The Pope's greatest life challenge

The death of the Pope signals an end of a chapter that began in 1978 and was historical in some ways and notorious in others. Gosh, he sounds human, doesn't he?

This was a man who has great strength of character and enormous physical prowess, yet perhaps it was the very structure of his belief system that compelled him to resist the huge potential he carried as head of Catholicism for progressing The Catholic Church into a new era of thought - particularly in regard to safe sex, HIV, gays and gender balance, and a new era of quick action - especially in regard to condemnation of war crimes, and closer to home, paedophilia within religion.

Did he succeed?

On an interlife level, I suspect he's probably in school detention right now. It's said that we're all destined to break free from structure, that generosity and optimism are our moral imperatives and that we are to almost stubbornly choose to develop at all costs in order to move into a generosity of spirit that includes all. This would have been his greatest ongoing life challenge, as it is for all of us.

There are two types of people in the world - those who believe there are two types of people, and those who do not.

We have all experienced past lives within the confines of religious thought and belief, and that, it is believed and channelled, we then progress to spirituality from traditional religion. Some of us still live with religious structure in this present life, translated into everyday life on some unconscious or automatic level.

Progressing to spirituality doesn't mean we know it all, it simply means that we accept that life is changeable, that we can let go of one belief as our personal experience opens us to another, that beliefs do not have to be rigid, immovable fixtures - and that there's nothing sacred about tradition unless it works.

And that the more we know, we less we know.

Perhaps the successor who will be chosen, after the 10 days of mourning, in an election called a conclave, will have spent his time noticing not what the Pope did during his reign, but what he didn't - and apply his own life challenge task to loving thought and actions that no longer exclude any member of humanity on any level.