Category: Afterlife

Past-Life Regression Pioneer Dr. Brian L. Weiss

When spending time with my mother in the Staten Island house I grew up in, which I frequently do, I take my daily walks at lovely Sailor Snug Harbor, formerly a home for retired mariners and now a cultural and arts center with gorgeous landscaped grounds. Most days, as I walk, I listen to podcasts or videos on my phone—generally woo-woo-related content that’s research for upcoming books (yes, Reader, there are two more in the works . . . so far). One day, I was listening to some material that had to do with “old souls,” a phrase used to refer to souls who’ve had many incarnations—hundreds, perhaps even thousands of them. Apparently, those of us who are drawn to this material, I had come to understand, are likely to be old souls too. And on a gut level, I felt that to be true. As I cut across a parking lot on my way to visit the loo, a license plate on a parked car caught my eye. “HERE B4,” it read. Yep, I thought, me too.

Have you, too, had the feeling you’ve been here before, and maybe more than once? As I write in my book Adventures of a Soul, it could be meeting someone for the first time and having a profound sense that you’ve known them before; it could be an inordinate fondness for—or even an obsession with—something not of your era or culture; or visiting a place for a first time and feeling, I know this place, often with deep emotion involved. (I had this feeling myself upon visiting several cloisters and convents, before I’d ever been told that I’d had many past lives in religious orders—which I was, a number of times.) It could be a phobia, for no apparent reason, or a prodigious inborn talent for, and knowledge of, something like music or math. For those who are curious about the topic, I direct you not only to the astonishing work of Dr. Jim Tucker at my alma mater, UVa, regarding children’s past-life memories—featured in several of my previous blog posts—but now, too, to that of Dr. Brian L. Weiss.

Brian L. Weiss was one of the earliest mainstream authors (and a best-selling one at that) in the field of reincarnation. A psychotherapist with an MD and an Ivy-League background, he used hypnotic regression as a tool with his patients, taking them back to their childhoods to find the roots of issues manifesting in their present-day lives. A skeptic about reincarnation at the time, he was astonished when, while regressing one of his patients, whom he refers to as Catherine, she appeared to recall past-life traumas that seemed to be the cause of the severe emotional problems plaguing her in the present. And while Catherine, quite remarkably, began to rapidly recover once those memories were explored and processed, it wasn’t until she began to bring in, or “channel,” messages from spirit “Masters” that were extremely personal to Dr. Weiss and his family, with information no one outside the family knew—in particular, messages about his deceased son—that he became convinced that what was going on was “real.”

Weiss wrote about the experience in his first book, Many Lives, Many Masters.  He went on to write several more books as he continued to work with his patients’ past-life memories, finding them a powerful means of healing, including Same Soul, Many Bodies (about, believe it or not, “progression therapy,” that is, peering into the future—or a future—through hypnosis! I haven’t read it yet, but having just learned about this phenomenon, now I must!), and the hugely synchronistic, fated past-live love story Only Love Is Real (a personal favorite, Reader, as I’m not only a hopeless romantic, but have experienced a fated past-life love story of my own, as told in my book Adventures of a Soul).

Why does all this matter? Well, to me, the idea of past lives is a fascinating topic in and of itself. But then, I always want to learn as much as I can about who I am, where I come from, and where I may be going. Not everyone, I’ve found, does! (Reader, it boggles my mind, but it’s the case.) If we can heal our present-day maladies by processing wounds and traumas from other lives in our past, in my opinion, that’s a valuable thing to know.

And then there’s this: I’m working on a few more books, one of which deals with a subject that I touch upon only briefly in Adventures—the idea that we are currently in the midst of a seismic shift in consciousness on the planet, one that has been predicted by a number of ancient cultures around the world, and talked about by countless channelers and intuitives in the “New Age” movement over the past several decades or more. One aspect of what they see happening to us humans as we evolve as a species is that we will be connecting far more seamlessly with what some call our “higher selves”—the divine part of ourselves to which we are always connected, but with which most (though not all) of us here on the planet don’t currently consciously interact. As we do, it’s said, one thing that we can look forward to is the ability to remember all of our past lives. Yes, Reader, you read that right! And not only remember them, but be able to access, for each and every life, all of the knowledge, experience, and talents that we possessed. Think about what that would mean . . . especially for old souls!

Do I believe it? Yes. Why? I’ll tackle that subject, as I said, in a future book! For now . . . check out Weiss’s books, and the videos on his YouTube channel, and you, too, may find yourself as intrigued as I am by the clues, and sometimes keys, to a present life of happiness that our past lives may hold.

Mediumship: Follow the Science at the Windbridge Research Center

I was talking to a friend the other night after learning the deeply sad news that one of his brothers had just died in an accident. Louie had lost his mother a few years before, and had been extremely close to her, as had his sister. He was not only now grieving the sudden death of his beloved brother, he was also quite concerned about how the shock and loss were affecting his sister, who was still very much mourning their mom. As we talked on one of those video apps—we were a continent apart—I could see the worry etched on his face as he spoke about his brother, and then his sister, wondering how he could help her.

While I generally hesitate, Reader, to bring up my beliefs about the continuation of consciousness after death with anyone going through a recent loss, as Louie expressed his profound sadness about his brother, pointing out that he would never see a new exhibition of Louie’s paintings, some in a style his brother had especially loved, it just popped out. “Well, you know me, Louie. You know I believe he can see the paintings, and that he’s around you right now. And that you can talk to him, and he’ll hear you.”

As I said it, I felt a twinge of apprehension. Had I overstepped? But Louie simply took in what I said. I told him, then, that during the course of the explorations that had resulted in my book Adventures of a Soul, and in the years since, in which I’d continued to explore, I’d become convinced that death was not the end of consciousness, but simply a transition, and a marvelous one at that. “Well, maybe it’s hard for me to believe it, because I haven’t had any experiences like you’ve had,” he said. “Of course,” I answered. “It really is the personal experiences that create the belief. That’s why I wrote the book: to encourage people to explore these things themselves. To perhaps help set them on their own exploratory path.”

After we hung up, though, I realized that what I’d said wasn’t entirely true. Personal experiences are the most persuasive. However, more and more each year, there is research being carried out that, to my mind, proves, or in some cases, all but proves, many of the phenomena I write about in my book, including the existence of an “afterlife.” I’ve written many posts about such work in this blog. But specifically, this time, I thought about the Windbridge Research Center. As their Web site explains, “The mission of the Windbridge Research Center is to ease suffering around dying, death, and what comes next by performing rigorous scientific research and sharing the results and other customized content with the general public, clinicians (like medical and mental health professionals), scientists (like researchers and philosophers), and practitioners (like mediums).” Windbridge has been studying, among other things, the ability of mediums for more than fifteen years. And I do mean scientifically studying. Serious, scientific, “fully blinded” (more than five levels of blinding!), peer-reviewed, replicated studies with optimized environments, and maximized controls. Their conclusion? Put simply, that “some mediums are able to acquire information about deceased persons through some unknown or anomalous means.”

I’d never heard of Windbridge until I happened upon the book Investigating Mediums by Julie Beischel, PhD, while trolling the waters on Amazon. Reader, with that title, of course I bought it, pronto. And I couldn’t put it down. Reading about the extraordinary work of the Windbridge Institute—which still exists, but which has since shifted its work on mediumship research to the not-for-profit Windbridge Research Center—I kept thinking, How have I not heard of this place before? Dr. Beischel, whose graduate training includes pharmacology, toxicology, microbiology, immunology, physiology, biochemistry, protocol design, and statistics, founded the Center with her husband, Mark Boccuzzi, a psi researcher, in 2017. As she explains in that book (which is now out of print, but is actually a collection of three previously published e-books, including the very much available Among Mediums: A Scientist’s Quest for Answers), her interest in mediums began after the death of her mother, and her first mediumship reading soon thereafter, which she approached as an experiment (definitely a woman after my own heart!). It’s a story that she recounts in the section of Among Mediums called “How Did I Get Here?”, and one with a great twist at its ending. (Reader, you know I’m not going to give it away! And by the way, I see she’s recently published another book—Love and the Afterlife: How to Stay Connected to Your Human and Animal Loved Ones. I’m definitely adding it to my “gotta get it” list!) After finishing graduate school, Dr. Beischel began performing medium research as a post-doctoral fellow, became totally hooked . . . and, as they say, the rest is history.

The section of Windbridge’s site that first caught my eye asks, “Why Is Mediumship Research Important?” That question is answered in three parts, each of which is expanded upon, but I’ll give you the main points here: “1. No research question affects more people than ‘What happens when we we die?’ 2. People are getting mediumship readings every day and it is important to understand the resulting effects of those experiences. Extensive research exists demonstrating that spontaneous after-death communication experiences (ADCs) have a positive impact on grief. 3. Sensory experiences related to accurate information about the deceased and similar psychic abilities point to more extensive human capabilities than can be explained by the currently dominant scientific paradigm.”

Amen to all that! I had experienced the “positive impact on grief” mentioned in point number 2 myself, after connecting with my recently deceased father through a personal friend with newfound mediumship abilities, as I wrote about in my book (quite a story, if I do say so myself!). And on a larger level, my explorations into these sorts of phenomena have completely taken away my own fear of death . . . a result that I didn’t expect when I began them. But it’s sure been a nice side benefit, Reader.

Getting back to Louie though. . . the day after our video chat, he texted me to thank me for our talk. “I wish I had your faith in the spiritual afterlife,” he wrote. I could almost hear the hopelessness and desolation in his voice as I read it. Well, Reader, that was all the invitation I needed. “You know, Louie, there are a lot of studies going on, scientific studies, on mediumship and the afterlife, that you might find interesting . . . ” I didn’t intend to take away Louie’s grief; I knew that I couldn’t, nor should I. I still grieve my loved ones when they pass—though more and more, I find myself focusing on celebrating their life, and on the memories and love we shared. But I did want to offer him some hope, and perhaps, through him, offer some to his sister, too. With the continuing work of places like the Windbridge Research Center, that hope is no longer unfounded, and I am so grateful to pioneers like Beischel and Boccuzzi for that.

 

Testing the Afterlife

In my book Adventures of a Soul, I chronicle a number of “informal experiments” that I performed with the invisible world. For instance, I accumulated a posse of ten gifted psychics and mediums—whom I dubbed my “Dream Team”—and had readings with them every six months for several years, to see whether they delivered any of the same information. Another thing I did was to pose challenges to beings in spirit, asking them to manifest specific “signs” to show me they were truly “there.”

At the time that I was doing these “experiments,” and even years later when I was writing about them, I wasn’t aware of many others who shared my proclivity for testing out the invisible realms. Or at least not many who were writing about it. But that has begun to change. And I’m excited about that.

Case in point: Recently, I discovered The Test: Incredible Proof of the Afterlife, a fascinating book by best-selling French author Stéphane Allix—a former war correspondent, journalist, and documentary director, cofounder of the Institute for Research on Extraordinary Experiences (INREES), and definitely a kindred spirit in his earnest desire to investigate whether consciousness survives beyond bodily death. Apparently, his interest in the subject was initially sparked by the untimely loss of his brother. But the book centers around a test he constructed after his father’s death.

Allix secretly placed five objects in his father’s coffin before it was buried. Then he sought out six mediums to see if they could—ostensibly with the aid of his father—name the objects in question. I won’t give away the results, Reader, but of course, there would be no book if they hadn’t been provocative.

Allix questions the six pracitioners, just as I did, about how they work, how their information comes in, and what they’ve learned from their experiences. Particularly interesting to me were one of the medium’s views on how schizophrenia may relate to mediumship—a question I’ve pondered myself.

Alas, the fantastic-looking INREES Web site (you know I had to check that out, Reader) is entirely in French . . . sacré blue! While learning French has always been on my bucket list, for now, I’ll have to satisfy myself with another intriguing-sounding Allix book available in English, When I Was Someone Else: The Incredible True Story of Past Life Connection.

I hope Allix’s book, and mine, will inspire you to conduct some “tests” of your own, if you haven’t already. Be prepared for some intriguing adventures!