Review of “Many lives, Many masters”
by Dr Brian Weiss
Psychotherapist Dr. Brian Weiss
wrote Many Lives, Many Masters: The
True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life
Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives in 1988. The book
documents the doctor’s journey from disbelief to belief in regards to messages
from the supernatural world and reincarnation. Widely read, the book launched
Weiss’s career as a sought-after speaker and a leading author on past-life therapy.
Themes
include spiritual conversion, connection with the dead, and the importance of
universal religious teachings such as charity, faith, and love.
The
first person narrative introduces Weiss as a classically trained, scientific
doctor. Trained at Columbia University and Yale Medical School and having
graduated with several honors, he admits to being the last person open to
channeling, reincarnation, and parapsychology. He is married with two children,
and has taught conservative psychotherapeutic techniques at the University of
Pittsburgh.
Weiss
was Chief of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida,
when he encountered Catherine. Catherine was a twenty-seven-year-old woman with
major anxiety issues. She also suffered from depression and a wide array of
phobias. Mutual friends encouraged her to make an appointment with Weiss. He
describes her as a very attractive blonde; she worked as a lab technician at
the same hospital that Weiss practiced at.
Weiss
treated her with conventional therapy. He suggested anti-anxiety medication but
Catherine refused, afraid of what chemical intervention could do to her body.
So they choose hypnosis for a treatment.
In the first pages of MLMM, when Dr Weiss describes their first session,
he jumps quickly to the conclusion of incarnation and presenting what the
patient seeing as antique and from another era. For his question "Go back to the time from which your
symptoms arise." He directly interprets her answer as weird and unusual
«I see white steps leading up to a
building, a big white building with pillars, open in front. There are no
doorways. I'm wearing a long dress ... a sack made of rough material. My hair
is braided, long blond hair."
The answer that Catherine gave to the doctor has no indication of time
or place, and being under hypnosis, is by definition the induction of a state
of consciousness in which a person apparently loses the power of voluntary
action and is highly responsive to suggestion or direction. I’m not
dispraising the doctor experience with Catherine, nor declaring it untrue. But
for a well-known Psychotherapist, who spent his life in academic approaches and
empirical conclusion, a skeptic who became a believer in seconds, make me
wonder and question the assumptions of MLMM.
In My opinion MLMM, should be taking as a spiritual message, encouraging
charity, faith, and love, and not a literal experience, that present
incarnation as a truth. May be it does exist or maybe not, but MLMM is not the
book to prove it.
