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Somewhat to my surprise, it took me to age 60 to believe that my Creator had endowed me with the right to make choices without obtaining somebody else’s permission.  This is pretty good proof that my father overplayed the discipline card, because even now I am careful not to get into too much trouble with authority figures.  I’m 67, for God’s sake – who could be a better “authority” on me, than me? 

On the other end of the spectrum, today's youth seem to have no trouble at all making choices and not caring what anybody thinks – an attitude that may not be so smart or safe for the young and inexperienced.  People are very diverse, so I’m sure there are still parents who teach their children respect and courtesy – military families and Mormons come to mind - but in today’s overly permissive society this must be hard, indeed, to enforce. 

At one time you may have considered yourself a Christian - because you loved the persona of Jesus, and felt a deep intuitive understanding of his attitude and teachings, as though he was an exemplar of kindred mind, the like of which you might grow to become yourself in time. You may have heard him communicate with you in your prayers and meditations. But the churches in your part of the country insisted that to be a Christian, you had to accept him as your personal savior, whose status you could never hope to attain - and moreover, you had to be evangelical about it. You saw no need for either of these things. You felt that each initiate must make his own sacrifices and his own choices, and that Jesus would prefer that you learned how to stand up for yourself! But because you had such a stiff-necked, self-willed attitude about it, no minister bound by a literal commitment to the Nicene or Apostles Creed could admit you into church membership. 

You might have also considered yourself a Hindu - because you meditated and chanted the Gayatri Mantra, and you received loving messages and assistance from Mother Lakshmi, Lord Vishnu, Sri Krishna and Siva Nataraj. None of them ever turned you away, that you could tell. You were sure you had lived many past lives in India. Yet militant "born" Hindus sent you nasty emails telling you to stop insulting their religion and stop teaching Yoga; you couldn't possibly understand the depth and gravitas of the subject. You couldn't possibly be psychically or emotionally gifted enough to communicate its truth to others. (As though complete strangers would be in any position to make that judgment about you.) 

The universe contains uncounted stages, and immortal souls are actors and actresses. We play many, many parts over many, many lifetimes, remembering our true selves fully once the makeup and costumes have come off.

Time is circular, and the Circle takes its time. Everything that is playing out now has played out before, and will be played out again—whether by this same acting company or by a new one.

This is not a complete list. I have left out several excellent contributors, with no lack of appreciation. And these reactions are purely subjective, based on my peculiar mindset and experiences.

Archer is a very smart cookie. She has the sort of brilliantly analytical mind which is usually referred to as a shining intellect. Her studies in Buddhism and Yoga exhibit insights far deeper than mere academia, for she derives clear lessons from their teachings which directly bear on our current daily issues. Her revelations come from states of profound meditation and intense thought.

When I was eleven years old, I became deeply engrossed in magic tricks and ventriloquism. Both of those studies quickly became compulsions for me, to the extent that I would practice them in the privacy of my room while my parents confidently trusted me to do my homework. Paul Winchell was a popular ventriloquist on TV at that time, and I had a Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy. I read books and learned the tongue-techniques of forming words without moving my lips. At the same time I devoured books on stage magic, discovering how to grab the spotlight by fooling an audience with digital manipulation, misdirection and mechanical illusions. 

At that point I could very well have been on track to become a colleague of Penn and Teller or Terry Fator—but such was not my destiny, for by the age of sixteen I had lost my enthusiasm for both of those trades just as abruptly as I had embraced them. The surprising reason was a sudden deep disappointment with their artificiality; I found that I no longer wanted to pretend to be the voices of animals and other non-human beings, I wanted to have real conversations with animals and sprites, in which somebody else would talk back to me! Neither was I satisfied to deceive people with illusions of magic tricks, I wanted to access the real magical powers of Moses, Solomon, Merlin and Jesus! 

I periodically run across blogs proclaiming that the shadowy guides who control spiritual evolution on this planet are divided into Good and Evil contingents—and that our religious and metaphysical organizations have become unwitting pawns of the Evil ones. According to these disaffected souls, any organization you can think of has been taken-over by the Dark Side: the Catholic Church, the Masons, the Theosophical Society, A.M.O.R.C., Self-Realization Fellowship, Eckankar, the Mormons, Wicca. You can't trust anyone!      

How to evaluate such extreme accusations? This is what my life experience has taught me:  

I used to think that certain Christians shunned dialogue with people of opposing beliefs simply because they feared we were tools of the Devil. But their reasons may be worse than that; they may actually be afraid that we are inhuman demons ourselves! This idea is derived from the Book of Enoch, which was deleted from our western Bibles but has reportedly always been in the canon of the Ethiopian Christian Church. 

We read in Genesis, “the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose,” and then later, “there were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men of old, men of renown.” But as no historical or biological record of these beings has been unearthed, our churches take no official  position on what these references allude to.