As I explained in my previous post, trauma from a previous life can manifest in a current life. After my clients have released the emotional energy carried over from a past life trauma, they often wonder why they had to experience such traumatic events in the first place. What value can we gain from such painful experiences?
Dechen’s story, detailed in my book, Other Lives, Other Realms, shows how a trauma can affect us across multiple lifetimes. As a sixteen-year-old girl named Lesandra, Deschen died terribly many centuries ago.
Lesandra shared a dirt-floored hut in rural England with her father and her sister. She felt exhausted after working all day in their small vegetable plot. Arriving home at dusk, she lay down to rest. Her younger sister began preparing the evening meal, intending to have it ready when their father returned.
Lesandra’s sister watched over a pot strung over an open fire, near Lesandra’s bed. Suddenly, the oil flared up. As the fire erupted, her sister panicked, and rushed out of the hut. Lesandra woke to a raging fire. Trapped behind the flames, she burned to death before she could find the door.
The fear from this death carried over into Dechen’s current life. As a doctor, she faced many life and death incidents. Some of these triggered debilitating anxiety. During the regression, Dechen re-experienced this past life, accepted the death and passed over peacefully. Afterwards, she noticed that her anxiety had disappeared.
Like many other clients, Dechen wondered why she experienced such a painful death.
During a life-between-lives regression, clients are given the opportunity to question the ‘Council of Elders.’ The Council is made up of wise beings who know us better than we know ourselves. They offer us their gentle wisdom.
I have noticed that clients are given the same answer whenever they ask why they have faced certain challenges. Which is? ‘You chose it.’
You may wonder how you can choose something before you were born. In the regression, you discover that you are much, much more than your physical body. Your greater self, or soul self, chose to be born. It chose to experience your past lives and your current life.
When we are born, we forget the choices we made during our life-between-lives. Indeed, some of the decisions we made then may seem inexplicable now. Why would we choose to experience a traumatic death? Why choose to be persecuted and tortured?
The Council explains. ‘To be whole, to complete your journey as a human on Earth, you need to experience life from all human perspectives. You need to know what it is like to kill, persecute and torture, just as you need to know what it is like to be killed, persecuted and tortured. You need to know what it is like to be fat, crippled and ill, as well as strong, healthy and beautiful.’
While this may seem perverse to us, the Council’s reasoning makes perfect sense. Sharing in every aspect of the human experience allows us to develop genuine compassion. We reach the point where we know that our only real choice is to love and accept every individual, just as they are. Once we know how painful it is to feel disconnected from love, to feel disconnected from our true self, we lose the ability to judge others.
Of course, there are times when judgment seems like a natural reaction to the worst excesses of human behavior—the callousness of terrorists, for example. But terrorists have cut themselves off from love. They have separated from their higher selves. Their hearts are set like stone. Remembering the pain of our past lives when we were disconnected, when our hearts weighed like granite in our chests, we soften, and feel compassion. There can be no happy ending for terrorists. They will suffer and struggle over countless lifetimes, acting out their anger and resentment. The pain their actions cause will spill over from lifetime to lifetime, until they gain sufficient insight to renounce and release their self-hatred, and choose instead to reconnect to love.
If our higher self chooses how we will be born and what we will experience, what level of free will do we humans have? I will address this question in my next blog.
My position on karma might surprise you. I do not subscribe to the common thinking about this concept. I base my view on experience, research and much thought. To explain my views, I am going to take you on a journey starting thousands of years ago.
Background
Through millennia our ancestors struggled to survive. Strength prevailed. The strongest men were most likely to prosper, and passed their advantages down to their offspring.
As society evolved, our leaders learned that they did not have to rely on mere physical strength. They found more subtle ways to control people.
Constantine, the fourth century Roman Emperor, inherited a divided and rebellious empire. He saw religion as a tool he could use to control the masses. He converted to Christianity and mandated that it be the official religion. In the sixth century, Justinian united the people further by convening the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, which further decreed formal Christian doctrine.
Rulers in Asian and Indo-European countries also used religion as a means of control. The Islamic caliphate governed in accordance with religious law. Sultans and Rajahs used the Hindu caste system to maintain their power.
Religious texts were concealed from the ordinary people. Most could not read. Even if they could, the sacred texts were in written in languages restricted to the ruling classes. Buddhist sutras were originally written in Vedic Sanskrit, and the Christian Bible was written in Latin.
The ruling classes used religious beliefs to keep their subjects in control—beliefs that enshrined obedience, submission, and humility. By remaining meek, the masses believed they would assure their place in heaven, or in a more favourable incarnation.
I personally know how this works. When I was a young girl, the minister in our Methodist church preached hell-fire and damnation. We were conditioned to believe that bad deeds, or even bad thoughts, attracted eternal punishment.
Only now in the twenty-first century are we beginning to seriously challenge these deeply held views.
Karma
‘Karma’ is a Sanskrit word that means ‘deed’ or ‘action.’ The word also embodies the idea that we reap what we sow. Our future depends on our current actions. Bad deeds bring bad karma, or suffering. Good deeds bring rewards.
In Hinduism, karma plays a role in the caste system. It assumes that people born into a lower caste have accumulated negative karma. Bad deeds committed in previous lives lead to low status in the current life.
You don’t need me to point out the coercive power that karma wields over those born into the lower castes. It justifies their inferior status, while emphasising the importance of humility as a way to progress in later lives.
What Regressions Tell Us
By undertaking regressions we are given an opportunity to see the bigger picture of our lives and their purpose. In our life-between-lives, we meet the Council of Elders, wise beings who answer our most searching questions.
We learn that are not punished and we are not rewarded. We are guided, we are helped, and we are given opportunities. Our free will is sacrosanct. The bottom line is clear, and its consequences inescapable: we choose our experiences.
Over and over again, I have listened as my clients received the same message from the Council. We create our reality. We make plans, with others, to take on certain roles in our incarnations. We endeavour to act out these roles. Even if we fail, the Council never chastises us for our performance. Any punishment we experience is our own creation. We punish ourselves through our sense of guilt.
You know this. Remember a time when you felt deep guilt and were found out. Even with your fear and shame, the chance to come clean offered you a real sense of relief.
Here is an example from a regression. A client experienced a past life as a soldier named Bill, in World War I. Bill felt a great deal of guilt about surviving World War I, in which his brother and mates all died. At the beginning of the war, he had convinced them to join up. He felt responsible for their deaths.
When he crossed over into his life-between-lives, he visited the Council of Elders. He saw them as judges with wigs and red gowns sitting at a high bench in a courtroom. He felt small, and sat with his head bowed. He trembled as he waited for their judgement.
The Council gently told him that he alone imagined them to be judges. He had no reason to feel guilty. His mates had free will and had chosen their fate. The Council suddenly changed appearance. He now found himself and the Council members sitting casually together on lounge chairs.
This client had been bought up in a strictly Christian household. In adulthood, he rejected his Christian roots. While he initially approached the Council with guilt carried over from his previous life, he soon relaxed and let go of that old conditioning. He was open enough to see the Council as friendly advisors rather than judges.
The information received in regressions does not bear out the idea that karmic consequences are visited upon an individual without their soul’s permission.
In my book, Other Lives, Other Realms, I outline the case of Morris, who suffers from cancer. Morris’s soul knew that cancer was a possibility because he chose a very sensitive body. Morris’s soul had good reasons for this choice and had accepted all the possible consequences.
In a recent regression, a client realised he had been murdered in a past life. In that life, he’d had an affair with the wife of his murderer. ‘What was the purpose of that life?’ I asked. ‘It was a gift,’ he replied.
Further investigation revealed that the wife and the husband were soul relatives of my client. This means they belonged to the same soul group in their life-between-lives. The husband and wife, as souls, had planned their lives together. The husband was working on jealousy, an issue he’d spent many lives trying to resolve. My client had been recruited to play an important role. He would have an affair with the wife. In accepting this role, he agreed to be murdered, if that was the way it played out.
The murderer was caught and hung. When his soul ascended, he suffered no karmic consequences. He might be disappointed that he failed to overcome this challenge and forgive, because he knows that, in another incarnation, he will face the same circumstances to have another attempt at resolution.
Conclusion
Our idea of karma as punishment is flawed. We have been conditioned to believe that bad deeds, thoughts or intentions bring negative consequences.
Reincarnation and karma are eastern concepts that we in the western hemisphere have adopted. These concepts are contaminated. We have all, east and west, been conditioned to be fearful. Those in control have used religious ideas for their own purposes.
I believe that negative consequences can spill from one life into the next. However, these consequences are not the result of bad deeds, nor are they intended as punishment. I will discuss this in my next blog.
No one can decide this question for you. You need to do the research and undertake experiences that help you decide.
There is no way of knowing absolutely if you have had past lives. However you can come to your own view through objective and subjective research
When someone is regressed into a past life, they usually feel deeply connected to the character they are being in the past life. They say it “feels like it is me.” Even so, some people still wonder if they are just using their imagination and making it all up.
There is objective evidence for past lives.
The late Professor Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia spent forty years systematically researching children who remember past lives. Professor Stevenson interviewed children who remembered their previous homes, their names and the names of their families. When these families were found, the children could easily identify who each member of the previous family was, and could give the family members’ correct names.
By the end of his career, Professor Stevenson had documented over 2,500 cases. Before he retired, he gave a lecture summarizing his work. Watch his thirty minute lecture below:
Dr Robert Almeder, a philosopher from Georgia State University, discovered Dr Stevenson’s work and checked his research. Dr Almeder found that Dr Stevenson’s research was systematic and impeccable. He challenges the current practice of psychology to accept reincarnation as a genuine phenomenon. Watch Dr Almeder talk about this below:
The Monroe Institute was set up by Robert Monroe after he spontaneously started going out of body in the 1950s. He subjectively researched his experience and then started researching the experience of his subjects while in other states of consciousness. During Bob Monroe’s subjective research and his research at the institute, Bob discovered that humans experience many lives on planet Earth before moving on. He and others have written a number of books about their out of body experiences. Watch below Bob being interviewed about his out of body experience not long after his first book, Journeys Out Of the Body, was published.
Dr Thomas Campbell, a physicist who works for NASA and the USA Defence Department, helped Bob with his research at the Monroe Institute . Even though Dr Campbell is a hard-nosed scientist and physicist, he wanted to learn to go out of body. He was determined to learn as much as he could about the nature of reality even if that included the esoteric. Dr Campbell discovered that the universe is much larger, diverse and complex than most scientists had ever imagined. He developed his theory of everything and wrote his book, My Big Toe (Theory of Everything). – in other words, his theory of the nature of our cosmic system. He has a number of lectures on YouTube including one explaining reincarnation. However you might find his ideas more easy to understand if you watch one of his entire lectures. He explains his ideas clearly and carefully so that the ordinary public can understand the nature of our universe. The talk he gave in 2010 at The Monroe Institute is particularly informative. Watch the first episode (0/12) of this talk below:
Dr Michael Newton, our mentor and founder, was a clinical psychologist who stumbled on past lives when he was regressing a client to the origin of her problem. He was amazed how effective accessing a past life was in resolving her psychological problems. Intrigued, he continued to research past lives and life between lives in great detail. He has written two best sellers about what he discovered, Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls. Dr Newton explains below how he first came to research past lives and life in between lives:
Dr Brian Weiss, a psychiatrist, used age-regression, hypnotherapy techniques in his practice with clients. He also accidentally stumbled on past lives with a client. He saw how effective this process was and continued working with her exploring many lives. Dr Weiss wrote a book about that experience with his client, Katherine, called Many Lives Many Masters. Itbecame a best seller and still is.
Watch Dr Weiss answer questions about reincarnation and past lives below:
To come to your own view about the existence of past lives, you need to do research, both objective and subjective. I have given you a number of links and references above that could be very helpful for your objective research. Your subjective research may include a Past Life Regression. If so we would be delighted to help.
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