This Divine Classroom: Earth School and the Psychology of the Soul

By Marcia Beachy

In times of great change and chaos, we flail against the suffering and difficulties in our lives. In This Divine Classroom: Earth School and the Psychology of the Soul, psychotherapist, Marcia Beachy, develops the broader view that planet Earth is a classroom for human evolution. Through past life regression (PLR) research with her clients, Marcia postulates that this outpost on the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy is providing unprecedented soul maturation opportunities as momentous choices are being made.

Incorporating in-depth PLR work and material from the interlife (afterlife) perspective, Marcia skillfully unravels some of the mysteries of the souls choices and what it hopes to learn from the challenges and joys of life. Fascinating stories unfold over eons of time depicting the souls long journey of evolution. The reader begins to gather a sense of the souls psychology, often shockingly different than that of our personality self. In addition, Marcia gently challenges us to a reinterpretation of our reality and to courageously see the new Earth School curriculum before us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 20, 2004
• ISBN: 9781468517217

Marcia Beachy

Marcia Beachy, MS, Licensed Professional Counselor and psychotherapist for 20 years, is a passionate explorer of human consciousness, continually asking who we are and where we are on our journey. She believes the path through our present difficulties lies hidden deep within the human heart. Her research with clients has shown that perspective and direction is readily available with a slight shift inward to where the language of the heart and soul reside. Many years ago, her own inner guidance spoke forcefully, saying, “This is a divine classroom and this is a guiltless path!” Since then, Marcia has deepened her love of planet Earth and her study of human consciousness, seeking ways of assisting humanity into a sense of the sacred within everyday life. In addition to psychotherapy, Marcia has included hypnotherapy, past life regression, bereavement counseling and massage therapy in her work with a focus on compassionate healing, releasing old patterns, and deepening into soul awareness.

Book preview

Canyon in Autumn

Can sky be more blue? Can sun be more inviting than on this afternoon of splendor? Autumn in southern Colorado falls more gracious on the land. Now a place resides for tender hearts and gentle spirits. The searing summer heat and punishing winds have surrendered. I summon a truce with my judgement of ultra-brown prairie grasses given the magnificence of rocks and junipers and sky. The fifty-ish couple with their immense Rottwieler amble back down the trail and the boisterous hiker-pair pack out their chatter with them. The canyon reverts to solitude. Pure delight rises.

I perch on a rock ledge, facing the cooling breeze. All of me craves this light. Regardless of ozone thinning, I draw this warmth into the bone, knowing its brevity. My skin gathers heat like these sun-warmed boulders which guard a timeless equanimity and the memory of a million suns. They harbor fossilized shells and rippled sand formations of an ancient sea. Ten thousand things have swum, slithered, flown and strode over their surfaces discovering rockness.

On the canyon walls to the east are petroglyphs, messages from the mysterious Anasazi people, long-since vanished. This language of shared symbols lies hidden upon rocky crevices throughout these miles and miles of canyon ranch land. Fossilized dinosaur tracks in the next canyon record life from a hazy past geologists call the Mesozoic era.

I am in the presence of a living library. Humanity has passed through leaving only a faint imprint, a recent chapter in a recent volume. Arrowheads from Native American tribes trace their wanderings. A few crumbling stone walls remain to mark the passage of hardy pioneers who struggled to survive the extremes of this land. On the open prairie to the north are still visible wagon wheel tracks. Here is carved a tributary of the Old Santa Fe Trail, a vital trade route in the 1800’s. Along the trail, Europeans and Mexicans traded with and fought both each other and the native peoples. This dynamic time of change fueled itself from the collision of polar-opposite cultures and intentions. Descendents of these peoples remain, as do their names. Towns, grasslands and old fort names reflect a vivid past, a patchwork quilt of erstwhile human drama.

Did I participate in this drama? Did I draw a sword, shoot an arrow, or shelter children from a raiding band? Is one of those enigmatic rock symbols etched with a familiar hand in another time? Do rocks beckon us back to where our feet have passed before? Perhaps I have returned to this canyon to integrate some ancient soul memory, or to simply remember the fullness of being. Here I drink in wisps of understanding. Impressions rise from this multi-layered, venerable classroom of living Earth and all the souls gone by.

The present draws me back. The breeze, though inviting, is dry-bones dry. Southern Colorado has given up on rain. The feel of rain is a distant memory and we seldom pray for it. Some things simply are. Change occurs in its own time. Instead of rain, we are fed on October’s azure, lit to brilliance by the southern drifting sun. Always, we are willingly bedazzled by the magnificent wholeness, the eternal spirit of these silent canyons, particularly on these shortening days.

A dust-colored grasshopper creeps to the edge of my towel, nibbling on terrycloth nubs to check their edibility. He crawls to my foot and begins to climb. He may be enticed by the feel of my foot but I cannot appreciate the pokiness of his. I shake him off and he flits away only to return. What is this fascination with fabric and human skin? Perhaps he is an extra-curious specimen and likes some Sunday afternoon variety. In that we are kin. Gratefulness swells for all my kin, all my beloved ones. How rich the fullness of being.

If this NOW moment is all that’s real, all we ever have, then this NOW has filled its particular time-segment to overflowing and I am drinking in the cascading rhythms. To witness, to learn, to experience, to love. Nothing more is asked.

Beginnings

We already know. We comment on the "school of hard knocks. We sing, when will we ever learn…. We muse, as a friend did recently, about her higher education in love". We discover, create, are tested, fail and succeed. Sounds like school and, of course, it is. Life is a demanding teacher. Earth is a tough classroom. And to what end? Could it be that we are spiritual travelers arriving from distant parts of the Cosmos to attend one of the most challenging curriculums in three-dimensional creation? Does this tough classroom serve to mature us and hone our spirits? Key alchemical processes are occurring now. Various immensely valuable teachings are enveloping us like waves some of which we ride with grace. Others propel us, gasping and sputtering into the depths. Yet at some core level we know all of life is about learning.

Like the wave on the ever varying sea, change is key to Earth School’s curriculum. Big change shakes and rattles our collective cage. That’s happening now. Immense waves of change are washing through every strata of life. This upheaval cracks us open. We may try to keep the shell of familiarity around us but fractures still show through. Sometimes our reality shatters. We feel adrift and without purpose. We may try to act normal but inside we feel like war victims or earthquake survivors. And we are. The human race is under tremendous pressure.

You need no alerting to this. Your relationships are undergoing major changes. Your finances feel unstable. You see ineptitude gripping our financial leaders. The challenges of medical care and the mercurial nature of the world arena are difficult to ignore. You may be watching your children cope with unprecedented assaults on their innocence. We long to create stability within this moving wave of change. Stability is a natural desire. Having stability within these changes requires great flexibility and opening the floodgates of clarity and creativity. It requires letting go of much of what we think we must have. It requires we dance with our fears.

Change rides on the wave of opposites. This classroom exists within the embrace of opposing forces. Instead of the oneness and harmony of our spiritual origins, we have the experience of light and dark, of happiness and sadness, of inclusion and rejection. We experience calm and security in the morning and by evening we are filled with anxiety. The sun shines and then the clouds oppress us. A friend becomes an enemy and we are thrown into anger. The friend apologizes and we love again. Back and forth we go until, with experience, we develop a middle path. We discover more acceptance of our anger and a deepening of our love, thereby creating some reconciliation of duality.

In addition to the hard learning tools of change and duality, we have the added challenge of "the veil of forgetfulness". An enormous dilemma in this spiritual training school, this divine classroom, if you will, is that most of its students don’t know they are enrolled! In fact, some traditional religions have taught the negation of Earth and the human body, that they are evil or at the very least, not worthy of honor and certainly not divine. How silly and sad this seems. What a waste we say! But wait. There may be a way in which our unknowing, whatever its origin, serves a greater purpose. Perhaps the enticement of discovery and coming to KNOW is part of the lesson plan, like the lure of a treasure hunt or the solving of a puzzle. Perhaps we are meant to unravel the mystery of who we are and in the process gain soul wisdom, a gift to ourselves and our Creator. To remember our true nature and feel it in our bodies and daily life is our quest.

Breaking through this veil is a necessary task in Earth School homework. Suffering is a great way to break through, though not often sought! When we suffer, we question, we probe, we protest, we cry. We go deeper than our present identity. We may touch the soul. In addition to suffering, other veil-breakers are deep meditation and prayer, deep compassion, various altered states and intense relationships. In this work, an altered state of consciousness is our particular avenue through the veil. Uncovering previous existences of the soul and wisdom from the heavenly realms, via hypnosis, is the passage we will explore together. Here we will discover how the learning tools of change and duality work as aids for soul growth over time. We will learn to perceive through the eyes of the soul, developing a sense of soul psychology. We will explore the divine classroom curriculum at the present time and the divine human archetype that is returning.

The term for the heavenly realms we use is interlife. Interlife refers to the dimensions and experiences encountered after the death of the body (often called the afterlife). From the interlife we will explore what lies beyond death including:

• Spiritual guides and support staff available to assist us

• Rehabilitation and retreat centers for recovery after difficult lives

• Interference or heaviness that can waylay the heaven-bound soul

• The healing of pain that the soul perspective brings, and

• The dawning realization that maturation of soul is the effect gained from all Earth School experience.

The past life stories in the three case studies that follow, are taken from my private practice and represent the story of humanity’s journey and our arrival at this present juncture, this choice point. These stories intertwine with all of our individual stories into a larger human chronicle that weaves into the epic of universal creation. As this grand chronicle unfolds, we are privileged to catch glimpses. Hints of the greater story most often come through from the interlife.

Critical soul choices are being made in the present chapter of our human story. Soul choices might involve following a prompting to move to a new location or placing ourselves in situations where we experience powerful lessons or growing the courage to speak our truth. If, for example, we can recommit to expressing love in the face of fear, our soul is being heard. Listening to the soul is a primary challenge as the proponents of fear become noisier.

Our death can also be a pivotal soul choice. My mother died in July of 2001. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, my father remarked, Well, your mother decided to go at a good time. This would have been too hard for her. Besides mirroring his own overwhelming sadness, he acknowledged the soul choice my mother made.

My desire is that the material in this book be of help in these soul decisions. And, if by chance, you are in the process of leaving this divine classroom, may you find comfort and guidance for your departure. If you are choosing to stay, flourish, and learn all you can, may you find deepening joy, courage and commitment. If you feel like you are camping out on the planet just watching the human drama unfold, may your curiosity guide you to the passages of interest.

The term God is seldom used in this material because it has become a conflicted term for many, implying anything from the greatest love to the greatest judgement and condemnation. It connotes a singular masculine deity, devoid of the divine feminine. This concept gathers no support from consciousness studies, regression work, spiritual research or personal experience. Therefore, I generally utilize more neutral terms, the Divine, Spirit, Source, etc.

This material is inspired by courageous past life regression clients who chose to understand themselves from the perspective of their souls. They discovered lives of service and growth as well as difficult lives that have haunted them for centuries. The healing power of soul understanding and bringing what has been hidden to light, released many ties from the distant past. Their generosity in releasing their stories, with the hope that others might benefit, is most commendable. I am deeply grateful to each one and honored that I have had the opportunity to work and learn with them.

As you read, may your heart drink in what nourishes you. May you remember what you already know. May your soul open more fully to your own unique expression of divinity so needed in this time of great change.

Remember

On the edge….

…there…

Where you began

Where nothing held beneath your feet

Until you called it into Being

On the edge

Where you began

At the beginning before Time

Before Darkness and Light

You remember….

CHAPTER 1

This Divine Classroom

"The soul is the perceiver; is assuredly vision itself pure and simple …

For the sake of the soul alone, the Universe exists … "

Pantanjali (Founder of the Hindu School of Yoga Philosophy)

Where have we come from? Why are we here? Various legends attempt to explain the origins of humanity. Myths and spiritual traditions from around the world have sought to address the mystery of Earth’s creation and our human family’s arrival on her doorstep. The story below is woven from several more recent accounts* with some unusual twists that are worth our consideration. In the present vernacular, it goes something like this:

Once before time, before memory, before the Cosmos, the Great ONE stirred and felt lonely for there was no other, only oneness. So the ONE moved upon the deep and from within an OTHER roused and emerged in splendor. The ONE and the OTHER witnessed each other and reflected each other’s radiance. As they drew together, great love stirred, and in orgasmic glory vast space burst forth and dimensions of all descriptions arose. With each merging, immense galaxies were flung into the heavens with the corresponding development of heavenly caretakers to monitor their sparkling evolution. The Beloved Pair, the Divine Father and Mother birthed Beings and Spirits of all kinds to move throughout the vastness of the multi-dimensional worlds. Here they would grow, multiply and eventually return with learning to their Source. In the process, the ONE/OTHER would learn about Itself—and no longer be lonely.

Eons upon eons passed. The Planners and Caretakers summoned a meeting in the cosmic boardroom to problem-solve and discuss the state of the Universe. Some parts of creation were progressing nicely; some needed assistance. After being sent out from Source, some beings thrived. Others experienced strange and new feelings of loneliness, homesickness, and fear. Dissention arose as some beings felt outside of love, developing instead an adverse warrior mentality. This appeared to be influenced by leaving "home" and experiencing a relatively new condition called polarity. The upshot of this was an energetic Star Wars-type drama with no resolution at hand. Polarization of consciousness occurred. Anguish swept through parts of the heavens. A solution must be found. The Caretakers decided to create a place in which, over time, the opposing forces might evolve and find reconciliation. A quiet, tucked-away cosmic experiment, if you will.

That place was planet Earth and we are the beings, aspects of Source, who through our growing consciousness over many lives are now able to contribute to this reconciliation. The split heals and becomes a passage to the stars as we embark upon the mysterious journey of becoming fully conscious. We emerge into a new relationship with our Creator(s) as we further our higher evolution and claim our cosmic/divine heritage.

I like this story. It graces the human drama with purpose and perspective. It provides another lens through which we can view ourselves and our place in the scheme of things. There will come a time, I suspect, when we will be able to know more fully the truth of our origins.

Keeping this story in the back of our minds, let us focus now on our part of the galaxy and our lovely blue and white planet. Let us explore the Earth School program set up for the education of souls here that perhaps serves an even greater function: the reconciliation of opposing cosmic forces.

The process of reconciliation allows space for all forces so that all may be brought into some kind of agreement and eventual harmony. By simply allowing space, the sense of opposition dissipates and a creative, new dynamic emerges. Thus we see the power of reconciling our own inner conflicts. Deeply accepting ourselves (letting go of striving, competition, and self-criticism) enables us to more effectively promote reconciliation between individuals and nations. Learning to reconcile opposing forces means there is no need for expulsion from the family, the church or the work place. A choice to learn occurs when all parties hold the understanding that opposing energies can become the grist for growth. Thus a vigorous and more peaceful co-existence can blossom.

A Classroom Called Earth

The Earth has been appointed the courageous role of being a classroom for our evolution as souls. This amazing classroom comes with great variety and beauty out of which many cultures and belief systems rise, fall, and rise again in new form. Within this richly diverse classroom, our souls choose their learning experiences. Eventually, there comes a point at which all souls complete their Earthly sojourns and schooling. Then we "graduate" and continue on, creating and evolving, eventually returning to Source, the Divine One.

The Earth-as-classroom concept came to me quite profoundly some time ago. In the mid-1980’s, I joined with other spiritual seekers to study with our teacher in Sedona, Arizona. The group process challenged us on all fronts, as did the weather, for we were blanketed with snow in an unexpected February storm. One drowsy morning, I was awakened by a forceful inner voice with this cryptic message:

This is a divine classroom and this is a guiltless path!

What does one do with a message so simple and profound? I shared it with my friend, Margie, and we then went on about our day—at times cooperating with and then rebelling against the challenges of group work. The words remained with me, quietly growing roots, as I placed myself more firmly on the path of the learner, the initiate. Years passed as I mothered three daughters, built a private practice in psychotherapy and bodywork, and expanded my spiritual horizons.

About ten years after the Sedona experience I was intensely drawn to add past life regression (PLR) therapy to my psychotherapy practice. Placing the psychotherapy work within the greater picture of soul work and soul growth was a logical direction. Past life regression is a profound way of accessing soul understanding so I studied, read, and became a certified clinical hypnotherapist. I then took further training in PLR therapy. The exciting research by pioneers and theorists in PLR therapy expands our understanding of higher levels of consciousness. It was this rich arena of study I wanted to further explore, focusing on the experiences of the soul in the interlife.

As clients’ past lives unfolded, one after the other, it became clear that this planet is indeed a "divinity school". However, the divinity part didn’t often make itself clear until after the death of that life. From the soul’s perspective in the interlife, we discovered what had been learned and what learning remained.

Working with guilt quickly became an integral aspect of PLR. We came to understand guilt as a learned response to real or imagined mistakes. Because of the veil of forgetfulness, we condemn ourselves and others due to misunderstanding our purpose. Guilt is difficult to work with because it has become sanctioned by many religious traditions and ingrained in judiciary systems. Guilt handicaps abound. Simply being born and taking on a negatively skewed ego can do it. Our guilt indoctrination easily intertwines with our inability to remember our divinity. However, through the greater perspective gained from PLR therapy, compassion grows, guilt dwindles, and a more appreciative view of our journey evolves. We will go into more depth with guilt issues in Chapter 6.

Having a sense of divinity is often a hit and miss proposition. We may experience the Divine when music, poetry, the stars or love ignite our hearts. There are moments when sunlight, radiating through the trees, leaves us breathless and we drop into a deep sense of the eternal. At deaths and births, the realms beyond Earth feel very near—and they are. However, to most of us, most of the time, life doesn’t feel particularly divine. We certainly aren’t accustomed to embracing the totality of life as being divine, in the way of a wise teacher.

We reside in this divine classroom our whole life. After the death of the body, we evaluate our