Although I’m not into organized religion and know little or nothing about these holidays, Passover and Easter is a chance to reflect on our beliefs and honor them. For me, I see Easter a little differently now that I know that Jesus did not die on the cross. Keep this to yourselves so the Easter Bunny doesn’t lose his job. (I have no idea what the resurrection of Jesus has to do with a bunny hiding eggs all over the place, but be sure your kids check to make sure the chocolate ones are really chocolate and nothing disgusting.) 

My family and I plan to have loads of fun. Friday, I’m going to Kristina’s big event. I hope to see some of you Houstonians there. I plan to give away books to the 5th, 10th and 20th blog member to greet me, but I can’t bring the books there (since it would look like I was promoting myself in a promotional event for Walmart and Dove) but I will take down mailing addresses so I can send the books to you.) I don’t plan to post anything until Monday. Taking a breather!

Saturday, my family and I (including Robert) are going to have dinner at Benihanas as a joint birthday celebration for my daughter, Michelle, and me. Sunday will probably be cookout time, weather depending. I hope you guys have great plans, too. Love up on your family and friends. 

Now, in keeping with our Celebrity Friday tradition (one day early), I’d like to introduce this sweet and powerfully influential soul. Through Robert’s channeling, I really got a strong sense of the kind of person she is/was. 

Me: Can you bring Anne Frank in, Erik?

Robert: Yeah, she’s here.

Me: Ah! What does she look like, or can you even see her?

Robert: I get really fast visuals of people. She looks young. I think she was young when she passed away. I don’t really know very much about her, personally. She’s wearing kind of a plain dress.

Me: That sounds like her.

Robert: And she looks like she’s a shy kind of a person. She tilts her head to the side and clasps her hands in front of her hips.

Me: Okay. Well, hello, Anne. How are you doing?

Anne: Wonderfully, thank you.

Me: Well, we’re going to ask you some questions if that’s okay with you.

Anne: I’d be delighted to answer them.

Me: All right. Tell us what your spiritual mission was in the life we know as Anne Frank.

Robert: She’s sitting back and thinking.

Anne: One thing I will tell you, which is a little off topic from your question, is that when we cross over into spirit, we don’t always sit there and think to ourselves, “Oh, so that’s why I came here.” You’d be surprised, but not all of us do, not in the way that humans think. We don’t come here and realize we were to write a novel when we’re in the human life. It’s more of an emotional purpose for why we come here and less tied to an action that we do.

Me: Ah! That makes sense since we’re emotional beings, and our energy is emotions.

Anne: Now, why did I come there? If I were answering that on an emotional level, it would be to let people who have suffered without anybody ever knowing that they suffered that their suffering still mattered.

Me: Oh!

Robert: That gives me chills.

Me: Whoa. That’s pretty deep.

Anne: I saw so much suffering in that life.

Robert: That makes me want to tear up.

Anne: I had a lot of contrast, because the life before my suffering was –

Robert: She makes me feel that she was quite happy before. Her family seemed close.

Anne: Then, all of a sudden, these atrocities happened.

Robert: It’s interesting that you’re even bringing this up about Anne Frank, because just the other day I was talking to someone about the Holocaust. Now, the Holocaust is coming into play again.

Anne: So, the short answer is to let people know that their suffering matters even if your story is never revealed.

Me: Erik, you probably understand that because of your own suffering. Can you tell us how that compares to Anne Frank’s?

Erik: Well, Mom, suffering is just talking tits. I’ll just say that.

???

I chuckle, but I have no idea what he means by that phrase.

Erik: One of the biggest things (he waves his arms in wide circles.) I got out of it is that we don’t have to choose to fucking suffer. What I learned is that, and I’m going to say it just like Robert and his guides said it, circumstances aren’t the lessons. It’s the reactions to them that are.

Me: Anne, do you understand what Erik said, and does that resonate with what you had to go through?

Anne: I would say that’s accurate.

Me: What’s the worst thing that happened to you in the Holocaust during your short life?

Anne: It was hardest to see other people suffer and in pain more than it was for me to experience it.

Me: Can you give me some instances?

Robert: Anne Frank—and I don’t mean to come off as ignorant—but Anne Frank was, from what I understand, involved in hiding during the Nazi occupation.

Me: Mm hm.

Robert: She shows me a visual of her being underneath the floor.

Me: That’s right.

Anne: I was very observant. I watched everything, and I liked to document everything. When the soldiers would come in and search the house, whenever they did these sweeps, I felt fear, apprehension, but also resignation, because I thought to myself, ‘Well, if they capture us, and we are executed on the spot or later, I’m okay with that for myself. I’m not okay with knowing that my family or the people who harbored us could be subjected to that.’ When the soldiers would do the sweeps, it was hardest for me to see the fear in the faces of the people I was surrounded by, because I felt a lot. We sometimes use the word, “empathic, “ feeling what other’s feel. I was one. So, that would be very disturbing to me. But, in particular, when I would see the people who harbored us, and I would hear the soldiers above us screaming and yelling and terrorizing those who were trying to protect us, that really bothered me.

Me: Yeah, because they put themselves in harm’s way for you.

Anne: Absolutely, and they teach us self-sacrifice and, on an even deeper level, vulnerability and surrender.

Me: Surrendering to the potential of death?

Anne: Yes. You can also see them as representations of justice.

Me: Mm!

Robert: She seems shy, but she also opens up and starts going into all these other things.

Anne: Another thing that those people represented was thinking for yourself. Everybody else just went right along with things.

Me: They reacted.

Anne: Yes. They were either indifferent—there was a lot of that—or they went right along with it and became one of the victimizers or they were like these people, the protectors.

Me: Right. They followed their hearts.

Robert: She’s bringing up the comparison of how the way they were protected was similar to how Harriet Tubman helped the slaves. I think they called it the Underground Railroad.

Me: So, you were an empath. Is that why you poured everything out onto paper? Did you just want to get all that pain out or was it just because you wanted people to know about all of this after you died? What’s the reason for your writing the book?

Anne: I did it for myself. That is the shortest answer. That was the root of it all. What branched out from that is the hope that the story would get out, and it did in ways that I did not imagine. I never thought it would become what it did. That goes along with what Erik says about expectation. You have to just do it for the sake of doing it and leave your expectations at the door. When you do that, you’re giving freely and it all becomes better than you imagined.

Me: How did it help you? What did writing this book do for you, specifically?

Anne: It helped me feel a sense of power at a time when I had none, considering the circumstances that we were in.

Me: What kind of power did it give you?

Anne: Well, I couldn’t control where I was. I couldn’t control the government. I couldn’t stop them, but I could express and document, for myself, what was happening—the tragedies that I witnessed and that we, as a people, endured.

Me: Yeah, you have control over your pen! Did you run out of ink?

Robert (chuckling): She thinks that’s funny.

Anne: I never thought about it, but there was always ink there. I wonder what would have happened if I had worried that I would run out of ink. What would have happened is I would have missed the opportunity to document all that was going on, and I would have focus on that feeling of fear. To me, that would play into the feelings that that era was feeding me. That was an era of fear. Fear is still very pervasive today. It’s just expressed in other ways.

Me: That’s true.

Anne: I wasn’t willing to accept that fear.

Me: Tell me, Anne, about the capture. What happened? Obviously, they eventually found you.

(Pause)

Me: Or did you starve to death? I don’t know.

Anne: That is still something I am working through. It was difficult. It was not—

Me: Was there a struggle, or did you surrender peacefully?

Anne: For me, there was that resignation that I had all along.

Robert: There’s a little boy there. It wasn’t easy for him.

Me: Aww. That must have been very difficult for you to see, Anne.

Anne (looking down): Very difficult.

Robert: You know it’s funny, because I know this is not what she’s trying to project, but there’s a feeling of shame. Why she would feel shame…

Anne: You are misunderstanding what I am projecting to you, because it was not my shame I was feeling. It was my shame for humanity. I felt ashamed of humanity.

Me: Oh! Did they take you all out and shoot you, or did they take you to the camps? How did you actually die?

Robert: I heard her say “camps.”

Anne: We died in camp.

Me: Aww. Now, reflecting on your life—

Robert: She shows me another visual of someone sticking a gun in her face, but I don’t think she died at that point.

I bet there were a lot of threats and attempts to make her feel like she was on the verge of death.

Anne: Can we move away from that, because it’s such a sad experience for me?

Me: Oh yes. We’re finished with that. Reflecting on your life, do you think you accomplished your spiritual mission?

Anne: I’m happy with the way things turned out, because the story, the diary, gave a face to the Holocaust and every Holocaust before and after.

Me: Ah!

Anne: It’s important to put a face on an experience for humanity, because then we can personalize it. We can see that face and recognize it as similar to our own. We can put ourselves in the shoes of others. So, from that perspective, I’m very pleased. I’d rather that the suffering did not happen in the first place, but it’s one of the things in humanity. Humanity has spent a great deal of time studying suffering. A lot of other races have too.

Me: Yeah. They said that you died of typhus in the camps. Was that common there?

Anne: Yes.

Me: Do you have any regrets?

Anne: This sounds arrogant to say, but I really do not have any regrets. If you regret something, then, to a certain degree, that means you did not fully process emotionally and see emotionally the purpose that it served on some level. So, for that reason, I do not have any regrets.

Me: Yeah, you did a lot of good.

Anne: Even if I did not, even if I had closed off that side of myself from being able to see that when I was on Earth, I know that who I am at my core would have allowed me to see that in what you call the Life Review.

Me: Where you here to learn anything? I think we understand what you were here to teach, but you can summarize if you want.

Anne: The simplest answer about what I was here to learn is compassion, to develop a deeper level of compassion.

Robert: She shows me a tree, and that represents empathy. One of the branches that comes off is compassion.

Anne: This helps you understand what compassion is on a deeper level, not just intellectually, but emotionally as well.

Me: Which is the most important. So, you were here to learn that. Compassion.

Anne: Yes. One thing I will say about what we are here to teach is that there is not just one thing, but compassion is the biggest slice of the pie.

Me: Can you share a life that influenced our last one?

Anne: I would be happy to.

Robert: She’s looking up, and she has her pointer finger on her chin like she’s thinking of one.

Anne: Hmm. Let’s see. Which one?

(Long pause)

Anne: A great one I can share that ties in with compassion and suffering was one where I played the other side. I wasn’t the one who was being treated unjustly. I was the one treating others unjustly.

Robert: It looks like a long time ago. I see people with spears, really dark skin.

Anne: It took place in Africa. I wasn’t the chief, but I was important.

Robert: It’s almost the equivalent of a general, someone very close to the chief.

Anne: In that life, I was always feeding the chief things that would make him paranoid about other tribes, and the chief [bought it].

Roberts’s words.

Anne: In that life I was very insecure. Here’s something that a lot of your blog members will relate to. I felt like I was a fraud, and I was afraid that I would be discovered.

Hmm. Does that fear of discovery have anything to do with her life as Anne Frank?

Anne: A lot of people who are afraid of moving forward in life, of the things that they came here to do, don’t move forward, because they think, “What if I’m a fraud? What if this is really not what I came here to be or do?”

Me: Fascinating!

Robert: Yes, that’s very, very cool. She’s got such a calm energy, too, compared to Erik!

Me: Ya think? So, in that life—I know that a lot of tribes captured and enslaved people from other tribes. Did that go on? It would be an interesting parallel to your life as Anne Frank.

Anne: Yes! Slavery was pervasive. Slavery is our first and last great Holocaust.

Me: Wow.

Anne: And as it relates to that life, yes we did sometimes take slaves. We never went into another tribe and kill everyone. Sometimes I could be particular cruel. Sometimes we would kill all of the able bodied men, because if they were strong, they’d be able to fight us in the future and perhaps prevail.

Me: Mm.

Anne: We’d take a certain number of the children. We’d take a certain number of the younger children, both male and female, to be used as slaves, but we never allowed them to become a part of our tribe. Once we got out of them what we wanted, we executed them. We killed them. The other thing that we did—and this is where I’m getting to the cruel part—is the elderly or the people who were infirm—

Amazing. As I type this I realize how similar this is to the Germans choosing which Jews to enslave and employ and which to slaughter.

Robert: It’s interesting that she used the word, “infirm” instead of sick or disabled.

Anne: We would just leave them to die.

Me: Aw.

Anne: In that life, I think that is so incredibly cruel to do that.

Me: Interesting, because the Nazis did the same with whoever they considered useless, the people who couldn’t be productive in the labor camps.

Robert: Yeah!

Me: They were killed.

Robert. Wow. I got chills again.

Me: Well, what did you learn from that? Did you learn about compassion in that life?

Anne: We all know what compassion is on a certain level, but we live our lives to give ourselves a richer, deeper understanding of compassion on an emotional level.

Me: So, with these other lives there is sort of a tapestry that’s woven to give you that deeper understanding?

Anne: Yes. The thing that we seek as conscious energy, whatever term you want to use, is emotion. That’s what we’re going after.

Me: Are you on the earth right now in some form?

Robert: First, she said, “Oh god, no!” And then she sort of switched gears and said, “Well, I’m actually thinking about it.” She’s kind of hovering around someone who doesn’t know that they’re pregnant yet. She can’t decide whether she’s going to attach to that life or not.

Anne: This is connected to Earth.

Me: Mm hm.

Anne: On other planets? Yes, I definitely have lives going on on other planets.

Me: So you’re giving us the reference point of Earth and our linear timeframe?

Anne: I don’t mean to sound critical, but Earth, especially at this time in human history, is very difficult, and there are a lot of contrasts there that do not occur at the same extreme.

Me: Is that why you’re hesitating to incarnate on Earth again?

Anne: I suppose so.

Me: Tell us about your afterlife. Do you do any work there now?

Anne: You know when I first crossed over, I reconnected to a lot of people who I had known who had passed away before me.

Me: Mm hm.

Anne: I waited for people –

Robert: I thought that everyone in her family had died, but she’s saying that some people, relatives I guess, lived.

Me: I think her father, Otto, lived.

That must have been torture for him being left behind to miss the rest of his family.

Anne: I waited for some of those people, and then I hung around them and continued to live out some of the things that we would have wanted to have had happen in that life had the Nazi occupation never occurred.

Me: Oh, okay!

Robert: She’s bringing up two things that she always wanted to do but didn’t get a chance to. One of them was piano playing. The other is painting.

Me: Mm. So, you do that now?

Anne: Yes, and I love it!

Me: Aww. That’s great! You need a break. These things bring joy to life, and you didn’t have much of that in your life as Anne Frank.

Anne: Yes. It’s not for everyone, and I don’t recommend it.

Me: Really? Ya think?

Robert and I laugh. Finally a little sense of humor!

Me: What do you think about the state of humanity now, and what messages or advice do you have for us. Then, I’ll let Erik chime in.

Robert (laughing): Erik says, and I know he’s just joking, but he says, “Your fart!”

I laugh, but I totally don’t get it.

Erik laughs.

Anne (nonplussed): Humanity has grown so much just over the last 100 years. That’s the benefit of living through extremes. You can grow in exponential ways. Humanity is one of those races.

Erik: We’re hardcore!

Robert (chuckling): That’s one of the phrases that I use a lot.

Me: Being human is an extreme sport!

Anne: I’m very hopeful, because, even though there is a lot of fear mongering going on, I would just ask humanity to not be influenced by it. If you’re constantly afraid of something and you keep your back turned away from it, behind your back, from your own perspective, it appears to get larger and larger and larger. It looms over you.

Me: Yeah.

Anne: But if you turn around and face that fear, you will see that all it is is a transparent illusion. It loses its power.

Me: Ah! That’s a great message. It’s your message and advice for us?

Anne: Absolutely, because the fear itself does not create the circumstances or our experiences. It’s our reaction to the fear. Fear in and of itself has no power, but the emotional reactions that we feel from having encountered it is where all the power lies. Emotional reactions are what cause us to take actions that create this negative energy. The fear didn’t do that. You can’t blame fear.

Me: Ah! Before I let Erik take the floor—

Robert (sighing): He’s picking his nose.

Me: Oh god.

Robert (to Erik): Erik! That is so disrespectful!

Me: Yeah, and right in front to Anne Frank!

Robert: And then he wipes it on my couch!

Me: Ew!

Spirit boogers. At least he doesn’t eat them.

Erik: I’m saving it for later.

Okay, so never mind.

Me: In what way do you think we’ve progressed the most. I’m talking about humanity, of course.

Anne: Awareness. Awareness is a thing that humanity, over the last hundred years and exponentially over the last 20, 30, 40 years, has grown.

Me: Awareness of all types?

Anne: Awareness of all types, yes. For instance, many human beings now realize that other species on this planet are just as emotional as we are. They’re recognizing that the reason that other human beings commit acts that we define or perceive as evil are because those individuals were taught that in some way and that even though you have to be held accountable, you don’t have to do it in a way that’s punitive. If you do it in a way that’s punitive, then all you’re going to get is more hostility in return. Any form of justice that’s approached from a punitive perspective is going to create more negative energy.

Me: And more power. Erik, is there anything you want to ask or say to Ms. Frank?

I brace myself.

Erik: I think she’s great, and –

(Pause)

Robert (to Erik): Yeah. No, I’m not saying that. (To me) He can be so irreverent sometimes!

Me: I know.

(Pause)

Me: Well go ahead. Say it.

Robert (laughing): Oh, Erik! You put me in these situations!

Me: Come on. Don’t be shy!

Robert: But it sounds so disrespectful!

Robert laughs so hard, he has to take some time to compose himself.

Me: It’s not you that’s being respectful. It’s him!

Robert: I know! I know!

Me: Don’t worry about it.

I’m thinking Erik and Anne can handle this themselves.

Robert: He said she could put a little meat on her bones.

Okay, I’ve heard him say a lot worse!

Me: Well, that’s probably true. Is she laughing?

Robert: She thinks it’s funny.

Erik: I know I’m going to get shit for that line.

Me: No you won’t.

I reconsider.

Me: Well, I don’t know. You could.

Erik: Yeah, Mom. People are going to think about the whole Holocaust thing. I don’t mean it that way. Even before she went into all that trouble she was in, she was still thin.

Me: Oh, okay. So, Anne, thank you so much for this opportunity. I’m so grateful for all you went through to teach us something valuable.

Anne smiles and nods her head.

Me: Bye.

Anne waves goodbye.

Robert: Wait, she’s coming back.

A curtain call!

Anne: I want to thank you for being a messenger for hope.

Me (touched): Aww.

Anne: Erik’s told me everything about what happened to him and about all of the traumas that you have endured. I can relate to you on that level, and you can relate to me, because we both endured a type of Holocaust. Yours was a Holocaust of grief, and your spirit refuses to surrender to that.

Me: To curl up and die?

There were so many times I wanted to.

Anne: Yes. You may have wanted to do that at times, but you’ve always had this sense of hope inside of you. That’s what I see. It’s what caused you to create the blog and start seeking out this information of consciousness survival. We want to thank you, because you’re a big part of helping to elevate human awareness.

Me (Choking up): Aww. And Erik! Erik, too.

Anne: Yes, of course, Erik. When I’m referring to you, I’m referring to you and Erik together.

Me: All right. Well, thank you!

Anne: Thank you.

Erik: Yeah, Mom. I love you.

Robert: He says it so sweet.

Robert mimics Erik’s sappy tone.

Me: I can just see him talk that way. I can see the expression on his face!