by Bryan Jameison

Q: What is the benefit of learning about one’s past lives?

A: Although there are many benefits, the reason is because most people want to find solutions to present-life problems that are causing them some kind of personal pain. Through regression [and other methods], they usually can discover what happened in the past to create their present problems. Once this is known, whatever is necessary is done to neutralize the cause, which invariably originates either in this life or one from the past. My own operating assumption is that nearly everything occurring in an individual’s present life is the effect of some former cause. Over the years, I have noticed that if the initial trauma is neutralized, a domino effect is created. Not only is the causal trauma neutralized but so, too, are the emotional consequences i.e. fear, begets fear, hate, etc. of those future experiences, which have been based upon the original trauma.

One also becomes aware that our Earthly scenarios only are parts of a continuum instead of a series of random chance beginnings and tragic endings. From this perspective it is easier to see and better appreciate our interplay with others as well as accept the responsibility for what happens to us. One soon realizes there are no accidents, no chance encounters, no irrevocable mistakes, no villains and no victims. Knowing past lives is one more way of knowing yourself more completely. Imagine what it would be like to have no knowledge of your physical origins, such as your ancestors, ethnicity or medical history. Without knowledge of the past, we are in much the same position as someone who develops amnesia in mid-life and, thereafter is unable to recall his previous experiences, which have shaped his life. His former knowledge and abilities are lost, meaningful relationships forgotten, and most importantly, his inner sense of self-identity vanishes.

Q: If past life therapy is so effective, why don’t more conventional psychotherapists use or recommend it?

A: One reason may be that most of them are not trained to take into account the influence the soul has on a person. Therefore, conflict of philosophies exists. As I see it, conventional therapy is focused on getting the patient to the point where he can understand and cope with what has happened to him in this life. Unfortunately, this may not be the true or only cause of his problem. Nonetheless, he usually is taught only how to cope with it, a process that may take many years of therapy. Conventional therapists also are not trained to recognize the ever-present symptoms of past life trauma for what they are.

Conversely, competent past life therapists always take into consideration the influence of the soul’s actions in all of its past incarnations. When properly done, the causal event in the causal lifetime is pinpointed quickly. Once this is done, it enables the client to re-experience and neutralize the present life effect of that initial cause. This is where Past Life Therapy (P.L.T.) and psychotherapy agree. Both believe in order to achieve healing, the person must revisit the scene of the trauma as soon as possible. After the damaging emotional charge is released, a client’s symptoms usually disappear within a matter of a few minutes. Therefore, further professional intervention usually is unnecessary. This, of course could be the main reason why some therapists are or are not using P.L.T.

Q: Can past life memories be recalled through dreams?

A: Yes, and they often are.

Q: When I was visiting an old Spanish fort in the Caribbean, I felt as though I had been there before. I also had a horrible panic attack. Could that have been because of a past life?

A: Yes. Experiences like those you describe, often may surface when visiting a place you have never been in this life but one with which you were very familiar in a past life. Many American GI’s in both world wars, as well as many world travelers, have described former life locations and events with amazing accuracy. In addition to either good or bad feelings, many of these people have also had flashbacks of how these places looked long ago.

General George Patton was one of the most notable of these people. He openly discussed his beliefs with his fellow officers. He believed many of the battlefields on which he was fighting, were the very same battlefields where he had engaged a different enemy centuries ago. He also consciously could recall the sights, sounds and smells of those long past battles with amazing detail. Often, he described the exact lay of the land around the next bend or over the next hill before seeing it.

One case of deja-vu I encountered involved a long-time friend of mine. While visiting London with his wife, he began to display bizarre behavior. Jim, who is a very easy-going, honest and hard-working guy, became not only paranoid, but also uncharacteristically irritable the moment he stepped off the plane at Heathrow airport. His usual pleasant disposition became one of snarling contempt for everyone around him. This experience culminated in what he described as a panic attack. As he was about to walk under an arched stone opening between rooms in Madam Tussaud’s wax museum, he froze, almost becoming violent and refused to go one step farther. Neither he nor his wife had any idea of why this was happening. The only thing they could think of doing was to abandon the tour.

From that point on, as long as Jim was in London, he constantly was peering over his shoulder, always feeling someone was about to attack him from behind at any moment. Upon leaving the city, however, he returned to his normal, easy-going self. Their remaining week in Europe was totally uneventful until they reentered London to catch their flight home. While there, he once again was plagued by his paranoid and bizarre behavior.

Several years later this matter came up in a regression. It turned out he had, indeed, lived in London over 200 years earlier. As an accomplished pickpocket and thief, he would escape by going down into the sewers and hiding. This tactic worked until he eventually was apprehended, tried, convicted and publicly hanged for his crimes at the ripe old age of eighteen.

Interestingly, his personality as the thief was exactly the same as the personality he displayed while on vacation in London. Stooping to pass through the arches at the museum activated his past life character. Apparently that simple act reminded him of the times when he used to duck into ancient London sewers to escape the law. He also gained insight into why he was so compulsively honest in this lifetime. The regression also explained why he had tried so hard to prove to his father he was an upright and responsible person. His father, with whom he always had had a poor and distant relationship, turned out to be his hangman in London. Although his father never knew about their past life connection, it, nevertheless, had affected his present life relationship with his son. This sort of scenario is more common than one might imagine.

Q: What do you believe is the purpose of reincarnation, and how long will it take to fulfill that purpose?

A: Albert Camus once said, “Reincarnation appears to be the eternal game of the soul through which it does whatever it has decided to do.” I personally believe that the ultimate purpose of any incarnation is to be true to oneself. Follow your love, satisfy your dreams and, above all, be yourself. An axiom to live by is “YOU be YOU, (UBU), whatever YOU is.” If your soul had intended for you to be someone else other than who you are, it would have incarnated as that person in the first place.

I have observed whenever people have condemned themselves for what they are, pretended to be something they were not, conformed to the status quo against their will or compromised themselves by rejecting the true nature of their own being, they suffered immensely for doing so. To pretend to be anything but what and who your are is hypocrisy, regardless of how noble your motives may be. Besides, trying to be something you are not is a fool’s game played only by losers. Simply put, when your soul is on track doing what it has committed itself to do [in a positive way], you will be at peace with yourself. Your inner and outer selves always are synchronized with each other when you find yourself happy, healthy and feeling good about how you are living your life.

On the other hand, when a soul is resisting learning its lessons or compromising itself, the outer person is usually chronically miserable. To look back someday on this life with pleasure and pride, I suggest you make a mental note of your deepest [constructive] desires, then decide to fulfill them. If you are completely honest with yourself, you’ll be well on your way to finding your spiritual path as well as the true purpose of your life. Always remember, “To thine own self be true” (Shakespeare). The cost of trying to be like everyone or anyone else is too high.

To the second part of your question, let me just say, if you incarnate to do something, eventually you will do it! If it’s something that’s going to take more than one incarnation to complete, you’ll simply continue to come back until you finish. As Jesus taught: one farmer tills the soil, another plants the crop and the last farmer reaps the harvest. In effect, He was saying it may take a soul several incarnations to complete a task and claim its rewards.

Q: How can you be sure that some of your clients are not just making up stories or fantasizing?

A: That is a very frequently asked question. There is no way I can be sure if someone just is telling me a big story because I am not inside their head. Regarding fantasizing, once again, there is no way to be sure. However, I am, nonetheless, convinced people are telling me the truth about their past lives because I can’t imagine why they would make up such colorless characters or fantasize such boring incarnations as ninety percent of past life accounts tend to be.

I ask you, why would anyone fantasize having a past life lover with broken teeth, dirty scraggly, lice-infested hair, a beggar’s wardrobe and a repugnant body odor? Why would anyone make up a story about being engaged in a famous Civil War battle and then admit he deserted his comrades by running away and, thereafter being branded as a coward for the rest of his life? Or why would anyone tell me a heartbreaking, emotionally charged story about watching every member of his family slowly perish, one by one, during an ancient plague in Europe? I can’t believe any rational person would conjure up such tales, let alone re-experience the emotional torment associated with them just to impress me with either his creative imagination or his acting skills. Because there are many more tragic tales than exciting adventures with happy endings, I must assume they are true. The most convincing factor is that people’s lives are noticeably changed as a result of their regression experiences.

Q: Could people be tapping into their own genetic or cellular memories rather than recalling past lives?

A: Possibly, but I hardly think so. Unless I’m mistaken, all of those being regressed would have to share a common gene pool with all persons in the past whom they claimed to have been. In cases when a Caucasian regressee explored one past life after another in succession in which he always was Caucasian, I’d say genetic memory could be a possibility. But more frequently we’ll find that a Caucasian in this life, indeed, was a Caucasian in one of his lives, and black in another and before that, Oriental or American Indian, and so forth.

Since these various racial groupings do not share a common gene pool, I don’t see how a person being regressed could possibly be racking a genetic thread back into past lives when he was a member of other races. There are those who contend all mankind can trace its beginnings to a common ancestry, but to the best of my knowledge, that has not been proven absolutely, nor do I believe it ever will be. If you eliminate that theory, the case for genetic memory is quite weak.

Q: Can the existence of reincarnation be proven?

A: No, not really, at least not by any means acceptable to materialistic science, however, whether or not past life recall is nothing but one’s imagination, I believe can be put to rest by the following two cases. The first of these involved a middle-age man named Gary who was born blind. He wanted to be regressed to find out if there was some karmic reason for his being visually challenged. During the ensuing regression, he discovered he once was an Indian brave whose village was attacked and burned by white men. During the course of the battle, he witnessed seeing his friends and family being brutally massacred before he escaped to the safety of the nearby woods. From there he continued to watch as the bodies of the women and children were mutilated and scalped by the invaders. He could see blood and dead bodies everywhere. He watched the white men torch every teepee as they proceeded to rampage through the village until nothing was left but smoking ashes. (Gary’s voice quivered, nearly failing as tears rolled down his cheeks as he described the horror of the scene.) He then described how, because of his intense grief over his loss and his inability to bear the pain any longer, he threw himself over the edge of a very high cliff onto the rocks below, where he died several hours later. Having no wish to ever witness anything like that again, at soul level he chose to be blind, during this incarnation.

You may ask how this story could prove reincarnation’s existence. I believe that, inasmuch as the blind have no way of describing smoke or flames other than noting the feeling of heat and/or smell, he had to actually have witnessed the melee. Having no depth perception, the blind must make judgments of distance by sounds and feel, and most certainly cannot distinguish one race from another at a distance. It is evident the only way he could have described that horrible scene was by actually seeing it. He was quite relieved to learn that his blindness had nothing to do with any wrongdoing on his part.

The other case occurred very early in my research, long before I was aware of all of the ramifications of past life regression. One night I had planned to regress a woman who had asked if her husband could be present. After saying he could, she asked if I would mind if he had a drink or two before the session to help him relax. I told her, as far as I was concerned, it would be no problem. What I didn’t know at the time was that a couple of drinks to him was about a half a fifth of whiskey. Thus, when they arrived, he was already very drunk and in a belligerent mood. He immediately made it known that, as far as he was concerned, all this past life stuff was a “bunch of crap!” while ridiculing his wife’s belief in reincarnation, he relentlessly taunted her into being regressed.

After putting up with his snide and degrading remarks for about fifteen minutes, she snapped back at him, “If you are so damned brave, why don’t you do it?” Without hesitation, he accepted her challenge. Although it was not unusual in those days for a regressee to have a glass or two of wine before being regressed, I never had attempted to regress anyone who couldn’t say three words in a row without slurring. Actually, I had no intention of regressing him. I thought by the time we finished the introductory phase of the process, he would be “out” for the evening. To my surprise, however, he immediately slipped into a past life in which he was a sailor in the British Navy sometime during the late 1500’s.

From that moment until the session ended, which was about an hour and a half later, he was extremely articulate, describing all of his experiences in minute detail. In fact, he was one of the most lucid and historically accurate regresses I’ve ever encountered during my entire career before or since. For instance, he was able to explain how to load and fire a flintlock pistol and accurately depict what was involved in raising the ship’s sails and what life aboard ship was like, especially the smells, repeatedly complaining about the repugnant odor below deck in the crew’s quarters.

Amazingly, he absolutely showed no signs of being intoxicated during his session, nor did he slur his words. Not only that but, at the conclusion of the regression he was cold sober and able to fully recall everything that had transpired during the session. I suppose one could say he had an extremely vivid imagination, but imagination must have a base of knowledge about the subject being fantasized.

After the regression, he assured me he knew nothing about the customs of the British Navy nor the weaponry used during the 1500’s, let alone anything about seamanship or the wearing apparel common to that time period. Yet, upon investigation we found his descriptions of these things to be completely accurate. At least in this case, I can say that the contention his recalled past life memories were fantasies is pure nonsense.

Q: If reincarnation exists, why don’t more people believe in it?

A: When one considers how much power the Catholic Church has had in the past, and still does have in many parts of the world, it is easy to see why many people, especially reincarnated Catholics, would be afraid even to consider the concept of rebirth. In the Western world, people lived in intellectual paralysis for centuries as the direct result of religious suppression endorsed by the Church. One doctrine high on the Eastern Church’s list of taboos was reincarnation. In those good old days, people were told what to believe and what to think. Taking the Church’s bloody history into consideration, you can easily see why reincarnation was a dead issue.

Although there have been many splits, reformations and schisms within the Christian faith, most denominations have retained the Mother Church’s belief, which rejects spiritual pre-existence. Therefore, it is not surprising most of the Christian World continues to reject reincarnation 1500 years later.

Another reason is the thought of being totally responsible for creating one’s fate is unacceptable to most people. When things go wrong, they prefer to blame the gods, evil spirits or some other guy, rather than accept their share of the responsibility for their life experiences. If nothing else, reincarnation is all about accepting personal responsibility for our lives; admittedly, sometimes that is very difficult.

Q: If reincarnation really exists, why do most Christian religions reject it?

A: I believe one of the primary reasons is they basically are ignorant about their own religion’s early history and generally have a complete lack of knowledge about early prevailing Christian beliefs concerning reincarnation. For instance, many of the Jews of Jesus’ time, including Jesus, believed in its existence. If I’m not mistaken, Christian religions claim Jesus was the Messiah. However, in order for Him to be the Messiah, certain conditions of Jewish prophecy first had to be fulfilled. One of the most important was that Elijah (Elias) had to return to Earth to prepare the way for the arrival of the Messiah. “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (Malachi 4.5, Mark 9:11-13 and Luke: 1:17 [Lamsa]).

What may come to most Christians as a surprise, is that for Jesus to be the Messiah, reincarnation had to exist. As Jesus said, “Elias, (Elijah) truly shall first come and restore all things. But I say unto you, Elias (Elijah) is come already, and they did know him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they wished…. Hearing this his disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist”. Then without further comment, they all left. (Matthew 17:11-13, [King James Bible]). If John the Baptist was not the reincarnation of Elijah, then it logically follows that Jesus could not be the Messiah. Whether Jesus was or was not the Messiah, is not, of course, the real issue. The point is that, if His words were properly understood, their obvious impact would have a disastrous effect upon current misconceptions about and objections to reincarnation. If reincarnation were accepted, it would require a major overhaul of church teaching, but worst of all, it would call for a long overdue apology.

Christianity’s general rejection of reincarnation also is traceable to the presumed destruction of many ancient scriptures, in addition to those that were either deleted or misinterpreted by the early Church fathers. In all likelihood these men believed the concept of rebirth too dangerous a doctrine for the common man. As though deleting most scriptural references to reincarnation wasn’t enough, the concept of the soul’s pre-existence was declared an anathema (cursed) by the Eastern bishops attending the Second Council of Constantinople, which was convened by Emperor Justinian in 553 A.D.

Of the 165 bishops who signed the acts of the Council, only six were from the Roman Church. One easily could conclude it was a “rigged” vote because the emperor, Justinian, stacked the Council with his own men, who then “rubber-stamped” his negative position on reincarnation. Supposedly, he did this to make Church Doctrine conform with his own beliefs and to appease his warped wife, Theodora, and ex-prostitute, who, besides being born in poverty, had committed many horrible sins. Because of this and many other reasons, she was terrified by the thought of karma or of being born again.

A little known fact by most Christians is that the Roman Pope, Vigilus, was so emphatically opposed to what was happening in Constantinople, he had to be kidnapped and brought there by Justinian’s henchmen. After spending nearly three years under house arrest, he finally was able to escape but mysteriously died en route back to Rome without ever attending the Council or approving its findings. Hence, the Roman Church has never officially condemned the belief in reincarnation, although most Catholics believe it did. (By the way, there were other vitally important issues ruled on during those early Church Councils, such as: the divinity of Jesus, the Virgin birth, the composition of the solar system, and the existence of the Holy Trinity. One of the most important questions, however, was how many angels simultaneously could occupy the space on the head of a pin!)

As the Inquisitions proved, the rulings of the Church were to be taken very seriously. To do otherwise, would have proven to be hazardous to one’s health. In any case, the issue of whether reincarnation did or did not exist was no longer discussed within the hallowed walls of the Christian religions after the Council of Constantinople adjourned. Even though there is no scriptural or spiritually valid reasons for most Christian religions to reject pre-existence, they continue to do so.

Excerpt from Exploring Our Forgotten Lives

See Part II here.