http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2008/9/7/lifefocus/1959597&sec=lifefocus
The Star, Sunday September 7, 2008
Experts who believe
THESE are two well-known experts who believe that people can regress into and “see” their past lives.
Dr Brian Weiss
He is one of the most compelling cases, as he was chairman of the psychiatry department at the prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami, United States.
“I was an academic psychiatrist, utterly sceptical about what I considered ‘non-scientific areas’. I knew nothing about the concept of reincarnation, and didn’t have the slightest interest in it,” he says in his book, Mirrors of Time: Using Regression for Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Healing (Hay House, ISBN: 978-1561709298).
But his life changed forever when, 20 years back, he had a new patient, Catherine, who was suffering from panic attacks, phobias and nightmares.
A year of conventional psychiatric treatment saw little progress so Dr Weiss decided to try hypnosis, a therapy he’d used successfully before. Catherine was able to easily recall traumatic childhood memories. But when he asked her to go to the “source” of her pain, Dr Weiss was shaken to his core – because Catherine regressed back hundreds of years and started talking about living many “remarkably emotional” previous lives with “an extraordinary wealth of detail”.
“I thought it was imagination or fantasy,” says Dr Weiss. “I didn’t believe in any of this. And neither did she.”
Yet, as Catherine recalled more past lives, her symptoms vanished within a few months, without the use of any drugs.
But Dr Weiss was still stuck in his “left (analytical) brain” and didn’t believe it until Catherine told him she had “met” Dr Weiss’ own father and related intimate family details – like how his daughter shared his father’s Hebrew name, Avram – that nobody could have known.
Even then, fearing for his professional reputation, Dr Weiss waited five years and did more research before “going public”.
“I was clinical professor at the University of Miami. I had ... children ... a big mortgage,” he says. “I could lose all of that. But (Catherine’s experience) was so real and so detailed. You know how you get the feeling in your gut, in your bones? There was no trick to this.”
After treating thousands of patients, he says, “Now, there is no doubt in my mind that past-life regression therapy offers a rapid and effective way of treating physical and emotional symptoms, in addition to offering many other benefits.”
In May, Dr Weiss discussed past life regression on the Oprah show (oprah.about.com/od/oprahshowrecaps/p/pastliferegress.htm). His website is brianweiss.com.
Dr Ian Stevenson
He was a trained medical doctor and psychiatrist (who headed the University of Virginia’s Division of Personality Studies in the United States) who travelled around the world for over four decades to research possible reincarnation cases.
Among some 3,000 cases studies, Dr Stevenson (pic) found several hundred with “strong evidence”, according to the Psychiatric News magazine (December 2004) of the American Psychiatric Association.
For example, back in the 1970s, while under hypnosis, a woman called Delores Jay assumed the personality of a 19th century German named Gretchen Gottlieb who spoke fluent German – although Jay herself had apparently never learnt or even heard the language.
“I think most memories of previous lives recalled under hypnosis are fantasies,” Dr Stevenson said. “But this appears to be an exception because the subject was able to speak a foreign language.”
Then there was a Lebanese boy who spontaneously recalled that he was a man who had died in another village. The boy and his family had purportedly never had contact with the deceased.
Dr Stevenson took the boy to the other village. There, the deceased’s relatives asked the boy where, in his previous life, he had kept his dog. The boy pointed to the right place. What was the deceased’s sister’s name? Where had he lain while dying from tuberculosis? Where did he hide his gun? The boy answered everything correctly.
In interviewing witnesses and reviewing documents, Dr. Stevenson searched for alternate explanations: that the child knew through other means, that the witnesses were engaged in fraud or self-delusion, that there was sheer coincidence or misunderstanding. But in scores of cases, Dr. Stevenson concluded there was no “normal” explanation.
The Psychiatric News article quotes other professors of psychiatry, such as Dr Harold Lief (University of Pennsylvania) and Dr Paul Wender (University of Utah), praising Dr Stevenson’s “meticulous” and “detailed” research findings.
After 40 years of research, 12 books and dozens of scholarly articles, Dr Stevenson concluded that his detailed case studies provided more than ample room for, “a rational person, if he wants, to believe in reincarnation on the basis of evidence”.
Some of Dr Stevenson’s research can be accessed athealthsystem.virginia.edu/personalitystudies.
