Robert Schwartz   Click the arrow to listen to this interview

Connie: I'm delighted to be talking to Robert Schwartz today. He’s the author of Courageous Souls: Do We Plan Our Life Challenges Before Birth?(Whispering Winds Press, 2007).

It explores the premise that we are all eternal souls who plan our lives, including our greatest challenges, before we're born for the purpose of spiritual growth. The book contains ten true stories of people who planned their lives' biggest challenges before birth. These included physical illness, having handicapped children, deafness, blindness, drug addiction, alcoholism, losing a loved one and severe accidents.

Prior to Robert's spiritual awakening, which occurred after a session he had with a medium in 2003, he was a freelance journalist for such publications as Life Magazine and U.S. News and World Report. He holds a BA from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University. Welcome, Robert.

Robert: Thank you, Connie. It's my pleasure.

Connie: So let's start at the beginning. How did you come to write this book?

Robert: The path to writing Courageous Souls started in Chicago in mid-2003. At that time, I was working as a self-employed marketing and communications consultant and feeling deeply unfulfilled by the work I was doing. I often had the feeling that, if I were to fall off the face of the earth, none of my clients would even notice. They would just plug someone else into my role and carry right along.

But along with that feeling, I also had the sense that there was a higher calling or a higher purpose to my life. I just didn't know what it was, and I wasn't even sure how to figure out what it was. So, in this search for greater meaning, on May 7 of 2003, I did something that I had never done before and that is I went to have a session with a psychic medium. Now in this session with the medium, she introduced me to the concept of spirit guides - that is highly evolved, non-physical beings with whom we plan our lives before birth and who then guide us through those lives after we incarnate.

Through this medium, I was actually able to speak with my guides. They said a lot of interesting things that day, one of which was they said: "You planned your greatest challenges before you were born." I just sort of shook my head and I said: "Why in the world did I do that?" They said: "You did this for purposes of spiritual growth." So we went on and we talked about what some of my challenges had been and why I had actually wanted (before I was born) to have these experiences.

Now I can't overstate for you the effect that this had on me. It allowed me to review the course of my life, go over the seemingly bad things that had happened to me and, in many cases, for the very first time, see a deeper meaning or a deeper purpose to those so-called bad events and for me, this was deeply, deeply healing. So I realized I was on to a concept that could bring healing to other people and that launched me on the path to writing Courageous Souls.

Connie: I started to read your book and I have to say, I love it. It really does make a person reevaluate everything that happened in their life.

Robert: Thank you.

Connie: As you say, you used several different mediums and channels to tap into the life blueprints of those you interviewed. I was wondering, how did you find the mediums and channels?

Robert: Well, what happened after the session with the medium, Connie, is that I started thinking about writing this book about how we plan our lives before we're born and the first thought that occurred to me was: "Well, we have the Internet now. There must be people out there somewhere who actually have memories of planning their current lifetime. I'll find them."

So I went to every spirituality and new aged bulletin board I could find on the Internet and I posted a little notice saying: "Author writing a book about how we plan our lives before we're born. If you remember planning your current lifetime, please contact me." Well, I heard from thousands of people all over the world, not a single one of whom remembered planning their current lifetime. They remembered past lives on earth, past lives on other planets, they even remembered non-physical lifetimes but no one remembered planning their current life and this went on for a period of months.

Eventually I began to despair of ever being able to write this book. At that point, I sort of metaphorically threw up my arms to the universe and said: "I need some help here. I can't do this alone." Within a very short time of making that statement to the universe, four very gifted mediums and channels showed up who had the exact collection of skills I needed in order to find out what someone had planned before they were born. One of the mediums, for example, can actually see and hear the conversations we have with each other before we incarnate. So by working with her, I was able to eavesdrop, so to speak, on these pre-birth planning sessions and I put those conversations verbatim into Courageous Souls.

Another one of the mediums has the ability to channel someone's soul, someone's higher self. So, by working with her, I could interview souls directly and ask them: "What did you plan for the current lifetime and why did you plan it?"

One of the other mediums is very gifted at speaking with the deceased, so if I was interviewing someone whose life challenge involved someone else who was now back in spirit, we could call in the person, speak to them through this particular medium and ask them: "What did you plan with this person I'm interviewing?"

And then the fourth person is a trance channel who generally channels angels, some of whom serve as guides to people and through her, I could ask the angels or the guides directly what did this person plan for this lifetime and why did they plan it? Then, by having the interviewees have multiple sessions with the different mediums, I could check on the information that had come up in earlier sessions and I could also retrieve complementary information that rounded out the pre-birth planning.

So the process was to have each person (with just one exception) have two or three sessions with the mediums and then I organized the book by type of life challenge so that it would be almost a reference guide to people. If you were going through a particular challenge, you could go straight to the chapter where someone else had planned it and find out why that person had planned it. So, by working with these four very gifted mediums and channels, I was able to research dozens and dozens of pre-birth plans, ten of which go into the book.

Connie: Yes, there are some very interesting things there. What I noticed about reading the book was, even if I didn't have the challenge of being blind, a lot of what she said was very applicable to my life and very interesting.

Robert: This is one reason why, in the introduction to the book, I tell readers that I strongly urge them to read all the stories, not just the ones that apply directly to them. The reason for that is that sometimes very different sorts of life challenges are planned for similar underlying reasons.

In other words, you might be a parent who has a handicapped child and so you turn quite naturally to the chapter on the pre-birth planning of having handicapped children. But it may be that the woman in the book who has handicapped children planned that experience for very different reasons than you did. Meanwhile, someone else in the book, say the person who planned alcoholism, might have planned that for the same reason that you planned to have handicapped children. So it's very important really to read all the stories and look in each case for the underlying motivation behind the planning.

Connie: Absolutely. Okay, now why do we plan life challenges? You say there are four primary reasons.

Robert: Yes. The first reason I found for planning life challenges before we're born is to balance karma. This is the reason that your readers and listeners are probably most familiar with and have heard the most about. Just to take a very simple example, let's say that two people had a past life together in which one was physically ill and the other person was that person's caretaker.

When those two people transition back into spirit and have their life review, as we all do, they will have a sense of unbalanced energy around that relationship and they will be motivated to balance it. The easiest, simplest, most direct way to do that is simply to switch roles. Now the person who was physically ill plans the life challenge of caretaking and the one who was the caretaker plans the life challenge of physical illness. So that's reason number one is to balance karma.

The second reason I found for planning life challenges is healing and I'll give you a quick example from Courageous Souls. In the chapter on the pre-birth planning of deafness and blindness, I shared a story of a young African-American woman named Penelope who was born completely deaf in both ears.

When we went into Penelope's pre-birth planning session, we heard her talking with her spirit guide about the choice to be born deaf. What we learned was that, in the lifetime immediately prior to this one, Penelope had the same mother she has in this lifetime. But in that past life, when Penelope was a young child, she heard her mother shot to death by the mother's boyfriend. Now she didn't actually see the murder but she heard the gunshots that killed her mother and as you can imagine, she was quite traumatized by this. In fact, it led her to commit suicide later in that lifetime.

She returned to spirit from that life with what you might call an energy of unresolved trauma, which now needs to be healed. So, in the pre-birth planning session, her spirit guide says to her: "My dear, would you prefer to be born deaf so that no similar trauma will happen to you again?" Penelope responds: "Yes, that is what I want and what I wish to do." So that's reason number two, healing.

The third reason I found for planning life challenges is to be of service to others. This was something that I saw in literally every pre-birth planning session we looked at. We heard souls talking about the desire to be of service to one another, to the world, to humanity as a whole. It was present in every single pre-birth planning session.

Then the fourth reason I found is a desire to experience contrast and let me explain what I mean by that. I believe, and my research confirms, that we as souls are made quite literally from the energy of unconditional love. It's also my understanding that the non-physical realm we come from is a realm of pure love. So if we are love and we are in a realm in which we experience only love, this means that we encounter no contrast to ourselves and, from the soul's perspective, that in turn means that the soul doesn't fully understand or fully appreciate what it means to be made from the energy of unconditional love.

So I believe that we come here to earth, to this realm of duality (in other words, up and down, left and right, hot and cold, good and bad, love and not love) because here there's a lot of contrast to love and the experience of that contrast from the soul's perspective leads to a more profound self-knowing and self-understanding. So those would be the four major reasons.

Connie: Now can you give me an example of one of the people in your book or one of the stories and how they changed after they went through these sessions, what they felt they learned, how different they became once they knew why they had chosen these things?

Robert: A good example of that would be John Elmore who is in the chapter on the pre-birth planning of physical illness. John planned before he was born to have the AIDS virus. Now, when I interviewed John I asked him: "How did you feel when you first learned that you had been diagnosed with AIDS?" He told me that his first thought was: "I deserve this," which I think gives you a good sense of how shame-based his self-identity was. He also shared with me that he was very, very angry with the former lover who had given him the virus. Of course, that's quite understandable; most people would be.

Now, as John comes into this awareness of his pre-birth plan and begins to understand why he planned such a big challenge for himself, there's a big shift that occurs. When we went into John's pre-birth planning session, we heard him talking with the soul who was going to become the lover who would give him the virus and they discuss why they want to do this. They do it for personal reasons of their own involving spiritual growth, but they also do it in service to humanity because they were shown scenes of the world at this time in history. They concluded that it's a very judgmental and intolerant place. So they selected for themselves what is arguably the most shame-based illness in the world today, because they knew they would be judged by other people, which would then give those people a chance to move beyond their judgments and become more loving and more compassionate. So they come in as our teachers.

Now when John heard this dialogue and understood that this was his motivation and, most importantly, understood that he had actually chosen AIDS rather than having someone else impose it on him or rather than being a victim, this allows him to do a couple of very important things. Number one, it lets him get out of that victim mentality that he had been in. You know, for many years, he had felt victimized by the former lover.

Number two, it allows him to forgive the former lover. For many years, he had been very, very angry with that person but now, understanding that they planned it together, he can let go of the anger and move into a place of forgiveness.

I think a third thing that happens with John, and with everyone who comes into an understanding of their pre-birth plan, is that it increases feelings of self-esteem and self-love. Instead of looking at himself as the AIDS victim, John comes to understand that he is very courageous, that he chose this illness in service to others, to be a teacher in the world. This knowledge helps him to think more highly of himself and to love himself more. So the shifts that occur are really quite profound and this was the kind of shift that I saw again and again with people.

Connie: One of the interesting things I found was how the other people (who hurt the person in the story), when we go back to the pre-planning, they didn’t want to do that. They love the person so much and they do it instead as a sacrifice often. I thought that was fascinating.

Robert: Yes. That's something that I saw time and time again. Very often the person who wanted to take on a big challenge, especially if it required someone else to play a "negative role," they had to convince somebody else to play that role for them. John Elmore is a good example of that. When he talks with the soul who is going to become his future lover, there is some discussion of how the future lover will treat him.

In John's case, he actually wants, believe it or not, for the future lover to say shaming words to him. The reason for this is that he had had a number of previous incarnations in which people had said shaming words to him and he had believed the shaming words. He internalized them and allowed others to define him to himself. Then when he had his life review after those lifetimes, he saw that he had responded this way and he said to himself: "Okay. I would like to give myself the same challenge in the next lifetime, that is people judging and shaming me, but this time I want to get it right. This time I want to rise above the shaming words."

So he then contracts pre-birth with a number of different people to shame and judge him and, of course, this is one reason why he chooses the AIDS virus. He makes this kind of contract with his future parents, peers at school, school teachers and with the soul who will become the lover who gives him the AIDS virus.

Well, when he asks that soul to do this for him, the soul says: "I really don't want to treat you that way. It's not kind. It's not loving." Then John has to talk him into it and the way he does this is that the other soul says to him: "If we're going to do this and if I'm going to behave in this way to foster your spiritual evolution, then we must experience love." And John agrees to that. In this personal interview, John told me that he did experience love in their relationship, so that was how he was able to persuade this particular soul to behave in what we would consider to be a negative manner.

Connie: Yes and there were a number of examples in there as I was reading, where people just didn't want to do the hard thing, say the mean thing, the pivotal thing that hurt the person. I thought that was really fascinating. It really made me re-evaluate a lot of what happened to me and even sometimes the things that I say or do that after I think: "I don't know why I said or did that."

Robert: The important thing to understand here is that these roles are scripted before birth and they are always based on unconditional love, even when the role is one that we would consider to be negative. So here on the third dimension on Earth, on the level of the personality, we have people who we regard as tormentors or enemies. But, on the soul level, there is no relationship like that. On the soul level there is nothing but unconditional love between souls, including those who we regard as our tormentors. When people come to realize that, it makes profound forgiveness possible.

Connie: Exactly. That's exactly what I thought. So now I wanted to ask you what you think made Courageous Soul so unique.

Robert: To the best of my knowledge, there is no other book specifically about the pre-birth planning of life challenges. The medium who is able to see and hear the pre-birth planning sessions, that's really quite a unique feature and the fact that the book contains these pre-birth conversations word for word as the souls were making plans for the upcoming lifetime. Then the interviews with people's souls / people's higher selves, I think is also a unique feature. The way the book is organized by type of life challenge, it makes it very accessible and very helpful to the reader.

Connie: You talked in the book about soul groups and how they play into our life planning. Can you just touch on that a bit?

Robert: Sure. A soul group is a collection of souls who are at more or less the same stage of evolution and who reincarnate with each other repeatedly. So you and the members of your soul group will have many, many lifetimes together and, in those lifetimes, you will play every conceivable role for each other. You and the members of your soul group will be mother and daughter, father and son, brother and sister, the best of friends, mortal enemies, murderer and the one who is murdered, and you will take turns playing all of these different roles for each other.

The reason for this is to stimulate each other's spiritual growth and your own. Again, on the soul level, there is nothing but love between you and the other members of your soul group, even those who played "negative roles" for you.

Connie: Now could you talk a little bit more about karma, as you've come to understand it?

Robert: Well, karma is often conceptualized as some sort of cosmic debt and I don't look at it that way. I think of it more as unbalanced energy. So when we were talking earlier about karma as one of the four major reasons for the planning of life challenges and the example I gave you was two people who had a past life together in which one was ill and the other was the caretaker, I don't view that as one person being indebted to another. It's not my understanding that that's the way souls look at it either. They look at it as a sense of unbalanced energy and, again, they are motivated to balance the energy in the upcoming incarnation. But it really is not a debt of any kind and it most certainly is not a punishment.

Many people think of karma as some sort of cosmic punishment or retribution and it really is not. It's a neutral, impersonal law of the universe, much like gravity. So if you were to, God forbid, stumble and fall later today, you would not curse gravity. You would not say gravity is bad, gravity is evil. You wouldn't say gravity is punishing me or I was victimized by gravity. It wouldn't make any sense to talk like that. By the same token, I don't think it makes any sense to say that karma is a form of punishment or that one has been victimized by karma. It's just a neutral, impersonal law of the universe.

Connie: Now you say that life sometimes labeled failures from the viewpoint of the personality are often unqualified successes from the viewpoint of the soul. Why?

Robert: John Elmore, who we spoke about a moment ago, the gentleman with AIDS, is a good example of that. If you just look at John's life from the level of the personality, many people would be inclined to judge him and what are the sorts of judgments that society has of somebody who has AIDS?

Many people think, well, the person must have deserved it. The person must have been promiscuous. The person didn't use protection. Some people even believe that AIDS is God's way of punishing homosexuals for being homosexuals, but consider the sheer absurdity of those judgments in light of what is actually happening in John's life. We know from the pre-birth planning session that he came in to be a teacher to the world, to help people learn greater compassion and non-judgment, greater tolerance. So these judgments that we have of someone with AIDS are really quite untrue and they don't get at the underlying meaning and purpose of the lifetime.

I think there are entire categories of people who our society judges quite harshly in the same way that's very unfair. Those would be people who are alcoholics, drug addicts, the homeless. All of these categories of people are judged very harshly by society and yet quite often they plan these experiences before they're born for their own growth and learning and to be teachers to others.

It really requires a great deal of courage to execute a life plan that has such a big challenge in it. These are challenges that not every soul would dare to take on. So I would submit to people that, rather than judge those who have AIDS or alcoholism or drug addiction or who are homeless, we should admire them, respect them and even be grateful to them for being our teachers.

If you are walking down the street one day and you see a homeless person in a cardboard box and you think to yourself: "Get a job," you're really missing the point, because it's very possible that that person was in your pre-birth planning session and agreed to be there at that moment. Yes, the planning is that detailed so that you could walk by the homeless person and have an opportunity to develop greater compassion in your heart. That person could very well be there as your teacher. So any judgments really are very disrespectful and, in my view, not accurate.

Connie: As you were talking about that, it made me think about the story about Penelope when she committed suicide and how there was no judgment at all about her committing suicide. In a lot of religions, it's not a good thing. Can you kind of explain to the listeners and readers about what you found out about suicide?

Robert: My understanding of suicide is that there is no judgment from anyone on the other side against someone who commits suicide here. Instead it's looked at with great, great compassion. Now I also understand that the person who commits suicide generally comes back into body very quickly and they have to pick up where they left off because they haven't finished their life lessons, but it's not viewed at the soul level as some sort of a failure. There's absolutely no judgment around it. As you mentioned, in Penelope's pre-birth planning session, every soul who is there views her suicide with tremendous, tremendous compassion. There's no judgment at all.

Connie: That's another thing you really bring out in the book is how one of the major reasons we're here is to learn compassion.

Robert: It is one of the major reasons for planning life challenges but rather than say: "Learn compassion," and I often use the word learn myself, but I think it's more accurate to say: "Remember ourselves as compassion." Again, on the soul level, we are love. We are compassion. Then we get into body and we forget where we come from and what our true nature is. Plus, we have the ego, the small self, and the ego is fear-based. So we go through much of our lives and, in some cases, people go through their entire lives identifying with the ego and the ego's underlying fear and they believe that that's who they really are.

Now the purpose of life challenges is to almost break open somebody's heart so that they rediscover and remember their true nature as love and their inherent compassion. Again, from the soul's perspective, when you remember that that's who you really are, this results in a more profound self-knowing on the level of the soul.

Many of the people that I talked to for Courageous Souls described a pattern in their lives in which something would happen, something would go wrong, and they wouldn't learn whatever lesson was contained within it. Then a short time later, or sometimes a long time later, a similar thing would happen, but it would be more severe. Then if they didn't get the lesson, sometime down the road the same thing would happen again, but it would be even more severe.

They described this always in the same term. They would say: "The universe hit me over the head with a cosmic two-by-four." If you were someone who notices that kind of pattern in your life, what's happening there is that your soul is trying to get your conscious attention. Your soul is saying to you: "You are not learning whatever lessons are contained within this life challenge and it's going to keep repeating and getting more severe each time until you do learn those lessons." And the basic lesson, again, is that you are love, you are compassion and your soul is here in body as you, hoping that you will choose to put the ego and the small self aside and express your love and compassion on the physical plane.

Connie: Yes, it is great. Your book is great. I just love it. Last night I put out my ezine/newsletter and I said that we are going to be reading your book for our book club this month. So I wanted to ask you how our readers can get your book.

Robert: They can order it from Amazon Canada. They can also order it through my website, which is www.courageoussouls.com. I'm not sure if bookstores and libraries in Canada can order it for people. I think they may be able to if they work with American wholesalers and distributors.

Connie: In that regard, because I had featured one of your articles in my other ezine/newsletter, people had gone to some of the stores here in Edmonton and gotten your book, so it is possible.

Robert: Good. Glad to hear that.

Connie: Okay. If they can't get them quick enough, it's good that they can go to your Web site and other ways, too, right?

Robert: Yes, at my website, we ship by global priority mail so it would get there very quickly.

Connie: Okay. Excellent. Now are you planning to write another book about pre-birth planning? Has this inspired you to keep discovering more about it?

Robert: I am. In fact, I'm working on the second book now. It will be similar to the first one but focused on the pre-birth planning of different life challenges. In fact, I'm looking for people to interview for the next book. If anybody who reads the interview or hears the interview would like to share their story with me, they can contact me at CourageousSouls@yahoo.com. You don't have to use your real name in the next book. If your story is selected, you can use a pseudonym so that confidentiality is protected.

Connie: Okay. Well, we're getting to the end of our interview and I was wondering if there is a special message you would like to leave our readers with.

Robert: The message that I would like to leave people with has to do with who you really are, which is something that we've touched on in this interview. A lot of people at this time in history define themselves as the personality, as the body and, in particular, as whatever they perceive to be their faults and limitations. I would submit to your audience that you are none of those things. You are not your body, you are not your personality and you most certainly are not whatever you think of as your faults and limitations.

Who you really are is the courageous soul who bravely left a realm of love and light and peace and joy to come here to earth in order to experience life challenges so that you could balance karma, heal, be of service to others and experience contrast. So when you have that moment in which your self-esteem is low, in which you are yearning to go home to the non-physical realm, in which you are wondering what it's all about and what you're doing here, that's the time to remind yourself that who you really are is a courageous, holy, eternal soul. That's your true identity.

Connie: I just thought of one more question. As you were talking it made me wonder, when you were in your pre-planning session with your medium, was writing this book (not only this book, but whatever books you are also planning) was this part of what you agreed to?

Robert: Yes, it is. In fact, in one of the stories in Courageous Souls, it's the last story in the book, a woman named Kristina plans before birth to be the "victim" in a bomb explosion. When we went into Kristina's pre-birth planning session, I was there, because she and I are members of the same soul group.

I went up to her in her pre-birth planning session, told her about the books I was planning to write and asked her if I could tell her story in one of the books and she agreed to that. Now I had no idea that this was going to come up. When we went into her pre-birth planning session, I never, ever expected to find myself there, but sure enough, there I was talking with her about the books I was going to write.

Connie: Isn't that great?

Robert: Yes.

Connie: Well, I really do want to thank you. I love your book and it’s been great talking to you. I really hope a lot of people will read it because I think it really could be life-changing.

Robert: Let me just say one more thing, if I may.

Connie: Sure.

Robert: Courageous Souls was originally self-published, but now a publisher has picked it up, North Atlantic Books, and they are going to reissue it in March of 2009 with a different cover and a different title. The new title will be Your Soul's Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born. That book is going to be distributed worldwide by Random House, so it will be available to anyone who is interested in this subject.

Connie: Okay. Thank you. Maybe after your next book we can talk again.

Robert: You're welcome. I would like that.

PLEASE NOTE: In Edmonton you can purchase Courageous Souls at the following two locations. Please call ahead to reserve your copy (if they are sold out, put your name on a waiting list and more will be ordered in).

Ascendant Books, 10310 - 124 Street (780-452-5372)
A Sense of Serenity, 10342 - 81 Avenue (780-439-3131)