Past Life Regressions & Their Purported Help In Healing
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
The earliest documented evidence of a past life regression coincides, not coincidentally, with the advent of hypnotism (or mesmerism, as it was originally called). The incident in question occurred when a German prince hypnotized a peasant woman from the village of Hesse in front of a number of guests. The Prince, and everyone’s amazement, the woman began to speak in very cultured French, and recounted the tale of her life being one of privilege and society. She took a lover and proceeded to push her husband off a cliff to eliminate him from the complication (as previously mentioned). The woman suggested that her current life and poverty were a direct result of those actions of selfishness and lust. (Here is indication of karmic law in action, although at the time, there was no common knowledge of such a thing.)
The case is even more remarkable, not just in that it was witnessed, but the fact that it was recorded and subsequently verified. The Prince took careful notes and subsequently made the trip to France and verified the woman’s story. Further, he determined from various interviews that the peasant woman had never been outside of her village, was uneducated, and spoke only the local German dialect.
The use of hypnotism seems essential to remembering past lives, at least in adults who have previously had no memory of past life experiences such as the children in Dr. Stevenson’s cases. Why this is so is not specifically known, however it is theorized that the subconscious mind has more access to the soul memories than the conscious mind. Just as we are more easily influenced when we are at that moment of complete relaxation prior to sleep but still conscious, so are we more accessible to a broader range of ability that is normally filtered by the conscious mind. (See the incident on xenoglossy above). The ability which allowed the young man total recall of an ancient manuscript he casually glanced at would be indicative of a rather broad spectrum of ability by our consciousness, yet it remains, for the most part, outside of conscious ability.
An interesting point brought up by Chinmoy (1998) and rather unique to him, is that he says that the soul can easily remember its past incarnations, but does not want to. Most contend that the soul cannot remember the past lives except for perhaps brief, relevant karmic moments. Chinmoy argues, however: “If you were previously in poverty in Puerto Rico, and now live in a nice house in Connecticut, why should you want to go back?”
Chinmoy also argues that we should avoid the past, to stay in the present and become conscious of the qualities that God wants you to manifest right now. That you have to do everything, and can and must do everything, in the here and now.
Others contend that we do not remember past lives, at least not in significant doses and only for significant life-lesson memories. Unless it is through a conscious attempt, we remember only an incident or two, or perhaps a fleeting snippet that we write off to imagination. The reason we do not remember much about past lives is this: we could not possibly function with all that memory! Professor Geddes MacGregor, in his book Reincarnation In Christianity puts it this way: “If I were to remember hundreds of incarnations back to my life as a farmer in Babylonia, a court jester for Philip the Fair, a tragic life as a Russian princess…you could hardly expect me to bear the burden of it all and still profit from yet another life on earth.”
It seems that forgetfulness gives us a fresh start every time. Forgetfulness helps guard us against complacency. Forgetfulness allows us to face our growth at a pace we can handle. Most reincarnation doctrines teach a period of “rest” or contemplative, objective learning away from the physical plane before reincarnating into another body. Many of the doctrines indicate that this is our true growing time and that we incarnate when the time and conditions are right to pay off our karmic debt in the form of life lessons.
Cayce identified the world in three dimensions: time, space and patience. His readings explain that wholesale memory of our past lives would not be beneficial to us. We might be overwhelmed by a sense of horror or guilt, or we might lose sight of certain principles if overwhelmed with past life information. Cayce’s readings further insist that regarding past lives, 1) You will never have “proof” of accuracy. There is no absolute proof. It is sabotage to consider whether something is true and verifiable or to look for scientific evidence rather than trusting your own feelings and instinct, and 2) A good, tentative past-life theory is one that makes sense to you. Does it feel right? Does it make sense? Is it beneficial? And finally, 3) The objective truth of a past-life theory can only be tested over time.
Tom Shroder, a Washington Post correspondent and investigative journalist, who wrote extensively on Dr. Stevenson (1999), undergoes his own regression and found the experience not much different than the kind of relaxed, meditative, vivid daydreaming that he undergoes when he is working at creating fiction. He visits a seer, a psychic recommended by Dr. Weiss, and the psychic speaks, “…in a charming delirium” as she looks at astrological charts and says, “I’m warming up my right brain.” After this, she spouts out past lives by the handful, insisting the subject (Shroder) had been and alcoholic in the pre Civil War South, an aging Japanese sage with arthritic hands, a black Jamaican sorceress, an Australian rancher, and a German physician. One of his interviewees provided what he takes to be an ulterior motive for believing in her past-life memories. “It never made sense to me,” she said, “that we could be here for such a short time, and then…nothing.”
Shroder also cites several undisclosed doctors and psychologists who reveal that they, too, have had patients regress into vivid, emotionally laden experiences from “the past” that have had a profound effect on “the present.” One, who is a “widely recognized expert in hypnotherapy and multiple-personality disorders” says that it is possible that such incidents are fantasy material similar to screen memory, an indirect way for the subconscious to deal with present problems. Nevertheless, he accounts that there is a purposefulness to them, and to the unconscious. Rather than being a sham, it could be that the fantasy is a way of bringing events to the surface in a safe way.
This expert also described the incident of a patient who woke at two in the morning and felt “famished”…which was an unusual word to her, not part of her normal vocabulary. Under hypnosis, the woman was asked to return to the cause of the upset and she said, “Of course. I was there!” She was referring to Kristallnacht—the beginning of the Holocaust in Germany. Though the woman was suddenly and happily free of her emotional trouble, the fact is that there had been a lot of news coverage the preceding week on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi’s night of terror against Jewish homes and businesses. The word fa-misht is a Yiddish word that surfaced, which means “all mixed-up, bewildered” and describes the chaos of that night. So possibly, rather than a “past life regression,” the woman found herself under hypnosis and able to freely associate any sense of fear and anxiety she might have felt from “re-living” the Kristellnacht through the news coverage. Fa-mischt, became famished, in a classic Freudian symbolism such as he recounts in his The Interpretation Of Dreams.
Dr. Brian Weiss himself, upon being interviewed many years after he wrote the groundbreaking book, Many Lives, Many Masters (1996), probably the book that first widely introduced the notion of hypnotic past life regression, distanced himself from the idea of regressions providing proof of reincarnation. What he cares about is that whatever these regressions tap into, even if only the patient’s subconscious or fantasy memory, they have been helpful in therapy. He claims that he’s seen problems that have resisted any other kind of treatment clear up almost instantly after a “successful” regression. Still, though, there have been no clinical studies to verify his impression in this regard.
It is important to recognize that the practice of regression as a therapeutic, psychological treatment has been almost universally abandoned and discounted by orthodox psychiatry. It has been found to produce false memories, especially in the case of sexual abuse and misconduct. Noteworthy is the recent case in Detroit, where a woman successfully sued three different psychiatrists for carelessly and ignorantly instilling false memories of sexual abuse as a young child, memories that led to breakdowns, family dysfunction and over fifteen years of treatment.
It is also important to note, however, that regressions are still used by those exploring reincarnation and past life experiences. The distinction here is important. Even with the caveat mentioned in regard to Dr. Weiss (that there are no clinical studies proving the effectiveness of past life regression in psychological healing) it remains anecdotally accepted that there have been healings of neurosis, phobias and the like in certain experiences where the patient uncovers a root of trauma in a past life. Once exposed, and given a cause and perspective, the patient is often no more subject to the traumatic effects. Whether it is actually a past life experience or a mere fantastical memory that allows the subject to indirectly confront the problem, the effect is generally positive.
Given that many seekers are at the point in which they are ending their reincarnational cycle in this particular lifetime, and that some very tough Earth Lessons take several lifetimes to complete, it makes sense that the causes of trauma could lie in a past life and that this lifetime is where resolution and peace are finally achieved.