Reincarnation is not a mystical Hindu or Buddhist concept.
It is not commonly known that it was part of the New Testament prior to Constantine.
The idea of reincarnation and hence past lives is complex. There are many schools of thoughts – that earth is one of many schools, that there are no past lives and that all lives are lived in parallel, in the now, that we can dip into this well of all past lives to retrieve knowledge and to set up new opportunities for growth, or that the famous and often-talked about white light keeps us in this cycle and karma. Or that there is no karma now.
Many therapists such as Dr Brian Weiss, Sylvia Browne, and Dolores Cannon have been collecting data through sessions on past lives. We also have a wealth of material from people like Edgar Cayce. German scientists recently showed that there is life after death in quite a controversial study. All this information are still piecemeal and forms part of the whole – and what it means, something we are still uncovering.
I am not here to convince anyone of anything. I am merely here to remind all of us how little we actually know. Sometimes we have to leave the realm of “scientific proof” and the ever evolving hypothesis that is science to respect, trust, and value our own experiential proof.
In Dr Brian Weiss’ book Same Soul, Many Bodies, he speaks of the immortal timeless soul.
I see the soul as a body of energy that blends with universal energy, then splits off again, intact, when it returns to a new life. Your soul registers its experience. It feels the appreciation and gratitude of everyone you have helped and everyone you have loved in a heightened way not that it has left the body. Similarly, it feels the pain, anger, and despair of everyone you have hurt of betrayed, again magnified. In this way the soul learns not to do harmful things but to be compassionate.1
The separation and individuation we experience in our lives is an illusion. In our bodies, we feel separate, dense. The body is impermanent and subject to the laws of gravity and time, and also our beliefs. Scientists have also shown that the world is a hologram. What is the programming behind this hologram? What is actually true? What is actually happening because of our complicit buy-in?
This book by medical doctor and psychiatrist Dr Weiss is fascinating. His focus is healing, healing as we are in this physical world, remembering we are a social species who may have forgotten “the joys of the physical, the pleasures of the senses.”
For those familiar with Dr Weiss’ previous work (Many Lives, Many Masters, Through Time into Healing, Messages from the Masters, Only Love is Real) you may know him more for past life regressions. This book explores the future.
Whether you believe in past lives, future lives, and reincarnation, I feel the beautiful message is that we are all here to learn, to move back into love. To find that alignment with what we really want in life. This may sound very esoteric. How would life be if we chose to include this possibility?
Imagine that even those we have labeled as monsters, be it Hitler, a serial killer, or that drunk driver are souls who have returned to learn, to “inhabit them in an effort to find alternatives to violence, prejudice, and hatred. They came back to resist that urge, probably because they had succumbed to it in previous lifetimes. We must be rich, poor, male, female, healthy, sickly, big, small, strong, and week. If in one lifetime I’m wealthy and someone else is living as I once did, in the slums of Bogota, then I will want to help that person because it will be a step in my own growth.”2
By doing The Work by Byron Katie on our beliefs around these “monsters” – large and small can give us space and possibility. It does not mean we are condoning their actions. It does help us open our hearts to more love and compassion and understand that not all is as it seems, or as we have been taught.
They are not just a name or a trait (“My aunt Maude never stops talking!”) but are multidimensional, made up of a complex of factors, just as you are. They have mothers, fathers, children, and loved ones. It doesn’t matter what their nationality is or whether they claim to be your foe. They experience joy, love, fear, anxieties, despair, and sorrow exactly as you and I do. They were children once, laughing and playing with their balls, their dolls, their pets, their games, when they were trusting.3
Another reminder is that we do have choice, even when it appears otherwise. What we do today shapes tomorrow.
In this book, Dr Weiss also includes visualizations and exercises such as dialogue with illness that he’s adapted from similar ones taught by gestalt therapists that can help bring a different perspective and relationship with our health symptoms and patterns in life. “We are all works in progress, moving at different speeds along our spiritual paths.”
1Same Soul, Many Bodies. Discover the Healing Power of Future Lives Through Progression Therapy. Brian L Weiss, MD. Free Press, 2004. p.11-12
2Ibid. p15.
3Ibid. p92
