by Maninder Sidhu

My spiritual quest began in a mundane way. A book by Shirley MacLaine aroused my curiosity and I soon found myself attending courses, study groups, anything that would take me further in my search for truth. It led me to Aparna Jha's house in Delhi, India, for what were initially healing sessions where we sat quietly and focused on issues we wanted resolved. Those sessions infused me with peace and happiness.

When Aparna announced healing-cum-channeling sessions, I felt mild curiosity, without the faintest inkling of what was to follow. A channel is a person who transmits messages from higher beings or energies. We were told to ask only spiritual questions. The teachings that followed have radically changed my life.

ON RELIGION
In your plane, you require structure. Therefore you have religions. But they are not used correctly. Teachings of all religions are correct; the systems are not. The essence of teachings of all religions is to help reach that state of oneness, yet it is not used that way. The form appears more important to humans than the spirit. Yet the answers are all in the spirit.

ON LEVELS OF ENERGY
There are 15 levels of consciousness with different levels of energy. Till the sixth level, positive energies have shadows or corresponding negative energies. After that, there are only positive energies. Only those steeped in the negative attract shadow energies. Those who remain rooted in love and peace will attract greater positive energies into your lives. Your level of awareness and what you want determines the energies you attract.

ON DETACHMENT
It is important to cultivate true detachment. What you seek is never going to be secure without detachment because on the earth plane, each quality has its opposite. So with happiness, you have sorrow, and where you have peace, you have conflict. The only way to attain absolute happiness is total detachment from everything.

The best practice for you is detaching from yourself. Imagine watching yourself, then detach from your identity by saying that this is so and so. Think of yourself as 'he' or 'she'.

Most thoughts that you have are other people's thoughts, other people's teachings, other people's feelings. So it is important to detach from your thoughts. All you need to do is keep imagining that you are separate from you.

Spiritual progress can only be measured in terms of your ability to detach from your small self and embrace the larger self. As this happens, you will find greater tolerance, patience and compassion within your being. As you come closer to the light, your perspective on many things will automatically shift. You will find that you are able to empathize with and understand others much better. You will also find your anger levels going down and resentments dissolving. These are benchmarks for your spiritual progress as it can only be measured in terms of how you live your life.

ON KARMA AND FREE WILL
Time as you perceive it does not exist. Time is an illusion specially created for your earth and similar worlds for you to experience things as being relative to each other. You are always free to make choices. At every point in life, you have a choice to go the way of love, peace and enlightenment. Often you do not choose it. Karmic consequences notwithstanding, you can change virtually any part of your life through your will. It is your determination to be free that counts the most. There are no absolutes; there are always many possible futures you can choose from. While your karma gives you a certain destiny, you are free to change it. The more you focus and experience the greater reality, the greater will be your capacity to alter your destiny. As you open your heart to a greater state of being, a lot of your karma is dissolved so you will no longer be bound to karmic consequences of all your actions.


ON LIMITATIONS
You have no limitations except those that you allow to be your limitations. The way you think is toxic or limited because it is scared or negative. Rarely do you examine your thoughts or the way they control you.

The key to everything lies within your own being. Each of you is not only a God in the making but in essence. Each of you is divine. Always be aware of this and act accordingly. Shadows do exist but the reality of you is much more than your shadows. It is your shadows that prevent you from being what you really are. Therefore, you must alter how you think, feel, act-from negative to positive, from living in fear to living in love.

ON EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL LIFE
Yes, there are many places in the universe where life exists. Some life forms resemble you and some are very different. In fact, some of you have already lived a few lives on those planets, a lot of which are parallel to the earth, which is to say that your souls incur karma on those planets too.

ON VEGETARIANISM
We are neither for nor against vegetarianism. Your physical being is designed to survive on food, which can come from different sources. If you ask whether only vegetarians attain enlightenment, the answer is no. What is important is the attitude with which you consume food, not what you eat. However, we do not advocate the taking of life and unfortunately, to eat you will always take life, whether it is of vegetables or of animals.

If you are fixated on eating only flesh, it is not karmically good for you. Then again, if you are fixated on eating only vegetables, it is again not karmically good for you because vegetables too have life. Consciousness exists throughout creation.

ON BEGGARS
It is important that you not judge others, particularly those who are in a situation you do not wish to be in. If somebody asks for something, particularly a beggar, it is karmically wrong for you to refuse. Every situation requires its own responses and actions.

All of you, at various points of your life, have begged. Beggars beg for money, you might have begged for compassion, forgiveness or help. What's the difference between you and them? They are as wretched as you were in those moments. We do not wish to belittle or hurt any one. We just wish to make you understand that there is little difference between one human being and another. You will all do the same things if you are in similar circumstances.

ON CHILDREN'S UPBRINGING
Samskara (the soul's impressions from life or past births) is what a soul acquires in all its lifetimes. Samskara is different from karma. Karma has all kinds of consequences that have to do with one's actions; samskara is the kind of values that a soul incarnates with. These values may be positive or negative according to the way the soul has lived in other lives.

Upbringing has little to do with the inherent samskara a child is born with. The child is essentially guided by nature and will be so no matter what. It is difficult to change that samskara of the child.

The upbringing of children is not properly understood on earth. You have this idea that you can make your children this or that. You cannot. The child is already an individual with its own karma, samskara and destiny. Its temperament and its nature are defined. This is particularly true of the children born in the last 40 years.

You can give your children total love and support. Your anger will breed anger in your children; your judgment will breed judgments in them.

How many of you are as perfect as you tell your children to be? Before you ask your children to be something that you are not, think carefully because there is nothing that your child is that you are not. Your entire approach to your children should be to empower them to transcend their faults and weaknesses, rather than to judge them or constrain them.

Concentrate your entire being on your children. If you do not have children, there is no need for you to give your all to anyone else. Once you have children, you have an absolute responsibility to them. And if at any point you are not able to communicate total love and nurturing to your child, it is a great tragedy.

If from the time you were children, you focused on understanding yourself spiritually and later began understanding the material world, your lives would be completely different. There would be peace on earth. Unfortunately, you first teach your children how to get ahead, how to compete and want this and that. The first thing your children understand is power because you as parents have power over them.

You do not teach children about love, about who they are and how important it is for them to be free within themselves, and that they are much greater than what they think they are. You teach them fear, limitations, what they can't have. You never teach them what they are and who they are. Generation after generation has gone through the same thing

ON THE HUMAN RACE
The human race was created to show how a race could evolve because enlightenment is inherent in each one of you. The negative emotional bias was created to prevent you from attaining it too fast. It was perceived by us that with no negative emotional bias, enlightenment would be instantaneous in each one of you. Therefore, a slight emotional bias towards the negative was created in order to make it more challenging.

Over time, this bias has become more pronounced because of the way your race chose to go. The human race was expected to evolve to greater peace and consciousness and enter a higher consciousness but again these expectations can only be fulfilled by the will of your race.

It cannot matter much to those who are beyond the earth plane because for us, time does not exist. But there will be so much unhappiness on your plane, so much destruction that if you do not choose to make things more positive or loving, it may become extremely miserable for all and you may arrive at a point of almost complete annihilation so that you will have to start all over again. This has happened before in the history of your earth plane. We do not want to see this happening again as we would like you to move ahead.

When you were given a negative emotional bias, it was not permanent. Right from the beginning your entire race has been given the choice to be free of it but everything that you have all done has reinforced the negative emotional bias further.

In the last 100 years, because of the bombardment of your psyche and consciousness by negative images and words through what you call the 'mass media', by the complete breakdown of compassion, generosity, kindness and values, your negative biases have become extremely pronounced. And none of you can transcend the negativity and the constant inundation of negative imagery, whether they are things that you read about, see or hear.

You must remember that all of you were given the power to create and to destroy as much as the God-being or any being in the cosmos has. Because you do not fully understand or accept this, you tend to use it destructively. Whatever you conceive of or imagine will manifest. Therefore, movies or books of destruction, which have tremendous mass appeal, will bring those events into being.

ON FREEDOM
Sometimes we are tremendously disturbed by what happens on earth. But for us, freedom is an absolute and your race has total freedom. In any case, your race will not fully self-destruct. Since you have not really followed spiritual teachings for a long time, it disturbs us. But on the other hand, if this is your wish, so be it.

ON LIFE BEFORE BIRTH
Before it is born, the soul always seeks opportunities for enlightenment. Once you are born, you forget all the challenges you set yourself, the great desire for enlightenment. And then it is an inner voice within you, which you tend to ignore as you get caught up in your life.

From any life, the soul has several exit points. If your soul feels that whatever it wants will not be fulfilled in that life, it will choose to exit. Before it incarnates, your soul has only one clear purpose, which is enlightenment and all challenges and situations you encounter in any lifetime were designed to help you move forward spiritually. Whether you do or don't is your choice.

The 'energies' are emphatic about not forming a cult or a religion, nor do they want us to preach what we have heard at the sessions because, as they explain, much of the teachings of our religions have been distorted or misinterpreted. I firmly believe that each of us has a sacred duty to use our discrimination to seek a path that will not lead us astray. I also went through the channeled teachings carefully, searching for a jarring note that was not in consonance with what our great sages and saints had taught. I could find nothing.