People are not prepared for it, at least not the first time around. I still have to roam the Internet to see if there are any 'how to' books about it. There must be. Given the market, it is hard to imagine that, by now, someone has not made an attempt to make money over one. Instead, starting the day of Lara's cremation, I referred to trusted people who had all lost a wife to cancer, as recently as last summer. (Lara and I went to her funeral.) I tried to learn from their experience, and I probably did, if only because they were able to empathize with natural ease. The atmosphere was thick in all three encounters, but gratifying.
One of them, a former colleague from the Foreign Service, had a remarkable comment. He had followed my blog daily, and more recently viewed Lara's photo album. I told him she and I had been true soul mates. He nodded in recognition, and then went on to say that we "probably already met in previous lives". The statement, slightly startling as it was, was offered not as a speculative one, but as one of fact. Impressed by his self-assured poise, I asked him if that is really what he meant, and he said: "That is what I believe, yes."
Then he started telling me about the writings of Dr Brian L. Weiss, a Florida psychiatrist, who published his first book some twenty five years ago. I had never heard of the man. My friend gave me one of his books to read, his third actually, entitled "Only Love Is Real'. I took it gratefully home, started reading at 6:00PM and finished it at 3:00 in the morning. The next day I read it again. Then I quickly ordered three more books through Amazon, by express mail, and read those as well, including Weiss' first book, titled "Many Lives, Many Masters".
Why were they so fascinating?
Weiss is a Colombia and Yale trained physician. His medical education had followed orthodox lines and his psychiatric training had been by-the-book traditional. He practiced, taught and published widely, building up a solid career as a therapist and a nationwide name among his fellows as a scientist.
Then, one day, a patient walks into his office, a young woman by the name of Catherine. She has all kinds of problems and describes herself as a 'mess'. None of Weiss' standard methods work over many months; her symptoms persist unabated. Frustrated, he then tries hypnosis in order to look for traumas earlier in her life that might explain her present condition. Still standard practice. Nothing truly dramatic turns up even as early as her third birthday.
But at the next session, seeking to explore what lay in the period around her birth, he gives her an open-ended instruction: "Go to when your problems began!". Catherine in a way overshoots the runway, and starts describing herself as a woman in Egypt, four thousand years ago! Many accounts follow from different lives, some fifteen or twenty, out of 86 she has lived so far according to what Catherine says in trance. Her present condition improves and all of her complaints eventually disappear.
Weiss tells he didn't want to believe what he saw happening in front of him. He calls himself a sceptic and at that point he certainly didn't accept reincarnation. But he saw no alternative way to interpret the facts he was witnessing in his very own office. He tapes her statements, has the tapes transcribed, adds his comments. But he waits four years before publishing, for fear of being ridiculed by his peers, and afraid to lose his position and financial security in the process. Then he publishes his first book and it sells two million copies over the next 25 years. Since Catherine, Weiss has treated thousands of patients with this so-called regression therapy, going back to their earlier lives. Many other psychiatrists and therapists now do, too.
The books evoke a coherent view about the relationship between, soul, body, life, death and the hereafter, in which serial reincarnation figures prominently. The overall view takes in free will and destiny, immortality and transitoriness as well. The books elaborate on empathy and compassion, but above all, love. (Why did it remind me of 1 Corinthians 13?). They tell about how people experience death and rejoin the origin of their souls, before being born again into a next life.
Patients recount their stories under deep hypnosis with great lucidity and a sharp eye for detail. Some patients acquire documentary proof that their stories check out. Some even stand at the grave of a person they once were. Most benefit from the therapy, in that their contemporary problems disappear.
They also tell of soul mates, but not in the colloquial sense of the term (and in the way Lara and I liked to hear ourselves described). Soul mates, in the Weiss' overall view, are two souls who keep running into each other in different incarnations but in different relationships over time, even different genders: not only husband and wife, but also sister and sister, mother and daughter etc.
I find reading those books exceptionally uplifting, for they offer a construct that is much more plausible (strange as it may sound) than the one emerging from the catechism by which I grew up. (In fact, early christianity accepted reincarnation, until all references to it were deleted from the New Testament within the first three hundred years.) Had I read Weiss' works before Lara went to her death, my tranquility of spirit would have been greatly enhanced compared to where I found myself now. I am also sure that if Lara had read these books, she would have derived greater peace of mind from them. Instead, she relied - a little half-heartedly perhaps - on the mere strength of her own conviction that life ends at death.
Having read these books, I now find it easier to be at peace with Lara's death. One, because I feel she is living on in another dimension until she is ready to assume a next life. She is not really dead, in other words. And two, because I am certain that the two of us will meet again in a future incarnation, just a breath away.
Saying this, I run the risk of being seen as soft in the head. "Poor man, fresh widower, his emotions frazzled, groping for any form of solace; no wonder his mind is rambling." True, I would be prone to connecting the dots without looking at the numbers.
And still, and still and still.
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