Happy Easter!  Christ The Lord is Risen Today, Hallelujah!
This past Good Friday I watched Jesus Christ Superstar as has been my ritual for many years.  Each year I find a new aspect of the Christ story that impacts me (and typically makes me weep).  This year my reflection was on the relationship between Judas and Jesus.
During Holy week I finished reading Journey of Souls by Michael Newton PhD.  Dr. Newton is a psychiatrist who uses past life regression to treat psychological conditions.  From his extensive use of hypnosis he determined that information can be learned from his patients about the time between lives, Heaven.  He made a study of this, researching aspects of spiritual life and the processes our souls go through their development.
One thing I took away from this book was information on our “soul group”.  When our individual souls are formed from the Light we are placed in groups of four to nine souls who we go through our lessons with.  These are our peers and when we choose to take physical form, to advance our learning, they play the major roles a characters in our lives.  From Dr. Newton’s research it felt to me that generations played significant roles in who we interact with.  Our parents and children maybe souls we interact with in many lives and are from the same cluster of souls as we are (clusters are groups that share guides, and masters at the broader scale).  Sometimes these significant individuals in our lives may even be our guides.  Our peers from our soul groups are typically of the same generation or age group as us, our siblings, our spouses, and sometimes good friends or business partners if these are significant relationships in our life.  Prior to coming to earth to be born human, our life’s purpose and the people we are to meet are planned out within our soul cluster. Souls are given roles based on lessons they need or new experiences that could occur.  As we interact as humans we influence each other to try to follow the plan and our guides influence our intuition (free will can always cause us to turn away from the plan).
So back to Jesus and Judas, Jesus Christ Superstar was written to have the viewer see the Passion story more from the perspective of Judas so this contributes some to what I observed.  I saw Jesus and Judas as soul peers who had come together to earth to fulfill this great plan.  Not a story of good and evil but of each soul playing out their role. Two Masters here blessing the planet; each learning, teaching, suffering, and dying for humanity so that 2000 years later we can continue to evaluate the lessons.
This awareness helps me with my work to see the Divine in everyone.  When I listen to all the spiritual leaders that I love so much, each one speaks of how they struggle with seeing to the Divine soul in everyone.  If current generations can start to see the Divine in the villain of two millennia, Judas, this could open the door to atonement on the planet, LOVE.
I will close with this analogy that comes from Panache Desai, a tree is made of leaves, stems, branches, trunk, and roots.  The roots do not look up and say about the leaves, look at how flighty they are, they do not have the burdens we have.  Each one of us has our role in the whole.  The energy that connects us all in a functioning system is LOVE.