Past Life Regression - Brian Weiss (So many questions)

[MariaDine]

Since the Oprah Winfrey Show featured Brian Weiss, MD, a Past Life Regression expert, on her show on Tuesday, May 13, 2008, many people are abuzz wondering if a past life regression is a hoax or real.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JmNMzepdD1A

Cosmopolitan magazine reported in 1997 that 79% of people believe in reincarnation, while only 45% believe one can experience a past life.

Dr. Weiss began his career as a psychiatrist and was well published and well respected by the time he was 35. In 1979, he became chairman of the psychiatry department at the prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami and was regarded as an expert in his field.

His work with a patient named, "Catherine," who suffered from panic attacks, phobias, fears and nightmares changed his life forever when during a hypnosis session she began talking about being a boy in Ukraine in the 1700s.

Weiss did not believe this story-chalking it up to fantasy, until one day she told him about his own family.

He says while Catherine was hypnotized she told him she was with his father, who died two years earlier, and that his daughter was named after his father.

"This was all true," Dr. Weiss says. "My father's Hebrew name was Avram. He died two years before ... [and] did not have an obituary. There is no place to look this up. And my daughter was named after him."

Subsequently, Weiss wrote his first book, "Many Lives Many Masters".

The knowledge that reincarnation is a part of life has been believed by many since the beginning of existence on this earth plane. Such books as Researches in Reincarnation and Beyond, Volume I by A.R. Martin,1942, brought this knowledge to the masses.

Albeit was not a highly discussed topic in the Western world until 1952, when Morey Bernstein a Colorado businessman and amateur hypnotist put Virginia Tighe, a housewife in a trance which revealed startling revelations about Tighe's recollection of a past life as a 19th-century Irishwoman and her rebirth 59 years later in the United States.

Likewise Edgar Cayce (March 18, 1877 - January 3, 1945) an American, used his psychic abilities to channel answers to questions on subjects such as health, Atlantis, Akashic records and reincarnation while in a self-induced trance.

In the past thirty years a plethora of books, TV documentaries and research projects have further substantiated the belief in the past life phenomenon. Albeit not in the belief that one can experience a past life.

The purpose of experiencing a past life is to learn what has prompted you to make the choices you have made and heal the emotional distress which creates havoc.

The most powerful gift of experiencing a past life is healing past emotional traumas to help one to make good choices in the current life. ´

The more clarity you have about your past, true nature, and the nature of the universe, the more effective you can be in decision making.

One immediate benefit of experiencing a past life is seeing the consequences of your behavior. If you cheated, lied or said hurtful things which brought pain to others in a past life, you are less likely to repeat those mistakes.

If you can see the growth and joy you brought with being loving and kind, you are more likely to create that in your life now.

The questions are important. What prompts you to choose one thing over another? What factors are you considering when making decisions in your life?

What do you need to know to improve your decision-making process?

How you make decisions in your life will reflect how you will make choices in your next incarnation. Clearing up these ineffective patterns from life times before can set you free to live your life more effectively and fully this time around. Are you ready to do that for yourself.

If so, a past life regression with a certified regression practitioner is key to your making a clear and highly effective transition to living life to the fullest versus coping in life.

Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, PhD is a certified regression practitioner www.IBRT.org


First published: http://www.qassia.com

Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, PhD, Life Coach, Hypnotherapist, Author, "101 Great Ways To Improve Your Life." Dr. Dorothy has the unique gift of connecting people with a broad range of profound principles that resonate in the deepest part of their being. She brings awareness to concepts not typically obvious to one's daily thoughts and feelings. http://www.drdorothy.net

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dor...ddermeyer,_PhD

[MariaDine]

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tzKj0F5ed7k

Also....
Reincarnation in Science - Dr. Ian Stevenson

Although reincarnation seems conventional to the more than 1.25 billion practitioners of Hinduism and Buddhism, it's not widely accepted by those outside of Eastern religion. The Western skepticism of reincarnation is tied to monotheistic religions' focus on a single life, a single soul and an active God who does not rely on karmic law. And with sporadic believers announcing they're Cleopatra or Elvis reincarnate, it's not surprising many people remain extremely skeptical of the soul's ability to return repeatedly.

However, this general skepticism has not prevented researchers from exploring the potential for reincarnation. Dr. Ian Stevenson, an academic psychiatrist, led the study of reincarnation in the United States until his death in 2007. Stevenson founded the Division of Personality Studies under the University of Virginia's department of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences. The lab, which later became known as the Division of Perceptual Studies, focuses on examining children who remember former lives, near-death experiences, apparitions and after-death communications, out-of-body experiences and deathbed visions.


Stevenson, who often called reincarnation the "survival of personality after death," saw the existence of past lives as a potential explanation for the differences in human condition [source: New York Times]. He believed past experiences plus genetics and the environment could help elucidate gender dysphoria, phobias and other unexplained personality traits.

Stevenson's reincarnation studies focused on young children, usually between the ages of 2 and 5, who had inexplicable phobias or detailed memories about a previous life. Stevenson would attempt to corroborate the facts the child presented with the details of a deceased person's life. He sometimes made startling connections between memories and lives. One Lebanese boy studied by Stevenson not only knew where a deceased stranger tied his dog but also that the man had been quarantined in his room -- a fact the family attributed to his pulmonary tuberculosis.

Stevenson studied 2,500 cases over the course of about four decades and published technical books and articles. He claimed he merely wanted to suggest reincarnation was plausible, not to prove it absolutely. Despite Stevenson's caveat, his work was largely rejected by the scientific community. The potential for piecing two lives together with coincidences rather than facts and the inability to perform control experiments opened his research to criticism.

[000]

Ah brilliant thread!

This documentary may be of interest. I don't know why it says 'banned' and if it was I have no idea why or where. It is a bit dated but nevertheless it is something I recommend viewing.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HayY1yyXnn0

[MariaDine]

For nearly seven decades psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson has been travelling the world, tracking reports of children who claim to have lived before. Spontaneously they will recall vivid details about complete strangers who died before they were born, people they say they once were. And when the memories are checked against the facts of real lives, they match to an astonishing degree.
It took journalist Tom Shroder years to persuade Dr. Stevenson to allow him to accompany him on his field research, the first ever to have that privilege. From the hills of Beirut, Lebanon to the slums of northern India, Shroder follows Stevenson as he struggles to understand the mysterious phenomenon of old souls reborn into new bodies. What this sceptical reporter, 'who has stared inward but had never seen a ripple of any life but his own', observes shakes him to the core.

Tom Schroder wrote a book «Old Souls» after his experience with Dr. Stevenson

Chapter Two: You Only Live Once

It's a long answer, and it begins ten years before he asks the question, in a small, surprisingly comfy doctor's office just blocks from my home in Miami Beach. The room is dimly lit. Dr. Brian Weiss, chief of psychiatry for Mount Sinai Hospital, is speaking softly in a remarkable voice, a voice that rustles like wind chimes, rises like the smoke from a joss stick -- a perfect voice for hypnosis. He is wearing a white coat and spectacles; his great, graying, blow-dried mane engulfs an earnest, open face. He is telling a story:

In 1982, he hypnotized a young woman. She lay on her back on the couch, eyes closed, hands lightly at her sides, eased into a trance by the doctor's voice and the willingness of her mind, swaddled in a blanket of imaginary white light. He ordered her back to her earliest memories, back to the root of the anxiety that plagued her life.

Weiss had been treating the woman for acute phobias once or twice a week for eighteen months, but this was only the second attempt at hypnosis. The first session uncovered a significant memory from the age of three -- a disturbing sexual encounter with her drunken father -- but there had been no improvement in her condition. Weiss found it extraordinary that such a breakthrough would not be accompanied by some alleviation of symptoms. Could there be a memory even further back, buried even deeper in her mind?

Weiss decided to give her an open suggestion. He made his voice firm and commanding: "Go back to the time from which your symptoms arise."

In her deep trance she spoke in a hoarse whisper. There were long pauses between her words, as if it were difficult or painful to speak. "I see white steps leading up to a building, a big white building with pillars....I am wearing a long dress, a sack made of rough material. My name is Aronda. I am eighteen...."

Weiss, uncertain what was happening, scribbled notes. The whisper went on: "I see a marketplace. There are baskets. You carry the baskets on your shoulder. We live in a valley. There is no water. The year is 1863 B.C."

Before the end of the session, Aronda died, terrified, gasping and choking in a flood.

This was the turning point for the woman on the couch, Weiss said. Her fears -- of choking, of drowning, of the dark -- would fall away after that. In the ensuing months, her hoarse whisper ranged through centuries. She would become Johan, who had his throat slit in the Netherlands in 1473; Abby, a servant in nineteenth-century Virginia; Christian, a Welsh sailor; Eric, a German aviator; a boy in the Ukraine of 1758 whose father was executed in prison. In between lives, floating in a shining void, she would become the host for disembodied spirits who revealed the mysteries of eternity. And, said Weiss, she also became well.

Weiss would write a book about the anonymous woman he called Catherine. Many Lives, Many Masters became an international best-seller and is considered a New Age classic.

In 1988, with the book buoyantly topping local paperback best-seller lists, I decided to write a story about Weiss for Tropic, the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, of which I was then editor. What interested me was Weiss himself: He was no New Age flake. At forty-four, he was a Yale Med School graduate and a nationally recognized expert in psychopharmacology, brain chemistry, substance abuse, and Alzheimer's disease. He said that he had waited four years to write his book for fear that his professional peers would ostracize him. Two years after he finally summoned the courage to publish his account, though, his fears had not been realized, at least not publicly.

Before going to interview him, I called the president of his hospital for comment and got only gushing praise: "Brian Weiss is highly respected, a competent leader in his field." When I asked him if Weiss's reputation had been tainted by the book, he responded with a sharp "No."

Others concurred. "If anyone else had written the book, I would not have believed it," said a colleague. "But I do because I know Brian Weiss as an astute clinician, researcher, and diagnostician."

The fact that normally conservative medical people were taking Weiss's ostensibly extravagant claim of evidence for previous lives seriously intrigued me. It didn't persuade me of anything, but it made for a better story.

When I read his book, the first thing I noticed was a surprising lack of skepticism. Okay, so one of his psychiatric patients had imagined herself to be an Egyptian named Aronda. That, in itself, did not seem to me to merit any further assumption than that she was expressing a fantasy. And yet Weiss was absolutely persuaded. I didn't get it.

In that first meeting in his office, I made no secret of my puzzlement. I told Weiss that I wanted the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity about his story, and that meant that I would be asking a lot of pointed questions. Weiss responded with a shrug and a self-effacing smile. "The whole field is new," he said. "There are a lot of possible loose ends."

Sitting behind his desk, his voice hoarse from a round of talk shows in Pittsburgh, where he had spent a sleepless night in an overheated hotel room, Weiss patiently worked through his logic: He had been treating Catherine, a lab technician in his own hospital, for eighteen months. During that time, he had used conventional therapy, and Catherine had never mentioned any belief in the occult or tried to manipulate him in any way. The only unusual thing about her therapy was her lack of progress. So, if Catherine were a con artist, Weiss reasoned, she was an incredibly patient one, for such a fraud would require her faking psychological problems for eighteen months, waiting for Weiss to suggest hypnosis, faking an emotional reexperience of an early childhood trauma in the first session, and only then slipping back into the phony past lives.

Weiss said that he had had thousands of hours to observe an endless array of patients, to hone his diagnostic ability, his BS meter. With Catherine, he felt sure that he had a patient with symptoms she genuinely wanted to alleviate. She was a simple, honest woman with a commitment to the Roman Catholic faith of her childhood; here was not a schizophrenic or psychotic, no manic-depressive or multiple personality. Her thinking was not delusional.

Then there was the way Catherine responded to the past lives herself. She seemed uncomfortable with them. They did not square with Catholicism, and she found them somewhat embarrassing. But she was thrilled with the rapid improvement in her condition, so she continued the sessions until she felt that she was cured. There was nothing about her that suggested any interest in using the past-life experiences for anything other than a therapeutic purpose. She hesitantly agreed to sign a release for the book, but she had no monetary stake in it. Even now, he said, when he bumped into her at Mount Sinai, she showed little interest in the metaphysical implications of her experience.

For those reasons, Weiss believed that Catherine was not crazy or a con artist. What convinced him that she was remembering actual past lives was that the lives themselves were strikingly mundane -- a fact that Weiss felt lent credibility that would have instantly evaporated had Catherine appeared as, say, Cleopatra in one life and Madame Curie in another. She was a servant, a leper, a laborer. In her deep trance, she focused on things like the scent of flowers and the glamour of a wedding she was not permitted to attend -- everyday things, real-life things. Her memories were at times fairly detailed -- in one life, she described the process of churning butter, in another, the preparation of a body for embalming. To Weiss, the descriptions -- though far from technically complex -- seemed to be beyond Catherine's normal range of knowledge. Once, recently returned from a trip to Chicago, Catherine told him that she had stunned herself on a visit to a museum by spontaneously blurting out corrections to the guide's description of four-thousand-year-old Egyptian artifacts.

I was impressed with Weiss's sincerity, but not by his evidence. Had he located the museum guide and the guide confirmed Catherine's account, admitting that he had later researched the artifacts in question and found himself wrong and Catherine correct, I might have been impressed. But none of that had happened. And in none of Catherine's past-life memories did she come up with the kind of details that any fan of historical fiction couldn't have manufactured. Catherine did not speak in archaic languages or scribble madly in Sanskrit or even mention the name of a single person who could be proven to have existed.

"I was so overwhelmed by what was coming out that I didn't really probe for that kind of thing," Weiss responded. "When I did try to steer her, she would often ignore me. This is the kind of thing that would be interesting to investigate. I've only made a small beginning. Catherine is just one case history."

And not a very convincing one, I decided, the more I considered it. In the session when Catherine remembered the life of Aronda the Egyptian, she used the term "1863 B.C." -- "before Christ" -- a term that no ancient Egyptian would know, and a translation of the ancient dating system that would require painstaking calculation by an Egyptologist. Furthermore, despite this eerie omniscience displayed as an eighteen-year-old Egyptian, in another lifetime Catherine could not come up with the date because she "can't see a newspaper." I also noticed that according to Weiss's account, Catherine said she was living as a Ukrainian boy at precisely the same date that she later claimed to be a Spanish prostitute.

None of that shook Weiss's faith: "The totality of the experience," Weiss said, "was such that these inconsistencies only add to its complexity. There is so much we don't know."

Way too much, I thought.

While interviewing Weiss, I met one of his patients. A therapist herself, she was a clinical social worker who worked with multiple-personality cases and also did past-life regressions with some of her own clients. She saw Weiss because she believed that dimly remembered traumas from her past were haunting her. Under hypnosis in a session with him, she had taken the elevator of her mind into the basement of the past -- and kept going:


"I saw a lot of darkness -- blackness -- and I realized that I was blindfolded. Then I saw myself from outside. I was standing on top of a tower, one of those castle towers made of stone. My hands were tied behind my back. I was in my early twenties, and I knew that I was on the side that had lost the battle. Then I felt an excruciating pain in my back. I could feel my teeth gritting and my arms stiff and fists clenching. I was being lanced, I could feel the lance in my back, but I was defiant, I wasn't going to scream. Then I felt myself falling, and felt the water of the moat closing around me. I've always been terrified of heights and drowning. When I came out of it I was still shaken, and I spent a couple days in agony -- I couldn't even touch the bones of my face, the pain was so great -- but the next morning when I woke up I thought, 'Something's different. Something's very different.'"


Now she was willing to undergo another hypnotic regression while I watched. She lay down on the carpet in Weiss's office and, under his suggestions, drifted back to another lifetime in which she saw herself hanged in public.

Once again, the descriptions that she offered of her experience struck me as unremarkable in detail, devoid of archaic vocabulary or knowledge beyond what any contemporary college graduate could produce without research or even hesitation. Watching the woman on the carpet, listening to her speak, what I was witnessing seemed self-evident: a contemporary American free-associating on a medieval theme.

Maybe, though, I was missing something that could only be found in the subjective experience. I asked Weiss to recommend a hypnotist to guide me through my own regression. I found the process to be relaxing, soothing, and oddly narcissistic, but completely devoid of any sense that forgotten past lives were opening to memory. Instead, I had the clear perception that I was attempting to supply the hypnotist with what she wanted, scenes from a time before I was born. I waited for an image to pop into my mind, and then attempted to embellish it into an appropriate life situation -- exactly what I did when I was trying to write a piece of fiction or drifting off to sleep. When I became even more relaxed, more deeply "into" a slightly altered state of consciousness, the images began to come without any conscious effort. But even then, they never carried with them any more weight of authenticity than a garden-variety daydream.

When I saw the therapist/public-hanging victim again, I related my impressions. Without meaning to, she revealed what I took to be an ulterior motive for believing in her past-life memories:

"It never made sense to me that we could be here for such a short time, and then...nothing," she told me.

And who hasn't felt that, felt it with the deepest instinct in their soul? Being into nothingness; light into dark. Current on, current off -- it just doesn't seem right. Or, maybe more accurately, it doesn't seem fair.

Also on Weiss's recommendation, I visited a psychic who specialized in "reading" past lives. Even in the context of reporting the story, I did it as a lark.

The psychic worked out of an office on the second floor of a Miami Beach shopping center across Route A1A from the Atlantic Ocean. She sat opposite me at her desk, animated, excited still, after all the years, with the prospect of her work. Speaking in a charming delirium, she pointed out signs and portents on astrological charts. "I'm warming up my right brain," she told me. "I'm waiting until I see it."

And soon she did see, past lives by the handful -- I was an alcoholic, drinking away the last of an old Southern family's money after the Civil War; an aging Japanese sage with arthritic hands and students at his feet, a black Jamaican sorceress, an Australian rancher, a German physician. As she talked, the lives filled with lovers and children, struggle and success, landscapes and lifescapes ranging through history, around the globe. My wife, my daughter, I've known them all before, she told me. And I'll know them all again. And again.

It was wonderful to imagine: never having to say good-bye; the soul unfettered from this claustrophobic constriction of time and circumstance that is our single life, our only life.

Unfortunately, nothing this woman told me had any resonance whatsoever, no echo, no fading scent of jasmine or sting of gin on the back of my tongue. The lives she sketched belonged to a stranger, or a stranger's imagination. The only thing clear to me was how powerful the urge is to believe, how strong the motivation for self-delusion. I filed the thought away, thinking I might need to refer to it in the future.

Though I was a little shocked that Weiss had recommended this woman -- apparently taking such a parlor game seriously -- and thought it might reflect an inadequacy in his BS-detection system after all, I realized that his hypnotic regressions still begged some alternative explanation. Other psychiatrists I interviewed, while not ready to make the conclusions Weiss had made, were still intrigued as well.

"Those of us who do hypnosis are not all that shocked by Dr. Weiss's book," one told me. "Many have had patients who have gone back to something. I'm not prepared to say it was a previous life. I think we are very interested and very afraid to talk about it."

A psychologist widely considered an expert in hypnotherapy and multiple-personality disorders said, "I have had a number of patients who have had vivid, emotionally laden experiences that have taken place in the past and had a profound effect in the present. I can't say that these experiences were actual memories of past lives. It is possible that they were fantasy material similar to screen memory -- an indirect way of describing a problem. For example, a person who talks about being raped in a previous life may actually be discussing a childhood memory of incest. But there is a purposefulness to the unconscious. Whatever is happening with these past-life memories, I don't believe they are a sham."

Just recently, this man told me, he had a patient who awoke at 2 A.M. "famished" and very disturbed. She couldn't get back to sleep. When he hypnotized her, he asked her to drift back to the cause of her upset. Suddenly there was a big smile on her face. "Of course," she said. "I was there!"

She was talking about Kristallnacht -- the beginning of the Holocaust in Germany. There had been a lot of news coverage the preceding week on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi thugs' night of terror against Jewish homes and businesses.

"What struck me was that she kept using the word famished, which seemed an unusual word for her. Interestingly, fa-misht is a Yiddish word meaning something like 'all mixed up, bewildered' -- a good description of the chaos of Kristallnacht. When I asked her about it, she said she didn't know why she chose that word, that it wasn't in her normal vocabulary. I have to say that I am open to explore this subject. It's my responsibility as a scientist to be open."

There is an old skeptics' saying: "If you're too open-minded, your brains will fall out." That was the position of some doctors I spoke to, and I tended to agree with them. Dr. Jack Kapchan, a clinical psychologist at the University of Miami with a special interest in parapsychology, for instance was troubled by Weiss's claim to being scientific. Where was the concrete evidence? Where's the thorough background check on the patient?

"What Weiss has in the book can be explained in naturalistic terms," he said, citing suggestion, fantasy, multiple personalities. In such a case, Kapchan said, it is improper to offer explanations that involve "the paranormal process." What sense does it make to "explain" a relatively simple set of facts -- a woman describing a scene from the historical past under hypnosis -- by conjuring up a vast array of phenomena, such as a soul, an afterlife, a reintroduction of an old soul into a new body, that have never been detected by any objective measure? That kind of explanation, clearly, should be a last resort, to be used when all other simpler, less-demanding explanations have been ruled out.

I decided to find the expert's expert, the man who wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on hypnotic past-life regression. This turned out to be Dr. Martin Orne, then a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, a senior attending psychiatrist at the hospital there, and the editor of The Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. He had plenty to say:

"I always feel like I'm the Grinch who says there is no Christmas, no Santa Claus. The people who promote these things are not malevolent, but they want very badly to believe. People think that if something comes out under hypnosis it is more likely to be true, when in fact the opposite is the case. Hypnosis can create pseudomemories. Reincarnation memories are no different than the cases of people who under hypnosis relate being captured by UFO space aliens and examined aboard the mother ship. These are what I call 'honest liars.' Therapists ask their patient to go back to the cause of a problem. This is something many people find very difficult, and if they can't find a good cause in this lifetime, they'll go back to a previous one -- fantasy, of course."

I remember hanging up the phone in my office feeling that my curiosity had been satisfied. Once again, as I had seen so many times in my career as a journalist, a story that at first appeared to have some fantastic explanation had, under closer examination, been relegated to the realm of the mundane.

Only recently a classic example of that occurred: the "face" on Mars. For years, after an early flyby of the planet in the 1970s produced a photograph of an area on the surface that appeared to mimic the physiognomy of the human face, an enormous number of pages and Internet computer bytes had been devoted to promoting the idea that this was some kind of monumental architecture that proved the existence of ancient intelligence on Mars. Some saw more than intelligence -- they saw divinity.

Most scientists insisted that the image was a geologic formation and the face nothing more than a trick of shadowing and the human imagination. Others, though, maintained that the scientists throwing cold water on the face idea were thickheaded, biased against anything that upset status-quo concepts of the universe, or part of an immense conspiracy to keep evidence of alien civilization from the public.

Then, one spring morning, the front page of my newspaper carried the intriguing news that another NASA craft had been directed to fly directly over the "face" and take high-resolution photographs of the area. By midday, the report concluded, we would be able to tap in to the Internet and see for ourselves if the close-up photos revealed clear evidence of alien intelligence.

I knew the pattern. And I knew that the photographs, when published, would show exactly what they did show: an obviously natural geologic formation, fascinating in its own right as possible evidence of a billion-years-past Martian environment that was surprisingly earthlike, but bitterly disappointing for people longing to see the face of God.

I saw a similarity in the Weiss story line: "Accomplished psychiatrist and objective scientist supplies convincing proof of reincarnation" was just too easy a way out of the dilemma of mortality. I was now completely satisfied that Weiss had become enchanted with an interesting phenomenon and assumed too quickly that it proved something supernatural when all it truly showed was the amazing richness of the human imagination. (In fact, when I interviewed Weiss again, years after Many Lives, Many Masters, he distanced himself from the idea that regressions proved the reality of reincarnation. What he cared about, he declared, was that whatever these regressions tapped into, even if only the patient's subconscious, had proved to be tremendously helpful in therapy. He had seen problems resistant to all other kinds of treatment clear up almost instantaneously after dramatic regressions. I asked him if he had done any clinical studies to verify his impression that regression therapy got such dramatic results. He hadn't, he said, but he wished that somebody would.)

Meanwhile, until another Catherine surfaced who could decode the Egyptian hieroglyphics without benefit of even a high school diploma, say, or perhaps tell what a Boston widow whispered in her son's ear on her deathbed in 1947 -- and have that son confirm its accuracy and swear that he had never told a living soul -- I was willing to call it a day on the evidence for the reincarnation front.

Except...

I came across an article about a Dr. Ian Stevenson, identified as the Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School, who had been investigating reports of past-life memories from a very different source: spontaneous, waking memories experienced by very small children, no hypnosis involved. These accounts often included names, addresses, and intimate details from lives that the children had no apparent way of knowing about. Surviving family members could be located and the child's purported memories checked against reality. In many cases, according to Stevenson's analysis, the memories passed the reality test fairly persuasively.

What astonished me was that Stevenson wasn't claiming to have investigated just a handful of such cases, but hundreds of them -- more than two thousand, in fact, from all over the world. My first thought, I confess, was that perhaps this was some kind of delusional wacko who also had a drawer full of fragments of the true cross as well as a radio that communicated directly with a race of blood-red dwarves on Io, the fifth moon of Jupiter. But upon reading further, I saw that this was clearly not the case. I found a quote from a 1975 article in no less than The Journal of the American Medical Association stating that Stevenson "had collected cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds [besides reincarnation]."

The JAMA article also cited a book in which Stevenson had compiled his cases. But although I visited a couple of bookstores and found many books on hypnotic regression and other related topics, I encountered nothing from Stevenson. And while the public library listed several volumes by Stevenson, I could locate only one. I took it home and read it. Its academic style made it difficult to follow, reminding me of the eye-crossing effort it took to read some of my graduate-level college anthropology texts. It proved worth the effort: The cases were compelling, even astonishing, and I was impressed by the apparent evenhandedness and thoughtfulness of Stevenson's investigation. He was after precisely the kind of details that Weiss's case sorely lacked; he sought statements that were concrete, specific, and verifiable about a previous life, things that the subject could not have had any way of knowing normally.

Time and again, according to his reports, he had found them.

How in the world, I wondered, could I have never before heard of this man's work? How was it possible that a rather flimsy case of hypnotic regression was the basis for a best-seller, while hundreds of cases of the spontaneous production of verifiable memories took a day at the library to discover?

And, finally, I wondered this: Why was I writing about Brian Weiss and not Ian Stevenson?

It would take a decade to set that last one right.


---------------------------------------------

An aventure that I would to try... with the right «guide»...

[greybeard]

I read Dr Weiss book which was excellent compelling and believe able.
Another book mass dreams of the future which Bill mentioned very good.
Chris

[MariaDine]

Very good video OOO .... because it shows that one can,in a relative close time frame of around 200 years, track the past live.

Which is realistic considering the problems of preserving documents, like archives transfer, fire, just to name of few...

Looking foward to read the next book...thanks Greybeard for the tip

[MariaDine]

Because there are are so many «Mad Hatters« on the lose... eheheheh!!! me included !!!

http://www.reincarnationstation.com/

[Sarahmay]

Comment removed.

[MariaDine]

Cool ! Tells us more....

So far acunpture for a bad digestion trigger a past life rememberance. Like little bits of a movie .
Meditation also works.
Haven't tried the couch....

[dim]

Apart from the obvious imply that there is an individual self, a "person" if you like, reincarnating throughout time
i never found any problems accepting this process of death and rebirth and why should i,
it always sounded like the most natural thing to me.

[Sarahmay]

Yes, we are all part of a whole, but we separate into souls, then pieces of our souls incarnate to experience. But it is all source, experiencing.

[NeoEmc2]

Brian Weiss is awesome.

Many lives many masters was very eye opening to me and it's one of the things that got me started in my awakening.

I posted an interview not long ago regarding past lives and the journey between lives:

Check it out
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...ight=past+life