The Quickening. Gregg Unterberger

had made a mockery of it.

      I have (last I checked) a sense of humor about all this, of course. If you haven’t figured it out, I think we can find some laughter in almost anything. But I think it is unfortunate that past-life regression therapy—something that has held up in court as a legitimate therapeutic intervention, a topic that has sold millions of books—should be reduced to a scary carnival ride by the media in this day and age.

      I remember Dr. Brian Weiss telling me a story about someone who had a near-death experience (NDE). The person reported being tortured by demons and devils, something all but unheard of in the literature. A major network asked Dr. Weiss to regress the person to find out more details. Under hypnosis, the near-death survivor remembered being poked and prodded by EMS workers who missed his veins several times while trying to put in an IV and realized that the demons were a part of his delirium. Cameras recorded the session but, as you can imagine, when the media broadcast the report, they completely failed to include the hypnosis they asked for, instead going with the original interview with the man who said he had been tortured by demons, even though he had now refuted it! The network went with the story they wanted, not the one that was true.

      Whether you believe in it or not, the majority of people on the planet believe in reincarnation or rebirth. Even in the Western world, according to polls, nearly a third of Americans and Britains believe in reincarnation—a substantial increase from twenty years ago. It’s amazing when you think about it, since only one Christian denomination—the Unity faith—fully embraces reincarnation as part of their theology. That means that somewhere out there, there are a lot of people that are Lutherans, Methodists, Catholics, and (Holy Christ!) Baptists, who believe they may have lived before, despite their religious affiliation. You may be one of them.

      As to beliefs about the afterlife in Judaism, my friend David H. Ehl, author of a remarkable book, You Are Gods⁶, once told me that he asked a rabbi about the topic.

      “He basically told me if you ask ten different rabbis, you will get twelve different answers,” said David with a wry smile.

      Still, according to Judaic scholar, Yaakov Astor, for most academics, reincarnation is unquestionably a part of mystical Judaism and is featured in the Zohar, a major source for Kabbalistic teachings. Indeed, Astor points out that many conservative scholars, not known for being sympathetic to mystical thinking, see reincarnation as a basic tenet of mainstream Judaic traditions, however unobserved.⁷

      If a major network made fun of Baptist beliefs or Catholic beliefs, there would be a serious outcry.

      Still, it was a wonderful weekend, overall. They pronounced my name right on television. Plus, a lot of people in my workshops remembered their past lives, and some discovered their destiny (sans the scary music).

      And Mary isn’t filled with shame anymore.

       IN LOVE WITH A NAZI

      What had I done?

      “Get me out of here!” she all but screamed at me. All that Greta had seen were bodies: bodies upon bodies upon bodies stacked up like so much cordwood against the cold concrete walls. Her eyes closed, her head twisted about furtively like a tiny bird, frantically looking about in her mind’s eye. “I can’t find myself,” she said with a ferocious urgency. “I . . . I don’t know which one I am . . . Get me out of here!”

      “Okay, okay, Greta,” I said, trying to sound calm and focused while I felt like my heart was going to pound out of my chest. “As I count upwards from one to ten, you will slowly regain full waking consciousness. Here we go: ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . .” I recited, not realizing that I was counting in the totally opposite direction, Way to go, Gregg!

      It was a good thing that Greta had her eyes closed, or she would have seen every red blood cell in my body rush to my face in embarrassment. In truth, that was the least of my worries. I had never seen anyone react so frantically in a past-life regression. Greta’s sheer panic was overtaking her. I had never once had to count anybody out of a past-life regression because they were overwhelmed by the intensity of their feelings.

      But then, I had never done a past-life regression before. This was my first.

      Fortunately, I already was a licensed professional counselor, not completely unfamiliar with how to deal with an abreaction like the one Greta was having. I counted Greta the rest of the way out, still counting in the wrong direction, but Greta came up and out of hypnosis nonetheless.

      She looked around, her eyes wide, the memory fresh. “I couldn’t find myself!” she said with a thick German accent. “I was looking, but I could not find me!”

      It took me a minute to get my bearings and figure out exactly what Greta was talking about, but slowly the tumblers were clicking into place. I had successfully hypnotized her and taken her into a past life.

      Hey, at least I got that part right. Not bad for a rookie. I told myself, trying to piece together a few shattered bits of my confidence, but cutting myself on the sharp edges. I had directed Greta to go to an important moment in that past life. But there was no way that either I or Greta could have known where she would go.

      She had arrived in a lifetime in Nazi Germany, but not “in” her physical body. Moments before, she had been hung by her neck. Her body had then been taken away to some kind of warehouse for temporary storage along with other corpses. Greta was experiencing the aftermath of her life as a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl immediately after her execution. She was completely confused by the experience. She was deeply identified with her young body and panicked, her consciousness floating over the stacks of bodies trying to find the mortal coil that she had so recently inhabited. But then, it was too much, and Greta, rightfully, had asked me to get her out.

      I snapped my fingers sharply, breaking the trance.

      “Oh, mein Gott,” she said, choking back the tears as I gave the final suggestion to arrive back fully in the present.

      “Greta, open your eyes. Greta? Greta! Greta, open your eyes,” I said in a firm voice. She responded, her eyelids fluttering rapidly, then becoming more present. She was breathing in short, sharp breaths, punctuated with chaotic moans. “That’s good. Greta, look at me. Look at me . . . look at me . . . look at me.” Her eyes finally went wide, as though she was seeing the bodies again. Then the rapid blinking returned as tears spilled down her cheeks. I was grounding her in the here-and-now by bringing her attention to my eyes and a safe presence.

      “Greta, you are safe. You are safe. Do you understand me?” Her eyes were still filled with a lingering horror, but she nodded, still unable to speak. She whimpered and perused the room, as if to double-check if the evil was still present. She was here, at least in part.

      “What you saw was horrible. What you saw was a horrible past-life memory. It was a very frightening image. And you are safe now. An image cannot hurt you. It can scare you, but it cannot hurt you. You are safe. You are back in Greta’s life experience here, now, in the year 1999.”

      Greta took a series of slow, deep breaths and looked around the room, nodding, clearly wanting to believe me, beginning to believe me. The terror was still with her, but gradually she was orienting herself with my help in a large room that contained other counselors and therapists, paired off together, all practicing their brand-spanking new regression skills on their second day of training with Brian Weiss, a medical doctor with degrees from Yale and Columbia and perhaps the guy that was voted in his college yearbook as “Least Likely to be an International Authority on Past-Life Regression.”

      Brian, a largely agnostic, obsessive-compulsive, magna cum laude grad, who had authored more than forty scientific articles and book chapters, had his life turned upside down some thirty years ago when he put a patient, “Catherine,” under hypnosis and directed her to go back to when the problem began, thinking she