A Comprehensive Guide to Mediumship: Part 1

The difference between mainstream

Religion and Spirituality

" Religion is to believe in someone else’s experiences.

Spirituality is to discover your own"

- Deepak Chopra –

What is spirituality? It is not holiness nor is it religion, even if hopefully it is a part of the incredibly many different religions existing in the world today. I believe someone mentioned a number to me a while ago and it was over 4300! Spirituality can lead to holiness during aeons of time since we are striving towards the Godhead, the more spiritually developed we become. Spirituality is all the nice and good sides we all have within us, such as compassion, humbleness, kindness, sensitivity, patience and so on. To say to someone that we are spiritual but not religious is often met with very confused faces. Most people think of spirituality as something strange or mystical and often have a hard time separating that from religion. The truth is that spirituality is probably the most natural thing there is, and it is simply our consciousness that recognises that we are so much more than just a physical body, we are also a soul with infinite potential.

Contrary to following a specific ideology or set rules spirituality allows us to simply follow our hearts. It encourages us to listen to our intuition and what is right for us and our loved ones. It lets us free to become the best we can be and to be good human beings without being promised rewards or threatened with punishment. Our reward is simply our inner happiness.

Throughout most of the mainstream religions, there is a lot of fear. Fear of the consequences of our actions, fear of what may happen when we die if we do not live, by what we are being told. When it comes to spirituality it is all about love. It encourages us to focus all our energy on what is good and fine and base our lives on that. This is the key to what is good for us and our soul – not to base our choices upon fears but on love. Decisions based on love will make us strong and free, make us braver and give our soul food. It shows us to stand steady despite being afraid, how we can dare to continue forward and do what we feel is right for us regardless of the consequences that might follow on from that.

Opposite to telling us in black and white how the Universe was created and why we are here, spirituality allows us to discover these questions and answers for ourselves. It allows us to find our truth and put no boundaries to how deep we can go into our understanding of what there is to know. Throughout history, there have been many mainstream religions and they have all preached that their religion is the right one. Spirituality sees the truth in them all and unites them because the truth is the same regardless of our differences and peculiarities. It focuses on the quality of the spiritual truths they share, and not on the differences in details over the stories they hold as their own. Instead of speaking of punishment and Hell, spirituality is about Karma, or the Law of Cause and Effect. What you sow you will reap, in this lifetime or the next, but it is spiritual justice for all. Instead of the antiquated stories of angels and God, spirituality encourages us to create our journey and create our history. This puts us on a journey of development and self- discovery where our limitations that are set, are our own and by ourselves. It encourages us to trust our heart and follow it wherever it leads us. If we look at religion, it is stemming from a deep-seated spirituality. Jesus and the Prophet Mohammad for example, both experienced deep spiritual journeys before they started their own. I believe that all religions have truth in them and that many people can be incredibly beautiful souls and religious at the same time, as well as atheists. It is not about what we believe in or talk about but our actions in the world. What separates us is not good for the soul, while what unites us is good for humanity.

Spirituality reminds us that we are not separate, that there are no boundaries, no human differences, no race other than the human race. All that is true is that we all come from the same source and the common denominator is love and progress.

Spiritual Development

What is ‘spiritual development’? To sort out this concept I would like to start by saying that we are all a spiritual being, in a temporary physical condition. We have always been and will always be. Just that statement can make many people frown, but that is how it is. That we with our physical senses are to be able to understand what eternity is, is too hard. We are governed by our linear time since we are here in the physical. Spirit World on the other hand is not governed by time but by an inner condition. When we talk about our spiritual being, it is our life force, our soul, which incarnates into the physical condition to learn something which we cannot do when we are in the Spirit World. There is an expression which says, ‘School of Life’ and that is exactly what it is.

The physical lifetime is a school for our continued spiritual progression. We have a body, but we are not the body, we are so much more than that. We were a soul long before we incarnated into this physical lifetime, and we will continue to be a soul long after we have left our earthly life. Our soul, which is who we are, is all that we are within ourselves. All that we have thought, felt, said, and experienced during our lifetime is what we are. All this governs how we choose to handle what comes towards us in our physical lifetime. It is not what we pretend to be, claim to others that we are or what we have hoped to become, but exactly who we are with the choices we have made in life. That is what we bring over with us when it is our turn to return to the World of Spirit, our original home, together with our etheric body, which I will talk more about further ahead in this book. We are to do the best we can, to develop our spiritual qualities and to lead our lives as well as we can, while we are here.

Have you ever felt lost, felt that it must be something more than just this physical experience of life, felt empty and alone inside even though you really should not feel that way? You do not feel satisfied. You are starting to wonder what the meaning of life is, what your calling is and the reason for your being here. You have simply started to awaken from the illusion which was created for us when we were born into this physical incarnation. You have started to allow your soul to be heard, to be noticed. It is only when we start to feel discontent with the situation we are in, that we start to search for change. That is something good.

Everybody has spiritual qualities since we are all spiritual beings. We all have these fine qualities within. These are those nice qualities everybody has but to vastly different degrees, irrespective of where we live. We are a part of this wonderful and beautiful universe, a part of the God power, the Source, the Great Spirit, the Universal Energy, regardless of what we wish to call it, it is still the same thing. God is not a person but an energy, a universal energy which is in everything and everyone. It is a life-sustaining and creative energy and it is the manifesting force in the universe. This energy exists in everything and everyone, which means that we all come from the same source. We are one race, the human race. The God force is perfect but is still expanding through evolution and no one or anything can alter or change the eternal, universal laws. Everyone and everything must adhere to them, and so it will always be a part of us. It does not matter which label we are using but it is the energy which is important. If we use the word God or Universe or anything else which we feel is more appropriate to us it is fine of course. The purpose for mankind on earth is twofold; firstly, to experience the joy and difficulties of the physical life, and secondly, through these experiences to grow spiritually. The school which the physical life is, is not a higher education, but we are told we are in kindergarten. It is about unfolding and developing our spiritual qualities, to allow them to shine over the not-so-good ones we all have as well.

The whole universe contains this God force or universal energy, and we are a part of that. We are made up of energy which is scientifically proven today. Everything in the universe is energy and energy can never be destroyed, just changed. Most people today realise that we are so much more than our physical shell. We are a living spirit in a very restricted physical body. This lifeforce, this light which we are, is made up of all which we have learnt, experienced, felt, thought, and done. The reflection in the mirror that we see of our physical body is not who we truly are, but all that we are within. We are so much more than what meets the eye. The person that we are inside of us is what we take with us into the Spirit World when the time comes, and we leave this physical existence. What we are inside of us is where we are vibrating in energy level and it is to that level we have evolved in our spiritual progression.

It is also important to understand that we do not have a best-before date, that we are allocated a certain number of years or days and when they have been used up, we die. That is not how it is, but we have our responsibility to choose how we live our lives. We are born into this lifetime with the DNA our parents supplied us with, and it is said to be relating to about 20% of us the remaining 80% are our lifestyle choices, i.e., how much we allow our inner stress, our eating habits, work, relationships etc. to affect us. It is said that inner stress is the single biggest factor for disease today both mentally, emotionally, and physically. This is what is so important to understand, that we can affect our lives, what is possible to affect, and our future both in the physical, as well as when the time comes for us to transition into the Spirit World. The lives we have chosen to live in the physical, have also created the conditions which our lives will be faced with when we get there.

We are a part of the Spirit World, we are first and foremost a spirit, and when the time comes and we make the transition going through the veil over to the World of Spirit, we will be coming home. Most of us have a wish or a curiosity to develop our ability to communicate with the souls who are in the Spirit World and wish to do so straight away once we have made up our minds or understood how it is all connected. We forget that we are a spirit incarnated in a physical experience and the spirits, most often loved ones who already have made the transition to the World of Spirit, are the ones we wish to be in contact with. They are a discarnate spirit and without the physical body now surrounding them. We are made up of the same matter, i.e., energy, even though we are on different energy levels at present. We often talk about the Spirit World as somewhere ‘up there’ but they are all around us even though they cannot see our physical bodies any longer, since they are not on a physical vibration. What they see is our radiation, our energy, what we truly are.

Conscious - Subconscious

When we have reached the age of 21, we have already permanently stored more than one hundred times the content of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica which contains more than 120,000 articles of everything between heaven and earth. Then we can also start to understand that there is a lot of information within us that we do not always remember.

Our subconscious mind's function is to store and retrieve data. It cannot think or reason independently of us; it only obeys the orders it gets from our conscious mind. Its work is to make sure that we answer in the same way we are programmed to respond. It makes sure that all that we say and do is in line with our patterns which consists of our self-perception, our ‘main programme’.

The conscious