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An Exclusive Interview With Bill Missett
Author, Awakening the Soul

Bill Missett has spent the past 40 years of his life investigating, exploring and uncovering truth—and then telling people about it. For 25 years, he was the editor of The Blade-Tribune (now The North County Times), a North San Diego County daily newspaper that played journalism by the rules—the old rules. Under Missett's direction, The Blade-Tribune became not only a bastion of good journalism, but a breeding and training ground for talent. Former B-T staff members went on to become top-notch magazine journalists, authors, top writers and photographers at major metro newspapers; one, Kirk MacDonald, has been a chief executive with Hearst Newspapers and the Denver Post.

In 1992, Missett retired and moved to an idyllic hideaway on the Mexican coast with his wife, Patrice. He plunged fully into his soul's calling—a deep relationship with Spirit and how it works with other souls. He'd been learning, studying, practicing and teaching forms of meditation and the spiritual way of life for 15 years. As he ran a restaurant in Mexico, another soul call hit him—to write a book that showed people how to awaken their souls. Several years and 900 pages later, Missett realized that the Awakening the Soul project would be not one, but three books.

We interviewed Bill Missett from New York, where he was preparing to embark on his first speaking engagements in advance of the full release of Awakening the Soul.

Bookstand: You had a moment that accelerated your arrival on the spiritual path—the near-drowning experience 25 years ago. I've heard moments like this described as a "brick on the head." Do you feel that, because of the busy-body lives we lead in this society, it takes such traumatic experiences for us to "wake up" and start heading toward our divine nature?

Bill Missett: It is not only our busy, hectic lives which interfere with our spiritual awareness and perception, but the parental, religious, cultural and societal programming we have all been exposed to practically since infancy. Sometimes a good smack on the head is necessary to break through that wall of programming and the distractions we all experience to open awareness of our divine potential. However, I believe my book offers a much more gentle solution to this difficult obstacle—a practical method of reprogramming the Ego's responsibilities and of consciously involving your Soul in your everyday activities. This effortlessly brings your divine nature into your everyday life, and brings you the gift of knowing your divinity with a minimum of external interference. Awakening the Soul replaces the brick in the head with a much kinder method of getting your attention.

Q: You did something very interesting here—the third book in your magnum opus trilogy on spiritual awakening and soul awakening is the first to be published. Why is that?

A: When the instructions for my Soul and Ego that form the core of Book 3 arrived in my meditations, I knew this was what I had to write about. But I also knew that before I could advise people how to restore their spiritual nature, I first had to convince them that they actually possessed a spiritual nature. I had a great deal of information about our spiritual nature, gathered for a planned weekly newspaper column on personal spirituality. That material and much more went into the first part of the book. There is so much confirming evidence of our spiritual nature it is amazing that we have ignored it for so long. This is primarily because we have considered all the parts of the puzzle separately, instead of looking at the evidence as a mosaic of our lives. Once you step back and look at the evidence as a whole, our true spiritual nature comes instantly into focus.

I also realized that I needed to show how we had lost awareness of our spiritual nature. The extensive research into that subject became the second portion of the book. It is the most shocking part of the Awakening The Soul trilogy, because I discovered that the primary reason we are so out of touch with our spiritual nature is because of its suppression by Western Religions, primarily Christianity. Then came the third section of the book, which was how to restore awareness of our spiritual nature. When completed, it was a huge text, more than 800 pages. After presenting it to numerous literary agents, I was advised that it was unlikely that any major publisher would accept it because of its size. At the same time, several people close to me said, "You have two or three books in there."

Also at the same time, literary agents were advising me that the third part – the restoration process – was most needed now. So I excised the last five chapters from the manuscript, added an extensive personalized introduction, and Bingo! – I had a stand-alone book. Book 1, subtitled Realizing Our Spiritual Nature is complete, and will follow next year. Book 2, subtitled Our Lost Spiritual Heritage needs a little more work, and is planned for release in 2004.

Q: Your awakening the soul meditation is very profound. As you were guided into this practice, and later assembled it for readers' consumption, what precepts did you consider to be most important to convey?

A: I really never chose which parts seemed most important, nor did I consciously select portions to stress to readers. It was obvious from the beginning that this process was being given to me to convey to others, and I did so with total discernment and clarity. I simply followed my intuition and the instructions as they came to me. The instructions came in two primary parts; an initiation process, and a daily invocation which allows the Soul Awakening process to mature. After the instructions were fully received, it became obvious that a preparation process was necessary before anyone should engage the initiation or invocation instructions. I was guided to understand what preparations would be necessary to lay the groundwork for engaging the process. It involves spiritual housecleaning to rid ourselves of the mental and emotional garbage we have stored away, which interferes with enlightenment. I was also guided to understand what immediate life changes would occur as a result of using the Soul Awakening process daily, and what long-term awakenings of our spiritual nature might occur. These aspects became various chapters surrounding the core instructions. When you realize that all those events we call "mystical" are really just aspects of our normal spiritual nature, – Awakening The Soul: Book 3: Restoring Your Spiritual Nature is basically an instruction book, but one containing an extraordinary spiritual tool.

Q: We're in an interesting time, a period of darkness after one dawn (Age of Aquarius) and before another. Yet, I get the sense this is a necessary rise of darkness, evil and warmongering in order to point out to us the folly of materialism and the urgency of connecting with God. What are the most important pieces of inner work that people can be doing to come to grips with the world today and come to grips with themselves?

A: Look at the sources of most of the darkness and warmongering in the world. What is causing most of it? The shocking answer is that much of the evil in the world is being perpetrated in the name of Religion. It's Catholics versus Protestants in Northern Ireland, Muslims versus Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims versus Jews in the Middle East, on and on around the world. Organized religions have become a major problem on Earth, and it is time for each of us to act on our own to solve this difficult problem. We can do just that. If everyone would Awaken their Soul, peace on Earth would reign. You cannot entertain darkness, evil or war when you Awaken your Soul and realize that we are all brothers and sisters, we are all equally divine children of God/Goddess, and that he/she lives through each of us. You cannot consciously host the presence of God/Goddess in your Soul and act negatively.

Q: Your background is intriguing: a no-nonsense newspaper editor whose job required healthy skepticism of the status quo and of what subjects of stories said to you and your reporters. Yet, you moved into a very unprovable (in material terms, at the time) field, in spirituality and metaphysics, that requires a layer of deep trust in Divine Source throughout. How did you reconcile the two?

A: I never had to reconcile the two. My training as a skeptical newspaper editor helped eliminate anything that did not ring true, and helped confirm everything that was true. It facilitated cutting through the chaff to get to the truth of the heart of the matter. The primary reason spirituality and metaphysics have been considered unprovable in the past is because we have never before looked at all "psychic phenomena" as a whole, nor with the one simple, common answer to those "mysteries"—that they are collectively a portrait of our spiritual nature. I think you can prove all aspects of both metaphysics and spirituality if you simply shift your perception to that view. As far as trusting the channeled information, when Spirit speaks through you, it eliminates all doubt about the reality and validity of the experience.

Q: In your introduction, you made a very interesting point about how, with increasing time spent meditating and connecting with the Divine, the physical body changes along with the other bodies—mental, emotional and spiritual. How did this happen for you?

A: I became much healthier, guided to appropriate natural or herbal solutions for whatever ailed me. I havenêt suffered any lasting illness (even colds) for about six years now since I serendipitously discovered colloidal silver. I have also conquered most of my physical ailments with the Five Tibetan Rites. The only thing hanging on is allergies, and Iêm working on them with traditional Mexican herbs and aromatherapy.

Q: Using Awakening The Soul as a guidepost, how does someone move into vocation or practice of their higher calling when it becomes apparent that the tried-and-true way of doing things is neitherãand they're scared to death of moving on?

A: When using the Awakening The Soul processes, two things will occur. First, you will discover great trust in the process, because it may be the most valid experience you have had in life. Secondly, when you devote yourself to the process, doors will open in your life to accommodate your spiritual growth. You have established the trust to step through those doorways, and the results seem miraculous. It is so obvious that the old ways are not working — and have not for some time—that it is easy to release the old programming, and thus, the fear.

Q: Meditation is the centerpiece of everything you write here — daily superconscious contact with God. Can you speak to the importance of meditation in our lives, and its benefits in our work, play, relationships with mates, nature and others?

A: Meditation is our divine connection to our Source, and the rewards of establishing and maintaining that connection are unlimited. The Soul Awakening invocation is an entrée to meditation, which sets the tone and intention of the meditation to the highest spiritual standards. It goes far beyond unstructured meditation. Once you establish a daily pattern of meditation, your life becomes enhanced in every possible way. It has been said that prayer, which most of us have been taught, is talking to God, and that meditation, which few of us have been taught, is listening to God. When we listen, we experience our divine nature unfolding, and that enhances every aspect of our lives. It is ironic that Christianity has known about meditation since its earliest days, but has never taught its followers to meditate. Yet the Catholic Church to this day requires all priests and nuns to meditate daily. One must wonder why the Church refused to teach its followers to meditate also.

Q: How did your training as a journalist and editor enable you to sift through the enormous mountain of material that you obviously accessed and studied to put together this book and trilogy?

A: It helped enormously, because much of my later research was done in the New York City public libraries, some of the largest and finest in the world, with miles of aisles. I kept the investigative journalistês adage, "If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck" constantly in mind. This led to several remarkable discoveries, including the realization that all of the "psychic metaphysical phenomena" I was studying was collectively aspects of our spiritual nature, and secondly, that Western Religions were responsible for suppressing awareness of our spiritual nature.

Q: We've been told for two millenia to have "blind faith," "blind trust," "belief," etc. When Paramhansa Yogananda came to America in 1920, already a great Master who lived in Divine Consciousness, he shocked everyone by saying, "Don't take what I or any other teacher tells you at face value. Test it out through the fires of meditation and divine perception." How does this speak to the precepts you lay down in Awakening the Soul.

A: Yogananda was right on the money in his advice. I would say the exact same thing about what I have written. Since Awakening The Soul is an individual process that each person customizes for their own needs, there is no belief system to accept, except one ® that you are a divine creation who has access to divine guidance. Once that acceptance occurs, your dharma comes effortlessly to you, and your trust in your divinity guides you to your destiny.

Q: Finally, you shared your bodysurfing experience where you nearly drowned 25 years ago. This reminded me so much of (singer) Cat Stevens' conversion to Islam after he nearly drowned while swimming in southern California. But in your case, there's always been a deep relationship between moving ocean/waves and flow of spirit. Could you elaborate on this relationship?

A: One of the primary initial steps you must take to awaken your spiritual nature is embracing Nature in all its glory. I was always close to Nature (I lived on an island for several years as a young barefoot boy), but surfing brought me into the arms of Mother Nature. Riding the waves, sometimes with surfing dolphins, brought me closer to Nature than ever before. It brought clarity and strength to my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual life that was vital in bringing me to this point. Surfing also directly served up the transcendental experience of two-way mental telepathy that triggered my spiritual awakening.

More Information:
• Review of Awakening The Soul – Book 3
• Excerpt of Awakening The Soul – Book 3
• Review of Awakening The Soul – Book 2
• New Interview with Bill Missett