Reviews

BRENT RAYNES
editor of ALTERNATE PERCEPTIONS
author of  VISITORS FROM HIDDEN REALMS

"When We Were Gods is a thought-provoking first-person account of Carole Chapman’s hypnotic exploration of apparent and ancient past life memories of a most incredible nature—‘memories’ that cited an extraterrestrial origin, as well as a past life, a strange root race, and the superior and mysterious technology of Atlantis, with a thing called ‘snake travel’ (would quantum physics call it a ‘wormhole’?) thrown in the mix. What you have is a fascinating autobiographical accounting of Carole’s memories, how she initially reacted to them and eventually came to deal with them, and the efforts and lengths to which she undertook to try and objectively confirm the truth of their reality—a journey and search that took her to Central America and Egypt. What she learned challenges conventional science and understanding, and it may take the emerging science of theoretical quantum physics  to eventually confirm the actual truth of their bewildering ‘memories.’ A genuinely intriguing and thought-provoking book.”

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. (C) Marie D. Jones, 2005

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CLAIR BALSLEY
editor, SUNTOPAZ LLC

When We Were Gods: Insights on Atlantis, Past Lives, Angelic Beings of Light, and Spiritual Awakening chronicles the remarkable spiritual journey taken by author Carole Chapman. The journey is initiated by Chapman’s decision to live life according to God’s will instead of her own. It is a lesson in the importance of humility.
 
By turning her will to work for the betterment of mankind, she is given a gift to share with the rest of humanity. She stumbles upon this path after marrying the man she first met in a dream. An excessive weight gain caused by a miscarriage prompts Chapman to seek the help of renown hypnotherapist Lynn Sparrow. It is through these hypnotherapy sessions that Chapman discovers remarkable information about the human soul.
 
She learns our origin, why suffering and death is necessary for the development of our eternal soul and what the next step will be in our soul’s journey.
 
Carole Chapman offers hope, going beyond the simple doomsayer’s description of the future. She sees that the earth changes (or earth cleansing) predicted by so many cultures are merely the path we must follow in order to welcome in the new world. This new world will be ushered in by the Golden Ones, souls who have elected to reincarnate at this time to help with the transition.

She not only gives us information from her hypnosis sessions but seeks confirmation of that information in the legends and visuals of many cultures. She even travels to the Yucatan, finding confirmation among the many Mayan sculptures and carvings. Chapman has included stunning photographs of these images in When We Were Gods.

This book is a joy to read. Chapman successfully paints us a picture with her words. This book is an example of how truth can be stranger and more fantastic than fiction!

DANIEL KOLOS
Egyptologist, Poet, Co-author of
THE NAME OF THE DEAD: TUTANKHAMUND TRANSLATED

Dreams connect us to our own innermost consciousness. Those of us who don’t take our dreams seriously miss out on life-changing signals. Then, years later, we begin to listen to our dreams and what happens? These dreams are still the same old, stale, outdated ones that were trying to get through to us years before! If we turn away from our dreams a second time, we may never have their benefit. But if we record them patiently, soon the dreams begin to catch up to our present, become meaningful and take their place as an equal contributor to our ‘mind’ along with intellect, intelligence, intuition, and many other functions.
 
Carol Chapman listened to her dreams. She shared them with a friend and together they expanded Carloe's dreams to include past life memories.  Her consciousness expanded outwards to encompass the stars, and inwards, to the awesome operations of her chakra-system. Then she found the ‘Golden Ones’ children of this world whose souls were aligned with God in order to bring in a New World in which there would be a thousand years of peace. Carol’s purpose in this lifetime was to awaken these Golden Ones to their destiny!
 
Carol’s path paralleled her daughter’s. Clair’s nonchalance gave Carol the courage to continue. They spoke of the Fifth Root Race, the Great Pyramid of Giza and Atlantis. Carol’s timidity often got in her way and time and again she heeded other people’s help to ‘get on with it’.  Along the way, however, she missed some obvious observations. About the Great Pyramid, for example, she could have easily noted that all those millions of people who have visited this mysterious ‘power plant’ have likely been unconsciously stamped with ancient Atlantean knowledge. In turn, all these people carry that knowledge about with them, waiting for it to awaken into their consciousness.
 
In order to awaken the Golden Ones, Carol had “to write a history of the soul on earth.” Along the way she was forced to think, to consult with a friend, and she came upon insights most serious meditators inevitably find, but in her own unique way: “The light beam knew no sorrow.” For me that would have been ‘unconditional love was not mitigated by sorrow.’
 
That the light beam “indulged in sexual play” was obvious to some of the ancient people. In Greek mythology, Danae, whose father had hidden her in a subterranean chamber, was sought out and impregnated by Zeus himself in the form of a shower of gold.  Similar stories have the maidens impregnated by the sun, whose color is gold. (Frazer, The Golden Bough, Chapter 60, section 3)
 
Carol asks the age-old question whether or not sexuality was the cause of the ‘fall’, and, in the process discovers the duality of light and darkness. Light was pure energy while darkness was the change of energy into corporeality.  Unfortunately Carol names this descent into bodily form the work of ‘Satan’, although she realizes that the ‘sin’ or the mistake of having been drawn from a consciousness of an energetic being to that of a corporeal being was a choice she had made. She calls this choice of becoming trapped ‘disobedience’ and lack of humility. In a sense Carol comes to the same conclusion Rudolf Steiner reached a century ago and he also portrayed Satan as a suave, sophisticated tempter whose job it is to make people forget their connection to their own energetic selves, to pull them into the unbalanced trap of indulging in their physical pleasures and prowess and to forget the way out. In this sense Carol traveled the well-worn path of the cathartic rediscovery of her own light-being.  In another sense, Carol had figuratively impregnated her consciousness and was reborn to the realization that there is a life beyond the physical body, something our culture takes great pains to suppress.
 
Carol does not examine the source of disobedience that caused her own ‘original sin.’ She does not make the connection to her own responsibility of being able to make a choice. This ability is akin to the vast difference between Christianity as we know it, and the ancient Gnostics:  orthodox religion demands that we believe, while Gnosticism assures us we are ‘able to know’ God. And if the essence of God is reflected in a light beam, and or inner selves are part of that light beam, then indeed we not only are able to ‘know’ God, but carry God’s essence within each of us! So when Carol begins her with the observation that a ‘light beam knows no sorrow,’ she is actually re-initiating this Gnostic process of examining her own connection to the essence of God and trying to figure out how she lost it in the first place!

Duality causes paradoxes and Carol discovers these in her own life as well as in the life of Christ. By reconnecting with her own inner light being, something that is part of her every cell, every thought, she realizes that she is not lost in her own physical mire and sees the way home, where dualism resolved itself back into the light. And she accomplishes this process through the trance of hypnotherapy.  And in that realization she discovers the history of the soul!
 
Having practiced past life therapy ever since my own ‘therapist’ passed into his light being, I was touched by Carol’s persistence to continue this process of self-discovery that proved to be far greater than the self.  It took into the presence of illuminated beings, solved the mystery of Christ’s washing of the feet of his disciples (teaching by doing, or role-modeling). This experience leads Carol to discover unconditional love.
 
Some questions arose in my mind, as they did in Carol’s. Was she being self-centered, self-indulgent in putting herself as the center of the universe from which she was supposed to radiate light to the rest of us? To stop with a facile answer to that question is to fall short of the process of self-discovery.  Having studied developmental psychology and the related neurobiological field that is still expanding exponentially as the fastest growing field of study, I concluded that just as every human being has to go through childhood in order to grow and develop into an adult, physically, emotionally and intellectually, we also have to go through that process spiritually and likely in several other yet unexplored areas of our existence.  Spiritual development, usually repressed by culture outside such controlled environments as churches, mosques and synagogues, is usually repressed by culture because it is socially uncontrollable and unpredictable. But once an individual begins the spiritual development, it is like any other form of development. Spiritual awareness has its own infancy, grows through its own ‘childhood’ before it unfolds into maturity. Most adults do not wish to go through such seeming infantile regression! And Carol, self-conscious of the self-centeredness, wondering why she has to go through it, nevertheless persevered through it. Along the way she finds Christ’s message, including the Second Coming, deciphered.
 
Carol reached her next cathartic moment when she realized that spending time in the spiritual dimension comes with a price: the seeming loss of the senses, the transcending of the body. We tend to equate the loss of the senses with being insane, and it is well documented that thousands of people under psychiatric care lost their senses and sanity. Carol struggled with the seemingly vast gap between the information filtering down to her as a ‘light being’ and her everyday life, which seemed so mundane in contrast to such grand events as the Second Coming, reincarnation memories from Atlantis, and being charged with writing a book to awaken the Golden Ones!
 
Even Pan had a hand in writing this book! In some of her visions he dictated too Carole how the book should begin.). He seemed to know about Atlantis, Egypt, the role of the Great Pyramid and Carole’s calling.  but he also had overriding concerns, asking humanity above all to ‘do no harm!’ His greatest lesson to teach us is that “death and re-birth is a gift.” Finally Pan left with a piece of advice for us all, to do some gardening: “Grow something!”

Carole did a stint on Toronto’s Ward Island at the time city hall threatened to remove its residents. It was a great school for grass roots cooperation in the face of bureaucratic insensitivity.
 
Carole returns to her self-doubts again and again. All people have doubts of one sort or another, but Carole seems to use hers for self-motivation: to return to hypnosis, to contact her inner self.
 
The Five Root Races are:

In the meantime, a loose form of Christ-centered Brotherhood begins to emerge from Carole’s writing. This Brotherhood is ‘etheric’ or, more precisely, part of her visionary energy. But when I began to read about the Brotherhood and Carole’s curious interaction with them, I began to ‘know’ what she was going through. I have read about this energetic Brotherhood a long time ago, and through the help of various selfless people, I encountered them in 2003 at a conference in Allegan, Michigan. Carole was there!  She didn’t know what I was going through, and I didn’t know at that time the focus of her ‘work’. I was pursuing a study of the role of Goddess worship throughout history. I had spent the previous year working with the ancient Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet, the lioness Goddess of both Destruction and Healing. Carole had encountered a ‘lifetime’ when she was an Egyptian Goddess!

Then I turned to the last thousand years of history and the role of the three Marys and their relationship to the Knights Templars. It was after one of my more animated presentations in Allegan about the Knights having sailed to the Americas centuries before Columbus, that Mary Hardy, our host, asked the speakers to form a meditative circle and introduced us to the etheric Knights Templars who have accompanied her and have supported her work for years. That is where, with head bowed, these Knights also appeared to me and spoke about their ‘Brotherhood’ that transcends all organizational ties humanity has created.
 
As I read Carole’s Chapter 17, I shivered: I also went through a time of medically untreatable skin irritation (in 1984-85) that only cleared up when a friend recommended I explore my past lives and I found the ‘cause’ of my unresolved problem in ancient Egypt! I also had to decide to forego ‘fame’ and work closely and selflessly with smaller groups of people. When I read Carole’s dreams of knowing about a secret chamber in the Great Pyramid that contained Atlantean records, I also remembered a 1963 dream in which I ‘saw’ three other people open that chamber, exactly as Edgar Cayce had foreseen it, and I was one of the follow-up people who helped to translate the ancient texts! I too have come to the personal realization that Christ’s Second Coming is a personal matter unique to each individual. When I finished Chapter 17, I recognized that Carole was following her own divine guidance.
 
The rest of the book was almost like ‘deja vu’. Many years ago I struggled with Rudolf Steiner’s concept of the “Egyptian Mysteries” wherein humanity had descended into our current physical bodies in similar stages as Carole’s Five Root Races.
 
Some years ago I had studied the Chakra system and its relationship with the body’s endocrine system, and acknowledged that each ‘chakra’ might be a transmitter and receiver of different energies, giving us another seven levels of sentience over and above our five senses. Then, when Carolyn Myss came out with her first book, everything fell into place for me: our chakras are indeed our connection to our light bodies.

We change the world by changing ourselves, one at a time. Perhaps it is a chain reaction, and the Golden Ones to whom Carole Chapman has dedicated her life, will get the message and see the light, see their potential to return to their light bodies by following the examples and role modeling that people like Carole provide them.