A great night on Saturday speaking to all the lovely folks at Poole Spiritualist Church. Many thanks to the fabulous Lawrence for hosting the event, a great opportunity to tell folks about the amazing work of Dr Helen Wambach. Check it out on the link below.
At one of my public talks I was asked a question about the origin of the past lives that Dr Helen Wambach and others were discovering when their subjects were regressed. The suggestion was made that on the point of death when the body and brain die all the information of that person’s life are uploaded automatically to a celestial database and this is what is being accessed during hypnotic regression. As these are real lives then it follows that Dr Wambach checks on historical accuracy would of course be correct.
This is an interesting theory but it presupposes that there is some automatic uploading to a celestial database of every detail of a person’s life which occurs at the moment of death. Alternatively, such details could be uploading all the time, every moment of every day. We know that the brain records every detail of our lives which can be accessed using hypnosis.
From a purely scientific point of view there is no evidence for any celestial database containing intimate details of all the many billions of lives that have occurred. Science tells us there is nothing left when we die. Once the brain dies that is the end and we are just become a memory in the minds of the people who knew us in the life just extinguished.
What we find in both Dr Wambach’s and in Dr Newtons work is the amazing amount of information regarding the death experience and all the details of what happens in the spirit world, all the healing, discussions and life reviews that go on. All this information correlates perfectly and is very consistent over the many thousands of hypnotic regressions performed. This information could not come from a celestial database that is only recording past lives. Similarly, all the fascinating detail of people we know in this life whom we have also known in past lives could not have come from this database of past lives.
For these reasons the celestial database hypothesis does not explain what has been found in the thousands of hypnotic regressions performed. So I would argue it is not a viable proposition.
Greetings all, finally got round to making a video of Dr Wambach’s work
I hope you find the video below of interest. I am attempting to revise the work of a little-known psychologist and one of my all-time heroines the wonderful Dr Helen Wambach. Back in the 1970s she devised a unique group hypnotic regression program to take people back to past lives. She then enabled people in that group to remember their experiences and write them down. That data was then correlated against historical fact to produce the closest thing to scientific proof of reincarnation. Sadly, Dr Wambach passed away in 1985 but not before she had regressed over 6,000 people. Her work is largely forgotten and her books are out of print but I’ve been on a mission to revive her work and have been giving talks in the UK on the subject. So here is the first of a series of videos I will be making. It’s on YouTube and it’s 30 mins long, essentially a condensed version of her two books that were published in 1978. Hope you find it interesting. Best wishes, David.
Dr Wambach said in one of her radio interviews that she thought it was inadvisable to ask subjects under hypnosis about their future lives. She believed that this could have an undue influence on their current life direction especially if the future life reported was unpleasant. I believe this makes good sense and shows a responsible attitude and respect for the subject under hypnosis. The reporting of future lives also introduces a further question around can a subject under hypnosis accurately report on a life that technically hasn’t happened yet?
It also brings in questions around how time operates in the spirit world. Can we incarnate in different time periods which may coexist in the same area of space and time. For example, in the spirit world can we have a life a thousand years in the future then decide that our next life might be in the past say in medieval time? To me it doesn’t make any sense, I would agree that time has far less consequences in the spirit world than is does on earth but to assert that time does not exist at all in the spirit world in nonsensical. If we incarnate on earth then come back to spirit and review that life then time has moved on and our experience has been added to. These are sequential events, at one point we are in spirit, then we have an incarnation and then we come back to spirit to review how it went. These events happen one after the other, time may be stretched or compressed of course and it may be irrelevant but it still exists and its sequential.
This brings us to the question of can a subject under hypnosis accurately report on a future life? One of Dr Wambach’s workshop participants who later became a therapist in his own right is Chet B Snow. He went on to perform similar group regressions and asked the subjects to report back on their future lives over several time periods. He produced a book of his findings called “Mass Dreams of the Future,” in this he reported on lives in various time periods in the future. The ones from the distant future tended to be all very ‘space age’ as well as ‘new age’ which one might expect.
Interestingly lives reported in the near future, in the 1990s were generally somewhat negative and seemed to indicate a significant disaster at the end of the Millennium. Lives reported immediately following this were few and far between, indicating fewer incarnations which might be expected if a disaster had destroyed a lot of people. Now his research was collected in the early 1980’s and the book published in 1989. Clearly we can now see in hindsight that the major disaster indicated didn’t happen so were those lives reported real or fantasy or were they lives reported based on an extrapolation of current events at the time of asking. The subjects asked were living in a time period in the late 70’s and early 1980s when the cold war was at its height so it would not be surprising that folks would view the future in a rather negative light.
We know that subjects under hypnosis are very keen to cooperate with the therapist and answer questions as accurately as they can so I would suggest they were tending to come up with future lives based on a best guess analysis. One could hypothesise that the subjects were perhaps tapping into another parallel universe where the disaster did happen and those lives were real. This of course brings up a whole new batch of questions such as how many parallel universes are there, why are they there, what is their function, do we really alternate our lives between these universes. Personally as there is no evidence for parallel universes I would argue that there aren’t any.
One big question that must be answered though is if subjects under hypnosis are able to report on what is in effect fantasy lives from the future, how many of the past lives reported are also fantasy? This of course is the questions that Helen Wambach asked when she started her research and she has shown that the past lives recalled were definitely not fantasy. That’s because she was able to check the lives reported in great detail against known historical facts. That of course is not possible with a future life.
So in summary if the subject under hypnosis is eager to respond to the therapist then they will do their best to accurately report on past lives that have actually been lived. We know this because the details can be checked against historical data. The same cannot be said of future lives and it’s an area where we must show caution and a healthy degree of scepticism.
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Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) was a Christian mystic who for forty-three years of his adult life possessed the uncanny ability to lie down on a couch, close his eyes, fold his hands over his stomach, and put himself into an altered state in which virtually any type of information was available. When asked about the source of his information, Cayce replied that there were essentially two. The first was the subconscious mind of the individual for whom he was giving the reading and the second was the Akashic Records.
The Akashic records are akin to a universal database of all the past lives, thoughts and events of all individuals that have ever existed. These are held in the astral plane and not normally accessible.
At a recent talk I gave the question was raised about the Akashic records and if these are being accessed during hypnotic regression. It was suggested that when an individual is regressed hypnotically perhaps they are actually tuning into the universal Akashic records of all the people who have lived and died in the past and accessing a random life as if it were a past life lived by the person under hypnosis.
This is an interesting suggestion which needs serious consideration. The first point to consider is under what circumstances could an individual gain access to this vast database of all past lives. It is feasible that under hypnosis an individual could gain access to their own past lives but one cannot assume that such access includes everyone else’s past life histories. Edgar Cayce only accessed the records of the person he was giving a reading for. In fact some authorities on the Akashic records state that access to past lives other than your own is forbidden except under exceptional circumstances. One would expect that the records are guarded by spirit entities with some degree of integrity and would not allow any unauthorised access!
Even if the records were completely open and under hypnosis everyone else had access to all past lives one might expect that the same life record might float to the top of the database so in a group hypnosis of the type that Dr. Helen Wambach employed the same life might appear to a majority of the participants. This was certainly not the case.
Another point to consider is that of relationships, Dr Wambach’s subjects all reported quite detailed relationships. Many relationships to people in a past life were repeated in the present life. If past life recall is actually the lives of other people selected randomly then these relationships would have no meaning. It is clear from Dr Wambach’s research that relationships were or paramount importance to each individual.
Another possibility is that if past lives were accessed randomly from a vast database of everyone that has lived one might expect the most recent past lives to be stronger and have more prominence. It’s further possible that the most recent past lives might be simultaneous or existing at the same time as the person under hypnosis or overlapping their lives. This has been shown not to be the case.
As a result I find it quite unlikely that the past lives accessed under hypnosis are plucked randomly from the Akashic records. We can never be 100% certain of anything of course but the balance of probability is that the lives accessed are actually the past lives of the person under hypnosis.
Dr Wambach discovered that folks choose their lives. They may choose the life themselves or they may receive help and advice in choosing. We may of course not be all that keen to reincarnate again but it does appears that returning to a physical incarnation is something we accept as a natural part of our development process. Many readers might think, ‘No way, I would never have chosen this life,’ but if things appear difficult then that is because there are challenges to be overcome in every life. Dr Wambach also discovered that folks incarnate with other people they have known from previous lifetimes. This can be because we have relationships to work out between those individuals, perhaps we didn’t get on in a past life so this time we can try a bit harder. Or they are people we incarnate with who have chosen to work with us and help us through difficult times or help us to achieve certain objectives. There are many permutations and it must quite a logistical headache for the giant ‘spirit computer’ in the sky to bring it all together.
Thinking about choices in life I’m reminded of the Bhagavad Gita which I came across many years ago when I was hungry for all thing to do with reincarnation. The Gita is part of the epic Mahabharata Hindu text. In the Gita, Prince Arjuna an acclaimed archer is about to start a battle against a rival family who are after his kingdom. The two armies are massed ready to fight. Arjuna is fortunate to have one of the Hindu deities Lord Krishna as his chariot driver. Arjuna though has a crisis just before the battle, he sees his relatives, teachers and friends in the two armies and his self-assurance melts away. His bow slips from his hands and he sits dejectedly in his chariot his eyes filling with tears. He tells Krishna. “I cannot slay my kinsmen not for all the three worlds much less a kingdom.” Krishna turns to Arjuna and says, “This is your hour of trial Arjuna, such base despair does not become you, it is inappropriate. The call to battle has already been sounded arise and take up your arms.” This surprising response from Krishna is followed by telling Arjuna, “The soul in man is neither born nor can it die. Weapons cannot cut it. Fire cannot burn it. Water cannot wet it. Wind cannot dry it. What makes you think you can kill the soul? Just as a man discards old clothes and wears new ones the eternal soul sheds a dead body and enters another.”
So Krishna is telling Arjuna to stop feeling sorry for himself and do his duty and get on with the battle. You can kill your enemies but not their souls which reincarnate in new bodies. Now you would be forgiven for thinking Arjuna has a point, why start a war against your relatives, surely there must a better way. But we have Krishna in the driving seat and Krishna has a different view on the matter. Pretty unlikely I know but if Jesus had been Arjuna’s chariot driver it would have been a case of turn the other cheek, make up and let’s go home for a spot of supper. Not so with Krishna. although I have read many interpretations of the Gita I still feel a little uncomfortable about it. Krishna does finish off his pep talk to Arjuna with a fantastic spectacle where Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna in his divine form. This does the trick and Arjuna goes on to win the battle and keep his kingdom. We can see Krishna’s point of view as well in that Arjuna has a job to do in fulfilling his destiny, overcoming his doubts and defeating his enemies. Good triumphing over evil and you could argue its a life lesson for the vanquished foes to suffer and perhaps that was one of their lessons they incarnated to learn.
So in our owns lives there are occasions when we have to make life changing decisions and it’s hard. We have to sleep on it, discuss it with close friend’s because that’s maybe why they incarnated at the same time to help us make the right choice.
“The god Krishna explains karma yoga to Arjuna. He tells him he must act, but not be attached to the fruits of his actions. He must fulfil his duty as a warrior and fight for good to triumph over evil. Krishna reveals his divine form to Arjuna on the battlefield. As he does Arjuna sees the whole universe subdivided into many worlds but united in the body of the highest Deity.”