Journey of Souls

You would know the hidden realm

where all souls dwell.

The journey’s way lies

through death’s misty fell.

Within this timeless passage

a guiding light does dance,

Lost from conscious memory,

but visible in trance.

M.N.

ARE you afraid of death? Do you wonder what is going to happen to you after you die? Is it possible you have a spirit which came from somewhere else and will return there after your body dies, or is this just wishful thinking because you are afraid?

It is a paradox that humans, alone of all creatures of the Earth, must repress the fear of death in order to lead normal lives. Yet our biological instinct never lets us forget this ultimate danger to our being. As we grow older, the specter of death rises in our consciousness. Even religious people fear death is the end of personhood. Our greatest dread of death brings thoughts about the nothingness of death which will end all associations with family and friends. Dying makes all our earthly goals seem futile.

If death were the end of everything about us, then life indeed would be meaningless. However, some power within us enables humans to conceive of a hereafter and to sense a connection to a higher power and even an eternal soul. If we do actually have a soul, then where does it go after death? Is there really some sort of heaven full of intelligent spirits outside our physical universe? What does it look like? What do we do when we get there? Is there a supreme being in charge of this paradise? These questions are as old as humankind itself and still remain a mystery to most of us.

The true answers to the mystery of life after death remain locked behind a spiritual door for most people. This is because we have built-in amnesia about our soul identity which, on a conscious level, aids in the merging of the soul and human brain. In the last few years the general public has heard about people who temporarily died and then came back to life to tell about seeing a long tunnel, bright lights, and even brief encounters with friendly spirits. But none of these accounts written in the many books on reincarnation has ever given us anything more than a glimpse of all there is to know about life after death.

This book is an intimate journal about the spirit world. It provides a series of actual case histories which reveal in explicit detail what happens to us when life on Earth is over. You will be taken beyond the spiritual tunnel and enter the spirit world itself to learn what transpires for souls before they finally return to Earth in another life.

I am a skeptic by nature, although it will not seem so from the contents of this book. As a counselor and hypnotherapist, I specialize in behavior modification for the treatment of psychological disorders. A large part of my work involves short-term cognitive restructuring with clients by helping them connect thoughts and emotions to promote healthy behavior. Together we elicit the meaning, function, and consequences of their beliefs because I take the premise that no mental problem is imaginary.

In the early days of my practice, I resisted past life requests from people because of my orientation toward traditional therapy. While I used hypnosis and age-regression techniques to determine the origins of disturbing memories and childhood trauma, I felt any attempt to reach a former life was unorthodox and non-clinical. My interest in reincarnation and metaphysics was only intellectual curiosity until I worked with a young man on pain management.

This client complained of a lifetime of chronic pain on his right side. One of the tools of hypnotherapy to manage pain is directing the subject to make the pain worse so he or she can also learn to lessen the aching and thus acquire control. In one of our sessions involving pain intensification, this man used the imagery of being stabbed to recreate his torment. Searching for the origins of this image, I eventually uncovered his former life as a World War I soldier who was killed by a bayonet in France, and we were able to eliminate the pain altogether.

With encouragement from my clients, I began to experiment with moving some of them further back in time before their last birth on Earth. Initially I was concerned that a subject’s integration of current needs, beliefs, and fears would create fantasies of recollection. However, it didn’t take long before I realized our deep-seated memories offer a set of past experiences which are too real and connected to be ignored. I came to appreciate just how therapeutically important the link is between the bodies and events of our former lives and who we are today.

Then I stumbled on to a discovery of enormous proportions. I found it was possible to see into the spirit world through the mind’s eye of a hypnotized subject who could report back to me of life between lives on Earth.

The case that opened the door to the spirit world for me was a middle-aged woman who was an especially receptive hypnosis subject. She had been talking to me about her feelings of loneliness and isolation in that delicate stage when a subject has finished recalling their most recent past life. This unusual individual slipped into the highest state of altered consciousness almost by herself Without realizing I had initiated an overly short command for this action, I suggested she go to the source of her loss of companionship. At the same moment I inadvertently used one of the trigger words to spiritual recall. I also asked if she had a specific group of friends whom she missed.

Suddenly, my client started to cry. When I directed her to tell me what was wrong, she blurted out, “I miss some friends in my group and that’s why I get so lonely on Earth.” I was confused and questioned her further about where this group of friends was actually located. “Here, in my permanent home,” she answered simply, “and I’m looking at all of them right now!”

After finishing with this client and reviewing her tape recordings, I recognized that finding the spirit world involved an extension of past life regression. There are many books about past lives, but none I could find which told about our life as souls, or how to properly access the spiritual recollections of people. I decided to do the research myself and with practice I acquired greater skill in entering the spirit world through my subjects. I also learned that finding their place in the spirit world was far more meaningful to people than recounting their former lives on Earth.

How is it possible to reach the soul through hypnosis? Visualize the mind as having three concentric circles, each smaller than the last and within the other, separated only by layers of connected mind-consciousness. The first outer layer is represented by the conscious mind which is our critical, analytic reasoning source. The second layer is the subconscious, where we initially go in hypnosis to tap into the storage area for all the memories that ever happened to us in this life and former lives. The third, the innermost core, is what we are now calling the superconscious mind. This level exposes the highest center of Self where we are an expression of a higher power.

The superconscious houses our real identity, augmented by the subconscious which contains the memories of the many alter-egos assumed by us in our former human bodies. The superconscious may not be a level at all, but the soul itself. The superconscious mind represents our highest center of wisdom and perspective, and all my information about life after death comes from this source of intelligent energy.

How valid is the use of hypnosis for uncovering truth? People in hypnosis are neither dreaming nor hallucinating. We don’t dream in chronological sequences nor hallucinate in a directed trance state. When subjects are placed in trance, their brain waves slow from the Beta wake state and continue to change vibration down past the meditative Alpha stage into various levels within the Theta range. Theta is hypnosis-not sleep. When we sleep we go to the final Delta state where messages from the brain are dropped into the subconscious and vented through our dreams. In Theta, however, the conscious mind is not unconscious, so we are able to receive as well as send messages with all memory channels open.

Once in hypnosis, people report the pictures they see and dialogue they hear in their unconscious minds as literal observations. In response to questions, subjects cannot lie, but they may misinterpret something seen in their unconscious mind, just as we do in the conscious state. In hypnosis, people have trouble relating to anything they don’t believe is the truth.

Some critics of hypnosis believe a subject in trance will fabricate memories and bias their responses in order to adopt any theoretical framework suggested by the hypnotist. I find this generalization to be a false premise. In my work, I treat each case as if I were hearing the information for the first time. If a subject were somehow able to overcome hypnosis procedure and construct a deliberate fantasy about the spirit world, or free-associate from pre-set ideas about their afterlife, these responses would soon become inconsistent with my other case reports. I learned the value of careful cross-examination early in my work and I found no evidence of anyone faking their spiritual experiences to please me. In fact, subjects in hypnosis are not hesitant in correcting my misinterpretations of their statements.

As my case files grew, I discovered by trial and error to phrase questions about the spirit world in a proper sequence. Subjects in a superconscious state are not particularly motivated to volunteer information about the whole plan of soul life in the spirit world. One must have the right set of keys for specific doors. Eventually, I was able to perfect a reliable method of memory access to different parts of the spirit world by knowing which door to open at the right time during a session.

As I gained confidence with each session, more people sensed I was comfortable with the hereafter and felt it was all right to speak to me about it. The clients in my cases represent some men and women who were very religious, while others had no particular spiritual beliefs at all. Most fall somewhere in between, with a mixed bag of personal philosophies about life. The astounding thing I found as I progressed with my research was that once subjects were regressed back into their soul state they all displayed a remarkable consistency in responding to questions about the spirit world. People even use the same words and graphic descriptions in colloquial language when discussing their lives as souls.

However, this homogeneity of experience by so many clients did not stop me from continually trying to verify statements between my subjects and corroborate specific functional activities of souls. There were some differences in narrative reporting between cases, but this was due more to the level of soul development than to variances in how each subject basically saw the spirit world.

The research was painfully slow, but as the body of my cases grew I finally had a working model of the eternal world where our souls live. I found thoughts about the spirit world involve universal truths among the souls of people living on Earth. It was these perceptions by so many different types of people which convinced me their statements were believable. I am not a religious person, but I found the place where we go after death to be one of order and direction, and I have come to appreciate that there is a grand design to life and afterlife.

When I considered how to best present my findings, I determined the case study method would provide the most descriptive way in which the reader could evaluate client recall about the afterlife. Each case I have selected represents a direct dialogue between myself and a subject. The case testimonies are taken from tape recordings from my sessions. This book is not intended to be about my subjects’ past lives, but rather a documentation of their experiences in the spirit world relating to those lives.

For readers who may have trouble conceptualizing our souls as non-material objects, the case histories listed in the early chapters explain how souls appear and the way in which they function. Each case history is abbreviated to some extent because of space constraints and to give the reader an orderly arrangement of soul activity. The chapters are designed to show the normal progression of souls into and out of the spirit world, incorporated with other spiritual information.

The travels of souls from the time of death to their next incarnation has come to me from a ten-year collection of clients. It surprised me at first, that I had people who remembered parts of their soul life more clearly after distant lifetimes than recent ones. Yet, for some reason, no one subject was able to recall the entire chronology of soul activities I have presented in this book. My clients remember certain aspects of their spiritual life quite vividly, while other experiences are hazy to them. As a result, even with these twenty-nine cases, I found I could not give the reader the full range of information I have gathered about the spirit world. Thus, my chapters contain details from more cases than just the twenty-nine listed.

The reader may consider my questioning in certain cases to be rather demanding. In hypnosis, it is necessary to keep the subject on track. When working in the spiritual realm, the demands on a facilitator are higher than with past life recall. In trance, the average subject tends to let his or her soulmind wander while watching interesting scenes unfold. My clients often want me to stop talking so they can detach from reporting what they see and just enjoy their past experiences as souls. I try to be gentle and not overly structured, but my sessions are usually single ones which run three hours in length and there is a lot to cover. People may come long distances to see me and not be able to return.