Hi Doc-
Fascinating things! And I almost missed out on reading this thread because I was caught up in mundane affairs.
There are a lot of issues brought up here, and everybdy has at least a part of the truth. Marilyn and Kathy have the core of it. Whatever happens has some kind of motivating purpose, else it wouldn't occur. The purpose plays into our motivation to have life more abundantly through learning, especially learning to live in a world in which there are immutanle boundaries, and our "divine creativity" affords no solution.
So in that sense, we seem to emerge from a One (yes, I call it the Collective Consciousness at times, but that wouldn't be my preferred title) and after passing through a state of life that arises from our prior life states, we drop the body and return, experiencing the One as Light. For us, this is an individual growth cycle. For God, this is another experience of the world, since although our own minds, as individuals, seem to separate from God, God never separates from us.
The states we call meditation, hypnosis, psychedelic drug experiences, all go to the same place as the death-rebirth experience. NDE experiences give more or less the same scenario. OBEs during surgery are also of the same type. In the same sense, Michael Newton's hypnotic work has tended to be of the same sort. The characteristic about Newton that stands out to me is that he leads his regressions to a very high degree. That means that whatever is coming out of his work is filtered through his views.
To ask whether we can "prove" the nature of a spiritual reality to which we have not had personal access suggests that there must be some transpersonal factor to which we can collectively appeal. In the 1960 era a lot of us thought that if we took enough strong drugs we could transcend the everyday nature of reality and see the Infinite through LSD-colored glasses. It didn't work that way. LSD turned out to be just another method of getting the subconscious out into the open.
At the same time, there was a lot of discovery, and this speaks to the heart of Matthew's question. As an example, one day, about 1959, I thought to combine published Tibetan pranayama methods with LSD. I then found that I could replicate many of the stages mentioned in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. But I still was stuck inside my own psyche. This information was about as valuable as discovering that if I buy a bicycle, I can have the experience of riding it, but I'll never be able to get beyond it to the experience of the Big Bicycle Maker in the Sky. This inability to reach beyond ourselves eventually led most seekers to abandon drugs.
The eventual solution, in my life, and in the life of my friends at that time, was to focus on meditation and use that as the core method, whether with or without chemicals. The result was that most of us rapidly reached sarvastarka samadhi. This state is one in which we sense reality as unitary, but variegated, with a network of definitions spanning everything and holding it all together. The world is thus viewed as an emanation of Mind, the cognizant part of the One. That does not prove the existence of an afterlife.
Following sarvastarka samadhi, the next step is to continue meditation until nirvastarka samadhi is reached. This requires abandoning the personal self. Then we are at the center as part of the One, and everything is also part of the One. It's all very clear. And this too is incapable of proving the existence of an afterlife. What it proves is that we are a participatory part of God, and that only on the basis of a single person's perception. I can't take this experience out and hand it to you as an objective fact.
If you want a fast track to that conclusion, start with Creation. In the instant of the Beginning, everything is One. All that now exists is how that One looks after expansion for a few billion years. So everything is still One. In that sense, everything is a manifestation of God. But you already knew that. So BFD, as they say.
Since there is no way that personal experiences can be exteriorized, the only value of regression is to go back and deal with the personal variables that are brought into this life with respect to the actor who has those experiences. Now we have two layers of obfuscation. My image of the world is imperfect, my patient's image of the problem is imperfect, and we do not share an innately common reality. As a result, I find that all these people seem similar, but that's my opinion imposed on them. They all feel like individuals.
Even the methods we use have problems. Once the body has fallen off the psyche is mingled with other information and energies, and the residual trace of the last moments is reduced to either a single one or very few lingering traits that mark the actor's historical passage through reality, or to a few added traits that hold the spirit earthbound while it seeks to deal with attachments that carry the threat of loss of some kind of mundane investment. (This is the opposite of abandoning ego to seek samadhi.)
To focus this soul on its issues, hypnotists use directions. Newton uses relatively explicit instructions. I am very non-directive, and get the same results in slightly different terms. In essence we tell the person to go back to a past life and to describe it. (As an example, I have a How-To script, more or less ver batimn, somewhere in my web site undee the heading of "things to read".
www.mbs-hypnoclinic.com ) This focusses the mind on an image that connects through the tiny linkage of one or two historical traits, and then begins to rebuild the historical moment as a regenerative process.
Regeneration is what happens when the loudspeaker talks to the microphone in an auditorium. First there is a ringing that greatly seems to amplify a specific tone, and then it goes into major squeal mode. The ringing phase is useful because it offers tremendous amplification of anything that happens tpo have that tone - so we hear that tome of speech, music, noise and whatever else all ringing. To focus on past images is similare, except that we use imagination to create an image linked to past memories, and then our perception picks it up, looks at it, and sends the next impulses to the imagination for further amplification, so that we make the mind into a regenerative history analysis system.
Regenerative systems have one big drawback, they have no noise rejection ability. Thus, after a regenerative signal has been received, about half of the received signal is actually noise, meaning imaginary stuff brought in by the workings of the mind. (I once worked on this noise issue with respect to the network of electronic systems that you now use when you make a call on your cell phone. These ideas are provable by relatively simple math.) Matthew is correct, given a perfect regression, we should be able to recall everything about the past. If you were Pope or pauper, the information is there, and in fact a little bit of it remains. The problem is that only half of your ordinary recall is valid, and the rest is distorted.
This works better when the person has a strong earthbound attachment due to a strong negative emotion that causes attachment to a specific state, object, person, activity or whatever. Then that aspect of their psyche has never been detached, and it is relatively simple to get blocks of undistorted data to emerge along with the rest of the mental noise. These are cases that can often be traced to physical locations. The only significant difference between these cases and those in which Bruce is rescuing a soul stuck in an imaginary state in the lower astral is that the person I work with has reincarnated.
To my mind, there is no way to use vicarious information to prove reincarnation. Whether it's all done with drugs, hypnosis, NDE, OBE, Monroe hemi-sync, or meditation on the nature of reality, the end product is imperfect, inaccurate and noisy.
However, I suggest that if one truly wishes to go to the source and learn, then the path leads through samadhi. This is one step beyond hypnosis or drugs or whatever, in the sense that to attain samadhi we abandon definitions, attachments and expectations, and then observe what remains. The state of sarvastarka samadhi (trance without negations) especially removes all the disjunctions and disunities we normally encounter, so that we attain a state of oneness with the "cosmic consciousness" and sense reality as a part of its nature. The next level is nirvastarka or nirvakalpa smadhi (undifferentiated trance) in which we are one with the central One. This state briongs clear, direct, immediate insight of a nature that language cannot express (because we rarely share such experiences verbally, so we lack words.) This insight can then be returned to these same questions, and they can be seen in a new light. However, despite my certainty of this reality, I cannot use it externally to myself to validate anything others experience because it remains a private and wholly subjective experience.
I guess the moral of all this commentary is that we can individually go to the One to attain personal certainty, but we cannot share this certainty with others. We can thus be certain, but we cannot use our certainty as "proof" because it remains personal. Given that, the best I can suggest is that if we all spend a few months and learn to experience samadhi we can all be confident, yet we still will lack proof. (The late Swami Sivananda said that his students could, if motivated, go from nescience to enlightenment in six months. While I'm not sure about enlightenment, nirvakalpa samadhi is definitely available in that time.)
As a result, since the experience cannot be shared, after samadhi, one returns to the world and goes on with life just as before, but with subjectiuve insight that makes sense of matters previously not understood. I somehow doubt that this is what you were lookimng for, Matthew, but it's all I really can say. It's the old problrm of, "How does it feel to live in New York?" You can go there and find out in a few moments, but it cannot be explained even over a period of many years.
dave
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