Thesis of the Intro

How do our past lives and past-life regression affect our present lives?

According to Brian L. Weiss, M.D., our past lives can affect us mentally, emotionally and physically.

Comparing the Two Books

Many Lives, Many Masters X Through Time Into Healing   





Ignore the squiggly grammar/spelling lines...





 

In Many Lives, Many Masters, Brian Weiss only writes of how past-life regression can help a person, not mentioning the opinions of those who don't believe in reincarnation or have similar arguments. In Through Time Into Healing, he is still encouraging people to use past-life therapy, but he also shows that it can only help those who want to be helped. As the saying goes, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." Another way in which the two books is that the first one is just telling people his experience, but the second book demonstrates how past-life therapy works and all the ways in which it can help a person. Of course, though, they do tie together in that, with both of the books, Dr. Weiss is trying to help us by showing us the process of past-life regression, even giving us a way to go through the process ourselves at the end of Through Time Into Healing.

Logic in Book Two

In the book Through Time Into Healing, Dr. Brian Weiss' logic is much stronger than in Many Lives, Many Masters. While the first book was a detailed account of his first, personal experience with past-life regression, this book shows more experiences and actual research Dr. Weiss did into the concept of reincarnation and psychic phenomena. According to this book, it took a long time for him to come forward about his experience with Catherine. During the elapse in time between her sessions and Many Lives, Many Masters being published, he went to a nearby library to find any research on the matter of reincarnation. He didn't find much, but after writing the first book, he said, he found out about many others who'd had experiences similar to his and Catherine's.

He also found out that a lot of people were experiencing psychic phenomena, such as a local book club of ten women. The majority, prior to reading Many Lives, Many Masters (the first metaphysical book they read for the club), already had a belief in life after death, three of the ten believing solidly in reincarnation. Reflecting in Through Time Into Healing about these ten women, Dr. Weiss (1992) wrote, "These statistics were very close to the national averages reported in a Gallup poll" (p. 43).

Book Two: Through Time Into Healing

One word to describe this book would be INFORMATIVE. The reason that Dr. Brian Weiss wrote this second book seems to be to teach us how and why past-life regression helps us in our current lives. In the first chapter, Dr. Weiss goes into a slight overview of Many Lives, Many Masters (1988) and in the second chapter he tells us what hypnosis is, and he also tells us about something called a hypnagogic state somewhere between being awake and asleep. In the hypnagogic state, it is said that we can access more inspiration and creativity than in the wakeful state.

After describing this state, Dr. Weiss (1992) points out that "Thomas Edison valued this hypnagogic state so highly that he developed his own technique to maintain it while he worked on his inventions. While sitting in a certain chair, Edison used relaxation and meditation techniques to reach the state of conciousness that is between sleep and wakefulness. He would hold some ball bearings in his closed hand, palm down, while resting this hand on the arm of his chair. Beneath his hand he kept a metal bowl. If Edison fell asleep, his hand would open. The ball bearings would fall into the metal bowl and the noise would awaken him. Then he would repeat the process over and over again" (p. 26). He goes on to say that society can benefit from the hypnagogic state as we did from Edison's invention of the lightbulb.

Another thing we learn about from this book is the two different patterns of past-life recall: the classical pattern, in which a person recalls a life in chronological order, and the key moment flow pattern, in which a person recalls little bits from different lives that are linked by some common theme or lesson. There is much more this book will be informing me, and hopefully you, about.

Book One: Many Lives, Many Masters

If I were to analyze this book in one word, that word would be TRANSFORMATION. I choose transformation as the one word because what Dr. Brian Weiss goes through with his patient, Catherine changes both of their lives forever. Before the past-life regressions, Catherine didn't believe in reincarnation, and Dr. Weiss was very skeptical and analytical. Throughout the time of Catherine's hypnotherapy, they began to change in many ways. Catherine not only came to believe in the unending life of the eternal spirits, she was also cured of numerous phobias, recurring nightmares, and panic attacks. Now she's more charismatic than she used to be, and people go to her for advise. Dr. Weiss became very open to new ideas and he doesn't assume that if it's not scientific, it's not true. He can now counsel people more easily through the hardship of dealing with death, whether it's their's or a family member's, and help them get rid of fears instead of just covering them up with medication. And, of course, this book can help others go through their own transformation and teach them that we are eternal.

Visual Interpretation - Pages 177-203 of Many Lives, Many Masters

Image One: The first image depicts Death leading an old man into a tunnel and an angel leading him as a baby the rest of the way through. This symbolizes the sort of rebirth that both Catherine and Dr. Weiss go through over the course of the last few chapters, as well as the entire book itself. Specifically, it refers to the lesson Catherine relates of the different stages of human life, and the different stages of the spiritual plane. In the book, she says that there are seven different stages of the spiritual plane. However, she says that her spirit has only been through two of the seven stages and that she can't learn about the other five until she has experienced them, learning about one at a time.

Imange Two: The second image depicts an angel at rest. This is relevant to the five-month period related on pages 193 and 194 between one of Catherine's hypnosis session and the next, that also happened to be the last. She still visited Dr. Weiss on a weekly basis, except for a three-week break when she was on vacation. After the five months, she related a nightmare she'd been having and decided to do one more hypnosis session. I chose this image because Catherine didn't need to have hypnosis and her fears were virtually gone. It represents her apparent feeling of peace over those months, and her ability to rest easily.

Image Three: The third image is a version of the last card in the Major Arcana of the tarot, The World. This represents the conclusion of Dr. Weiss' "lesson" about reincarnation and past-life regression--in this book, at least. In the tarot, the Major Arcana--excluding The Fool, which is marked as 0 in the numbering--is like a three-phase journey, with seven cards in each phase. The number 3 is relevant to the Karmic Law of many New Age religions. The seven cards in each phase can be related to the seven stages in the spiritual plane. The World is the seventh card in the third phase, and in relation to this "journey"--often called "The Fool's Journey" for the excluded card of the Major Arcana--represents completion and reaching a goal. At the end of the book Many Lives, Many Masters Dr. Weiss seems to have reached some goal in what he wanted to teach the world.

3: Brian L. Weiss, M.D.'s Logic

Analysis of Brian L. Weiss, M.D.'s logic in his first book on past-life regression, Many Lives, Many Masters

So far, I'm a little over halfway through reading Many Lives, Many Masters, which is Brian L. Weiss' detailed account of his first experience with past-life regression, counceling a woman named Catherine through intensifying phobias and anxiety with hypnotherapy when she suddenly started recalling past-life memories. His logic would be slightly questionable since this is his one personal experience, but there are frequent referrences in the text to other research he's done. He also referrences situations after helping Catherine in which he used past-life therapy for his patients. Despite only talking about his experiences, Dr. Brian Weiss is very convincing in his argument that past-life regressions are real and can help us heal.

In chapter four of Many Lives, Many Masters, on page 54, Dr. Brian Weiss wrote something that Catherine said, convincing him that the past-life regressions weren't part of some elaborate fantasy. During one such regression, at a point where she was regressing memories from the spiritual plane, Catherine told him, "Your father is here, and your son, who is a small child. Your father says you will know him because his name is Avrom, and your daughter is named after him. Also, his death was due to his heart. Your son's heart was also important, for it was backward, like a chicken's." This was shocking to Dr. Weiss because he hadn't told Catherine anything about his personal life or family as part of his job to be professional.

Before Catherine's first hypnotherapy session, she told Dr. Weiss about a trip to Chicago, where she visited an Egyptian exhibit in the art museum. She told him that, during her visit, "When the guide began to describe some of the artifacts in the exhibit, she found herself correcting him...and she was right! The guide was surprised; Catherine was stunned. How did she know these things?" (p. 24). Dr. Weiss convinced her to try hypnotherapy to try and find some long-forgotten childhood memories of this information. When he regressed her back to her childhood, though, she didn't remember anything about Egyptian artifacts from her current life. He tried to find a point at which she might have learned, in this life, about Egyptian artifacts, and suddenly she was talking about a life in 1863 B.C. as a young woman named Aronda.

During Catherine's next hypnotherapy session, she was regressed to a previous death and into the spiritual plane where she would await the time when she would be able to return to a new body. Before she was allowed to return, though, she began relating lessons from what she would later call the Masters, saying, "Our task is to learn, to become God-like through knowlege. We know so little. You are here to be my teacher. I have so much to learn. By knowledge we approach God, and then we can rest. Then we come back to teach and help others" (p. 46). Dr. Weiss knew it was someone other than Catherine coming up with this because her voice became huskier, stronger, and she was speaking faster. Catherine herself had no memories of the spiritual plane, or the Masters, after these sessions.

With each session of hypnotherapy, Catherine started sheding her fears easily, after eighteen months of unsucsessful psychotherapy. It was evident even after just the first session of hypnotherapy. This alone stands to make Dr. Brian L. Weiss's logic very solid. Combined with the experience of her knowing about his family without him ever telling her makes the logic virtually undeniable. It would seem that only the most decided skeptics would question his logic.