When I talk to spirit beings, or when I do sessions occasionally to enable other persons to talk to their loved ones or teachers who have passed on, we often end up talking about themes. A baby soul may come to this plane to experience the bigger, harder deeper forms of love that were touched on in the section on apart-ness. We talked about how there are good reasons, and larger reasons for apart-ness. What we can do with it is fascinating. The themes are a critical part of this understanding. They are the basis for the plots of life. They dictate the architecture and the set up. They are like primal interactions, or like the arch-types of the stories. Themes generally revolve around desire. Desire is the seedbed for creation.  

Since we are children of a creator, and therefore are, by heritage, creators, we are connected to desire. It inspires us. Love desires to express itself. Plus, we are equipped with powers and access to ultimate powers so that we can satisfy those desires. As we said before, desire is not felt the same in a heaven of all bliss and union. Rather desire is the stuff that drives a lot of what happens on the earth plane. We can feel the range of experiences from whims and preferences to a real wanting. From wanting we can tip toe into more extreme settings, like needing. This is rather foreign to the other heaven. We don’t have a need long enough to identify it before it is met. So only here can they last long enough to get the full taste and value of a need. What is it like? What does it do to us? Under different circumstance it can be very different effects.

Then what if you need, and then you get it, you receive. And, what if you need and you don’t get it (or it feels that way). How does it all affect you? Can gratitude find a place in the cycle of needs? If so, how? How does need affect those you relate to? And how does it affect your love – greater or lesser?  From needing one can move up the scale even more, to a level of “dying for” something. This gets us into compulsive conditions, and irrational states.  

From frantic needs, one can take another leap into addiction. Wow. That is among the heaviest of all options on this planet. The power of desire, of will and of addiction are quite fascinating. Addictions can range from caffeine to smoking, to sex to hay fever medicines, and of course, all the to the hard drugs. Addiction tends to be very trying for the souls, so these lives seem to be short. Either the person dies early to get relief, or the person cleans up, converts to a straight life and hangs around to help other souls who want to stay on this plane longer, but cannot tolerate the intensity of the destructive and high-end addictions (no pun intended.)  

These souls may be born into family lines that are physically predisposed to have addictive tendencies. You may hear about how families tend to have problems with alcohol, or drugs, speed, coca and other dangerous things. This physical lineage on this side helps the soul to get the behaviors it came for. Of course there is a more than just nature, there is a lot of nurture that goes into the making of an addict. I am not pointing fingers at parents so much as pointing out that the traumas, the types and timing of them, all will contribute to the set up. Then as the soul decides to go forward with each step of the plans, the conditions are in order for him or her to take on the next level of difficulty. There are opportunities for the souls to change their minds or bail out early or the like as well.       

Addiction itself can be the sprouting ground for other themes. While under the influence of these intense addictive drives, we find our behaviors change. We can hurt someone. We are distorted enough and driven enough by power, fame, or needles, that we can do extreme things – things we could not do if we were enlightened or full of the knowing-ness about our true heritage. We are in altered states in a way. It may feel as if we are wrestling with demons that seem to be in control of our otherwise loving and compliant beings. This may also be true. There are probably many agents who are helping souls get tied up with addiction, so there are so-called “evil” ones out there facilitating our stories. (However, you may recall that trouble is the whole reason for being here in most cases, so re-thinking evil might be in order.) We find we are not so prone to good after all. We can cheat. We can steal. We can be quite blind to, or untouched by, the effects of our behaviors on others. Even though we love Mom, we might know there is money in her purse, and she would not give it, so we take it. So in those cases, the ones who we love might be the targets of our theft, our meanness our misbehaving.  

Betrayal. This is a theme that can also be served by someone who is also here doing an addiction theme, or by someone around and interacting with them. The addict can be on one side of betrayal and the trusting family member might be on the other side of it. We taste it all. To take on a theme means to take on several life times or more related to that theme. This way we experience it from all sides. After much experience, inside and outside of it, one really knows what betrayal is. From this place, one can become bigger. One can be deeply moved, grow more compassionate and more loving because they have felt what happens to souls under this spell or this condition, this theme. 

So one theme can nicely interact with another theme. For instance, physical health is a popular theme for a love story. One soul may be interested in confinement. Poor health is very foreign to spirits and beings who can move effortless by using only thought, who can shift to fit in all spaces and forms, and can even bi-locate when they want to. There are souls who come to this earth plane to be handicapped, to be locked in bodies that cannot perform a record high jump, or even hold their own fork. They may be persons who uses wheel chairs, or they may be mentally handicapped or somehow incapacitated (seemingly so). These bodies are perfect vessels for beings of love who want to demonstrate the strength and diversity of love. These bodies are great for those beings of love who want to serve others by giving some one else a chance to experience service and experience being needed for awhile. This physical loss may require that others tend to their needs a great deal. So one being in a theme of service may hook up with another being who is working on levels of dependency, and the ups and downs therein. It’s a beautiful thing. Mother Theresa is an embodiment of such an arrangement. She owes a lot to the persons in pain and suffering for whom she devoted her life. I must repeat. It’s a beautiful thing. The ones who serve may then find that the one who seemed so much in need and down trodden, that one actually was a gift. He or she provided a need for the other person to demonstrate his or her love in some passionate and meaningful way. The gratitude may be greater from the giver than the givee. In another life time with this theme, this being may want to be an Olympic athlete. She or he can find what love and power lies in there, and what is not there. It gets very hard to tell who the heroes are in these stories. It gets hard to tell if the theme came from the menu of agonies or the menu of ecstasies. But again, the idea of karmic balance may fit here too. If you come to immerse yourself in a theme, you will be committing to lifetimes so that you can experience it in many forms – from the hero, through the villain role, and all the way to the victim.     

If themes are the reason for being here, then success might need to be re-defined. If a person was born in to poverty, and earned a fortune, and lost it on personal indulgences, that would be a story. Then he loses his  beautiful wife and the kids resent him. Then if he struck gold and got another fortune, Wow. And then say he blew that bundle on charities and free-bees for his good-time buddies. And then say he finally dies in poverty again. It might be easy to judge him as a failure. All that action, drama and money moving around, and yet he had nothing in his bank at the end, not a penny. But wait. If the themes were money and the power it gives and does not give, then that might be a very very successful life. He threw himself into his life story and packed tons of events and emotions into one life time. Hey, congratulations to that guy! He did a good job!    

Another theme might be intellect. A person may be very happy to serve the other beings on the troubled planet with them by providing cures or answers, problem-solving or information that can lead to improving  the quality of life. A person may be quite brilliant, highly intelligent. Then ignorance serves him or her  well because he or she can feel so much above it, above the fools and the masses. Or they may get the thrill of contributing some new knowledge to the world. Discovery is a great game. We humans love it. It’s a major thrill! We knew when we were in the enlightenment of home. We agreed not to know as we came into this life. Then we get to discover again how cool it is to capture this knowledge again. Actually all knowledge is in the field of all possibilities. If something is new, it is new to the population in the current age. Living with varying levels of knowledge can have a lot to do with the set up for getting the most out of a theme. 

Or this smart person may find that the brilliance makes her or him very un-compatible with the rest of the beings on the planet. They may find it hard to function here. I recall seeing a show about parents who were fertilized with sperm or eggs of brilliant people. These families had children with extra-ordinary high IQ’s. I noticed as they interviewed these brilliant persons in their twenties, that the ones on the show tended to be artists, musicians and were quite sensitive people. They did not go into fields like engineering and science and medicine as might have been expected. Kind of interesting in terms of a life theme. This type of theme would also work well with pride. Those bright folks can get all puffed up about themselves and the scientific method, and ways of knowing and learning, and all of that. It can feel very important. 

Pride is a versatile theme. It is a real useful partner to ego. As I have already said, I defend the ego, so ego is not automatically a bad thing. However I still find people who are dabbling in the shallow pride, or who are just too whipped up about themselves, they are quite boring company. Hooray for apart-ness. I get to avoid ones who I think are too over-the-top into themselves. Yet other folks may love the stuffings out of them. You may have seen where I have raved before about this. It is so great the scoundrels and scallowags around here get to be loved. Love is not earned. People love people who are quite imperfect. Pretty people get attention, but they don’t have the corner on love. The not-so-pretty ones often do better.  

I want to present another tribute to pride. Yes, it keeps us from God. Well, it does in that our awareness and energy is very strictly focused on our little persona’s and their vital local and immediate importance. So, if the consciousness is all-about-me, then it feels like there is no room in my mind and heart for awareness of others, including an awareness of a divine presence. So, if a divine presence is blocked out by “me” thoughts, it appears that the pride is keeping one away from God. Yup, that makes sense. However if we go back to making sure we have appropriate definitions before deciding how successful anyone is, let’s consider what pride does for us. It is a good agent for “not-you” thinking and “not-God” thinking. It gives us space that only we occupy. From there we can feel isolation, separation from those who are beneath us (yay for apart-ness) and they may be able to feel love or lack of love or the limits and joys of self love from this little made up self important perch.  

So though they are not fun friends to have, the people who dabble in pride are doing human stuff all along. And it serves the larger love story just as much. So, although I will agree that pride and ego keep us from being aware of our godly roots and connections, it is by design, like the rest of the earthly experience. This earth plane is super virtual reality. It is SO convincing! What an accomplishment! If we want to live as if we have a close personal connection to a divine being in every detail of our lives, we can do that. If we want to see what life is like believing we are alone and without divine support, we can do that too. So some kinds of independence might also be themes to be recognized. Americans love this individuality. Go rebels! 

A follow on to pride is fame/celebrity. This area seems to be very attractive. It appeals to so many people, especially in the first half of their lives. It might be that they crave love (as we all do, it is the common denominator for the entire human condition.) and they equate love to the attention and admiration one gets through the media. Admiration is a form of love, a fragment or aspect of love, yet admiration is often confused with a bigger more fulfilling love than it truly is. One cannot trade in close personal love for the big screen yowsa and find it is enough to completely nourish their whole beings.  

Of course the issue of drive is a key to the formula too. If a person gets “enough” love, does that satisfaction then cool down their passion, brilliance, and drive for career success? Does happiness ruin the creative spirit? Sometimes it seems like the fire goes out, when the thirst for personal love is quenched. The converse seems to be true, that is, suffering and heartbreak and lack of love seems to spur on artists and creative juices. Many of the most incredible musical pieces are expressions of pain, loss, sorrow, etc. Misery and desperation are great conditions for brilliant creativity. One of my current favorite CD titles I’ve  heard recently is “I’m Trying to Break Your Heart.” Isn’t that cool? That sums up the reason for human experience. Break the heart. Heal it up. Stretch it out. Test the love. Be the love. Be bigger, dig deeper, survive, grow and so on and on.     

I was surprised by the types of visitors we had when I started doing group sessions. My friends and I just offered for any spirit who wanted to come in, to come and speak to us (with the guidance of the beings who had worked with us. We trusted them. They would bring in the slate of speakers, for our good and/or for their intentions to teach us something.). I would not have thought to invite celebrities, but they showed up each week. At least they said they were the beings who we knew of. And they seemed to exhibit some quirk that was recognizable to us, so that helped with the identity. Their personalities seemed familiar, so it was easy to listen. And their message or lesson to us often related to the theme of their lives. Their lives were so public that their theme was also quite obvious. Their comments were interesting, and often they were very useful. They do it all with kindness now, even if they were not so nice while they were alive. (It could be that the visitors were actually tricky spirits or ghosts who were great impersonators. They may have taken on the persona so that our interest would be sparked by the appeal of well know celebs. But even if that is so, the messages seemed useful and positive enough. It was fun to listen.)  

(Nice-ness – this is a common phenomenon. People improve when they pass over. However it doesn’t mean they are all knowing or perfect, but definitely improved. A friend of mine died in a car crash on New Year’s Eve. I talked to him a few times after and he was so gentle and nice – not at all the rowdy hot-headed guy that I knew. I referred to his SOB-ness a few times while writing about him. Then one time he came and said, “Sherry, stop telling people what an asshole (his word) I was. I am nice now!” He wanted the new and improved him to be known.)   

Here are a couple of examples of the messages we got during the visits from the celebrities. Sabastian Cabot, who played Mr. French on TV and who recorded albums of children’s stories, told about how powerful story-telling is. He said another person can be touched for life, inspired, uplifted and encouraged by the simplest details of a simple story like Pooh. He urged us to tell our own stories and not wait for some famous person to tell one. Marilyn Monroe (yes, of all things! I was a bit embarrassed by her at first) talked about glamour and the difficult upkeep of a fake image. She encouraged us to be ourselves, even in public and not feel like we had to act like movie stars. Churchill was cussing like an old sailor when he told us that simply talking and telling the truth, even if it is hard, is still the most powerful strategy to help people, to move people and the lead people. He used radio very effectively to talk to the people during the war, to keep them from unraveling, keep hope alive, and keep the people united in their resolve. His win was largely due to talking on the radio each day. So during crises and upheaval, we might be able to help others by just sharing what we know, in our own terms and style, even if it is rustic or less than fully polished. He encouraged us to be tough, but be ourselves. Some came to talk about race issues too. I loved that. Other big leaders provided the insights of their experience even though history makes is sound so noble, it was quite a bit more normal and modest than that. One famous song-writer came very often to talk about the power of a few simple love songs. His songs were heard around the world and they stirred up hearts over and over again, reminding people that all you need is love. It’s a pretty effective way to have millions chant the same mantra all day long – repeating the hook of a love song that got stuck in their heads. What goes through your head is what gets created in the local reality for you. I share more about thoughts and creation in the piece about prayers and forms of communicating with the universe and with our divine relatives. (See the menu page.) 

Other human life themes might be around power, like oppression, being on the underside of power and mis-handling of power. Another one is security/insecurity, which studies self knowledge about the very real weaknesses associated with humanhood. Depression, anxiety and fear are quite natural given our tiny stature and our pervasive frailties. When we accepted the ignorance that keeps us away from our real identities, which stays with our higher selves, we take on the experience of not-good-enough and failure. That is one of the mysteries, because, given the theme of life, there is actually no failure. Every life has a happy ending. We get a heroes welcome when we go back home. And still, we find amid the human shortcomings there are other forms of incredible power inherent in those weaknesses. As we operate in such a fragment of our true selves we are empowered to do great things with love. Other themes that were mentioned before are local power positions, such as wealth and political clout.  

One theme we cannot miss mentioning is fear. This one affects many things. It forces us to do extra-ordinary things, good and bad. It is not a part of the other heaven, but is very common on this plane, the alter-heaven. Fear can stress out the body and make us age twice as fast. It can lead to illness, disease, harmful behaviors. It is a powerful unit that affects nearly all humans much of the time. Earth is a dangerous place, so a lot of the fear is warranted. Other times, it seems some of us are just hard wired to be in fear all the time, no matter what the local scene brings. Speaking of hard wiring, if you are a person who would like to adjust down the dial on your fear factor, you might want to try Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). It works on the body response as well as the mental, emotional, electrical and chemical effects that fear and trauma and other problems have on the body. If you have been traumatized, and every human has been to a greater or lesser extent, you also might be interested in Whole Hearted Healing (WHH). These can be found in any web search.  

A couple other themes might be clan/group/community. Most societies on the planet have key components for this experience. Counter to that might be a monastic life, un-bothered by group needs and personality dynamics. This might be appealing for those who need a respite from some of the other more harried themes. It also gives souls a “light duty” lifetime. Or one might be serving the planet by immersing oneself in prayer and so blessing the plane with prayer filled or peace filled vibrations. Or the solitude may be very torturous for one to be so left alone. We are usually our worst critics and task-masters. We really cannot judge these life styles and life stories. However, we can appreciate them.   

Appreciation is a very powerful force. Whatever the soul is going through it can benefit from appreciation. Applause applause to all you souls who are struggling with your stories, who are budding experts in love, who came to this planet to serve us all. In some way, we all benefit from each person’s story. If we see someone struggling or we see them prosper, we can support them with prayers and positive thoughts and feelings. IF they are in transition, we can pray for them. Send light. In bad times and in good times, send light. I have written another short section on prayers and prayer forms. (See menu.) You might find it has some parts that are interesting to you, as a way to consider how to help yourself and your fellow beings on this planet. Interestingly, all the persons who I talk to who have crossed over already – the friendly and helpful dead folks who visit us. They all say that we should not send prayers to them. Prayer is for us over here. That was rather curious to me at first. Now I am used to hearing it. 

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