Talking with Twentieth-Century Men
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A Book of Spiritual Interviews
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Compiled by
Peter Watson Jenkins
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Channeled by
Toni Ann Winninger
Published by Celestial Voices, Inc. at Smashwords
This book is available at CelestialVoicesInc.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008906641
ISBN: 978-0-9798917-4-8
©2008 Celestial Voices, Inc.
13354 W. Heiden Circle, Lake Bluff, IL 60044 USA
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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not buy it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.
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About this Book
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People like to discover more about the famous people they admire. Some put pictures up at home of their idols, go to movies telling their story, collect old newspaper articles, autographs, and programs in scrapbooks, and even buy items of clothing the famous people once wore. Many visit websites put up by fan clubs, or by those whose creators want to honor their memory. But once these idols die, their book of life closes.
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Or does it?
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What if it were possible to talk with famous people after their death? What if they could tell us more about themselves and their life? What if General Patton could tell us about where he got the inspiration for his strategy in the WWII “Battle of the Bulge”? What if John Lennon and Dr. Martin Luther King could tell us what it’s like to be assassinated—and explain how they feel now about their murderer? What if Joe Louis could tell us how it was to be admired as a champion boxer. What if Elvis could confirm whether he’s ever been down again to visit planet Earth? How does Dr. Robert Oppenheimer now assess work he did developing the nuclear bomb? With 21 famous men to interview we had tons of questions to ask!
But it’s true! We really can talk with them, and we really can find out their answers. It’s what this book and its companion book on Twentieth-Century Women are about.
In Talking with Leaders of the Past, the first book in our series of Dialogues with Masters of the Spirit World, we interviewed 15 leaders, all born in the nineteenth century, including: Andrew Carnegie, Winston S. Churchill, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Adolf Hitler, Pope John XXIII, and Oscar Wilde. They answered the questions we shot at them, talked about themselves, and discussed what their life is like at “Home”—the place in the universe where everybody’s soul migrates after they have died—which people sometimes call “the Other Side.”
A lot of what we learned from these souls blew our minds. It was all so different when they talked about God, Heaven and Hell, the purpose of our life on planet Earth, why human beings suffer so much, and lots more.
Our first book was organized in cooperation with a group of Ascended Masters, spirits who live permanently in the eternal Home. Then the Masters encouraged us to produce two follow-up books of famous men and women of the twentieth century. The human interviewer was Peter Watson Jenkins. He’s an author and former parish minister, now working as a clinical hypnotherapist. Peter drew up a very long list of famous people and presented them to the Masters for review. For many different reasons a lot of these people were not available for interview, so they were dropped from the list. Souls are not idle at Home; they are involved in their own past-life reviews and have further spiritual training to undertake. Many act as guides, advising the souls of people on planet Earth, or helping newly arrived spirits settle in after their time here. After being at Home for a while souls are usually given the option to return to planet Earth. We know those chosen by the Masters for our list of 21 famous men are outstanding subjects.
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So how did we talk with these people?
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Contact with the spirit world was successfully made by a leading American channeler, Toni Ann Winninger, JD. The Masters first asked her to start channeling just a few years ago, when she was getting ready to retire as a prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in Chicago. Toni’s training as a lawyer has given her a real gift of mental accuracy, and her regular practice of very deep meditation has resulted in her amazing ability to allow the thoughts of those souls whom she channels to flow through her mind with little or no interference from her. Toni spends much of her time as a psychic advising private clients. She enjoys working with the same large group of Ascended Masters, which includes both spirits who have finished their task of coming down to planet Earth, and celestial beings (whom some call angels and archangels) who have never been down here in physical form.
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Yes, we do know people are skeptical of channeling!
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Psychics are really a mixed lot. Some of them, such as Echo Bodine, Sylvia Browne, Sonia Choquette, John Edward, Esther Hicks, Judith Orloff, and James Van Praagh, all have fine reputations, and deservedly have achieved great popularity. Many “street corner” psychics are also trustworthy, but, sadly, there are many wannabes and frauds who cheat and manipulate innocent people. But that’s true in every profession—even religious leaders in churches, temples, and mosques, can be fakes.
As authors, we are more skeptical than you might expect, believing that we need to “test the spirits” as the Bible says, and also to test the claims of human psychics. We understand that some readers may prefer to treat this book as a work of fiction, but we sincerely believe that it is absolutely true and that, with Toni’s channeling, Peter really did converse with the souls whom we have named. We stake our reputations on the claim that what is printed in our books is an accurate record of our conversations.
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What if I don’t know anything about these people?
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It’s easy! The questions that Peter asks fill in a lot of historic information, so we have not detailed every one’s life story in this book as we did in the Leaders book. If interested, you can easily find out about each man for yourself by typing his name in an Internet search engine and harvesting the results.
Our aim is to help readers discover how and why these famous people came to be who they were, what influences affected them, and if they were influenced at all by their past lives. As we talked together we asked them to tell us a little about themselves as they are now, to explain in what way they like to remember their most recent physical life, and also to comment on our life on planet Earth today from their spiritual perspective back Home.
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Note
We have used italic type to indicate Peter’s questions and comments during each discussion. Replies are in roman type.
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Glossary
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Advisors. Souls who are given the task of advising incarnated souls.
Angel. A human term for a celestial being who, after being separated from Source, acts as a guide to those upon earth, but may or may not at some later time chose to experience an earthly body.
Archangel. A human term for a celestial being that is very advanced and experienced as a guide, whose soul has never incarnated.
Council. A group of guides who help us decide what lessons we wish to experience, and who help us make best use of the lessons we have learned.
Creator. See “Source.”
Dimension. A waveband or stratum of vibrational energy. Planet Earth is at the third dimension. Home is at the fifth and higher dimensions.
God. See “Source.”
God-Force. See “Source.” Sometimes used as meaning “all souls.”
Guides. Souls given the task of advising incarnated souls.
Heaven. See “Home.”
Hell. A state of mind on Earth.
Home. Not a physical place but an energetic dimension of unconditional love and of conscious connection with Source. It is where each soul works with its guides, and council. Every soul who is not incarnated is consciously within the dimension of Home.
Incarnate. A soul who has gone down to planet Earth and is now in a physical body.
Shell. The living physical structure inhabited by a soul. No human or animal body can live without some connection to a soul.
Supreme Being. See “Source.”
Souls. Individualized pieces of energy split off by and from Source, in order to have unique experiences outside the perfect. They are all particles of Source, so each and every soul is also Source. All souls are equal regardless of the human shell they have chosen to inhabit.
Source. The point of origin of all that is known by human beings, and all that exists. It is the energy of unconditional love, the highest vibrational energy anywhere, and is found in everything. The Source makes no judgments and does not reward or punish souls.
Transition. The soul’s move from life in the body to life at Home. Physical death.
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I was in a hurry to be able to use the energy that I felt boiling up inside of me, trying to get out and come into expression.”
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Frank Lloyd Wright
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Frank Lloyd Wright you were born in Richland Center, WI, the son of a Welsh Baptist minister. You later called both your homes in Wisconsin and Arizona by the Welsh name “Taliesin,” and you changed your middle name of Lincoln to Lloyd. What did your Welsh connections mean to you?
A wistfulness, a connection with the Earth, and a connection with the flow of energy. As you are aware, the island of Great Britain is a magical place that allows one to be connected to the flow of the Earth, to feel the energy as it transfers from one place to another. To me, my Welsh roots—the DNA, the energy that was there—gave me the feeling I had for the flow that could be converted from the outside to the inside. From this built-in ability I derived the principles that created the flow of my buildings, that designed my windows connecting the various energies in a particular place, and that turned the buildings into homey, comfortable surroundings.
Where did your desire to be an architect come from: your past lives, or the Froebel building blocks you played with as a child, or something else?
It was a combination of things. I had been a builder, a constructor, in a number of my past lives. Sometimes it was building a physical building, and sometimes it was building a person—in other words, teaching, letting them know what abilities they had. So there was always within me the urge to connect things, to make things that were out of people’s ordinary experience, so that they could expand and connect with their feelings. The building blocks that I had as a child kept drawing me to put into application everything that I had done before, but in a new way, because I had never before been a physical builder of individual homes.
In fact, you used geometrical designs and pre-cast concrete blocks and things that had designs on them, didn’t you?
Yes, I did, because I could feel the energy of the symbols. It has now been recognized that Feng Shui has a terrific impact on the physical body. The various designs that I used were used in architecture in the world going back to the pyramids. I just modified them to be appealing and appeasing to the eye and the senses.
Where did your actual decision to be an architect come from?
It was sort of a gradual transition where all of the pieces just fell into place, and I realized everything that I had been thinking about and trying to work with would be best suited were I to build homes.
During your life you abandoned the Trinitarian faith of your parents and became a Unitarian. How do you view those religious traditions now that you are back Home?
It wasn’t that I walked away from the religious beliefs of my parents; it was that I found they didn’t serve me and have the same appeal to me as they did to them. My family needed specific direction. They needed to be told exactly what to think and how to think it and what the possible responses were for their earthly actions. I found that within the beliefs of the Unitarians, it was more left to individual persons to come to grips with their feelings. From back Home here, I see that they were all just lessons I had to learn. This provided a direction enabling me to think outside the box, which showed up in my architecture. It was an awareness that gave me the opportunity to connect with some of the feelings I had had when I was in a non-physical body, and to go with those feelings.
You were a young man in a hurry. You quit the university engineering college without a degree and then quickly left your first job with Joseph Lyman Silsbee to work with Louis Sullivan, and, remarkably soon, you took on all his residential design work. Tell me about that period and your two mentors.
It could truly be said that I was in a hurry. I was in a hurry to be able to use the energy that I felt boiling up inside of me, trying to get out and come into expression. With my first job, I was taught the basics of dealing with people within the profession, how you had to have—at least outwardly—a compromising demeanor, even if inside you were maneuvering to get things done your way. I was not given the opportunity, however, to really take the reins and create. When I started working with Sullivan, it was as if an entire world opened up to me. I showed him the designs I had, and we began almost to vibrate on the same level. I would now call it an enlightenment, that we were freeing energies from inside of us. He was not as concerned with residential properties as I was; I felt the additional component of the human person who would be affected by my energy, whereas that was not a factor in the larger, commercial buildings. He saw that my direction was residential, and after I had completed a couple of projects, they were so successful that he just turned over everything to me.
Then he sacked you for moonlighting—you were doing work on the side.
He felt that all my ideas should be used exclusively to bring money into the company. It’s very common in this day and age for your employer to expect exclusivity; however, there were some projects that I just had to undertake that he did not want the company involved in, so in order to go in the direction that I felt I had to, I did a little moonlighting, yes.
Silsbee and Sullivan both taught you quite a bit.
They taught me the basics of what became my own individual style. They gave me the knowledge of how things had to be done and how to implement my designs. They did not teach me enough about business, because I wasn’t as successful on my own as I was with them, but they showed me how to deal with people and which ones I had to deal with in order to accomplish what I sought.
Your pace was breathtaking. In 1889 you built a home in Oak Park, outside Chicago, for yourself and your bride, Kitty Tobin. Within the next 12 years you had designed some 50 homes, many of them in Oak Park and neighboring suburbs. This was before your Prairie Style period. Looking back at this start, what do you feel you achieved in domestic architecture?
I got away from what some would call the “cookie cutter” approach, that everything had to be built on the box, and every little piece had to be able to be easily put into a form. The important thing to me was the flow of the living space, and within that flow, how the geometries that people interacted with impacted each individual’s energy.
Every single house was a new experiment. Every single house was a design specifically for an individual and his or her family. Even those houses which, nowadays, you would say were built on speculation were built with the owner’s energies involved. I proved that you could take what people considered just brick and mortar and plaster and make it a living, breathing extension of the human beings who lived inside of it.
In 1904 came the Larkin Soap Company project in Buffalo, New York. Your innovative design for their Administration Building included air conditioning, radiant heat, plate-glass windows, and built-in steel furniture. Your designs for Midway Gardens, Chicago, in 1913 and the Johnson Wax Headquarters, Racine, Wisconsin, in 1936 were also big commercial ventures. Was technical innovation a common theme of all three?
You might call it a theme. I call it tools that were being overlooked by a lot of designers at that time, because these technical elements were not part and parcel of what they had learned to use, and change was very slow in coming to the average designer. I took into consideration who was going to be occupying the building and what type of energy they were going to need in order to fulfill the job that was going to be done in that building. When it came down to human comforts, current technology provided me with a basis to do it, so I took advantage of everything that was available.
Your radical designs sometimes caused headaches for owners. The Johnson Wax building, with its innovative Pyrex glass tubing and clerestories, leaked badly, and the three-legged chairs you originally designed were unstable. You were asked to try one out and fell off it, didn’t you?
[Laughs] Yes, I did! I would get these visions when I was designing something; they were very appealing to the eye and had an energy that was fantastic, but sometimes they were a little bit before their time. We didn’t have the capability of putting the energies that I was downloading into physical shape—and I say “downloading” because some of my designs had assistance from non-physical architects whom I asked to help get the energy flows right.
Specific architects, or just generally asking the Universe?
Generally asking the Universe if they wished to participate, and of course, there was always somebody who wished to participate.
In your physical state were you aware of channeling?
No, I wasn’t aware that I was channeling. I thought that I was just coming up with these brand-new ideas, although I was aware that there was an expansiveness about the origin of these ideas that meant they had to be beyond anything contained on Earth.
During the 17 years from 1900, you focused on designing open-plan “Prairie Houses.” In addition to being distinctively horizontal to fit the landscape, they met human needs in new ways. They may even have inspired the Bauhaus movement later on, but they were not meant to be merely “boxes for living in,” were they?
No. I guess you might call them incubation capsules, incubating the energy that was within people, bringing it out to let them know that they were more than just what everybody else was (if they allowed themselves to be) and that they didn’t have to be categorized, that they could be expansive. The whole idea behind the Prairie approach was of unlimited abilities, unlimited energy, spreading out to interact with energies coming from all different sources. My desire was that a person within those areas would feel their connection to the Universe, that there were no “glass ceilings,” as people say now, preventing them from moving above and beyond the pattern that somebody else had dictated for them.
It’s interesting that you should be talking in terms of fluid movements of energy, because in fact you were sometimes very precise and particular. I remember the story of one house you visited that you had built some years before. You found that the furniture was not in the place in which you had put it, and you went around putting the furniture back in its “rightful” place.
[Laughs] I was very aware of energy. I could stand in any room, in any location within that room, and know if there was anything impeding the flow of energy or air through that space.
Ninety-eight percent of the population was not as sensitive as I was to that. They went merely with their eye or what was convenient for them, whereas everything I did was placed with the idea of the flow of energy.
[Toni: He’s showing me a wind tunnel, where they test cars and bike riders, and use smoke so you can see how the wind ruffles over them—indicating that he was his own barometer of how the energy or air was flowing.]
Your favorite Prairie house was, I think, “The Robie House” in Chicago, wasn’t it?
I don’t know that I had a favorite one. That was one where I felt that I had accomplished more innovations in a single place than I had been able to do before.
Did you make any mistakes that you would have preferred, in retrospect, not to have made in the design of the Prairie house?
Well, the only mistake that I might have made was not to be able to convey to people exactly what the Prairie houses meant to me, or what I was trying to accomplish with the design, with the flow of the energy. Some people saw them merely as living units. They didn’t see them as living, breathing extensions of themselves that could help them to grow, and so, if there was a mistake, it was that I could not give my vision, my energy, to some of the people who inhabited my houses.
During the building of a Prairie house for Mr. Edwin Cheney, you fell in love with his wife, Mamah. Scandal followed, and with your reputations badly damaged, the two of you ran away to Europe. Was this a diversion, as some historians have suggested, because you had lost interest in the Prairie style and felt a failure in not getting much large-scale commercial work?
It’s hard to tell you exactly everything that was going on with me at that time. There was a great degree of frustration within me that I was not able to convey what I felt about everything I did. I saw my work as being perfect reproductions that, instead of being honored in a museum, were given to a child to play with. So it was a diversion for me. It was getting out of my idealistic pattern of trying to help the world and change the way the world saw the interaction between buildings and humans, and just being able to be concerned about myself and go off and live.
After your return in 1911 you built “Taliesin” on land your mother bought for you at Spring Green, Wisconsin. What you were trying to achieve there architecturally?
As far as architects were concerned, I wasn’t trying to please anybody. I wasn’t trying to make a statement. I was just trying to create a womb for myself.
In 1914, personal tragedy struck that womb when your servant, Julian Carlton, set fire to “Taliesin” and butchered seven occupants, including Mamah and her two children. How do you feel about this tragedy looking back from where you are now?
I know now that contracts had been made between the various souls involved to experience things. I also was involved in those contracts, because, though my life had had ups and downs, it had been fairly smooth. I had never experienced a true sense of having my gut ripped out of me, as happened with that one act. I had been very aware of energy interaction with buildings and human beings, but I hadn’t been that aware of the soul’s essence interacting with the physical. It put me into a state where I had to examine priorities, stepping out of what is just bound by the physical, by the ego, and go into the emotional feelings generated by having such a thing happen to me. I had always felt protected and charmed, and thought it was my right as a human being to be able to say the world doesn’t affect me if I shut it out. This was my wake-up call.
That call went on being sounded, because in 1922, after Kitty divorced you, you married Miriam Noel, then found out that she was a drug addict, and the two of you separated. Then you met Olga Hinzenburg, a dancer with the Petrograd Ballet, whom you eventually married, and she bore you a daughter, Iovanna. Her ex-husband, seeking custody of his daughter, Svetlana, had you arrested briefly under the White-Slave Traffic Act. Then “Taliesin” went up in flames because of a faulty electrical system. You were better known then to the public for scandal and disaster than for good architecture. Do you now see your behavior at that time as wrongful, and was karma involved?
From up here, I don’t see it as wrongful; no one up here sees it as wrongful, because we don’t judge. We evaluate if it was a lesson that enriched our knowledge of the human and soul experience, and yes, in that it was very successful. Although it contained what in human standards were a lot of disasters, to me it provided a lot of rich feelings, putting me onto paths that I needed to explore and understand. During that whole period of time, from the murders on, my physical world was in turmoil. I was depressed most of the time; I sought anything I thought could make me feel physically better. It brought me into a dream world where I wouldn’t see negativity existing as long as I physically felt somebody wanted to take care of me. I was used and abused during that period, and I used and abused others. The only thing that was not true was the white-slavery case. Our coming together was by agreement, a true feeling that we could provide something for each other. Now I see that I learned more during that period of my life, as far as spiritual lessons go, than I learned in the entire rest of my life.
You had four sons and four daughters, including Svetlana, Olga’s daughter, whom you adopted. Were you a good father?
It depends upon your definition of a good father. Was I there emotionally for all of the children? Not really. Was I able to provide physical needs for all of the children? Most of the time, yes. Was I able to give them some lessons in how to deal with the world and learn things about themselves? Yes, I was. Did they all agree (at Home) to be my children before they became my children? Yes, they did. So the agreements that we had made were exactly what I was able to produce.
Many of them have gone on to do very good things, haven’t they?
Yes, they have, because one of the things I was able to provide for them was alternatives, that you don’t have to go to the same beat of the same drum.
You sound like a Unitarian.
Fancy that!
Then came two of your most successful Organic Style houses: “Graycliff” on Lake Erie and “Fallingwater” at Bear Run, Pennsylvania. Tell us about them.
Since I had been up and down and all around, as you might say, the only place I felt a sense of comfort was in and with nature. There was a stability there that wasn’t found in the airiness of my Prairie style houses. To be able to extend the energy of the outside and incorporate it into the whole sense of the energy of the house was my crowning glory. It showed that the planet is a living, breathing thing, and when you work with it, you create something that is unique, something that incorporates the living matter of a human into synchronization with the living matter of the planet. The houses had a totally different feel from anything I had done previously.
In 1936 you changed direction and built the “Jacob House” as your first of 50 Usonian homes (“Usonian” replacing the word “American”). They were less expensive, environmentally designed for solar warmth, with what you called a “carport” in place of a garage. Did you see this often-copied design as a way of influencing popular American architecture?
I saw it as a way for those who couldn’t afford custom-designed houses to have some of the benefits that my experience had shown were good for the interaction between owner and home, and also a way to put a person into awareness of conservation.
One of your projects abroad was the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo. It was completed in 1923, the year of the 7.9 magnitude Great Kanto earthquake, which it survived. How do you view the current state of the world’s preparedness for such disasters?
The world society, as a whole, is unaware of and cannot feel the energy of the Earth. They have a sense of superiority that they alone, as human beings, know that they are in control. It is an arrogance which time and time again is proving that they are not working with the Earth, that they are actually making an enemy of the Earth. She is showing them that their arrogance is their downfall, because while they claim to have scientific evidence that what they are constructing will withstand the shaking of the Earth, they are not taking into consideration the fact that the planet not only shakes but undulates. They think of it as a solid mass. They don’t see it as a living, breathing thing, and in their arrogance they take account only of certain ways that a structure can be moved.
So this type of architecture is still faulty in your opinion?
Absolutely.
Is it going to be tested much in the near future?
It is going to be tested quite a bit in the near future—from shakings, quakes, weather-imposed tests such as wind and water. There are going to be a lot of things going on throughout the planet because of the arrogance of not caring, and of being unconcerned with what has been put in place.
You built several special buildings, such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the large Florida Southern College campus, including the Anne Pfeiffer Chapel; and on a smaller scale, Unity Temple in Oak Park; and your own sprawling homes: “Taliesin,” Wisconsin, and “Taliesin West,” Arizona. Which one satisfied you the most?
Of all of my buildings, the one that I felt the closest to was the Pennsylvania house, “Fallingwater;” I could feel the flow of the water within every board and tile in that house.
In your book The Disappearing City (1932) you outlined “Broadacre City,” the concept of a new type of suburban development. Were you to return to planet Earth today, how would you go about community planning in this environmentally conscious age?
My biggest problem, were I to come back now, would be that I would have no memory of anything that had come about in my prior lives. Were I to come down as an architect, even with the sensitivities and sensibilities that I had in my life as Frank Lloyd Wright, I would be fighting the economic patterns on the planet right now. There are just too many variables for any really long-term planning to create a trend at this time.
What about the usage of fossil fuels for commuting, and that type of issue?
I don’t know that I would have any effect on commuting unless I came back as a designer of motor conveyances. The use that the current inhabitants of the planet are making of the resources of the planet is sinful—if there were such a thing as sin. People will understand me when I say “sinful.” It is against the basic principles of ecology, economy, and living in harmony with your neighbors. It is all based upon people thinking that they are entitled to whatever they want, even if it has a detrimental effect upon their neighbors, and until and unless the inhabitants of the planet shift and become aware of their interconnectedness with all of the other beings on the planet, I don’t see any shift in the selfishness that is prevalent on the planet right now.
And is this leading to some kind of disaster?
The disaster has already started. The change in weather patterns, the melting of the poles, the increase in seismic activity based upon pressure put on the various plates of the Earth have all begun and will continue.
Are you going to come down to help us with that situation, do you think?
I don’t have any plans at this time to do that. I am working as a guide with a few people who are involved in attempting to work on some of these situations, but I do not plan on being in physical form for quite some of your Earth years.
Thank you, Frank Lloyd Wright, for speaking with us.
I hope that I have explained a little bit about a soul’s variances during its physical lifetime.
Commentary
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Toni: The energy I perceived with Frank was matter-of-fact about everything. Whether we were discussing his extreme accomplishments or his scandals, it was all matter-of-fact. Yes, it did occur; I was a participant; it was just something I did to learn something. There were no emotional ups and downs with it. The only time he became somewhat energetic was in talking about the interaction between the soul having a physical experience and the physicality of the planet. When he talked about the ecology, the energy flow, and an interchange between the human being and the planet and the energy on it, he became much more animated and interactive. I found him a very interesting person. He gave me some visual pictures when we were talking about his different designs and how they affected energy—that was also quite interesting.
Peter: There were three aspects of special interest to me in this dialogue with Wright, and also a number of minor comments for his followers to discuss.
The ephemeral asceticism of his early period, with his use of terms like Energy and Feng Shui, came first. It felt a little odd that this businessman-in-a-hurry would express so different an aspect of his character as to remark, “…some of my designs had assistance from non-physical architects whom I asked to help get the energy flows right.” But the individualism of this Unitarian free spirit clearly means more to him now than the aggressive “take it or leave it” architect who was adept at bending his ambitious clients to his iron will (and his ever-expanding budget). Perhaps it is rather easier, back Home, to recall aesthetic energy issues than business concerns.
Second, Wright helped us to understand more fully the issue of when and how the lessons that we prepare for ourselves before we come down to planet Earth may occur. These lessons—the incident of the servant who murdered Mamah and her children and set fire to “Taliesin” and, later, the electrical fire there—assailed him after a relatively calm early life. Once he had come to terms with them in his heart, his life appears to have returned to equilibrium. For those who are new to talk from the Other Side, “contracts” are made before incarnation with other incarnating souls, that they and we will mutually provide experiences which represent lessons that each wants to learn during the forthcoming human lifetime.
The third element, mention of coming planetary disturbances, is explored in greater depth in my dialogue with George Orwell, later in the book. This may be of special interest to architects who must design buildings that, like Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, are able to withstand earthquakes. This was the starting point of his dismal list of physical horrors to be visited on us by planet Earth in the coming days. He called the natural challenges a “disaster,” and said that this situation had already begun to affect our life because of our human egotism and greed, which have made us enemies of Mother Earth “against the basic principles of ecology, economy, and living in harmony with your neighbors.” Frank Lloyd Wright will not be on Earth to share the coming troubles with us who are left on the planet. He’s sitting disaster out this time around—for a change.
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“This is what the future is like, this is what the universe is like. It’s not in the form that we see with our eyes, it is in the energy that is all around us.”
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Pablo Picasso
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Your father, José Ruíz, was an art teacher and considered you a prodigy. Was it his influence and his genes which gave you early and lasting success, or were you endowed with genius like Mozart and Einstein?
I am a soul who had previous incarnations within my chosen physical profession. What you call a prodigy is not a person who is experiencing a first life within an art. There is a bringing together of previous lives which have laid the foundation for going forward and developing in different ways new aspects of the art. All prodigies come down with part of the tapes of their prior existences still playing in their heads. That is how at an early age they seem to be much more advanced than they really are because they are drawing on previous experiences. I chose to come into that particular biological family so that I would have the ability and the tools readily available for me to jump right in where I had left off in my previous lifetimes.
So genetics and environment do count quite a bit?
I don’t know if you can say “quite a bit,” but they facilitate the direction you have planned for that particular lifetime. Were I to have been born into a cobbler’s family I would not have had ready access to the paints and the canvasses. I don’t suppose people would have cared to have decorated shoes!
Tell us about your previous lives that were artistic.
I did a little bit of everything. Going back to prehistoric times I was one of the historians’ pre-Neanderthals who recorded animals and migration paths on cave walls. I started art back in that time frame. I was also involved with a lot of oriental calligraphy which was very feeling—you’re not only putting the characters down on the paper but you’re putting your energy into them so that your message is conveyed on several levels at once. That is how I perceived my work—which to some seemed to be pure garbage but which had an energy in it. Some said my art had an idiosyncratic tendency, but people could not take their eyes off it because it was energy that pulled them in—the energy that I began to use a long time ago. I also did some renaissance art, painting chapel ceilings. I dabbled in folk carving and forming sculptures to get my energy into the clay or the marble. So I had a very complex history of mixing all the mediums that led me into what I accomplished in this last lifetime.
Were any of the people you have been currently famous?
Not by national standards. They were well known within their own small circles for being talented artisans. But they were no one whose works are now incorporated into any of the museums.
Among your early works, some, such as “Le Moulin de la Galette,” were optimistic, but many were sorrowful, like your early 1899 “Self-portrait” in charcoal; or lonely, like “The Absinthe Drinker;” or like the 1903 portrait of your tailor friend Soler, full of melancholy. Were you unhappy at that time?
I was very aware of the depths of emotion that a person could sink to. I was going through a period of experiencing the depth of those emotions as a means of providing me with the energy to put that down on a canvas for another person to feel. Some people choose to be one level with their emotions, either a very low level, a very neutral level or a very high level, and they don’t have the experience of feeling, of living and sensing the various beautiful experiences that can be had in the physical body. By that I mean, while it may seem strange to say that melancholy or depression is something we would choose not to have, it is a beautiful experience to know, so that you can rejoice in the opposite. I chose with those pictures to put people in an energy that would allow them to know if they were extremely happy or not. This let them know why they should rejoice in their happiness because they could be in that depression.
In your painting “La Vie,” you were making a tribute to your friend Casagemas, who committed suicide. Can you explain the purpose of the picture?
Its purpose was my way of honoring him, of going through my physical grief over the loss of him, and attempting to get down on paper the energy of a transformation that can occur. As some people journal to get out their true feelings, I painted to express mine. It was a purging for me.
The setting was an artist’s studio with a painting of nudes on a canvas in the background, then a male and female nude to the left and one dressed female figure to the right. Was there a particular meaning in this?
On a very esoteric level, we come in with nothing, we go out with nothing. That is the discourse of the nudes, meaning that all of our life is about the experiences we have in between birth and death. With this, the painter is able to paint his life, he is able to determine what he experiences, and starts with the unclad body form. Then he can experience whatever he chooses to experience; then he goes out with only energy, the knowledge that he has not taken away anything that he physically gained. It was all a metaphor of life.
Wasn’t the dressed figure that of a woman?
That’s because I was in a period [laughs] when women appealed to me. Also, in that setting, the artist’s major model was the woman. Had I put a naked me in the painting it would have been condemned! The naked man and woman stood for the experiences which could be had in human form. The woman clothed was going through the experiences of life. The babies were the coming in. So for the coming in and the going out both couples were totally naked.
Another picture, “The Last Moments,” has been discovered to have been covered up by “La Vie.” What was that painting, and why did you destroy it?
It was too idealistic as I was painting it, and it did not make me feel that I was able to express the emotions that I had. I started it in total grief without honoring the entire process of life. To me it did a disservice.
This was your grief over the death of your friend?
Yes. It was totally inadequate to convey the feelings I had of the entire experiences of life and of the life that he had led.
It is said that, as a young man, you were inspired by the work of Courbet, Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec. What did you take from their art and make your own?
Freedom! Freedom to do what the heart chooses to do. Also it was the energy they put into their paintings. Each one of those artists had a way to take and to capture not a flat surface but the energy of what was going on. Whether it was the energy of flowers growing in a lily pond or the energy of dancers and of human experiences, I took from them the energy of life.
Historians talk about various periods in your painting: The Blue Period was characterized by the use of a blue palette and subjects including prostitutes and beggars. Then after four years the Rose Period with light colors, pink, blue, beige, and rose, and a change of subject to harlequins and clowns —circus people. What was in your mind when making such a change of course?
This was the changing course of my thinking and experimenting. The Blue Period was a time of melancholy and depression for me. It was a time when I was considering what might be seen as the negative aspect of humanity—how badly one person could treat another, and the angst they would carry with them out of such an experience. In the backgrounds of my Blue Period, within the intermingling of the blues, there was that which created a boiling, twisting, roiling energy that took a person and said, “If you want to experience the deepest interactions that can be had in humanity, jump in and join me. You will experience sadness, you will experience depravation, you will experience the dark side of human life.”
After I felt that I had had enough of the energy within that view of humanity, I chose to go on to the joyous, the growing, the lightness of the roses and pinks. It was as if sunshine were coming from the darkness of night into the brilliance of day—and also into the frivolity that surrounds people, so they could feel the happiness. Then, whatever they did brought them and others a way to contrast the blues, which were very deep and ponderous, with the roses, which were light and fluffy.
In 1905 you turned more to sculpture and large nudes, and finally, at the end of 1906, to cubism. How important to you were Paul Cézanne and your friend Georges Braque in this development, and how much came from within yourself?
The majority of it came from within. I was always aware of what was going on around me, but I caught on to what was being accepted by others a little bit—I still had to eat! It was observing what others did within the art and then taking those primary formulas and pulling out of myself what seemed to match. The sculptures were just what came out of my hands. I would go into a trance and just let my hands pull the energy from my core. When I went into the cubism phase, I was in an arena where I was attempting to communicate in the most primitive fashion with the essence of a person, saying that you don’t need to have nice, beautiful, shapely forms (that I so dearly loved to work with). You could have straight lines! You could have primary colors! The combination you used with them could touch deep into a person and trigger emotions, trigger experiences. It wasn’t for the inexperienced to get that out of the paintings but for one who picked up the energy of a painting. It was a new step. It was saying, “This is what the future is like, this is what the universe is like. It’s not in the form that we see with our eyes, it is in the energy that is all around us.”
Were you psychically aware of energy?
In the way you ask the question, yes. I didn’t think of it that way, I just felt my way through life. I could feel a color. I could feel how the vibration of a color interacted with everything that was around it, with both animate and inanimate objects. I was aware of how a color impacted the mood of a person. It was that knowledge, experience, and the wisdom within me which allowed me to get feelings into my art.
What was the influence upon your cubism of African and early Iberian works of art?
Since I once had practiced them myself before they became known to collectors, it was like a revisiting of some of my background. I was an African artisan.
Artist or artisan?
Artisan, because at that time art was not only what was painted on the walls and put primarily onto wood to hang up, but it was also what was woven into reed baskets and into mats. So anyone who participated in artwork was multi-faceted, because putting colors onto a flat surface wasn’t a way people could support themselves. They had to put art into the baskets, into something that had a useful purpose for other people.
So cubism became your hallmark. People have often asked about your works, “What does that mean?” Now, from your present position at Home, can you tell puzzled lay people what cubism is all about?
Cubism is about simplicity. It is about containment of various aspects of ourselves within boxes or cubes that lie upon, behind, and partially within other aspects of ourselves, and each aspect has a color vibration that affects the things that are near, within, or connected. It is part of the sacred geometry that is a form of communication within the universe. I never went into that as an explanation because it seemed to be [laughs] contrary to who I was at the time, and I didn’t want the energy of what I was working on to be analyzed by the mathematicians.
You refused to accept payment for your very large, untitled, monumental sculpture in Chicago. You were enthusiastic but entirely enigmatic about it. Is it a woman, a bird, a horse, or an abstract?
It is a combination of what I felt was the energy of the City. It encompassed all of human life. It combined with that spiritual aspects of the angels. The morphing of the sculpture’s outer appearance caused by the weather was representative of the experiences that we learn in life. The blending of the surfaces as the moisture rains down upon it shows everything in our existence is interconnected. It was for me a gift to a very active part of the planet, and those who go and feel the energy within it see what they need to see for the next step in their growth. That is why everybody sees something different within the sculpture.
Between the world wars your style mellowed somewhat and you did not embrace surrealism. Why was that?
Surrealism took the energy that I was putting within my pieces to a level that was on par with a mind that is on drugs. It wasn’t part of the being and the feeling of what was real to the body.
You were truly prolific but did not care to sell a large quantity of your work. Was that deliberate?
In some regards, yes, because I chose to be surrounded by the energy that came out of me. Sometimes there would be so much of my energy in a painting or in a piece that, if I sold it, it was as if I had sold part of myself. It was easier for me to give it into the care of another and then I would be in many, many different places but never in exchange for a price.
Do you feel now, with some historians, that your post-World War II work has been rather neglected?
To be honest (as you would say), I don’t care. I did what I did to have the experiences. What people need to feel, I hope they will allow themselves to feel through my work. There will be different times in the coming years on the planet when people will need different energies out of my various works. I hope that it is there for them, even if it is only for a small segment of the population. I did not paint, I did not sculpt pieces for other people; I did them for myself as an expression of who I was, where I was going, and what I felt. Those which were roundly applauded by people were of a vibration to feel and to accept. Those which were disregarded, like that period you mentioned, were so because people’s focus was in a different direction from where my art was at the time.
In the non-material spirit world, how can souls visualize and appreciate art?
There’s a difficulty in answering that question because we don’t have visual sight as you do. We sense and live in the vibrations. Each of the various pigments within a picture gives off a vibration equivalent to the color within the spectrum. We can stand energetically in front of a picture and know what is there by the vibrations emanating from it.
So you visit Earth and stand in front of pictures?
Yes, sometimes we do that to have the experience, or we can bring up the imprint of that energy, either from experience or from a database.
You were a pacifist and a communist; you opposed Franco but kept out of harm’s way in France. Did social causes actually mean much to you?
No. It was accepted that if people had an impact on the populous (artistically or not), they were supposed to have an opinion. So I expressed various opinions from time to time only to be left alone to do whatever I chose. Had I not been those things (pacifist, communist, etc.), I would have been pursued by people to become part of their cause. This gave me a label so that I was considered “harmless” and then they left me alone.
Okay, Pablo, one thing has defeated me. I lost count of all the relationships you had with women, some of whom you treated shabbily. Also I guess that no one knows exactly how many explicit paintings and lithographs you created of women in your last years. Were you obsessed with sex?
[Laughs] In the physical form I went through a period of indulgence. That was to satisfy all of the animal yearnings that I had put on the back burner for some years. It would be considered by many to be excessive. I was simply in the position of being able to open my door and have it filled by those who wanted to come and experience the master! I courted a lot of that in sketches because the beauty of the energy of another human being, especially in an intimate relationship, is like a beacon that can be set ablaze. I recorded numerous, even hundreds of energy releases in what you call sketches. It’s not for me now to judge what the human flesh did, but just to say that I experienced as much as I could.
With that in mind, are you planning to return to planet Earth soon?
I have contemplated it, but I have not seen a way in which I could really contribute to the art world, since the majority of art that really impacts people now is done graphically on computers. I get no energetic feel from that.
You could come down as an artist’s model, perhaps!
I don’t think so. I can’t sit on the sidelines—I have to participate.
Thank you, Pablo Picasso, for talking with us.
It’s my pleasure.
Commentary
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Toni: When Picasso was talking about a piece of art, the emotional feeling he got from it and the vibration that was given off, I was right there, feeling the energy he was feeling. When he talked about the Blue Period it was like a pall of depression over all, but it was an energetic thing, not something you might consider sad. There was a depth of his sensing an emotion and being able to live within that emotion, able to see things through the eyes of those down on their luck or depressed. When he talked about the Rose Period it was as if there were bright spotlights on everything and the sun had come out (the Blue was like night) and everyone was in the open—I even smelled flowers.
The conversation about the Chicago sculpture was full of whimsy, almost as if he were saying, “Boy, did I pull the wool over a lot of people’s eyes—but look what it started in so many lives.” They had begun to look at art in a way that they had never done before, trying to connect with what it meant, with the energy it gave off. I saw kids playing on the sculpture in the city center with such happiness that people would think of art as something with which they could interact. He evoked a sense of completion and of satisfaction at having accomplished what he had set out to do. The popular response was more than enough payment; nothing else was needed in the physical sense.