Anyone who has asked the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?" will find it clearly answered in Life Lessons: our purpose in being human. The Masters of the Spirit World selected for this book 40 souls- channeled by Chicago-based psychic Toni Ann Winninger-who freely chose their life lessons before they incarnated on planet Earth. In dialogue with the book's editor, Peter Watson Jenkins, the souls were identified as having previously lived lives in many parts of the world over the past 100 years. They each tell the story of how they met, with varying success and failure, the challenges that represented the lessons they had chosen for themselves. The book is divided into four sections: Prosperity (wealth and poverty); Health (Depression, Handicaps, Illnesses, Addiction); Physical Challenges (abandonment, domination, abuse); and Emotional Challenges (Ambivalence, Bigotry, Validation, Enlightenment). The selection is illustrative of many life lessons, but there are many more such challenges that people meet, of course. Outlining the principles involved in our undertaking these tests, the Masters selected examples that arise from our relationship with the eternal Source, of which our souls are fragments. These experiences, necessarily negative in nature, are those that souls taking human form suffer because they have requested them beforehand. There is no predestined cause in what happens to us. We freely make our choice, and there is a deep purpose in all the suffering that is involved, that the book amply clarifies. The Masters have also brought in ten commentators to help us understand their teaching, being familiar in their own lives with these lessons. These spirits range from souls who have worked on the Masters' books before: Rachel Carson, Mahatma Gandhi, Pope John XXIII-to newcomers: Vladimir Lenin and Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. This very readable 246 page book displays the comfort with which both the Masters on the Other Side and the earthbound team of Winninger and Jenkins transparently feel in working with each other. It picks up techniques successfully employed before by Celestial Voices, Inc., the publishers, giving an unrivaled clarity and purpose to this searching metaphysical conundrum.
