Remember this one? – Many Lives, Many Masters

Brian L. Weiss, MD is a psychiatrist, trained at Columbia University and Yale Medical School.  He was, he admits, a man of science first… and a skeptic when it came to matters of spirituality like reincarnation.

He wasn’t on a spiritual quest… but one found him.

While he was Chief of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center he met a woman who took him on a journey he never expected. He wrote about what happened in Many Lives, Many Masters, published in 1988. It became a New York Times Bestseller. In 2010, the Times revisited it in this fascinating article.

In the article, the phrase “human narrative” is used to describe the story of our lives… well, actually… it encompasses much more: birth, life, death… and rebirth?

Human narrative. I love that.

This book is the story of a man and woman who enter into a “routine” doctor/ patient relationship and end up on a spiritual odyssey.

I read this about ten years ago. I remember talking about it on a message board and a friend asking why I found it so illuminating. I can’t remember what I said, I just remember that I did.

So, I thumbed through it again this evening.

Ah, yes… now I remember why. I’m nosy.

And also, you know I’m always interested in whether or not I’m normal. Whatever that is.

Reading the book felt like being a fly on the psychiatrist’s office wall. What’s not to love?

Throw in some anxiety, which interests me cuz, ya know, I suffer… and therapy to get at the crux of said-anxiety… and hypnosis that was supposed to take the patient back to her second year of life… and instead took her back hundreds of years… and, uh, yeah. I was hooked.

Now, you’ll probably expect me to share about my feelings on reincarnation. Was I a believer? A skeptic? Did this book change my mind?

Well, I was neither. I’m still neither…

I don’t know what’s beyond this life. I tend to believe that the only people who know for sure have already gone before us.

However…

As I discussed in this post, I’m open to all sorts of ideas. Life and God and Love… SO VAST. What do any of us know for sure?

I can tell you what Weiss knows for sure. It’s that his patient changed the trajectory of his life. He was destined, I believe, to do great things. But she flipped him on his head and sent him on a different journey through the prior lives of his patients, which helped them heal. And he shared it all with us.

Great things, indeed!

Beyond!

And… truly fascinating.

This post was originally written by me for this blog on June 14, 2018