After having a philosophical discussion with a classmate recently I was recommended to read the book Many Lives Many Masters by Brian Weiss MD.  I wasn’t able to find the time to read the book until the school term was over.  However, the book is short and I was able to finish it in under a week (only reading while on the elliptical machine at the gym).

The book is quite straightforward in its “discovery” of “proof” of reincarnation.  The entire book, save for some brief reflective paragraphs about the author’s life, is simply the (supposedly) verbatim copy from Dr. Weiss’ therapy sessions with a patient named Catherine.  Under hypnosis Catherine goes into great detail about the physical details of her past lives (“I’m wearing a blue shirt with a necklace containing a small piece of lapis”) and also connects with “the Masters,” knowledgeable spirits that want to teach Dr. Weiss about the afterlife.

At first, after reading the book I thought that Dr. Weiss had written a less obvious type of “life lessons” book like “Ishmael.”  However, where Ishmael spells out its lessons fairly clearly, the lessons in Many Masters are disconnected by the long narrative “hypnosis interview” segments that by the end of the book I was skipping through.  In each life, something is supposedly learned (or not learned) and it can be connected to something that is happening in Catherine’s current life.  At the end of the book Dr. Weiss tries to pull it all together saying that knowledge of our past lives through meditation and hypnosis can cure all our mental ills because we’ll discover why we’ll feel the way we do (“I had sensitive teeth in a past life, that is why I don’t like ice cream!”).

I surmised pretty quickly that this whole thing was fake, in the same way the gorilla in Ishmael was fake – but a device to get us interested in the story and message.  However, unfortunately, Dr. Weiss tries to validate that his story is true by repeatedly mentioning his credentials and “how did she know that?” moments in therapy.  One of the things he mentions early in the book is how Catherine took her father to the race track and Catherine bet correctly on every single horse that day.  …..to me this is an ability much different than discovering and learning from past lives.  Now we’re into the realm of telling the future, which is not just a belief, but patently absurd.  Dr. Weiss mentions this oddly enough as some kind of validation for Catherine’s regressions and “proof” of her abilities to connect with the afterlife.  To me these two are vastly different things… but let’s move on…

After I finished the book I decided to google Brian Weiss.  As it turns out he has written several similar books capitalizing on the success of the first one.  The author of Ishmael went this same route, publishing books about Ishmael’s other students… but unless you’re a complete moron it is obvious there never was a talking psychic gorilla.  Daniel Quinn has used this fact and interest in his book’s points to organize organizations supporting these ideas to bring about changes in our society (or at least how we think about things).  To this end he has participated in non-fiction films, articles and books talking about our societies methods of food production among other issues originating in Ishmael.

Dr. Weiss goes the opposite route.  On Dr. Weiss’ website I found several more books for sale about other patients he has regressed to past (and now FUTURE) lives.  Beyond that (surprise!) he sells meditation programs both on disc and actual live conferences (an Alaskan cruise coming up!).  This information can be seen here.  So, that validated my skepticism in all of the claims he has made.

Beyond this book, I have several problems with reincarnation.

Even if it IS real, what is the point?  As concerned with our physical lives reincarnation doesn’t help.  If we’re supposed to learn a lesson – how would regressing and realizing that help?  Wouldn’t that disqualify us?  Wouldn’t that be like being given the answers to the GMAT by Stanford before you take the exam and then still expecting them to admit you to the program afterward (“but I got an 800!”). 

Since you can’t remember your past lives without hypnosis, doesn’t that mean the person you were is actually dead?  The “soul” lives on, but so what?  The “soul” is not the You that is thinking and living on this earth, reading my blog entry right now.  THAT part of you still dies and is gone forever – and THAT is the part we’re all scared of losing. That is why Christians don’t like reincarnation because Christian theology provides for the personality of the physical mind to continue into the afterlife untouched. Under reincarnation this “soul” (at least as a separate conscious being in control of its own experience) still dies, thus providing no relief to the fear of death.

The ironic thing is that Dr. Weiss repeatedly says that this regression treatment cured himself and all his patients of their fear of death.  However, Catherine never remembered her past lives without hypnosis, and even when describing them she appeared more as an observer in their bodies than actually the same person over and over.

Let’s stop for a moment and consider what’s actually likely happening here. The good doctor and his patients are participating in transferrence. They take their negative experiences of the world and absolve themselves of the responsibility by placing that source of pain or joy or what-have-you on the shoulders of a “past life,” which is many times not even a genetic reletive – a stranger, in other words.

This is the psychological equivalent of Chuck Stuart: blaming someone else for your problems. The difference, of course, is that the “someone else” that Dr. Weiss’s patients blame is fictitious – and they are being blamed not for crimes, but habits, feelings, and emotions the patient wishes to shed or overcome.

In that regard I have to admit that if the patients have an improved quality of life this is a worthwhile therapy – but it’s a sad delusion to claim these fictitious scapegoats are due to reincarnation.

Speaking of reincarnation, let’s get back to the problems with that philosophy by itself. If I take you and wipe all the memories in your brain, then transplant your brain into another body on the other side of the world …. you are dead. 

Or are you?  That is a question any good psychology 100 class asks freshman students in undergrad.  And anyone paying attention to futurists knows where this is going. Ship of Theseus and brain uploading and all that.

Imagine if Neo didn’t remember that he was Neo every time he went back into the Matrix… and he was pushed back into a different body.  Would he still be Neo?  Would it even matter?  To me, it seems like the previous Neo would have still died; similar to the Star Trek transporter problem.

None of this assuages my fear of death. But it also brings up the question, now that I’m 28, have I died 27 times already?  (or any arbitrary number of days, months, minutes, etc.)  Surely we all know we think differently than we did five years ago.  Does that mean that person is dead?  Does consciousness really “grow” and remain the same if it can’t remember the past?  Existence without a past is a hollow one.  I’m sure when people get amnesia it doesn’t help much to be “told” about what happened to them in the past.  If you can’t remember it, it doesn’t feel like you did it.  (ask anybody that did something out of character while drunk – “I said that?  no way!!”)   Reincarnation therapy is apparently doing this over and over.   86 times in Catherine’s case.

<meta side moment here: I noticed in 2019 that this post was getting a few views so I read through it and made some updates like the Oprah clip that happened years after my original post. Honestly, I didn’t remember writing this post or even reading the book at first – so to then read the end of the last paragraph was a bit of fun>

Oh – and after reading the book I also wondered how you account for a growing population.  Surely there are many “original” souls born all the time.  Weiss allows for this by saying that souls can “split” to take up two or more bodies at once in the same time period.   Hey…that sounds familiar. Almost as if they wrote an entire episode of STNG around that premise.

It gets even worse when you learn that eventually, some souls “merge with God” and never come back into a body.  Okay, so that means there is an original number of souls…. but, how many?  If the goal is to get to merge with God and there are only a certain number of souls, won’t you run out of souls at a certain point to reincarnate?   Will people just not be born and the human race ceases to exist… poof?  and when did these souls start?  Did it start when we were walking upright?  When we were living in caves?   When we first formed language?   When we were swinging in trees?  When we were single-celled organisms?  The whole idea of continuous reincarnation is a swiss cheese philosophy and the only way to accept or believe it is to not think about it too much. Like every other religion in town.