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Past-Life Regression

Coastaljames said:
I don't get it.

Hypnosis is a technique for behaviour modification. Not some kind of memory-retrieval technique.
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Exactly.
You only need to have watched professional hypnotist entertainers getting people to behave like a baby or a particular animal, or to feel like there's electricity running through their chair, to appreciate how a trance-like state with no inhibitions can result in manifestations of bizarre and comical behaviour.
When a hypnotist plants the thought "we're drifting back through time now - to your childhood, your birth - and beyond" then it's not hard to see how the subject fixes on a time from history that takes their fancy and pictures themself as a soldier in the Civil War or Cleopatra's handmaiden.
 
I believe I may have mentioned this elsewhere on this site but in 1987 I was being treated for severe inflammatory bowel disease and the drugs I was being treated with made me a nightmare to live with.
I tried hypnotherapy to overcome the problems caused by the treatment quite successfully. It was towards the end of the treatment that I asked the hypnotherapist if she would try past life regression on me…she did.

I found myself in the gunnery cockpit of a Bristol Blenheim that was obviously going down and was hurtling towards the ground at great speed. The hypnotherapist pulled me out ASAP as I was in distress and was scraping my feet on the floor to “keep me up”.

She believed it was possibly proof of a previous existence, however being an early sixties baby I was more inclined to think with all the stories I grew up with, the books I read and the films I saw and with my childhood heroes being Douglas Bader and Guy Gibson etc, it could possibly be an over active imagination.
 
Hypnotic regression is something that I've always wanted to try - just out of curiosity. Although, having studied History, and read hundreds of books on the subject, goodness knows what I'd come out with.

From what I've heard/read about regression though; it would seem very much the exception that someone would believe themselves to have been an 'Egyptian Princess' - it's probably just that such an outcome garners all the attention. The 99.9% of regressions - back to completely mundane, ordinary lives don't generate any significent publicity.
 
CALGACUS03 said:
... The 99.9% of regressions - back to completely mundane, ordinary lives don't generate any significent publicity.
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Is it known (even better - documented ... ) that the majority of regressions both (a) yield one or more specific past life claims and (b) produce claims too mundane to get publicity?

Even if most regressed subjects reported no famous past lives, any demonstrable consistency in generating past life reports would tend to promote belief in the regression process.
 
Most of the cases I have read seem to have that "nearly right" quality so beloved by UFO pilots and channelled communications, interestingly Dr Ian Stephenson was not a big fan according to what I have read

The point about proof to me, is to tell us something you can't easily look up like the names of long lost shops, in fact the more mundane the better for me.

Perhaps people are living vicariously in another dimension?
 
But if a hypnotic regression can make you think you’re someone from history and it seems real enough, could we be hypnotised into thinking we’re Neil Armstrong? That would be cool.
 
Another thing most people who claim a past life (during regression) seem to have had a traumatic passing, this actually ties into the work of Dr Ian Stevenson, perhaps there is a fixed time decided before you arrived here, and you have to do that time no matter, there is no escape
 
Robbrent you could be right.
When my youngest started kinder a little boy there came up and was very friendly.
He also asked me about his older sister.
When I mentioned it to his mother she said he didn't have one.
Later I had a vivid dream where he was my child and was stabbed to death but i never said anything about it.
One day his mother told me she and her husband had made their wills and I was to have him if they died as he had told them I was his mother in another life.
 
I have read a book where a past life regression therapist describes a fascinating incident.

A man and woman were being treated by her separately...each for anxiety which they could not link to any event in their childhood or adulthood.

On a couple of occasions they had simultaneously been in the waiting room, but more often had not.

They had exchanged pleasantries on each occasion, but nothing else.

The therapist heard from each of them about a certain past life...

Them man had been murdered by Roman soldiers.

The woman had a husband who had been murdered by Roman soldiers.

Over six months the therapist noticed striking similarities between the stories; the description of the village it happened in, the clothes, the dialogue, minor details etc.

The therapist realised this man and woman patient had been married to each other in a past life.

She agonised for weeks whether to introduce them in this life, and how to do it,

She decided to do it, calmly, seriously, in her office.

The man and woman exchanged numbers, met up for some meals, and actually married in this life, and had a child together.
 
I was watching the Joy Division documentary on MUBI, and there's a bit where Bernard Sumner recorded his past life regression session on Ian Curtis. From the extract, Curtis tells him he's "reading a book about laws" and when Sumner asks him how old he is, he says "28" - Curtis died aged 23. But otherwise, it was totally unenlightening.
 
EnolaGaia said:
Is it known (even better - documented ... ) that the majority of regressions both (a) yield one or more specific past life claims and (b) produce claims too mundane to get publicity?

Even if most regressed subjects reported no famous past lives, any demonstrable consistency in generating past life reports would tend to promote belief in the regression process.
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Regression consistency and variance: the best book I have read, by far, on this is “Exploring Reincarnation,” by Hans TenDam. Getting my minor quibble out of the way: it is a long and sometimes difficult read, as the author’s English seems to degrade about page 220 and the book then goes on for another 200 pages.

I was delighted with his baselines, analyses, conclusions – and wicked sense of humor about Scientology, Hinduism, etc. His framing of the question and setting parameters for the topic was truly exemplary. It is not often I run across a mind as focused and clever as Mr. TenDam’s. I think this book will prove to be a seminal source for PLR research linked to similar, interdisciplinary topics.

Variance was noted and explained as being based in the different approaches, baseline assumptions, and goals of the regression. Scientology and popular, cash-driven regressions had more of the “I was Cleopatra in my past life” stories. The popular regressions had the most variance in process, and the most variance in the types of past lives recalled, with many famous historical characters being recalled. I view this as a result of the sensationalist goals and poor process controls.

Consistency: Clinical psychologists who stumbled into PLR as a type of hypnotism to help clients reported the most consistent, mundane past life stories (almost 100%). The goal was to help clients resolve personal psychological difficulties, not PLR. However, the past lives kept coming up, from thousands of sessions around the world – and not just English-speaking sources. There is much similarity in orientation, approach, and process in the clinical psychologist-based PLR sessions, so it is not surprising that the results are similar as well.

My personal experience with PLR: 35 years ago, a friend and I went to a psychic fair and paid $5 to do a group hypnotic PLR with about 20 other strangers. We were hypnotized and I promptly fell into a deep sleep. I didn’t remember a thing (and really hope I didn’t snore too loudly). My friend, however, recalled in vivid detail her life as the head of the Atlantean priestesses, the only one wearing a purple robe, etc. In that life, she was politically powerful, and had psychic, telekinetic, and prophetic abilities.

This single PLR experience changed her life, and not for the better. Based on this experience, she became a spiritual teacher in the American Theosophist tradition and was “empowered” to tell everyone what was wrong with them! Over the years, I ran out of tactful conversational diversions. We drifted apart completely about 4 years ago when I insisted she not tell my husband that he could cure himself of his incurable neurological disease.
 
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Another thing I have noticed in many regressions and children who remember past lives is that the other life ended in an accident or murder, you could say before the allocated time so they have to come back to do what they have to do
 
Have there been any instances of PLR when someone has been regressed and started fluently speaking in a language they had no knowledge of? It just occurred to me that it would be most natural to 'slip back' into one's original language, and speaking that without having any knowledge of proper pronunciation and grammatical construction would be a sure fire way to establish genuine regression.

And also to note - last night I had a dream in which I was talking to a friend about how she always used to complain about her car. In the dream I had constructed an entire series of memories of events that never happened. The friend is real, although I haven't seen her for a few weeks. The car isn't, and she had I have never had any such discussions, yet my dream-memory was absolutely certain.

Just an observation as to what the mind can come up with when it's let off the leash.
 
catseye said:
Have there been any instances of PLR when someone has been regressed and started fluently speaking in a language they had no knowledge of?
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Ah, you mean xenoglossy!

What an intriguing question.

From memory, there were cases I possibly recall, years ago now and will ook into this - meantime, one reported example on YouTube:

She Speaks a Language SHE DOESN'T KNOW...

 
xenoglossy is a strange one, and I don't really think there is any rational explanation especially when the person has no proven contacts with the claimed culture
 
Comfortably Numb said:
Another fascinating example?

Nepali girl is speaking english as if a native

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Her English is very good but heavily-accented. She doesn't sound like a native speaker, although her pronunciation of certain words is English rather than, say, American, as if she has learned English from a British person.
 
escargot said:
Her English is very good but heavily-accented. She doesn't sound like a native speaker, although her pronunciation of certain words is English rather than, say, American, as if she has learned English from a British person.
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Absolutely agree - thinking along the same lines.

I find these videos.... 'uncomfortable'!

In this particular case, kinda waiting for her head to turn full circle...
 
It's the nearly right that intrigues me, I have read a few cases where the details check out except from one detail that can't be reconciled, in The Siren Call of. Hungry Ghosts. by the late Joe Fisher (great Book by the way) he had the same experience with an entity who claimed to have been a Pilot in WII, everything checked out, and he gave some pretty precise details apart from one major thing, no one of the name given had ever served in WII, and things like this crop up in regressions quite frequently
 
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