Past Lives

I watched a program last night about past life regression where they hypnotised a man and took him back in his mind to see who he was in a past life. They took down all the details they could with the aim of trying to track down that person to see if there was any truth in it. It started off by spooking me a bit as they showed clips of a couple of people having regression and some got quite animated, there was one who cried 'fire' and began frantically screaming as if she was stuck in a fire. It made me feel quite uncomfortable.

Anyway, they regressed the man who was volunteering and the first thing he said was that he was at a funeral and he was burying his wife. This didn't help the shivers I was already feeling! It turned out he was a landowner from Glossop in Derby who had just lost his wife and then later went on to lose all his money and eventually went to prison for manslaughter. The man was asked whilst hypnotised how he felt and he was very lonely and sounded sad and miserable and when asked to describe his life basically said it was 'a heartache.'

So they then got a genealogist to try to find the man as they had his full name but although they could find plenty of landowners with the same surname in Glossop, they couldn't find one with his exact name. And the same for men who committed manslaughter, they could find men with the surname who had ended in prison but not with the specific Christian names they were looking for. The genealogist said that if a landowner had killed someone and been put in prison it would definitely have been reported somewhere, even if only in the court records let alone the press, but they couldn't find this man.

They also took the man to Glossop to have a look around to see if he recognised anything. Whilst under regression he had seen a picture of where he lived and the land and everything and he was very specific about the house and drew a picture of what it looked like. However once he got to Glossop, although he said things looked similar to in his regression, he couldn't find the exact scene and nothing like the house he was looking for. They walked around the graveyard at the Church but nothing seemed to stir his memories.

It was only then in the graveyard that he sat down and started talking to his father who had gone with him on the trip. They started talking about his mum, who died when he was 15 years old and it suddenly struck the researcher that this could be significant. Could his grief at being left without his mother at an early age have triggered the 'memory' when under past life regression? When back home and he'd had some time to think about things, he took us to his front window to see the view out the window and he pointed out his Dad's house which you could see on the hill from there. It was a house on the top of the hill with a lot of land around it. He talked about how familiar the house and land were as he played all around it as a child and how it was kind of separate to the houses further down the valley. Could this be the source of his 'memories' as a landowner with a house and land?

At this point his wife stepped in and interrupted, apologising for interrupting but said that she couldn't keep out for any longer. She asked if the grief, loneliness and misery which her husband had felt in the regression, could be similar to how he had felt when his mother died. He looked a little shocked at this, but she continued to say that he had never spoken about his mother or the time when she died and this was still after 13 years of marriage. The only time he had ever spoken about it was about twice when he had been drinking. He said that he didn't like to speak of it as he went off the rails for about 5 years after she died and it wasn't a good time.

It soon began to become apparent that losing his mother at 15 years old must have been an awful time for him and it looks as though when he was regressed, his mind came out with a description of the events and feelings but displayed in a past life format. At 15 years old, a teenager would have felt that they were grown up and probably felt that they couldn't express their loss because at that age they aren't supposed to need their parents anymore. Fifteen is one of the exact ages where expressing anything to anyone is difficult anyway. So this man had lost his mother at a time when he really did need her, but didn't feel that he could let it show. So even though he was feeling terribly lonely and sad he hid it by going off the rails and expressing it with anger and misbehaviour.

It was quite a sad program in the end. The mind is a clever thing and we all dream when we sleep and I'm thinking that past life regression is a similar process where the brain gets free range to come up with an experience which expresses emotions which might otherwise never get expressed or revealed. In a way this was a good experience as the man got to express feelings which he probably didn't really know he'd hidden and was able to talk about his mother.

At the beginning of the program when he came out with all the detail, I was almost willing them to find it was true as this would have been quite bizarre. I've never believed in having past lives, it's not something I've ever thought reasonable or possible. However towards the end I was really glad that they didn't find any truth in the regression and it made me happy that there seemed to be a reason behind the details.

The hypnotherapist summed it all up at the end and said that some people do reveal details which then check out when researched. However he also said that your subconscious mind is always taking in details, so you might be talking to someone with the TV on in the background and hear things which you don't realise you've heard, and similarly you can look at a newspaper and take in things even if you don't think you've read an article. It made me wonder what on earth I'd reveal if I were regressed, I've done so much family history research in the past delving into records and articles and things that I could probably come up with a true history of someone, just from details my mind has seen/heard over the years.

Still it was an interesting program and has had me thinking this morning. I went from a starting point of feeling spooked and wondering if it could be true, in which case there was 'something' out there which scared and alarmed me, whereas I now feel comfortable in the knowledge that my ideals haven't been challenged and that my personal belief is intact.

[So what about these young children you hear about who when taken to a place they've never been to before seem to know the layout and that the church is 'down there' and that Aunt Mary used to 'live in the big house around the corner'....!] ;)