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When you do this work, past life therapy and future life progressions,
you see that there really is no death

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The Monthly Aspectarian: Brian, it’s been a few years since we last talked. Why don’t we start out with a quick overview of your work and then talk about what you are doing these days.

Brian Weiss: My background is as a psychiatrist. I was formally trained at Columbia University and Yale Medical School. I had no belief in past life regressions, life after death or any of those kinds of things until my work with Catherine. She’s the patient I describe in Many Lives, Many Masters, my first book. I then started doing a lot of work with regressions. This is done with the patient in a hypnotic state, very relaxed, going back in time, and remembering really detailed incidents and events from childhood, from in utero states, and even from past lifetimes. During this remembrance, their symptoms, fears, anxieties, phobias, and physical symptoms as well, often get better. This fascinated me because I didn’t understand how it could be. Was it just imagination or fantasy? Over the past 25 years since Catherine began her therapy, I have worked with more than 4,000 patients using this regression therapy, both validating the memories of patients and watching them heal. That, in a nutshell, is how it evolved for me.

TMA: It’s interesting that you can use the hypnotic state to do that.

BW: Hypnosis is very safe, it’s just a form of focusing the concentration while in a relaxed state. People are misled by the stage hypnotists, what they see on television, and in the movies. It’s not that. You never give up control. It’s just a state of focusing concentration. In that state the memory is enhanced, it’s much better, and it is easier to remember these ancient times. Through these memories, understanding occurs and a healing takes place.

TMA: Do you think that fantasy does come into play?

BW: Absolutely, for some people more than others. In terms of breaking it down, about 80% of what people remember seems to be actual memory. That varies. About 10% is fantasy or imagination and another 10% may be metaphor, symbol, much like in dreams. The art of the therapist is to work it all together, integrate it, and help understand the content. Because a metaphor will have meaning for a patient, even the fantasy or imagination has meaning. Then of course, most of it is actual memory. We know this because some people are speaking foreign languages that they never learned or studied. Sometimes the languages are extinct like Aramaic or ancient Chinese, and we can verify it by taking tapes to university linguistics departments. They come up with names and details, historical facts that they had no conscious awareness of, and we are able to track them down.

TMA: Would the people that have had that sort of experience be more deeply under than others?

BW: In general, yes. Those in deeper states can remember more, and in more detail. But sometimes even those in lighter states can remember enough to validate an experience.

TMA: What are some of the standout experiences people have had?

BW: Well, there are some just amazing ones. First of all, to see healing take place, this is especially emphatic to a therapist or a doctor like me. I was seeing a woman who had severe back pain for 17 years, secondary to cancer, multiple surgeries, and radiation. Her pain entirely disappeared when she remembered the trauma of having her back broken in ancient Palestine, about 2,000 years ago, by Roman soldiers. She was a man in that lifetime, and was kicked in the back as a punishment. When she remembered that, the symptoms in the current time started to disappear. Now she has completely gotten rid of her back pain and there are even structural changes. By that I mean x-rays and MRIs that show the resolution, the healing of the structural damage that was there on previous x-rays and MRIs. That to me is amazing, how the mind can do that just by remembering. This wasn’t surgery. This was just her regression experience. I’m writing about that case much more extensively in a new book that will come out in November.

TMA: Many Lives, Many Masters was your first book. What were the others and what did you do in them?

BW: Many Lives, Many Masters is really the story of Catherine, the patient that changed my life. She was the first of the regression patients. It is just an amazing story. The second book, Through Time into Healing, has lots of clinical cases. It looks at lots of patients and how the therapy works emotionally, psychologically, physically, and even spiritually to help people heal. The third book is called Only Love is Real. This is a story about soul mates, people who have lived many past lives together and met again in this life. The fourth book is called Messages from the Masters. It’s really a continuation of my work and the spiritual implications of it. I’ve written some smaller books since then, mostly with CDs in them that help people to practice at home. They’re very safe. The one I’m working on now goes into the future a little bit, reflecting some of my current research and taking people into future lives and future time.

TMA: Future life, what, progression?

BW: I had some people spontaneously progress which is different from regression. Progression means to go ahead in time. They progress into the future either in this life or future lives. Finding something out that is important to them, they can make changes in their current life. Maybe certain decisions become easier for them or more obvious, or they change certain attitudes that are holding them back, or they feel less anxiety, more freedom to choose. Remarkable changes happen in their present life. Then I started progressing, again using hypnosis, large groups of people forward in time. For example, I take 100, 200, or 500 people and move them into three future time periods. One hundred years from now, 500 years from now and 1,000 years. I was doing this to see if I could find a consensus, that is, did most of them agree about what’s going to happen in the world 100 years, 500 years, or 1,000 years in the future?

TMA: What kind of consistency are you finding?

BW: A lot, which was surprising to me. 1,000 years into the future I’m finding more than 85% correlation. Maybe six out of seven people were agreeing on what they would find 1,000 years from now.

TMA: It’s exciting that we’re still around 1,000 years from now.

BW: We are. There are pros and cons, it’s a very idyllic world, but the population is much reduced. That’s what I’m exploring right now. Something seems to happen 300-500 years from now that causes a decline in the population. It may be something cataclysmic, like a war. It could be some toxin, it could be just a decline in the fertility rates, or it could be a conscious decision to not reproduce at the same rate.

TMA: Not in our lifetime.

BW: Not in our lifetime. But what we do now will affect the future. It seems as if we’re going to get to that 1,000 year future, which is much more idyllic, with a very green planet with some areas off limits for repair. There’s much more detail in the results that I’m writing up now. This is just a thumbnail sketch. But what we do now can affect that date, move it sooner, move it later, can affect what it is that actually causes the decline in population.

TMA: One could argue that there is no past and future, everything is now. But in terms of linear thought and time, the past happened and what happened there happened. The future, however, is still open.

BW: What I’m finding in this work with individuals and groups seems to be that the future is a system of possibilities and probabilities that is in flux, can be altered, can be changed so that if things don’t change much we will sort of just roll towards the probable future that’s already being determined. But if we do change things, we can achieve a more possibly remote future, less statistically probable future. We have choices there. You’re right, the past seems to be fixed, it seems to have already been imprinted and done. We can’t really change that, but we can change how we react to events in the past. In that sense, the future is more fluid but we can still change our values, attitudes, actions, and our intentions just by coming more aware of the past and of the possible implications for the future.

TMA: There are many things that one may think could happen in 100 or 1,000 years. Are you getting reports of contact from other planets?

BW: I think we do. Again it gets much more complex because other civilizations are much more aware of the free will that comes into the interplay of destiny and free will. The contact seems to be there, at least there’s some sort of consensus about that, but also their awareness of our free will and the urge not to intervene and interfere with our choices and our destinies. We’re trying to state this in a way that doesn’t lose people.

TMA: Are there reports of us getting off the planet and going other places ourselves?

BW: In the 1,000 year period we seem to be able to do that. We can leave our bodies. We can travel by intention, by thinking ourselves there. We’re not restricted, whether you call this astral traveling or some other word, but we seem not to be so bound to our physical bodies.

TMA: Well, clearly to travel those distances you’d have to go non-physical.

BW: Exactly, and that seems to be what happens in 1,000 years from now. There seems to be less illness, less disease, we have much more control over these processes. But the population is much less.

TMA: What else has been exciting to you in these progressions?

BW: It’s a continuation of this work that we all have many bodies. Bodies in the past, this body we currently have in the present. We will have future bodies. But we have the one soul that is what energizes all of our bodies. So, to me, it’s the finding of immortality. We really are immortal, and there’s a shift then in how we look at ourselves. Instead of looking at ourselves as just a person or the physical being we are now, we have to have a much more universal and transcendent view of ourselves as spiritual beings.

TMA: Just to remove the fear of death from large numbers of people would make a big difference in the world.

BW: That is huge. What happens when you do this work, past life therapy and future life progressions, it’s all connected of course, is that you see that there really is no death because we’re all immortal. We are these spiritual beings. We existed before our birth. We didn’t just show up in a body, and we will exist after the death of the physical body. So that, to me, is the most important finding. That’s the one recurrent finding that allows people to let go of fear. By doing that, they can feel so much more joy in their lives.

TMA: Talk a little about James Van Praagh’s work and how you work together.

BW: He, as you know, is a psychic medium. What he does is bring messages from the other side. It’s another way of showing the same thing, that we don’t die. We don’t die with the death of the physical body. Our loved ones don’t either, and we can be reunited with them either there or communication can be established with us still here in the physical body. I met him years ago when we were both guests on the same taping of the Maury Povich show. I didn’t know him at all, but I watched him work. I knew he didn’t know any of those people before the show, and he was giving them accurate information from loved ones who had died. He had the idea of working together because we were really showing different aspects of the same concept, which is immortality. So we did that and it worked out well. There was tremendous interest. I think perhaps as a psychiatrist, a physician, I’m lending credibility, and years of experience and research, and letting people experience it. James is more talented in what he does and is able to give messages. It’s not the person’s own experience receiving the message, but through him, and that seemed to catch the enthusiasm and interest of people because every time we do this, the crowds are really large and enthusiastic and seem to be receiving a lot. So we started doing more of them and now we do several a year.

TMA: Can you describe an incident where your work verified his?

BW: What happens is that in my work, through regressions, a person might find a loved one in a previous life and learn that they were together before. He will sometime do a channeling, bringing messages from the other side from that person. They might talk about the past life where they were together before. It might be the same thing that the person experienced in the morning part of the program because I typically do the first half and then James is giving confirmation in the second half. It’s very interesting when those things happen.

TMA: What else is coming up for you?

BW: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is doing a documentary where they are validating cases. They have a therapist doing regressions with five or six volunteers. Some of them go really deep and come up with a lot of information. One had lifetimes in India, Ireland, and some other places, and then the CBC went and validated. They’ve come up with names in these little villages and families who validated that the memories were correct. I’m not sure when it’s going to air, probably later this year. It’s beautifully done, high quality work.

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Dr. Brian Weiss, the foremost figure in past life regression therapy, is a graduate of Columbia University and Yale Medical School, and is Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. He is the best selling author of Many Lives, Many Masters and many other books, including his most recent, Eliminating Stress, Finding Inner Peace. Dr. Weiss will be appearing with spiritual medium James Van Praagh on April 17 at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in an all day program. For more information, contact Brenda Taylor, 800-222-4852, extn. 223, or brenda@worldviewtravel.com.

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