Concerns and Questions about Past Life Regression

Wednesday 17 Feb 2016

Website Enquiry  

Name:  Steve    

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Comments/Enquiry --- Concerns and Questions about past life regression

Hi Dennis,

I found you through your very impressive Buddhist Society of Western Australia segment in their convention. I am interested in past life regression, but I have some questions and concerns.

Is it true some people can't be hypnotized?

Many years ago when I was in high school I stayed after school with a bunch of the older kids from an honors class to wait out a snow storm. The head of the biology department was a hypnotist in his spare time, so he gave us a demo. One of my classmates, Dennis, was a very good subject and went under very deeply. He was given the suggestion that he was from the planet Venus and asked to talk in his native language. It sounded highly articulate.

Since then I've had skepticism about past life regression with hypnotism.

Obviously, there is no life on Venus, yet a mere suggestion could make Dennis produce what sounded like an articulate foreign language. If the brain is that powerful, what is to stop someone from manufacture fake past life memories during hypnosis.

No disrespect intended. I'm open minded and I am curious as to what you have to say about this.

Thanks

Steve

Hello Steve,

I have no doubt that your friend Dennis was convinced he was from Venus and able to give a good account of a language from there. The subconscious mind is a labyrinth that hypnosis can exploit. It should be said however that hypnosis is not such a strange happening. There are many times in a normal day when the average person will slip into a trance and day dream. Sometimes with a memory of it, others times not. In hypnosis terms we talk about this as dissociation from the conscious mind.  The conscious mind can be seen like the tip of an iceberg that consciously looks after our interests, but the vast bulk of the iceberg is submerged and unseen, however It is still asserting vast unconscious influence over us, and  we are not aware of it.

We are all vulnerable when we happen to drift into a trance. Imagine a suggestion is made by advertisers, when we are relaxed and tranced out in front of the tele. The advertised suggestion often times gets implanted into our memory, especially if the conditions are right for that suggestion to take root. When you then decide to go to the shop to buy the advertised item that you have subsequently thought of, you usually don’t credit the advertisement, because you were dissociated at the time, so the mind confabulates a story as to why you like the item and why you are there to buy it. You can extrapolate this to everything we perceive. Our behaviours, our culture and our countries norms are all conditioned. Americans are this way and Japanese are that way.

The way we think and operate in the world is all conditioned into us via a similar hypnotic process with suggestions learned from our families, peer groups, schools, governments etc. If you and the rest of your class were also hypnotised to be Venusian’s on the day in question, you may have had enough collective energy to start a cult. If you had the will and ability to go out and hypnotise others in your town or country to accept this way of thinking, we may all have ended up speaking the language of Dennis. Look how effective Hitler was with the German people. The conditions were right and he used the power of his belief to exploit these conditions. All of the major movements including fads and lifestyles is conditioning that allows us to hold the world up and to believe in it, in the way we are conditioned. The thought that we are free is a confabulation! This insight shows why the Buddha’s structured his teachings for us to practice to see and go beyond our conditioning.

So to answer your first question! Can everyone be hypnotised? I would say we are all already hypnotised. Some peoples conditioning can be changed or taken on easier than others. Some people cling to their beliefs for dear life and will resist hypnosis, but the fact remains that the beliefs they are protecting were still conditioned into them; and in any case, a clever hypnotist could get past that resistance.

You have posed your question around Hypnosis and its affect. I have explained the process of dissociation and subsequent implanted suggestion. When we use Hypnosis to look at Past Lives, we use the same process but instead of inserting suggestions we are trying to retrieve beliefs and stuff that were previously embedded. When we do this we have to be clear that the story is coming directly from the clients mind and it not something we have planted. It is certainly possible to exploit a client in circumstances like this and we have seen the epidemic of false memory’s occurring in years gone by, where some people were quite damaged, sometimes even children accusing parents of being perpetrators of evil actions that were not in fact true. False memories had been planted by overzealous, fixated therapist’s using hypnosis and implanted suggestion. The hypnotist does need to know what he or she is doing and be ethical and morally responsible with their work.

So hypnosis can allow us to retrieve Past Lives from the Sub Conscious. You may be interested in a discussion about this in a previous blog :

“The Conscious Mind, the Sub Conscious and the Double Slit.”

As I mentioned at the Buddhist conference that you have referred to in your question, a client can sometimes have difficulty believing their own story. Our belief in the conditioning of our current life is so strong that even when a past life story is clear, it is sometimes not believed. That is why I gave the example of the person who could not believe his story, even though it seemed likely and was entirely consistent with his presenting problems.  He would have discounted the hypnosis completely were it not that he was a skilled meditator and knew that there was a “Nimita” present through the whole time of his sesssion. A Nimita is instability in the mind that indicates the mind is very still and present. It is very close to an energetic change that will cause the body to drop away finish and unify, reducing knowing to pure mind only. For a skilled meditator, as this client was, it is a very powerful affirmation that his story was more in the direction of truth and congruence rather than the confabulation that can happen when the mind is not focussed with the congruence of presence. His story was hard for him to discount!

In my talk at the conference I also spoke of clients who know beyond any doubt that their story is real and have subsequently proved it by referring to the written record. (See Peter Ramster’s 11 part film --- Video 1 on my Hypnosis website) I also mentioned at the conference that for people to know that a story is real it has to be present with both the intellect and the felt emotional experience. Head and Heart! As an aside this same truth needs to be present to go deep into Meditation. It requires balance.

Having said all this I do wish to add a caveat and that is the lesson the Buddha gave on the “Three Characteristics of All Things”. See my blog on “Unctousness & Dukka (Suffering) in Buddhism”. In this teaching the Buddha pointed to “No Self” (Anatta). So even though our stream of Consciousness may produce many lives, the Buddha was always prompting us to look deeper, beyond this conditioned life and all of our past lives to the Unconditioned. A place he called the Deathless. This is a place beyond consciousness and as he said can be known by anyone who has practiced to see it in this fathom long length of body. 

Post Script:

I have written this blog accepting your premise that “Obviously, there is no life on Venus” which is probably a reasonable position, however we do have to remember that consciousness permeates the entire Universe with the potential for beings to be everywhere. Perhaps Dennis was remembering a past life either accurately or mixed up with several past experiences. Part of the Buddha’s teaching is to accept experience as it is and let go. Best not fight with it! It is all Dukka (Suffering), Annica (Impermanence) and Anatta (Not Self). Sceptical doubt is good up to a point but in the end doubt too needs to be seen for what it is! See my poem “Doubt” in volume one of my poetry collection.