PERSPECTIVES: DOES COVID-19 HAVE A SPIRITUAL PURPOSE? "Beyond the Michael Chart" Workshop

Published: Fri, 01/14/22

PERSPECTIVES

Newsletter of Shepherd Hoodwin and Summerjoy Press

Dear Friends,

The third series of the Zoom workshop "Beyond the Michael Chart" is scheduled for March 5–April 9. It’s a sort of Q&A “satsang” on what Michael teaches about how incarnation and the universe in general works. A PDF brochure is attached. You can subscribe to the first two series if you didn't attend and catch up via videos, but that is not required. We had lively, fascinating discussions on a wide range of Michael teachings topics, such as parallel universes, internal monads, karma, and working with our guides and essence.

This is a complement to "The Journey of Your Soul" workshops that cover Michael Reading charts: “Understanding Your Essence” and “Understanding Your Overleaves.” Feel free to ask any questions you wish, but we’ll be focusing on material not on Michael charts. Attending Levels I & II is not a prerequisite, but consider attending those if you’d like a deep dive into your role, overleaves, soul age, etc. A new series isn't currently scheduled, but let me know if you're interested in either workshop.

Please spread the word!

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UPDATE ON CHANNELING SESSIONS

When directly channeling Michael, I've always brought in a strong and powerful current of causal energy, which is both very cool and hard on my body. During the past year, I've been learning (with the help of a couple of gifted coaches) how to accurately get information from Michael without much of their energy in my fields (probably more akin to how other channels work). After a lot of trial and error, I have merged channeling sessions into intuitive readings.

I've offered intuitive readings for decades, billing them as guided but not directly channeled, accessing relevant guides and essences (including my own), and using my truth sense to choose the words. I'm in a slightly altered state, but not as much as when channeling Michael directly. They're fun sessions, more casual and conversational than direct Michael channeling.

In the past year, I've asked Michael to supervise them to ensure accuracy. I now also can directly access them for information that they can best provide without much cost to my body. For example, when someone orders their written "trues" (true rest, play, work, study, and life task), they come wholly from Michael. When someone wants to know the soul connections between two people, my guides look that up on the fourth level of the astral (in all psychic work, different kinds of information reside in different places) but Michael supervises the access. Increasingly, I'm finding that what comes through intuitive readings sounds very much like what comes through in direct Michael channeling sessions. I'm no longer offering direct individual Michael channeling Q&As, but people are finding that intuitive readings are working just as well.

If requested, there can also be powerful healing energy work. It's not quite the same as a direct blast from Michael, but it's still wonderful and effective. After channeling them for over thirty-five years, I have a solid energetic infrastructure in place for transformational healing work.

I continue to bring Michael in fully for sessions of channeling charts. There's so much dense information that that's still the most practical way for me to do it. It is my intention to continue offering charts indefinitely, and working in this new way should allow me to keep going a lot longer without burning out my body. With charts and other written accesses, I commit to doing them in six weeks, but it's often three or less if I'm not traveling or on a break.

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I was interviewed by Simon Bown on "The Past Lives Podcast," a terrific series:

https://www.spreaker.com/user/15573647/past-lives-podcast-ep185-shepherd-hoodwi

All the best,

Shepherd

DOES COVID-19 HAVE

A SPIRITUAL PURPOSE?

By Shepherd Hoodwin

I’m sometimes asked whether there is a spiritual purpose to some event, especially by people who are priest souls, which is one of the seven soul types defined by the Michael teachings. Priests are “wired” to seek the higher ideal in all things.

Michael has a very useful take on this question. They teach that the universe is half male energy and half female energy. (Some refer to these as focused and creative energies.) Male energy is linear and goal-oriented. It forms structures. Female energy is radiant (nonlinear) and process-oriented. It fills those structures with atmosphere in which new things can be created. They are essential halves of one whole.

Our lives are half male energied and half female energied. The male-energied half includes our life plan, the blueprint that we made largely before incarnating. It also includes new plans as well as revisions and additions made as we respond to changing circumstances. The female-energied half are the improvisations necessitated by the free will that humans (and all sentient creatures of reason) have. Free will helps generate the chaos half of life that gives us room to grow. If everything were the result of a predetermined plan, we wouldn’t have the ability to make choices and therefore learn and evolve. There would be no creativity.

From casually observing an event, there is no way to determine whether it was preplanned by the soul (or by many souls collectively) or if it was an accident. Two people could have similar-looking mishaps. In one case, it could have been planned on a soul level, perhaps to repay a karmic debt or to wake up the personality. In the other, it could have been chance, the result of not paying attention or the free will exercised by another person.

Some like to say that there are no accidents or coincidences, but if that were the case, there would also be no free will or creativity. There are some accidents and coincidences, and again, on the surface, it’s hard to differentiate them from those events that are part of our life plan. Accurate channels and psychics who go deep and understand that not everything “happens for a reason” can provide that information, as can our own unbiased intuitive access.

Michael speaks about “hazards of the physical plane.” In other words, due to free will (which has been part of human experience from the beginning) and other factors, “shit happens.” Some spiritual traditions have stories about a time before recorded history when humanity lived in greater harmony with nature (the Garden of Eden, for example) and therefore there was far less disease and suffering. Early chapters of Genesis in the Bible speak about people living thousands of years. Hindu texts say that we’re currently living in a Kali Yuga, an age of darkness and conflict when humans are out of alignment with the universe. There is disagreement about how long that will last, but the good news is that it’s temporary, like passing through bad cosmic weather. I believe that it is almost over.

In any case, due to this lack of harmony with the whole, we have high levels of disease, along with war and other forms of strife and suffering. This is nothing new. The current COVID-19 pandemic pales next to the influenza pandemic a century ago, in part because of how far we’ve come medically. Is it part of God’s plan for humanity? No. God is not a sadist. God is love. This, like just about everything else that occurs, is part of humanity’s collective creation. It is the culmination of all choices ever made and how they have interacted with nature, putting the environment out of balance. We have created enough growth opportunities on our own without God needing to step in and make more. Neither does God step in to stop people from doing terrible things. Even casual observation can confirm that it doesn’t work that way. We are each co-creators, and if things are going to change, we’re going to have to change them ourselves. There is abundant support available from non-physical realms, but we’re on the front lines.

Human influence occurs not just through actions but through consciousness. Fear-based consciousness, including hate, resentment, bitterness, judgmentalness, prejudice, etc., also throws life out of balance by lowering the vibration (energy). “When a butterfly flaps its wings ….” Natural disasters might still occur were humanity in an enlightened state, but probably much less frequently. As the Bible puts it, humanity has dominion over the earth—our consciousness is the single most influential factor in how well things go here.

For the soul, all challenges are growth opportunities. If everything were easier and more harmonious, we’d have fewer difficult choices to make and therefore we’d grow less. It would be like going to an easy school where we might become bored by the lack of challenges. We obviously don’t have that problem at the moment here on earth. If anything, many of us could do with a few more lightweight courses. But imagine all the lessons that could be gained if humanity dealt with COVID-19 in a sane, intelligent, alert, and creative manner. Alas, we have repeatedly proven ourselves to be slow learners due to being in what Michael and others refer to as the “waking sleep.”

In any case, souls don’t really care whether the challenges we face were part of our life plan. They all can work in terms of giving us opportunities to test and improve our skills. The better we become at making skillful choices, the more joy we ultimately become capable of experiencing.

The world we have today is the one that we have collectively created. If we wake up to a higher vision, we can choose to create a more loving and harmonious one. If we don’t, we can choose to make it impossible for human life to continue on earth. Obviously, the former is far preferable. If we choose the latter, we as souls will have to find another planet on which to continue our grand cycle of growth in some other sentient life form. It won’t be the first time a creature of reason has had to do that, and it won’t be the last. But it would suggest that humans are pig-headed and unnecessarily remaining in fear-based false personality.

One of the main ways we grow is through creatively solving problems. COVID-19 is obviously a very big problem. Scientists throughout the world have worked together in an unprecedented way to find one solution, the various vaccines. We have collectively grown as a result. It’s not the only possible solution to the problem. There are usually several possible ways to solve a problem. It’s not perfect—nothing is—but at the moment, it’s by far the most successful one, and far better than getting a horrible disease. The same can be said of most vaccines, even if they have room for improvement and shouldn’t be overdone—young bodies especially may need time to recover from one before taking another.

I have had a longtime preference for holistic health solutions, and have kept pharmaceuticals to a minimum. However, the ultimate spiritual approach to all problems is to choose whatever works best, all things considered. I do my utmost to keep my immune system as robust as possible, but the healthiest immune system is often no match for virulent infectious diseases. I am thankful that we have these allopathic options.

Michael is fond of saying that “All is choice.” We are constantly making choices, and those choices have repercussions. We learn by observing them and hopefully learning how to make wiser ones in the future. The right to make choices is “sacred” but others also have the sacred right to make choices in response to the choices we have made. Those who choose not to take advantage of vaccines may be choosing to instead become severely ill and possibly die. They may be choosing to live out the rest of their lives with compromised vascular and respiratory systems, or to infect others, including loved ones, with a disease that possibly kills them. That could incur a karmic debt.

However, theoretically, if someone effectively solves the problem of COVID-19 without taking a vaccine, more power to them. That might simply entail scrupulous mask-wearing and sanitizing. Of course, there are a few people who have medical conditions or sensitivities that preclude them from taking vaccines (although those who can’t tolerate MRNA vaccines might be able to handle the other kinds, and vice versa). It is hoped that those who choose to believe that vaccines are generally unsafe (despite overwhelming evidence) have truly found and fully practiced other ways to keep themselves and others safe. If they don’t, they might be choosing, as Michael puts it, to “grow through pain” rather than through joy. We grow one way or the other, either through making reasoned, wise choices based on real facts, or through the “school of hard knocks,” perhaps sincerely believing things that are false. We don’t get do-overs in life. If a person’s chosen solution doesn’t work, illness or death can result. It’s true that even some of those who had booster vaccines have become infected, but very few without comorbidities have become severely ill or died.

Why do we sometimes sincerely believe false things? There are several possible reasons. We may simply be misinformed by what we assume to be credible sources. We are more likely to hold firmly to misinformation when it resonates with a bias we hold. Biases spring from unresolved emotional charges and faulty beliefs, such as festering resentments or a worldview that others are out to get us. We are usually unconscious of them. Being on a conscious spiritual and/or personal growth path implies working to become increasing aware of our biases and releasing them. Our biases limit our ability to be happy, so releasing them is in our best interests.

There’s also the Dunning-Kruger effect. From https://www.britannica.com:

In psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general.

This is more likely to be a problem in our current anti-intellectual climate in which objective facts aren’t valued, and people are encouraged to believe things that feel correct to them based on their biases. A lazy, fear-based “Don’t confuse me with the facts” attitude creates closed mental systems that don’t allow in new information. There’s no point in arguing where there is a closed system.

From the soul’s point of view, “It’s all good,” in that growth can come from any choice. But from the human point of view, this results in a great increase in avoidable tragedy and suffering.

We can always choose love rather than fear.

Fortunately, we complicated human beings are much more than our surface intellectual beliefs. There are people who are generally kind, intelligent, and generous who hold some extreme and destructive false beliefs. There are also people who are emotionally contracted, yet see the world more accurately. For me, a good heart is the most important thing, even with people who have some beliefs that seem disconnected from reality. My own practice of unconditional love is to maintain heart connections wherever possible and avoid unproductive conversations. Ultimately, love is the only thing that will get us out of this “fine mess.” Raising the vibration of humanity can create an atmosphere in which people feel safer to let go of biases and embrace truth.

ONLINE LINK:

https://shepherdhoodwin.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/does-covid-19-have-a-spiritual-purpose.pdf

RELATED ESSAY—"COVID-19, VACCINES, AND FEAR":

https://shepherdhoodwin.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/covid-19-vaccines-and-fear.pdf