The Holiday From Hell

The Holiday from Hell

The Re-Enlightenment Two

A Spiritual Journey

Carole and David McEntee-Taylor

‘The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.’

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945)

Copyright 2007 Carole and David McEntee-Taylor

Smashwords Edition

Preface

In the last book we explained how we are not just physical beings but a spirit that has taken a physical body. Our spirit has chosen to do this to allow us to experience a range of emotions and events that will help us evolve spiritually. To do this our physical bodies need somewhere to exist physically and the place we come to is the earth. It is here that we experience the emotions and events that we can only theorise about whilst in our peaceful spiritual home. It is such a complete change from our spiritual existence that it could be described as a holiday. After all, we choose to go on holiday and we chose our destination because of what it has to offer. We also use our holidays to try different things and to think about how we can make changes in our lives. It is the perfect opportunity to have a break from work and spend time with our loved ones.

Our holiday from spirit is no different in that respect. Our spirit chooses our destination for what it has to offer us in terms of our spiritual development. It allows us to experience things we can’t experience as Spirit and it gives us the opportunity to make decisions that will influence our future spiritual development. It also allows us to experience the sensations of being physically close to our loved ones. The main difference is that the holidays we take on the earth plane as physical beings are intended to make us feel relaxed and to rejuvenate and energise ourselves. Our holiday from spirit normally has completely the opposite effect and can very often be described as The Holiday from Hell! But it doesn’t have to be like that – there is another way.

Have you ever wondered why the world is like it is? Why there are such disparities between rich and poor? Have you ever wondered why we as individuals and communities seem to keep repeating the same mistakes? Why it is that anti-Semitism and racism thrives and why the messages put out by the major religions seem to lead to wars and conflict instead of the peace and love that they preach? Have you ever wondered why some people interpret spiritual messages of love as messages of hate and persecution and more importantly, perhaps, why other people would believe that this is the correct interpretation?

The Holiday from Hell asks why, in the 21st Century, we are still fighting over events that happened or supposedly happened centuries earlier. It sets out to examine and explain the roots of current conflicts and asks whether the past is as important as we think it is, or whether we, as individuals and communities should leave the past behind and begin to live in the present. One of the ways it does this is by looking at several explanations for our existence. There are many gaps in our knowledge of the past and almost as many theories put forward to explain them as there are mysteries. Some set out to disprove religious accounts of our beginnings; others try to find proof to back up these religious accounts. Some are based purely in science, others are assumed to be science fiction. The aim of this book is not to say that any of these theories or explanations are right or wrong but to ask whether it really matters. Many of the differences in these explanations are based purely on differences in interpretation and perception and are a result of the life experiences of those doing the interpreting. Throughout the centuries our societies and their values have gone through continual changes and many theories reflect the mores and values of the time in which they were written. Our scientific knowledge is also constantly improving which makes it easier to prove or disprove some of the earlier theories about our existence. There is nothing wrong with a healthy curiosity about our beginnings but we should also remember that we are here to live this life; to experience the here and now. We are often told that the present is a gift – and that we should live in it and appreciate it. Another expression claims that ‘the past is another country’ and as such should be treated like that. In other words many of today’s problems could be resolved if we left the past in the past and concentrated on the present.

As we have said, our spiritual evolution does not happen in isolation. It is not only closely integrated with our physical evolution but also with the spiritual and physical progression of every other living being on the planet. The Re-Enlightenment was an introduction and concentrated on us as individuals. The Holiday from Hell not only continues this examination but expands to include our individual physical journey as well. It also examines our common physical and spiritual evolution because we are not just isolated individuals; we are part of a community. Therefore, everything we think, say and do impacts on someone else and vice versa.

So how do individuals become part of a community? For individuals to form a community there must be some kind of glue that binds them together, that gives them this sense of shared identity. This could be either a sense of or actual shared geographical territory. In other words they live in the same area and within the same physical boundary. If they live within this boundary or area they may well have a shared history ie: the same things that have happened to them will have happened to their neighbours and would have been seen and experienced in the same way. They may also share the same language and even the same dialect. These are the cultural and social things that bind individuals into communities. If the community does have its own territory it may also have its own system of government. All these things will shape the community’s view of themselves and the world outside their community and all of these things are essentially political.

But there are other communities who may not live within the same territory or share the same language. They may not share the same history or live under the same type of government; nevertheless they consider themselves to be a community because they share the same religious beliefs. Thus the world has both political communities and religious communities and some that are both. Any solution to the problems facing the world must take this into account because the problems that divide us are both political and religious and both have their origins in the distant past.

But why are we still fighting over things that apparently happened centuries ago? Are they really relevant today or have they become so entangled with our idea of our own identity that we are unable to move past them? If we took a fresh look at the origins of these conflicts would this allow us to move forward? The answer to this probably lies in how the investigation is carried out and whether it encourages us to change our understanding of our political and religious history. It is this attempt to change our perceptions that underpins this book.

The Holiday from Hell describes our spiritual journey from the beginning of our holiday on the earth plane to the end of our time in this physical body. It sets out to argue that in understanding the origins of our physical, political and religious beginnings we have the beginnings of harmony and an end to the differences that divide us. Because we are mind, body and spirit and are all of these things intertwined, we can only understand one if we understand all and the only way we can really do this is to look at our existence from a physical, emotional and spiritual view.

As with our spiritual journey through life, our journey through this book has a Beginning, a Middle and an End. As in life, where we start as children, then progress through adolescence to become adults, in the book we start as spiritual children, progress to our spiritual adolescence and then become spiritual adults. There are also three themes running throughout the book that have a massive impact on how we live our lives. These are identity, change, and control.

Identity, Change and Control

Who we are and how we see ourselves has a huge influence on the way we interact with other people. If we see ourselves as isolated individuals we will become selfish and introverted; only looking out for our own interests and not seeing others’ problems as any of our concern. However, if we see ourselves as part of a community, we have to be careful that our community does not strengthen itself by making others ‘outsiders’. This is just as harmful as being an isolated individual. The answer is that we all have to change the way we see ourselves. Somehow we have to move beyond this narrow vision of who we are and begin to see ourselves as a world community. We all have to realise that everything we do impacts on someone somewhere else in our world and that something as simple as changing our perception of who we are is the only way forward if we don’t want to keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

However, change is something we often find quite difficult to deal with yet how we react to change is another aspect of our lives that has a huge impact on our ability to interact with others. Everything eventually changes; because everything is temporary and nothing ever remains the same, the one thing we do have to get used to and adapt to during our time here, is change. Unfortunately, instead of seeing change as an opportunity, we often see it as a threat and react accordingly.

The third theme is control. If we see ourselves as individuals we see ourselves as being in control of our lives and the events within our lives. When things happen that we have no control over, which is inevitable, we react in negative ways. The same applies to communities and nations which are, after all, just the sum of the individuals within them.

If we consider these three aspects of our lives together we can see how important they are and how much influence they have on how we live our lives and how we interact with others.

The first section begins with our interpretation of how we start on our spiritual journey. It continues by looking at the physical, religious and political aspects of that stage of the journey. The second section begins with a brief introduction and then offers our interpretation of this part of our spiritual journey. This is followed by a look at the physical, religious and political aspects of this stage of our journey. As most journeys have a rest stop we have included two chapters of questions and answers on spiritualism, mediumship and healing in the middle section to give you a chance to have a break before starting the final section which looks at The End of our spiritual journey.

Although it may seem that we are critical of many of our political and religious institutions we have tried to emphasise that it is the institutions we are critical of and the way they have evolved, rather than the individuals within them. After all, if we are writing a book that suggests change is needed, we have to outline where we think the problems lie. We cannot do this unless we look at them critically and although we have tried to be as constructive as possible in our criticism our passion sometimes gets the better of us! We hope that any criticism we have made is seen in the constructive way that it is meant.

The final thing to add before we start our holiday is to say that we have tried to make this as easy to read as possible but we have to include a certain amount of detail to support the theories that we are explaining. As with The Re-Enlightenment we cannot emphasise enough that we do not expect you to take our word or believe everything we say. The book is intended to get you to ask your own questions, not take our word as gospel truth. One of the reasons that the world is in a mess is because people have tried to impose their views on others by telling them that their interpretation is the only truth. This is our interpretation. It may not necessarily be yours!

Contents

Introduction

The Beginning

1.In the beginning there was spirit

2.In the beginning there was science

3.In the beginning there was religion

4.In the beginning there was politics

The Middle

5.In the middle there was spirit

6.In the middle there was politics

7.In the middle there was religion

8.In the middle there was science

9.Questions and Answers about mediums

10.General Questions and Answers

The End

11.Coming Home – Our Science

12.Coming Home – Our Religion

13.Coming Home – Our Politics

14.Coming Home – Spiritually

15.Conclusion

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Inspiration & Acknowledgements

About Us

‘We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.’

Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)

Introduction

Welcome to our spiritual journey

As with all journeys it is quite a good idea to do some preparation before we set out. If we are going to another country it is particularly important to know about the current political and economic status of our proposed destination. Our spiritual journey is no different. Before we leave the comfort of our spiritual existence we need to have a look at the current state of play on the earth plane. This will give us an idea of the problems that we will be facing and help us choose which gifts we should bring with us. As we explained in the previous book our gifts are the emotions, abilities, instincts etc. that influence the way we think, speak and act and the way we view the world around us. These and other aspects of our personalities are known collectively as our spiritual gifts.

We all have free will and one of the ways we express our free will is to do with how we use these spiritual gifts. All our spiritual gifts can be used for good or bad. We can also allow them to control us or we can control them. Learning to use these gifts for the benefit of all is part of the process that helps us to evolve spiritually. But, perhaps even more importantly, because the world is the sum of the individuals within it, the way we use them will also affect the evolution of the whole world.

So let us begin by taking a brief critical look at how things are in our world at the time of writing (Autumn 2008).

All the worlds systems are now working at full stretch with very little capacity left for unforeseen emergencies. The financial systems that were relying on credit to keep them buoyant and on hedge funds that provided large profits have proved themselves to be inherently unstable. Similar things have happened in the past where large unsustainable investments have cause instability and collapse. The most notable of these include the South Sea Bubble in the 18th Century and more recently the collapse of Enron where only the intervention of the US government prevented the world’s money markets collapsing in a scene reminiscent of the Wall Street Crash of the 1920’s.

But in the last few months, on an unprecedented scale, the governments of all the worlds’ richest nations have had to step in to prop up the banks and guarantee savings and investments. Shares on the stock market have lost billions of pounds in a relative short time and many countries, including Britain, are now in or on the verge of recession and depression. Despite billions of pounds of tax payers’ money – our money - being given to the banks to ease lending between them and free up some credit, the banks have done very little to comply.

Lack of consumer confidence is fuelled by the dire predictions from most of the major media who seem to revel in the doom and gloom indicated by the poor economic statistics. Unfortunately this does little to help and actually makes everything worse because it reinforces the fear and leaves people even more reluctant to spend what little money they do have. Repeated calls for the Bank of England to reduce interest rates received little response until last month (November 2008) when they finally reduced them by an unprecedented one and half percent followed by another one percent in December. Unfortunately many banks and building societies have still not bothered to pass them on, preferring to use the opportunity to make a quick profit.

The whole situation is exacerbated by continually rising energy prices. The world’s resources are under pressure. The oil that the world’s economies depend on is set to run out some time in the next 20 years at current rates of consumption although if this increases, which seems likely, it will happen sooner. The demand for oil has soared over the last couple of years as countries new to capitalism undertook massive building and expansion projects. Oil producers eventually bowed to international pressure and increased production after the price of a barrel of oil hit a record high in the summer leading to rocketing energy and fuel prices. But as the world-wide economic slow-down has reduced consumption and energy prices have begun to fall back to realistic prices they have now cut back production again to protect their enormous profit margins.

The high price of energy has also led to a scramble to find alternative sources of energy and reignited the debate about nuclear fuel and whether need outweighs any safety concerns. The increase in energy prices has also added to the price of food in two ways. First, rather than being nationally self-sufficient in food, much of it is transported round the world so any increase in energy prices mean increased costs for suppliers and transporters.

Secondly, the increase in energy prices has led to an increase in fertile land being used to grow fuel for cars rather than us. This has led to shortages of basic foods especially rice which is the staple food of many poor countries. Despite the promises of our politicians and the best efforts of our charities, one third of the world’s population still have two thirds of the world’s resources whilst one third still continue to live in abject poverty with not enough to eat or drink.

Even our eco systems seem to be on the verge of collapse as we lurch from shortages of water to floods on a scale never previously seen. Add to this the poor harvests because of adverse weather conditions over the past couple of years and we could be forgiven for thinking that our world is on the brink of catastrophe.

The world’s political institutions are also becoming increasingly unstable. Many counties are returning to the dictatorships of the past and those countries that claim to be democratic are constantly under threat from those who would undermine their stability and freedoms. This has resulted in many democracies bringing in policies that are undemocratic and that undermine the basic principles of their own democracy. The indigenous populations of those democracies seem unwilling or unable to see what is happening. Governments are elected on minority votes whilst the majority of the population are unrepresented. The media of these nations pumps out a constant diatribe of what, to paraphrase Marx, could be described as ‘opium for the masses’. Whilst the populations of these countries are busy watching trivia, changes are happening under their nose that they are not even aware of.

The world’s social systems are straining to cope with the results of the growing number of dictatorships as their citizens seek freedom in other countries whose governments are liberal and democratic in nature. But many of these new citizens do not understand democracy and have no understanding of the duties and responsibilities that go hand in hand with the rights that they expect. Others find their new countries lacking in spiritual resources even though they may appear to be rich in material success. Coming from a variety of illiberal cultures they find it hard to adjust their lives to fully assimilate into the culture of their adopted country. Many do not wish to fully assimilate because they see the unlimited freedoms of speech, clothes, ways of life and female equality as alien. This coupled with the lack of parental/familial respect adds to their feelings of alienation.

Many of these cultural groups have a religious basis. Because many of the religious institutions of the world are also becoming less secure with falling congregations and constant media scepticism, those who feel their beliefs are under attack resort to fundamentalism. This takes many forms but is essentially another form of fascism, albeit with a religious basis. All faiths have their extremists although they operate in different ways.

So is there any answer to these problems or like other civilisations before us, are we doomed to fade into obscurity?

The earth is rather like our playground. It is here that we come to learn our lessons and it is these lessons that will help us to progress spiritually. One of the most basic lessons we learn as we are growing up is how to behave. We learn what is considered acceptable behaviour and what isn’t. This is something we would normally learn from our role models. Our role models are primarily those who are most involved with bringing us up. This is usually but not always, our parents. But it is not just parents who are role models. Every adult in society is a potential role model for our children. Children learn by example. Therefore, everything we do impacts on them and it is from us that they learn what is and isn’t acceptable.

It is important for all of us, particularly our children, that someone sets the boundaries and limits of what is and is not appropriate. Codes of satisfactory behaviour are decided by the society within which we live and are reflected in its legislation and criminal justice system. They often have their roots in religious teachings and are constantly updated as we reassess how we view certain types of behaviour. Some things that were considered unacceptable in the past have now become a normal part of our lives. Other things that were considered normal behaviour are now outlawed or viewed with disfavour.

However, like children left too long unsupervised in the playground, we seem to have not only forgotten why we are really here, but also how to set these boundaries. Think about what happens if you have a dog and you allow it to run wild with no set rules. It will become aggressive, unruly and a danger to itself and everyone it comes into contact with. It could be argued that we have now reached the point in our society where our boundaries need to be reassessed and redrawn. This is not to say that there should be even more legislation, nor should we return to fundamentalist politics and dictatorships of either the past or those that exist in other less democratic countries. But it is now time we all grew up and started to take responsibility for our world. It is time we all worked together to decide exactly what kind of world we really want to live in and what kind of world we really want to leave to our children. As we have said, we all have free will, but with any form of freedom there comes responsibility. The more freedom we have, the more responsibility we have to ensure we use our freedom wisely.

It is now time to look at the chaos and damage around us and decide what we are going to do about it. After all, if you leave your children to run wild in your home sooner or later you will need to take charge, clean up the mess and sort it all out. This is no different. The earth is our home and we have been allowed to run wild and make a mess. Now it is time to start the big clean up. And where better to start than with our thoughts, words and actions. It is now time to grow up spiritually and remember why we are really here.

In the Re Enlightenment we argued for a new identity, one that could override all the social, cultural, political and religious identities that divide us at present. We called this our spiritual identity. But what exactly is this and how could it possibly take the place of all the other identities that coexist uneasily in our world today? The answer to the second question is simply that it can’t because it is not meant to. It has no need to replace other forms of identity because it will stand alongside them and when differences arise it is our spiritual identity that will reconcile the tensions between them.

Of course this sounds like an impossible task and we agree that it is not easy. But nothing that is worth having is easy. If it was we would not appreciate it. If you have to save up to buy something you enjoy it much more than if you just go straight out and buy it. If you have to fight for something because you are in danger of losing it, it becomes even more precious. Our occupation of the earth goes back several centuries and the logical progression would be for us to be advancing both scientifically, politically, and spiritually from those earliest civilisations. But this does not appear to be the case. If anything we appear to have regressed considerably and are only now making up some of the ground that we have lost over the past three or four centuries.

The same appears to be true of ourselves. Although we seem to have advanced from those ancient civilisations that we look back on is this really the case? Progress seems to be extremely slow and painful and we often seem to be repeating the same mistakes and having the same experiences over and over again. But we are not just individuals. We are all part of our communities and our communities are part of our country and our country is part of the world. Like our personal spiritual journeys, the countries of the world also seem to be undertaking their own spiritual journeys. And like us they seem doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes and experiences, some of them again and again, albeit in slightly different forms.

To discover the reasons for this we need to go back to the beginning and rediscover our roots. Not just our spiritual roots, but our physical, social, political and religious roots. This means opening our minds, stepping outside our physical selves and the stories that we have been told and listening to our spiritual selves. In other words, we need to see things from another perspective – a spiritual perspective.

Both our physical and spiritual evolutions are part of our spiritual journey and as with all journeys ours starts at the beginning. But before we start on our journey it is important to reiterate that we do not have all the answers. We are not historians or theologians in the wider academic sense. However, we, like you, have access to books, libraries, the internet and our spirit guides. We do not expect you to agree with everything in this book. We would be extremely worried if you did. The book is intended to spark debate and to encourage you to open your minds and ask your own questions. One of the hardest things about writing these books was to avoid falling into the trap so many philosophers fall into – that of stating that one theory is true and everything else is wrong. These books are our interpretation of the message we have been given to share with you. Interpretation is highly personal and comes from our own experiences of life. Our experiences of life will be totally different from someone else’s experience of life. Thus our interpretation will be different from someone else’s interpretation. This does not mean that one is better than another or even that one has more validity than another.

We would not presume to tell you how to think. We only presume to ask you to think for yourself, to ask questions of yourself and others and find the truth that you are happy with. We only ask that you do not let others dictate how you should think. Allowing someone else to impose their particular interpretation of the spiritual message has led to centuries of war and misery. That was fine when we were spiritual children. As children we accept the interpretation of life that we are given by our elders until we are old enough to make up our own minds. However, once we become teenagers we begin to think for ourselves and to seek our own identity. We have been children long enough. We need to now embrace our spiritual teenage years and to do what all teenagers do.

Teenagers rebel against the systems around them because they can see the problems, the inconsistencies, the hypocrisy that we have learnt to live with. They are seeing the world with fresh eyes and they have fresh