being, "Don’t pay attention to what they say, examine what they do. At the time, this primarily applied to governmental bureaucrats and politicians, famous for saying one thing and doing another. Now, we can add popes, cardinals, bishops and priests to that list. The second primary axiom was the familiar: If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck." This means that if the evidence discovered consistently describes the same situation, then it is most likely accurate. When I applied these two axioms to the mass of evidence I was compiling on the suppression of spiritual traits, it quickly became quite evident what had happened – and continues to happen. That is how Book 2 came into being.

In-depth research into the mass mind control by religion was overwhelmingly convincing: Western religions, primarily Christianity, suppressed and vilified almost all aspects of our spiritual nature. Religious leaders went out of their way to keep us from learning about our spiritual nature, and insisted they were the only source of information we should consider. This frequently happened under the threat of death. The evidence is present, in case after case, example after example. Religions turned our spiritual senses and nature into tools of the devil, the supposedly evil side of our spiritual nature.

This research confirms with startling consistency that we are spiritual beings with a wide array of spiritual abilities and talents that are largely forgotten. As more and more people learn about these various branches of research, they are awakening to the fact that things are really not the way they appear, or the way we have been taught. Much of this knowledge and information surfaced only recently in popular books and magazines. However, its historical base is old, going as far back as the Bible and other ancient religious texts. You may note that almost every book I reference in the following pages contains the date of publication. This reveals how recently much of this incredibly important body of knowledge emerged for mass consumption.

As a result, millions are casting off the veil of ignorance foisted upon humanity by our ancestors, our culture and schooling, our religions and science. We can see this evidence in the numerous popular movies, television programs, books, and magazines featuring spiritual themes and content. We are learning about our true spiritual nature, instead of what we have been brainwashed into believing for nearly 2,000 years. The expansive evidence will convince all but the most close-minded that our spiritual nature is constantly at work, often right under our noses.

To date, our approach to studying psychic and metaphysical phenomena has been much like the five blind men examining the elephant – each has a different description of the beast, not realizing they are all parts of the same animal. The study of parapsychology has been much like that for more than 100 years, it being studied in bits and pieces, with little or no coherence. But now, it is apparent that we have been studying the various parts separately, without realizing the true sum of the whole. The lone common answer to all the mysteries – our Souls’ spiritual nature – is present in every instance examined.

To my knowledge, no one has ever looked at the wide range of mysterious metaphysical psychic paranormal phenomena as a collective portrait of our spiritual nature as we do in Book One. What is so astounding about this premise is that there seems to be an endless supply of confirming facts and data. Conversely, there’s practically no evidence to refute the premise – except the hollow nays of the skeptics. You can pick up just about any book on phenomena or the history of religion and discover additional confirming facts in a variety of amazing stories. Most remarkably, the new information rarely clashes with established facts. It fits quite seamlessly into the grand scope of this premise.

The vast amount of readily-available evidence from a myriad of mainstream and scientific sources constitutes proof that our true nature, which most of us consider purely physical, is at its heart primarily spiritual. We must conclude on the basis of this evidence, that we are fully spiritual creatures – even though most of us have not awakened to that fact.

My research also dealt with the perplexing disregard mainstream science displays today toward the mysteries of human consciousness and spirituality. Why, I wondered, was science so skeptical about this most intimate part of our lives? Why, when science would finitely examine such mundane things as sea slugs and rarified gases, would it refuse to seriously examine humanity’s very own spiritual consciousness? The answer was equally shocking: Christianity was also to blame for this denial.

The Church barred science from investigating humanity’s spiritual nature through 1,500 years of suppression of science and 800 years of direct persecution of scientists. Christianity, primarily the Roman Catholic Church, gets most of the blame, for it persecuted or killed millions of people who held different spiritual views or beliefs, including a number of theologians and scientists. Judaism is not innocent in this regard, as it does share lesser responsibility in this suppression. Islam, however, did not repress science but much to its credit, encouraged it. Protestant faiths also vigorously continued the repression of science and humanity’s mystical spiritual nature after the Reformation. However, a few Protestant religions later embraced various aspects of our spiritual nature and made them part of their belief systems, most notably the born again and Pentecostal movements.

This is what history shows, despite the abundance of inbred Church apologists who try to dust off as old news the intense persecution of other religions, the assault on all heretics (i.e., anyone who thought differently about practically anything), the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Witch Hunts, and the suppression of science. These events may have happened a long time ago, but they continue to haunt and limit us today in the way our belief systems, history, culture, society, and laws are structured.

This is also the case with our suppressed spiritual nature. The Church’s 2,000 years of spiritual suppression has almost erased our spiritual memory. It was the outright theft of our spiritual nature, regardless of what any modern-day apologist theologian might say to attempt to mitigate the horrific damage it has caused to our collective and individual psyches. It is no wonder we feel lost and confused on Planet Earth. The early Church’s repression was so widespread and so intense that it created what we now call the Dark Ages, an 800-year period of almost-total illiteracy and ignorance in the Western World of Christianity.

The Church also created a Dark Age of the Soul for Western humanity, with corresponding ignorance about our true spiritual nature, from which we are just awakening. Had we known and nurtured our true spiritual nature for the past 2,000 years, we would be far more confident, far more in control of our destiny, far more able to deal with our difficulties, and much less dependent upon religion as a crutch to sanity. Our ancestors were intentionally kept illiterate, ignorant and unschooled, while being forced to embrace religion and to believe a particular brand of dogma under the threat of death. While this was occurring, the Church also denied our ancestors almost all our God-given talents as spiritual beings of free will.

If there were such a thing as original sin, this would be it, in all its ugly glory. If it were an indictable offense, this would be the indictment.

When I began writing this book, I had no intention of being critical of the Church, since I had been raised in a good respectful Irish Catholic family. Until I began my research, I was blissfully ignorant of the Church’s horrible history, none of which the Church ever shares with its followers – for obvious reasons. As my research progressed, I became angry that religions had so intensely and cruelly suppressed humanity based solely on what individuals and groups believed or thought.

It came as a real shock to me to learn how repressive and intolerant the Church had been throughout so much of its history, right up to today. It quickly became apparent that the Church conducted the most widespread indoctrination of forced thought-control in world history, and for centuries persecuted or killed almost anyone who disagreed or resisted. If you consider this Church-bashing,’ it is not intended as such; it’s simply the telling of long overdue truth. If telling the truth is Church-bashing, then so be it – and it’s about time. The Church has been hiding behind the sin of blasphemy" (criticizing religion or the Church) for far too long. It is time to hold the Church accountable for its horrid history.

The Church ignored all the teachings of Jesus in promulgating its worldwide repression. Whatever happened to Jesus’ primary teaching of love thy neighbor? Did the Church forget that God gave us free will to decide our lives for ourselves? Who appointed the Church as the inquisitorial guardian of all human Souls? Who gave the Church the authority to enslave all heathen races? Certainly Jesus’ advice to his apostles to guide his sheep to the promised land was not authority for the resulting mayhem later Church fathers heaped upon humanity for many centuries, enslaving the minds of all those it encountered.

Church fathers made these claims for their own purposes, for their own ends and designs, with no higher authority whatsoever. Priests and preachers continue exercising that unauthorized control to this day, citing dire threats about what will happen to us if we don’t obey their severe admonishments. Jesus did not found a religion, nor did he request one to be founded in his name. His followers, who were all Jewish-Christians, gathered in what was known as the Jerusalem Church, which was directed by Jesus’ brother, James. Born from Judaism, Jesus’ teachings held similarities to early Christianity but did not teach the resurrection or the virgin birth. It was considered a minor sect within Judaism, until Paul and other early Church Fathers hijacked its beliefs and created Christianity with a much different belief system.

However, even Paul recognized the importance of humanity’s extensive spiritual traits and abilities, as evidenced by his discourses on those subjects in his First Epistle to the Corinthians. There Paul reveals that the spirit of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit lives within each of us, and that each of us can become one in spirit with Christ. Further, Paul reveals we are blessed with the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, healing, performing miracles, prophecy, seeing apparitions, as well as speaking and interpreting tongues. Did the Church guide us to this exalted state of knowledge? No, sadly, it didn’t. Quite the contrary occurred. All these spiritual traits and abilities cited by Paul as our spiritual inheritance were later suppressed by the Church, stripping us of our own God-given nature.

When you reach the end of this book, you will also realize how this spiritual theft has negatively affected humanity. You are encouraged to consult the Awakening The Soul Trilogy page at the end of this book for extensive additional information about our suppressed spiritual nature and guidance on how to restore it. Use your free will. Make up your own mind.

Bill Missett

July 15, 2008

CHAPTER ONE

Slipping Into Darkness

Humanity’s eternal search for its true spiritual roots – the cause and basis for all the world’s religions – remains our most compelling common universal quest. We all seek to be reunited with our Creator. However, despite three millennia of intense religious indoctrination, humanity remains strangely unfulfilled in the search for spiritual understanding. This is most evident in Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East, which are dominated by Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This basic failure of religion, despite the broad proliferation of varied spiritual beliefs, is evident in the thousands of alternative spiritual paths that have spawned inside and outside the major formal religions on Earth, including some 11,000 variations of Christianity alone.

We remain unsatisfied in our perpetual quest to fill the spiritual vacuum within our Souls. Much of this dissatisfaction with religious doctrine stems from the sad fact that most Western religions do not provide the spiritual needs we seek because they deny us free expression of our spiritual nature. Religion has not provided the answers to the spiritual questions that arise from our hearts and Souls. Millions, however, accept and believe mystical religious dogma that is quite distant from the truth they feel in their hearts and minds. This occurs despite the depth of the spiritual void and the longing in their Souls. Before we can fill that void with spiritual truth, we must understand how we lost our spiritual awareness. We must understand our true spiritual nature before we can restore it. We need to know how we lost our way before we can return to the path. We need to receive spiritual truth before we can reject false dogma.

The deep sense of spiritual loss and the dissatisfaction with most Western religions is evident in the millions who hold no religious beliefs, and in the low church attendance rates of those who do. Even in staunchly religious Ireland, regular church attendance has fallen to 50 percent. Some 60 million Americans do not claim any religious affiliation, and traditional religious attendance worldwide is falling each year. Yet the majority of those disenfranchised millions still feel their personal spiritual nature, whether they are aware of it or not. Many of these millions believe themselves to be spiritual while not being religious. There are several valid reasons for this contradiction, which go to the very heart of our perpetual spiritual search. The reasons reveal why we are so spiritually deprived in spite of the intense religious competition for our allegiance.

Our spiritual loss goes back many millennia, to ancient humanity’s early era on Earth. Simply put, we forgot our spiritual nature eons ago as we concentrated on becoming newly-created physical beings in a material world. We forgot the source of our creation and the presence of our Creator within our Souls. We gradually forgot the wide variety of spiritual abilities and talents granted us by our Creator. This loss became more entrenched as we lost touch with our personal spiritual nature and abilities, generation by generation. We inadvertently allowed our Egos to take control of our destiny, pushing our Souls into the background of our lives. In the process, we all but forgot the awesome spiritual powers of our Souls.

Most of us pay more attention to our hair than we do to our Soul.

With the rise of modern religions during the last 3,500 years – all of which sought to remind us of our spiritual destiny through a wide variety of invented mystical beliefs – our true spiritual nature was pushed aside, distorted, misinterpreted and suppressed. Those who remembered their spiritual nature and tried to demonstrate it or tell others about it were persecuted and killed by the same Church that supposedly was saving us. Rather than regaining a true understanding and full use of our personal spiritual nature, we were taught beliefs that were quite distant from the natural aspects of our true being. Rather than restoring our understanding of the god-like qualities of our spiritual nature, we were informed we were lowly, unworthy sinners certainly headed for everlasting hell if we didn’t meticulously submit to the Church’s dogma. We were told that exercise of our natural spiritual nature was evil, and its banned elements were replaced by a variety of Church-invented mystical beliefs. These were supposed to elevate us to our former spiritual glory, but have failed miserably to do so in two desperate millennia.

There is no argument that we are spiritual beings temporarily occupying physical bodies to accommodate our presence in this material world, as difficult as that might now seem. Historical, religious and scientific evidence confirms this fact in a myriad of fully documented ways. How are we supposed to regain our true spiritual nature if we receive little or no understanding of the characteristics and abilities of that nature and how they truly function? How are we supposed to elevate our Souls to their former glory if we are not allowed to exercise the true spiritual nature of our Souls? When we examine the extensive variety of confirming evidence about our spiritual nature from history, religion and science, we reach conclusions about ourselves that distinctly vary from the stern dogma taught to us by most Western religions. We discover that we are all spiritual beings, something that many of us innately understand. However, we are portrayed by most western religions as hopeless beings with no spiritual abilities, despite the Biblical instruction given by Jesus that You are gods. How can we possibly regard ourselves as spiritual beings with god-like qualities if our religions grant us so very few of these characteristics?

The truth is shocking: religions – primarily Christianity – stripped humanity of its belief in almost all of its spiritual qualities, abilities, experiences and characteristics. This was accomplished in a most brutal fashion, through fear-based intimidation enforced through widespread genocide. Millions of men, women and children have been killed over the last two millennia in the drive by western religion leaders to force us to give up our spiritual beliefs and accept their invented dogma and doctrine. Only in the last few decades have we started reclaiming aspects of our spiritual nature.

This book examines how this happened, describes many of those spiritual talents and beliefs, and reveals the abundant evidence of their continuing existence. The ongoing presence of those spiritual traits in our day-to-day lives, despite our spiritual amnesia and the suppression of our spiritual nature for two millennia, fully validates their reality.

CHAPTER TWO

Restoring Our Future

Since the dawn of humanity, almost every culture on Earth has acknowledged belief in the existence of the Soul in each human being. But for most modern civilized humans, true understanding of the Soul’s spiritual nature and its multitude of abilities is all but forgotten. Religions attempted to remind us of our spiritual source, but in the process created restrictive dogma that for centuries banned almost all aspects of our own spiritual nature. Religions forced us to believe something other than what we feel in our own Souls, our own divine nature, often under the threat of death. If religion is the opium of the people, then it is very apparent the drug is wearing off for much of western humanity.

The millions of spiritual seekers who have abandoned organized religion, and the millions of disenchanted believers fully confirm those facts. Despite our spiritual amnesia, mankind universally accepts the reality of the Soul’s presence as a matter of knowing. We possess an intuitive knowledge that a Soul exists within each one of us. But we have largely forgotten our inherent nature as spiritual beings, created by our Soul. These missing elements of our lives create an enormous, haunting spiritual void, symptomatic of our eternal spiritual quest to rejoin our Creator. Their absence is also the core reason for many of our most serious personal, societal and global problems.

We are historically possessed with an intense drive to understand the remnants of those distant memories. However, most of us have been brainwashed into doubting and ignoring our spiritual nature, the very essence of our Soul. Church and science have unwittingly conspired in this brainwashing. Religions, primarily Christianity, forbade free expression of personal spiritual experience for almost two millennia, killing millions as heretics who didn’t comply. A hidebound science, thoroughly intimidated by the Church for most of those 2,000 years, still declares all mystical phenomena bogus.

In reality, it is our spiritual nature at work.

We have never been taught to focus on