Category Archives: Reviews

All book and movie reviews, on a wide array of topics, will appear here, as well as in other appropriate categories.

“Paul and Stephen”

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Just finished an intriguing book: Paul and Stephen, by Francisco Candido (Chico) Xavier. This book, published by the International Spiritist Council of Brazil, is listed as “A Novel Dictated by the Spirit, Emmanuel”. Subtitled, Historic Episodes of Primitive Christianity, it has been “psychographed” by Chico Xavier, that is, written down by him. Is this the way some of the biblical documents were written? H-m-m-m!

The book tells the story of Saul of Tarsus, and Stephen, the first martyr of the Christians. It is completely faithful to the sparse details the Bible gives us. It fleshes out the story, giving us a much fuller picture and more complete story of the early years of the followers of Jesus after he was killed. In that way it is a most fascinating story, especially since I have been a student of the scriptures and have known these stories for many years.

My biggest critique has to do with the writing. Since this is a translation from the Portuguese, it is not fair to criticize the author. But the language is overly flowery. Everything is always perfect; everything always works out for the good. Skies are always crystal blue, with gentle breezes blowing. Because of this it gets quite tiring to read. Do angels and spirits not have a sense of good literature?!!

But it was helpful to understand more fully the struggles of the earliest followers of the Way of Jesus. Theirs was not an easy existence. And to see the transformation of Saul the persecutor into Paul the Apostle was marvelous. An interesting detail was that Saul was betrothed to the sister of Stephen, before either of them knew that the Stephen who Saul was persecuting to the point of his stoning death, was actually her brother Jeziel under an assumed name. When she and Saul discovered this, at the time of his death, both were completely overcome with despair and guilt. Understandably this became a very formative event in Saul/Paul’s life.

So, an interesting read, raising some questions. I hope to be able to read more from this source, about the early Christian days. I have already read Astral City by the same author, a book coming from a doctor in Rio de Janeiro who died, and then began communicating with Chico Xavier about life on the other side. This also is a fascinating account, but very poorly translated. The Portuguese version, Nosso Lar, has been around since the 1940’s. It illustrates many of the things I have been learning over the past years about death and life on the other side. The video is well worth checking out.

Your Soul’s Plan, Robert Schwartz

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Just finished reading this book. It is an awesome depiction of how healing it can be to know that you planned your life before you were born, especially in the wake of accidents, major illnesses, deaths, personality disorders, etc. Through presenting a number of cases, Schwartz demonstrates how people were helped through gaining knowledge of their own pre-planning.

While we are still in the Spirit dimension, as souls, we participate with other souls in planning how our life on earth will proceed. The lessons we want to learn, the karma we want to take care of, other souls who will be on earth with us and in what relationship, all are things which are discussed together with our Spirit guides and teachers. Much care and thought is given to what our lives will consist of.

This knowledge alone results in a sense of acceptance and peace about events in our lives. What can seem overwhelming and negative on the physical level can, with a changed perspective, come to be seen as a gift we helped plan. When we become aware of ourselves as love and compassion, and the result of love and compassion, it changes everything.

In Church/Christian settings we often refer to “God’s will for our lives”. We spend a lot of time and energy searching for God’s will. And we wrestle with submitting to it. Robert Schwartz provides a complementary perspective to all this. This is something all humans on earth live with, our plan, God’s will, for our lives. We are here for a purpose. We have work to do. We have things to accomplish.

And all of it is for the purpose of a spiritual awakening, both for ourselves and for the entire race, indeed, for the entire universe! Our lives have meaning, deep, profound meaning. We are cared for with infinite love. There are Spirit beings always accessible to us to help us carry out our purpose. They love and support us in every way possible. Their every wish is for our success.

On the human level we often view disastrous events with dismay. We consider them setbacks to our lives, abrupt detours. With the heavenly perspective we can begin to view them with new eyes. We are given obstacles, we plan obstacles, in our lives to give us opportunities for spiritual growth and enlightenment.

There are many means available to us to help gain this perspective. Robert Schwartz has shown us one way this information can be accessed. Soul regression is another way. Shamanism, prayer, meditation, contemplation are all ways which we humans can use to help us understand ourselves as eternal soul beings living a human incarnation on earth for specific purposes.

Thank you Robert, for giving us this account of your own journey in assisting others gain a life-changing perspective on life, on their lives.

 

Two Book Reviews!

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Just finished reading two books over the weekend. The first one I had been reading over a period of time, as it’s that sort of book – one you want to savour, contemplate, and wonder about. The second I had only recently heard about, checked it out of our local library, and read very quickly.

The Universe Speaks: A Heavenly Dialogue, Kimberly Klein, 2011.

The author’s 13 year old daughter, Talia, was killed in an airplane crash, along with her father and the pilot, in Panama in Dec, 2008. One month later Talia communicated to a family friend to let her mom know she was okay. This friend, called “G” in the book, continued to hear Talia’s communications from “the other side”. She told him to write these down, and to publish them for the world to read. What follows are the first half-year of these communications. She is basically teaching G what the heavenly realm wants humanity to know. There is a sense of urgency in these messages; the time is short. G goes through a lot of self-doubt that he is actually hearing Talia, that he is hearing her accurately, and that he has the ability to communicate these lessons to the world. Talia continually reassures him that what he is doing is good, and the right thing.

One thing that amazed me was the biblical language used by Talia, since she and her mother lived a non-religious life. I was so intrigued by this use of biblical imagery that I emailed Kimberly Klein to ask if perhaps G had a religious bent. She replied that no, he did not, no more than she and Talia had, but that he had recently picked up a Bible for the first time shortly before Talia’s death, and had read it. Kimberly thinks that the immediacy of G’s reading the Bible may have contributed to the spirit dimension communicating to him in biblical language. Spirit always relates to us in accessible terms.

Solving the Communion Enigma: What is to Come, Whitley Strieber, 2011.

In the mid-eighties Whitley Strieber had published an account of his abduction by unknown, and non-human, entities, called Communion. After some initial interest and furor over his experiences, he found himself marginalized by society. This experience pretty much wrecked his life. He continued to publish both fiction and non-fiction books, always based on para-normal occurrences.

Now, 25 years after its publication, he attempts to further understand, and explain to us, the implications of his earlier experiences. What he concludes is that these experiences were not sinister in nature. In fact, he sees them now as the beginning of a schooling for him.

The lessons he learned, and that he shares with the wider community of humans, are profound. We are being looked after by others. There definitely is much more to our existence than our material world. We are being taught how to survive on this planet. Things are urgent enough that if we don’t learn our lessons soon, we will not be able to continue living here. And these “others”, whoever, and whatever they may be, are completely committed to helping us through.

We are cared for and loved. Communications from them are not direct, but rather enigmatic. Things like crop circles, cattle mutilations, human abductions, implants, etc, are done for specific reasons. If they were to communicate openly and directly to us, we would come to rely on them, ceasing to use our own intellectual powers to solve our problems. But they are overseeing and guiding us as we seek to get ourselves out of the mess we have created on earth.