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REVIEW:
Awakening the Soul Book 2: Our Suppressed Spiritual Nature

By Bill Missett

(Author House: 2005)
Orders: www.authorhouse.com

Review by Bob Yehling

Everyone who has experienced spiritual awakening must confront and deal with a stark and dark reality: At some point along the way, a person, book or religion sought to suppress and/or manipulate deep truths of the soul to advance their mission, thesis or dogma. The realization is not easy. It feels like walking from open sky into a tangled, thorny berry bramble that doesn’t seem to end.

Such is the walk-in point on Bill Missett’s second book in the Awakening the Soul trilogy, Our Suppressed Spiritual Nature. Missett meticulously laid out the proof of our spiritual nature in his first book, and showed us how to reclaim and restore our divine inheritance in his third book. However, something very terrible began to happen on the planet three thousand years ago: Hundreds or thousands of spiritual teachings and schools with pure, divine missions and practices were eradicated and consolidated. This was exacerbated by the struggles for control and power to proselytize to the world following Christ’s death, a struggle that reached its first peak during the Crusades. It’s a struggle that continues to this day, as evidenced by the war of more than words between the west and the Muslim east, and the sharp ultra-conservative turn by the political, social, judicial and religious elements of both.

Never has a book been better timed – or more necessary to read – for a populace in search of its individual and collective soul at a time when some world leaders are acting more like their forbears of past millennia than progressive 21st century human beings. Our Suppressed Spiritual Nature documents hundreds of intentional, deliberate actions taken by the three predominant religions – Catholicism, Judaism and Islam – to suppress the spiritual power and truth of the people to whom they’ve ministered.

The chapter titles of this book give you a sense of this difficult journey; four of them are “Slipping Into Darkness,” “Why We Can’t Remember,” “How Science Was Silenced” and “The Deception Disintegrates.”

Missett confined most of his research to matters inside the Vatican, from the time the Church rolled out its plan to rule the world a century after Christ’s death to the present day. Within the 396 pages of this book is the 118-page title chapter, “Suppressing Our Spiritual Nature,” that cites incident after incident of dogmatic transgression. When reading the blood and gore that followed, one feels caught in a horror movie. To think these terrors actually happened to people seeking to know God is unfathomable. To realize they were perpetrated and carried out by the body that deemed itself God’s representative on Earth is worse.

Missett’s case builds from spiritual falsehoods that the Church instilled forcibly into the people as it spread throughout the social, political, judicial, spiritual and scientific institutions of the world. The concepts, as Missett writes, included belief in original sin, living only once, an angry, vengeful God, an angry Devil, belief in perpetual Hell, belief that the Catholic Church was the only salvation for humanity, our concept of Sin, belief that Church sacraments were necessary for salvation, belief that all spiritual matters were wrong or evil, and so on.

Missett spells out the crimes the Church perpetrated against our souls and spiritual truth itself with the hammer and chisel he utilized as a no-nonsense newspaper journalist for more than 30 years – and which he utilized in Proof Of Our Spiritual Nature and Restoring Our Spiritual Nature as well. Every incident is well-documented, and he connects the dots throughout so that the long, egregious pattern feels to the reader like it felt to those who suffered through it – a matrix that, until recently, offered little chance for escape. The way in which he presents and shares this information illustrates the deep wisdom, contemplation and realization of a man who’s been there (he was raised Catholic) and done that (experienced spiritual awakening and changed his life accordingly).

During this discourse, the author takes care to explain spiritual or religious concepts. He also provides a welcome personal touch by interspersing the battery of incidents with anecdotal evidence – not the least of which are accounts of saints and sages suffering the same fate as wayward citizens. It’s not an easy thing to do when you’re digging through ten years of intense research that keeps piling up as the spiritual suppression continues to this day (does the controversy over stem-cell research ring any bells?).

The most telling segment of this book concerns the Biblical saying, “The kingdom of God is within you.” Christ’s admonition is in plain King James English in Luke 17:21. No doubt about where to look for God, right? This was perhaps the main tenet of Christ’s mission on earth, the core teaching of anyone seeking a personal relationship with God. It was recorded and re-recorded by his apostles. However, two centuries later, the Church declared the teaching heretical.

From there, the author tells us the reason why: If you know that God is within you, then no institution can exercise control, power or its dogma over you.

Our Suppressed Spiritual Nature should not be viewed solely as an indictment of the Catholic Church. The author’s purpose for writing this book – and the whole Awakening the Soul trilogy – is to enlighten us on who we are, how we were taken into the dark, and how we can reclaim the light that’s always been within us.

Sometimes, it takes a brick on the head to stir us from our slumber. Here’s the brick.

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