Encounter With The Past

ENCOUNTER WITH THE PAST

Once the subject has become aware of the various stages of birth, conception and embryonic development (this process takes about five hours of therapy) we regress him/her into a previous incarnation. He now experiences himself as he was during that earlier life and learns to survey it from birth to death. Naturally we always have him live consciously through dying in a previous existence, so that he becomes reconciled to life's opposite pole, death, instead of suppressing it as most people do.

After this therapy the subject no longer fears death, since fear has given way to knowledge (fear is lack of knowledge!). One woman was heard to remark spontaneously during a session: “It's funny, I never thought that dying could be so simple.” Our subjects' description of death tally fairly exactly with the reports which Dr Moody, Dr Kübler-Ross and others have received from people who have died clinically and been re-animated. Just as at conception the consciousness becomes linked to the body, so at death it is once more released.

When the person has learned to survey some of his earlier lives, we then take up the thread of a particular symptom and follow its appearances through their previous incarnations. In this way we examine in each case only the specific situation linked with the symptom and leave aside all the other details of this particular life. In that way we gain access relatively quickly to very remote incarnations.

The actual number of previous incarnations is a subject of much misconception. Some people boast for instance, that they know they have already lived four times. In fact the true number of past lives is inestimably high. After only a few sessions the person loses any desire to count the number of times he has lived before.

Equally difficult for the newcomer to imagine are the stretches of time that we cover in our therapy. It is difficult to name figure, but we go much further back than modern historical research reaches. Atlantean incarnations of 12,000 years ago are not considered by us as particularly old.

We are fully aware of how incredible such claims may seem to some readers, but these claims are merely the result of daily work with people who are no different from those treated by other therapists. There was never any attempt to suggest or provoke particular phenomena, and this is borne out by the fact that the initial results did not correspond at all to our expectations.

In exploring the material plane we have likewise had to accustom ourselves to unfathomable dimensions. Anyone who thinks he has lost the capacity for amazement should try going to a planetarium and meditating on the inconceivable magnitudes that modern science deals with.

Not content with the undoubtedly impressive achievements of science in exploring the material world, we have also begun to explore the world of the mind. On this level, however, we have hardly taken the first step. Thus many quite unimaginable phenomena are waiting to be grasped by the human consciousness.

We shall also have to revise our present ideas radically when it comes to the age and origin of mankind. Mankind is considerably older than is generally assumed today, and has already gone through many periods of high culture very similar to our own. Here also we see the law of rhythm in operation: every high culture eventually yields to ruin and destruction, but mankind still goes on building the tower of Babel.

Let us return to the subject of reincarnation therapy. When someone scans through the history of a particular symptom over many lives he learns that his present-day problem or symptom is ancient and has been present in similar form in almost every previous existence. Here again lies a danger of misinterpretation, which I myself initially fell prey to (see the relevant chapter in Voices from other Lives).

When one finds in a previous life a traumatic situation corresponding in content to the symptom in question there is a temptation to interpret the earlier situation as the primal trauma and therefore as the “cause”. Here is an example: a patient cannot see with his left eye. In an earlier life he experiences his left eye being pierced by an arrow. Another example would be a person with vertigo who experiences having been thrown from a cliff in a former existence. Someone confined within the conceptual system of modern psychology would tend to regard these earlier experiences as having caused the symptoms. This conclusion is, however, just as false as the attempt to find in childhood the cause of psychological disorder.

If we relate the thoughts we have developed in this life to an earlier incarnation we find that the traumatic experience was certainly no chance occurrence but an expression of a problem, which was brought into this life. Looking at it the other way round, the soul of a person who drowns in one life is very likely to have a fear of water in the next. But we should not conclude from this that the drowning was the cause of the later fear of water. The drowning was itself part of a meaningful pattern, a demonstration of an inherent problem.

The more one goes back the more situations one finds that would seem to qualify as the “primal” trauma. Thus, returning to one of our earlier examples, the patient with the arrow in his left eye will find many more events in which he lost that eye. All these events are links in a chain whose totality forms the problem common to all the situations.

When, in our therapy, we have followed a chain of symptoms right back as far as it seems to go, we then take the decisive therapeutic step: we regress the patient back to the moment when he himself originally set up the cause of the chain of suffering and introduced the basic theme that was to emerge in many different forms. This is the step with which the individual confronts his own karmic guilt by which he himself has made necessary all the painful situation he has been through. Up to now he has always regarded himself as an unfortunate victim. It is really all the same whether he blames his disorder on his mother or on some unpleasant experience in an earlier life – in either case he is projecting the guilt outside himself.

When, however, he is confronted with his own karmic guilt, something quite different happens. The sufferer has to integrate his shadow. He experiences himself as an agent, doing to others the very thing that he complained was being done to him over several thousand years. To confront his own guilt is no easy matter for the patient, but it is a major step in the direction of healing, if he is able to take it. If one wants to insist on looking for a “cause” then it is to be found in karmic guilt.

Guilt of this kind, however, is not the ultimate source; one could easily go on searching for other determinants. If we do not do this in therapy it is for the following practical reasons:

1 There is no definite source of guilt, a fact which the Church obscures with the concept of original sin.

2 A karmic misdeed, in relation to a present-day problem, can at least be considered as the beginning of a particular phase in the unending rhythm.