Conscious Life Journal: How did you come to write your books?
Rob Schwartz: I was a marketing communications consultant, doing different forms of corporate writing that I found deeply unfulfilling, and I had the distinct sense that there was some particular purpose for my life. But I didn’t know what it was and I wasn’t even sure how to figure it out. So I did some career counseling. I took the Meyers-Briggs inventory. I went to family and friends and said, “I’m really very unhappy doing this corporate work. I feel like there’s some other calling for me but I don’t know what it is. What do you think I should do with my life?” Half the people I talked to just shrugged their shoulders and the other half advised me to do what they were doing. So I started to think outside the box and this idea came to me: go see a psychic medium. I had never done that before. I wasn’t even sure if I believed in mediumship. But I went on May 7, 2003, and I remember that date because it was on that day that my life changed.
The medium introduced me to the concept of spirit guides—highly evolved nonphysical beings with whom we plan our lives before we come into body and who then guide us through our lives after we’re here. Through this particular medium I was able to talk with my guides. They said a lot of amazing things to me in that session, one of which was that I planned my life, including my biggest challenges, before I was born. Without me telling them, they knew what my major life challenges had been and they were able to explain why I had planned those experiences before I was born. I thought about this perspective constantly in the weeks after the session. It allowed me to see, for the first time, the deeper purpose of my greatest challenges. And that was very healing. I realized I was onto a concept that would bring a similar kind of healing to other people, and that was the impetus for leaving the corporate sector and starting on the path of writing Your Soul’s Plan.
CLJ: Why do we plan these life challenges?
RS: There are five main reasons. One is to release and balance karma. Balancing karma means you choose before you’re born to have an experience that energetically completes or offsets a previous experience. Releasing karma means you heal the underlying tendency that created the karma in the first place.
The second reason is healing. In Your Soul’s Plan a young African-American woman plans to be born completely deaf. In the lifetime previous to the current one she had the same mother she has in this lifetime, and when she was a little girl in that previous lifetime she heard her mother shot to death. She was so traumatized that she took her own life in that previous lifetime and returned to Spirit with an energy of unhealed trauma which needed to be healed. In her pre-birth planning session her spirit guide said, “My dear, would you prefer to be born deaf so that no similar trauma happens to you again and so that you can complete your healing from the previous lifetime?” And she responded, “Yes, that is what I wish to do.”
The third reason, which is true in every pre-birth plan I’ve looked at, is service to others.
The fourth reason for planning life challenges is to contrast. The nonphysical realm that we come from is the realm of great love and light and peace and joy. The soul is made from the energy of unconditional love. So if we’re in this realm of unconditional love, and we are made of unconditional love, that means that the soul experiences no contrast to itself. The soul doesn’t fully understand or appreciate who or what it is. So we come into body for the experience of what you could call the “not-love,” so that when we go home at the end of the physical lifetime, we understand much more profoundly who we really are as beings made from the energy of unconditional love.
The fifth reason is healing or correcting false beliefs or false feelings. Almost all of us have had at least one past life, if not many, in which certain things cause us to pick up a false belief or a false feeling about ourselves. The two most common are feeling unworthy, or perhaps even worthless, and a feeling of powerlessness. The soul knows itself to be infinitely worthy and infinitely powerful. So if part of our personality picks up a false belief like that, to the soul it feels discordant and the soul wants to clear or heal it. Certain challenges will be planned to bring the false feeling or false belief to conscious awareness. Once it reaches the level of conscious awareness we can then set about healing it.
CLJ: How do all the details and planning happen?
RS: One of the mediums featured in my books reports that when she goes into a pre-birth planning session, Spirit shows her something that looks like an incredibly vast and elaborate flowchart, a series of decision points. If you do A, then X happens. If you do B, then Y happens. The flowchart is so enormous it’s beyond human comprehension, but it’s not beyond the soul’s comprehension. That flowchart is the soul taking into account the free will decisions that the personality may make. That’s why you have an almost infinite number of decision points. That’s how true learning and healing occur, and you have a lot of leeway to go down different paths within that broader outline.
Almost everyone who comes for a private session is interested in a Between Lives Soul Regression. During the session the person goes into a past life, usually one that had a big impact on the plan for the current life. They leave the body at the end of the past life and a portion of their consciousness crosses back over to our nonphysical home. They’re usually greeted by a guide and they talk to the guide briefly about why they were shown that past life and how it affected the plan for their current lifetime. Then we ask the guide to escort them to the Council of Elders. The Council consists of very wise, loving, and highly evolved beings who oversee the incarnation on Earth. They know the client’s life plan. They know how well the client is doing in terms of fulfilling their life plan. And they have suggestions as to how they can better fulfill the life plan.
We’re learning how to give and receive love more unconditionally. And both of those are equally important. It’s not just a matter of giving love. It’s also a matter of receiving love from others.
CLJ: Are there some things that are specifically set? For example, do we choose our parents?
RS: Yes, parents are a very good example, and that includes adoptive parents. Another thing would be a physical illness or handicap that you’re born with that can’t be treated by medical science. You would know that before you came to body. Most of the planning is flexible. It’s not just the case that there’s a Plan A. There’s also a Plan B, C, D, E, F, G, and on and on.
CLJ: Are there common themes that we humans choose for our challenges, like disease and divorce and suicide?
RS: A typical pre-birth plan shows the level of consciousness increasing slowly over a number of years, then it suddenly spikes, and that in inflection point where it spikes is the pre-birth planning of a life challenge. Given humanity’s current state of evolution, some challenges are chosen much more frequently than others because they’re effective at awakening the personality. One of them is physical illness, very often cancer. Another one is an accident which is not really an accident. The third one that’s very common is the death of a loved one. Healing and awakening are very much a process, like peeling the layers of an onion. Something happens and people respond to it in what they believe is a conscious manner, and then life seems to get harder and that means they’re going to a deeper layer of the onion.
Suicide is not planned as a certainty but as a possibility, or sometimes a probability, or occasionally a probability so high as to be almost a certainty. You could say the same thing about all kinds of different life challenges. Planned does not mean it’s set in stone; it means it’s possible or probable or highly probable. Eventually, when humanity rises to a higher state of consciousness, those kinds of very harsh challenges won’t be needed anymore, and then people will plan much less difficult challenges or perhaps even shift to learning more through love and joy rather than pain.
CLJ: Are we raising our consciousness collectively?
RS: That’s my understanding, and I believe the Buddha said you can learn anything you want to learn through love and joy. It doesn’t necessarily have to be done through pain and suffering, but pain and suffering is a very effective way to learn. It’s very motivating, and I think that what’s happening on the Earth plane is that people are having their hearts broken open in order to become more loving beings, to remember their true nature.
CLJ: Would you speak about the courage that it takes to be human?
RS: The Earth is not the most difficult place to have an incarnation, but it is one of the most difficult, so not all beings are willing to incarnate on Earth. Those who do come here are viewed throughout the universe as among the most courageous of all beings. After you’ve had an incarnation on Earth, it becomes part of your energy signature—your unique vibration that consists of a combination of color and sound. When you’ve incarnated on Earth, the color and sound change, the vibration changes. So after someone has been here and returns to the nonphysical realm, other beings can see from their energy signature that they’ve had an incarnation on Earth, and their response is something like, “You had an incarnation on Earth? Oh!” They’re tremendously impressed and respectful because it’s understood how diffcult it is to be here and only the most courageous of beings will choose to incarnate here.
CLJ: Can you tell us how the chapter on pets came about?
RS: It came simply out of my own desire to know if pets were part of the pre-birth planning process. I felt intuitively that they probably were, but when I actually researched it and received confirmation from Spirit, that was a very powerful moment. There’s a touching story about a woman who planned to be a dwarf in this lifetime. She’s told by her guides that this is going to be difficult for her and that when she’s a young child she’ll be ostracized and teased in school. She realizes she’s going to need a lot of emotional support to get through that so she plans with a number of diffierent pets—dogs, cats, horses, there’s even a rooster named Crooked Beak—to come into her pre-birth planning session, and they talk to her about how they will supply her with the unconditional love that she’s unable to get from other people.
I’ve seen this again and again in people’s pre-birth planning sessions. Whatever challenges are set up, they also set up the support they’re going to need in order to handle the challenges.
CLJ: Do you have a final message for our readers?
RS: Remember who you really are. I often recommend to go to a mirror, look into your own eyes, and remind yourself who you really and truly are. Say to yourself, “I am a holy, eternal, courageous soul. I’m the brave soul who left a realm of love and light and peace and joy to come here to experience great challenges so that I could release and balance karma, heal, be of service to others, experience contrast, and correct false feelings about myself.”
Every single person that’s here is a vast, multidimensional, eternal soul, very courageous for coming into body, and very courageous for executing the pre-birth plan after they’re in body. And I would like everybody to treat themselves with the sort of respect they inherently deserve. Because that’s who they really and truly are.