From the moment of my birth, my life was captured and broadcast on international newsreels. Being so young at the time of my father’s death, I had no real recall of saluting his passing, except from what I’d seen in those newsreels. Memories of my early life came from these celluloid moments, frozen in time, that were a part of the history of this great country. That little kid standing at his father’s grave was as much a stranger to me as he was to anyone else. And as odd as this might sound, just like the rest of the world, I took him as my own.

When I was older, I saw the Zapruder tape. Watching my father’s last day, last moments on the planet, over and over I asked myself unanswerable questions: Did he know these were his last moments? How did he feel waking up to his last day on Earth? Could one decision made differently that morning have changed the entire course of history? There were no answers to these lifelong questions.

I came to believe I’d wake up the morning of my death and know it. But I didn’t. My last day on Earth was an ordinary day. Sure, you might wonder if John Kennedy Jr. ever had an “ordinary” day in his life. But even the most powerful, affluent and influential people have ordinary days in relation to what’s important to them and their inner circles. Cutting through all demographics, economics, moral and ethical values comes death, the great equalizer.

When I got to the plane that afternoon to do the flight check, I thought, “What if this is my last flight?” But I almost always thought that during flight check, so even that was not extraordinary.

I’d picked up the weather report off the Internet shortly before I left for the airport. It called for winds at 10 knots, visibility six miles, and clear skies. It seemed like an ordinary weather report.

With Carolyn and Lauren strapped in, as we started down the runway I can honestly say I had no indication that this was the last flight of my human life. We took off into a clear summer evening. Climbing into the altitudes Carolyn and Lauren discussed the wedding presents they had gotten Rory.

Within seconds a thick haze surrounded the plane. I could hardly see the horizon and any lights from land were swallowed up in the mist.

Looking back, I see that the moment the haze enveloped us was the beginning realization of my death. An extraordinary fear came over me, like electricity surging through my body. I suppressed this fear the best I could. As the son of John F. Kennedy, I can’t begin to tell you what was expected of me in life. Suppressing fear was a survival technique I learned in childhood.

The president’s son in me wanted to live up to his father’s legacy. The ordinary husband in me wanted to keep my family safe from harm. The macho guy wanted to rise to the challenge and become an ace, able to fly safely through any weather.

Frankly the crash took place so quickly that no one knew what was happening. I struggled a bit with the controls but never really knew how out of control I was. Barely enough time to get dizzy, every second was eternity as some deeper part of me knew where we were headed.

The impact was so intense, so lightening-fast that at first there was no difference between being alive and being dead. When the plane hit the water, our consciousness continued on seamlessly without a great deal of turmoil. The only difference was that moments before the crash, there had been an intense whistling around the windows. Suddenly, everything was dead silent.

We didn’t realize we had died. In fact, it took us awhile to really know what was going on. We thought we were still in the plane flying through the haze. Nothing seemingly changed, but, in retrospect, everything had, in an instant and we were trying to understand it.

For a little while, we speculated about this odd sensation. Since we weren’t aware of the crash, we weren’t carrying with us some dastardly human memory of a violent end.

Suddenly, out of nowhere I heard my father’s voice say, “Nice flying, ace.” I whipped around to see him sitting there in the back of the Piper, the same age as when he died, looking fit and rested. I was shocked, elated and completely confused, all at the same time. This felt like waking up in a luscious, lucid dream. I was speechless.

I flew on in this addled confusion. Suddenly the mists parted and an island airstrip appeared below us. At first I thought it was Martha’s Vineyard, but as we made the approach, I noted a tropical climate below me. My father’s hand rested on my shoulder as I landed the plane.

As we taxied to a stop, as if out of some dream sequence, my mother appeared on the edge of the tarmac on this island paradise. She was also the age she’d been when Dad died, and even more beautiful than ever. With my father smiling behind me and my mother waiting to embrace me, the joy was indescribable.

The elation, the comfort, the love and sense of family were overwhelming. I recall thinking at some point of everyone we’d left behind, but oddly, I didn’t miss them, as if we were on vacation in another part of the world, apart from them but not without them in our hearts. And somewhere inside, I knew they were being comforted by the knowledge of this moment, this reunion with my mother and father.

On seeing my mother again, I finally realized that Death had crept up from behind and gently taken me, in an ordinary way. By the time I figured it out, I was already enveloped in the joy of the Afterlife. The reality of this precious joy was much more powerful than the idea I’d contemplated when I was on Earth. This was not like thinking about the possibility of heaven, it was a complete experience entailing all my deepest emotions, farthest-reaching thoughts and, even though I didn’t yet understand this part, every molecule of my entire body.

Standing there with my mother and father in that paradise was truly ecstasy. They led us to a great hall where family members who’d died before us were gathered to greet us. Some of them I’d known on Earth and some I’d only heard stories of and seen in pictures. Here was a great celebration with plenty of time to catch up.

This has always been our family: banding together in times of change. Yes, dying was intense, but still, it was coming home.

After meeting with the family, my mother led us to a lodging of sorts that sat on the edge of a white sand beach on the shore of the blue-green ocean. I could have sworn we were in Hawaii somewhere. Carolyn and I settled into the room’s deep, luxurious bed and allowed the sea breezes to lull us to sleep. As I slept, I dreamt about asking questions of faceless people, mostly things like, if this is a dream and I am dead, when I wake up will I be alive again? Eventually, my dream changed and I found myself soaring high over the planet, mesmerized by the lights of Earth shining below.

The next morning, my parents arrived early and asked me to attend an editorial meeting with them. Editorial meetings in heaven? I never imagined that after death you might be given editorial assignments. Would the joy never end?

~ Diana Spencer & Gianni Versace ~

Q: Di, can we talk about your death? Do you remember what happened to you that night with Dodi?

DS: I have many memories of that night, and I do have to say, I was spared having to remember the most horrific parts. Even though I was conscious for a while, I was already out of my body by the time they found me. For a fleeting second I returned to my body in the car, like a spot check, to see that yes, I was indeed dying.

When we left the restaurant, I knew something was going to happen. In fact, for weeks before my death I had had this nagging feeling. I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s not like I foresaw my death, but there was this tenderness that pervaded my life. When I was with my children, I felt a kind of urgency. My thoughts were sometimes preoccupied with what would happen to them if I died. I found myself wanting to make peace with Charles in ways that I had never felt before.

I even tried to put some unfinished personal business in order. I asked my assistant to contact some people I had not spoken to in the months before my death.

That night when we left the restaurant I had a strange feeling, but we had been drinking and laughing at dinner, and everything seemed so “normal.” You know, the funny thing about it was, that dinner was a special night for Dodi and me. We had been working through some facets of our relationship that had been very difficult. I love Dodi, and in life I loved him very much, but he was not the love of my life like he felt about me. If you could have seen his apartment, he had so many pictures of me around. He was such a gallant man and believed with his whole heart in worshipping the woman he loved, but after the life I had been living, of being held up as an icon, I was looking for a more down-to-earth spot. Oddly enough, even in his adoration of me, he gave me that. But we were much more like brother and sister, really, than Romeo and Juliet.

That night at dinner, we had come to this wonderful agreement. I understood that I could not ask him to not worship me, but he agreed that we would try to be more casual in our direction together. I could see it was hard on him because he wanted me to be this adoring passionate partner, but I simply could not and that night we finally reached a compromise where that was okay.

When we left the hotel and the photographers started to follow us, we had this discussion in the car about lack of privacy. You must understand, one develops a kind of shield when one is in the public eye as much as we’d been. Even though the lack of privacy was always an irritation, I had finally come to a place where I just tried to ignore it. I had to, in order to live my life with any kind of normalcy, which of course was impossible in the position I was in. But when they started to chase us, at first it was a joke to try and outrun them, a sort of, “We’ll show them!” There really was a kind of gaiety to it, like we could do this because we were morally better than they were.

When we got into the tunnel, everything just went black for me. I think that’s why Trevor does not remember either. It happened so fast. In a matter of a few seconds we hit and spun, and I went black. For me, there was no pain. Even when I was allowed to slip back into my body to be assured that this really was happening, I did not feel pain.

Q: Gianni, how do you feel about what happened to you? And how do you feel about your killer?

GV: This is again a difficult thing to explain. Sometimes when we are human, we have these ideas about what it is like to die. But I am finding that, once in the realm of spirit, things are so different than we ever imagine them to be while we are living in the flesh.

The murder itself was gruesome and horrifying. I have not been so scared. It happened very quickly, from the time it started. Like Diana, I was not made to endure a great deal of pain, although if I could conjure the human physical memories of the experience, I am quite sure it would be extremely pained.

But this I do know and that is, the young man who committed the murder, who is also in this realm of spirit, is undergoing an experience here that is quite fitting for what happened. I’m not saying he is being tormented or has gone to hell, but his own actions when he was living his life have come back to haunt him.

This is what hell is. Believe me, there is not some place that is set aside like we were raised to believe and saw in paintings, that place that is somehow conceived as underground and filled with fire. Hell is something that surrounds the souls like those of that young man. He created this hatred in life for others and now he has to pass through it, directed at himself.

I have absolutely nothing but compassion for this young man. He was actually very much like me in many ways. He did not have the wherewithal or the connections to power to make the rise into the world as I did. But he had the same tormented childhood as I did. He was not accepted for who he was by his parents and therefore did not learn to accept himself. But at every turn, his life became a torture chamber. He fell in love several times and was thwarted by the objects of his affections.

But underneath his pain, he was a loving and compassionate young man. He had killed others before he got to me, and by that time, he was already creating his own hell for himself.

If there is one thing I want to tell the world it is to do not judge him. Forgive him. Send prayers of compassion to those who are his family, for they are in their own kind of hell, too.

~ Nicole Brown Simpson ~

Q: Were you in the courtroom during the trial?

NBS: That’s an interesting question. After I left my body so quickly and unexpectedly, I was shocked to discover that I actually had died. I hovered for a while around our bodies in shock. Ron’s spirit was separated from me at that time. It wasn’t as if because we died together we remained together after the fact. I was very much alone except for the angels.

You always hear about that, you know, being greeted in death by angels and loved ones. It’s true. The angels are a powerful force and mine was very comforting in the face of death. Because I died quickly and unexpectedly, it took some time to really understand where I was and what I could do now. My angel just quietly spoke to me in such loving tones. He could see that my heart was with my children. I really wasn’t concerned about whether O.J. was going to get what he deserved. I was focusing on my children.

So, was I in the courtroom during the trial? Yes, I was privy to what was going on with the trial, but I really didn’t care. I was with my children. I was able to be with them through the trial and do my best to give them the kind of comfort they needed now that they had no parents. I was aware of what was happening. But it was such a joke, I found it hard to care.

But yes, there was a part of me that wanted the world to know what he had done, not just in killing me, but all the things that happened that led up to my murder. That’s why my sister was so motivated. I was working with her to get that information out to the public.

Q: Do you feel like the case was bungled? Or do you feel like this was part of the master plan, like this is going to make society look more carefully at justice? Or do you feel there were just mistakes made?

NBS: Yes, absolutely the case was a farce. The lawyers were so wrapped up in themselves and their own careers they didn’t put into it what ordinary lawyers might have. Add to that O.J.’s fame, then play the race card, bring in domestic abuse issues and top it off with a vindictive, power-hungry press and I’d say it’s a formula for a made-for-TV movie.

The judge was also not truly interested in the fair trial. Of course, look what he had to work with. He must have felt like a daycare worker some days, the way everyone was acting, like this was all about them and not about bringing this murder to justice. I think America should study this trial as a foremost example of misuse of the criminal justice system.

In a world with real justice, all the bungling mistakes wouldn’t have been made. In a world with real justice, people would have listened to me sooner. Lawyers would have looked deeper. The jury wouldn’t have bought the whole glove charade. In a just world he would have been convicted him of the crime he committed and put into jail, maybe even gotten the death sentence, regardless of what color he was. Then he could have been put out of his own misery and the message sent to abusers everywhere would have been different: Beware! You cannot kill us and get away with it any more. Oh well…

However, if you’re asking if, from here in Afterlife I can see some kind of plan in all this horror? I’m still looking. Maybe his getting off and having to live with himself will be hell enough. Maybe every time he looks into the faces of his children, he will see me staring back, like a mirror. Maybe I will haunt him forever so he will never forget.

Ultimately, though, do I think the way the case played out was purposeful? There sure was a lot of controversy and consequently, a lot of awareness raised by the way it ended. Regardless of if there was a plan, for me the lessons are forgiveness and coming to understand what I’m supposed to do now.

~ John F. Kennedy & Jacqueline Onassis ~

Q: You talked about how the press is different now than it was then. You’re obviously aware of the Clinton sex scandal. How do you feel about that?

JFK: Here is a good example of how the press has changed to become an instrument of its own devices. Today the president’s private life has been used as a tool to play the country against itself. That is by far the greatest tragedy of this situation.

President Clinton is, like me, someone in a pivotal place in time. He has chosen to put himself in a place that might appear to be compromising of his ideals and directives. Cultural dictates of 1998 say that he’s hurting himself and the presidency, ruining himself with his indiscretions.

In reality he has chosen to come to this chair with all that he is and all that he has. Again, an ordinary human being, someone who does not profess to be perfect, he doesn’t insist that he has no foibles. This doesn’t mean that he wants to allow his private inner life to be sacrificed at the altar of public scrutiny. Yet he knows he’s in this position to change that, too.

When I was president, there were many more gentleman’s agreements between the press and those in office. This may or may not have been a good thing. I only know that my indiscretions couldn’t have taken place in today’s White House because there are no gentleman’s agreements anymore.

Q: For example, it would be very difficult for Bill Clinton to have an affair with Madonna?

JFK: It would be impossible for that to take place as quietly as my relationship with Norma Jean took place.

Q: When a president makes a commitment to office and also makes a commitment of fidelity to his wife, the American people should expect him to honor the commitment to the office but not the commitment to the wife?

JFK: An American president makes a commitment to the people to serve out the job of President to the very best of his ability. He makes a commitment to his wife to serve her to the best of his ability as a husband and a partner. These are two reciprocal areas, but they don’t become hinged on one another.

Looking at it your way, you should then be able to say that if the president committed a major error in foreign policy that his wife should then be able to divorce him?

Q: I get your point.

~ Albert Einstein ~

Q: We’ve been talking a lot about world peace and our consensus seems to point to the idea that world peace starts within the ordinary individual. Can you share your thoughts with us on that?

AE: The pursuits of my life were about expressing revolutionary information to make people think differently about the structure and nature of reality. This information is not as irrelevant to me now that I’m in the Afterlife. Don’t give up your pursuit of knowledge about the nature of physical, four-dimensional reality. There is always more to learn.

However, we feel from this place of spirit, it’s much more important now to use our energy to influence and inspire you to find ways to live together. Look at all the different perspectives, like we used to do when we were young. My circle of friends would get together, have a beer and toss around some outrageous idea. You, as a human race, must be the ones to learn to live together from the level of one ordinary to six billion others. No divine intervention on the part of a party of dead people will make that happen without your participation.

It’s much more important for the world to find a way to work together than it is to find a particular gem of information or a nugget of knowledge or the next great scientific discovery. Without the love that passes between you as humans, without cooperation and self-respect, you will live in a very segregated, turbulent world.

All of us here have been in positions of notoriety and power, each in our own way. We achieved a kind of recognition and social standing that allowed us to speak from our soapbox, to make a difference in a broader intellectual sense. And now, in the Afterlife, we are still trying to cash in on our fame, learning new and clever ways to make the most of our notoriety to influence peace on the planet.

Q: About our ability to work together: How will we be able to integrate the spiritual side of healing with what goes on in the hospitals and labs? We had a recent discussion about molecular cell regeneration and wondered, is the answer raising money for more research in the lab, or getting out of that box and looking within?

AE: The answer is really a combination of both. The advances that medical science has made over this past century have been truly miraculous. There are many people alive today because of that research, because of the frontier of young doctors excited by the prospect of uncovering new answers to cures for what were formerly deadly diseases. That area has been miraculous, in and of itself.

Individuals within the area of research are going to broaden their personal perspectives to be more inclusive of other possibilities. Still, you will get a great deal of resistance from the medical research community. Not because they don’t want to find a way to regeneration. They’ve poured their lives and time and energy into their work. They’ve discovered a great many cures, and answers to prolonging life and relieving misery. Their resistance isn’t about not wanting to find those cures. Their resistance tells them that life is not constructed in this way, because of what they’ve seen, because of the damage to the physical body they’ve experienced. Many cannot conceive that internally fueled cell regeneration is possible. That’s where the changes will have to take place. I don’t want them to abandon their work. I want them to be more inclusive in their work.

As you yourselves have said, you’re coming up against a very strong political system. This system says you have to be dependent upon someone else for your well-being, your doctor, instead of trusting your body to tell you what it needs, thereby developing clear channels within your body and a confidence and firsthand knowledge about your body.

That might mean that you have a clear channel into your physical body and you can tell there’s something wrong in your menstrual cycle and in your womb, so then you can go to a medical doctor and get help finding the cure. There is a great force in this culture to take away that self-authority and self-knowledge. It says, “You can’t possibly know that about your body because you’re not a doctor.”

There’s also a power structure of politics in the corporate world of medical science. For some it has become about profits over needed research. You see that they’ve raised billions of dollars within the medical research community to find the cure for AIDS. And yet, when they do come up with an experimental drug, the cost is so outrageous that it’s prohibitive for the ordinary human being with AIDS to have any hope of getting it.

It’s the people with the diseases who don’t have access to these new, expensive treatments who are being forced to look into alternative possibilities. They are the ones who are spearheading the self-healing movement. Out of that movement is coming a consciousness about self-regeneration. Out of that will come a conflict with the political system that creates the drugs that then make a huge profit for the corporations. That culture will want to squelch the self-healing movement. Consequently more than ever this is an area that needs to be explored and uncovered.

You’re going up against many layers of culture here, many layers of fear. Don’t relent. Stick with the problem as long as you need to find the answer.

~ Adolph Hitler ~

Q: Can you give me some direction on answering the question, “Why channel Hitler?”

AH: It is a good question. I am glad you ask it. Because from my unadulterated hell, I can remind you to never create this ever again. I can implore you from my place of eternal agony to never again allow yourselves to become as the world did when I was alive. Do you realize how many ordinary people looked past their own hearts to perform the atrocious acts of the holocaust? This was not just about Adolph Hitler pulling the triggers of seven million guns. This was about a culture following along blindly to what was dictated from a hidden place. Good men were drawn into the darkness, into their own hell, with varying levels of hell for each and every person who participated in this.

Talk to me so I can tell those today who are taking up the Nazi banners and marching in the street for hate and division, in the end, there will be only you, you and your hate and this burning fire. In the end, you will have to live with the repercussions of all the hate you generate for those around you, because ultimately, it is self-hate that you are persecuting others for, and that will return as your own karma.

You must learn how to never allow this to happen again. Only you can make sure, from a place of consciousness about your life now, that you make your choices with these things in mind.

This interview is also about forgiveness. If I represent the potential evil in all humans, then somewhere, inside each person is the capacity to perform such evil acts. You must forgive yourself this potential, first and foremost, for then you can forgive people such as me.

~ Ryan Wayne White ~

Q: Do you think there is purpose in physical illness? Or do you believe, as Christopher Reeve does, that it's all random, but what's important is what you make of it?

RW: I don't think it's random. I do think I got AIDS for a real good reason. The world changed because of what I did. I was just an ordinary kid, minding my own business in a Midwestern town. Sure, I was a hemophiliac and that kind of prepared me for some of the things about having AIDS, but for the most part, I was an average Joe. I can see how you might think it's random. The universe is pretty chaotic by nature.

But from where I am now? No, I don't think it was an accident. I believe I accepted the destiny before I was born as Ryan. I knew, on some deeper level, I was going to have to deal with this.

Q: Then why would you do that? Why would you agree to go into life knowing you were only going to get sick and die?

RW: Partly because, before being born, everyone is spirit. Everyone knows they are going to live through it. It's not like being human, where you don't understand ultimately yet what you go back to when you put your body aside. It doesn't sound nearly as dire in spirit. It's a life to live, to create, and to somehow try to influence the world, even if only in some small way. And the end result is that we're all going to die sometime.

On the other hand, while I knew I'd been asked to carry a message with me into life, I had little idea what it was going to feel like as a human being. That's why spirit comes to life, and why we create ourselves as humans, to feel all the suffering and joys of creation. When I was asked to carry this message, and if I wanted to be an inspiration in this way, I was excited! It was a chance to make a difference.

~ Norma Jean Baker ~

Q: Norma, you rose to a place of influence in pop culture at a time when women’s rights and issues were just beginning to move to the forefront. What role, if any, do you feel you might have played in bringing those issues into the conscious minds of America?

NJB: My place in American history served different purposes, really. For one thing, I was the epitome of popular, public sexuality. I’m not talking about sex, mind you, I’m talking about the sexual image women had at the time. I was like a go-between, from the time after World War II, when women had to return the power they got when the men were away at war, and the sixties, which, as we all know, was when women really began to stand up and speak their minds, and not be afraid of being openly, naturally sexual beings.

Not many people, I suppose, would look at me as some kind of icon of feminism. I can understand that. In many ways, I was the classic co-dependent, helpless female. That’s certainly what most people got from my public image. Not many people knew the real, true me. My friends were often stifled from seeing me depressed. I didn’t let many people know my mind. I ended up getting lost in my own public image, too, by the end.

Being famous is always a double challenge in dealing with life. There is the challenge of the public eye, always being looked at and commented on and photographed, and then the challenge to not let that feedback influence you to become what you perceive the world sees of you. That’s what happened to me: I got lost to myself. I lost my intellectual power, as I became this public kitten.

The pain and sense of loss I sustained in my childhood set me up for the longing I felt through my entire life. I longed for something, all the time. I think you can see it in my eyes in some of those earlier pictures. That longing became the basis of a sexual positioning by people who were guiding me. But it was really an emotional longing more than a sexual craving. The emptiness I felt as a kid followed me around into adulthood because no one ever taught me any other way to fulfill myself than seeking outside myself.

As I rose from obscurity and into the public eye, the people around me started pulling my sexuality out of me. They wanted it to be a powerful part of displaying and selling me. They wanted me to exaggerate this natural side of myself so that I would appeal to more people.

I often thought back, later in life, to what I would have done, and what I would have been like had I not been brought up that way. What if I hadn’t hooked up with those people who influenced me throughout my life? What if I had just been plain old Norma Jean? What if I had learned how to fill myself from my own self-worth and stayed home, married some strong, stable guy, had a bunch of kids and grew old and died in an old folks home somewhere, in my sleep. I can’t tell you how many times I fantasized about that. Not that I wanted to give up any of what I had. It was a wild ride, I’m telling you. I wouldn’t have given up any of it, but, you know, you often think about lives you could never live, just like I suppose many “ordinary” women fantasized about being me. What if I had been that ordinary woman? I don’t know...

Looking back, I see now that I had a huge effect on the culture of sexuality in America. I did sort of make sexuality an everyday thing. Oh, I know the glamour was constructed, but I did have this very natural sexuality. I was comfortable in it. It was the one thing I knew was mine, that no one could take from me, that gave me a certain kind of power.Out of this need to feel something real like that in my life came my agreement to market it. The more successful I got through marketing this sexual part of me, the more I felt filled and powerful, and the more I wanted because, ultimately, it didn’t fill me up. It was all empty calories fueling a very destructive cycle.

But I did gain power over many situations because of my sexuality. And don’t think I didn’t know it. I worked it to the hilt, in quite a creative way, I think. I took the softness of a woman, the completely feminine approach, the passivity, the compassion combined with the sexual appeal, and openly influenced things: everything from casual conversations to business deals. I could always gain the attention of a room, just by being Marilyn.

Not that I always got my way, but I did at least feel like I was a part of a world that basically ignored the rights of women. Using my power in this way hid my brain from their view. People usually didn’t know how smart I was because I didn’t want them to.

The only trouble was, this kind of power didn’t work with my emotions, which were turbulent and extreme. I was a very unhappy woman, but I had to contain all that when I was in the public eye. For all the containment I did in public in order to portray Marilyn Monroe, I suffered terribly in private when I let my feelings out. That’s why I used the drugs and the alcohol, because the price that I was paying for that power was isolating me from myself, from my true self.

But if you’re just asking culturally, yes, I believe I set the stage for a much more open attitude about sex for women. My presence inspired women to know that their sexuality was not about performance, it was about being totally yourself. A gal can be sexual anywhere, anytime. Not only that, but if a woman harnesses her sexual energy, great achievements can be created.

Q: What exactly do you mean by “harnessing sexual energy?”

NJB: First of all, girls were taught from the time they were born that they were suppose to get married. That was expected of a young woman during this era. For a long time, especially when I was in vogue, there was even an age we were suppose to be married by. Anytime past that age and a girl was an old maid. Even for those women who couldn’t stay married to one guy, like me, there was a push to always have a man in your life.

What this does to a woman is focuses her fulfillment outside herself. It also encourages her to have sex when maybe she doesn’t want to, or not have it when she does, and arranges her sexual identity around the guy. The focus of her own sexuality is now outside herself. She then becomes a product of that environment. If her guy likes lingerie, she buys herself some crotchless panties, whether or not they are a turn-on for her. She starts to mold her sexual identity around this thing outside herself, which is really foreign to her. Not just because she’s trying to please this guy, but because she is taking on his image of what he thinks she should be. But he’s a guy! He can only know what he wants her to be to him. He has no idea what she needs to be to herself.

So here she is, expending all this energy on becoming someone that she’s not, not getting what she needs from the guy, wondering why she is so empty even though she gives and gives and gives. That’s when women turn to the booze and drugs, trying to not feel that emptiness anymore.

Q: Is this what happened to you?

NJB: Ah, yes, it was.

~ Sigmund Freud ~

Q: Sigmund, knowing what you know now, are you finding that your theories on dreams and such don’t really apply?

SF: No, I don’t find that at all! But I do look upon those times of discovery with great longing. Those were times of inception, it was not expected of me that I understood everything then. My purpose was to open doors, open doors. The difficulty came when it was time to process all the information and sketch the relationships of the parts of self to each other and one another.

Dreams are exactly what I discovered, only more. Bigger than I thought. Much bigger than I even thought back then.

Q: But I thought that the emphasis of your work on dreams was sexual. Are you saying that they don’t have anything to do with sexuality?

SF: They have everything to do with sexuality, but very little to do with the cultural interpretations of that sexuality, the very interpretations I espoused.

Dreams are manifestation of the sexual energy of your physical body. In the dream state, it is your sexual energy that brings you back to you. Sexual energy is like having your own inner gravity.

What wasn’t exactly correct was my interpretation of what sexual energy meant against the culture I was living in at the time and also with regard to my personality. I was extremely compulsive and exceptionally obsessive. Certainly I can credit my diligence and perseverance into an undiscovered area of reality to those traits. But it was that very compulsion that prevented me from realizing how much projection I was involved in. Much like Adolph’s projection of his lack of emotions, I projected my personal neurosis over the theories I was developing.

Q: So you’re saying that we define ourselves in our dream state by our sexuality. Is it about desire or is it an energy the individual exudes?

SF: Sexuality is the hum of the life force of the body. Humans are meant to exist in a vibration that feels like pure orgasm. That is part of what heaven is, but, well, how can anyone think to be in heaven when they cannot be with their own bodies and their own sexuality?

The finely-tuned vibration of your sexual energy reveals a road map to a molecular level, a road map to the source of your own consciousness. Your sexual energy is the key to that road map.

But culture makes it about morals and meaning, rituals of union or not, having to pick it apart psychologically and attach judgment to it. Culture takes acts of sex and labels, judges, confines and forbids them, removing all the acceptance and mystery from something that is far more scientific than moral.

In my early work, I was beginning to investigate avenues to dissociate from culture. I knew that the inner life was symbiotic to the outer life. But I was not sure that we as humans had the integration and strength of character needed to envelop such personal power as to dissociate from culture. After all, look at the atrocities of the World Wars. There was nothing in my investigations that indicated society could properly use that kind of personal power justly.

Instead of investigating further, to see if we could cultivate the strength to take on changing culture, I took that embryonic idea, projected that everyone’s inner life was as neurotic as mine and concluded that humans were elementally weak!

So, did I understand the metaphysical interpretations of sexual energy back then? Heavens no! And good thing! I wasn’t supposed to!

Q: Why weren’t you supposed to know it back then?

SF: Because it would have been inappropriate for where I was on my path at the time. I was too neurotic. By projecting my own neurosis, I was able to catalyze an entire generation of investigators into taking these ideas further. My own students began the evolution of my material, right under my nose.

I was always the grounded one, you know, the one who thought too much. In school, I was always last, finishing tests, in line for lunch, late for appointments. My mind became so myopic about whatever it was that I was engaged in, I took a long time to follow up with people. I often felt I actually moved slower or that I was behind the times, even in the face of all my degrees and credentials. But those degrees were ones I created for myself. I just followed a little niche that drew me in, and there I landed, in that place, at that time, making sweeping statements about my own neurosis.

~Anwar al-Sadat ~

Part of my job was to tour the military bases. I talked to the soldiers, not as a commander, but as one brother to another. There is a strong sense of brotherhood underlying the Arab nation. I looked into the eyes of my frontline soldiers, some with children and wives of their own. I could feel their pain, their worry about their families. Some of these soldiers were only boys themselves.

As I talked to them, I started to further develop the ideas of my childhood. In retrospect, I was tuning into the destiny that I had brought with me. Just like our friend Adolph, I knew I had come here to play the part of a man who would change culture. I have to admit I chose one of the most enduring and violent cultures on Earth. As I took part in ruling this ancient country with her longtime battles, I started to wonder why we were fighting. Aside from the heritage of violence and a history of dissension between us, I began to wonder what was beneath the religious rhetoric and misplaced patriotism.

After Nasser’s loss in the Six-Day War, we were an outraged, yet weary nation. I partook of searching through archives and talking to the country’s religious leaders. I wanted to understand the roots of our conflicts. They stretch so back far through history, I found it impossible to pinpoint the incident that started the fighting in the first place. After all, the Israelis were part of a tribe from Egypt. Regardless of their slavery status in that period, this had been their home, too. No matter how much history I poured over or how many conversations I had, I could not comfortably find the beginning of what caused them to be exiled from Egypt in first place, other than hate and injustice.

Then, I realized it did not matter the root. Here it was, years and years and years of fighting, of Holy Wars, of death and destruction, killing sons and husbands, of terrorists in the name of what? Allah? In the name of simply being an Arab or a Christian or a Jew? Were we not human beings first, and then Arabs and Israelis, Americans and Soviets? This was traitorous language for the leader of one of the most powerful Arab nations in the world.

As I toured the military facilities and talked to the soldiers, and thought about what I believed in my heart, I knew I had to change something.

I believe it was at the time of Nasser’s death that I first realized I would probably be assassinated. When I took office, I knew what I had to do. I knew there was absolutely no way to make this change and expect that everyone would support it. There is a great interpretation of Islam that believes in martyrdom as an act of God. I knew I was not going to appeal to those parts of society, and I knew how they usually dealt with their enemies.

But what could I do? Here I was, commander-in-chief of an army of men of many ages, men with families. I was sending them out to probably die at the hands of the enemy. I started to think that, by doing that the enemy only won. The greatest loss would be that of our most precious natural resource, these men and their families, and I did not want to see any more Egyptian blood shed in the name of anyone’s god, including the god of control that the British and French worshipped.

On top of this we were going bankrupt as a country. Our natural resources were drying up, unemployment was high, and poverty was rampant. The very state of the state was not one that could continue to support the economics of war. I knew we needed to align ourselves with one of the super powers to prevent this war from going on into the future of yet another generation.

That is when I started to dare to see things in a different way. The first step was to make a decision as to which super power to align Egypt. At this time, many of our neighbors had aligned with the Soviet Union. This made some sense, due to the close proximity of the continents, their natural resources, the alliances of our neighbors, and of course the great might of Communism. I made an appeal to Moscow, and was flatly refused. In a move that also brought solidarity to the people, I expelled the Soviets and prepared to align with the West.

~ Jesus of Nazareth ~

Q: What then are the roots of this livelong feud in the Middle East? Mr. al-Sadat said he tried to find the origins of it and couldn’t.

JofN: To understand, you must go back to the beginning of the emerging human consciousness. Picture a large tribe of humans, just beginning to be self-aware, learning to live together, acquainting themselves with the environment. Their biggest challenge is survival: fighting for their lives against the elements, creating shelter, securing food. The major condition dominating their instincts is fear: fear of the environment, fear of the unknown, fear of darkness, fear of light such as fire and lightening, fear of annihilation. Quite simply, self-awareness came with the fear borne of suddenly awakening in a harsh, unknown environment. This is the most primal root of all fear within humanity.

This is the condition that the story of Adam and Eve tried to depict. Only there was no evil serpent, and they were not thrown out of the garden. It was the growth of humankind, being directed by the divine intelligence of compassion, prodding consciousness awake to become self-aware. It is also the story of every human birth. As you leave the watery womb and enter the hard cold reality of spacetime, the separation from the oneness is at first terrifying. But the degenerative concept of something evil luring you into the temptation of sin only serves to undo the progress made towards ridding the infrastructure of fear.

To counter-balance the fear, within this emerging human was installed a heart, to feel, to mourn, to celebrate, to laugh, to be connected to the inner source of eternal consciousness, the wellspring of life. Emotions were intended to be each individual’s one-to-one connection to his or her source. Emotions were also the great equalizer. Everyone in the tribe received the capability to feel, and conversely, the capability to deny those feelings.

The new human also had an intellect, which was to be used to define the new images and experiences of the new awareness. This ability to define perception was part of a kind of sonar system. As the emotions in their new bodies picked up information from the source within, messages were then sent to the intellect, a series of descriptions of what was being experienced from without. These descriptions then created a third dimension of intuition. This voice was a combination of both the emotion and intellect, and provided the next most advantageous step for the human to take. Intuition was a more highly evolved form of instinct, and was an inner compass, keeping the human safe and providing unity with the other two emerging dimensions of emotion and intellect.

As the intellect began to define what was being perceived, these newborn creatures of consciousness started to organize, much like cellular activity on a molecular level. Different members of the tribe began to identify with one element outside themselves or another. At first, they gravitated toward nature’s elements: wind, water, wood, fire. This division was meant to develop diversity. From the infrastructure of fear, however, it also became the beginning of separatism.

Nature soon gave way to thought, and thought’s ability to conquer nature. These new thoughts evolved into associative language coalitions: people attracting and gathering because of similar definitions of what was being perceived. Those who were afraid of lightening and believed it was the wrath of an angry God rallied together. They separated themselves from those believed something different about the lightening. Then came symbols with which to identify: flags, emblems, coats of arms, all were outward symbols to rally under in kinship. The differences were sometimes celebrated and embraced, but more often than not, it became about which one was the “right” point of view.

One type of associative language group was religion. Each different religious affiliation believed that their god was the “right” god. They built temples to their god as a form of worshipping those they perceived had a greater power than they themselves could ever hope to have. This helped promote the idea of an external god that had something that the humans needed in order to survive.

Within the different religious groups there emerged certain people who could scribe god’s words. These prophets were separated from the rest of the tribe as people who had special powers to talk directly to god. The rest of the group then began to listen to the words of the scribe instead of listening to their own connection to their own source. No one realized that the words from the scribe were available to everyone in the tribe. In this way, separation from self began to take place within the individuals of the separatist groups as well.

As the religious affiliations, fueled by fear, laid down the laws, slowly the intellect of the human took on those definitions as what was real, as opposed to the information being received from the sonar systems that existed within their own beings. Changing the source of information for the definitions to the outside world interrupted the system that engaged all three dimensions, emotion, intellect and intuition. Instead of being guided by intuition that represented all three, intellect literally took over and became the primary decision maker. A voice of fear and separation, this dominance limited the emotional connection to only experience the fear. With emotion’s range diminished to a much smaller frequency, intuition all but closed down, and intellect making decisions that weren’t in the best interest of the whole, the human began to experience more and more the misery of the illusion of separation.

Entire structures of government, religions, politics, most all organizations of associations were built around this primal perception of fear and separation. Because of this, your entire culture is program to manifest from a fear-based infrastructure.

The natural birthright of every human being is a one-to-one connection to their own source within. God speaks to everyone, every day. Having the voice of God within is an indivisible part of being human. The voice of your own god is that of the three parts working together, making decisions in compassion and oneness. Part of the challenge you are faced with as a civilization is to come to an understanding of the billion different ways God speaks to the planet.

Now, the Arabs, gathering and attracted by stories from their beloved ancestors, held certain beliefs about the Jews and used the definitions of those beliefs to keep away from the Jews. All of the stories were based in fear: fear that the Jews, who appeared to be so foreign and unattractive, were somehow dangerous to the Arab group identity. The Jews did the same of the Arabs.

Born of fear and disconnected from the words of love within them, each set of separatists projected their fear onto the opposing group, and framed their definitions in ways that made it look like each group opposed the other’s ideals, thereby giving them each a justifiable reason to fight against one another. Deeper and deeper the chasm became, until each side has carried on their own cycle of projection and separatism to the point of possible complete annihilation of the entire planet Earth.

What you don’t seem to understand yet is, first, you are all one tribe, and second, the only thing you can be separated from is yourself.