I mentioned in another thread that Michael Newton's book, Journey of Souls, chronicles his therapy session over a 30 year period with patients who spend usually at least three hours with him, sometimes much longer.

According to Dr. Newton, his subjects are regressed to their past in this life, and then to a "between life," phase.  Most give consistent corroborating testimony about the afterlife, guides, life goals - all of which gels very much with New Age beliefs.  Patients gain insight into their current lives by seeing how their planning between lives and their guides have arranged things for them - what lessons they were supposed to learn.

Hypnosis is an art practiced for centuries in one way or another, though popularized by Mesmer in his description of "animal magnetism."  Truth to tell, deep meditation and hypnosis share much in common.  Deep relaxation is essential.  The question is, are directed questions given during these sessions prone to elicit true responses?  We have all seen hypnosis on stage where normal people quack like ducks, or start to undress on command.  Most hypnotists suggest that people are quite aware of what is going on in hypnosis, and are not "slaves" to the will of the hypnotist.  

I would like to hear, if possible from Dave, an accomplished practitioner of his art, and others on this topic.  I have often wondered, when a past life is encountered this way, how we know it is us, as opposed to a soul/spirit we are linked to or feel a commonality with.  I would argue that it truly isn't us, as much of what we are is based, at least right now on our experience, knowledge and interactions on the earth plane.  Don's points about merging with another spirit and mistaking it for our own in the past is interesting too, and must be considered and supported or refuted by those who practice this technique.

If hypnoregression is legitimate, then if one documents past names in less than a century, they should be able to be verified.  True, I won't be able to see if I was a pope in the third century like Seth said he was.  But if Jason Doe was me 80 years ago, shouldn't I be able to locate his prior existence?  If I did, was it necessarily me, or could it have been a spirit I "bonded" with.  

The issue of false memories, such as kids at a daycare center being prodded to say they were abused, and eventually believing it, with repeated suggestion (when it never happened) is important as well.  If Michael Newton has a three or five hour session, could he be impressing ideas on patients who, under hypnosis then begin to create a fictional scenario, believing it to be real?

I am open to the idea that hypnoregression is legitimate.  I wouldn't mind sitting on Dave's couch and seeing what came up (with my frequent use of hemi-sync and meditation, I think I'd be an ideal candidate - I can relax).  If this phenomenon is real, it may substantiate past lives, guides, and the entire new age philosophy.

Matthew

I, too, would very much like to hear more about this kind of therapy.  Just last night, for the first time, I tried two past-life regression guided imagery recordings from two different therapists (ordered several weeks ago and just received yesterday, so I'm delighted about this topic).  The first was simply designed to produce one "life" (and let it go) and the second was designed to produce two "lives" and also to release accompanying emotions.  

The techniques used were quite similar and the guided imagery was somewhat like others I have used for quite different purposes.  

My results:  I received three distinctly different "past lives" through these meditations, one man and two women, each with completely different lives and deaths.  I felt their emotions, the way they held themselves, their general outlook on life.  This was an unusual feeling, like truly stepping into another person's "shoes," which was the first item in each experience that I was supposed to notice.

What was amazing to me was the extremely sharp difference in how each of these "personalities" felt to me.  Emotionally, they were very very different and distinct people to me and I was looking out of their eyes at glimpses into their lives, as if in the moment.  

As I got up after the last meditation I found myself saying "Wow" out loud because the experience was quite interesting.  I wrote these experiences down, and what I perceived as possible places and times.  There was no "inbetween" state in the suggestions so I did not experience the "between life" states for these people.  

I have never completely believed in multiple lives, although there is a lot of support for them, but this subject is intriguing and I will continue to focus on it for a while.  It would be so interesting to hear more from anyone with experiences in this area.

love, blink

Doc-

The one thing that continues to bother me about Newton's books is what his clients report about how a soul is prepared to begin another incarnation.

It's been several years since I read his books, but as I recall, the point is repeatedly stressed that no life is decided upon until all of its ramifications are fully explored by not only the soul in question but also (more importantly) his or her guides.  A soul doesn't just willy nilly jump into a body wihout meticulous preparation.

A life that will be challenging and stressful needs the proper amount of energy to be brought along, if the soul is going to be prepared to cope.  As you know, his clients say that not all of our energy is brought with us, some of it always remains on the other side.

Whatever, the point is repeatedly made that great care is necessary to be sure the chosen life will contribute to what the soul needs for growth.

My problem with that is, the guides apparently screw up immensely.  All we have to do is read the daily paper of any city in any country to figure that out.  Sure, we have the obvious examples of Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Idi Amin, etc etc.  What the heck went awry in their cases?  But forget about them, we also have the serial killers who feed on the thrill of taking other lives, often torturing them in the process.

But even forgetting about the Charles Mansons of the world, we have the drive-by shootings, the child molesters, the cheats and the frauds.  And the millions we never hear about, the ones who are spiritually barren, who abuse their spouses or their employees or their friends.

The thing is, nowhere does Newton explain this.  Yes, he acknowledges that sometimes either too much or too little energy accompanies the soul.  He says sometimes mistakes of that nature occur. 

But he implies that mistakes like that are the exception, not the rule. 

I dunno.  My own take on it is that the way society is these days, the guides are falling down on the job. 

The only possible answer I can come up with is that a determined soul will do whatever it wants in terms of deciding on its next life, the guides notwithstanding.  However, per Newton, we don't have that kind of autonomy.  Therein lies the dilemma.

My 2 cents on the matter is, we COULD BE tapping into the collective un/conscious is the "One" we all belong to.

Marilyn-

We've all been murderers?  Would you please be so kind as to tell us how you know this to be true?  I'd love to see the documentation for that statement.

As you well know, there is no proof. The first time I read this in Robert Monroe's 3rd book, I thought too that this was ridiculous. That was until I started looking into some of my past lives. Sad, but true. And how else are we to learn. I'm talking about the soul, not our conscious minds learning. Our souls have to learn everything, good or bad (although there is no good or bad). I don't expect you to believe me Rondele as you are one along with so many other skeptics here who always want proof. Get your own proof. Look into your own past lives. I'm certainly not going to do it for you.

SC, thanks for the support.

Love, Mairlyn 

Yes!  Thank you dear Kathy.

Love, Mairlyn

THE CASE AGAINST PAST LIFE REGRESSION

In 1985 the AMA Council of Scientific Affairs "finds that recollections obtained during hypnosis can involve confabulations and pseudo-memories and not only fail to be more accurate, but actually appear to be less reliable than non-hypnotic recall.”  It has been seen that the recall of events that occurred early in a  subject’s life does not increase under hypnosis....It has been proven in laboratory experiments that “memories” divulged under hypnosis often stem from from suggestions made by the hynotist himself *Udayun Das Roy, "Reincarnation: A Scientific Evaluation”).”   

(1) Laboratory research demonstrates that memory can often be strongly influenced by expectation, one's own or other people's.  This point has been proven from three different lines of research:

(a) “Psychologist Robert Baker demonstrated that belief in reincarnation is the greatest predictor of whether a subject would have a past-life memory while under past life regression hypnotherapy.  Furthermore, Baker demonstrated that the subject’s expectations significantly affect the past-life regression session.  He divided a group of 60 students nto three groups.  He told the first group that they were about to experience an exciting new therapy that could help them uncover their past lives.  85% of this group were successful in “remembering” a past life.  He told the 2nd group that they were to learn about a therapy which may or may not work to engender past-life memories.  In this group, the success rate was 60%.  He told the 3rd group that therapy was crazy and tha normal people generally do not experience a past life.  Only 10% of this group had a past-life “memory.””

(b) Stephen Jay Lynn conducted a simulated hypnosis experiment in 1994.  He first asked patients to imagine they had seen bright lights and experienced lost time.  As a result, 915 of patients who had been primed with such questions later claimed to recall being abducted by aliens. 

(c) In the late twentieth century 100s of people were imprisoned for abusing children in Satanic rituals.  A later critical reappraisal of the hypnotic regression techniques used to recover these so-called memories of past abuse discovered that these were not "recovered" memories, but rather memories created by the power of suggestion. 

(2) Laboratory research has demonstrated that memory can even be strongly influenced by the desired outcome or the implied belief of others. 

(a) Wilson (1982) doscovered that the time lapse reported between past lives was consistent with the therapist's beliefs on this issue.  If the therapist believed that past lives followed directly after each other wth no gap, their hypnotized clients support that claim in their bogus memories.  The span between incarnations is alleged to be about 51 years by hypnotherapist Helen Wambach, but only 5-10 years by Dr. Ian Stevenson (so Mark Albrecht).” 

(b) Conclusions of the more thorough researchers clash.  Helen Wambach claims the races are intermingled from life to life, but Ian Stevenson’s researchnegates this.  In all of Stevenson’s 20 cases, the subjects were allegedly reborn in the same ethnic group.   Spanos, Menary, et al (1991) discovered that regressed subjects incorporated subtle suggestions into their alleged past lives that they may have been of a different nationality or or sex or that they had probably suffered child abuse.

(3) The devastating flaws of past life regression require strong independent corroboration of the past lives alleged.  In this respect, the aburdities of alleged recovered memeries border on the comical.

(a) In the late 1970s, a large number of people were hypnotized for mass past life regression.   The study turned up a few Napoleons! 

(b) In another study of past life readers, readers explained their legion contradictions by claiming they were bringing up earlier or later past lives of the same individuals.  To dispense with this rationalization of failure, the readers were independently asked to detail subjects' IMMEDIATE past lives.  The results?  No subject received the same immediate past life from the readers! 

(c) Claims that so-called past life memories "help" some patients is too subjective to be relevant to the  reincarnation question.   Anyone who imagines rightly or wrongly that they have gotten to the root of their problem can potentially be helped by that sense of closure.   More relevant is the fact that in the few cases where verification seems available, the details are generally a mixture of truth and error of the sort that might be expected from ESP gleaned from living or disccarnate minds rather than from genuine recovered memories. In his research on the past life recall of young children, Ian Stevenson "best past life candidate ...was not named Mahmoud Bouhamzy [as alleged], did not have a wife named jamilah, and did not die as a result of an accident at all, let alone one that followed a quarrel with the driver (so Brian Holly's Ask Doctor Science: Is there empirical ecidence for reincarnation?"). "  on the other hand, in two of STevenson's cases, the prior presonallity allegedly recalled by the children was still alive for a considerable period after the child's birth.   For this and other reasons, even Stevension admits the strong possibility that these so-called memories are due to memory merger with discarnate humans or even to demonic possession.

I was struck by David Fontana's skepticism about the past lives that "came through" his own hypnotic regressions of subjects.  Fontana has ideal credentials.  Consider these two quotes from Fontana's seminal book, "Is There an Afterlife?":

"I..was a founder member of the British Society of  Experimental and Clinical Hypnotists (a body open only to qualified psychologists and medical doctors)...I have used [hypnotic regression] for experimental purposes (431-432)."   

"I am not necessarily convinced that these past life memories are what they seem.  Their paranormality would would seem self-evident, but an alternative possibility to reincarnation is...that the details come from the minds of the deceased.  This explanation was first suggested to me by some of the mediums with whom I have worked, and WHO ARE IN NO DOUBT THAT WERE THEY NOT TRAINED TO AVOID DOING SO THEY TOO COULD FREQUENTLY MISTAKE THE DATA COMMUNICATED BY DECEASED INDIVIDUALS FOR DETAILS OF THEIR OWN PAST LIVES.  In their view inexperienced men and women, encountering similar date in dreams, in spontaneous occurrences, and in hypnotic trance, may not be able to make the same distinction (432-33)."

This is precisely what Swedenborg discovered--an insight confirmed by Paul Beard's earlier "classical" mediums.  Even Ian Stevenson rejects the legitimacy of hypnotic regression as a means of recovering past life memories.

Don