Past Life Therapy
Contrary to some people think, Past Life Therapy (PLT) did not arise within the spiritualism. It was created in 1967 by the Doctor of Psychology Morris Netherton, who was even Protestant, and did not believe in Reincarnation.
The purpose of PLT has never been to "prove" the existence of past lives, but rather to seek the origin of traumas that are deeply stored in patients’ minds and thus bring them up and treat them. It does not matter if the origin of such traumas is in this very life, in the intrauterine period or in a previous life. It is important to emphasize that PLT is effective even for treatment of patients who do not believe in reincarnation
Dr. Morris Netherton
In order to free himself from a nightmare that had always disturbed him, in which he saw himself dying drowned in a ship, Dr. Morris sought treatment with a therapist, who then subjected him to deep hypnosis, in order to find out if such a nightmare came from some memory stored in his subconscious. But in this memory regression, something totally unexpected occurred: He recalled being another person in a previous life, even remembered his old name and the name of the ship in which he was shipwrecked.
Impressed with such memories, he began an intensive search of several American maritime databases, until he was able to confirm that both his former name and the ship's name were real. He then intensified his research and developed a method of treating his patients' traumas, where he led them to an altered state of consciousness, in which they were able to access information from past lives without the need for the use of classical hypnosis , also called passive hypnosis.
His book "Past lives Therapy” was the first past life regression book to address the use of reincarnation as a reference for therapy and has remained a valuable source of information for those engaged in research and clinical practice.
In his book “Strangers in the land of confusion”, he presents compeling cases from his extensive file of over 40,000 sessions
“For 45 years, I have processed over forty thousand sessions in which people lifted the boundaries of their minds and changed their lives. Many sought therapy to heal physical and emotional pain and did, indeed, free themselves of addictions, phobias, and physical problems. Many others, however, expanded their lives by exploring the far boundaries of their soul’s evolution. They discovered earlier existences in which events and situations continue to create the structure of their lives today. They learned that spiritual evolution determines who they are from cell to soul. The exploration of this evolutionary process is what I call Past Life Therapy.
Reviewing thousands of sessions over the years has revealed drugs, politics, materialism and the irresponsible treatment of children as a few of the sources of confusion which are endemic in the lives of us all. I decided to write this book when it became evident that the ultimate source of confusion is the increasing distortion of spiritual beliefs and practices. God and religion are used as excuses for corrosive government policies, church edicts of condemnation, and destructive personal behavior.”
Dr. Brian Weiss
Dr. Brian Weiss is an American psychiatrist, hypnotherapist and author. Graduated from Yale University, he has been a professor of medicine at several American colleges. His research includes reincarnation, past life regression and survival of the human soul after death.
After 18 months dealing with a patient named Catherine through traditional therapies, he realized that no medication or technique was working. Then he started using hypnosis in one of the sessions. To his utter astonishment, his patient began to remember all the details of a previous life and traumas suffered in it. Dr. Weiss stated: "Nothing in my past had prepared me for that. I was totally surprised when such things happened". He did not believe in reincarnation at the time but, after confirming elements of Catherine's stories through public records, he came to be convinced of the survival of an element of the human personality after death. After a few regression sessions, the patient was fully healed from her traumas!
Weiss took four years to gather courage and take the professional risk of writing what happened, even with all the seriousness and technical documentation of his work, because of the resistance to the idea of Reincarnation. According to him, "Throughout history mankind has resisted change and acceptance of new ideas". It could not be different with respect to a truth that has the power to shake the foundations of the major Western religions. He also cites the example of the great genius Galileo Galilei, who discovered the moons of Jupiter, and the astronomers of the time refused to accept and even look at these satellites, because their existence was incompatible with their beliefs.
Weiss describes in details Catherine’s story in his book "Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives" – Brian L. Weiss (1988)
Proving that the memories of other lives do not come from the imagination
Without being able to refute the work of the renowned Doctors presented above, many critics of Reincarnation state, quite simply, that such "memories" of past lives would only be "the fruit of imagination" created by the minds of the regressed people. However, such critics cannot explain the fact that such recollections were later confirmed by research which proved their real existence. Would it also be just a coincidence?
A scientific research, conducted by psychologist and neuroscientist Júlio Peres, from Peres Regressive Therapy Institute, in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, has shown that people undergoing regression are not activating the brain region responsible for the imagination, but the region responsible for memory!
In recent years, researchers have traced our memory up to structural and molecular levels and found that memories are stored throughout brain structures in many connections between neurons.
This storage can occur in two ways: Short-term memories are processed in the front of the brain in a highly developed region, called the prefrontal lobe. As time passes, short-term memory is converted into long-term memory in the hippocampus, a deeper area of the brain. The hippocampus helps solidify the pattern of connections that form a memory
Dr. Peres' team, using CT scans, performed a brain mapping of some of their patients during the regression sessions. The results were completely conclusive: The area of the brain activated when the patient remembers an experience occurred, both in this life and in a past life, is that of the memory, that is, the regions of Temporal lobe and those of the left prefrontal lobe, which responds by memory and emotion.
The figure above shows two images of the patient’s memory area. The left image shows the area of memory with the patient in normal state, while the image on the right shows the image of the memory area with the patient during the regression state. This means that during the regression the patient is accessing memories of real events, and not imagining them.
On the other hand, the brain region responsible for the imagination, that is, the neurological circuits that are related to fantasy, during the regression do not come into activity.
"The neurophysiological pathways used to rescue traumatic memories from present-day life were also used to rescue traumatic situations from past lives. The structures related to fantasy, to the neurophysiological circuits that are related to fantasy are other structures, other circuits. "(Dr. Peres).
The results of these researches demonstrate that the memories of those submitted to memory regression are real, and not simply the result of imagination.
The works developed by Dr. Morris Netherton, Dr. Brian Weiss and Dr. Julio Peres, show that reincarnation is independent of "belief" or "religion". It is not a "dogma," but rather a natural truth that is increasingly being revealed by science, through well-known and renowned researchers such as those cited in this chapter.
