The soul has one desire. It wants to grow, constantly grow. . . .the only way a soul can grow is through obtaining mind. The mind can only be created by one organ - brain.
A Glimpse
Behind the Veil of Life and Death
an interview with
It was my first real conversation with Bernard, the exacting human energist (his term for the work and teaching he does in the biospiritual realms of existence), and alter-ego Ben, the jocular 63-year-old former shipbuilding engineer who couldn't wait to begin constructing the couple's dream home and Human Energy Institute in the countryside near Halifax. I quickly learned that Bernard's views on the Big Questions - which he claims are exact knowledge imparted to him by guiding and teaching spirits - is as precisely constructed as one of those ships. Every detail is black and white. There is no grey: it's my semantic way or the highway.
Our conversation was punctuated by frequent laughter as we struggled - with help from Penny - to synchronize my greyish questions and concepts of soul, spirit, and other abstracts with Bernard's black and white ones. For two people in the metaphysical field (Penny is a counselor who collaborates with Bernard on all his books, workshops, and other projects), Ben and Penny proved warm and unaffected, easy to laugh at themselves - and at me.
Syd Baumel: One of your quotes that I read on your website is that we don't have a soul, the soul has us.Now that's an iconoclastic statement, because most people either believe we don't have any kind of soul or, if we do, it's a personal soul - a "Sydney soul" or a "Ben soul" or a "Penny soul."
Bernard Willemsen: To me, people walking around saying "that's my soul" is like the apple saying "that's my tree."
SB: But is there something analogous to the personal soul, like when people have a sense that there's something about them as a person that might survive. Let's not call it a soul; let's call it something else, if necessary. For example, people have a near-death experience, and often they report that they see their loved ones again. Now what do you think about that? Because if they really are seeing their loved ones, then that means that some remnant of their loved ones has survived for some period of time. Or is it something that they're imagining? What's your take on that?
BW: You first have to accept - or you don't have to accept - do we have only one life, the physical life? Or is the physical life part of a cycle? People commit suicide, say, and they realize that they are still there, but not with a body.
SB: So what do you call that, that person who has died already?
BW: You see, then you have to say that person did not die. The body merely stopped functioning and died and got buried. The person, in those cases, is very much here, very much in the physical world and he realizes he's in a
physical world and nothing has changed except he doesn't have a body. So he can't, for instance, open doors.SB: So could that correspond to what people often intuitively think of as a personal soul? What do you call this remnant of the self that remains after that person's body has died?
BW: That's very interesting how you talk. You see, you say a remnant of self. To me, that is the self.
SB: You're right. I agree with you.
BW: When a normal death happens, then often the channel to the next dimension is open, and people may enter into what we could call the period of transition from the physical realm into the spiritual realm or next realm. And then they may see past loved ones.
SB: So a past loved one that they're seeing, what is the nature of those loved ones? Are they in the mind of the survivor or do they exist in their own right?
BW: They exist in their own right, but they also could be in the mind. You're in the grey area. Because if people go through a near-death experience, how near was their death? Did they in fact leave their body or did they see
their past loved ones, as they call them. And that is what we call them, past loved ones. But once we're in the karma world [Willemsen's term for the advanced life-after-death stage where we've transcended our earthly attachments], "loved ones" don't exist anymore. But the spirit identity still exists, even though the frequency has changed.SB: Yes that's what I'm thinking about. So it's this thing that you call a spirit identity that most people, I believe, think of when they say "I have a soul." But they're not talking about the soul you're talking about - the Big Soul, the "tree." They're talking about the essence of the apple that survives after the apple has fallen off the tree.
BW: The essence of the identity. . . - you cannot have an identity or spiritual identity without a soul. You take that soul force, or the essence, or the drive of life, away from the person, then you have nothing. You have a mind, but the mind by itself, it will dissipate. The mind will [only] stay intact because of the soul.
All the questions you're asking I write about in my second book.
Penny Margolis: Have you not read Beyond a Shadow?
SB: I haven't. [Everyone laughs.] But even if I had, this tape recorder is running for the benefit of our readers who may not have read your book. So I have to pretend that I haven't read it anyhow in order to ask you these questions. [More laughter.]
BW: Okay, in short, when a soul, which is comprised of many incarnations, obtains a fetus, it gives the fetus the will or drive to live. And that is done through the flowing aura, which enters with the soul. [As Willemsen describes it in his first book, Don't Water the Stick, the flowing aura is the "layer" of the soul's "energy egg. . . .which flows continuously through and around the body," energizing our biological organs to a higher level of functioning than they're capable of on their own. The flowing aura sounds like the life force described in other systems as chi, prana, orgone, etc.] Then the fetus starts to produce its own energy and then there is the will to live, the will to learn. The soul drives that identity - the baby - all the way towards adulthood. That soul has one desire, and that is to obtain that mind
eventually. But it is not a thinking process. It is an automatic process.SB: You mean a soul is not a thinking process?
BW: No, soul does not think. It is. It is the total sum of all its knowledge. But it does not think, it does not reason. A soul does not choose. A soul can be designated - for example, by a higher power or intelligence to carry out a particular service - but the soul does not choose.
When a woman is pregnant and is near delivery, signals
go out. A soul picks that signal up and goes to that vicinity. And that's it. The soul remains there up until the birth. Another soul will not come near it. That is the law of that particular cycle.Now, the soul has one desire. It wants to grow, constantly grow. It has that force, that universal force within it. So the soul obtains that baby, or the fetus that then becomes a baby, in order to obtain mind. Because the only way a soul can grow is through obtaining mind. The mind can only be created by one organ - brain.
So we can then go back into the micro and you can see that the whole body is designed to do one thing, maintain brain.
SB: I see, so it's kind of a ladder of one thing supporting the other with the soul being at the top?
BW: Or on the bottom, pushing.
SB: Okay. There's something beyond the soul too, I guess? God must get into this picture somewhere?
BW: To go into that, we have to ask, "What is your perception of God?" Because people have so many different perceptions.
SB: Well, what's yours? [laughter]
BW: Do you want to listen to me for sixteen hours? [More laughter. Willemsen's notion of God comes up a little later. But here we segued into a discussion about the distinction between what he "believes" about the everyday world and what he "knows" with absolute certainty about the spirit world.]
. . .So, do I believe about things in the spirit world? No. Because to me it is an absolute reality. So I
don't "believe" in it.SB: Okay, a lot of people say "I know that I have spirits around me who are guiding me." What do you know about that?
BW: I know that there are very seldom guide spirits around people.
A karma spirit [the spirit of a formerly living person, including guide and protector spirits] has to have a purpose, because he wants to fulfill his karma, and he can only fulfill his karma if what he does has purpose. So if you take, for instance, a truck driver who has a family, who's a long haul truck driver, you may find that there is a protector spirit with him. Because for him to stay alive is important, because he is feeding a family with children - while the three children may only have one protector spirit among them. Another guy who's driving on the road who's a bachelor, he may not have a spirit around him, because there is no reason. There are only so many spirits. And so not everybody has spirits.
SB: Where does the spirit get its purpose? Does it have a higher sense of purpose, or morality, or ethics?
BW: First of all, what is a karma spirit? Once you go to the next dimension, you go into a judgement cycle where the pure ego [the pure self] and the ego defense [akin to neurotic defense mechanisms] separate.
So the karma spirit's ego is pure. They are not in a "reactive state," like we are. We do many things with our defense mechanisms, because that shields our ego system. We have an ego system. The karma spirit is ego, without those defense mechanisms.
SB: So is this karma spirit a little bit like what many people think of as an "angel"?
BW: Yeah, I have no problem with that. The system teaches us by utilizing all those things that we are familiar with. So if the system wants to give you a message or bring you a vision, and you believe in angels, and you believe angels come from God, what will they show you?
SB: I see. So, "the system" is what? A benign kind of force?
BW: You could call it "a God System." Or you could call it God, I don't care . . .
So when it comes from above, then it [may seem to come] with wings. As far as I know, the karma spirit - which is a human who went through the next dimension - does not appear with wings, because they cannot change their image - other than that they can appear younger, because within their knowledge is the shape of their body at all its ages. And they can feel that the best they felt was when they were 35, even though they died at 82. Then, if they appear, they may appear to be 35.SB: I see. So karma spirits are - all of them or most of them
are - former people?BW: Former, physical people, yeah. When they go into the karma period they still are very much their [human] identity, and they associate themselves with that identity. But as they stay in the karma world and go through the karma cycle, their individuality
slowly disppears. And towards the end of the cycle their whole desire to be an individual is gone. And then they go through the second judgment, which is merely that the mind and the soul blend - and the soul grows. The soul grows, and now the soul enters a new fetus. Everything about you will enter the fetus, but
not your "identity," or your desire to be an identity.SB: You mean what will come from the soul that sort of gobbled me up after I went through my karmic period, that would be kind of purged of my individual identity, but it would be more of an essential, non-superficial kind of self?
BW: Right. So the soul then may give some of that information up.
SB: Give it up to whom?
BW: To the present being.
SB: Oh, I see, like when you are doing past life regression.
BW: Yeah. Not even a month ago, I was allowed by my spirit guide to show two of my students all the cycles [reincarnations] of the soul that drives me - all the way back to the animal world. They even saw the two animals that the soul was first and then it went into the human cycle all the way up to now.
SB: How many lives did they have to go back before they saw the animal realm?
BW: I think there were six or seven.
SB: To get back to where we started, it still seems to me like in a a way you've got two souls here. You've got one with a small 's' in terms of the way people normally understand it, what you refer to as the karma spirit. [Note: Here I confused Bernard's term karma spirit with what he would call spirit, leading to Bernard and Penny's following clarification.] In other words, when you say, we don't have a soul, the soul has us, that's true from your point of view. But it's also true from your point of view that we have - or we are - this karma spirit, after we die.
PM: We become that.
SB: But you're saying, we already were. That now we just shed our bodies.
BW: No, no. I [Bernard Willmesen] never was a karma spirit. I will become one and then after the karma spirit has gone through its cycle, then all its knowledge blends with the soul. The soul becomes larger and re-enters into a new baby.
[Here we reflected for a while on the problem that different people ascribe very different meanings to words like soul, spirit, and ego.]
BW: . . . .Words become extremely important. When we wrote the books, it was so hard to find the right words to define what we mean. And furthermore, I speak very simply. When you work with students you have to define exactly what that word means on this path.
SB: Yes, my mother passed away last year. A lot of people would say - or I would say - that she survived in some way. I speak to her sisters and I say, "maybe you'll meet her, maybe we'll all meet her again."
And when people talk about a soul, that's usually what they're thinking about: they're thinking about the thing that survives.
PM: The spirit.
SB: Yes. Spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it - "a rose by any other name. . ." We're talking about "me," or something like me, that survives after we die. And you're saying "yes, it does." I think my intuition jibes with what you're saying. For example, if near-death experiences in which people are greeted by their deceased loved ones are real, it leads me to think that maybe what you call the spirit survives long enough, before being absorbed by the soul, so that everybody who knew it is able to see it again after they die.
BW: The cycle is not defined in years, just periods and cycles. But yeah, the period is quite long. It is long enough for the next generation, when they die, to meet up with those they knew who passed before them.
Read an excerpt from Bernard Willemsen's book Beyond a Shadow: The Path of the Spirit.From The Aquarian, Winter 1999View Willemsen's books at Amazon.com or Chapters.ca.
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