Many Lives, Many Masters

-Dr Brain Weiss

Many Lives, Many Masters is the true story of a prominent psychiatrist, his young patient, and the past-life therapy that changed both their lives. As a traditional psychotherapist, Dr. Brian Weiss, M.D., graduating Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, from Columbia University and Yale Medical School, spent years in the disciplined study of the human psychology, training his mind to think as a scientist and a physician.

He held steadfastly to conservatism in his profession, distrusting anything that could not be proved by traditional scientific method. But when he met his 27-year old patient, Catherine, in 1980, who came to his office seeking help for her anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias, he was taken aback at what unfolded in the therapy sessions that followed, which jolted him out of his conventional ways of thought and psychiatry.

For the first time, he came face-to-face with the concept of reincarnation and the many tenets of Hinduism, which, as he says in the last chapter of the book, I thought only Hindus practiced.”

For 18 months, Dr. Weiss used conventional methods of treatment to help Catherine overcome her traumas. When nothing seemed to work, he tried hypnosis, which, he explains, is an excellent tool to help a patient remember long-forgotten incidents. There is nothing mysterious about it. It is just a state of focused concentration. Under the instruction of a trained hypnotist, the patient’s body relaxes, causing the memory to sharpen eliciting memories of long-forgotten traumas that were disrupting their lives.”

During the initial sessions, the doctor regressed her back to her early childhood and she strained and stretched her mind bringing out isolated, deeply-repressed memory fragments. She remembered from age five when she swallowed water and felt gagged when pushed from a diving board into a pool; and at age three when her father reeking of alcohol molested her one night.

But what came next, catapulted skeptics like Dr. Weiss into believing in parapsychology, and in what Shakespeare had said in Hamlet ,There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

In a series of trance-like states, Catherine recalled past life memories that proved to be the causative factors of her recurring nightmares and anxiety attack symptoms. She remembers living 86 times in physical state in different places on this earth both as male and female. She recalled vividly the details of each birth  her name, her family, physical appearance, the landscape, and how she was killed by stabbing, by drowning, or illness. And in each lifetime she experiences myriad events “making progress to fulfill all of the agreements and all of the Karmic (from Hindu concept of Karma) debts that are owed.”

Dr. Weiss’s skepticism was eroded, however, when she began to channel messages from “the space between lives, messages from the many Masters (highly evolved souls not presently in body) that also contained remarkable revelations about his family and his dead son. Often he had heard his patients talk about near-death experiences when they float out of their mortal bodies guided towards a bright white light before reentering their discarded body once again.

But Catherine revealed much more. As she floats out of her body after each death, she says, I am aware of a bright light. It’s wonderful; you get energy from this light. Then, while waiting to be reborn in the in-between-lives state, she learns from the Masters great wisdom and becomes a conduit for transcendental knowledge.