Thanks to:
And to
ARCHANGEL GABRIEL, Who lovingly and patiently used the
simplest questions for profound teaching.
This is your book.
INTRODUCTION
More than six billion human beings inhabit a small planet called Earth, a tiny warm Eden circling endlessly around an ordinary star at the edge of a galaxy, light-years from any other.
Who are we? Why are we here? Where did we come from? Do our lives here have any meaning or value? What is the purpose of this vast universe filled with giant galaxies and stars? Did some great God create all this?
Age-old questions. From where and whom will the answers come?
From us, claim religious leaders, citing the authority of ancient scripture although they know little of its authors or how it was assembled, and even less about how it may have changed or evolved through translations, transcriptions, or politics. Still, we are told to accept it as truth as many religious fundamentalists try to make their cultures and laws conform to their beliefs.
From us, say scientists, who tend to dismiss religion as so much superstition, instead searching for answers through technology and scientific enterprises such as NASA’s Genesis Project—many perhaps agreeing with the late astronomer Carl Sagan’s contention that he would be willing to believe in God if he could find any evidence to support that belief.
We may have progressed from a time when religious authorities could order the imprisonment or death of a Galileo. Nonetheless, science and religion are still locked in battle over whose views of creation will prevail.
Yet, why should we cede the quest for answers to either group? Both are constrained by limited belief systems that try to define for the rest of us what is possible or acceptable. Followers have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to censor or punish their own who challenge their orthodoxy. No wonder so much innovation comes from outside organized disciplines where people are free to think outside the box of orthodoxy.
But what of the rest of us? How open are we to new information that challenges our beliefs?
How open, for that matter, am I?
That was the question I faced in August 2002 when I first encountered the Archangel Gabriel.
That summer I had learned of an energetic healing practice called Reiki that supposedly was related to the ancient healing arts practiced by Jesus. Curious, I tracked down a Reiki Master in Manhattan and began studying with Robert Baker, who I soon learned “channeled” the Archangel Gabriel. Gabriel of course is the archangel who the Bible says announced to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to a child called Jesus who was the Son of God.
Gabriel is a sacred figure in the Catholic Church in which I was raised. Even if I might accept such a thing were possible, the idea of Gabriel communicating through some obscure person outside any recognized church seemed highly unlikely and somewhat irreverent to me. Why would Gabriel be communicating through Robert Baker, and why to a small group of people who gathered weekly in Baker’s home rather than to someone of spiritual prominence and reputation? (Though I realized heavenly messengers in the Bible usually visited the poor and obscure, including the Virgin Mary.) In time, Robert’s intelligence and gentle, unassuming demeanor along with the credibility he created in his Reiki classes sparked my curiosity, and I decided to attend one of his Sunday evening channeling sessions.
Some twenty people were spread over the furniture and floor in Robert’s living room. Robert, slim, fifty-something but looking somewhat cherub-like with curly blond hair and blue eyes, sat in a comfortable armchair. He lowered his head and appeared to quietly meditate. Then he bolted upright and began twisting his arms and body as though invaded by some powerful force. With eyes closed and a slight smile, he slowly surveyed the room, observing the audience. Suddenly, as though propelled by a great force of energy, he announced himself as Gabriel and declared, “It is a joy to be in your divine presence.” To my surprise and disappointment, I soon realized I was not feeling the same way.
Perhaps I was expecting a comforting spiritual message from the divine realm. Instead, Gabriel launched into a chilling warning that the democratic societies of the world were being undermined by powerful worldwide networks of wealthy institutions and families that dominated the financial, energy and pharmaceutical industries, among others, as well as most of the governments of the world—including our own. He said the ancestral roots of these networks went back hundreds of years and were connected to the Freemasons and something called the Illuminati. They were seeking to create a new world order in which the super-wealthy few controlled the many.
I am a trained journalist (Columbia Graduate School of Journalism), served as a vice president of a major financial services organization, and consulted for twenty years with many Fortune 500 companies trying to separate fact from fiction. I have little tolerance for deceit or misrepresentations. Gabriel was making darkly sinister charges about organizations and institutions of enormous prestige and influence, warning that their motivation was to create and control a world economy and government—in other words, us. “Wake up,” he warned. And do what, I wondered? Write my congressman? Call the New York Times? Was Gabriel an archangel or an eccentric conspiracy nut?
Nonetheless, I was intrigued by much of what he discussed and returned to the Sunday sessions. Although Gabriel occasionally revisited the dark subjects of international conspiracy, he most often gave fascinating talks about God, creation, and the “divine plan,” including man’s role in it. He explained incredibly complex concepts with great authority and, occasionally, a dry wit that tempered their seriousness. He also gave personal counsel in an open questions segment after his lectures.
My confidence in Gabriel’s authenticity grew along with my relationship with Robert during the Reiki training. Robert and I agreed that Gabriel’s teachings were too important to be limited to the small numbers attending Robert’s spiritual center that he headed with his business partner, Ronald Baker, in Manhattan. I proposed we do a book in which I would interview Gabriel as a journalist, asking questions anyone would want to ask a heavenly messenger. I felt encouraged when Gabriel told me in private session that I had been preparing for this work over “many incarnations,” but that I had the right to choose according to my free will.
On April 11, 2003, we began the first of a series of interviews that were completed in December 2004. Gabriel counseled me to proceed “as a little child,” which I found both comforting and easy as I am no theologian and simply wanted answers to questions I’ve always pondered. As the interviews progressed, Gabriel’s responses sometimes led into subjects I hadn’t anticipated, and I occasionally felt Gabriel was guiding the interviews, not me. A number of subjects were developed over several interviews, thus permitting me to ask follow-up questions to clarify his answers. So you may find that questions arising in your mind at certain points get answered as you continue reading.
Invariably, the material seemed clearer each time I reviewed it. When I made that observation to Gabriel, he explained the material was given in “energetic layers” and is revealed gradually as we review it so we are not overwhelmed. If some passages seem too difficult, rereading may clarify them. Alternatively, skip them and return after you have covered more of the material, as they may then seem clearer. I believe this is more a book to study than to read.
Gabriel suggested I organize the book by subject. As one subject naturally flowed into another, I sometimes found it difficult to separate them, much like pulling apart a tightly woven tapestry. Chapter One presents the first interview in its entirety because it sets up the discussions that follow. The middle chapters are loosely organized by subject, though some topics reappear in several chapters as they are developed and may appear somewhat repetitious. (To me the repetition builds understanding.) The final chapters (all dated) present complete interviews because they develop subjects covered earlier.
So what has Gabriel come to teach us? As I reviewed hundreds of pages of transcribed interviews, I realized Gabriel was essentially retelling the creation story. The creation stories that man believes, he says, are largely “fairy tales.” In telling his version, Gabriel discusses a wide range of subjects from great spiritual themes such as man’s origin and journey to more personal issues such as healing and death. However, it seems to me his core teachings relate to the questions: Who or what is God? What is the nature and purpose of creation? Who are we? Why are we here? And he tells us very specifically why he is communicating with us now. Here are some of his key teachings:
God is all there is. Each of us is a part of God, an individuated expression of God. As part of the energy of God, everything is connected. Therefore, we are all one. God uses the vast universe to experience its infinite diversity through all the countless expressions of creation, including us. Therefore, God is experiencing itself (God has no sexuality) through each one of us.
Everything is composed of energy vibrating at vastly different frequencies, most of which we cannot perceive. The lowest vibration—what we perceive as matter—constitutes a tiny fraction of all creation. As we attempt to understand creation in the narrow range of what we can perceive, we are barely scratching the surface of all that is—much like a radio that can receive only one signal, unable to detect the countless frequencies around it.
In the realm of matter, mankind on earth is part of a divine experiment, which Gabriel says is unique in the universe. He indicates the earth was seeded millions of years ago by twelve star systems that created the human form (humans are unique in the universe) as a vehicle to allow God to experience the ascension of the soul, with twelve archetypes of the divine being represented by those twelve star systems. The ascension is an evolutionary process of discovery of the God within each one of us (our souls) that gives God the opportunity to “experience twelve aspects of the divinity of the force of love.”
Each of us as a soul has chosen to come here from one of the twelve star systems to participate in this experiment. Many spiritual masters have come to help in that process, including Jesus whose birth Gabriel announced two thousand years ago. Jesus, Gabriel says, demonstrated the pattern of self-mastery that produces the awakening and the ascension of the soul in man through a series of “initiations,” the seven stages of soul evolution (birth, baptism, transfiguration, renunciation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension) that Christian religions recognize but don’t completely understand.
Now Gabriel is proclaiming a new two-thousand-year age, the age of spiritual unity of all mankind. This new age was born on January 23, 1997, signaled by a configuration of planets aligned to form a six-point star—the same configuration Gabriel says announced the birth of Jesus two thousand years ago.
In this new age, mankind will follow the pattern Jesus demonstrated to awaken the soul, the Christ Consciousness, in each one of us. This, he says, is the Second Coming. It is not “the Christ, the man, coming to rescue and save you. That is a fallacy. What he was telling you was that the Christ lies within you. You are the Christ. The time in evolution has come for the Christ Consciousness, the soul, to awaken in all humankind. We come to give you the step-by-step process for the awakening of the Christ Consciousness in all humanity.”
Central to this process is the preparation of our body, the temple of the soul, by “raising its vibration to a vibratory rate where the vibratory rate of the physical body matches the vibratory rate of the soul.” The chapter “Energetic Exercises” contains the exercises Gabriel has given to help each of us prepare our body, the temple, for our soul’s awakening and ascension in this new age.
Preparation for this new age of unity of all mankind began centuries ago. A key component was the creation of the United States, which was to be the New Jerusalem, the promised land, the “land of the awakening of the new spirit,” signified, Gabriel says, by the fact that the letters USA are the central letters in the word Jerusalem. “Its original intention was to be a synthesis of all the people of the world who have lived under oppression and have come here to find spiritual freedom and expression of their individual being. In its original intention, it was supposed to have been a collective of that democratic idea of the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of individual social construct, so that every person and every group can live together in harmony and peace.
“That creates a collective consciousness that brings together a synthesis of all the peoples around the globe to begin to synthesize all the belief systems into a new world of spiritual development. A new world that takes bits and pieces of everything and creates a synthesized whole to lead the world into a new level of unity, oneness, communion and freedom, spiritual freedom.” The United States, in essence, is the prototype of the unity that is to develop in mankind in this new two-thousand-year age.
But “that has been distorted,” Gabriel warns, because our democracy is now dominated by huge global concentrations of wealth and power that have greatly reduced the power and influence of the individual, which is fundamental to the success of democratic societies. It is the few “seeking through their greed to control and dominate the many, rather than creating for the many an experience of equality and provision, support, compassion, love and prosperity.” These powers are working to undermine mankind’s unity by fostering conflict, separation, and disunity and by gaining control through fear. “Create that war on terrorism, keep them fearful,” he says, is a current manifestation of this strategy. He tells us to “wake up” because our leaders have been “bought and sold” by these powerful international consortiums. We must take back our democracy through the power of one—first alone, and then together in unity.
This unity will happen, he says, whether it happens on planet or off because it is “God’s evolutionary plan.” We are given the gift of free will. We have the power to create a “new golden age or a nuclear holocaust.” It is up to us.
In the course of telling this story, Gabriel proves to be an equal opportunity offender, including religion, scripture, global corporations, government leaders, and many of the rest of us. He tells us religions that have done much to shape the cultural norms of most contemporary societies were created by men, not God, and that most of what is judged as moral or immoral simply reflects ancient tribal customs and cultural values that were taught and became accepted as God’s word. “God had nothing to do with it,” he says.
As for his warnings about the international power brokers that could easily be dismissed as “conspiracy theories,” Gabriel insists they are not theories but dangerous realities that not only put our freedoms and democracies at risk, but seek to undermine the spiritual mission of this new age. “We are not interested in harboring your sacred cows to make you feel good. It is not our job to make you feel good. It is not our job to support your vanity. It is our job to reveal the truth as it is. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free!”
Most challenging for me is accepting and practicing the spiritual context Gabriel creates to help us respond to the information and challenges he presents to us, some of which I admittedly find quite disturbing. Rather than judging his warnings as issues of justice and injustice, right and wrong, he says we should “approach them from the point of view of redemption. Redemption is about bringing things into conscious awareness. From that you can receive the learning it offers you and, in that, uncover greater parts of yourself.
“Look at the history of the human experience as an experience of coming into a place of awareness and consciousness that allows you to see and experience reality in a conscious way. That then allows you to use that reality to discover and to grow and become more of the potential that you are. Challenges reveal your potential. They reveal those places where potential is blocked or thwarted or unconscious. In what you call the negative experience or the frustration of the challenge lies the redemption because in it lies the answer to what you’re looking for. Behind every negative experience is redemption, revelation, and inspiration.”
Ultimately, Gabriel is bringing an age old message found in metaphysical literature to this new age: Life is a journey of self-discovery, of expanding awareness and consciousness, as we remember our God selves, using all the circumstances of life—what we perceive as good and as bad—to help us. On this journey, Gabriel says each of us serves as “the discoverer and the uncoverer for God of all the parts that God gets to experience itself through. The fact that you’ve been given freedom of choice is not without a purpose where the divine is concerned. It is a brilliant choice … because through freedom of choice God gets to experience through experience, itself, the fulfillment of its beingness. It gets to experience it as if it were itself going through a process of evolution and discovery.…”
Clearly, Gabriel is telling a very different creation story from those taught by most religions or science. Whether you find that Gabriel challenges your beliefs or confirms them, it may be wise to consider the counsel of spiritual teacher Ram Dass:
“Trust only those teachings that feel intuitively right in our deepest heart is to me the final criterion and protection that we must apply in regard to any system whatever its source. Cosmologies, by the nature of the metaphysics with which they deal, have no scientific or empirical base. We really must seek ultimate validation in our deepest being.”
I began this journey as a skeptic. The intuitive truth and rightness of Gabriel’s teachings have found their way into my “deepest heart,” my “deepest being.” It is my wish that Gabriel’s teachings find that place in you and that all mankind may one day join in peace, love, and unity in this new two-thousand-year age.
Addendum (April 2008)
This manuscript is being published approximately five years after my first interview with Gabriel, which occurred three weeks after the start of the U.S. war with Iraq. Though Saddam Hussein is long gone and the presidency of George W. Bush is nearly complete, I believe Gabriel’s observations about both leaders as well as political and economic events and the Iraq War are timeless and contain important lessons for citizens and their governments everywhere.
Excerpt:
Joel: It seems so easy to get trapped in so much destructive behavior or circumstances that seem to limit our incarnational experience. I guess I’m puzzled as to why it is so easy to fall into these traps that seem to limit our ability to achieve our mission and to grow.
Gabriel: As human beings in your experiential process of growth you’ve been given freedom of choice. Now, you can look at it from the perspective that you get trapped in your defenses and you don’t learn, and then you carry it on from lifetime to lifetime. But, you see, you’re looking at it from the perspective of the limitation of time. Therefore, you’re saying—well, why don’t we get on with it and get it done? There’s the judgment of time that says “I should really achieve this and get it done and do it right” rather than realizing you have infinite opportunity where life is concerned to incarnate as much as you want, to progress and develop at whatever level you need to through your own experience of growth, through your own choices, because that is how you learn.
So if you make enough mistakes in a lifetime and you carry that through many lifetimes with the same patterns, eventually, the pattern from lifetime to lifetime becomes more pronounced and more extreme and more obvious. And as it becomes more extreme and more obvious, it produces more disease or suffering or pain. Eventually the organism wakes up and goes, oh, pain isn’t the way to do it.
Pain is not the way I choose to do it. Let me do it by embracing reality. So, you see, gradually over time, over incarnational history, you learn to take responsibility. You learn to be aware of your choices rather than live in ignorance of them. But, you see, that’s a level of soul development.
We divide soul development into three categories. We call it development through the Hall of Ignorance, development through the Hall of Learning, and development through the Hall of Wisdom. Most human beings in the earliest stages of their incarnational development, in earlier soul levels of development, learn through the Hall of Ignorance, through cause and effect, through action and reaction, through the process of duality. Then there comes at a certain point in their development as souls after they have had enough incarnational experience and enough growth where they start to wake up, and they move into the Hall of Learning. The learning process then becomes more of a chosen process. Choice is something for which they take more responsibility. They learn to respond more rather than react through their incarnational process.
So you awaken one lifetime and you go, as you are doing, oh, I don’t have to create reality through being a victim. I don’t have to create through resistance. There’s another option—I can create as a conscious creator. Let me try that. Then I enter the Hall of Learning. As I enter the Hall of Learning, I start to clear the vehicle and I start to realize that there’s something more. It’s a point at which the conscious mind in an incarnation says that there must be more than just the physical. And that’s where in its incarnational process it begins to develop an interest in its spiritual development. As it does so, it enters the Hall of Learning. It then begins to prepare the road through the purification process, readying the body to awaken the soul consciously. When the soul starts to become awakened, then you move into the Hall of Wisdom.
As you move into the Hall of Wisdom, you move into the path of beginning to consciously realize the soul’s vision and carry it out. The Hall of Learning is the process by which you awaken the soul. You start to awaken to yourself as a spiritual being. That’s the learning process that transits you from the world of desire and objectification to searching for the meaning behind the form, that which makes up physical reality. And you start to understand. This is the path that you’re on in this incarnation. This is what you are embracing with us. This is what you are embracing with the channel in your sessions. As you’re starting to enter the Hall of Learning and go, “Oh, there must be more behind the form. Life is not just the form. There is a spiritual me. I want to contact that.”
