Does anyone know about the Michael teachings? I know very little but had a housemate who studied it extensively through a modification of it called "Higher Alignment."

The idea behind Higher Alignment is to locate a life partner who has the most similarities to you so that you can see each other's failings, and support each other's strengths. The usual way is to go along with the attraction of opposites. With an opposite, you don't have personal, inside experience with their negatives and each can hide them from each other (I mean the buried, subconscious stuff). So growth is not so easily fostered in that relationship. Also, they don't tend to be as successful as relationships between similars. Birds of a feather flock together, kind of a thing. So they teach you all kinds of ways to discern right away whether someone is on the same wavelength you are, to save you time in finding your soul mate.

Anyway, the Michael teachings are channeled. Michael is a "group soul" that many different channels have access to, so you can find various channelers with this same information. There are books on the teachings, but I haven't found them to be real readable. The idea is that we are all sparks of God and we go thru life after life so that God can experience "otherness" and have all these myriad experiences. Eventually, we evolve and go back to God. So it's a circular thing. Soul growth basically follows the same growth pattern as a single human lifetime does. First there are infant souls. There aren't many at this time on the planet nowdays. You wouldn't know any of them. They would be brand new souls, probably incarnated deep in a jungle, just merely concerned with the basics of food and shelter and learning what life is. Souls go thru each phase many, many times. So there can be a young infant soul, a middle infant soul, and an old infant soul.

Then it finally progresses to a baby soul. There are lots of baby souls on the planet right now, especially in the U.S. (Our country is a young country, as far as countries go, too, so the soul of the U.S. is an adolescent. Can't you just see that?! LOL!)

Baby souls need strong direction, black and white rules they can follow, a strong parental figure to guide them. They are not capable of nuances because they just haven't been around long enough. The world is a very big, scary place. They are motivated by safety and security. Remind you of anyone? How about our puppet in the White House and all of his followers?

The next phase after many, many lifetimes as a baby soul, is to progress to adolescent age. That’s where so many Americans are. That’s when a soul realizes that the parents/leaders are not always right. They begin to develop an ego of their own and become curious about their own power in the world. They are quite often yuppies—the “me” generation. They are the CEOs of our corporations. They are very creative and energetic. They are greedy for power over others, for money because it gives power, and for accumulating things of their own. They are the most materialistic. They assert their egos on the world and use others for their own goals. They are chiefly concerned with how far they can go in life. There are young adolescent souls, middle adolescent souls, and old adolescents who are just about done with that phase. They have mined all the gold out of it and are ready to open up to what’s beyond all that.

So they incarnate finally as “mature” souls. They realize that, “Hey! There are other people out there besides just me!” They want to get involved in relationships. They are the ones who are chiefly concerned with relating. They create all kinds of drama in relationships because they want to know where they end and the other begins. They want to know what the boundaries and differences are in relating with others.

After many lifetimes exploring relationships, the soul matures into an old soul. This soul has incarnated over and over and over and over. It has seen just about everything and knows there is much more to life that does not meet the eye. Ordinary life starts to become too mundane, too meaningless to hold their interest. They become intensely interested in what’s beyond our immediate five senses. This is when the soul begins to experiment with meditation, drugs possibly, astral travel, psychic phenomena, etc. I’d say I’m probably an old mature soul/borderline to new old soul. I’m just recently done with relationships. I’m very aware of how much the “unseen world” has to offer, how happy I am in deep meditation compared to my ordinary life, and yet it’s still difficult to devote myself to pursuing it.

Beyond the old soul stage, comes the soul devoted to world service. These are the rare old souls like Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc. They have deep mystical knowledge that all is God, and they just want to serve the Divine in all its manifestations. Their soul is getting ready to merge back into God.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the teachings on soul growth. But I’ve found this part to make enormous sense. No wonder my family members have always thought I was off in the land of fruits and nuts! No matter how I’ve tried to explain and show them what I’m learning and what makes me who I am, they cannot begin to understand. It’s because they have not had the lifetimes of experience that I have. I think I’m an older soul than they are. My mother constantly asks why I need to continue “searching” and why I can’t just be happy where I am. It’s because I’m so deeply aware that what we see in front of us is not all there is! I’m being called to a deeper experience of reality. These teachings have given me much more patience with people and much more of a sense that everything and everyone is in its/their rightful place. I sure they grow up before totally destroying this planet, though! But I have heard one wise person say that having Bush in the White House is like having a baby with a machine gun in the house. The parents are not paying any attention and looking for the welfare of all concerned. So possibly that’s part of the role of old souls! I ponder this question a lot.

How is it that the baby or adolescent souls are always the ones in charge here?! I’m dying to know what you all think on this issue!