Remembrances of lives past
Remembrances of lives past
Remembrances of lives past
In one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman.
The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the dcor of his office - leather couch, granite-topped coffee table - makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring.
DeBell has a private practice in Manhattan where he specializes in hypnotizing those hoping to retrieve memories of past lives. DeBell likes to reflect on how previous lives can alter one's sense of self. He, for example, believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk.
Belief in reincarnation, he said, "allows you to experience history as yours. It gives you a different sense of what it means to be human."
Peter Bostock, a retired language teacher from Winnipeg, Manitoba, says that in the early 1880s he managed a large estate - possibly Chatsworth - in Derbyshire, England.
He thinks he was in love with the soul of his current wife, Jo-Anne, then embodied as a cook in the estate's kitchen. He says he and his wife share the kind "of attraction and recognition that a soul makes when it encounters the familiar." In that spirit, the couple traveled recently to Rhinebeck, N.Y., where they and more than 200 others paid $355 each to attend a weekend seminar run by one of America's pre-eminent proselytizers on the subject of reincarnation, Dr. Brian Weiss.
Regression Therapy helps understand these deep routed issues and to help resolve them within to enable you to live a fuller life, which is free from these deep routed conflicts within.
On this second day of the seminar, Weiss, a 65-year-old Florida resident, took a break from teaching and, over lunch, reflected on the rise of interest in the West in reincarnation.
Like DeBell, he is a psychiatrist with an Ivy League pedigree (Columbia University and Yale Medical School). Weiss was censured by the medical establishment in 1988 after he published "Many Lives, Many Masters." In it he details his work with a patient he calls Catherine, who, under hypnosis, the book says, remembered multiple past lives, relieving her of paralyzing phobias. It has sold more than a million copies.
Now, Weiss said, "Doctors are e-mailing me. They're not so concerned with their reputations and careers. We can talk about this openly."
According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a quarter of Americans now believe in reincarnation.
In religious terms, the human narrative - birth, life, death and rebirth - has been relatively straightforward in the West. You were born. You lived. You died. After a judgment you went to heaven (or hell) forever.
But nearly a billion Hindus and a half-billion Buddhists - not to mention the ancient Greeks, certain Jews and a few Christians - have for thousands of years believed something else. Theirs is, as the theologians say, a cyclical view. You are born, you live, you die - and because nobody's perfect, your soul is born again, right here on earth.
Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, Columbia University's first Hindu chaplain, called it "a re-do." After an unspecified number of tries, the soul finally achieves perfection. Only then does the soul go to live with God.
Spiritually minded Americans have had a love affair with Eastern religion at least since the Beatles traveled to India in 1968, but for more than a generation, reincarnation remained a fringe or even shameful belief.
Now the East is in our backyards, accessible on the Internet and in every yoga studio.
At the same time, Western religion is failing to satisfy growing numbers of people.
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