Can you go back to the past and solve the problems of the present: is it possible? Is past life regression possible? Priyanka Bhargava Shukla

Is past life regression possible? Priyanka Bhargava Shukla 

Most human minds right now, the way they are, cannot even handle one lifetime’s memory. If you remember ten lifetimes, your mind will crack up.

Past life regression is a technique that attempts to use hypnosis in order to recover memories from previous lives. According to past life regression therapists, many mental health issues that patients experience may have their origins in traumatic experiences of past lives. Thus, through hypnosis, practitioners take the patients back in time (regression) (1). This regression could be to periods of their infancy, but also to periods of their gestational development, or periods before they were born with their current body, but their soul may have been embodied in another body, i.e., past lives.

Who Is Priyanka Bhargava 

Spiritual Teachers, Clinical Hypnotherapists (IMDHA, USA), Akashic Records Healers and Past Life Regression Therapists, Psychic and Trainers. Based in India, Inner Journeys was founded in 2015, with a vision to promote innovative healing techniques, ancient wisdom and practical spirituality.

Over the years, it has been innovating in the field of Past Life Regression Therapy, Inner Child Healing, Akashic Records Healing, Astro-Akashic Healing, Angel Healing, Life Between Lives (LBL) journeys, Shadow Work, Remote Spirit Release Therapy, Space Clearance, and Family Tree healing (Pitr Dosha or Ancestral Curse Healing).

Past life regression therapy, therefore, assumes the reality of reincarnation. Based on this assumption, practitioners believe that various mental disorders can be treated by addressing the events that an individual went through before he or she was born in this life.

https://innerjourneys.life 

Mainstream psychiatry has traditionally rejected this assumption. However, some high profile practitioners in the field have upheld past life regression therapy, and actually incorporate it in their medical practice as a therapeutic technique. Perhaps the most prominent promoter of this therapeutic approach is psychiatrist Dr. Brian Weiss.

In a series of bestselling books, Dr. Weiss has recommended hypnosis for patients, in order to overcome phobias. These phobias, Dr. Weiss believes, go back to experiences from previous lives (2). By going back to those experiences through hypnosis, the patient confronts his/her fears, and ultimately, becomes desensitized to his/her original fears. Dr. Weiss’s therapeutic approach has gained notoriety, because at first, he did not believe in reincarnation. According to his testimonies, as he encountered patients that allegedly gave precise details of their past lives, Dr. Weiss came to change his mind. In the public’s view, Dr. Weiss’s initial skepticism renders him some professional credibility; he came to believe in reincarnation and the efficacy of past life regressions not due to some whacky previous religious beliefs, but rather because evidence from his medical practice led him to it.

Although the medical establishment does not favor these procedures, there is a high demand for them in the general population. According to some estimates, 25% of the American population believe in reincarnation, and that figure is surely higher in countries with religions (Buddhism, Hinduism) that give karma and reincarnation a strong relevance in their belief systems (3).

For the most part, professional psychiatric associations have refused to offer support to these techniques, but they have not gone further in calling into question the ethics of such procedures. In this article, I shall evaluate the ethics of past life regression, by considering three of the most important principles in medical ethics; autonomy, beneficence, and non-malfeasance. I will address three points: 1) is reincarnation even conceptually possible? 2) Does the evidence really support the reincarnation hypothesis?; and 3) Is past life regression therapy harmless?

Is reincarnation even conceptually possible?

Reincarnation beliefs are quite ancient. In Ancient Greece, Pre-Socratic philosophers speculated about the soul travelling from one body upon death to another newly born. These beliefs were not particularly important in Western societies, but in the East, they did become quite prominent, first, during the Vedic Period, and then, with some of the great religious reforms by Buddha and Mahavira.

Yet, even from very early times, some philosophers realized that, regardless of the actual evidence, there are some conceptual objections to reincarnation. First, there is the problem of population growth. The human population has increased continuously throughout history. In 8,000 BCE, the human population was at about five million; today, it is at about six billion. Now, if the doctrine of reincarnation is true, the number of souls is constant. For, when someone dies, her soul does not become extinct, and when someone is born, her soul is not new, as it is travelling from another body. However, if the number of souls is constant, how can we explain the increase in the number of bodies? Presumably, in the year 8,000 BCE, there were five million soles in the world. Today, presumably, there are six billion souls. Where did these additional souls come from?

In truth, this objection is not formidable. According to the reincarnation doctrine, there is no reason to assume that no new souls can be created. Even if the number of souls is constant, some of them could have a disembodied existence while they wait for new bodies to come into existence, as the population increases. Furthermore, if, as Hinduism teaches, reincarnation need not only take place amongst

 human beings, then, the remaining souls could also be embodied in animals, while they wait for new human bodies to be born.

However, there are some other important conceptual objections. If reincarnation is real, it is nevertheless true that most people do not remember their previous lives. Now, without memories from previous lives, how can we allege that someone is the same person (or, as philosophers would phrase it, numerically identical) as the one who lived in a previous life? For the sake of argument, we may admit that the criterion of personal identity (i.e., how do we make sure that a person at a given time is the same person at another time?) is not the body (although, some philosophers do insist that the only possible criterion is the body, for reasons that I shall not delve into). Under this assumption, one need not have the same bodily continuity in order to be considered the same person, as long as there is at least some psychological continuity. The philosopher John Locke famously argued that if a prince would one day wake up in the body of a cobbler, but would keep his memories as a prince, then, he would still be the prince (4).

Nevertheless, the problem with reincarnation is that there is precisely no psychological continuity, as most people do not remember their previous lives. By the psychological criterion of identity, then, we cannot be someone of whom we have no memories. Defenders of reincarnation claim that we have no memories from our earliest infancy, but that does not mean we are not the same person. Furthermore, patients with memory impairment (such as patients with Alzheimer’s disease) have few, if any, memories of their life, but again, that does not mean they are not the same person.

However, philosophers have usually pointed out an important caveat regarding the psychological identity criterion: if there is a chain of memories from one stage to a later stage, then, identity is preserved. Thus, for example, an elderly general may have memories of his time as a young officer, and this officer had memories of his childhood, then, we can say that the elderly general is the same person as the child. Yet, in the case of reincarnation, there is no such chain.

Apart from these conceptual problems specific to reincarnation, there are also conceptual problems regarding the existence of souls. The doctrine of reincarnation assumes that souls exist, as a person’s soul abandons his/her body upon death, and enters another body at the moment of birth. However, if the soul is a mysterious nonmaterial substance, how does it interact with matter? Back in the 17th Century, philosopher Rene Descartes was aware of this problem, and he argued that soul and body interact in the pineal gland (5). Now we know that this is wrong; the pineal gland has no cognitive function. But even if it did, the problem remains: how does a nonphysical substance make its entry into the physical universe and become a causal agent?

Is there evidence for reincarnation?

As early as the times of Plato, some philosophers have tried to offer evidence that seems to support the reincarnation hypothesis. According to a famous argument laid out in Plato’s Phaedo, we have knowledge that we could not possibly acquire in this lifetime. Plato was intrigued by the abilities of some people to do certain things that they never learned to do. In Plato’s estimation, learning is actually a form of reminiscence: in education, while we are stimulated by our teachers’ questions, we come to remember things from our previous lives (6).

It is no doubt true that we have innate knowledge and innate mental contents. Nevertheless, as opposed to what Plato believed, that does not imply that it comes from previous lives. Actually, our brains may be genetically hardwired for certain mental traits, and some specific innate knowledge. One need not have been bitten by a snake in a previous life in order to innately fear snakes. The fear of snakes was very likely advantageous in the African Savannah, and thus, that fear is probably encoded in our genes.

Defenders of reincarnation also point out déjà vu experiences. They are the strange feeling some people get when they encounter a situation for the first time, but they have the sensation that they have already lived through it. But again, we must not rush and jump to conclusions. It has been proposed that déjà vu experiences are due to a mismatch in the timing of sensorial information processing; it is possible that one of the brain’s hemispheres assimilates information, and a short time later, the other hemisphere assimilates the information. In such a scenario, the person would believe that he/she is reliving incident that, in fact, only occurred a few milliseconds ago.

Déjà vu experiences may also be explained as instances of cryptomnesia, i.e., when a person stores some sensorial datum in their memory, but it soon disappears from conscious memory. These memories may remain hidden in the person’s 

क्या पिछला जीवन में जा कर वर्तमान के समस्याओ को सुलझा सकते है : क्या ये संभव है? Prinka Bhargava 

अधिकांश मानव मन अभी, जिस तरह से हैं, एक जीवन भर की स्मृति को भी संभाल नहीं सकते हैं। अगर आप दस जन्मों को याद करेंगे तो आपका दिमाग फट जाएगा।

पिछला जीवन प्रतिगमन एक ऐसी तकनीक है जो पिछले जन्मों से यादों को पुनर्प्राप्त करने के लिए सम्मोहन का उपयोग करने का प्रयास करती है। पिछले जीवन प्रतिगमन चिकित्सक के अनुसार, रोगियों के अनुभव के कई मानसिक स्वास्थ्य मुद्दों की उत्पत्ति पिछले जन्मों के दर्दनाक अनुभवों में हो सकती है। इस प्रकार, चिकित्सक सम्मोहन के माध्यम से रोगियों को समय पर वापस ले जाते हैं (प्रतिगमन) (1)। यह प्रतिगमन उनकी शैशवावस्था की अवधि के लिए हो सकता है, लेकिन उनके गर्भकालीन विकास की अवधि तक, या उनके वर्तमान शरीर के साथ पैदा होने से पहले की अवधि तक हो सकता है, लेकिन उनकी आत्मा दूसरे शरीर, यानी पिछले जन्मों में सन्निहित हो सकती है।

इसलिए विगत जीवन प्रतिगमन चिकित्सा पुनर्जन्म की वास्तविकता को मानती है। इस धारणा के आधार पर, चिकित्सकों का मानना ​​​​है कि विभिन्न मानसिक विकारों का इलाज उन घटनाओं को संबोधित करके किया जा सकता है जो एक व्यक्ति इस जीवन में पैदा होने से पहले हुआ था।

मुख्यधारा के मनोचिकित्सा ने पारंपरिक रूप से इस धारणा को खारिज कर दिया है। हालांकि, इस क्षेत्र में कुछ उच्च प्रोफ़ाइल चिकित्सकों ने पिछले जीवन प्रतिगमन चिकित्सा को बरकरार रखा है, और वास्तव में इसे चिकित्सीय तकनीक के रूप में अपने चिकित्सा अभ्यास में शामिल किया है। शायद इस चिकित्सीय दृष्टिकोण के सबसे प्रमुख प्रवर्तक मनोचिकित्सक डॉ. ब्रायन वीस हैं। बेस्टसेलिंग किताबों की एक श्रृंखला में, डॉ वीस ने फोबिया को दूर करने के लिए रोगियों के लिए सम्मोहन की सिफारिश की है। डॉ. वीस का मानना ​​है कि ये फोबिया पिछले जन्मों के अनुभवों पर वापस जाते हैं (2)। सम्मोहन के माध्यम से उन अनुभवों पर वापस जाने से, रोगी अपने डर का सामना करता है, और अंततः, अपने मूल भय के प्रति असंवेदनशील हो जाता है। डॉ वीस के चिकित्सीय दृष्टिकोण ने कुख्याति प्राप्त की है, क्योंकि पहले तो वे पुनर्जन्म में विश्वास नहीं करते थे। उनकी गवाही के अनुसार, जैसे ही उन्होंने उन रोगियों का सामना किया, जिन्होंने कथित तौर पर उनके पिछले जीवन का सटीक विवरण दिया था, डॉ वीस ने अपना विचार बदल दिया। जनता के विचार में, डॉ वीस का प्रारंभिक संदेह उन्हें कुछ पेशेवर विश्वसनीयता प्रदान करता है; वह पुनर्जन्म और पिछले जीवन के प्रतिगमन की प्रभावकारिता में विश्वास करने के लिए कुछ अजीब पिछले धार्मिक विश्वासों के कारण नहीं आया, बल्कि इसलिए कि उसकी चिकित्सा पद्धति के साक्ष्य ने उसे इसके लिए प्रेरित किया।

हालांकि चिकित्सा प्रतिष्ठान इन प्रक्रियाओं के पक्ष में नहीं हैं, लेकिन आम जनता में इनकी काफी मांग है। कुछ अनुमानों के अनुसार, 25% अमेरिकी आबादी पुनर्जन्म में विश्वास करती है, और यह आंकड़ा निश्चित रूप से उन धर्मों (बौद्ध धर्म, हिंदू धर्म) वाले देशों में अधिक है जो कर्म और पुनर्जन्म को उनकी विश्वास प्रणाली (3) में एक मजबूत प्रासंगिकता देते हैं।

अधिकांश भाग के लिए, पेशेवर मनोरोग संघों ने इन तकनीकों को समर्थन देने से इनकार कर दिया है, लेकिन वे ऐसी प्रक्रियाओं की नैतिकता पर सवाल उठाने में आगे नहीं बढ़े हैं। इस लेख में, मैं चिकित्सा नैतिकता में तीन सबसे महत्वपूर्ण सिद्धांतों पर विचार करके, पिछले जीवन प्रतिगमन की नैतिकता का मूल्यांकन करूंगा; स्वायत्तता, लाभ, और गैर-दुर्भावना। मैं तीन बिंदुओं को संबोधित करूंगा: 1) क्या अवधारणात्मक रूप से भी पुनर्जन्म संभव है? 2) क्या सबूत वास्तव में पुनर्जन्म की परिकल्पना का समर्थन करते हैं ?; और 3) क्या पिछला जीवन प्रतिगमन चिकित्सा हानिरहित है?

क्या वैचारिक रूप से भी पुनर्जन्म संभव है?

पुनर्जन्म की मान्यताएं काफी प्राचीन हैं। प्राचीन ग्रीस में, पूर्व-सुकराती दार्शनिकों ने अनुमान लगाया था कि आत्मा एक शरीर से मृत्यु के बाद दूसरे नवजात में यात्रा करती है। ये विश्वास पश्चिमी समाजों में विशेष रूप से महत्वपूर्ण नहीं थे, लेकिन पूर्व में, वे पहले वैदिक काल के दौरान और फिर बुद्ध और महावीर द्वारा किए गए कुछ महान धार्मिक सुधारों के साथ काफी प्रमुख हो गए थे।

फिर भी, बहुत शुरुआती समय से ही, कुछ दार्शनिकों ने महसूस किया कि वास्तविक सबूतों की परवाह किए बिना, पुनर्जन्म के लिए कुछ वैचारिक आपत्तियां हैं। सबसे पहले, जनसंख्या वृद्धि की समस्या है। पूरे इतिहास में मानव आबादी में लगातार वृद्धि हुई है। 8,000 ईसा पूर्व में, मानव आबादी लगभग 50 लाख थी; आज, यह लगभग छह अरब है। अब, यदि पुनर्जन्म का सिद्धांत सत्य है, तो आत्माओं की संख्या स्थिर है। क्योंकि जब किसी की मृत्यु होती है, तो उसकी आत्मा विलुप्त नहीं होती है, और जब कोई पैदा होता है, तो उसकी आत्मा नई नहीं होती, क्योंकि वह दूसरे शरीर से यात्रा कर रही होती है। लेकिन यदि आत्माओं की संख्या स्थिर है, तो शरीरों की संख्या में वृद्धि की व्याख्या कैसे करें? संभवतः, 8,000 ईसा पूर्व में, दुनिया में 50 लाख तलवे थे। आज, शायद, छह अरब आत्माएं हैं। ये अतिरिक्त आत्माएँ कहाँ से आईं?

वास्तव में, यह आपत्ति दुर्जेय नहीं है। पुनर्जन्म सिद्धांत के अनुसार, यह मानने का कोई कारण नहीं है कि कोई नई आत्मा नहीं बनाई जा सकती है। यहां तक ​​​​कि अगर आत्माओं की संख्या स्थिर है, तो उनमें से कुछ का एक अलग अस्तित्व हो सकता है, जब वे नए शरीर के अस्तित्व में आने की प्रतीक्षा करते हैं, जैसे-जैसे जनसंख्या बढ़ती है। इसके अलावा, अगर, जैसा कि हिंदू धर्म सिखाता है, पुनर्जन्म न केवल मानवों के बीच होना चाहिए.