Regression to a previous Life!?

Monday evening was unusual. I went to a tiny office unit  in one of the hundreds of characterless buildings crowding the streets of Mongkok.  I arrived shortly before 7.30 p.m. But when I arrived, the iron-grille at its entrance had a padlock slung across one of its vertical metal bars, its U-shaped hook appeared firmly clicked into the mother-socket. I took out the computer-printout notice of meeting from my bag. No mistake. 7.30 p.m.! I had been there once or twice already. It was the meeting place of a new progressive religious organization in Hong Kong called the United Universalistsof Hong Kong  (UUHK). They have just started life in Hong Kong. The premises were shared by several similarly small religious groups. The UUHK is a loosely organized religious group which accepts people of all faiths who share some of their ideals and would admit even atheists to be its members! The meeting that evening was however not a UU meeting as such. It was a meeting organised by a psycho-therapist. I went because it was supposed to be the second session of two-part meeting entitled: "Past Life, Psychotherapy and Jesus". The brief explanatory note says: "Talk on Past-Life Regression Therapy, Hypno-therapy, Reincarnation and a Christian perspective." I missed the first, which was Monday last. The title was interesing. I wanted to find out what, if  any, relations there might be between the three nouns in the title. I pressed the doorbell. No answer. I waited for about 3 minutes. No one came. I was beginning to have some doubts if somehow it had been called off. Perhaps they had cancelled the second part of the meeting because of the low turn-out last Monday?  But if so, there should have been a follow-up announcement on the internet. There weren't any, as far as I was aware. I waited a little while longer. Still no sign of any one in that claustrophobic lift lobby of less than 30 square feet. The other office on that floor was closed too! It was not surprising. It was already past normal office hours. I took out my mobile and thought I might call up the inquiry number on the computer printout to find out if my surmise was right. Too bad. The phone was dead. Mine. I forgot to charge it on Sunday. So I went down the lift once more. I asked the caretaker, who looked a bit like a new PRC immigrant, if I could use the phone on top of the small counter next to the lift entrance. He eyed me with suspicion. I showed him the dead phone. He said, "OK, but please hurry". I did. At the other side of the line, I heard a male voice. I asked if the meeting was still on. "Oh yes. Who are you?" I identified myself. ""Oh, I'm Jonathan. I remember you. I met you earlier at the talk on the Taoist religion. Don't worry, I'm on my way." I breathed a sigh of relief. I then asked for the empty stool which I saw at side of the caretaker. I did not want to go up there standing in front of that nondescript iron-grille like a fool inside that dismal matchbox lift-lobby whilst waiting for the arrival of the therapist.The care-taker allowed me to take the stool after saying no two or three times. I fished out my  latest book onTaoist philosophy from my bag. I was hoping to read a bit to while away the otherwise unbearable boredom. But then a young Pakistani man arrived.  I was told he was  waiting for his shift duty to start at 7.30 p.m.. But it was not yet time. He was standing right in front of me! I asked him if he wanted my stool. He said it was OK. So we got talking.  He had been in Hong Kong for more than a dozen years and came from Western Pakistan. He told me that at present, there are about 70,00 to 80,000 of his compatriots in Hong Kong and told me with great enthusiasm how many mosques there were in Hong Kong including the one in Chaiwan, Fanling, Kowloon etc .Before he could finish, 4 people arrived, the therapist and at his side, a slim young lady with an oval face and healthy sun-tanned skin in her early 30s and another Eurasian looking young man with pinkish white complexion, short curly hair and at his side, another girl with big eyes, dark skin and thick short straight eyebrows whom I believe I saw once at the previous talk on Taoism there. I was so happy that the meeting would definitely be on. And almost the the same time, the President of the UUHK arrived. We just had an introduction to a little known religious organization in Hong Kong last Saturday afternoon and I paid him for some books which he bought for me on the internet. I thought he would bring the books along. But he didn't. He explained that he did not expect to find me there that evening. He had good reason to. I was not there on the previous occasion.

 

The sesssion started after two or three other people arrived and I helped with arranging the chairs. We introduced ourselves around the little tables, organized into the form of a big rectangle. It was quite informal. The atmosphere was quite cordial. I like it. One of them was a Buddhist, another a fundamentalist Christian, three others did not  have any particular religious beliefs, and there were also three so-called "progessive Christian humanists", of which I counted myself one. So was the psycho-therapist Jonathan, the other was the UUHK President, Alex. Jonathan started by recapitulating that according to some psycho-therapists it was possible  that we might have hidden somewhere in our psyche certain deposits of the psychic experience from a previous life. This was the explanation given for certain "deja-vu" experiences where we appear to be quite familiar with a place which we had never been to, or had been to only in a dream, the kind of feeling that we were very familiar with someone whom we are sure we have just met for the first time. They also think that some people might find certain pains in a certain part of their body for which the doctors might not be able to find any traceable organic causes but whose explanation could be found through hypnotic therapy in which the patient would be able to regress to a previous life and there find the  "missing" link .When I heard that,  I suggested that  we must tread carefully when trying to based our conduct on this kind of explanations because whilst we are under hypnotism, we might be extremely susceptible to suggestions from the relevant hyno-therapist and that it was entirely possible that we might be anxious to "respond" to the kind of "leading questions"  put to us during the hypnosis sesssion and to supply "answers", if possible,  to such questions because it seemed to be the decent thing to do. This would be particularly likely during a hypnosis session when the patient's "resistance" is methodically broken down. And when the subject does supply what appears to be his/her voluntary answer about his/her "previous" life, often it is impossible to verify whether the kind of "explanations" given is true or not.  I told him that I remember having read a book called Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian L Weiss about this type of therapy, given to me by one of my friends and that I was not entirely convinced that the type of explanations given by the author in that book were the only logical explanation to the kind of experiences he described there. I said that whilst it is certainly true that we do not know about the causes of many phenemonena we find in our lives, it is also true that people may have a strong desire to want the world to be a "comprehensible" world, if that is in any way possible at all. The reason might be very simple: we find a comprehensible world much less "threatening" or "menacing" or "fearful"  than one in which we may find "rational" explanations for the happenings there. In our perfectly "rational" desire to try to find "reasons" for otherwise inexplicable phenomena in spheres beyond our present knowledge, sometimes we may in fact not hesitate to try to "short-circuit" the explanatory chain by going from "natural" verifiable explanations to unverifiable "supernatural" explanations. I said that that might very well be the explanation why peoples of all ages and civilizations have invented their "gods" or God and their religions: as a kind of explanatory hypothesis for many universally experienced situations and phenomena crying out for explanations e.g why should there be something rather than nothing, who controls the rain, the wind, the thunder, the lightning, the sun, the moon, the stars, diseases, natural disasters like famines, floods, earthquakes, who or what control the life and death of plants, animals, human beings etc. In that sense what started out as a perfectly "rational" desire of trying to find cause-and-effect explanations will paradoxically become transformed into something entirely "irrational". It is "irrational" in the sense that there is no sound and verifiable evidence in support of our purported "supernatural" explanations. In that sense, those who claim to be able to explain otherwise inexplicable phenomena in "this" life by attributing causation to unverifiable "causes" in a "previous life/lives" may in fact be practising "pseudo-science". I am not saying that it is not permissble to explore other forms of explanations, including "supernatural" explanations, but we must be very careful about what we are doing and about the limitations of our existing scientific knowledge. I said that the proper scientific attitude should be one of open-mindedness. But on the other hand, we must never allow our mind to be so open as to readily "accept"  just about "any" explanation simply because it has a "prima facie" appearance of reason to it. Psychologists and physicists have repeatedly demonstrated to us how easily we may be "deluded" or "duped" by our senses or our "common sense". Stage magicians, like David Copperfield, have made a career and plenty of money out of it. They are now called "illusionists" ! Everything must be examined critically to weed out the bad "explanations" from the good. Jonathan said whilst it is good to be critical, to make hypno-therapy work, we must abandon the use of our critical faculties at least during the hyno-therapy session.  He said usually the therapy will work better for those who are less "resistant" to it. I said that that is precisely what all religious leaders are urging their flock to do: to have uncritical faith in them! I said very often simply because we firmly believe in the power of a god or a supernatural cause, it may actually work for us. I call that the "self-fulfilling prophecy" or the "placebo" effect, which is well known in the testing of modern medicine. But the true reason why it appeared to work in the "miracle cures"  ( of which we may find numerous examples in quack medicine) is that such firm beliefs may relieve our anxieties and hence allow our natural immune system to function better instead of staying impeded by our nervous tension from doing the kind of work it has been evolved and designed by Nature to do or in the case of of the happening of non-body related "miracles" , that the relief of our anxietires and worries will make us calmer and saner and therefore we would thereby be empowered to reason more effectively,  with less interference from the "noise" caused by the the multitude of clamors of such negative emotions as anger, fear, despair etc. which would otherwise cloud and interfere with the normal functioning of our reasoning faculties. And if we think things through rationally and according to the objective evidence,  the chances of our successes in whatever it is that we intend to do will naturally improve rather than deteriorate and it is therefore far more likely that we will in fact meet with the kind of success that we are hoping for, than would otherwise be the case. And when we do, we attribute it to our gods or God when in fact such "good" or "miraculous" results may really be the effect of the application of the principles of probabilities based on reasonable inference and objective assesssment of the factors leading to or preventing success.  Jonathan repeated that his experience is that for this therapy to work, we really must allow our "sub-conscious" rather more freedom to express itself and not engage our reasoning faculties too much.

Then the interesting part began. He suggested we do a collective experiment. He would try to hypnotize us and we could tell him later what images we see when we close our eyes following his directions and urged us to try to bring back from that experience something which we think might be useful in our present life. First he told us to relax and sit as comfortably as we could, relaxing from the shoulder down to our feet ( even down to our toe nails!), then the top of our head down to our chin etc.  I had no difficulties doing that. I had been doing meditations or breathing exercises on and off for more than a year now and relaxation is a pre-requisite. Then when he felt that we were sufficiently relaxed, he told us to follow a path, down to the side of a lake. We would be going down, step by step, each step heavier than the previous. We were asked to step into the water, slowly. He told us that the water would be very warm, very comfortable and we could completely relax in that pool. Then when he thought that we were sufficiently relaxed, he asked us to imagine a door. Then he asked us to open that door, slowly and try see what was behind that door. Then he asked us to go back to age when we were at primary 6 and try to see what we found. After that, he told us to imagine what we would see when we were at age 3 and after that to our birth, and from then on to our previous life! Then he told us to retrace our steps and re-open that door and come back to where we were.  I followed his directions, relaxedly and tried to follow his instructions to the letter.After the session, he told us to tell him what we found. He did everything in a very soft voice, a gentle coaxing voice. However, he did not use any device like a swinging crystal ball or a candle etc. Somehow, I felt that I continued to retain my consciousness. It was as if I were divided in two "consciousnesses" or had two "minds": one part observing and monitoring the other from time to time. 

Something interesting came out. It seemed that out of the 9 people, only 4 were able to regress to their previous life. For the majority, it appeared impossible: either nothing or something completely hazy and inchoate.  The Buddhist said he was a monk. The fundamentalist Christian said he was someone in the Tsing dynasty. The atheist sitting next to the therapist said he could not go back further than his present life and was able to regress only to age 6 when he found his father taking him out for a walk . The atheist Eurasian doctor sitting opposite to me said he could not regress into his past. His atheist girlfriend said she was a dancer in a previous life and said she was a child amongst a group of children all wearing green shorts and laced ballet like shoes but could not see their faces.The UU President, also a specialist doctor, said he also could not regress to a previous life either.

I found that when I was asked to walk the along down to that lake before the idea of the lake was suggested to me, I was in Greece close to the sea. I could see that I was in a cave whose sides were rather like rombolo or cumulus-shaped foam like clouds which keep on foldimg into each other and from whose edges the sunlight was streaming in in hundreds of very beautiful and dazzling whitish yellow needle-like shafts towards me. They were breathtakingly beautiful. It was so good. Then when I was asked to imagine myself walking down the path, I imagined walking down a path amongst some fresh green grass just after a shower, with light shining from its dews., like some clear and completely transparent beads. It was so good to be there. When I was asked to imagine the door to my past. I felt a little apprehensive. I did not know what was hidden behind that really big heavy oakwood door, maybe about almost a foot thick with heavy black cast iron hinges and handle.  When I was asked to think back to a time when I was at primary six, I saw myself in the playing field of my primary school during one of the morning drills. It was a sunny day. I could see the fan like green leaves of the delonix regia ( ying shu/ fung wong muk) tree with its blood red flowers swaying gently in the breeze bathed under the soft light of the morning sunlight. I was dressed as the vice-captain of disciplinary team (which I was) with a yellow sash across my white shirt over my green shorts. One of my favourite female teachers was looking at me approvingly. And when I was three, I was lying comfortably on the back of my childhood amah dressed in her black sam-fu feeling very comfortable and was saying to myself, how good it was to lean on her back. I was given some kind of Chinese candy, a bit soft and translucent and a bit but not too sweet. Later I recalled it was the kind called "Cherry-Blossom soft candy" (Ying Fa Yuen Tong)!  When I was told to imagine back to my previous life, the image which appeared was a fattish German woodcutter with a thick head of curly dark brown hair called Johannes, dressed in some loose fitting earth-coloured sack cloth with a wide belt around his waist,  on his way to work in the forest along a country grit path on a summer day in 1842 (!) and found it fascinating to watch a tiny squirrel holding some pine nuts in its forehands which it was then trying to push into its mouth under an oak tree, its tiny eyes glittering in the sunlight. I was fascinated by the light from her tiny tiny eyes and stopped in my path and told myself not to hurry to work that day because it was such a calm and peaceful day and felt that it would be infinitely more preferable to spend some time admiring the beautiful, quiet surrounding scenery and to look at the little red flowers lining my path and their tender freshly sprouted green leaves, surrounded by soft velvet like green grass under the summer sun with white clouds above and in the distance there was a small house with a red roof and white walls . I was wondering who was inside that house! But I think I was just "creating" the images according to the store of information in my brain by following the suggestion of Jonathan to picture various scenarios. Whatever the true cause might be, it was something interesting and completely novel to me. I could certainly use the lesson to stop and admire the scenery!