Born in Iceland 1952, Rick Lindal grew up in a country that unlike many in the Western world continues to be steeped in folklore that is familiar to all its inhabitants. This folklore includes tales of elves, trolls, spirit beings, and ghosts, which all children learn about during their youth. The beliefs that the soul survives death and the departed will occasionally appear to the living are accepted by most Icelanders.
Understandably, this culture fostered within Lindal a certain attitude toward spiritual matters. During his formative years, Lindal’s interest in spiritual existence was further awakened when he began to play the Ouija Board with his mother, which they used to communicate regularly with his deceased maternal grandfather. As this activity evolved, he developed the ability to communicate with his grandfather while using the Ouija Board on his own. This activity was subsequently replaced with automatic writing, which allowed him to converse with his grandfather using pen and paper.
Lindal’s interest in all things spiritual continued into his adult life and he read everything he could find on the subject, and he also sought readings from clairvoyants and mediums on frequent occasions. This topic, which falls under the general umbrella of parapsychology, became a life-long hobby for him and it molded the perspective he had on life. In the ensuing years, as he received training as a clinical psychologist and began to work with people who struggle in life, his attention was increasingly drawn to the spiritual meaning of existence and to specific attitudes and coping styles that enabled people to endure the tragedies of life.
In his search for interesting reading on this topic, he found himself drawn to The Seth Material, channelled through the medium Jane Roberts in her conversations with a discarnate entity who went by the name of Seth. The Seth Material, which is undoubtedly the most detailed information about spiritual existence and consciousness that has been documented to date, had a profound influence on his thinking. A more practical perspective was offered by the Austrian philosopher and psychotherapist Dr. Victor Frankl, MD., whose main focus was on helping people find meaning in life and to teach them how to view their lives from a perspective that would motivate them to thrive. His thinking was also influenced by the work of numerous other writers, including Neal Donald Welsh’s trilogy Conversations With God, An Uncommon Dialogue, and Dr. Michael Newton’s books on the soul’s journey from the Spiritual Dimension into a lifetime on Earth and back home to their prior spiritual existence following death.
Over the years, Lindal began to formulate a comprehensive theory of existence. A stumbling block, however, that was immediately apparent to him was the difficulty in communicating these concepts to his psychotherapy clients and to people in general. Much of the literature, especially The Seth Material and the writings of Dr. Victor Frankl, was written in such a convoluted manner that it was almost impossible for anyone to comprehend fully. Most people found themselves lost in the pages and eventually gave up on reading them.
While Lindal’s main motivation for writing The Purpose: The Soul’s Emotional Journey was to introduce a worldview to his clients that had meaning and purpose, he realized the first challenge he faced was how to communicate these concepts in a manner that the average reader could understand and benefit from. This challenge he accomplished by means of a dialogue, where he communicates with his own ‘over-soul’ (a term analogous to the ‘unconscious mind’, ‘the inner mind’, ‘the higher self’, ‘the I’, etc.) whom he personalizes as his mentor and comes to know as Old Soul. In this way, and through Lindal’s autobiographical journey where he shares his emotional struggles, the reader is gently guided into an ‘easy- to-read’ odyssey, depicting a worldview that provides a framework for understanding the purpose of and meaning in life’s ups and downs, tragedies and horrors.
Dr. Rick Lindal is married and lives with his husband and their two dogs in the picturesque Northumberland Hills east of Cobourg, Ontario, Canada. He maintains a private practice in the town of Bowmanville, where he specializes in existential and spiritual therapy techniques, including Past-life Regression, Life-Between-Lives Regression, and Entity Releasement Therapy.
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