The cause of the fall of Atlantis was spiritual. The means for that destruction was physical.
The Spiritual Cause
The spiritual cause was this: The souls of the people living under Atlantean rule needed more freedom to make any kind of choices they wanted to make. As mentioned in the previous article, under Atlantean rule, people enjoyed a worldwide peace and prosperity. But many people behaved well because the Atlanteans were able to keep track of everybody and everything; if anyone got out of line, the consequences were swift and sure. It was not possible to commit a crime and get away with it. Therefore, knowing that they would always be found out, people just didn't bother to commit crimes.
Now, some of the people living then were evolved enough to behave well because that was their choice. Others, however, at the soul level, felt they had no choice but to behave—or else. They also knew, as all souls knew, that there was a grand opportunity coming to make a huge leap forward in spiritual evolution; however, these souls knew that they would not be able to make that leap if they hadn't had a chance to, well, actually evolve enough to make that leap. Most of the Atlanteans themselves were evolved enough and so did not feel this pressing spiritual need. But the rest of the world did.
This was the blind spot that the Atlantean rulers had: They could not see how their perfectly run society could, in fact, be holding people back from evolving spiritually.
The Physical Means
The means of destruction was a number of very large chunks of matter hitting the earth from space. I believe that the closest one can come to a description of what happened and the physical consequences can be found in a meticulously researched book that is now out of print. The book is titled, When the Earth Nearly Died: Compelling Evidence of a World Cataclysm 11,500 Years Ago, by Derek S. Allan and J. Bernard Delair.1 In the main, I believe that their hypothesis is the closest to what I see psychically when I look at that time. In their book, they say that several huge chunks of matter struck the earth. Accompanying these large chunks was a fall of red, icy water (probably red from iron oxides) and a fall of fine gravel that scattered over a fairly large portion of the earth.
It is interesting—but not surprising—to me that, although the entire world felt the destructive effects of the meteors that struck it, Atlantis itself was the hardest hit. By taking out the heart and control center of Atlantis, and by disrupting the earth so massively, the falling chunks of matter ensured that the Atlantean society could not possibly go forward. Humanity had to painfully reconstruct its societies. In Egypt, Atlantean technology and knowledge survived the best and the longest, but even there a hiatus occurred during which almost all the Atlantean technologies were lost. Much of what information remained about Atlantean technologies might have been destroyed in 212 BC at the decree of Qin Shih Huang, the Chinese emperor of the terra cotta soldiers fame, who had all the books in his kingdom burned that didn't fit the official dogma. The various burnings of the library at Alexandria took care of any lingering official Atlantean information in the Western world.
The Results and a Lesson to be Drawn
After the destruction of Atlantis, after souls had had a chance to reincarnate, many of them went wild in lifetime after lifetime, plundering, pillaging, torturing, manipulating, controlling, poisoning, and in general abusing their powers and abilities and exploring the dark side. The souls who performed these actions did not have the soul development to know any better. Their lives under Atlantean rule had been peaceful but also devoid of the possibility of behaving so badly. The post-Atlantis lifetimes they spent performing these actions were all opportunities to learn otherwise. For the wiser souls, the lifetimes spent abusing others were balanced by lifetimes in which they chose to experience the other side, so that they could know and understand the consequences from every angle.
And although unfortunately a number of them learned nothing, a number of them did learn that it neither feels good nor extends love in the universe to mistreat themselves or others, or to allow others to mistreat them. Which was the point of the destruction of Atlantis—to give all souls on earth a chance to evolve as spiritual beings so that they will be ready to advance to the next level of spiritual freedom.
I have spoken many times about the coming world shift, but I will summarize it here very quickly. Essentially, Earth and the souls upon and within it are all undergoing an energetic change. We are being given the opportunity of being lifted from existing at the third/fourth dimensional level to existing at the fifth dimensional level. What this means in practical terms is that we may not see a huge difference physically, but the thoughts we have, the choices we make, and the actions we take will have much more immediate and obvious results. If we were to be at that level and not have good intentions, our ill intentions would strike out at everyone around us. Or if we have not learned to accept that we are responsible for our thoughts and actions, we will flail about like babies, causing harm and not doing anything about it because we refuse to accept that we are the ones causing the harm.
Because of this, not everyone will be ready to take on the greater responsibilities that come with existing at the fifth dimensional level, a level in which personal responsibility is even more important than it is here. Those souls who are ready will graduate to that level. Those souls who are not ready will go to other Earths in the multiverse, Earths where they can continue the reincarnational cycle until they learn enough to graduate the next time this opportunity comes around.
The destruction of Atlantis and the subsequent opportunities for souls to awaken is an integral part of the world shift. Without having learned a certain amount of self-control, and without having attained a certain level of awareness about how we are responsible for all our choices, we cannot advance. It would be like taking a bunch of people who know the mechanics of driving a car, but who have no idea of how to drive safely and courteously, and letting them all loose on the road at once. Only mayhem and disaster would result. So instead, people have had the opportunity for the past 12,000ish years to learn as much as they can before the world shift started to take place. Ideally, no one would be left behind, but because free will is an inviolable gift, not everyone has chosen to learn from their actions.
But it isn't too late, even now, for souls to advance enough to make it to the next level. Many of you may have been puzzled by Jesus' parable about the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16). For those who are not familiar with it or who don't remember the details, here is the text from the New International Version of the Bible:
1 For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. 2 He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.
3 About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. 4 He told them, “You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” 5 So they went. He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing.
6 About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, “Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?”
7 “Because no one has hired us,” they answered.
He said to them, “You also go and work in my vineyard.”
8 When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, “Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.”
9 The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner.
12 “These men who were hired last worked only one hour,” they said, “and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.”
13 But he answered one of them, “Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius? 14 Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. 15 Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
16 So the last will be first, and the first will be last.
The very hopeful message of this text is that, while some souls have labored a long time in the vineyards of the Lord, so to speak, learning the lessons of love, peace, tolerance, self-control, responsibility, and so on, other souls are only just now finally waking up to the idea that there is a greater reality, and to the idea that perhaps all those soft-headed souls who prated of love and peace may, after all, have a point. These newly awakening souls have a lot of catching up to do, but time means nothing to the soul. If a person turns their life around, leaving the old path they were following and getting onto the right path, if they are willing and have the right intentions, then they have just as much right to move to the next level of existence as the older2 souls have; to, in short, receive the wages that others have been earning for a longer period of time.
(1 First printed in 1995, it was reprinted in 1997 as Cataclysm: Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C.. You may be able to find one or both of these editions at Abebooks.com. Here is a good summary of the contents of the book. Also, I think the authors' dates might be off; I believe it was a little longer ago—about 12,500 to 13,500 years ago—though I could be wrong.)
(2 An older soul is not older in terms of time, but is older in terms of how they have made use of the time they have spent on earth. Two souls may have spent the same amount of time on earth in various incarnations, but one may still be quite young in the sense that they have learned nothing or next to nothing from their experiences, while the other may be old because they have learned much.)