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Eternal Lives, Eternal Deaths
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Chapter 3
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Chapter Three
Cycles of Life and Death: The Reincarnationist Worldview
South of Nazareth, there is a cave that holds the oldest remains of anatomically modern humans ever found. It is the Qafzek Cave in Galilee, where over a dozen skeletons came to light, dating back a mind-blowing 100,000 years – but it is not their age that’s most stunning about these finds. Some of these ancient dead were deliberately buried – and in a way that gives us insights into the thought processes of our distant ancestors. It’s not merely artefacts they left behind in the cave, but also fragments of their life stories. Next to the remains of a teenage boy, carefully laid to rest in a rectangular grave carved out of bedrock, a deer antler was placed. In us – beings from an unimaginable future – this act raises curiosity: What could have been the meaning of the deer to this particular boy? In another grave, we find a female buried together with a child. It touches our hearts to think: a mother and her offspring perhaps? Human bones, painted with ceremonial ochre, indicate that funerary rites held special meaning for these Stone Age people. Anthropologists talk about ‘referential associations of a higher order’ – meaning that these ancient humans had complex ideas about the individuals they buried, their societal roles, and possibly even their place in an afterlife.
The very fact that the dead were buried – laid into coffins or other special places filled with various personal belongings, such as garments, jewellery, and food – suggests that human beings, all throughout the millennia, have had a kind of multidimensional awareness. In virtually every culture, we can observe death rituals and some form of belief about death is a cultural universal – even though specific ideas about what happens after this life may vary.
A consistent observation has been that life and death were intrinsically connected. During most of human evolution, while massive ice sheets covered the land, we had to stay in harmony with nature, not only witnessing but living its cycles. We, humans, have learned that in nature everything returns – nothing gets lost, only transformed. New light shines every morning no matter how cold the night was; new life awakens in the spring no matter how frozen and barren the winter has been. The daily reappearance and disappearance of the Sun, its annual ‘rebirth’ at the winter solstice, the waning and waxing of the Moon... snakes shedding their skin, birds laying eggs to hatch… all these phenomena of nature served as universal symbols of life’s eternal return. Our species has seen that everything made of matter always perished; yet, the pattern of life came back over and over again. Thus came the discovery of something immaterial that seems to be the underlying intelligence behind all-there-is, causing everything that has ever been alive to return into the world over and over again, eternally.
Perhaps this is where the concept of reincarnation originated from: a direct experience with nature – external nature as well as our own internal nature through introspection. The German philosopher, Schopenhauer said that reincarnation ‘presents itself as the natural conviction of man whenever he reflects at all in an unprejudiced manner.’ Most scholars today, may think of reincarnation as a religious idea, but it is surprisingly under-represented in institutionalised world religions. Even in Hinduism and Buddhism, where it belongs to the central tenet of the teachings, there isn’t much practical encouragement to explore past lives. Certain beliefs may even hinder that. (When Ian Stevenson was collecting his cases of children spontaneously remembering past lives in India, he came across a strange superstition that jeopardized his research. Remembering a past life, or so the belief went, meant bad luck. Hence, parents of children who began telling stories about their karmic past became frightened: They used to even sit the child on a special rotating chair, which they beat with sticks to remove the ‘harmful’ memory.) Other religions removed reincarnation from their official teachings altogether. In Christianity – where certain writings of early church fathers such as Origen and scrolls from the Nag Hammadi library suggest that reincarnation may have been part of the early Christian teachings – it was excluded from orthodoxy by the latest during the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 A.D. Such decisions may have been politically driven rather than philosophically grounded, for reincarnation ‘has a special tendency to cause those who believe in it to feel able to dispense with the institutional aspects’ of religion.
Rather than in the form of mainstream religious teachings, reincarnation – the actual experience of the existence of past lives – comes forth as a result of spiritual practices and experiences that allow for personal encounters with the transcendental. Christopher Bache observed that all world religions include reincarnation in at least one of their esoteric sects – those branches of religion that contain teachings not intended for the general public but for practitioners who are mystically inclined and willing to go deeper into their practice (for instance, Hasidic Judaism, Sufi mysticism, and Gnostic Christianity). He further pointed out that past life awareness tends to emerge whenever ‘psychological exercises are employed that are capable of penetrating into the deeper layers of consciousness.’ Thus the reincarnationist worldview seems to come from natural observation and a certain depth of self-exploration. Buddha is said to have attained recollection of his past lives before he attained enlightenment – an ability that can open up to anyone who practices advanced meditation and mindfulness. In notable Western mystical schools, such as theosophy and Rosicrucianism, the process of exploring one’s karmic past is considered a step of spiritual development necessary to attain higher levels of initiation.
Many of us are prompted by this personal, experiential nature of the reincarnation topic to explore further. Like wolves by a scent in the forest that lures not only towards food, but adventure… we are drawn into a realm that hides unspeakable promises. In this chapter, we shall trace down all the empirical data, from spiritually relevant experiences to hypnotic regression materials, that provide clues about the mechanisms that govern the cycles of life, death, and rebirth.
The very fact that the dead were buried – laid into coffins or other special places filled with various personal belongings, such as garments, jewellery, and food – suggests that human beings, all throughout the millennia, have had a kind of multidimensional awareness. In virtually every culture, we can observe death rituals and some form of belief about death is a cultural universal – even though specific ideas about what happens after this life may vary.
A consistent observation has been that life and death were intrinsically connected. During most of human evolution, while massive ice sheets covered the land, we had to stay in harmony with nature, not only witnessing but living its cycles. We, humans, have learned that in nature everything returns – nothing gets lost, only transformed. New light shines every morning no matter how cold the night was; new life awakens in the spring no matter how frozen and barren the winter has been. The daily reappearance and disappearance of the Sun, its annual ‘rebirth’ at the winter solstice, the waning and waxing of the Moon... snakes shedding their skin, birds laying eggs to hatch… all these phenomena of nature served as universal symbols of life’s eternal return. Our species has seen that everything made of matter always perished; yet, the pattern of life came back over and over again. Thus came the discovery of something immaterial that seems to be the underlying intelligence behind all-there-is, causing everything that has ever been alive to return into the world over and over again, eternally.
Perhaps this is where the concept of reincarnation originated from: a direct experience with nature – external nature as well as our own internal nature through introspection. The German philosopher, Schopenhauer said that reincarnation ‘presents itself as the natural conviction of man whenever he reflects at all in an unprejudiced manner.’ Most scholars today, may think of reincarnation as a religious idea, but it is surprisingly under-represented in institutionalised world religions. Even in Hinduism and Buddhism, where it belongs to the central tenet of the teachings, there isn’t much practical encouragement to explore past lives. Certain beliefs may even hinder that. (When Ian Stevenson was collecting his cases of children spontaneously remembering past lives in India, he came across a strange superstition that jeopardized his research. Remembering a past life, or so the belief went, meant bad luck. Hence, parents of children who began telling stories about their karmic past became frightened: They used to even sit the child on a special rotating chair, which they beat with sticks to remove the ‘harmful’ memory.) Other religions removed reincarnation from their official teachings altogether. In Christianity – where certain writings of early church fathers such as Origen and scrolls from the Nag Hammadi library suggest that reincarnation may have been part of the early Christian teachings – it was excluded from orthodoxy by the latest during the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 A.D. Such decisions may have been politically driven rather than philosophically grounded, for reincarnation ‘has a special tendency to cause those who believe in it to feel able to dispense with the institutional aspects’ of religion.
Rather than in the form of mainstream religious teachings, reincarnation – the actual experience of the existence of past lives – comes forth as a result of spiritual practices and experiences that allow for personal encounters with the transcendental. Christopher Bache observed that all world religions include reincarnation in at least one of their esoteric sects – those branches of religion that contain teachings not intended for the general public but for practitioners who are mystically inclined and willing to go deeper into their practice (for instance, Hasidic Judaism, Sufi mysticism, and Gnostic Christianity). He further pointed out that past life awareness tends to emerge whenever ‘psychological exercises are employed that are capable of penetrating into the deeper layers of consciousness.’ Thus the reincarnationist worldview seems to come from natural observation and a certain depth of self-exploration. Buddha is said to have attained recollection of his past lives before he attained enlightenment – an ability that can open up to anyone who practices advanced meditation and mindfulness. In notable Western mystical schools, such as theosophy and Rosicrucianism, the process of exploring one’s karmic past is considered a step of spiritual development necessary to attain higher levels of initiation.
Many of us are prompted by this personal, experiential nature of the reincarnation topic to explore further. Like wolves by a scent in the forest that lures not only towards food, but adventure… we are drawn into a realm that hides unspeakable promises. In this chapter, we shall trace down all the empirical data, from spiritually relevant experiences to hypnotic regression materials, that provide clues about the mechanisms that govern the cycles of life, death, and rebirth.
Memories of Life and Death
For a long time, in mainstream psychology and medicine, it has been assumed that humans could not carry recollections from the time around their births. It was argued that the formation of memories would be dependent on the existence of myelinated sheaths in the brain, which are undeveloped in newborn babies. The mind at birth, according to this understanding, is tabula rasa, like a brand new computer, empty of memory. Thus, it was considered an impossibility to have awareness and memories of one’s own birth. (This kind of conviction was so predominant that up until 1999, surgical procedures were routinely carried out on babies without anaesthesia – based on the same assumptions, infants were thought not to perceive pain, either.)
However, as research advanced and therapies reached deeper into the human psyche, it appeared that humans do seem to carry memories of their births after all, mostly subconsciously. Otto Rank was the first in psychotherapy to write about the birth trauma and its effects on later life; Stanislav Grof mapped out the stages of the birth experience, how each could cause both agony and ecstasy. Reviewing more than 3,500 psychotherapeutic sessions he conducted with the aid of psychedelic drugs, Grof could empirically show that there was a link between birth trauma and various mental conditions that would develop later in life. His findings have prompted other researchers and therapists to take memories and potentially traumatic events surrounding the birth event more seriously.
Yet, if we take the possibility of birth memories seriously, the question remains: What sort of memories could these be? We may say subconscious memories but how would they form and be carried forward? Arguably, the neonatal brain is not developed enough to form the usual, synaptic memories. It has been suggested that in the case of birth effects, we are not dealing with memory as such, but rather with subcortical learning mechanisms that may be responsible for creating and storing an emotional response at such an early age. Even though this kind of mechanism may be in place, there also exists another type of research indicating that an entirely different type of memory may be at work here that cannot be explained by the brain or bodily functions alone.
In 1973, clinical psychologist Helen Wambach from the John F. Kennedy University, California, launched a large-scale project, in which she hypnotically regressed groups of hundreds of people back to their birth experiences. In dramatic contrast to mainstream expectations, her subjects reported that their consciousness, which joined the baby’s body at birth, appeared to be a fully developed adult-type of consciousness. As one of the subjects reported: ‘I was aware of other people’s feelings, and I had the understanding of an adult, not a child. I just listened and observed.’ Wambach’s subjects remembered having had the ability at birth to tune into the thoughts, feelings, and energies of those present in the room (the mother, doctors, nurses, or other family members). ‘My feeling was that the people in the delivery room know nothing,’ another subject said ‘and you knew it all.’ This grand, higher type of consciousness, present at birth, seemed to shrink as months went by in the life of the infant, almost as if that ‘mind was too big for this little body.’
Parallel to near-death experiences – which indicate that consciousness would still exist after the death of the brain – Wambach’s findings suggest that consciousness could exist prior to the brain’s formation also. Her subjects describe consciousness ‘downloading’ itself into the brain at birth, like a software being installed on a new computer. This process typically takes time and requires adjusting, even ‘downsizing’ awareness.
As unique as this experiment may appear, Wambach’s subjects were not the only ones who remembered their births. Even without hypnotic induction, we can find individuals who are naturally aware from birth that life is embedded into a greater timeline.
Personal Experience With ‘Born-Awares’
On a dark winter evening, I was rushing along by the Thames. Right under my feet, some powerful waves of the river were lashing up some stone stairs onto the cobblestone street. It felt as if something otherworldly was lurking around every twist and turn, while a meeting of lucid dreamers was about to begin in one of the nearby London pubs.
An upstairs room, where a dozen or so participants had already gathered around a wooden table, was reserved for the meet-up. Soon after I arrived, participants began to tell, one by one, about their ventures into the world of lucid dreaming. As I listened to them, a curious feeling overtook me: These people, I sensed, knew more about the nature of reality than any group I ever met before. They spoke not only about their dreams, but their memories of birth and events before that. Encouraged, I also related my childhood memory, how, in kindergarten, I used to sit with my soul-friend Katinka in a corner watching the other kids playing and thinking of it all as absurd. Rather than playing along, we kept asking ourselves the question: ‘How did we end up here?’ We sensed that we had embarked on a journey long before we were born but also that we somehow got lost, not exactly arriving where we were supposed to. Everyone in the group understood the significance of this. Sitting among these people felt as if the future was already upon us, a grander, more evolved future, in which humans understand the multidimensionality of life.
Curiously, the next morning, when I searched the internet for their next meeting, I couldn’t find the group, not even a reference to yesterday’s meeting. It was as if I had shifted reality to meet them and shifted back after this curious encounter...
In her book Born Aware, Diane Brandon describes these kinds of people: who naturally remember times around their births or even before that. She found and interviewed individuals who have been born aware that there was more to our existence than the physical dimension and carry an ongoing awareness that they have a purpose of being here, for which they are often gifted with talents and abilities. As children, they spent time connecting to a higher, pre-birth consciousness and sometimes received information about the type of work they would be doing later in life. (One woman, for instance, remembered ‘being in her crib and feeling that she was practising by addressing large groups of people in different parts of the world.’) This type of consciousness (and connected memory) is not a product of the brain or even the individual mind. Rather, it feels like a kind of ‘soul awareness’ that the individual is ‘downloading’ or ‘processing.’ This can at times be experienced as a blessing (in moments when a ‘profound truth is saturating’), at other times as a curse (for example when the person knows more than other people do, yet they don’t listen or when parents become concerned that their offspring might be autistic, spending periods of time in their ‘own world’) - but in all cases, this type of consciousness is direct, transpersonal, and non-local to the body.
However, as research advanced and therapies reached deeper into the human psyche, it appeared that humans do seem to carry memories of their births after all, mostly subconsciously. Otto Rank was the first in psychotherapy to write about the birth trauma and its effects on later life; Stanislav Grof mapped out the stages of the birth experience, how each could cause both agony and ecstasy. Reviewing more than 3,500 psychotherapeutic sessions he conducted with the aid of psychedelic drugs, Grof could empirically show that there was a link between birth trauma and various mental conditions that would develop later in life. His findings have prompted other researchers and therapists to take memories and potentially traumatic events surrounding the birth event more seriously.
Yet, if we take the possibility of birth memories seriously, the question remains: What sort of memories could these be? We may say subconscious memories but how would they form and be carried forward? Arguably, the neonatal brain is not developed enough to form the usual, synaptic memories. It has been suggested that in the case of birth effects, we are not dealing with memory as such, but rather with subcortical learning mechanisms that may be responsible for creating and storing an emotional response at such an early age. Even though this kind of mechanism may be in place, there also exists another type of research indicating that an entirely different type of memory may be at work here that cannot be explained by the brain or bodily functions alone.
In 1973, clinical psychologist Helen Wambach from the John F. Kennedy University, California, launched a large-scale project, in which she hypnotically regressed groups of hundreds of people back to their birth experiences. In dramatic contrast to mainstream expectations, her subjects reported that their consciousness, which joined the baby’s body at birth, appeared to be a fully developed adult-type of consciousness. As one of the subjects reported: ‘I was aware of other people’s feelings, and I had the understanding of an adult, not a child. I just listened and observed.’ Wambach’s subjects remembered having had the ability at birth to tune into the thoughts, feelings, and energies of those present in the room (the mother, doctors, nurses, or other family members). ‘My feeling was that the people in the delivery room know nothing,’ another subject said ‘and you knew it all.’ This grand, higher type of consciousness, present at birth, seemed to shrink as months went by in the life of the infant, almost as if that ‘mind was too big for this little body.’
Parallel to near-death experiences – which indicate that consciousness would still exist after the death of the brain – Wambach’s findings suggest that consciousness could exist prior to the brain’s formation also. Her subjects describe consciousness ‘downloading’ itself into the brain at birth, like a software being installed on a new computer. This process typically takes time and requires adjusting, even ‘downsizing’ awareness.
As unique as this experiment may appear, Wambach’s subjects were not the only ones who remembered their births. Even without hypnotic induction, we can find individuals who are naturally aware from birth that life is embedded into a greater timeline.
Personal Experience With ‘Born-Awares’
On a dark winter evening, I was rushing along by the Thames. Right under my feet, some powerful waves of the river were lashing up some stone stairs onto the cobblestone street. It felt as if something otherworldly was lurking around every twist and turn, while a meeting of lucid dreamers was about to begin in one of the nearby London pubs.
An upstairs room, where a dozen or so participants had already gathered around a wooden table, was reserved for the meet-up. Soon after I arrived, participants began to tell, one by one, about their ventures into the world of lucid dreaming. As I listened to them, a curious feeling overtook me: These people, I sensed, knew more about the nature of reality than any group I ever met before. They spoke not only about their dreams, but their memories of birth and events before that. Encouraged, I also related my childhood memory, how, in kindergarten, I used to sit with my soul-friend Katinka in a corner watching the other kids playing and thinking of it all as absurd. Rather than playing along, we kept asking ourselves the question: ‘How did we end up here?’ We sensed that we had embarked on a journey long before we were born but also that we somehow got lost, not exactly arriving where we were supposed to. Everyone in the group understood the significance of this. Sitting among these people felt as if the future was already upon us, a grander, more evolved future, in which humans understand the multidimensionality of life.
Curiously, the next morning, when I searched the internet for their next meeting, I couldn’t find the group, not even a reference to yesterday’s meeting. It was as if I had shifted reality to meet them and shifted back after this curious encounter...
In her book Born Aware, Diane Brandon describes these kinds of people: who naturally remember times around their births or even before that. She found and interviewed individuals who have been born aware that there was more to our existence than the physical dimension and carry an ongoing awareness that they have a purpose of being here, for which they are often gifted with talents and abilities. As children, they spent time connecting to a higher, pre-birth consciousness and sometimes received information about the type of work they would be doing later in life. (One woman, for instance, remembered ‘being in her crib and feeling that she was practising by addressing large groups of people in different parts of the world.’) This type of consciousness (and connected memory) is not a product of the brain or even the individual mind. Rather, it feels like a kind of ‘soul awareness’ that the individual is ‘downloading’ or ‘processing.’ This can at times be experienced as a blessing (in moments when a ‘profound truth is saturating’), at other times as a curse (for example when the person knows more than other people do, yet they don’t listen or when parents become concerned that their offspring might be autistic, spending periods of time in their ‘own world’) - but in all cases, this type of consciousness is direct, transpersonal, and non-local to the body.
Adventures of the Field
But how can memory that is non-local to the body even exist? As the new, consciousness-based paradigm is emerging, so are the first field theories of consciousness, which propose that consciousness is not confined to the brain but is carried by a field that interacts with the brain. This concept is akin to the way radio signals or wireless internet work, where information is carried by electromagnetic waves and then decoded by a receiver, whether it’s a radio, a computer, or the brain.
Federico Faggin, known as the inventor of the first commercial microprocessor, is also deeply involved in consciousness research. In his psycho-informational theory of reality, he postulates that consciousness comes from a pure quantum state. From that informational (semantic) reality, consisting of irreducible conscious entities, physical reality arises as a symbolic expression. His theory is an exemplary model within the consciousness-based paradigm. It allows for consciousness, information, and memory to exist in a field, independently of matter.
Various names and specific theories for an informational life field have been proposed. Harold Saxon Burr from Yale University proposes the existence of L-fields (Life-Fields) that govern the behaviour of all living beings and link them to a larger order of the universe. Edward Russell suggests that there was compelling evidence of thought being carried independently of the physical brain in what he calls T-fields. Russell’s T-fields are described as capable of anchoring themselves to genes and brain cells, even being directed by will. They may carry a person’s entire consciousness which can expand indefinitely into space and connect to the thought-field of the universe. Further proponents of consciousness as an energy field of information are Hiroshi Motoyama (1978) from Tokyo University and William Tiller from Stanford University who writes that the mind can surpass its physical (sensory) limitations. A recent theory of consciousness (including memory and learning) being encoded all throughout the physical universe is the Unified Spacememory Network, by Haramein, Brown, and Baker.
The Hungarian-American philosopher of science, Ervin László, talks about A-fields (Akashic fields), in honour of the ancient Indian concept of Akasha. The idea, brought to the West by the theosophist movement, encompasses an etheric field beyond all perceptive things: a canvas upon which consciousness manifests all its creation, at the same time, a field through which thoughts can travel. Memories held in this field are sometimes referred to as the Akashic Records or Akashic Chronicles: an archetypal storage of events from the past, the present, and the future into which we can sometimes tap while ‘human history continues from age to age.’
Far from being merely a theoretical concept, the Akashic field becomes empirically accessible to many contemplative and creative people as they tap into it for inspiration. In her book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert describes a phenomenon, well-known among writers, artists, and inventors: Ideas seem to come to those who are ready and willing to act upon them, as if sent from a larger, external source. If individuals are not ready and willing to act upon them, the idea might travel to someone else. Gilbert recounts a personal experience where, after abandoning a story due to personal circumstances, she later discovered that a friend and fellow writer had written a book with an eerily similar plot. A historical example is Charles Darwin, who, after working on his theory of evolution by natural selection for many years, received a letter from Alfred Russel outlining a similar idea, which prompted him to publish his work quickly. For inventive people who bring new things into the (physical) world, the notion of an intelligent field they are immersed in is often not surprising.
Federico Faggin, known as the inventor of the first commercial microprocessor, is also deeply involved in consciousness research. In his psycho-informational theory of reality, he postulates that consciousness comes from a pure quantum state. From that informational (semantic) reality, consisting of irreducible conscious entities, physical reality arises as a symbolic expression. His theory is an exemplary model within the consciousness-based paradigm. It allows for consciousness, information, and memory to exist in a field, independently of matter.
Various names and specific theories for an informational life field have been proposed. Harold Saxon Burr from Yale University proposes the existence of L-fields (Life-Fields) that govern the behaviour of all living beings and link them to a larger order of the universe. Edward Russell suggests that there was compelling evidence of thought being carried independently of the physical brain in what he calls T-fields. Russell’s T-fields are described as capable of anchoring themselves to genes and brain cells, even being directed by will. They may carry a person’s entire consciousness which can expand indefinitely into space and connect to the thought-field of the universe. Further proponents of consciousness as an energy field of information are Hiroshi Motoyama (1978) from Tokyo University and William Tiller from Stanford University who writes that the mind can surpass its physical (sensory) limitations. A recent theory of consciousness (including memory and learning) being encoded all throughout the physical universe is the Unified Spacememory Network, by Haramein, Brown, and Baker.
The Hungarian-American philosopher of science, Ervin László, talks about A-fields (Akashic fields), in honour of the ancient Indian concept of Akasha. The idea, brought to the West by the theosophist movement, encompasses an etheric field beyond all perceptive things: a canvas upon which consciousness manifests all its creation, at the same time, a field through which thoughts can travel. Memories held in this field are sometimes referred to as the Akashic Records or Akashic Chronicles: an archetypal storage of events from the past, the present, and the future into which we can sometimes tap while ‘human history continues from age to age.’
Far from being merely a theoretical concept, the Akashic field becomes empirically accessible to many contemplative and creative people as they tap into it for inspiration. In her book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert describes a phenomenon, well-known among writers, artists, and inventors: Ideas seem to come to those who are ready and willing to act upon them, as if sent from a larger, external source. If individuals are not ready and willing to act upon them, the idea might travel to someone else. Gilbert recounts a personal experience where, after abandoning a story due to personal circumstances, she later discovered that a friend and fellow writer had written a book with an eerily similar plot. A historical example is Charles Darwin, who, after working on his theory of evolution by natural selection for many years, received a letter from Alfred Russel outlining a similar idea, which prompted him to publish his work quickly. For inventive people who bring new things into the (physical) world, the notion of an intelligent field they are immersed in is often not surprising.
Different Bodies in Different Dimensions
Mystical traditions throughout the ages have taught us that human beings are capable of tuning into the Akashic field because they themselves consist of more than just their physical bodies. Individuals are seen as encompassing various non-physical – energetic, mental, and psychic – functions, which form various subtle bodies.
Eastern healing practices such as acupuncture and Reiki work with the universal life force energy (chi or prana) that circulates within the human body and makes up the energy body (energosoma). The subtle anatomy of the energy body is traditionally described in terms of channels (meridians) and vortices (chakras). The flow of chi through these channels and vortices has been extensively studied in Eastern medicine, such as acupuncture or reiki, and can be felt by those who are naturally sensitive or have practised techniques to enhance their perception. Internal martial arts also utilize the energy body, both in combat and in practices for self-mastery.
When a person’s consciousness is being experienced outside of the physical body, the so-called astral body (psychosoma) carries their emotional and psychological programming, often bringing forth an astral double (Doppelgänger). This highly organised form of a subtle body may be perceived by other consciousnesses, when out-of-the-body or in the death state (appearing as a ‘ghost’). It has been hypothesized that the phantom limb pain experienced by some amputees may stem from the psychosoma, where the blueprint of the lost limb is still present, transmitting sensations.
Finally, consciousness can exist without any shape or form, as a pure mental body (mentalsoma). In death, the physical body, the emotional, and finally the astral body may gradually dissolve, but the mentalsoma, being of the same essence as the original or cosmic consciousness, remains. It retains all the experiences, knowledge, and wisdom accumulated across incarnations. In therapy, connection with the mentalsoma is often facilitated through the concept of the Higher Self.
While the names and numbers of these bodies vary from tradition to tradition, the fundamental idea of multiple layers of bodies operating at multiple levels of reality is central to the reincarnationist world-view. These bodies are interconnected and exist on a continuum from the physical to the mental. Just as water can exist as solid, liquid, or gas, so can consciousness be ‘frozen’ in the physical, ‘flow’ as energy, or ‘evaporate’ in the ether. In Tibetan Buddhism, practitioners are encouraged to cultivate an illusory body (a type of astral body) to realise the illusory nature of all phenomena. This illusory nature suggests that everything arises from consciousness and the physical world lacks inherent, permanent existence.
Eastern healing practices such as acupuncture and Reiki work with the universal life force energy (chi or prana) that circulates within the human body and makes up the energy body (energosoma). The subtle anatomy of the energy body is traditionally described in terms of channels (meridians) and vortices (chakras). The flow of chi through these channels and vortices has been extensively studied in Eastern medicine, such as acupuncture or reiki, and can be felt by those who are naturally sensitive or have practised techniques to enhance their perception. Internal martial arts also utilize the energy body, both in combat and in practices for self-mastery.
When a person’s consciousness is being experienced outside of the physical body, the so-called astral body (psychosoma) carries their emotional and psychological programming, often bringing forth an astral double (Doppelgänger). This highly organised form of a subtle body may be perceived by other consciousnesses, when out-of-the-body or in the death state (appearing as a ‘ghost’). It has been hypothesized that the phantom limb pain experienced by some amputees may stem from the psychosoma, where the blueprint of the lost limb is still present, transmitting sensations.
Finally, consciousness can exist without any shape or form, as a pure mental body (mentalsoma). In death, the physical body, the emotional, and finally the astral body may gradually dissolve, but the mentalsoma, being of the same essence as the original or cosmic consciousness, remains. It retains all the experiences, knowledge, and wisdom accumulated across incarnations. In therapy, connection with the mentalsoma is often facilitated through the concept of the Higher Self.
While the names and numbers of these bodies vary from tradition to tradition, the fundamental idea of multiple layers of bodies operating at multiple levels of reality is central to the reincarnationist world-view. These bodies are interconnected and exist on a continuum from the physical to the mental. Just as water can exist as solid, liquid, or gas, so can consciousness be ‘frozen’ in the physical, ‘flow’ as energy, or ‘evaporate’ in the ether. In Tibetan Buddhism, practitioners are encouraged to cultivate an illusory body (a type of astral body) to realise the illusory nature of all phenomena. This illusory nature suggests that everything arises from consciousness and the physical world lacks inherent, permanent existence.
The In-Between Lives (Intermissive) State
Thinking in terms of various subtle bodies allows us to look at life and death in a differentiated way. From this perspective, life and death no longer appear as two sides of a coin that has ‘to be’ written on one side and ‘not to be’ on the other. Rather, life and death appear as a continuous cycle like other cycles in nature: winter, spring, summer, and autumn or day and night. Death is not the end but the ebbing of the energy of a person away from the physical ‘day’ into the mental ‘night’ during which a new life can be dreamt into being.
Death is not a single moment occurrence but a process. Even physical death comes about in stages. (Else, we would not have legal battles in cases when it is unclear whether a patient is dead ‘enough’ for doctors to terminate life support. Clinical death, for instance – the cessation of heartbeat and breathing – is distinguished from brain death – the irreversible cessation of all brain functions.) In Tibetan Buddhism, we get the warning not to move the body quickly after death: The corpse should be left undisturbed for a while so that the mind has time to adjust to its new state and go on its journey in peace.
Much of the energy body may carry over into the intermissive state in between lives (sometimes referred to by the Tibetan term bardo). This bardo is essentially the mental experience that follows the physical death of the body, strongly determined by the thoughts, sentiments, and energies present at the time of death. The dissolution of the energy body also depends on the quality of the individual thoughts and sentiments: for instance, addiction or unfinished business can delay the disintegration of the energy body, as the consciousness continues to seek fulfilment in vain.
Consciousness researcher Ines Beyer notes that the individual consciousness may even carry energetic imprints into future incarnations. This could explain the birthmark and birth defects documented by Stevenson, where a traumatic death resulting from a fatal injury leaves an energetic imprint strong enough to carry its blueprint into the next incarnation. More generally, it may also explain why so many children with natural past-life memories remember violent deaths. Such violence may render the memory indelible even after rebirth. In less traumatic cases, however, we can assume that the energy body would dissolve shortly after physical death, leaving only the psychosoma (astral body) and the mentalsoma intact.
The astral journey of consciousness through the bardo of death before the next rebirth remains one of the greatest mysteries of consciousness research. It is notoriously hard to study. Sometimes, during near-death experiences, hypnotic regression sessions, or other altered states of consciousness, individuals take glimpses of the bardo state – but not much of our usual toolkit works here, not even language. Raymond Moody’s near-death experiencers frequently said that this state in the afterlife was ‘ineffable.’ It was impossible to talk about it, because in the moment of death, consciousness is brought outside our usual reference system of time and space and life stopped being a story.
This is an extraordinary observation, from which we can derive something profoundly valuable for our understanding of life and death. In 1949, Joseph Campbell published his iconic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he put forth his thesis of the monomyth, namely that all narratives of the world, no matter what era or culture they belong to, follow the same pattern. The Campbellian scheme, which became known as the Hero’s Journey, is so universal that even if we wanted to, we couldn’t come up with a story that did not fit it in some way. It is the reflection of our inherently dualistic world: An adverse situation ignites a search for solution. The adventure is routinely refused at first, but then continues through tests and trials, friends and foes move the hero forward, towards a remedy. Through the hero’s reward, the story seemingly comes to full circle, but in truth it is a spiral. Something was learned about life and the quest of happiness: either through the affirmation of a happy ending, or the warning inherent in a tragedy.
Today, the scheme of the hero’s journey is widely used not only by screenwriters and other creative writers but psychologists, therapists, personal development and business coaches, for it can be applied not only to stories of fiction but life itself. Life is a narrative experience. ‘God made man because He loves a story’ wrote Elie Wiesel and by that, he may have touched upon one of the most profound truths ever expressed – for life is a story that comes to an end in death. At the time of death, consciousness does not stop, but the causal, temporal, and spatial framework of stories no longer applies.
This is a remarkable conclusion: Although consciousness does not end in the moment of death, the story does. While life is a narrative experience, death seems to be something different altogether. Raymond Moody made another interesting observation to support this: Dying people often speak gibberish. This may not simply be the outcome of a compromised brain, as commonly assumed. It may be some sort of ‘transdimensional nonsense’ as the human mind tries to tune in to another level of reality that is not accessible in our usual terms of story-telling and dualistic logic. Hence, the state of consciousness in death is empirically very difficult to access while still alive. Sometimes, the dying, the clinically dead, the ones under hypnosis or states of altered consciousness take glimpses of it, yet find it impossible to express it literally.
For this reason, all attempts to describe the bardo state of death with human language will always remain but an approximation of the truth: Anything we can learn about it, is symbolic-allegorical in its nature and must not be taken literally. As an example, the following passage is a personal account of an in-between-life memory, gained through hypnosis. Essentially, the remembrance was not a cognitive but a kinaesthetic-energetic experience that can only fragmentarily be referred to in words. None of the images used are to be taken literally. Christian said, there was no actual computer room or USB stick involved – these were just the closest concepts he could find to approximate his experience while using words to describe the ineffable.
Christian: Intermissive Memory
Floating in space, my consciousness comes to a place that is like a big computer room. I’m bringing the experience of my previous life here – as if stored on an invisible USB stick. It is all brought here together with experiences from other lives, at other times, in other places. Also, I feel that I’m just one of many who come here after each life. The computer system is somehow calculating the value of each life. It is in search of those things that were of greatest beauty and happiness. When the computation is finished and the consequences of our actions have been drawn, we go back into new lives, in search of new experiences.
Many reports about the bardo state contain the theme of evaluation. Whether the event is interpreted as a judgement (like in old religious teachings), learning, experiment, or computer processing may depend on the evolutionary level of consciousness. In each case, however, the purpose seems to be the drawing of some sort of conclusions. If life is a story, death could be seen as the analysis thereof. In the following account, a client of mine used metaphors such as a lecture hall, a library, and even the school grading system to describe the evaluative and edifying nature of the intermissive period we explored together.
Trixi: Intermissive Learning
- At the moment of my death, I suddenly remembered reincarnation, something I was not aware of throughout this life. I feel regret, as from the point of loving my family, I didn’t do much but there is also this feeling of ‘Great! I can start over.’ After I died, I went to ‘heaven’ (laughs): It was all like a lecture hall or a library. I studied a lot, like a real bookworm. I graded myself: for the life just finished, I gave myself a B+ or B-. Not good. I also decided: when I go back [into the next life], I’ll put in a lot of reminders for myself.
- What are those reminders?
- Symbols. I may encounter them while reading a book or watching a movie, to remind myself that I have a higher purpose. They can also be life events: a setback, like an illness or a break-up. They can also come in the form of bad dreams, nightmares. Should I ever get too comfortable or lose hope, I’ll need to be reminded that this is a test.
To regard life as a test or experiment and death as its evaluation is a tempting conclusion from in-between-life cases. It seems to be supported by perennial philosophy, personal experiences in non-ordinary states of consciousness, even intuition. Yet, we must apply some caution, for all our knowledge about the bardo state is gained indirectly. We must be careful not to translate experiences between different states of consciousness without critical differentiation. Just as we don’t want to take experiences from a dream state (say, jumping off a cliff in order to fly) and apply them without distinction in the waking state (we would crash to our death), we don’t want to be too literal with our interpretation of bardo experiences. For example, we have reports from in-between-life states describing how a ‘soul’ was planning a new life ahead in considerable detail including selecting circumstances, parents etc. But can we conclude that this is always happening, like a metaphysical law? Can we infer that everyone ‘has chosen’ their parents, maybe even some abusive circumstances? Would this kind of generalisation be wise, therapeutically or would it effectively result in victim blaming?
As we have seen in Chapter One, different states, levels, and qualities of consciousness may produce different experiences. A consciousness-based universe is a creative universe, in which our decisions – every moment of our lives – determine the very reality we are experiencing. In line with Tibetan Buddhism, we can say that the bardo state has a sort of dream-time quality, where mental events arise out of previous actions, while setting new actions into motion. It is characterised by the dynamic forces of creation, fluid, malleable, mutable. As one of Diane Brandon’s born-awares said: ‘I smile when I hear someone aver or opine about spiritual things always happening in a specific way because I can tell they have no direct knowledge.’ As opposed to old-paradigm thinking, where hard, ironclad rules are sought out, we are now discovering a creative universe, where moment by moment, our own thoughts, sentiments, and energies determine what new dreams and new births may come.
Rebirth
According to spiritual traditions that have reincarnation as one of their tenets, rebirth into a new life is determined by karma, the metaphysical principle of cause and effect. Traditionally, karma has been interpreted on moral-punitive principles, postulating that good intentions and actions would lead towards a good future, bad intentions and actions towards misery. Yet again, we can challenge ourselves to see beyond simple billiard-ball-type of causality: The mechanisms which govern the seriality of life may be more subtle as well as more pliable than commonly assumed. Consciousness researcher, Analaura Trivellato suggests that our individual as well as collective thoughts, sentiments, and energies (in short: thosenes) form an immensely complex web, in which our patterns from the past determine the currents we engage with. This process of thosenic reverberation happens less through mechanical chains of cause and effect, rather through field forces which are yet to be understood precisely but seem akin to synchronicities and quantum entanglement, allowing to take acausal and non-local connections into account.
This interpretation of karma as reverberation in the field of life, includes all its rich aspects: the outer and the inner, the action and the intention behind it. Like synchronicity, karma can be seen as the (outer) world’s response to inner events. It arises from past actions, future decisions, and present attitudes and thus has aspects related to the past, the present, as well as the future.
In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, karma determines the realm into which someone is reborn. Our precious human existence is seen as the most favourable of all realms to be born into, as it provides the necessary balance of pain and pleasure conducive to practising compassion and the attainment of wisdom and enlightenment. For even if someone is born a god and so can enjoy aeons of pleasure in a beautiful, painless body, eventually the good karma in the god realm is exhausted without having gained spiritual advances. Much of the good energy may also have been wasted away on keeping the demigods at bay, who are constantly in envious competition with them. In the so-called lower realms, there is said to be so much suffering that it incapacitates those beings living there. Animals, who live in ignorance, prey on each other, and are exploited by humans, hungry-ghosts, who are desperately trying to satisfy their insatiable desires, cravings, and attachments, hell beings, who suffer indescribable tortures, beatings, heats, and colds are all seemingly just waiting for their evil karma to end. However, karma is not predestined. It is not creating a fate set in stone, far from it. Life in the different realms is ‘impermanent as autumn clouds’ says the Great Play Sutra. ‘Beings die and are born: it is like watching a play.’ All phenomena rise as an interplay of various conditions, which can be influenced by changing one’s mindset and intentions – and that can be done at any time, under all circumstances. Buddha, after all, is said to have first generated compassion in a hell realm. Fill your mind with wisdom, compassion, and positive intention, so the teachings suggest, and you have turned around the wheel of karma. Especially in the human realm, where we usually have enough intelligence and freedom, conditions are favourable for developing bodhicitta: the enlightenment-oriented compassionate mind.
Within Buddhism, we can find various tools, for instance, the Lamrim meditations that lay out a graduated path, to progress towards enlightenment. Modern hypnotherapeutic or NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) techniques often resemble these ancient meditational techniques, as they similarly use visualisation and other internal representations to create wholesome changes in the mind. The idea that karma or one’s life path can be changed by changing one’s mindset implies the concept of evolution. It also brings us to the concept of an existential program or life’s mission.
This interpretation of karma as reverberation in the field of life, includes all its rich aspects: the outer and the inner, the action and the intention behind it. Like synchronicity, karma can be seen as the (outer) world’s response to inner events. It arises from past actions, future decisions, and present attitudes and thus has aspects related to the past, the present, as well as the future.
In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, karma determines the realm into which someone is reborn. Our precious human existence is seen as the most favourable of all realms to be born into, as it provides the necessary balance of pain and pleasure conducive to practising compassion and the attainment of wisdom and enlightenment. For even if someone is born a god and so can enjoy aeons of pleasure in a beautiful, painless body, eventually the good karma in the god realm is exhausted without having gained spiritual advances. Much of the good energy may also have been wasted away on keeping the demigods at bay, who are constantly in envious competition with them. In the so-called lower realms, there is said to be so much suffering that it incapacitates those beings living there. Animals, who live in ignorance, prey on each other, and are exploited by humans, hungry-ghosts, who are desperately trying to satisfy their insatiable desires, cravings, and attachments, hell beings, who suffer indescribable tortures, beatings, heats, and colds are all seemingly just waiting for their evil karma to end. However, karma is not predestined. It is not creating a fate set in stone, far from it. Life in the different realms is ‘impermanent as autumn clouds’ says the Great Play Sutra. ‘Beings die and are born: it is like watching a play.’ All phenomena rise as an interplay of various conditions, which can be influenced by changing one’s mindset and intentions – and that can be done at any time, under all circumstances. Buddha, after all, is said to have first generated compassion in a hell realm. Fill your mind with wisdom, compassion, and positive intention, so the teachings suggest, and you have turned around the wheel of karma. Especially in the human realm, where we usually have enough intelligence and freedom, conditions are favourable for developing bodhicitta: the enlightenment-oriented compassionate mind.
Within Buddhism, we can find various tools, for instance, the Lamrim meditations that lay out a graduated path, to progress towards enlightenment. Modern hypnotherapeutic or NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) techniques often resemble these ancient meditational techniques, as they similarly use visualisation and other internal representations to create wholesome changes in the mind. The idea that karma or one’s life path can be changed by changing one’s mindset implies the concept of evolution. It also brings us to the concept of an existential program or life’s mission.
The Existential Program
The great difference between the evolution of consciousness compared with its Darwinian counterpart is the implication of a logos, a purpose to our existence. The evolution of consciousness is seen as an inherently intelligent process. As we have seen, many of Raymond Moody’s near-death experiencers were ‘sent back’ into life with the reasoning given that they have not yet fulfilled their life’s mission. It was implied that there was something that the individual had to learn or complete, upload into the cosmic computer, or contribute to the Akashic chronicles, which had not been completed yet. Frustratingly for these NDErs, they were never actually told what their mission was; presumably, it is part of the task to find – or to create – the purpose of life.
Meaning as a crucial aspect of life has been introduced into Western psychology by Viktor Frankl, world-famous psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, who based his logotherapy on observations he made while being held prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. He saw that those who could hold on to a purpose (like thinking of finishing a manuscript or finding a loved one) were the ones more likely to survive these most adverse circumstances. His own experimentum crucis was to find more ‘dignified concerns’ (menschenwürdigere Sorgen) than hoping for a piece of potato in the evening broth. In his mind, he began composing his future speech entitled ‘Psychology of Concentration Camps.’ It’s the meaning in life – Frankl concluded – that prompts a man to survive and to thrive, as it was the search for meaning that brought those who almost died back to life.
In a way, this conclusion turns Maslow’s pyramid upside down: Self-actualisation is not the pinnacle of a fulfilled life, rather its primary, driving force.
In The Soul’s Code (1997), James Hillman asserts that every human being is born with a unique blueprint (daimon) of their highest personal potential. Just as the acorn holds all information necessary to grow into an oak tree, the soul’s code contains the nature of the mission a person was born to fulfil. It plays a more decisive role in a person’s development than nature, nurture, or even the parents’ fallacy. Hillman calls for the ‘re-souling of the world’ by calling on each of us to find and follow our particular purpose. Brazilian consciousness researcher Waldo Vieira calls it the existential program: It’s a specific and personal programming of a particular rebirth that derives from the intermissive period. According to Vieira, if someone lives a life contrary to their existential program, no matter how outwardly successful their life may be, no matter how much money, power, even good relationships or acknowledgement from others that person may gain, they will always feel an underlying melancholia, often mistaken for (clinical) depression. On the other hand, if a person lives a life in alignment with their existential program, no matter the hardships and setbacks the person may encounter, their life leads to increasing levels of contentment and ultimately euphoria, not only in this life, but also in the following intermissive period.
Meaning as a crucial aspect of life has been introduced into Western psychology by Viktor Frankl, world-famous psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, who based his logotherapy on observations he made while being held prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. He saw that those who could hold on to a purpose (like thinking of finishing a manuscript or finding a loved one) were the ones more likely to survive these most adverse circumstances. His own experimentum crucis was to find more ‘dignified concerns’ (menschenwürdigere Sorgen) than hoping for a piece of potato in the evening broth. In his mind, he began composing his future speech entitled ‘Psychology of Concentration Camps.’ It’s the meaning in life – Frankl concluded – that prompts a man to survive and to thrive, as it was the search for meaning that brought those who almost died back to life.
In a way, this conclusion turns Maslow’s pyramid upside down: Self-actualisation is not the pinnacle of a fulfilled life, rather its primary, driving force.
In The Soul’s Code (1997), James Hillman asserts that every human being is born with a unique blueprint (daimon) of their highest personal potential. Just as the acorn holds all information necessary to grow into an oak tree, the soul’s code contains the nature of the mission a person was born to fulfil. It plays a more decisive role in a person’s development than nature, nurture, or even the parents’ fallacy. Hillman calls for the ‘re-souling of the world’ by calling on each of us to find and follow our particular purpose. Brazilian consciousness researcher Waldo Vieira calls it the existential program: It’s a specific and personal programming of a particular rebirth that derives from the intermissive period. According to Vieira, if someone lives a life contrary to their existential program, no matter how outwardly successful their life may be, no matter how much money, power, even good relationships or acknowledgement from others that person may gain, they will always feel an underlying melancholia, often mistaken for (clinical) depression. On the other hand, if a person lives a life in alignment with their existential program, no matter the hardships and setbacks the person may encounter, their life leads to increasing levels of contentment and ultimately euphoria, not only in this life, but also in the following intermissive period.
Case Study: Why Was I Born in Brazil?
The bus was taking us over the Vasco de Gama Bridge in Lisbon, the longest bridge in the European Union. Near the shore, I got caught up watching some people line fishing in the knee-deep waters – but as we drove on, listening to music and looking at endless blue waves, a sense of unspeakable euphoria came over me – the kind that would have made Waldo Vieira proud. I was heading to the First International Congress on Consciousness Science, organised by the IAC (International Academy of Consciousness) which was held at their visionary campus in Evoramonte, Portugal.
One lunchtime, during the conference, I was walking around the campus green, amongst trees and globe shaped labs that were designed to trigger out-of-body experiences. As I was pondering the talks we heard… how understanding energetic vibrations, spacememory fields, consciousness in-and-out of the body… can bring us closer to understanding life, the ultimate nature of reality, and the meaning of our existence… I couldn’t help but think about the hypnotherapy I was practising back in England. What if – so the idea found me – we conducted past life regression sessions, not only on an occasional, as-needed basis, but as a series? The aim would be to visit a variety of past lives with the intention of finding a common theme, if there is one, that would point towards the existential program of a person’s present life.
Circumstances quickly aligned with my idea, as if destined to be realised, for the next day I met Sebastian, a young participant at the conference, who kindly and enthusiastically agreed to become the first subject. We conducted a dozen sessions into his past lives with the intention to find a pattern that could help him discover the highest course in his life.
The following case study stems from our work together – as Sebastian became the first of many people embarking on this inner adventure with me. This summary features a kaleidoscope of Sebastian’s past life patterns, each serving as a dot on the coordinate system of karmic trajectories. By connecting these dots, we could trace the curve of Sebastian’s evolutionary development. Finding negative experiences and traits was just as useful as positive ones, as they pointed towards their own counterparts (e.g. ignorance leading to a thirst of knowledge and education). Past memories, present life experiences, and future hopes were all interconnected like those dynamic, layered networks of emotionally charged memories of common themes, Stanislav Grof calls condensed experiences (COEX system). They constitute the main psychological contents that shape an individual’s destiny, hence working with them in regression sessions, through various techniques can significantly alter a life’s trajectory.
Sebastian is an intelligent young professional, who now lives in Germany, but was born in Brazil. Despite his strong desire to avoid ever returning to his birth country, he feels an inexplicable negative pull from Brazil. Not only does he not want to go back to an economically less developed country, he personally never felt as safe and homey there as he feels in Europe. His childhood was marked by poverty and a harsh, abusive upbringing, and it was only through his self-driven efforts to educate himself that he could escape his disadvantaged background. Today, Sebastian speaks almost accent-free German, holds German citizenship, and in general, exudes a very Germanic vibe. Yet, he still harbours an irrational worry that one day he might be fated to return to Brazil. For these reasons, we started our investigation into his karmic past by inducing the trance state and asking the question to trigger possible past-life memories: ‘Why was I born in Brazil?’
The Overseer
Encouraged by this kinaesthetic feedback, I felt we were on the right track and went on to ask Sebastian what this punishment was for. He said, he had been a building overseer, originally from Holland, who tried his luck overseas and helped to build some kind of fortress on an island or peninsula. For this project, they utilized forced labour.
Later in this life, he remembered changing his thinking but he never changed his behaviour of treating people like slaves. He died with the thought that he had committed a ‘grave mistake.’
After the session, Sebastian confessed that he found it emotionally ‘quite hard’ to go through the experience; at the same time, he was ‘positively’ impressed by the outcome. The remorse he felt at the moment of death was important for setting a learning curve. In general, thoughts, sentiments, and energies at the moment of death provide important indicators about the nature of the evolutionary trajectory that consciousness is on – including how much they have or have not so far fulfilled their existential program. In Sebastian’s case, realising that mistreating humans through slave labour was a ‘grave mistake’ was an important turning point. This was highlighted by a synchronistic event that occurred shortly after the session. Sebastian was listening to a radio show,i in which the moderator – as if out of the blue – spoke out loud the following sentence: ‘In the year 1750 something big changed and that was you.’
Synchronicities occur, when an outward event, in itself minor and causally unrelated, resonates so surprisingly with an inner event that it hits the experiencer with a sense of deep meaning. The program moderator was not talking about Sebastian’s past life when she mentioned that something big changed in 1750 (with ‘you’ she was actually referring to the audience, as this was the year when public concert halls were introduced). Yet, for Sebastian, hearing this sentence drove the message from his past life journey even deeper.
We began to explore more about the turning point around the year 1750. In the next hypnosis session, we got in touch with Sebastian’s non-physical (inner) guide named Larjin, who revealed to him that at that point of his development he was harbouring ‘too much arrogance.’
Hence, we used the phrase ‘too much arrogance’ as a trigger to find another important point on the trajectory of Sebastian’s past. It led us back into an even earlier life, when the slave-trading behaviour began.
The Slave Trader
This disturbing revelation was soon overshadowed by an even more unsettling discovery when I asked him to move to the next significant event in this lifetime.
This was yet another life we unearthed with the same theme: slavery. At the end of the session, we again contacted Sebastian’s non-physical helper Larjin. He revealed that Sebastian’s consciousness in this old life was seeking ‘Anerkennung’ (recognition or approval). His intentions weren’t sadistic or malign; he was seeking recognition in a misguided way. In his community’s understanding, there was nothing morally wrong about selling humans. He, too, believed that selling people or supervising them as slaves, could make an honourable profession.
As it turned out during his next session, this was not the only kind of ignorance he was entangled in.
The Ignorant Village Man
In his next session, Sebastian found himself in a land of arid climate with dry trees, living in a small, dirty village he described as unhygienic, with flies buzzing around animal carcasses. He saw himself as a barefoot man in his mid 50s, who lived alone in one of the primitive houses: no furniture, no door, just a curtain. He had lost wife and daughter but at first, he could not remember how they died.
In this incarnation, the man from the village died alone and miserable. Due to ignorance, he had let his family die from a lack of medical treatment. Ignorance had trapped him multiple times: both the building engineer and the slave trader had been ignorant of the wrong they were engaging in. The theme of ignorance has also been prevalent in Sebastian’s current life: As a child, he grew up in an environment full of ignorance and poverty. We are beginning to see a pattern here, points plotted on the coordinate system of his karmic development, through which the curve can be drawn.
However, the curve does not just show ignorance but also the evolutionary drive to come out of ignorance. We can see that in Sebastian’s current incarnation, in which he had this deep, in-built urge to pursue education. That helped him, against all odds, to work as a teenager, collect money to enable himself to graduate from high school, get a job abroad, and eventually study at a university in Germany to make it all the way to earn a Ph.D.
This positive turn, as we found during our next session, has also not just begun in his current life...
The Developmental Helper
During the next session, we discovered yet another past life of Sebastian in which he went to a developing country – but this time, he and his colleagues wanted to bring progress to the people there. Thus, the theme remained the same, but the intention has changed: Now, they wanted to help. The task, however, could not be completed. He, the developmental helper, got caught up in a complicated, confusing political situation. At the end, he was captured and executed.
Here, we can see the challenge embedded within Sebastian’s COEX system, tensioned between living in a developed vs developing country, ignorance vs education, arrogance vs assistance. The question arises how in the present life, Sebastian can best move away from ignorance and arrogance, in order to find and walk his highest path in life.
Sebastian’s Existential Program: Sharing Knowledge and Teaching Wisdom
The technique we used to find the answer is called future life progression. It is the future-oriented counterpart of therapeutic regressions. It’s more imaginative in its nature, however, as the goal is not so much to gaze into a psychic crystal-ball but to investigate what sort of future a person is unconsciously heading towards. If the outcome turns out to be unsatisfactory or the life’s mission (existential program) not sufficiently fulfilled, further therapeutic techniques can be used to create necessary, inner changes in the present that will lead towards a different future.
In our next session with Sebastian, we ‘went into the future’ with him, to see how his life would unfold staying on his present course of action. As it turned out, the session contained a warning.
In his future life progression, Sebastian woke up in a spacious, two-storey house that he owned and had furnished himself. When asked to go to work and see what he is normally doing, he said:
The job was respectable and well-paid, but not particularly challenging or satisfying.
Why only 3? To find out, we contacted the Wise Old Man, an inner archetypal helper. He said the danger in Sebastian’s current life was to give in to the temptations of jobs with great financial and reputational benefits, without providing a real opportunity to combat ignorance and assist others through teaching. The Wise Old Man advised him to go more into teaching. He said, the more time Sebastian spent in teaching – not only as a side job – the more he would be fulfilling his existential program. He should, however, start slowly and choose his positions wisely.
At the end of this last session, something remarkable happened. The Wise Old Man – still as part of the hypnotic journey – handed over to Sebastian a light blue marble. He said, he was giving it to him to prove that this experience with him was ‘real,’ something to be taken seriously. At that time, neither of us had an idea how an imaginary blue marble could prompt us to take this ‘seriously,’ let alone how it could serve as any kind of proof. On the next day, however, when Sebastian left his apartment building, he saw something on the street, right in front of the entrance. He picked it up. It was the same blue marble the old man had given him the day before – this time in physical reality, presenting itself as physical proof.
Thus, the blue marble served as a wonderful sign of synchronicity. It also strengthened the warning: Only if Sebastian is willing to lead a life less spectacular perhaps, but more genuinely devoted to the teaching and assistance of others, can he make the best use of his strengths while overcoming his past weaknesses to fulfil his existential program – his current reason for being here.
Where next?
Sebastian’s story came full circle when revelations from his past shed light on his present, offering crucial insights for his future. Yet, with others, the work has only begun. What will more work into people’s karmic past uncover? Can explorations of past lives help us heal trauma and fear, help us lead happier and healthier lives? Can they deepen our understanding of life and what awaits us after death?
In the following chapter, I invite you to step with me into the reincarnationist’s study. We will delve into the intricacies of regression sessions and related practices, uncovering the tricks and techniques that can be used to discover who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.
One lunchtime, during the conference, I was walking around the campus green, amongst trees and globe shaped labs that were designed to trigger out-of-body experiences. As I was pondering the talks we heard… how understanding energetic vibrations, spacememory fields, consciousness in-and-out of the body… can bring us closer to understanding life, the ultimate nature of reality, and the meaning of our existence… I couldn’t help but think about the hypnotherapy I was practising back in England. What if – so the idea found me – we conducted past life regression sessions, not only on an occasional, as-needed basis, but as a series? The aim would be to visit a variety of past lives with the intention of finding a common theme, if there is one, that would point towards the existential program of a person’s present life.
Circumstances quickly aligned with my idea, as if destined to be realised, for the next day I met Sebastian, a young participant at the conference, who kindly and enthusiastically agreed to become the first subject. We conducted a dozen sessions into his past lives with the intention to find a pattern that could help him discover the highest course in his life.
The following case study stems from our work together – as Sebastian became the first of many people embarking on this inner adventure with me. This summary features a kaleidoscope of Sebastian’s past life patterns, each serving as a dot on the coordinate system of karmic trajectories. By connecting these dots, we could trace the curve of Sebastian’s evolutionary development. Finding negative experiences and traits was just as useful as positive ones, as they pointed towards their own counterparts (e.g. ignorance leading to a thirst of knowledge and education). Past memories, present life experiences, and future hopes were all interconnected like those dynamic, layered networks of emotionally charged memories of common themes, Stanislav Grof calls condensed experiences (COEX system). They constitute the main psychological contents that shape an individual’s destiny, hence working with them in regression sessions, through various techniques can significantly alter a life’s trajectory.
Sebastian is an intelligent young professional, who now lives in Germany, but was born in Brazil. Despite his strong desire to avoid ever returning to his birth country, he feels an inexplicable negative pull from Brazil. Not only does he not want to go back to an economically less developed country, he personally never felt as safe and homey there as he feels in Europe. His childhood was marked by poverty and a harsh, abusive upbringing, and it was only through his self-driven efforts to educate himself that he could escape his disadvantaged background. Today, Sebastian speaks almost accent-free German, holds German citizenship, and in general, exudes a very Germanic vibe. Yet, he still harbours an irrational worry that one day he might be fated to return to Brazil. For these reasons, we started our investigation into his karmic past by inducing the trance state and asking the question to trigger possible past-life memories: ‘Why was I born in Brazil?’
The Overseer
- In this relaxed, focused state of mind, repeat mentally the question ‘Why was I born in Brazil?’
- (After a couple of minutes doing so.) It’s a punishment.
- When you say ‘punishment,’ is that more of a thought or a feeling?
- Feeling! I have the goosebumps now…
Encouraged by this kinaesthetic feedback, I felt we were on the right track and went on to ask Sebastian what this punishment was for. He said, he had been a building overseer, originally from Holland, who tried his luck overseas and helped to build some kind of fortress on an island or peninsula. For this project, they utilized forced labour.
- Which country is this?
- (emotional) Brazil.
- What is the year?
- 1750.
- Tell me about the workers you oversee.
- They are all clearly undernourished. They hate me.
- Are you the one starving them?
- No, I'm not the owner. I don't manage them. I just supervise the building process.
- What’s your role?
- I can think mathematically and logically.
- Why do the workers hate you?
- Because I think I’m better than them.
- How do they know that?
- The way I speak to them and my gestures.
- Are you aware that you talk to them in such an uppish way?
- Yes.
- Does that bother you or not?
- No. I’m enjoying it.
Later in this life, he remembered changing his thinking but he never changed his behaviour of treating people like slaves. He died with the thought that he had committed a ‘grave mistake.’
After the session, Sebastian confessed that he found it emotionally ‘quite hard’ to go through the experience; at the same time, he was ‘positively’ impressed by the outcome. The remorse he felt at the moment of death was important for setting a learning curve. In general, thoughts, sentiments, and energies at the moment of death provide important indicators about the nature of the evolutionary trajectory that consciousness is on – including how much they have or have not so far fulfilled their existential program. In Sebastian’s case, realising that mistreating humans through slave labour was a ‘grave mistake’ was an important turning point. This was highlighted by a synchronistic event that occurred shortly after the session. Sebastian was listening to a radio show,i in which the moderator – as if out of the blue – spoke out loud the following sentence: ‘In the year 1750 something big changed and that was you.’
Synchronicities occur, when an outward event, in itself minor and causally unrelated, resonates so surprisingly with an inner event that it hits the experiencer with a sense of deep meaning. The program moderator was not talking about Sebastian’s past life when she mentioned that something big changed in 1750 (with ‘you’ she was actually referring to the audience, as this was the year when public concert halls were introduced). Yet, for Sebastian, hearing this sentence drove the message from his past life journey even deeper.
We began to explore more about the turning point around the year 1750. In the next hypnosis session, we got in touch with Sebastian’s non-physical (inner) guide named Larjin, who revealed to him that at that point of his development he was harbouring ‘too much arrogance.’
Hence, we used the phrase ‘too much arrogance’ as a trigger to find another important point on the trajectory of Sebastian’s past. It led us back into an even earlier life, when the slave-trading behaviour began.
The Slave Trader
- Where are you now?
- I’m sitting at a table. A rough, wooden table. I’m wearing brown leather boots and dark trousers. We are in a tavern, with five others, somewhere in the cellar.
- What are you doing?
- We are traders.
- What are you trading in?
- Humans.
This disturbing revelation was soon overshadowed by an even more unsettling discovery when I asked him to move to the next significant event in this lifetime.
- There is a celebration in the church community. I am being declared a Man of God. They honour me for my ‘good work.’
This was yet another life we unearthed with the same theme: slavery. At the end of the session, we again contacted Sebastian’s non-physical helper Larjin. He revealed that Sebastian’s consciousness in this old life was seeking ‘Anerkennung’ (recognition or approval). His intentions weren’t sadistic or malign; he was seeking recognition in a misguided way. In his community’s understanding, there was nothing morally wrong about selling humans. He, too, believed that selling people or supervising them as slaves, could make an honourable profession.
As it turned out during his next session, this was not the only kind of ignorance he was entangled in.
The Ignorant Village Man
In his next session, Sebastian found himself in a land of arid climate with dry trees, living in a small, dirty village he described as unhygienic, with flies buzzing around animal carcasses. He saw himself as a barefoot man in his mid 50s, who lived alone in one of the primitive houses: no furniture, no door, just a curtain. He had lost wife and daughter but at first, he could not remember how they died.
- In a moment, I will say the word NOWw. When I say the word NOWw, you will know exactly how your wife and daughter died. [Pause.] NOWw.
- They were ill.
- What kind of illness?
- No one knows. They were very thin.
- What did you do when they were so thin and ill?
- I prayed.
- And what happened?
- They died.
- Did you call a doctor?
- No, I was praying. I thought that was enough.
In this incarnation, the man from the village died alone and miserable. Due to ignorance, he had let his family die from a lack of medical treatment. Ignorance had trapped him multiple times: both the building engineer and the slave trader had been ignorant of the wrong they were engaging in. The theme of ignorance has also been prevalent in Sebastian’s current life: As a child, he grew up in an environment full of ignorance and poverty. We are beginning to see a pattern here, points plotted on the coordinate system of his karmic development, through which the curve can be drawn.
However, the curve does not just show ignorance but also the evolutionary drive to come out of ignorance. We can see that in Sebastian’s current incarnation, in which he had this deep, in-built urge to pursue education. That helped him, against all odds, to work as a teenager, collect money to enable himself to graduate from high school, get a job abroad, and eventually study at a university in Germany to make it all the way to earn a Ph.D.
This positive turn, as we found during our next session, has also not just begun in his current life...
The Developmental Helper
During the next session, we discovered yet another past life of Sebastian in which he went to a developing country – but this time, he and his colleagues wanted to bring progress to the people there. Thus, the theme remained the same, but the intention has changed: Now, they wanted to help. The task, however, could not be completed. He, the developmental helper, got caught up in a complicated, confusing political situation. At the end, he was captured and executed.
Here, we can see the challenge embedded within Sebastian’s COEX system, tensioned between living in a developed vs developing country, ignorance vs education, arrogance vs assistance. The question arises how in the present life, Sebastian can best move away from ignorance and arrogance, in order to find and walk his highest path in life.
Sebastian’s Existential Program: Sharing Knowledge and Teaching Wisdom
The technique we used to find the answer is called future life progression. It is the future-oriented counterpart of therapeutic regressions. It’s more imaginative in its nature, however, as the goal is not so much to gaze into a psychic crystal-ball but to investigate what sort of future a person is unconsciously heading towards. If the outcome turns out to be unsatisfactory or the life’s mission (existential program) not sufficiently fulfilled, further therapeutic techniques can be used to create necessary, inner changes in the present that will lead towards a different future.
In our next session with Sebastian, we ‘went into the future’ with him, to see how his life would unfold staying on his present course of action. As it turned out, the session contained a warning.
In his future life progression, Sebastian woke up in a spacious, two-storey house that he owned and had furnished himself. When asked to go to work and see what he is normally doing, he said:
- I'm teaching. At uni... I think... I don't know which one.
- Listen to yourself speaking, until you get a feeling for what is it that you are teaching.
- Research methods – something really abstract.
- Who are your students? Try to get a feeling for them: what is their background?
- (surprised) This is not a university, this is a school!
- Interesting. How come pupils in a school learn about research methods? Go back in time, when you got a chance to teach research methods in a school. What can you see?
- Bad students... they disappointed me... made me sad... one must start to teach them earlier... when they still can have fun with it.
- Who offered you this job in a school? How did this become part of the school curriculum?
- Acquaintances... I have the feeling this is not my main job though.
- What is your main job?
- Something in IT, with data management.
The job was respectable and well-paid, but not particularly challenging or satisfying.
- In a moment’s time, when I say the word NOWw, a number between 0 and 10 will appear in front of you. It will indicate the extent to which you are fulfilling your existential program: 0 – not at all, 10 – completely. Look at that number NOWw. What is the number?
- 3.
Why only 3? To find out, we contacted the Wise Old Man, an inner archetypal helper. He said the danger in Sebastian’s current life was to give in to the temptations of jobs with great financial and reputational benefits, without providing a real opportunity to combat ignorance and assist others through teaching. The Wise Old Man advised him to go more into teaching. He said, the more time Sebastian spent in teaching – not only as a side job – the more he would be fulfilling his existential program. He should, however, start slowly and choose his positions wisely.
- He says, it is my task to help people through clarification and critical thinking. But he also says that I must start small.
- What does small mean? What sort of size group?
- Not size, the size doesn’t matter – but I must find people who are already searching. I must present what I know to those who are already searching for information. Those are the ones I can assist. […] I see myself offering talks and workshops.
At the end of this last session, something remarkable happened. The Wise Old Man – still as part of the hypnotic journey – handed over to Sebastian a light blue marble. He said, he was giving it to him to prove that this experience with him was ‘real,’ something to be taken seriously. At that time, neither of us had an idea how an imaginary blue marble could prompt us to take this ‘seriously,’ let alone how it could serve as any kind of proof. On the next day, however, when Sebastian left his apartment building, he saw something on the street, right in front of the entrance. He picked it up. It was the same blue marble the old man had given him the day before – this time in physical reality, presenting itself as physical proof.
Thus, the blue marble served as a wonderful sign of synchronicity. It also strengthened the warning: Only if Sebastian is willing to lead a life less spectacular perhaps, but more genuinely devoted to the teaching and assistance of others, can he make the best use of his strengths while overcoming his past weaknesses to fulfil his existential program – his current reason for being here.
Where next?
Sebastian’s story came full circle when revelations from his past shed light on his present, offering crucial insights for his future. Yet, with others, the work has only begun. What will more work into people’s karmic past uncover? Can explorations of past lives help us heal trauma and fear, help us lead happier and healthier lives? Can they deepen our understanding of life and what awaits us after death?
In the following chapter, I invite you to step with me into the reincarnationist’s study. We will delve into the intricacies of regression sessions and related practices, uncovering the tricks and techniques that can be used to discover who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.