Attar Books

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Peter Calvert is a writer and channeller. He is a Reiki master and past-life regression therapist who is practised in Vipassana mediation, Holotropic Breathwork, spiritualist platform mediumship and energywork. He has written a number of channelled books on spirituality.

Keith Hill’s work explores the intersection of mysticism, history, science, religion and psychology. His books include The God Revolution, Striving To Be Human and Practical Spirituality, each of which won the Ashton Wylie Award, New Zealand’s premiere prize for spiritual writing.

PREFACE

Peter and I first met in 2008, at a book fair in Tauranga, New Zealand, where Peter was presenting his first channelled work, Agapé and the Hierarchy of Love. I bought a copy, started reading, and was immediately drawn in. The material offered a rational, scientifically-oriented approach to spiritual development that made a lot of sense. But as much as the text, I was drawn to the standpoint from which it was written. The identities Peter was channelling were looking down on human existence from way above. They were knowledgeable without being dogmatic, exact without being stuffy, and they had a sense of humour. What especially attracted me was that they offered a relevant contemporary take on metaphysical and spiritual matters.

As a result, I offered to help Peter edit his next channelled book, Guided Healing. While working on it I decided meeting Peter presented a unique opportunity to ask a group of non-embodied identities, if that’s who he was communicating with, some serious questions. I consequently put together a list of what became one hundred questions on “big” topics, such as the creation of the universe, how the spiritual and physical connect, and the purpose of our life on Earth. The answers Peter received surprised us both. They went far beyond what either of us had anticipated, and opened up an entirely new—at least, for us—way of conceiving reality.

The answers Peter received, and the diary he kept while working on them, I edited into our first collaborative book, The Matapaua Conversations. Since then our collaboration has blossomed, resulting in eleven books to date, channelled by each of us. Beyond this, during the past three decades Peter has channelled well over a million words (and counting), which he has archived on the www.agapeschool.nz website. I have produced a much more modest volume of material.

Learning Who You Are is an introduction to these channelled texts. It is designed to offer an easy-to-read overview of what the guides, as we denote them, have shared with us to date. In these pages you will find material that deals with the topics traditionally explored in spiritual teachings, including metaphysics, human spiritual nature, psychospiritual development, meditation, and the aura.

What differentiates this material from traditional teachings is that its conceptual frame is non-religious, preferring to link spiritual processes to current scientific and cultural knowledge. It explores the spiritual aspects of our existence in ways that sync with how we see the world in the twenty-first century.

All the material that follows has been channelled by Peter or by me. It is drawn from a range of sources. Some has previously been published in our books and online, some was channelled for group meetings and appears in print for the first time, and a little interlinking material has been channelled specifically for this publication. An appendix lists further reading that expands on the material presented here.

Keith Hill, editor

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE

We begin our exposition with what human identifies as the beginning, the origin of the universe. That origin is well known to human scientists in a purely physical sense. The emergence of a singularity and the big bang that followed is an adequate explanation for what happened to bring this universe into existence. What is not well known is the spiritual intent behind that coming to be.

What we will attempt to describe here is something of that intent and how it has created the universe—for creation there certainly was. However, creation did not occur in the way that is traditionally and religiously understood. God was not involved in the sense that is proposed in the world’s religious literature. In order to explain the process of creation, we replace the traditional concepts of God, which has become over-used and outworn, with the term of the Dao.

The Dao is the ultimate unmanifest. Everything that exists comes from the Dao. Consciousness is intrinsic to the Dao and derives from it, as does intent. The Dao in its intent is magnanimous and expansive in a way that those involved in human existence, focused on the much narrower concerns of the physical self, are incap­able of manifesting.

Inextricably bound into the Dao’s intent is an active force to which we give the name *observer*. In simple terms, it could be said that the Dao is the ultimate source of all that is and the *observer* is its intent. The *observer* is filled with goodwill, intelligence and love, plus many other qualities that cannot be expressed in human language, because there is no equivalent experience in the human domain. It must be understood that the *observer* is not a personal manifestation of any kind. When thinking of the *observer*, think of an abstract intent that cannot be fully described. It is an urge. A momentum. That is all. Certainly, do not conjure in your mind the image of a being of any kind. It is not God in a traditional religious sense.

We have chosen the words Dao and *observer* because they are relatively neutral terms, at least in the context of secularised Western English language. In doing so, we are attempting to avoid religious God language. So while aspects of what we are saying here have certainly been described before, in other cultures and eras, generally in religious literature, we are developing and updating those older concepts, constructing culturally relevant models and using terminology appropriate to these times.


It was via the *observer* that the Dao created the physical universe. When discussing this it is necessary to expand the discussion to include a cluster of universes. To appreciate what is involved, picture an extensive field within which multiple universes are expanding and contracting. Science calls this the multiverse model. We affirm that this model is valid, although not in the way cosmologists currently speculate.

How many universes exist within the multiverse? We affirm between five and ten universes are currently going through their cycles of expansion and contraction. We cannot assign a particular number because the human timescale is simply too truncated to accommodate the vastness of what is occurring. Humanity lives in a now that simply does not exist for us. Or for the multiverse. Or the *observer*. We exist outside the spacetime continuum humanity lives within. For us to generate a sample, which is what we would need to do, by making a theoretical slice through spacetime and then use that as a reference moment to definitively state, “As of now x number of universes exist within the multiverse,” is ultimately an arbitrary exercise. There is no now. There is a range of current existence. From which we can derive an approximation only.

Each universe has specific parameters within which it exists. Just as scientists have identified certain numerical values in relation to this universe, such as the strength of gravity and the values of the weak and strong forces, and they know that these values are basic to this universe being what it is, so the parameter values basic to other universes are different, and consequently give rise to a different universal nature and conditions for existence.

Accordingly, it can be seen that the universe humanity exists within is actually part of a multiple initiative. It is not a sole attempt, as the philosophers say, to conjure something from nothing. It is part of a wider experiment to explore many varied possibilities of existence. And we say experiment advisedly, because this is certainly one way the multiverse may be viewed.

The *observer* initiated the multiverse experiment. The *observer* selected the experimental parameters for each universe, then set them in motion. Given each universe is at a different phase within its complete repeated cycles of expansions and contractions, some will cease to be before others. They will, or will not, be replaced by other universes according to the *observer’s* intent. So this initiative identified as the multiverse is an ongoing process, the scale of which is beyond the understanding of any physical mind. It is not a randomised initiative. An infinity of universes has not been brought into existence out of a vague hope that one universe out of millions might succeed. It is an intelligently intended and constructed experiment.

Many scientists deny that there is any purpose to the universe and what exists in it, that everything happens accidentally, entirely as a matter of chance. They adopt this view because the only coherent alternative view is the traditional religious view, which is that God created everything and now personally oversees and controls it. Neither religious metaphysics nor scientific naturalism are accurate. As a corrective to partial thinking, we present the notion that the intent of the *observer* certainly led to the multiverse coming into existence in what could be said to be a creative act. But no overseeing or control is subsequently exerted in the traditional religious sense.

The *observer* has never been involved in any physical universe. Nor will it ever be. After setting the underlying parameter values for each universe, the *observer* has stood back, to use another inadequate human metaphor, and observed what occurs. This is somewhat like the Deist notion that a personal God created the world then stood back and let creation function according to natural laws. Yet the analogy works only partially. We repeat, the *observer* is nothing like a personal God or a person of any kind.

To come back to the origin of this universe, and to use current scientific terminology, following the big bang the laws of physics spontaneously transformed energy into matter, matter developed into gas clouds, gravitational forces drew the gas into stars and planets, and on certain of these planets environmental niches formed, some of which were supportive of life, from which life eventually emerged.

Behind the creation of each universe is a multiplexed intent to generate environments in which ever more varied and complex forms of physical life come into existence and evolve. But throughout this extensive process there is never any intent, at the *observer’s* level, to control either the process or the outcome. From the *observer’s* perspective there is also no attachment to what happens to any single life form.

So the multiverse is an extended experiment of inconceivable magnitude in which sets of opportunities have been constructed for the purpose of facilitating the emergence of ever more varied life forms. There is benign goodwill at the outcome of each universe. But no outcome is predetermined.