Soul on the Street

by William Roache

  My mother was a great character and had real strength. Sara used to say my voice always changed when I spoke to her on the phone, that I was on guard. Possibly I was. I knew my mother had really made the most of her life. She had had no education as such and had left school at 14, but she had gone on to get a diploma in drama and become a magistrate and a director of the Townswomen’s Guild drama group. She had done well, and I think I recognized that. I always wanted to please her.

  I had very good parents and I hope that in turn my own children do not find me that bad really. Just over a year after the death of Edwina, Sara and I had a son, William. The hurt of Edwina’s loss was unbelievable and I wasn’t sure whether we should have another child, but William’s arrival turned out to be a wonderful thing, a very happy event. As the children grew up we found ourselves involved in a great many activities, including horse-riding, as Verity became an excellent rider and competed very successfully with the British Show Pony Society. With family activities, sport, charity events, my glittering singing career and of course the drama of Ken and Deirdre’s marriage, life was very full both on and off the Street.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Spiritual Path

  ‘Align yourself with the consciousness of the soul.’

  All this time I was continuing my search for answers to all the great questions of life. The great joy about being in touch with your spiritual self is that you do get answers. Seek and ye shall find, as it says in the Bible. So often I have put out a questioning thought and have received the reply with a wonderful feeling of excitement. It’s like getting a long-awaited letter. The answer is not always what you expect, but you know without doubt that it is the answer.

  I work my way forward by putting things to the test of experience. This is often a mental or an emotional test, a very personal test, where you receive the evidence to your own satisfaction. But your own satisfaction is what counts. It’s only through personal experience that you really learn. Eventually, you just know when something is right. There are things that strike chords, like musical chords, and you know that they are true.

  Learning in this personal way does mean, however, that you cannot prove to other people what you yourself know. I find that very frustrating. But of course ultimately it’s quite right, because if you could just prove spiritual truths, people wouldn’t develop in the correct way. You have to grow slowly and gradually. Every journey is totally individual and we each have to experience the events that we need to experience and overcome the difficulties we need to overcome, and that’s how we move forward.

  I don’t think it’s a gradual progression; I think we go along in fits and starts. Some incarnations we waste. We load ourselves up with too much to do and then don’t make much progress. We never quite go backwards, because a soul that’s reached a certain level of consciousness and worth won’t lose that, but we can take on too much in an incarnation and get sidetracked. Some incarnations zoom along wonderfully and you fulfil your destiny and your soul purpose and you go back and everyone says, ‘Well done!’ Others don’t work out well at all. There’s never any judgemental criticism or punishment in the spiritual realms, so when that happens people will just say, ‘Well, never mind, you did your best but you overloaded yourself a bit there. Maybe next time don’t set yourself such a big challenge.’ But at the end of the day it’ll be your decision as to what your destiny is.

  ‘Lessons refused or neglected in one stage are presented in a far more difficult form in the next.’

  In every incarnation we have to try to overcome the lower self, and this has many aspects, not all of them bad. These aspects combine to form the personality, for good or ill, and until we are able go beyond it, the strongest of these will determine the type of person we are.

  For the majority of men the desire for sex can be the strongest motivator, whereas in women it can be the need for security, which often manifests as the desire for money. The strongest desire will continue to mould the personality until either it is brought under control or the consciousness is raised to a higher level.

  If one desire is brought under control, then the next strongest aspect will take over, and so on until all desire is controlled. That is when the lower self has been tamed. The higher self has no desire other than oneness with God.

  ‘Spirit is master and matter is the servant.

  Let the spirit show its mastery.’

  There is a big difference between controlling and suppressing a desire. Suppressing a desire is putting a lid on a pan of boiling water: it has to erupt. Controlling a desire is having the power to move it into a higher channel and turn it into something good. Ridding yourself of a particularly strong desire has been described as like ‘being unchained from a lunatic’. It brings an incredible sense of peace.

  Everyone is involved in this infinite process and we will all be given the environment and circumstances that we need to help us progress on our spiritual journey.

  Essentially we are all gods in the making. In our hearts there is a light that shines brightly. This is the part of God that is ours, or, shall we say, the part of us that is God. This light is undeveloped and our soul is the vehicle that will carry it to maturity.

  ‘The Holy Grail is that ever-burning flame.’

  This light covers itself in cloaks or bodies to take it on the journey of growth. Its first covering is the spirit body. This is then covered by the mental body, then the emotional body and then the etheric body. The etheric body is the exact replica of the physical body into which the soul will incarnate. When the spirit body is fully developed, all the other bodies will have served their purpose and been discarded.

  The first body to be discarded is the physical body. What we call death is in fact the release of the other bodies, the bodies of higher vibration. As each body is discarded the soul rises to higher and higher levels until it reaches the level of pure spirit. From pure spirit we came and to pure spirit we return, but as an evolved being.

  In the meantime life on Earth isn’t easy for any of us and when you think of all the violence and hatred there are in the world, you can understand how a lot of people say, ‘How can there be a God?’

  To understand it, you have to think of the situation we are in. God has created a place for us to learn in and part of the process is that we are closed off from our true selves, so we feel we’re alone, and we’re given free will, because the point is that we have to battle on our own and work through our own development. As we go through it, during many incarnations, learning to discriminate between good and evil and right and wrong and to take responsibility, we inevitably do bad things because that’s what the lower self wants. And that is where all the evil in the world has come from. We have created it through our desire for power and wealth and through the expression of our lust and anger.

  That is all part of our lower nature and God gave us free will so that we could learn to overcome it. Now, He’s not going to give free will on the one hand and then intervene. So the world is full of evil. But if it didn’t exist, how could we learn the difference between good and evil?

  God is often blamed for the evil here, but the real question is not how come He allows the suffering but how come we allow it? It can be very hard for us to accept the fact that it is we who are responsible for all the suffering.

  ‘All the evil in the world has been caused by man’s free will serving his baser self.’

  Also, until we have total conscious control over ourselves, we have to go through suffering in order to learn from it. It would be nice if there were a way for us to grow without such suffering, but it’s really the quickest way. It isn’t easy for us to understand, and even though I’m now giving an explanation of it there are still certain circumstances, for instance when a loving family is totally devastated by some awful disease, when it just doesn’t make sense to me. Life can seem very unfair. But that’s because when we’re here we only have a limited perspective. It’s only when we get to our real home in the spi
ritual realms and look back that we get a true understanding of why we had to go through a certain set of circumstances. Then all is revealed.

  In the spiritual realms we have a full understanding that there is an absolute deity – infinite love, infinite power, infinite wisdom – and that we are all part of it, but for our development at the stage we are at, as independent beings with free will we need to be put into the material world. It’s a theatrical creation, in a sense. ‘All the world’s a stage,’ as Shakespeare wrote. But while we’re here we need to believe in it and live it fully. It’s method acting taken to extremes. It can be painful, but at the end of the day it’s a process that we’ve chosen to go through to overcome fear and desire and move on spiritually.

  And ultimately, all the evil in the world will be dispersed and there will only be love. Love, always love.

  ‘Know full well that love is the strongest power in any world in any condition.’

  In the meantime help is always available if we ask for it. When you are feeling particularly down, just try asking for help, perhaps each night as you go to bed, and you will get a result – as long as you’re not asking for the winning lottery numbers or some other materialistic thing, that is! Even then God will always answer your prayers in some way. It’s just that more often than not what you’re asking for isn’t right for you and your destiny or you’re not able to receive it at that time. But if you send out a prayer, it will be answered in some way. Then it’s up to you whether you can receive it or accept it.

  I know this works, because I’ve tried it. Once, quite some time ago, I was feeling a bit down. It didn’t relate to anything particularly, but I was feeling low and I wanted to feel loved. So I asked to experience the love of God. Then one day I was walking in the park and I saw a mother pushing a pram with a baby in it. She was looking lovingly at the baby and the baby was looking lovingly at her. And I just burst into tears. The beauty of that mother! I felt tremendous love for her. And for the baby! And then I switched on the news and saw people starving in Ethiopia and again I wanted to cry. I felt so much love for them that it was almost unbearable. For the next few days, wherever I looked, whoever I saw, it was the same thing. I thought, What’s going on?

  What was happening was that I was feeling the love of God. He loves us, all of us. So I was loving other people, not being loved, as I thought I would be. I was just looking at life and loving everyone. It was almost unbearable to see some of the suffering, but lovely to see the happiness. And so I had the answer to my request to experience the love of God.

  Ultimately, we are all one with God and the purpose of a religion is to bring us to a closer understanding of this. Tragically, quite the opposite has often been the case. In most religions a priesthood has set itself up as an intermediary between God and His people. But being ordained does not make anyone nearer to God. Neither does being well versed in theology. Closeness to God is dependent upon the state of a person’s being, upon their individual worth. A simple man who loves those around him and goes peacefully about his duties can be more spiritual than a high-ranking priest.

  Initially religious leaders arrive from the spiritual realms in a great burst of light and love. They have a direct contact with the divine source and are here to give out wonderful spiritual messages to humanity. Jesus came to give the message of love; Buddha came to give the message of enlightenment; Mohammed, I believe, came to teach courage. Each of the great teachers had a lesson for their people at that time.

  The tragedy is, once these teachers go, the people left behind try to encapsulate their teachings and end up locking them into a rigid form. Then dogma is created, which is the deadening and divisive aspect of all religions. Ceremonies, rituals and extended teachings become the religion and they gradually move further and further away from the original message. So religions actually hinder the search for truth. They’re just made up of empty ritual and people trying desperately to hang on to what they think are the great teachings of their original leader. But by that stage it’s inevitable that the teachings have become distorted. The words of Jesus, for example, have been so distorted over the last 2,000 years. He didn’t want a Church, he just wanted people to love one another. And his was the greatest sacrifice – he’s probably the most highly evolved spiritual being we know who has ever incarnated.

  ‘Jesus had reached such a state of grace and purity that he could manifest the Christ principle of divine love.’

  Jesus did not want hierarchy and ceremony but his simple message – ‘Love one another as I love you’ – to be understood and lived. He didn’t want to be worshipped as God. He was indeed the son of God, as are we all, but he did not die so that our sins would be forgiven; instead he came to show us the way to the kingdom of God through retribution, forgiveness, love and service to others: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’

  Unfortunately Christianity has strayed so far from its simple origins that I feel it may have to suffer a complete breakdown before the true teachings can re-emerge. It has already fallen in influence and popularity. But Jesus is a great teacher and still loves us dearly and works in the heavenly realms on behalf of us all.

  I was brought up in the Church of England and I still call myself Church of England, but I go back and forth in my attitude towards it. So many people who are in it are loving and well-intentioned and sincere in their beliefs, but I can’t fully accept its teachings. I feel that what it does is take certain spiritual truths that it does understand and try to encapsulate them into doctrine. Well, spirit can never be encapsulated and held – spirit is free and open and loving and different for different people.

  This is another reason why people are falling away from Christianity, because the consciousness of the human race is rising all the time and a lot of the Christian doctrine was really more suitable for the people of another age, people who were illiterate or very poorly educated. The height of the Church’s power was in the Dark Ages and it hasn’t moved forward since then.

  It’s sad when you see individuals within the Church who are wrestling with their own faith, striving to understand and seeking the truth, but who aren’t being helped by the teachings that they have been given.

  ‘Theology emanates from the mind of humans. Thus revelation always must take priority over theology.’

  Christianity has done a lot of good in many ways, but it’s now not teaching primarily what it should be teaching. Splitting into different Churches and sects hasn’t helped. Nowadays, however, there is a strong ecumenical movement and some of the top people are showing a real willingness to bridge the divide and I’m still optimistic that they can.

  Where I really part company with Christianity is over their lack of understanding about the spiritual realms and life after death. Not everyone in the Spiritualist Church and the various mystical movements agrees with reincarnation. But at least, as Peggy Kennard was always quoting to me, what esoteric writings say is, ‘Never accept anything that offends your reason.’ Now if you go to a Christian service and think rationally about what you’re listening to and saying, half of it will offend your reason.

  ‘There is only one religion, the religion of the living God.’

  Atheists say that God doesn’t exist, that He is man-made. They go about ‘proving’ their case by debunking religion and in that sense they are right because religions are man-made but that has nothing to do with the existence of God. Man with his theology has strayed from the truth and if people cannot accept theology they think they cannot accept God. Some religions are as far from the truth as atheism itself. But God does exist and you will find Him in every aspect of nature and within yourself. You do not need theology or religion; speak to your own soul – that is your point of contact with God.

  I wanted to ensure that my own children had a spiritual awareness but weren’t hampered by religious dogma or the fear of death that I grew up with. Verity and William had the lackadaisical easy-going Church of England take-or-leave-it side of religious educ
ation and we were never churchgoers apart from weddings, christenings and so on. There was no particularly strong religious element at all in their upbringing, but when they were in their late teens I gave them a short text I had written called ‘A Gift of Understanding’. They also heard me read it out in Manchester Cathedral one Christmas morning. It was really just a starting point for them.

  Since then we have had the odd little conversation about spiritual things, but I do believe you shouldn’t try and impose anything on people. When they’re ready, they’ll ask, and that’s when you need to have the reply ready. At the moment neither of them has any particular interest in such matters. But they do know how I see things and they do refer to my views from time to time and seem to be in tune, as far as I see it, with them. It will be up to them at some point in their lives, if they wish, to go deeper.

  My son from my first marriage, Linus, found his own way. He follows Andrew Cohen, who teaches a spiritual path that he calls Evolutionary Enlightenment. The focus is on the actual process of enlightenment and liberation, and it has benefited Linus tremendously. We email quite a lot and have great talks on the subject. He’s following his own interests and rightfully learning a lot in the process because we should all choose the paths that best suit us.

  This is why you should never condemn anything. However it may seem to you, if someone is improving as a result of it and gaining more knowledge about themselves spiritually, then it’s good. It might not be for you, but don’t dismiss it. The danger is when the ego gets involved and people say, ‘My way is right. God only works through us.’ It’s horrendous that major religions actually teach that. And it is why they have committed so many atrocities in the name of God.

  All the great religious teachers – Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and so on – were essentially saying, ‘Love one another. Work together.’ And this is all that’s needed. You don’t need a Church to be spiritual, you just need an understanding that there’s one living God and you’re part of it. We all are. We’re all the same as God in essence, but not in degree. We’re all little pieces of divine love trying to grow. We don’t need dogma and ritual for that; all we need is to love and care and be compassionate.