LIVING IN INTERESTING TIMES

Michael Channeled by Shepherd Hoodwin

Greetings to you all. You do indeed live in interesting times. Michael students know this as a period when humanity is transitioning from the average soul age being young or achievement focused to mature or relationship/inner world focused. This is typically the most dramatic change that a sentient species experiences both individually and collectively. Exactly where people are in this varies by location. There are places where the average is quite a bit younger or older than the world average. In addition, there is a broad range among individuals in most places.

The beginning of a grand cycle is occupied with getting accustomed to the new species and environment. You gradually become more capable of being effective. No matter how many previous grand cycles you’ve had, there are many new things to learn about in each life form and planet. The movement through the infant, baby, and young soul developmental stages is focused on becoming more adept at handling the outer world, making deeper inner and spiritual explorations possible later.

There is certainly also much internal development in those stages. People are, after all, having relationships even in their earliest lifetimes, so they are learning about themselves and other people, and are wondering about the larger universe. There are not black-and-white divisions between the soul ages as to what is learned. It is not that younger souls are entirely outwardly focused.

However, once there is an adequate ability on the part of a sentient species to build a world, there emerges from within an urge to focus more on the meaning of it all. There is more room for refinements in emotional understanding, considering the results of previous actions and how future actions might be improved.

We caution against jumping to the conclusion that older souls are necessarily wiser, more loving, or more progressive. Having more experience gives one greater complexity and therefore potential, but due to free will, there are baby and young souls who live at a higher vibration of love than some mature and old souls because of the choices that they have been making in their lifetimes. We encourage our students not to be dismissive of any soul or group of souls due to their assumed soul age (or for any other reason). Ultimately, the grand cycles are about learning greater unconditional love, but some are learning more about that through exploring the absence of it, which can help account for some older souls with higher negativity than one might expect.

If a soul is going to come to a conscious spiritual path, the likelihood grows as the soul advances through the stages. However, the majority will complete seventh-level old without ever coming to a conscious spiritual path. They certainly will have learned some things because they have had experiences, and having adequate experiences in each of the thirty-five soul age levels (seven in each of the five physical plane soul ages) is all that is required to graduate from the physical plane school, what we call “cycling off.”

As with regular schools, one can graduate with anywhere from an A to a C average. You are more likely to graduate with a higher GPA if you have been consciously seeking, because it means that you will likely have found some tools that allow you to transfer from the School of Hard Knocks to the School of Conscious Choice where you learn to grow more through joy and less through pain. You know that you’re in school and you engage with the process with intention rather than being pushed from pillar to post. If you are a gifted student, you can be helpful in tutoring other students who are struggling more if they want your help.

The term lightworker refers to any soul who wishes to be a blessing to others. The majority of lightworkers would not use it to describe themselves, but they carry a vibration that other lightworkers can recognize, what might be referred to as “goodness” if you remove religious associations from that word in which you are considered good if you conform to a certain list of rules and evil if you do not. Goodness is simply a desire to love accurately; to love accurately, one must grasp what love is.

Many do things they believe are expressions of love that actually harm, such as parents who say, “I’m doing this for your own good” even though it causes suffering. It’s simple: love brings improvement; acts that are not based in love cause objective, material harm. It true that sometimes people overcome harm and grow as a result, but that is growing through pain and is not the most efficient way to grow. People don’t need more obstacles deliberately placed in their path to grow; human life provides plenty of them. They need more light shone on the path.

Most Michael students are Michael students because they are innately lightworkers and are seeking tools to become better at it. This is also true of many who participate in mainstream religious and spiritual traditions, although probably not the majority of them. If you are a lightworker who does not know about more sophisticated spiritual teachings—all you know is your local church, temple, or mosque, for instance—you will find a way to be in that environment and resonate with whatever truths that the teachings of that institution offer. People hear things according to who they are. In a religious service, some might hear a message of love while others hear one of hellfire, for example. Those who hear love don’t engage much with the negative messages because the message of love is what speaks to them.

Souls have a pretty good idea what they are signing up for prior to beginning a series of lifetimes on a planet. You knew coming in that the human species is pretty aggressive (which can be both positive and negative), for example. You are also aware of the general circumstances of individual lifetimes prior to incarnating. You do not know everything that is going to happen; you have a better idea about what is more imminent. If you made an agreement to be born to a married couple who is likely to divorce and you come in anyway, then clearly it was not a deal-breaker in terms of what you came to do.

Further out, it’s harder to predict what will happen. Let’s say that when you chose your parents, they were not on a vector toward divorce, but things took a turn in their relationship and they decided to end their marriage. That obviously affected you and maybe caused some trauma that was not part of your life plan. However, souls are voracious for growth. Whenever you encounter something that is difficult to handle, if you find positive ways to deal with it, you grow in skill so that the next time you encounter a similar challenge, you will do better with it. Therefore, the soul does not generally object to setbacks or hardships unless they are so far beyond their capacity to cope that they end up being devastating. That does happen sometimes. That is the nature of living in a difficult and somewhat backward civilization.

If as a soul you were to say, “I will only be born to ideal parents who are unconditionally loving and maybe, for good measure, rich, good-looking, and have great genes,” you might have to get on a very long waiting list. But you choose the situation that fits your priorities. That could include karmic repayment. As a soul, you are content to endure the hardship that will allow you to relieve yourself of a karmic debt.

You are both essence and personality. It is natural for you as a personality, as the human being who has to live day-to-day on the front lines of human experience, to imagine that your purpose is mainly to be comfortable and happy. You probably think of that in terms of removing some immediate stresses. That is understandable. The personality who knows about things such as the soul’s plan might even be angry that the soul didn’t set it up to make everything as comfortable and pleasant as the personality would wish.

Souls, on the other hand, by their very nature take a larger and longer-term view. They invest in increasing their ultimate capacity for joy and pleasure through some lessons that may, in the short term, be difficult to endure.

Souls do sometimes bite off more than they can chew. They forget how difficult it can be on the physical plane. However, older souls, especially, generally make pretty good life plans that are within the range of what they are capable of dealing with. Guides are available to help with life planning to ensure that the goals are probably achievable, although due to free will, no one can guarantee anything.

The universe is half structure (which includes your life plan) and half chaos, due to free will. If you did not have free will, you could not grow. If everything were known in advance, it would all be rote and there would be no point to any of it. There must be room for people to choose, and that must include the ability to make what you might call “bad choices”—those that lead to unnecessary pain. However, if people make choices that lead to unnecessary pain, their consciousness is not yet sophisticated enough in that area to make choices that do not lead to unnecessary pain. Almost by definition, if they made those choices, they need some lessons so that in the future they will become more skillful at making choices that do things in a more positive manner.

Even a devastation that temporarily breaks you can lead to a deepening and refinement where you are ultimately greater than you would have been without dealing with that event. At first, you will not know how to deal with it, but if you seek healing and wisdom, which is what being on a conscious spiritual path is about, it is likely that eventually you will heal and grow. It won’t be easy, but if you are motivated to face yourself to see what was missing from your understanding and to try to fill in the gaps, you will prevail. If not, you will continue to grow through pain and make similar mistakes. Maybe eventually, you will become tired of growing through pain and will start to become curious about alternative paths.

You could say that the motto of the consciously evolving soul is “It’s all good.” Or it’s at least mostly good, in that every experience, if harvested with understanding, can lead to growth. You might think, “I’m sick of growing! I just want to feel good.” That would not be an unreasonable attitude at times. Growth ultimately gives you more possibilities of experience—it expands your capacity for happiness, beauty, satisfaction, and love. Still, sometimes you need to prioritize the short term. By all means, do take care of yourself.

Think about what makes you feel better, what nurtures you to get through the day, week, or month. We teach about the balance among true rest, play, study, and work. When these four parts of life are in balance, you grow more efficiently. If your well is almost dry, think about the rest that will help you refill it. If you are without joy, think about what makes you happy, true play—what makes you laugh and rejoice. If you’re bored, think about your true study. If you lack satisfaction, like you’re not accomplishing anything, think about your true work. You can have your “trues” channeled, but if you know yourself pretty well, you can probably come up with some things that work for you in these areas.

Many are troubled by the increase of belligerence and cruelty on the part of governments. Throughout history, these kinds of things ebb and flow, but they have not been uncommon. There have been far more autocratic leaders than enlightened ones. There have always been greedy people trying to squeeze out more from the poor. And so forth. It is particularly difficult and even shocking now to those who observed a few decades where things were becoming more balanced. There was a lot of hope for increasing peace and equality, and some of that progress has temporarily been lost.

With history, it is often two steps forward and one back, and sometimes two steps forward and two or three steps back. To feel sadness over this is a normal response by compassionate people. It should be noted, though, that any lessons gained cannot be lost. They may be forgotten, but they’re there to be accessed and eventually probably will be. You can see this in a course of a life.

Let’s say someone became clean or sober and did well for years. Then there’s some stress and they backslide—they start using or drinking again. However, they can never again not be a person who achieved sobriety or freedom from drug addiction. They can access those resources when they are ready.

Humanity has made a lot of progress. Even though there is now some backsliding, it does not lose what it gained from its previous progress. Therefore, it becomes easier to recreate it in the future, whereas the first time is more difficult.

How can you deal with what is in the news?

One of the most useful spiritual/personal growth skills is “living from the inside out,” or what Buddhists refer to as “non-attachment,” which is not the same as detachment. The word detachment might bring to mind cold indifference to what is going on. Non-attachment is compassionate and connected to choice. We are fond of saying that all is choice, that your path as a soul is largely about learning to make increasingly skillful, wise, and loving choices. If your internal experience is excessively controlled by your environment, it takes a lot of your bandwidth away from being able to consider your choices and make skillful ones. You would not be human if you were not affected at all by the choices that other people make, and it is especially easy to be thrown off balance by what surprises you, but there are ways to minimize the negative effects of outside influences. One is to focus on what is in your power to do and to withdraw focus from what is not.

Some people who are in the habit of being outraged like being outraged because it is an outlet for their anger. They keep seeming surprised by behavior that should not be a surprise at that point. For example, and this is just one example: if you are surprised by anything that Donald Trump does, you have not been paying attention for a very long time. If you are not surprised, you do not have to waste much energy on being upset and outraged, even when, objectively speaking, the actions are cruel and heinous.

You might ask, “How could I not be upset by this?” We suggest a path of what might be called “spiritual practicality.” You can be upset, but what is your priority? Is it to be helpful or is to vent your anger? If you want to be helpful, the most energetically efficient approach is to observe with clarity and care. Clear observation is the most important tool one has to make good choices. Be curious not only to know what is going on but also about the motivations of all concerned. Since you’re largely here to grow, you may as well grow from this experience. You might, for example, explore the psychology of people who support these actions. What can you learn about the human condition, particularly in this case about what crowds out love? Most importantly, you can ask yourself, “Is there any of this in me, even a small amount? In what outrages me in someone’s actions—for example, greed—do I have any of that in me?” You heal the whole when you heal what you see in others that is also in yourself, because you are part of the whole.

No one can control other people. Despots may suppress behaviors, but they cannot change other people’s minds and hearts. However, everyone can change themselves. Your first point of power to heal humanity is in observing where things in need of healing show up in yourself, which they always will, at least to some degree.

You may be quite right in saying, “I would never do what those people do.” But if you can observe, clarify, and have compassion for any similar motivations within yourself—motivations you would generally not act on but show up occasionally in your thoughts and feelings—you can shine a light to others who have a more extreme version of them.

The most comforting words we can offer is that the current state of affairs is likely to be pretty temporary because humanity is more capable and advanced than it was the last time much of the world descended into extreme despotism and aggression.

Another issue of great concern is climate change. It is not going to be an easy century ahead, but we again see cause for hope. First of all, humanity has a growing motivation to save the natural world, even if those who currently have political clout are trying to undo progress. In general, there is more will to correct course than there has ever been. You might recall that at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, it was a fringe movement. Environmentalism is not yet universal, but it is getting close to being so.

In addition, one of the hallmarks of the late young soul cycle is excitement about innovation to meet challenges. There are many brilliant, creative people coming up with technologies and other clever solutions.

The greatest cause for hope that is rarely taken into account is that human consciousness is the most powerful influence on the planet. If human consciousness rises to accommodate a little more unconditional love, truth, and beauty, it will unleash a power that would allow nature to heal itself more quickly than most believe possible, and it would take less than you might imagine. Human consciousness is growing in its capacity to love. It is easy to judge by the appearance of things that this is not the case, but what you receive from the news is generally not a balanced picture of the whole of what is occurring in humanity. It is not that news outlets want to present a biased picture necessarily. Some do, of course. But even the most earnest of them that want to be fair and accurate don’t have the bird’s eye view where they can get a correct picture of what is happening in humanity.

Those of us observing on higher planes do have that view, and we see progress. We see a lot of nasty unhealed emotions coming to the surface that have been there for a long time and are currently dominating some events, but we also see humanity reaching out to love, wanting to increase its love capacity. Therefore, when spiritual students come together as you have here, with the intention to amplify love, truth and beauty, you are providing an invaluable service.

Presently it is only a drop in the bucket, but consider medicine: a tiny amount of a substance can be powerful in your health. Consider the minuscule amounts of hormones that can change your body’s chemistry. A minuscule amount of unconditional love dropped into the mass consciousness is significant. If it can catalyze more such raising of humanity’s vibration, maybe it will eventually reach a critical mass.

Objectively speaking, there is no reason to be without hope. There are no guarantees which probabilities you will manifest, but we don’t think it will be the worst-case scenarios. We also don’t think it will be the best-case scenarios, either, but it is possible to inch things toward better-case scenarios. If you are expending too much energy focusing on negative events, you are not planting seeds of rebirth. That is the best reason to train yourself to focus more on love, truth, and beauty.

We are not suggesting that you bury your head in the sand, that you don’t engage with politics or the news, although for some, it might be advisable to take a break if you are being pulled down too much by them. Otherwise, devote yourself to whatever activism you are called to, and use it to promote positive values. Be articulate in addressing the shortcomings of current thinking and actions with non-attachment so that you are not meeting hate with more hate or resistance to hate, which is a form of hate, actually.

Speak truth with compassion and wisdom; many of you already do this well. Try not to be triggered by outrages. Yes, they are outrageous, but maybe you don’t need to be outraged. You already know and understand what is happening; it’s old news for you. Focus on what can turn it around.

Consider quality versus quantity. It’s not hard and fast, but let’s say that you increase the quality of your unconditional love by ten percent. That would be like having a hundred percent more love energy than you had at the previous level of consciousness, because a higher quality of love is much more powerful. So it is well worth your investment to raise your vibration. How do you do that? Noticing your thoughts and feelings, bringing love to them—deliberately correcting your own consciousness—is essential. Notice where fear has been in control.

Fear exists for good reasons. Fear is useful if you are in literal physical danger—it gets your attention so that you move away from a possibly harmful experience. However, much of human suffering arises from irrational fears that are not helpful. We teach about the seven obstacles (chief features). These are fears based on illusions. For example, you fear that if someone criticizes you, you will die; that is not rational.

The more you observe when fear is seizing control of your consciousness, and with compassion, release that, the more quickly you raise your vibration. The work within your own consciousness is the most within your control, and the most powerful.

There is also work to do in the world. Maybe you feel called to carry an amusing, penetrating, or thoughtful sign in a demonstration, or to write letters, make donations to more positive candidates, write a book, or have discussions with people whose hearts are open to new information. There’s plenty to do in the world, but if you do nothing else but heal your consciousness and raise your vibration, you are doing more than most.

MEDITATION

Many of you have felt helpless and hopeless. Allow these feelings of helplessness and hopelessness to come to the surface. Negative emotions do need to come up to release. Feel them coming up in you now like air bubbles that pop once they reach the surface.

Feel love sourced in the Tao coming through your essence, filling you with hope and a sense of your spiritual power, releasing unfounded fears.

Know yourself as an eternal, powerful soul.

If you have been feeling exhausted by the current state of affairs, that is perfectly understandable, but now feel the restorative power of love coming up through the earth, through nature, as well as coming down from spirit, including your guides and teachers. Ask for renewal and receive it into every fiber of your being.

Finally, ask within, “What one thing do I choose to do in the next week that will help me express the power that I have to be helpful in this time of great need?” It could be anything.

We will conclude here.

Love and blessings to each of you.

 

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East Coast Michael Gathering
Harrisonburg, Virginia
May 7, 2026