Through Experience into Understanding
OFTEN A NEW PATIENT OR WORKSHOP ATTENDEE CONFIDES to me, “Dr. Weiss, I’m very interested in experiencing past life regression, but I’m having some trouble accepting the concept of reincarnation.”
If you feel like this, you are not alone. Many of these people need to address this issue before beginning the regression process. Doing this is often a preliminary part of therapy with these patients, and it is a common topic for questions and answers in my workshops and lectures. Before my extraordinary experiences with Catherine, I myself was extremely skeptical about the concept of reincarnation and the healing potential of past life regression. Even afterwards, it took several more years for me to make the commitment to bring my new beliefs and experiences into the public eye.
Although Catherine’s therapy had radically changed my understanding of the nature of life and the nature of healing, I was hesitant to let other people know about these profound experiences because I was afraid I would be considered “crazy” or “weird” by colleagues and friends.
On the other hand, I had received further confirmation of the effectiveness of past life therapy by successfully treating more patients with this technique. I knew that I had to alleviate my discomfort, to resolve this issue. So I went to the medical library to see if other research was available. The left-brained, logical clinician in me liked this solution to the problem, and I hoped that such validation existed. If I had accidentally stumbled onto past life recall, I was certain that other psychiatrists using hypnotic techniques must have had similar experiences. Perhaps one of them had been brave enough to tell the tale.
I was disappointed to find only a few, albeit excellent, research reports. For instance, I found Dr. Ian Stevenson’s documentation of cases in which children appeared to remember details of previous lives. Many of these details were later corroborated by investigative research. This was very important because it helped to provide validating proof of the concept of reincarnation. But there was little else to be found, certainly next to nothing about the therapeutic value of past life regression.
I left the library even more frustrated than when I had entered. How could this be possible? My own experience had already allowed me to hypothesize that past life recall could be a useful therapeutic tool for a variety of psychological and physical symptoms.
Why had no one else reported his or her experience? In addition, why was there almost no acknowledgment in the professional literature of past life experiences surfacing during clinical hypnotherapy? It seemed unlikely that these experiences were mine alone. Surely other therapists had had them.
In retrospect, I can see that what I really wanted was someone to have done the work that I would soon do. At that time I could only wonder whether other psychotherapists were as hesitant as I was to come forward. My research of the literature complete, I was torn between the power and reality of my own direct experiences and the fear that my ideas and new beliefs about life after death and contact with master guides might not be personally and professionally “appropriate.”
I decided to consult another discipline. From my college religion course at Columbia University, I recalled how the major traditions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, embraced reincarnation as a central tenet, and how in these religions the concept of past lives is accepted as a basic aspect of reality. I had also learned that the Sufi tradition of Islam has a very beautiful tradition of reincarnation, rendered in poetry, dance, and song.
I simply could not believe that during the thousands of years of the history of Western religions no one had written about experiences like mine. I could not have been the first one to receive this information. I later discovered that in both Judaism and in Christianity the roots of belief in reincarnation go very deep.
In Judaism, a fundamental belief in reincarnation, or gilgul, has existed for thousands of years. This belief had been a basic cornerstone of the Jewish faith until approximately 1800-1850, when the urge to “modernize” and to be accepted by the more scientific Western establishment transformed the Eastern European Jewish communities. However, the belief in reincarnation had been fundamental and mainstream until this time, less than two centuries ago. In the Orthodox and Chasidic communities, belief in reincarnation continues unabated today. The Kabbala, mystical Jewish literature dating back thousands of years, is filled with references to reincarnation. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, one of the most brilliant Jewish scholars of the past several centuries, summed up gilgul in his book, The Way of God: “A single soul can be reincarnated a number of times in different bodies, and in this manner, it can rectify the damage done in previous incarnations. Similarly, it can also attain perfection that was not attained in its previous incarnations.”
When I researched the history of Christianity, I discovered that early references to reincarnation in the New Testament had been deleted in the fourth century by Emperor Constantine when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Apparently, the emperor had felt that the concept of reincarnation was threatening to the stability of the empire. Citizens who believed that they would have another chance to live might be less obedient and law abiding than those who believed in a single Judgment Day for all.
In the sixth century, the Second Council of Constantinople underscored Constantine’s act by officially declaring reincarnation a heresy. Like Constantine, the Church was afraid that the idea of prior lives would weaken and undermine its growing power by affording followers too much time to seek salvation. They concurred that the whip of Judgment Day was necessary to ensure the proper attitudes and behavior.
During the same Early Christian Era leading up to the Council of Constantinople, other Church fathers like Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and St. Jerome accepted and believed in reincarnation. So did the Gnostics. As late as the twelfth century, the Christian Cathars of Italy and southern France were severely brutalized for their belief in reincarnation.
As I reflected on the new information I had gathered, I realized that aside from their belief in reincarnation, the Cathars, Gnostics, and Kabbalists all had another value in common: that direct personal experience beyond what we see and know with our rational minds or what is taught by a religious structure is a major source of spiritual wisdom. And this direct personal experience powerfully promotes spiritual and personal growth. Unfortunately, since people may be severely punished for unorthodox beliefs, the groups learned to keep them secret. The repression of past life teachings has been political, not spiritual.1
And so I began to understand the “whys.” I myself was concerned that I might be punished for my beliefs if I made them public. Yet I know that people have the right to have access to the tools of growth and healing, and I have seen from my own clinical experience that past life regression can heal and transform people’s lives. I also know that patients become better, more useful members of society and their families, with much more to offer.
But even after Many Lives, Many Masters was published, I was still waiting for the backlash. I was waiting for doctors to ridicule me, for my reputation to be tarnished and, perhaps, even for my family to suffer. My fears were unfounded. Although I hear there’s a stray colleague or two who has been known to mutter about “poor Brian who’s only got one foot on the curb,” instead of losing friends and colleagues, I gained more. I also began to receive letters—wonderful letters—from psychiatrists and psychologists throughout the country who had experiences like mine but had not dared to make them public.
This was a powerful lesson for me. I had taken the risk of documenting and presenting my experiences to the public and professional world, and my reward was knowledge, validation, and acceptance. In addition, I had learned that understanding does not always begin with reading accounts of studies in libraries. It can also come from exploring one’s own experience. Intuition can lead one to intellect. The twain can meet; they can nourish and inspire each other. They had done so for me.
I tell this story because your concerns—the tug of war between your experiential and intellectual knowledge—might, in essence, be similar to mine. Many people have the same experiences and beliefs you do, perhaps many more than you can imagine. And many of these people feel discouraged from communicating their experiences for the same reasons you do. Still others may be expressing them, but in private. It is important to keep an open mind, to trust your experiences. Don’t let the dogma and beliefs of others undermine your personal experience and perception of reality.
Another concern people have about past lives is whether it is “weird” to believe in psychic phenomena. This concern is easier to allay. Such experiences are universal. Discreetly poll some of your friends and family members about whether or not they have ever had any kind of precognitive dream or other psychic experience. You may find the results surprising.
I certainly did. Two months after Many Lives, Many Masters was published, I gave an informal talk to a book club composed of ten women who lived in Miami Beach. The group had been meeting for twelve years to discuss a wide range of books, mostly popular literature. They were not particularly interested in metaphysics. However, since I was a local author and willing to talk with them, the club read its first metaphysical book in its twelve years of existence. On the evening I attended, the discussion group consisted of all ten women. They were mostly middle class and mainstream and seemed to constitute a good cross section of that population.
Early in the discussion, I polled each member of the group about what her beliefs about reincarnation and life after death had been before reading Many Lives, Many Masters. Three women (30 percent) had believed in reincarnation. Six (60 percent), including the first three, believed in life after death, and four (40 percent) believed that they died when their bodies died. These statistics were very close to the national averages reported in a Gallup poll.
When I asked the club members whether they had ever personally experienced any psychic phenomena, I was surprised at the range and intensity of the responses I received. Remember, this was not a preselected, metaphysically oriented group with an ongoing interest in ESP, psychic events, or reincarnation. This was just a group of ten women who liked to read and discuss many different kinds of books.
One group member’s mother had once been visited in a dream by her grandmother, who was elderly but not ill. In the dream, the grandmother was radiant and glowing, enveloped in a golden-white light. She spoke to her granddaughter: “I’m fine, don’t worry about me. I have to leave you now. Take care of yourself.” The next day, the mother found out that her grandmother had died during the night in a distant city.
Another woman had dreamed about an older male relative, someone she had not thought about or had contact with for a long time. In the dream, there was blood on her relative’s chest. Unbeknownst to her, he had undergone open-heart surgery the previous day.
A different member of this small group had experienced recurrent dreams about her son. In these dreams her son, who was quite healthy at that time, appeared to have been seriously injured. The book club member saw herself in his hospital room and in that room a strong, mysterious voice would radiate throughout the room with these words: “He is being returned to you.” She was confused because the boy in the dream, who she knew was her son, had much darker hair than her son’s own hair. The dream recurred repeatedly for one month.
At the end of the month, her son was critically injured when his bicycle was struck by a car. In the hospital, this book club member told the concerned doctors that her son would recover. She knew this unequivocally; the voice had told her so. His head swathed in bandages, the boy slowly recovered. When the bandages were removed, the hair on his head, which had been shaved, grew in dark. The woman never had this dream again.
Another woman told the others about her two-year-old son who seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of facts to which he had never been exposed. “He must have been here before,” she told her friends.
A woman’s dentist, who was also her good friend, seemed to have a special talent for avoiding traffic accidents. One evening they, along with several other friends, were leaving a restaurant and beginning to cross the street. “Step back on the curb,” he suddenly yelled and put up his arms in front of them, herding the group backwards. He had no idea why he was doing this. A few seconds later, a car careened around the corner and sped by recklessly, several feet in front of the group.
A few weeks after that incident, the dentist had been half-asleep in the passenger seat of his car as his wife was driving them home. He was not looking out the window, just dozing on and off. “Don’t go when the light changes,” the dentist mumbled when his wife braked for a stop light. “Someone is going to run the red light.” He was still half-asleep and not looking out the window. She heeded his warning. A few seconds after the light changed, a car sped through the intersection across their projected path. They were both shocked, but alive.
While cleaning her house, one woman in the group was struck “out of the blue” by the clear and entirely convincing thought that an old friend of hers had just committed suicide. She had not thought of this friend for months and had no knowledge of any emotional problems or thoughts of self-harm. But the thought was so clear, so untinged by emotion, and so convincing, that it seemed like knowledge of a fact rather than an idle thought. It was true, she later learned. He had committed suicide on that very day.
These striking, intuitive experiences kept pouring out. Several more of the book club members related precognitive dreams. One typically knew who was calling her before she picked up the phone. Most had experienced strong déjà vu feelings, intuitive knowledge, and/or simultaneous thoughts and utterances with their husbands.
But what was perhaps even more striking was that in the twelve years the group had been meeting, these women had not shared most of the information about their psychic experiences. They were afraid of being considered “weird” or even “crazy.” And yet these are normal women experiencing normal psychic phenomena. It is not weird or crazy to have these experiences—we all do. We just don’t tell others about them, not even our families and closest friends.
In a sense, past life recall is just one of many directions the very common, very precious experience of intuition can take. A mind that is relaxed and focused in a light hypnotic state is often better able to tap the unconscious stores of intuitive guidance and wisdom than is the normal, “awake” mind, which receives random, spontaneous hunches. If you have ever had an intuitive experience, a hunch that has paid off or come true, you know how valuable and empowering such an experience can be.
The experience of past life recall often feels the same. It feels as if you are remembering, guiding, and healing yourself in a way you do not have to explain or prove. It simply happens; it flows. When you feel better as a result of your recall experience, whether a physical symptom has been alleviated, an emotional issue soothed, or you simply feel more confident and peaceful about your life and its direction—all very common results of past life therapy—you don’t need to question the logical validity of the experience you have had. You know it has empowered you to improve the quality of your own life or to receive insight about yourself and others in a very tangible way.
Psychic, precognitive dreams are a particularly common example of an ability that we all have and that we all further develop. Soon after the state of Florida began a six-digit state lottery, an unusual psychic dream led a New Jersey man to win the $10.5 million prize. In an interview reported in the Florida newspapers, the winner said his daughter had appeared to him in a dream almost a month after her death, and she had prompted him to buy a lottery ticket.
“My daughter said, ‘Why don’t you play my numbers?’ She said, ‘I’d like to bring you a little happiness.’”
Her father, a sixty-one-year-old real estate agent, and other family members had come to Florida to try to recover from the sudden, tragic death of his twenty-three-year-old daughter who had died in a fall from a two-hundred-foot cliff in New Jersey several weeks prior to the dream. After awakening from this vivid dream, her father remembered that a New Jersey lottery ticket had been found in his daughter’s car. He thought it very eerie, but he telephoned home for the numbers on her New Jersey ticket: 2, 6, 11, 14, 31, and 34. Early on the day that the weekly drawing was held, the father and mother, two daughters, and a son bought a single Florida lottery ticket with these numbers on it. The odds of winning are computed to be fourteen million to one. The family won.
“I got like a funny feeling,” the father said. “I was surprised, but not surprised. It’s hard to explain.”
Later that month, a Homestead, Florida, man won $11.2 million by picking the numbers 1, 2, 3, 13, 28, and 48 in the Florida lottery. A fifty-eight-year-old body shop mechanic, he had never before bought a lottery ticket, not even in his native country, Cuba. But on the Tuesday night prior to Saturday’s drawing, his dead mother appeared to him in a vivid dream and told him to buy a lottery ticket. He bought ten tickets at a nearby supermarket the next day. One of those ten turned out to be the winner.
Psychic, precognitive dreams are not only frequent but also quite real. I am aware of this not only from my recent research into psychic phenomena, but also from over twenty years of experience as a sleep and dream researcher.
The validation of near death experiences, or NDEs, through the research of many prestigious experts like Dr. Raymond Moody, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Dr. Kenneth Ring, Dr. Melvin Morse, and others, also defines the intuitive, experience-based worldview in which past lives and recall of them seem logical and comfortable to both mind and intuition. It also highlights another very common human experience that many keep to themselves, and one that often parallels the findings of past life regression research.
Shirley is a sixty-five-year-old woman, one of the few survivors of an airplane crash in which more than 170 passengers were killed. Shirley was severely injured, with multiple fractures and damage to internal organs. She was found in marshy water, still belted into her seat, which had fallen out of the shattered fuselage of the plane.
Hospitalized in a trauma center, Shirley developed a fever of over 106 degrees, a potentially lethal level. She began to have convulsions, and she lapsed into a coma. She then had a cardio-respiratory arrest, and her breathing and heart rate ceased. Heroic efforts to resuscitate her appeared fruitless, but the medical team persisted.
During these efforts Shirley had a near death experience. Floating out of her body, she was met by a flock of white doves. They directed her toward a beautiful light in the distance. She felt wonderful. On the way, she turned around and saw the doctors and nurses frantically working on her body. She could see which bones in her body were broken as clearly as if she were looking at an X ray.
Turning back toward the beckoning light, she thought, “Oh, I wish the birds could talk.”
At this point, she heard a voice coming from the light. The voice was calm and peaceful, and it was telling her that it was not yet her time.
Shirley protested, “But my body is crumpled. I don’t want to go back to this pain.”
The voice responded, “You have a message to bring back, and the message is that peace equals love, love equals wisdom.”
Shirley was further told that she would help people by communicating this message.
Shirley returned to her body. The doctors were amazed. Fifteen minutes had passed since her heart had stopped beating, since she had last drawn a spontaneous breath. She later told everyone her message. Her family put posters around her room. “Peace, Love, Wisdom,” the posters said.
Shirley heard the voice one more time, when her doctors told her that she would probably be permanently paralyzed, a paraplegic.
“No, I’m not!” she protested. “Come back in half an hour, and I’ll prove it to you.”
After they left, Shirley closed her eyes and pictured the light she had seen during her near death experience. Then she heard the voice again. “Your healing will come from within, from the inside out.”
When the doctors returned at the appointed time, Shirley told them that her healing would occur from the inside out. She instructed them to watch her feet. Once again she closed her eyes and focused on the light. The skeptical doctors were completely taken aback when Shirley moved her foot. Since then, her recovery has been steady.
According to a Gallup survey, more than eight million Americans have had NDEs, including many young children. The accounts of these experiences are remarkably consistent and extremely well documented. Usually the person near death becomes detached from his or her body and “watches” the rescue and resuscitation efforts from some point above the body. Soon the person becomes aware of a bright light or a glowing “spiritual” figure or sometimes a deceased relative in the distance. Often, he or she hears sounds or music and floats down a tunnel toward the light or toward the figure. There is no pain. Instead, a feeling of intense peace and joy pervades the floating consciousness. Most people do not want to return to their bodies, but if their tasks, duties, and debts on earth are not yet completed, they are returned to their bodies, and once again become aware of pain and other physical sensations. Yet most are also aware that life does not end with the death of the physical body. Most never fear death again.
Raymond Moody, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., renowned author of Life After Life, Reflections on Life After Life, and The Light Beyond, told me about some of the more than two thousand interviews he has conducted with people who have had NDEs. In his interviews, the subjects describe the typical experience of floating above their bodies. Many knew what the doctors and nurses who were attending to their bodies were going to say moments before the actual words were uttered. When patients tried to touch the doctors’ or nurses’ shoulders, their disembodied hands went right through the solid bodies of the medical team. There was no physical contact.
“They then open up to a sense of transcendent reality,” Dr. Moody continued. “They feel totally permeated by love as they find the brilliant light, which in no way hurts their eyes.”
One frequent characteristic of NDEs is a life review, a panorama of one’s actions, behavior, and deeds that is somehow all displayed instantaneously, beyond time, and in brilliant color and three dimensionality. In addition, the life reviewer experiences the emotions of the people he has helped and hurt, loved and hated. One or several spiritual, godlike beings often accompany the life reviewer during the review.
One of Dr. Moody’s subjects was a minister who had tended toward the fire and brimstone approach in his preaching. As the life review got underway, the preacher found himself experiencing one of his own vitriolic sermons from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy who was quaking with fear in his pew. The preacher’s acquaintance with this boy prior to the NDE had been fairly casual, yet now he felt the full force of the boy’s fear as well as the decidedly unspiritual effect of his sermon on the entire congregation.
It was then that the spiritual being who was observing the life review calmly commented, “I suspect you won’t be doing that any more.”
Recalled the minister to Dr. Moody, “I was very surprised that God was not interested in my theology!”
Dr. Melvin Morse, a Seattle pediatrician and author of Closer to the Light, has been carefully documenting NDEs in children since 1983, reporting more than fifty cases. Children who have had NDEs relate very similar experiences. They, too, describe leaving their bodies, entering a void, and being drawn to a bright, welcoming light. The impact of the NDE on children is equally as profound and transformative as it is on adults. The children learn that life has a real purpose. They “revere life and see the intricate connections throughout the universe.” In a follow-up of his patients nearly eight years after the original interviews, Dr. Morse found that the children who had experienced NDEs had become exceptionally mature teenagers and forged excellent family relationships. They did not experiment with drugs, were not rebellious, and did not act out behaviorally or sexually.
Dr. Kenneth Ring, the founder and past president of the International Association for Near Death Studies, Professor of Psychology at the University of Connecticut, and the author of the excellent books Life at Death and Heading Toward Omega, as well as Dr. Morse, Dr. Moody, and I recently lectured at a medical conference in Los Angeles. The theme of the conference was near death and after death experiences. At the conference, Dr. Morse related that several children in his study had reported having overheard conversations among physicians and nurses during surgical procedures during the NDE, even though the children were unconscious under general anaesthesia at the time.
He also related the story of a child who had an NDE at the age of nine months. Later at the age of three and a half, the child attended a religious pageant and saw someone portraying Christ.
“That’s not really Jesus,” the boy objected. “I saw Jesus when I died!” Elaborating, the boy described how he had seen a tunnel with a “world of light” at the other end, where he could “run and double jump with God.”
“This was his vision of heaven,” Dr. Morse added. Dr. Morse also mentioned three or four children who told him that they “met souls in heaven waiting to be reborn” during their NDEs. “This bothered them,” Dr. Morse commented, “because it seemed contrary to their religious training, yet they did meet these souls.”
Dr. Moody told me about a case cited in the Journal of Critical Care Medicine of a child less than one year old who had nearly died but was revived at the last moment. Afterwards she showed signs of separation anxiety whenever she was near a tunnel. When the child was about three and a half, her grandmother became terminally ill, and the news of the impending death was delicately broken to the young girl.
“Oh, will Grandmother have to go through the tunnel to see God like I did?” she innocently asked.
In Dr. Ring’s experience, religious orientation and background do not predispose people to NDEs. Anybody can have this experience, despite what their beliefs may be. He reiterated the finding that people experiencing NDEs lose the fear of death. “This does not happen with those near to death who don’t have NDE’s,” says Dr. Ring. “. . . Almost every NDE’er develops a belief in God, even those who were atheists previously. There is a greater concern for life, for nature, for the environment. They are less judgmental about themselves and more compassionate for others. They are much more loving . . . it’s love that matters . . . they have a heightened sense of purpose. They are more spiritual.”
Dr. Ring also believes that as resuscitation technology continues its rapid advances and more people than ever begin to come back from the brink of death, the number of NDEs will increase and provide even more important new data.
Patients describing their actual deaths in past lives use the same images, accounts, and metaphors as do the children and adults who have had an NDE. The similarities are astounding, even though vivid past life death descriptions usually come from hypnotized patients with no previous familiarity with the NDE literature.
The similarity of the changes in values, perspective, and outlook on life that typically occur after the experience of an NDE and a past life recall is also very illuminating. You do not have to be hit by a truck or suffer a cardiac arrest to reap increased awareness or spirituality, decline in materialistic worries, the development of a more loving, peaceful nature, or any of the other benefits that past life regression and near death experience share. Members of both groups experience a dramatic lessening of the fear of death and express the new and certain conviction that love is what really matters.
In addition to fear of punishment or judgment by peers, an occasional third area of concern expressed by those interested in exploring past life recall is the question of validation. Is there any objective “proof” of past lives? Is there factual investigation into the veracity of the details of recalled past life memories? Sometimes this question arises in people who have already had a past life recall experience. Can all these details be true? They wonder. What if I made it up?
Ian Stevenson, M.D., Professor and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, has collected and documented more than two thousand cases of children who have had a reincarnation-type experience. Many of these children exhibited xenoglossy, the ability to speak a foreign, often ancient language to which they had never been previously exposed. Usually very young, these children also knew specific and detailed facts about towns and families hundreds or thousands of miles distant and about events that occurred a decade or more ago. Half of these children came from the Western world, not India or Tibet or other areas in Asia where belief in reincarnation is common. Many of the details in these cases were carefully corroborated by Dr. Stevenson’s research team.
Although my field is adult psychiatry, parents of children who appear to be experiencing a past life memory are also occasionally referred to me, so I have also had the opportunity to interview children with apparent past life recall.
The parents of one young boy sought me out to talk to me about their son’s ability to speak French. The child had started speaking French in phrases and sentences when he was between the ages of two and a half and three. Could this be genetic memory of some sort, the parents wondered, since there was some French ancestry on one side of the family? However, neither parent could speak French, and the child had not been around any French-speaking people. No relatives, household caregivers, neighbors, or friends of the family spoke French.
After asking the parents more questions, I advised the little boy’s parents that it was more likely that his xenoglossy was based on past life memory than it was on genetic memory. I told them that their son reminded me of Dr. Stevenson’s children. It was certainly possible that, like them, he might be psychically tapping into a collective unconscious or stream of knowledge of all things, including history, languages, archetypal symbols, and past events. But, all in all, I felt that it was more likely that the boy had learned French in a prior life.
A distraught mother, an attorney by profession, was referred to me because her four-year-old daughter was behaving “strangely.” Commitment to a psychiatric institution was even being considered. The child’s “strange” behavior began after the mother bought some antique coins. She and her bright and hitherto very normal daughter had been sorting and playing with the coins when they came upon an odd, many-sided specimen.
The daughter immediately grabbed the coin and said, “I know this one. Don’t you remember, Mommy, when I was big and you were a boy and we had this coin? Lots of them.”
The daughter began to sleep with the coin and to talk frequently about that other time. A psychologist friend of the family feared that the little girl might be psychotic. As I elicited further details about the case, I could confidently advise the family that the little girl was not psychotic; she was merely recalling a past life experience in a lifetime that she and her mother had once shared together. With reassurance and understanding, the daughter soon resumed her “normal” behavior, and the mother’s anxiety disappeared.
These are not the only cases of this sort I and other researchers have in our files. Children such as these who spontaneously produce facts, details, languages, or other indications of past life recall are compelling examples of the reality of past lives. These children are too young to have studied the material they are presenting. They do not embellish or distort. This makes the information even more powerful.
I know of a three-year-old boy who can point out World War II vintage airplanes and can describe flying them when he was a man. He is able to provide some of the airplanes’ specifications. How does he know this? I have heard about a little girl who remembers how to assemble rifles. Another describes in great detail the large sleigh that overturned on her when she was big.
There are many more examples of this phenomenon, thousands in the literature. Just ask a three-year-old if he or she remembers when he or she was big. You may be amazed at the response.
As a trained psychiatrist, I instinctively compare the content of my patients’ past life memories to the traditional psychoanalytic material of the dreams, with their attendant distortional and metaphorical content. In this way, I have been able to make my own discoveries about the issue of fantasy and metaphor versus actual memory in past life recall. I have also been able to compare the experience of past life regression with the traditional Freudian uncovering of childhood memories.
In my practice I have found that the fluid, living, seemingly multicolored mixture of actual experience, metaphor, and distortion that occurs in past life regression is very similar to the mixture that is found in dreams. In a past life regression session, my work is often to help pry apart these elements, interpret them, and find a coherent pattern to the whole tapestry, just as it is in a traditional psychoanalytic session, which might include childhood memories.
The difference is, again in my experience, that in dreams perhaps 70 percent of the dream content consists of symbol and metaphor, 15 percent consists of actual memory, and the last 15 percent of distortion or disguise. I have found that in past life recall, though, the proportions are usually rather different. Perhaps 80 percent of the past life experience will consist of actual memory, another 10 percent of symbol and metaphor, and the last 10 percent distortion or disguise. For instance, if you regress to your childhood in this lifetime and are asked to recall kindergarten, you may remember your teacher’s name, the clothes you wore, the map on the wall, the friends you had, and the green wallpaper in the classroom. On further investigation, it may turn out that the wallpaper in your kindergarten classroom was actually yellow and that it was green in your first grade classroom. But this does not undercut the validity of the rest of your memory. Likewise, a past life memory may have an “historical novel” quality to it. That is, the important nucleus of truth may be filled out with fantasy, elaborations, or distortion, but the core of it will be a solid, accurate memory. The same phenomenon occurs in dream material and in regressions within the current lifetime. It is all grist for the mill. The truth is still there.
A traditional analyst might wonder whether a past life memory might be psychological fantasy. Is the past life memory a projection and embellishment of a childhood issue or trauma?
My experience and that of other therapists who have written to me about their cases tells me that it is actually the other way around. Memories, impulses, and energies from past lives seem to form or create the childhood pattern in this lifetime. It is simply another repetition or coming together of long, preexisting patterns.
Actually, this phenomenon of prior inputs from past lives surfacing in childhood and repeating once again is very similar to the concept of neurosis and repetition compulsion that Freud hypothesized (i.e., “hidden” traumas in the past that result in present symptoms, and which must be uncovered to relieve those symptoms). My only disagreement with traditional analysis on this particular point is that Freud’s temporal stage was too small and limited, that it needs to be extended backwards beyond this lifetime to reach the root of some problems. Once that stage is enlarged, coherent, effective, and rapid therapeutic results usually occur.
As a therapist or a patient, you don’t have to believe in past lives or reincarnation for past life therapy to work. The proof is in the pudding. As more than one fellow psychotherapist has said to me, “I still don’t know if I believe in this past life stuff, but I use it, and it sure does work!”