Shepherd Hoodwin

Our consciousness on the physical plane is relatively crude. We view choice making in terms of language, but like time, language is a construct of the physical plane. Nonetheless, on some level and in some way that may be incomprehensible to us now, we chose all the components of who we are__hey are not imposed upon it.

Those who apparently do evil do it ultimately out of love, even if their actions are misguided for the moment.

Jesus incarnated when our Western civilization was changing from being predominantly baby soul to predominantly young. We are now in a similar transition, from young to mature.

Since we have free will, we create our own reality and virtually everything is negotiable.

There are such things as delusions, but not every unlikely vision that the mentally ill have is imaginary.

Although we experience our nonphysical levels of self as potential, they are also functional in our lives. An acorn is a potential oak tree, but the oak tree could be seen as the essence of the acorn, guiding its development into the oak tree.

Today, many of us are trying to understand just what male and female energies are, since we are calling old rigid stereotypes into questions. There is a risk of replacing such stereotypes with even more politically correct rigid stereotypes. The destructive aspect of the masculine has been emphasized in recent years, but both the feminine and the masculine have destructive sides. (The evil witch in fairy tales is an example of the destructive feminine.) Love is the ultimate nature of everything; it is not just the feminine that is loving. We tend to think of female energy as nurturing because it is undirected__t includes everything__ut perhaps one could say that the feminine loves and nurtures in a being way, and the masculine does so in a doing way. We are each capable of loving in both ways.

To know someone, we must experience him, and that knowing will not exceed our self-knowledge__e cannot know someone else to a greater depth than we know ourselves.

Through channeling, we can make conscious contact with higher planes. We can also communicate with beings who are physical but nonhumans, such as devas (nature spirits), dolphins and whales, and extraterrestrials.

All true teachings expand awareness, not limit it.

Truth is infinite and is therefore vast enough to hold an infinite number of facets. It has been said that the measure of an idea__ greatness is the degree to which its opposite is also true. For example, love is gentle; love is also strong.

An infinite soul incarnates in order to catalyze massive spiritual change in a civilization, generally during a shift from one average soul age to another. An incarnation of a transcendental soul usually precedes it in order to catalyze massive social change.

Still, we always have some level of choice, even if it only how we react and make use of what life brings us.

Obviously the choices of other people affect our lives, but we are the primary creators of our experience.

A significant number of people diagnosed with mental illness have psychic abilities not yet under control. They may have true mental illness as well, including faulty neurological wiring and chemical imbalance. However, some people have mental breaks because of psychic abilities they don__ know how to handle.

One of the most confusing issues in channeling is that of accuracy.

No one on any plane of existence is infallible or knows everything we need to know.

With any spiritual teaching, we are working with rounded-off truths, because we cannot work directly with the whole truth__t__ too big.