How could they just be magically healed?

[As if speaking to a very slow child] Because there was blocked energy. It comes down to the power within to unblock the things that are restricting your vehicular power. And she did it.

Things like that happened over and over.

So why did you stop doing the seminars?

You know, I would have a thousand people in the room and the power involved in having a thousand people getting the energy from each other was so extraordinary. But many of them gave their power away to me, they didn't take it for themselves.

They gave you their power?

They thought I did it for them. But now with this new millennium shift, they're ready to take it for themselves and I can feel that, so I'm going to escalate what I did in the '80s and make them even more profound. I just feel the urgency to go back and do 'em.

What do you mean "with the millennium shift"? You feel there's been some drastic change from within?

Oh, yeah. I think that after Jan. 1, 2000, we had an extraordinary shift. You know, when Y2K did not really happen, I think we felt this kind of positivity that happened over New Year's Eve and has been continuing.

Now, people feel the positivity but they don't know what to do with it, because we don't learn how to do these things like meditate and align ourselves within, we have such busy hectic lives -- addicted to technology. And people are searching on the Web, for example, for relationships and intimacy, but the intimacy is really necessary within yourself. If you use that new positive energy to align yourself within, man, you could do anything you want to do in your life, and it makes intimacy with other people in your life so much deeper.

When you go into a meditation and connect with your higher self, your higher self guides you along the timeline to where you can understand some of your past life experiences and how they impact on your life today; it's quite extraordinary.

When was the first time you felt that?

Well, I've been doing this for the last 30 years, and when I went through my divorce, it was extremely painful. But when I got in touch with what that person meant to me over time, down through different incarnations, I didn't feel any bitterness or any sense of loss. We had served each other and it was time to be over. And because of that understanding of the past lives I had with this person -- and many of them, by the way -- I was able to adjust more and be balanced and peaceful with the divorce. That's when it really happened to me.

Ever since you started talking about your past lives, you've really taken a beating in the press. Do you ever feel like maybe it's just not worth talking about it?

Oh, no. I don't think they've beaten me up. I think they make jokes.

The ridicule doesn't bother you?

Not at all. I'm amused by people who think I'm a nutcase. I even help them write the jokes! I just insist that they're funny. If they're not funny, I think that's a humiliation.

And even the people who are really threatened by this are kind of reluctant to be really, really hard on me because, you know, what if it's true? [Laughs.]

Who knows?

What if karma really works! [Laughs some more.]

Speaking of karma, you were recently the butt of a lot of jokes for saying you'd had an affair with Charlemagne in a past life and had discovered he bore a striking resemblance to Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister with whom you had an affair in this life. Do you know when something you say is going to get you poked at in the gossip columns?

Oh, sure. I've been in this business long enough and worked for 50 years with the press, I know what they're gonna do. And some of it's been funny, but you know, there were many less jokes this time, with this last book, than there were before. Because more people are into understanding that they have lived before. Three-quarters of the Earth's people believe in reincarnation. The whole East! It's Christianity that's not very sure. And I'm not convinced that that wasn't what some of the great teachers -- including Jesus -- were saying.

I mean, there are many things still left in the Bible, and as you know the Bible's been rewritten several times. I'm not positive that Jesus was not talking about this. At one point he asked his disciples, "And who do you think I was?" And they say, "Elias, Elijah" -- they give certain names to what they thought Jesus had been before -- and he didn't refute it.

And there are several little things like that that are still left in sections of the New Testament. In the laws of karma, which is really "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," it comes back. So this is the cosmic justice.

Listen, this whole country, which I find very fascinating, was based on the founding fathers' beliefs in transcendentalism, they were all transcendentalists. They were all Masons. Some of them 33-degree Masons. They were convinced of the tenets of reincarnation, except for Jefferson. And Jefferson speculated on it quite seriously and quite profoundly, but he wrote his own bible. I have a copy of the Jeffersonian bible, I don't know if you've read that. But this whole country was based on these metaphysical precepts. That's why we have "In God we trust" and the pyramid with the third eye over it on the dollar bill.

And they learned it, of course, from the Iroquois Nation and a lot of our Constitution is based on the amalgamation of nature, the rebirth and the self-governing principles of nature. And if you are a metaphysician, which most of these founding fathers stated themselves to be, you understand that self-governing is what democracy is really about. So we've in many ways lost what our heritage intended for us to be.

So it's not something to really ridicule at all. It was why our founding fathers revolted against the repression of the church in Europe.

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