The Quickening. Gregg Unterberger

       4

       Past Lives, Future Lives, and the Afterlife: Understanding Your Karmic Arc

      “[Under hypnosis] the conscious mind becomes subjugated to the . . . superconscious or soul mind . . . From any subconscious mind information may be obtained, either from this plane or from impressions left by individuals that have gone before.”

      Edgar Cayce reading 3744-3

       Not So Sound Bites

      The television camera was all but looking over my shoulder as I began to take my subject back to another lifetime. The conditions were hardly ideal. For starters, I was outdoors on the patio of a chain hotel; the Sacramento spring air was close and muggy, and periodically people were passing by. My client sat in a lawn chair, a last-minute volunteer whom I had never met, pressed into service by a bubbly young female reporter to “demonstrate” past-life regression therapy for a local network affiliate. To top it all off, the woman I was hypnotizing, a kind and gentle soul, was hard of hearing.

      “It’s okay,” she said a bit loudly, when she volunteered. “I read lips pretty well.”

      That was of great comfort to me, given that most of the time she was hypnotized, she would be sitting there with her eyes closed.

      I had flown into California to essentially keynote at a weekend event called The Healing Arts Festival, produced by my friend Marci Mortensson. As the featured speaker, I would be offering a couple of abbreviated group past-life regressions as well as an exercise called Discover Your Destiny, that had helped lots of people intuitively grasp their life’s mission and even apparently see a glimpse of their future. The trip seemed like a good idea at the time, especially when I had conspired with my best friend, Jack Morrison, to piggy-back some R&R after the conference. He would fly in and meet me, and we would drive over the mountains to hang at Lake Tahoe. Marci had told me—no, warned me—that the media might be there.

      Television is anything but a patient medium. Media today is all sound bites and snippets. Heaven forbid that anyone spend more than ten seconds on any subject. I knew I needed something visual. I decided on a rapid-induction technique I had learned when I trained under Dr. Brian Weiss, the leading authority in the field and the author of the best-selling Many Lives, Many Masters. Basically it was a technique that would put someone under hypnosis all but instantly . . . but not something that you would want to screw up on television.

      Mary was seated in front of me, and I was standing. I asked her to place her open palm in mine and to look up at me. I tipped my head down, burning my gaze into her eyes.

      “Look at me, Mary. Look at me. You are getting sleepy, sleepy. Your eyes are tired, heavy, limp, loose, relaxed. You can’t fight them . . .” I said firmly. She began to glaze over slightly.

      “Your eyelids are so heavy, so very heavy, you can’t fight it—sleepy . . . heavy . . . limp . . . loose . . . relaxed . . .”

      Her eyelids began to blink rapidly.

      “Sleep!” I commanded.

      Her eyelids snapped shut, her shoulders collapsing, her chin falling to her chest. As I recall, I literally had to catch her shoulder to keep her from falling out of the chair and onto the stoned pavement.

      “Going deep, even deeper now, dropping down, way down, so easy, so gentle,” I said quietly and rhythmically as her face softened even more. I could see the trance state taking hold. She took a very deep breath and exhaled. The camera, the patio, the cheap lawn chair beneath her, and the moist morning air were all falling away from her now.

      “Just like a stone falling through clear water—going down, down, all the way down, even deeper . . .” I intoned.

      I took Mary through a series of weigh stations on our way to her past life. There were additional deepening techniques to insure she was in a profound trance. I surrounded her with a brilliant spiritual light to guide her and create safety. Then it was on to a magnificent spiritual garden, a place of safety and sanctuary, where I would introduce her to a spiritual guide, who would take her on her journey.

      It was only then that I realized the camera crew had not placed a microphone on her. Also, I had been so focused on Mary (as I should have been) that I completely missed the fact that the camera was no longer on us. Bored, I suppose, they had trotted off to get another bite of metaphysical news, somewhere else. Still, I had a client in front of me, and I felt an obligation to finish what we started. As we explored her past life, an amazing story unfolded.

      She reported that she was a man, a Muslim, somewhere in the Middle East, perhaps hundreds of years ago. Yes, crossing genders happens sometimes from lifetime to lifetime. Although Edgar Cayce says that we typically incarnate as the same sex, we occasionally switch to check out what it’s like to have different chromosomes. In that incarnation, as a male, she was on a special mission. She was given a sacred prayer mat that was to be delivered to some holy men for a very special ceremony. She believed that if she did not complete her task, and this sacred ritual went incomplete, then some catastrophe would occur. As she scurried across the city, through crowded bazaars, anxiously moving toward her designated meeting spot, she was suddenly waylaid and dragged into an alley. She was beaten and left for dead, and the holy prayer mat stolen!

      As the last of her life flowed from her, her thought was not for herself, but that she had failed Allah and the Holy Ones. She wept with shame. Her life was a failure. Blood, tears, and eventually even her spirit, left her body.

      We talked for a few minutes afterward. The intense regret and shame was still with her. In her incarnation now, she had always been concerned that she was fulfilling her life’s mission. But in her current life, she had spent much of it composing, recording, and performing sacred Native American music around the country. Her work and spirit had touched thousands of people. Maybe, I said, she could forgive herself for what happened in her Muslim life. After all, she had died in the service of Allah. And in this life, her efforts to help bring spiritual growth to the planet had found success.

      Mary quietly cried tears of relief and forgiveness. Smiling through her grief, she thanked me and told me that the regression was immensely beneficial and that it helped her make sense of a lot of her thoughts, feelings, and fears over the years.

      “Most of all,” she said, “I don’t feel like such a failure anymore. That was an echo from my other life.”

      Later, the pretty and perky young reporter approached me and asked me to tell her what had happened to Mary in the regression. She shoved a microphone in my face, the camera light clicked on, and suddenly an electric white smile blazed on her face.

      “We’re here with Gregg Unterberger, a licensed professional counselor and a national expert in past-life regression. He has taken thousands of people around the country into hypnosis to see who they were in other lifetimes!” she said musically.

      I didn’t think I could match her 500-watt smile, but I remembered what my friend and producer Mike Gilg used to say, “Smile big for Mister Camera. Remember, this isn’t real life, this is TV!” As we continued, I tried to share Mary’s experience as briefly as possible. With my every sentence the reporter’s skull nodded frenetically like a bobble-head doll on the dashboard of an ‘86 Oldsmobile with bad shocks. I tried to truncate Mary’s story, but how do you encapsulate a transformative experience into a thirty-second sound bite?

      Later, as I watch the recording of Good Morning, Sacramento with my friend Marcie Mortenson, I realized it hardly mattered. Initially during my interview, they let me talk about Mary and cut away to shots of my rapid induction as she collapsed into trance. It was a nice visual. But then as I continued with her story, the audio played an ominous over-the-top piece of music that would be best suited to a horror movie. Finally, they cut back to the anchors, mugging spookily while the lights flashed on and off in the studio and thunder sound effects played on the soundtrack.