Trafford Publishing: Beyond Belief into Knowing: My Soul's Journey

Here is the full reference card for this book...

If you'd rather place an order by talking to one of our cheerful order desk clerks, please call 1-888-232-4444 (USA and Canada only) or 250-383-6864. From Europe, ring our UK order desk clerk at local rate number 0845 230 9601 (UK only) or 44 (0)1865 722 113.

Beyond Belief into Knowing: My Soul's Journey

by Joybeth

332 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); **** AVAILABLE NOW ****; catalogue #01-0002; ISBN 1-55212-600-5; US$28.50, C$39.00, EUR24.70, £17.20

In a true chronicle of our times, this intimate accounting of one woman's need to integrate spirituality and metaphysics into daily life leads us all into not only believing, but knowing that, "There is more to life than this!".

Sample Excerpts

SOUL CONSCIOUSNESS LEVELS

Through my life's journey, I KNOW, BEYOND BELIEF, that the Earth is a "classroom" or learning environment for developing Soul Consciousness. As Souls with spirit or light bodies housed in physical human form, we are presented many lessons unique to Earth living. Learning and attuning to the awareness, knowledge, and daily application of the Divine Light's Universal Laws and Truths is the real reason we are Soul-journeying together on the Earth's surface. We are given, through the power of attraction and karma, the experiences we are ready for. These provide us opportunities to move forward in our knowledge and recognition of our Divine or Higher/True Selves, including our oneness with God/Goddess/The All Of Life.

In relation to the Soul Consciousness we can develop as humans on Earth, there are very real and practical stages that we all must go through, before we are ready to move out of human incarnation having learned all that human Earth living has to offer. This journey takes lifetimes. In every one of our lifetimes, we move through a series of distinct stages of Soul Consciousness. Each of us, as individuated Souls in human form, go through these stages or levels in our own way taking our own time. However, there are certain understandings, experiences, and tools that are most helpful in moving through each of these stages of Soul Consciousness.

For the purposes of communication and application, these stages are named LEVEL ONE through LEVEL SEVEN, paralleling the seven major chakras or energy centers of our spirit bodies. In every human body and personality we take on, we start at level one. Many of us will stay in level one for lifetimes until we have the motivation and knowledge t o move into t he next level. Others of us will move from one level into another, stopping at a certain stage while in a particular lifetime. We can also work within several consecutive levels simultaneously.

When we are born again, we start back at level one. But we have the Soul and human knowledge and skills available within our memory banks to move quicker through repeated stages into more advanced stages of Soul Consciousness, if we so choose. Those who have worked through all seven stages or levels of Soul Consciousness possible on Earth do not continue taking earthly human forms. Instead, we permanently move on into other dimensional states of being.

How do I know all this? I have lived it personally for eons. As a Soul, I was determined to bring it into conscious awareness this lifetime. I was ready to integrate spiritual truth daily on Earth in order to be able to share it with those who are arriving at the stage of needing to know.

What you are about to read is my personal story of how I brought to consciousness, and am learning to integrate into my everyday life, the wisdom of my Soul. You will journey with me as I, unconsciously at first and then quite consciously, travel through the levels of Soul Consciousness in the physical form of a very human American womon in the last half of the twentieth century. The individual stages of Soul Consciousness are briefly explained before you read about my own unique, intimate adventures that have helped to guide me through each level.

Be aware that various details of my journey can stimulate feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in you that may need some special attention. My companion book, A Soul's Delight: Your Step-By-Step Higher Self Integration Journey, is full of resources, activities, and information that can help both in understanding my journey and in helping you with your own. Remember to take special care of yourself as you engage energies that move you . . .

from CHAPTER ONE

Earlier in the week, I had called my mother telling her that I was unexpectedly coming to see her. I needed to talk with her alone about something extremely important. I wouldn't give her a hint about what it was because I simply didn't know how to put it into ten words or less. The truth was that I wasn't sure what I was going to say even though I knew from somewhere deep inside me that I had to talk to her.

Poor Mom! After all, it was 1974 with "drugs, sex and rock n' roll" at a frenzy, whirling its influence on young bodies and minds of all backgrounds. At barely 18, she had seen me explode as soon as I stepped foot on my college campus abandoning my bra, shaver, shyness, and strict conservative upbringing. For two years, she had suspected that I was exploring everything and anything that came my way. Having a vivid imagination and mental processes rooted in catastrophic thinking patterns, she was pacing the floor by the time I arrived that Friday evening. I was unwilling to get into it until after supper when we could be alone.

"I like school just fine, Mom. Yes, I'm making good grades. Don't worry: I'm not dropping out!"

"Yes, I have a social life. I have friends of all types. I do all kinds of things with them. Don't worry: I do like boys and I'm not into drugs, yet. Just kidding on the yet, Mom!"

"No, there's no one special at the moment, so: No to eloping, pregnancy, venereal disease, crazy over men fears!"

"I feel great, Mom: No to disabling and life-threatening diseases! And a resounding NO to rape and assault, fires and floods, hallucinations and sociopathic behavior!"

By the end of supper, my mother was acting about as confused as I had been feeling for years. While my Mother knew that the Catholic Church could not hold me, she also knew something about me written by a psychic priest. This had given her an earlier indication that I might choose to live my life differently than the average person. She had also seen a deep inner strength in me. It was a strength she had learned to connect with those few people she had known who seemed to be "held closely in the palm of God's hand."

Since all her fears had been denied, she watched me quietly for a few moments and, against her better rational judgment, asked, "Do you want to become a nun?"

"Yes!" I shouted spontaneously. "I mean, no, of course not!" I shouted just as spontaneously. The nerve pulse had been triggered. We were off into the first of many in-depth-life-sharings between the two of us that continue to this day.

"I'm so different. I can't even begin to think, feel, and act like others do. When I try to, it feels like I'm killing off who I really am, whatever that is." The torrent of thoughts, feelings, and questions I had held in all my life began to gush out. My dam had burst!

"Everything I've been taught about life thus far makes absolutely no sense at all. The things I experience in my life I'm told do not exit or that I'm just 'loony tunes'. Yet, I seem to be more functional and healthier than those who deny my reality. Furthermore, no one has yet to convincingly answer any of my questions. And do I ever have questions: tons of them constantly rattling around in my head!"

"In fact, I often have three different trains of thoughts going on in my brain all at once, something I'm told by my psychology professors is impossible. Impossible? It is happening inside me and I've got to figure out how to handle it or I will go crazy. The voices, the ghosts, the colors, the memories, the senseless fears, the knowing of something before it happens: I've got to find out what they all mean and how to control them."

My mother listened while t he confusion and alienation poured out of me. "I don't understand why I don't want two and a half kids and a house in the suburbs. Why does just thinking about having a normal average work life for 40+ years gives me the heebie-geebie's?"

"I don't understand all the hatred and bigotry I see. Why is there so much pain and suffering everywhere? I can't accept the traditional male/female roles. Why do most people seem so programmed and so unhappily out of touch with what they really want? Why do kids, brought up in the same household, turn out so differently?"

"I'm tired of feeling afraid of life and everyone in it. I don't understand death: where does all that energy go? What are those ghost-like beings? I want to know God myself if there is such a force. Is there? How do I know what it's like to be in child labor when I've never seen or been through it? What are these memories of ancient times I see in my head?"

I ranted on and on. The tears began to stream down both our cheeks as my questions drew closer to home. "What was that invisible girl who was with me when I was a baby and where did she go? Why can't I remember huge parts of my childhood? Why did I stop talking after I had learned how? What caused me to be so sick? How did I heal from being crippled?"

"Why do I have no feelings about my biological father? How could my stepfather be nice one day; violently angry and abusive the next? How did I know from 150 miles away that you had heart trouble and needed help? Why can't I be normal and want what others want?"

"There is so much more to life than fighting for the buck and going along with the crowd. I don't seem to belong anywhere yet, on some level, I can relate to most people. Many things I feel like I've experienced before, yet something is radically different about them. I seem to get pushed from the inside out, not the outside in."

"I hurt so much watching others in pain. I've got to do something about the world's woes, yet I feel so powerless. What is the real meaning of life and isn't there some way we can all learn to manage it healthier and happier?" On and on it poured out, so fast and furious: probably every existential question about life that's ever been asked.

While I had t o stop for breath, my mother t old me t hat she had something to show me, went off to her multiple file cabinets, and began dredging. She returned with a letter from an elder Catholic Priest we had known in California when I was six. My mother had met Father Healey when he spoke at a study group she attended. He was very kind and soft-spoken, yet extremely intelligent with natural psychic abilities that he chose to use in his work.

Father Healey became a family friend, t aking a special interest in me. I remember going to the zoo with him and how much fun he was, especially for a priest! We had some really rough times while we lived in California, during which I became crippled with JRA, Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. This letter from California had been written to my mother in Texas, when I was 14.

Fr. Healey could sense when things weren't going well for us and would contact my mother providing both emotional and spiritual support. When we moved away living in several different states, they kept in touch a couple times a year by mail. By the time I was 13 my JRA was in remission.

Suddenly, when I was 14, strange physical symptoms, such as a "butterfly rash" across my face and sensitivity towards the sun, began showing up. Because of my history, I was treated and studied by specialists at a huge medical complex in Houston, TX. After testing, their conclusion was that I had Lupus, which then was still considered potentially fatal. My mother was absolutely crushed, yet soon after received an unsolicited letter from Fr. Healey. This was the letter she showed me when I was twenty.

Until that moment, I had never seen this letter or known anything about it. I did remember being sick when I was a high school freshman, the trips into Houston and all the testing, but I was never told the diagnosis. I remember my mother trying not to show how upset she was when she told me that I was sick and would have to stay home inside. I was upset and confused, feeling totally out of control because I had no idea how long these latest restrictions would last. I also remember going back into Houston for more t esting, my mother and the medical staff being confused yet elated this time, and going back to school the very next day.

The letter was very simply stated and to the point. He wrote her to not despair, but to hold on to hope because the illness would not take my life nor inhibit me from doing what I was here to do because God would heal me. The letter went on to explain that my past, present, and future hardships were all preparing me to be able to give uniquely to the world in a way that would continue to evolve after my physical life.

This psychic priest wrote that God had a plan for me that would result in me exploring and living my life differently than most people. He encouraged my mother to allow me the freedom and emotional support I needed to follow God's plan and in pursuing things out of the ordinary, though she and others would not always understand nor agree with what I was doing. He reassured her that my intentions would always be based on love. In closing, Fr. Healy stated I would persevere through all the stumbling blocks and obstacles that would come my way.

I was stunned! I had the impression from most people that I was just as ordinary as anyone could be. In fact, I had a real lack of confidence in all areas of life, due to what others in my childhood had told me about myself: that I was an average, if not dumb, "Plain Jane" who would live an average life being ordinarily normal.

For most of my first 18 years, I had been shy, afraid to speak up, letting people run all over me, and scared I wasn't pretty or smart enough to really do much of anything. When I went to college all that changed. Then the energy, thoughts, questions, and dreams I had suppressed all those years began to pour out. With them, came the feelings that I couldn't live an ordinary life. Something inside me began demanding I search for the answers to life's questions. All the pat behaviors I knew would please others or get them off my back began breaking down. I had kept all this to myself, still thinking I was hidden from the world, until I began speaking my fledgling truth to my mother.

Fr. Healey's letter was the first time I learned that truth cannot be hidden and that none of us can really hide anything from one another. Here was proof of some aspect of life and abilities that reach beyond the surface into a deeper knowledge defying space and time. It was this I had to explore and understand: the mystical mysterious happenings called life. Somehow I knew there were answers. I just knew there were life systems and structures that could explain the reasons behind all behaviors and circumstances that occur in people's lives.

I had gone to my mother to dare risk stating aloud that I, this shy little ordinary being, had to know the answers to life's deepest questions. Fr. Healey's letter supported what I was feeling and trying to say. But more importantly, through the special circumstances under which the letter had been written and finally revealed, I realized that what I was feeling and who I was becoming had been validated by God through one of God's ministers. But who or what in the world is God? What is it specifically that I am to do? And why in blue blazes ME?

My mother and I hugged and cried. She grieved and apologized over the hardships I had experienced due to her life choices. We both realized that I would learn from those experiences and in some way use them later as part of my gift to others. But we really didn't know what to do or say next. We knew I was going somewhere different in my life, but we had no earthly clue as to where or how. I didn't have any kind of a road map, guide, or model.

"So, what now?" we asked each other.

We talked about our relationship and what had to change for we knew that she had to let go of me. I was suddenly much more than "her daughter." We knew that I was older than my years. We both recognized that my journey would be extremely difficult for the two of us if she couldn't let go of the normal expectations between a mother and child. Until that moment I had played the daughter, as she had played the mother amid a stage full of trauma and turmoil. After that moment, we began forming a friendship based on an inner honesty and Soul Love that has enabled us to be there for one another, friend-to-friend, no matter what phases we've been in.

We also talked about what I was going to do next. I needed a college education for the future doors it could open. The only thing I knew to do was to continue my daily life, as I had been doing, for I was learning so much about life in my present setting. However, I also knew that the beans had been spilled and that I could never completely deny the mystical pull again.

I had begun a new stage in my life, although I didn't yet know what that meant or where it would take me. I did know it was to be one of searching and learning. I felt that somehow I would find the directions I needed to go. I also felt that my future was built upon my past; if I was seeking clarity about my future, then I needed clarity about my past. And that still felt like a muddled, confused "Pandora's Box." Thus, began my search to understand my roots. . .

Here is the full reference card for this book...

Read more!

About the Book

About the Author

Sample Excerpts

SOUL CONSCIOUSNESS LEVELS

from CHAPTER ONE

Catalogue Information