Reincarnation is literally defined as “to be made flesh again.” The general idea (with a few exceptions) is that when your physical body perishes at the end of your life, a certain essence (called the soul, the spirit, the jiva, the atman, the self, the no-self, the I, and a whole lot of other names depending on where you’re from and what you believe) continues to exist in some sort of intangible, microscopic, or ethereal form, retaining the experiences and lessons learned from the life you’ve just led. This soul takes those experiences, as well as all it has experienced in all of the previous bodies it’s ever inhabited, and transfers them into the next body it inhabits. In many belief systems, this soul continues to learn and evolve, becoming wiser and more enlightened with each incarnation, until eventually it “graduates” from the material world and is able to achieve nirvana, moksha, heaven, oneness with god, or that sort of thing.
There are all sorts of religions that base much of their teachings on a belief in reincarnation. Hinduism is one of the oldest and most widely recognized, first introducing the notion of reincarnation in writing in the Bhagavad Gita, which was written between 2100 and 2600 years ago. Hindu reincarnation incorporates the notion of Karma, which is defined as the sum total of one’s actions throughout the entire existence of that person’s soul. Whether you have built up good or bad karma determines what sort of a body you’re born into. Generally speaking, the more you learn and experience, and the better your karma, the higher level of a physical body you inhabit, beginning with, perhaps, some sort of small plant, and progressing through the animal kingdom until your soul inhabits a beetle, and then a mouse, and then maybe a lion, and then, finally, a human body. After many incarnations, you eventually realize that the material world isn’t all it’s cut out to be, and that the greatest type of existence is a spiritual existence. After lots more spiritual learning and concentration, you eventually leave the material world and, depending on what sort of Hindu school of thought you accept, either become absorbed into an eternal state of peace and happiness, inhabit heaven with god, or become a god yourself.
Buddhists, by contrast, don’t believe in an individual, independent soul that moves from body to body. Instead, they see the cycle of life as an endless continuum, in which we are all part of a universal and all-encompassing energy. While our energy moves from body to body and life to life without maintaining its individuality, the notion of rebirth is still relatively central to Buddhist philosophy; Buddha himself describes his many incarnations in his teachings, and Tibetan Buddhist monks believe that their deceased Lamas are often reborn as new individuals who will resume the role of their predecessors.
There are fringe sects of all major religions, as well as a wide berth of smaller religious groups that refer to reincarnation in some fashion. Plato and Pythagoras spoke of reincarnation in Greek history, Norse mythology mentions it, Ashkenazi and Orthodox Jews have written of it, Native American Inuits accept it as a central tenet of their spirituality, Gnostic and new age Christians believe it was taught in the early days of their faith, and various sufi Muslims interpret certain portions of the Koran as proof of the existence of past lives. Beyond these historic and/or wide-reaching ideologies, there is a host of smaller religious groups that base their convictions on some sort of reincarnation.
Despite such wide-range and historic interest in reincarnation by all sorts of world religions, the western world’s large-scale curiosity in reincarnation is a fairly recent phenomenon. This is due in part to the apparent incompatibility between reincarnation and the dominant religion of the western world, Christianity: most Christians believe in the resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ and the ascent into heaven of all those who accept Christ as the son of god, and the notion of reincarnation might undermine or contradict these beliefs if they are interpreted strictly. Nonetheless, mass media has made significant steps in introducing the idea to western thought, as dozens of major motion pictures and popular books have been made about the subject, and reincarnation has been a major topic of discussion on radio and television talk shows, internet blogs, and the like. In the last fifty years some noteworthy scientific research has been done in an attempt to validate reincarnation, most prominently by Professor Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia, who, over the course of their respective careers, recorded interviews with thousands of young children who recounted past lives and beginning in 1960 published numerous articles, studies, and books on their findings. There is much skepticism over this body of research in the scientific community, but notable scientists and researchers have at least allowed for the possibility of the existence of the phenomenon. Carl Sagan may have most famously summarized that reincarnation stands with certain ESP (extrasensory perception) phenomena as one of several “examples of contentions that might be true.”
Past Life Regression: Using Self Hypnosis to Explore Past Lives
As we’ve already mentioned, you can use hypnotherapy to make positive suggestions to your subconscious mind, as well as to recall deeply-buried subconscious memories. Hypnotherapists have historically had success with simple tasks like helping clients remember where they may have misplaced particular valuables, or with the careful and sensitive process of recalling repressed childhood memories that may be at the root of emotional issues a client is facing. It is this ability to delve into the subconscious memory that links hypnotherapy with reincarnation by posing this question: if past lives exist, and we have a soul that retains the memories and experiences from those past lives, and hypnosis enables us to remember things we thought we’d forgotten, is there a way to somehow access our past life memories through hypnosis?
Since at least 1950, past life regression Hypnotherapists have attempted to do just that. Through a careful “induction” process (that’s the method used to facilitate a hypnotic state, or “trance”) a Hypnotherapist helps her client relax the body and mind completely in order to create a strong rapport with the subconscious mind. The Hypnotherapist then invites the client to explore memories of a past life, using open-ended, non-leading questions to help the client sense and describe his surroundings as accurately and with as little influence from the Hypnotherapist as possible. The process may take thirty minutes or several hours, and a client most often leaves a successful session with a large volume of knowledge stemming from the scenes and events he has witnessed. In many reported cases, these scenes and events are later verified as historically accurate, and in many more cases the client is able to address and resolve issues in the past life that positively affect his behavior and well-being in his current life.
Despite the volume of cases in which clients have reported positive past life regression experiences, past life regression hypnotherapy is still a subject of great contention. In the scientific community it is generally viewed with skepticism for several reasons. The foremost scientific objection to past life regression is a general objection to reincarnation, stemming from the fact that thus far it has been scientifically impossible to prove the existence of the soul. Despite various tests, scientists have found no conclusive evidence to support the existence of any entity that moves from one body to another from life to life, carrying memories and experiences with it. Additionally, many skeptics believe that the memories a subject unearths in a past life regression hypnotherapy session are faulty. It is a fact that the human mind is perfectly capable of distorting real memories or conjuring completely unreal ones. It is therefore possible that past life memories are merely constructions, stemming from a combination of imagination and previous experiences.
For example, let’s imagine you had a regression session in which you recounted in great detail a life you led as a fisherman on a Scandinavian whaling vessel at the beginning of the 20th century. The skeptic would refute this memory, simply attributing it to an article you may have read about whaling in a magazine, an old history lesson, or your long-standing interest in Norwegian culture. Such a criticism is not without merit; there has been at least one famous case of past life regression in which a subject claimed to have lived a previous life, cited many specific facts and details concerning the particulars of that life, but later was found to have already had previous knowledge of most of her supposedly newly-recovered memories. If we take this a step further, there have been thousands of cases in which subjects seek past life regression hypnotherapy to alleviate various problems in their current lives–physical pain, irrational fears, or anxiety about an upcoming event to name a few. These subjects are regressed into the past, and during their hypnotherapy session they determine that their problems in their current lives are rooted in traumatic events that occurred in a previous life. Once these problems are understood and put to rest in the hypnotic state, many subjects report a significant decrease in their initial symptoms. Psychotherapists who do not trust the legitimacy of past life memories obviously disapprove of such a treatment regimen, which, in their opinion, is based on fallacy and therefore potentially harmful.
Despite these concerns, one of the most inherently intriguing aspects of the past life regression process is that you, the subject, can work with a Hypnotherapist or with audio files like those offered here at Energy of Avalon, and decide for yourself what to believe, without any doctrine or dogma influencing your decision. You can work through the process, and as long as you are open-minded and willing to practice and follow instructions, you are at the very least guaranteed a brief glimpse into a possible past life experience. The images in that past life may be so extensive and vivid, and you may come away with knowledge so compelling that you may decide that the memories are real, and that you have just discovered a new and fascinating spirit world. Or you may come away from your work with little more than a thorough understanding of the hypnotic induction process and a few scattered images of memories you decide came straight out of your imagination. Whatever the case, the process is consistently safe, relaxing, and fun, and both believers and non-believers almost always take positive life lessons from their experiences.
