Interpreting Medicinal Metempsychosis or a defence of past life regression therapy to aid in the healing of ulcerative colitis
In two recent podcast episodes (Vestiges of another life and From the jaws of the lion), I describe the experience of regression therapy used to help heal ulcerative colitis, which I have come to call, medicinal metempsychosis. While I describe these personal experiences under hypnosis, I felt, in retrospect, there was something I needed to further submit, a discussion, perhaps. Or some additional ideas plus a background. So, as an addendum to those two episodes, I want to offer up some personal and investigative history, along with an interpretation and a defense of this concept and therapy.
Rêve du Soir, 1925, Alphonse Osbert
“I am certain I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times.”
Unorthodox possibilities – my own backward glance
Before I present a kind of chronicle as to the notion of metempsychosis, an interpretation and defense, I would like to discuss how this belief was nurtured in my childhood.
I was raised by a mother who always considered anything possible. Her childhood was not ideal, and yet something angelic, divine had protected her from the worst and most aggravating moments while growing up. Raised by an abusive alcoholic father and an emotionally vacant mother, she was able to flee her situation, moving out to Western Canada and later returning to her hometown to marry my father. And while bitter remnants of that former, desperate time returned, she managed to give my brother and me the childhood she never enjoyed.
My mother and I to this day share a belief in reincarnation. Looking back, I know it was never something forced upon me. It felt natural to wonder about. Things she was inclined to dream and think about, I mirrored her inclination. As a kid, I believed in life after death, the soul surviving in some form. In my teens, I was an avid reader of ghost stories, Edgar Allan Poe and the novels of Stephen King. The supernatural was a world I wanted to know more about.
My two favourite books in our household library were hardcover coffee table tomes, the first featuring pictures and stories related to haunted castles of England; the other, ghost stories from America. I pored over those books for hours, longing to visit those cold and creepy citadels in some English shire or view firsthand the ghostly battlefields of the Civil War. I was fascinated with that part of American history.
When it came to the first regression therapy I experienced in my mid-teens, it was simply an offshoot of everything I was drawn to. Such as it is, my soul feels real to me, I cannot deny it and if I look back through the pages of history, I am in good company with my reverent regard for reincarnation.
The past world of belief: a brief overview of like-minded souls
“As a man leaves an old garment and puts on one that is new, the Spirit leaves his mortal body and then puts on one that is new.”
If we look at the ancient world, the soul moving through multiple lifetimes is at the core of numerous philosophies and religions, especially in the east. Look at reincarnation in India. Here, it is called Punarjanman (Sanskrit punar - ‘again’ and janman - ‘birth’) and exists in the central tenets of Buddhism, the majority of Hinduism, Jainism and later Sikhism. We find it in the scripts of the great epic, The Mahabarata. One can only read The Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2 to get a deeper idea of this concept as related by Krishna to Arjuna.
In Ancient China, we find references to reincarnation in Taoism, the Tao Te Ching and the writings of Chuang-Tsu (369-286 BC): “Birth is not a beginning; death is not an end. There is existence without limitation; there is continuity without a starting point. … There is birth, there is death, there is issuing forth, there is entering in.”
Evening Poem, 1897, Alphonse Osbert -Musée d’Art, Histoire et Archéologie, Evreux, France
It is also alluded to in the writings and teachings of the Greek philosophers. According to Diogenes Laertius ( who flourished in 3rd century AD), biographer of ancient philosophers, Pythagoras (570 - 490 BC), a mathematician and mystic could remember his previous incarnations. Plato (427-347 BC), would have Socrates speak of reincarnation or metempsychosis in the Phaedo. Later Plato holds a discussion about the Myth of Er, from The Republic relating a tale where a man miraculously returns to life after 12 days dead. He goes on to describe the underworld which involves the transmigration of souls, the metempsychosis.
“They say that the soul of man is immortal, and at one time comes to an end, which is called dying, and another is born again, but never perishes. Consequently, one ought to live all one’s life in the utmost holiness.”
Reincarnation also appears in Germanic and Celtic paganism. The Gauls, like the Ancient Greeks and Indians, believed the soul was immortal. Even when Christianity in its early stages came onto the scene, the Gnostics, a Christian sect in the 1st century AD found their ideas and teachings flourishing in the Mediterranean world.
“Souls are poured from one into another of different kinds of bodies of the world.”
Yet mockery has always accompanied reincarnation. We see it lampooned in the writings of the Greek writer Lucian (c. 125 - 180 AD) and the Roman, Persius (34-62 AD) in his satires. But by the time of the Council of Nicea, a few joking jabs were no longer the issue. In 325, it became basically verboten to talk of reincarnation in the church, even though Clement of Alexandria (150-250 AD) and his student Origen (185-253 AD) had both been influential church leaders who had aligned themselves with Neoplatonism, itself a philosophy linked to metempsychosis.
There was resistance, naturally. The belief in reincarnation would linger in the background for the Christians. During the Middle Ages, the Cathars in France, the Bogomils in Bulgaria (considered to be the Gnostics of the Byzantium Empire) and the Paulicians in Armenia were all persecuted for their heresies, one being reincarnation.
Trial of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition, Bronze Relief, Ettore Ferrari, Campo de Fiori, Rome - “Since the soul is not found without body and yet is not body, it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.” - Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), words spoke at his Venice trial in 1592
During the Renaissance, with the rebirth of classical ideas in Europe, many writers, poets, thinkers and painters returned to the ancient world for inspiration. Though, with the church keeping tabs on them, the men and women who pored over the ancient texts had to be cautious. Marsillio Ficino (1433-1499), being not only a Catholic Priest and Italian scholar, figured it best to make the suggestion that Plato regarded reincarnation as more allegorical. Maybe he didn’t want to be burnt alive at the stake, which later happened to the polymath, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), for his teachings on reincarnation. In England, things were easier for the Cambridge Platonists. (It is said Shakespeare also believed in it.) A younger contemporary, John Donne (1572-1631) penned a poem entitled ‘Metempsychosis’ and sung of the “progresse of the deathlesse soule.”
By the 18th and 19th century, the heat on those who believed in metempsychosis was cooling. Voltaire didn’t find it surprising to be born more than once: “everything in nature is resurrection.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) regarded past lives as a reality. His older contemporary, Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781) felt the same: “Why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world? … Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? “(The Education of the Human Race) This sentiment was later shared by the idealist philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a man who slept with the Upanisads under his pillow: “We find the doctrine [of reincarnation] springing from the earliest and noblest ages of the human race, always spread abroad on the earth as the belief of the great majority of mankind.” A devout reader of Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, composer of mammoth operas, noted “in contrast to reincarnation and karma, all other views seem petty and narrow.”
“The least valid objection to the theory of soul-circulation is that we forget these journeyings. Even during this life and without experiencing a ‘change of clothes’, multifarious conditions vanish from our memories. How then should we expect to remember the different bodies and the still more varied conditions experienced in previous lives?”
Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, 1873, Ivan Kramskoi - Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow - “… so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other, more real life… and then return after death.” - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
In the Romantic period, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) wrote in ‘The Cloud’: “I change, but I cannot die.” William Blake (1757-1827) called his friend, the sculptor and draughtsman, John Flaxman, a “companion from eternity” in a letter espousing immortality. William Wordsworth (1750-1850) expressed that our birth to be “a sleep and a forgetting” in his magnificent poem, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’. Come the Victorians, though it was repressive in other facets, Robert Browning (1812-1889) noted in his poem ‘Paracelsus’ that he dreamt ‘I too have spent a life the sages’ way, and tread once more familiar paths.’ On the continent, both Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Honoré de Balzac believed in past lives (see the character of Princess Darya Oblonsky in the former’s Anna Karenina or the Frenchman’s esoteric novel Séraphîta). In New England, around the middle of the century, you had the rise of the American Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) were both enthusiastic about reincarnation, amongst other topics, including the philosophy of the German Idealists. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) alluded to the transmigration of souls in his poetry - one can look at the last lines of the epic, ‘Song of Myself’. Little Woman’s Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was also in good company.
When we arrive in the 20th Century, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) stands out as an advocate of reincarnation, along with Ghandi, the painter Paul Gauguin, Beatle and songwriter, George Harrison (“Friends are all souls that we’ve known in other lives.”) and novelist, J.D. Salinger. But here we have the New Age movement and the stigma of the occult attached to the belief. And with the rise of the science as the be all and end all, the curiosity surrounding the soul dissipates. Even in popular psychology, a word with the Greek word for soul, psyche in it, will forever remain a sceptical possibility.
“I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task that was given to me.”
Unorthodox thinking and healing – the current world view in the west
The trouble with the reincarnation in the twentieth and twenty-first century is we cannot place the soul under a microscope. The soul cannot be patented by pharmaceutical companies. And with metempsychosis being taboo within the church, thanks to the impact of Council of Nicea, people in the west are more comfortable dismissing the idea we have lived before, even though our history, whether we realize it or not, whether we want to realize or not, has been manipulated, censored. History is a tainted forgery of time. Or as Napoleon observed, a ‘fable agreed upon.’
One must ask the question: if reincarnation was some crazy and ridiculous idea, why would the militant church in the Medieval Era go to such trouble attacking the Cathars and similar groups and individuals? And not just campaigns of ridicule, no. These outlying groups were butchered for their beliefs. Murdered for merely believing in metempsychosis.
There’s also the internet. Today, you type in ‘reincarnation’ and amidst the fringe academic research, discussions surrounding Plato and Neoplatonism and explorations in eastern philosophies, you have, unfortunately, all kinds of eye-rolling websites that help perpetuate the stereotype that those who believe in reincarnation are eccentric loons. These sites, many just pages of fantasy and conjecture, are cast into the mire of potential attempts by those curious enough to do research.
I do believe this world is controlled by evil people, and has been for centuries. Suppression is part and parcel of control. Dismissing concepts such as metempsychosis only contribute to my suspicions. Meanwhile, I find the concept of reincarnation liberating. And I am not alone.
Further investigating: cell memory
While recuperating from my therapy in May 2003, on the path to gaining thirty pounds practically in thirty days, my mother and I visited the Vancouver Public Library where in addition to my classics, I took out copies of Dr. Brian Weiss’s book, Many Lives Many Masters and Sylvia Browne’s book, Past Lives Future Healing.
Vancouver Public Library, Downtown Branch, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada - I had always been drawn to the library and strange that it resembled a Roman coliseum, the place of my death in a previous existence. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rodefeld/2449990562/sizes/l/
While reading the latter book, I felt my experience was not just an isolated one, that other individuals with physical pain had found healing with regression therapy. There was Henry with neck pain, regressing to a life where he had been guillotined in 18th century France; Neil, with chronic pain in his right foot, revisited a lifetime in the 19th century when he’d been a boy with a deformed foot; or Royce, suffering from severe back pain, would find himself the victim of a fall, dying from a severed spine in a previous life. Browne explains: “the spirit enters the body with crystal clear memories of the traumas and majors injuries it experienced in previous bodies, and infuses the cells with those memories. The cells, in response, from physical evidence of those past injuries, like scar tissues, form a whole other lifetime.” She calls it cell memory.
The main idea is that the soul has a cell memory and often, our ailments, whether physical or psychological, can stem from us being simply stuck. She explains that not all deaths from previous existences are tragic. Her understanding is that if the death came about as a result of karma - that is, the punishment fitting the fate - the cell memory would not be passed on. But if the experience was traumatic and felt unjustified, the soul would continue to live in a place of misery due to misinterpretation and its need to revisit and reexamine the pained experience in order to release it. We need to relive a moment, typically a death in a past life, in order to free ourselves and heal the present pain.
For many readers, this may sound ludicrous. I understand. Our culture and all the repressive tendencies dominates our thinking and as I have described and outlined, metempsychosis has been a target for many centuries now.
To create an arena in the self for healing
While I definitely adhere to the concept of cell memory, others may have trouble with such a radical and unconventional idea. There are many who want to heal but perhaps feel this unorthodox, off-the-beaten-path approach far too wild to even consider.
To this I will offer an alternative perspective. Let us liken my therapy less to this idea or ideal of the soul. Let us offer a more practical approach. If we think of the Greeks in the Ancient world, we know they attended the theatre for a cathartic experience. Viewing the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, they were engulfed in the dark tragedies of their heroes and heroines from legends and myths. They experienced grief and horror and upon leaving the theatres of old, they departed as if emotionally cleansed.
In our time, one might then conceive that the body is the theatre and the illness is the stage play unseen, unattended. By going through therapy, namely hypnosis, the individual might view the experience of this other life as the play or the tragedy finally being witnessed, and the catharsis is thus experienced before being released. As such, I invite others to interpret all of this as the mind’s way of turning the ailment into something of a narrative. I suffer because of this story might be easier to digest than I suffer because of another/previous existence.
Proof is always in the pudding, as the silly proverb goes. If such a therapy works, why not heed it? When we look at the pain as stemming from a story and by going through that narrative, we might contain the misery, the agony and the myriad of other sorrowful emotions and with the ending, with the penultimate forgiveness, which is key to healing and overcoming, then perhaps, we invite the healing to finally occur.
First pivotal step… a retrospect and a consideration of caution
On the road to recovery and Whistler, B.C., Canada, 2004
While suffering in 2003, being reduced to 92 pounds due to drugs and a colon found to be entirely inflamed, two months of steroid were mere drops on my burning insides compared to the alleviating flood, that wondrous baptism that was the medicinal metempsychosis.
To what extent it was miraculous or a result of investigating cell memory within my body, I cannot offer an objective perspective. Following that session, I went from my pathetic 92 to 130 pounds in just under three weeks. 30-plus pounds. Three weeks. Unbelievable. Especially when I was still restrained before that regression when it came to diet. But post therapy, the blood stopped instantly. Like that. Like Diana’s finger snapping. Instead of dealing with bowel movements four or five times a day, and one typically in the middle of the night, I was more constipated than anything.
For those who are considering this alternative path of healing, however, I would be cautious. For all my enthusiasm, I was in a precarious place, walking a precipice because at that point, I had abandoned the allopathic practitioners, all those specialists intent on either feeding me more drugs or removing my large intestine entirely. Perhaps I was dealing with less than compassionate physicians or perhaps this is the norm, I am uncertain because I am limited by the experience. In my podcast, I put out a disclaimer that I am not a doctor and in looking back, ideally, I wish I had had someone in the medical community and in my corner to support me, to help guide my path of experimentation or at least be there in a nonjudgmental role, a buffer to future health scares that I wound endure. I would find that doctor later when I was living in North Vancouver, and he would come to my aid in a time of distress. But that would be further down the line.
Perhaps I was blind and arrogant to myself, having been blinded by the miracle of the regression. While I advocate for medicinal metempsychosis, I cannot count it as the sole alpha and omega of my healing. It was a starting point. This cannot be discounted. I recognize today that I rested on my laurels in spring 2003 and as a result, by late 2003, I was back in trouble, gut-wise. I will be providing the details in a future podcast.
I will conclude by advising people to be equally open-minded and cautious when considering this kind of therapy. I will defend this approach, yet do not place it as the pinnacle of success though it has been one of the amazing pieces to my healing puzzle. To my way of thinking, all pieces are worthy of attention.
“...death is often only the result of our indifference to immortality.”