Experiences Of The Beyond

EXPERIENCES OF THE BEYOND

People often ask whether, on our journey through a series of incarnations, we also pass through the intervening stages between lives and, if so, what people report about the beyond. Our experiences of the beyond and of the intermediary stages are at the time of writing considerably wider than they were a few years ago, but they are by no means complete. In our therapy we try to pass through only those stages that are relevant for the patient, and we avoid enquiring about things merely to satisfy our own curiosity. This is why our experiences of the beyond are still at a somewhat early stage.

It is difficult to make generally valid statements on this subject since the beyond does not present a homogeneous picture but is just as differentiated as are the different stages of human consciousness. The beyond is an astral world and therefore purely a plane of images where the forms that a soul perceives will reflect the acquired content. The soul of a dead person, by the law of resonance, will reach whatever plane of the beyond corresponds to this soul's level of consciousness. These different levels make it difficult to give a unified picture. It depends on the individual whether the beyond for him is heaven or hell. A deceased will often experience the beyond as a landscape whose appearance and mood will reflect his own quality of soul. One female patient who entered the beyond after a life (very remote in time) as a cruel and powerful ruler, describes it as follows:

I die a painful, slow and lonely death. Above all I have a horrible fear of death which almost takes me out of my senses. I hear dreadful noises and find myself within a dark sphere, amidst a bizarre landscape. Everything is terrifying, everything is shivering with fear. The landscape is inharmonious, everything is sharp, angular, cold and repellent. It is windy, the air is filled with anguished groaning. Aimless and disorientated, I look for a hole or a crack through which to crawl but find nothing. Even colours are threatening. There are also many other beings, including some that resemble rats. I have to spend an agonizingly long time here, ceaselessly looking for some corner to hide in. The worst thing is that one never gets used to the horror of this place. After a long time I finally find a crack; I hastily thrust myself into it and at the same time am pulled in.

Similarly unpleasant experiences could be related by others who have entered the beyond after a life dominated by greed, cruelty and selfishness. Apart from these cases, the beyond is described as pleasant and beautiful. For example, here is a description given by a dying child:

Slowly everything becomes lighter, and I begin to float. I am no longer myself, yet I am myself. I can see everything: my mother, my father, the woman and myself in bed. I float higher, up towards the ceiling, then down again until I am near my mother. I stroke her. Then I float up once more and see the house and the garden. Someone is leading me by the hand. It is my grandmother, the mother of my father. She is very sweet to me. She says she is going to take me somewhere and show me everything. We come to a gentle, undulating landscape, and I see other beings. We do not speak, but one can tell what they are saying, and they know what I am saying. This is a place where one feels good and happy. There are soft, light, gentle colours which somehow merge into one another.

Descriptions of the world beyond present a wide variety of scenery, ranging from ultra-horrific wasteland to magnificent countryside. And the beings that one encounters there correspond to the quality of the environment. It must be emphasized again that we are not talking about a material plane but about a purely psychic world, which is nonetheless real.

The experiences we have discussed show that the beyond reflects the soul's level of consciousness and that all other beings encountered there belong to roughly the same stage of development. There is contact with other souls and entities, and evidently further learning also takes place. Help from more highly developed beings only comes to those who ask for it. Usually after physical death, the mistakes that an individual has committed during his life become suddenly clear. Apart from such experiences as the dark sphere, the beyond is found to be so pleasant that no one wishes to return to the material world. It is only when the individual recognizes his own mistakes that he feels a desire to compensate and make good and hence finally realizes that he must once again be incarnated.

The beyond is just as varied and many-faceted as the material world. As death alone does not make a person essentially more intelligent or mature, in the beyond wisdom and stupidity are distributed in much the same proportions as they are on earth – a fact which is often overlooked by the followers of spiritualism. I am not trying to cast doubt on the “genuineness” of spiritualistic phenomena but merely wish to warn against accepting any utterance and giving it a halo of infallibility just because it comes “from the beyond”. The chance of obtaining messages of really high spiritual quality through a medium is very small. One is much more likely to receive only the private opinions and views of certain underdeveloped souls or even non-human entities.

The Basic Problem: Power

THE BASIC PROBLEM: POWER

Within a process of therapy we follow up several chains of symptoms with their accompanying karmic guilt. All of these chains ultimately lead back to a nodal point representing the basic problem which so far the patient has failed to overcome. The problem was the same then as it is now, though in the distant past it took a coarser and more clearly defined form. In his or her present life such problems have mostly become refined and sublimated to the point where they are no longer recognizable.

If we analyze the basic problem of any individual we find that it always boils down to the same theme, namely power. Man becomes sick with the disease of power. In earlier lives this was usually lived out in a very obvious way, whereas in the present life it is veiled and refined. But always it is power that is man's downfall. The polar opposite of power is humility. Every time we say “I must” or “I want” we are expressing a claim to power.

In terms of the present life, one of the commonest ways of exerting power is through being ill. Today illness guarantees the individual a space in which he can exercise his unconscious power-urges free of criticism. Herein lies the reason why sick people would really prefer not to give up their illnesses. Any sick person would of course hotly deny this and would point out all the measures that he or she had taken in order to become well again. But this piling up of alibis does not reflect the individual's real state of mind. Naturally the patient himself believes that he wishes to be cured, but only because he is not yet aware of the motive for his being ill. Once he recognizes that he himself must decide either to remain ill or to renounce power, he usually finds the choice a very difficult one.

Power is to be equated with ego-dominance. It is the attempt to impose one's will on others instead of subordinating oneself. This power-urge was what led, in Paradise, to the biting of the apple. The disobedience of Adam and Eve represented a refusal to subordinate themselves to the law and an insistence on arrogating to themselves the knowledge of what was good and what was evil. Man has always been willing to pay a high price for power. To attain it he has even been willing to make a pact with Satan and to sell his soul.

Yet not until the patient has re-experienced, with full clarity, the power-urges of his earlier incarnations will he begin to unmask them in the here and now. Only when he has seen how over many thousands of years, he has heaped suffering upon himself in order to buy power, will he slowly begin to be ready to understand the doctrine of humility. Such understanding does not come about through an intellectual process, but through an experience of reality which brings about a trans-polarization in the individual. The change in consciousness takes place in the present, and thereby the person becomes healed. The symptoms, having become superfluous, literally disappear of their own accord, although we have in fact not treated them at all.

Reincarnation therapy is not a flight into the past but a way of using the past in order to guide the patient into its opposite pole the present. As long as the past is suppressed and continues to work on an unconscious level, the individual will not succeed in living consciously in the here-and-now. He will be continually re-stimulated by past events and will confuse past and present. Only when he has fully integrated the past into his consciousness can he put it aside as over and done with and finally experience the present with a freshness he has hitherto not believed possible. The reason why we look back into the past in our therapy is not because we find the past interesting but to make it clear how unimportant it is.

The goal of any esoteric path is to attain a state of constant awareness in the present moment. But in order to reach that state we must first isolate the present from the past and purify it. Reincarnation therapy follows the homeopathic law of similitude. By exploring the chain of symptoms, the sick person is continually confronted with similar situations, until finally he discovers the poisonous source of guilt. Through his act of recognition, he potentises this poison, turning it into a medicine and solving his basic problem.

Reincarnation therapy is neither a means of satisfying curiosity about previous lives, nor is it an “opium of the people” which gives consolation by promising a new existence. Reincarnation therapy is a hard route to purification. In repeated reincarnations we see no source of comfort but rather a challenge to develop towards completeness and thus become free of the wheel of rebirth. We say “yes” to this earthly existence, as long as it is necessary for our path of development. Our goal, however, lies beyond the material world. It lies in that unity which we once left behind and to which every human being longs finally to return.

Guilt And Responsibility

GUILT AND RESPONSIBILITY

With the recognition of guilt the individual has to assume full responsibility for his fate – a step which opens the door to healing. The uninitiated are often afraid of discovering past situations of guilt and believe that they can hardly go on living with this knowledge. Some believe they could never, for example, get over the discovery that they have killed someone. Such fears are unfounded in regard to specific memories of this kind. There is an old saying: “Only that which man suppresses, oppresses”. It is when the knowledge of guilt is unconscious that we are afraid to confront it. But if we succeed in looking guilt in the face all the pressure disappears immediately. The pressure was only there because we pretended not to know about the guilt.

Nothing of which we are fully conscious can ever have a negative effect. In therapy the confronting of guilt is entirely free of value judgment It is a looking into reality and is incorporated into the past as a step in the learning process. Through integrating step by step into his consciousness all his hitherto totally suppressed shadows, a person becomes complete and whole. Confrontation with guilt is not the taking on of a burden but the giving up of a burden. Although the confrontation itself is frequently not felt to be very pleasant, afterwards the patient has an unfamiliar feeling of freedom and relief. Any dealings with guilt should avoid any extreme. To suppress guilt or to project it onto others is to create sickness in oneself, since one is retreating from reality. It is equally unhealthy to overload oneself with guilt and self-accusation until one collapses under the burden. We must learn that we are guilty because we are human beings and that this guilt is the price we pay for our learning process. Without error there is no development. There is therefore no single person who has not shouldered guilt at some time in the past. Only by going through the darkness can we reach the light. Nobody is able to avoid hate without first having tackled it.

In the tradition of the Church we see another example of a balanced way of dealing with guilt. First the believer is made aware of the fact that, as a man, he is sinful and has shouldered a burden of guilt, then he is given absolution and the burden is removed.

Some people object that the principle of grace stands in direct contradiction to the law of karma, which states that all guilt must be redeemed by the individual. But this contradiction between karma and grace is illusory. Like all polar opposites, these two principles unite in the middle and in fact determine each other. Grace only comes to the person who asks for it, and to do that he must acknowledge his guilt. Hence grace can only become effective through karma. Karma works to promote insight in a human being, and once this has been achieved he is ripe for grace.

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.

Re-experience Of Birth And Conception

RE-EXPERIENCE OF BIRTH AND

CONCEPTION

After two or three sessions the subject is, as we say, tuned into birth. He experiences his first regression in time as he re-lives his own birth, feeling again the pains, smelling, seeing, hearing and perceiving all that took place before and after delivery.

When the patient has learned to experience his birth in all its details and stages (which usually necessitates a number of repetitions), we then go back further in time to his conception. Now he re-lives the experience of being present as a conscious and perceiving entity at the conception of what was later to be his body. He can see the surroundings and his future parents. He experiences their sexual union, suddenly feels himself being sucked in as though through a funnel and finds himself once again confined in something limited, dark and material. To be present at one's own conception would seem a grotesque idea to most people of today, but it becomes entirely natural when we learn to distinguish consciousness and body as two separate things. The human being is just as much present at the conception of his material body as he is at its burial.

After the experience of conception we explore the span of time between conception and birth, those months inside the womb which are the source of so many, mostly unpleasant, experiences for the child. The fears and pains, not to mention abortion attempts, that the foetus suffers during that period, cannot be believed by anyone who has not re-lived them.

Compared with these pre-natal traumas, the subsequent childhood experiences of the early years are harmless episodes. A conscious survey of the period in the womb will shed more light for the patient than a hundred hours of analysis.

More and more often it happens that people during ordinary therapy regress of their own accord into birth and intra-uterine experiences. Thus, even in orthodox circles, it is becoming gradually accepted that the pre-natal period can be consciously re-lived. In comparison with earlier theories and therapeutic methods this discovery is sensational. The danger is, however, that some people may become convinced that in the unpleasant experiences in the womb and at birth lies the “true cause” of subsequent conflicts and disorders. In reality these factors are not causes at all, any more than the childhood experiences that Freud and his followers made so much of. Both childhood and pre-natal events are only links in a chain of problems that stretches through many incarnations.

Here some readers may raise the objection that only in the third month of pregnancy does the soul enter the body. The evidence against this is that up to now all patients and test subjects without exception have been able to describe their conception and simultaneous entry into flesh. In due course experiments may reveal how the theory about the third month arose, but it seems to me a doubtful theory, since the cells require information form the onset in order to develop according to plan.

The fact that from conception onwards a child is fully conscious of all that happens and is spoken, has far-reaching implications for parents, midwives and doctors attending labour. Fortunately the gentle-birth methods of Dr Leboyer are currently receiving increasing sympathy, and clinics are gradually accommodating themselves to the demands of conscious parents.

One could fill whole volumes with warnings and pieces of advice relating to pregnancy and birth, but the important thing for the parents to realize is that it is only in terms of the body that the growing embryo is so tiny, so helpless and so young. It is quite possible for a newborn baby to be older in soul than its parents. There is absolutely no reason to talk to a baby in meaningless babble. It understands every word and every sentence – even those things that are better not said in the presence of children.

All parents would be well advised to begin as early as possible with the education of their children – namely on the very day when they learn that a child is expected. Eugenics – in the sense of ante-natal education – consists in the parents talking to the child in the womb in a perfectly normal way, encouraging it to look forward to its arrival, teaching it about birth, exposing it only to good music, literature, films and plays. Telling the embryo clearly about birth does more good than weeks of gymnastic exercises.

All difficulties and complications during delivery are attributable to the child's attempts to prevent itself from being born. Fear of being born has to do not so much with the delivery process itself as with the mastery of life, which begins here. The embryo does not possess its own breathing rhythm and is therefore not fully caught in polarity. This means that it still has access to past and future. It can survey the most important stages of its future life – compare this with the “film” of life that a person sees at death.

The extinguishing of this knowledge occurs with the first breath, for it is through the breathing rhythm that a human being enters fully into polarity and dependence on time. This is why a horoscope is calculated in relation to the first breath or the first cry. Herein lies also the reason for the great significance attached to breathing in esoteric training. The embryo views the problems of its future life and knows that this knowledge will disappear when it is born. Hence the fear of birth and the frequent attempts to prevent it happening. Appropriate pre-natal conversations can help here more than all clinical techniques put together. By the same token, parents who spend weeks discussing whether or not they should abort a child should not be surprised later on if the child is disturbed, or rejects its parents.

Reincarnation Therapy - A Path Towards Wholeness

VIII

REINCARNATION THERAPY

- A PATH TOWARDS

WHOLENESS

Again and again you descend into the ever-changing

bosom of the world,

Until you have learned to read in the light

that living and dying are one-times-one

And that all time is timeless -

Until the wearisome chain of things

Comes to rest within you

as an ever tranquil circle.

In your will is the will of the world.

Stillness is in you -

Stillness and eternity.

• Manfred Kyber

REINCARNATION therapy, as I practice it, emerged from a series of experiments which I carried out in 1968. In these experiments, we succeeded by hypnotic regression in enabling the subjects to re-live not only their own birth, their development in the womb and their conception, but also earlier incarnations. My record of such experiments and my observations about the possible consequences can be found in other books of mine, such as Voices from other Lives (New York, M. Evans & Co.)

The technique used in these experiments was hypnosis, by means of which regression in time was made possible.

Experiments of this kind are not new. In the nineteenth century they were carried out by Albert de Rochas. Around 1956 the case of Bridey Murphy aroused great public interest. In England Arnall Bloxham and Denys Kelsey have publicized experiments in hypnotic regression which they carried out over decades. During the early stages of the purely experimental work in regression which I carried ou, I discovered that there was an obvious connection between current symptoms and previous lives. As this theory became more consolidated there emerged the idea that there was a possible therapeutic value in bringing earlier incarnations into consciousness. The decisive step towards realizing this idea came when I developed methods which made possible regression into earlier incarnations without the subject having to be hypnotized. By doing without hypnosis it was possible to open up conscious memory of past lives to everyone.

As already mentioned in the chapter on hypnosis the capacity of a patient to be hypnotized is dependent less on the hypnotist than on the patient's basic trust, and it is precisely in psychotic patients that such trust is least to be expected. Apart from this, there are numerous other reasons for avoiding a dependence on hypnosis. It is not for nothing that warnings and critical observations about hypnosis have been frequently voiced in esoteric circles.

The technique of hypnosis works by suggesting feelings of tiredness and sleepiness in the subject, and thereby goes against the very aim of esotericism. Man's problem is precisely the fact that he is constantly in a state of sleep and moves about like a marionette, instead of waking up and become conscious. Everything that happens in a therapeutic session should represent on a small scale what is expected of the patient in everyday life. Our goal is therefore to make people more awake and more conscious, to teach them to see reality with ever-increasing clarity, and not to encourage them further in their sleepiness and unconsciousness.

Besides, hypnosis is always bound up with the problem of power, which, as we shall see later, is the central theme of every therapy. Furthermore, hypnosis turns the patient into a passive consumer, who expects it to provide an instant answer to his problem. These considerations should suffice to show why I have tried, as far as possible, to dispense with hypnosis in applying regression for therapeutic purposes.

The result is that in our reincarnation therapy we make the patient aware of earlier lives without ever having to use hypnosis. The regressions take place in full waking consciousness. To those unfamiliar with our methods, this sounds so unbelievable that the public continues to associate reincarnation therapy with hypnosis. This no longer applies, for in the meantime reincarnation therapy has become independent of hypnosis.

It is legitimate to ask how these new methods work. To describe them is difficult, if not impossible. We always begin with a short period of relaxation which is intended to put the subject into a meditative frame of mind. The relaxation serves to diminish external stimuli and allows the person to listen in to himself. It switches the attention from the outer to the inner pole, without either fatigue or sleepiness entering in. Through the help of the therapist, sensations and images arise which the person learns to observe and describe at the same time.

Maturing Through Reincarnation

MATURING THROUGH REINCARNATION

Some people raise the objection that it is rather senseless and impractical if all the knowledge one has accumulated through many incarnations is forgotten each time one is reborn, so that one has to begin all over again. Others argue exactly the reverse: they say that there is a very good reason for not being able to remember earlier incarnations, and they believe that consequently there should be a prohibition against bringing knowledge of the past into consciousness.

The fact is, however, that one does not invariably forget previous incarnations and have to start again from the beginning. On the contrary. In each incarnation we slot into the stage of development that we have reached in our last life. The mistake we make is to confuse specific knowledge with a general state of maturity that has grown out of past knowledge and ability. To use an analogy: most of us have learned things at school which we have since forgotten. Yet our involvement with these things at the time and the process of learning them had the effect of shaping us in a certain way – an effect that continues to be felt even when the specific knowledge itself has been lost. The effect of learning is an extension of consciousness. Thus the original object of learning ceases to have great significance of its own. A child's box of letters is there to help the child learn to read. Once it has served this purpose it has no further value.

Now, everything that an individual has learned in earlier incarnations is reflected in the degree of maturity and consciousness with which he is born into his present life. This is what lies behind differences in intelligence, maturity, natural abilities, and so on. Psychologists continue to argue about whether intelligence is acquired or inherent. The answer is: neither. The soul brings with it a certain degree of development which is neither something inherited nor a result of the much quoted environmental influences.

Men are not all equal – even if today the supporters of equality are making their voices heard with increasing shrillness. Equality in their sense has nothing to do with justice. And hierarchical thinking has nothing to do with dictatorship.

Pursuing the analogy between a series of incarnations and the different forms in a school, each pupil is allotted to the appropriate class – no one gives a third-former a problem in differential calculus to work out. Each has his task and problems appropriate to his grade at the time. There are no objective problems, and therefore there can be no solutions that are universally valid. Fractions appear insuperably difficult to the first-former, but are child's play to the sixth-former. Both points of view are subjectively correct, but neither is pertinent to the nature of fractions. It is the same with all human problems. When we try to make a particular problem accessible to everyone and look for a universal solution to it we are forgetting the different grades of awareness that exist among human beings.

Herein lies the root of all proselytizing. Any kind of proselytizing is wrong because it disregards the varying grades of individual development and projects its own level of development on to everyone. Esotericism recognizes these varying grades and therefore never proselytizes. Esotericism only has anything to offer those who discover for themselves an affinity with it. One should not try to foist a truth on someone who is still resistant to it.

The discrepancies between individuals are the result of experiences from previous incarnations. We forget nothing of what is essential. We forget only the specific details, which, however, are not important.

The same applies to capacities and inclination. The capacities from a previous life will be brought into this incarnation as gifts if they are meaningful and useful for the task in hand. Otherwise they will be, so to speak, forgotten – which is good, otherwise they would merely distract the individual from his study plan.

This is why I warn people against using reincarnation therapy to incorporate past abilities (usually of an artistic nature) into present consciousness. Unfortunately, however from the experimental point of view this is one of the most impressive proofs of reincarnation and is highly valued by certain experimenters in the field. Some of them even see it as part of therapy – a most dangerous mistake!

If an external influence is used to bring an earlier capability into the present life, when this capability has not manifested itself naturally, then the effect is to distract the person from his or her true path. By thinking too much in terms of utility, we value such abilities too much for their own sake and forget that they are merely aids. To be able to paint or make music has no value in itself but only in relation to the practitioner. Making music can be a source of deep experience. But once such experience is integrated into consciousness the source is no longer needed.

Just because one has been a gifted musician 500 years ago it does not necessarily mean that music going to play a role in one's present life. If the soul has learned what it had to learn from music, then music has no further use for the person. Instead, new areas will become relevant. If he goes back to his old musical skill he may be setting up an anachronism that will hinder him in his present apprentice's journey.

This does not, however, apply to child prodigies. A child prodigy is an eloquent example of someone who has not yet finished with a particular theme. Rather the theme is approaching the culmination of a long development.

Therefore one should rely confidently on fate and work with the talents that one has received, instead of constantly glancing back at those that one no longer has. Nothing is lost in this universe. This is true not only in physics but also in regard to a soul's process of maturing. The tendency to forget past incarnations is no blunder on nature's part. The point of it is to relieve the consciousness of accumulated ballast and enhance its receptivity in the here-and-now. I do not believe that it would be better for everyone to be able to survey all of their past incarnations, any more than I believe reincarnation therapy could ever be taken like a mass inoculation. Particular items of knowledge apply to particular levels of development. The vast majority of mankind has never read Dante's Divine Comedy, and it is right that this should be so. Yet for certain individuals Dante's poem may be of supreme importance.

The esoteric path of ever-widening consciousness is not a “natural” path but an artificial product of human development and knowledge. Likewise the alchemist in his laboratory produced artificial things that do not occur in that particular form in nature. The yogi adopts physical postures that no creature in nature could ever adopt willingly. Numerous other examples can be cited. All of them merely serve to show that esoteric initiation, although orientated to natural laws, is ultimately a kind of art, bound up as it is with human intelligence. Being an art, it is therefore “arti-ficial” and not “natural”.

It is precisely in such artificially induced evolutionary process that the task of humanity lies: the task of redeeming itself and the cosmos. Thus, the conscious surveying of past lives has always been recognized as one of the steps on the path of development, a step which is taken with the help of appropriate techniques or, occasionally, takes place of its own accord. As there is no such thing as coincidence, one can be sure that no one is ever going to be placed in the embarrassing position of learning about his past incarnations before he is ready.

There is a phenomenon whereby certain sensitive people can look clairvoyantly into the past lives of others. This is generally known as “reading the Akashic records”. These records are comparable to a data bank in which is stored the sum total of all events, past, present and future. Those who possess or have developed the ability to call up consciously information from the Akashic records are able to see the incarnations of other people. As it is difficult if not impossible to control the way such information emerges, one should not believe uncritically all clairvoyant statements about past incarnations.

If a clairvoyant simply tells someone about a past incarnation, the information is of relatively little use, since it will not by itself give the person access to the past, and he will not by itself give the person access to the past, and he will not be able to identify with it. But obtaining information from the Akashic records can be valuable therapeutically in cases where the patient is unable to retrieve the information himself on account of his disability, such as a speech defect or restricted faculty of comprehension.

At any rate one should always be clearly aware that mere curiosity should never be the motive for wishing to learn about past incarnations. Curiosity is the plague of our age. It is always a sign of immaturity and is the surest means of hindering true initiation.

The number of people, especially children, who remember past lives of their own accord, is considerably greater than is generally supposed. Such memories are either not recognized in our culture or else are hushed up and suppressed as signs of mental disturbance. Children up to the age of six have a particular facility for remembering the past, but their parents, out of fear and lack of understanding, tend to discourage them from talking about their memories. This leads to a suppression of the entire complex. Then when the child is six, these impressions from the past usually disappear of their own accord.

The situation is quite different in cultures where reincarnation forms part of the world picture. In such communities children's memories of past lives are so accepted that they are not even presented to the public as anything out of the ordinary.

A certain proportion of psychotic symptoms can also be attributed to the surfacing of memories from past lives. Any number of situations, places or people can stimulate an individual in such a way that fragments of memory from other incarnations break through suddenly into consciousness and can no longer be separated from current experience. A whole host of hallucinations and fantasies can be explained in this way.

But it is not only psychotic symptoms that become more explicable in terms of reincarnation. One can say that every symptom of illness whether mental or physical, has its “cause” in earlier incarnations. At the same time we should be careful in using the term “cause”, for it is not possible for a person to find the ultimate cause of an illness unless he goes right back to the original fall of man.

Unfortunately the concept of cause is used far too often and consequently is quite wrongly applied. If we speak of “cause” here what we mean is the beginning of a recognizable theme. At the same time we remain aware that this kind of cause is in turn determined by other factors more remote, and so on ad infinitum.

I maintain, therefore, that the cause (in the above sense) of a mental or physical illness never lies in the present life. I know how provocative such an assertion will seem to many people, considering how painstakingly we have grown accustomed to finding early childhood the cause of so many ills. But remember how, in discussing the horoscope, I tried to make it clear that an individual's birth is merely a résumé of his entire life and that no new theme can ever arise in a life without having been present in miniature at birth.

Even without astrological arguments it should be evident that all problems encountered in life can be attributed to previous experiences on the path of learning. But this path, if we follow it backwards, does not end at birth, or at conception, but encompasses the totality of all incarnations.

This becomes clearer if we once again think of a day as being analogous to a lifetime. If a problem occurs for an individual on a particular day, it would be naïve to expect to find the cause of it on the same day. A day does not begin as a blank sheet. Rather, despite the intervening period of sleep, it carries with it certain assets and liabilities from the period that has gone before.

Similarly the beginning of an early life is not a completely fresh start. Already at conception the individual is equipped with the karma he has accumulated over many lifetimes as well as with his own particular learning program which he carries into the present incarnation. If he fails to solve a problem in this program, or finds the sense of it beyond his understanding, it is only by a conscious contemplation of the entire path which has led him to this point that he can attain the insight necessary to find the solution to the problem.

From all that has been said the reader will have understood the concept that has evolved into the present-day psychotherapeutic method which I call reincarnation therapy. Reincarnation therapy, as developed and applied by me and my collaborators since 1975, is not a new technique among the ever-increasing host of psychotherapeutic methods, but it deliberately stands at the opposite pole from all other known methods and theories. It is not a form of psychoanalysis that extends to past lives, nor a therapeutic treatment aiming to re-live earlier traumas, nor a special kind of hypnotherapy. Reincarnation therapy is rather an attempt to leave behind the untenable concepts of orthodox psychology and, building on the esoteric view of man and universe, to develop a valid therapy. This stance leads, not surprisingly, to an outlook and method of therapy that are diametrically opposed to all the familiar concepts in psychology.