Brian L Weiss is a smart psychologist, he is the author of “Many lives, many masters”. In that book, he discusses the concept of rebirth, perhaps it is for the first time a westerner is acknowledging and propounding the belief of rebirth to a widespread audience.  Though the concept is prevalent and widely believed by believers of Buddhism and Hinduism.

I am not completely bowled over by Dr. Weiss to begin with. The criticism in the scientific community towards him includes lack of peer review, the absence of scientific protocol in his experiments. Conceivably Weiss can argue that it is a metaphysical area that current protocols are handicapped to be used for his research. Weiss uses a method known as past life regression. He uses hypnosis on his patients/clients and the clients are said to have revealed their past life experiences. From memories. He in his book admits being skeptical in the beginning and was convinced when one client during the hypnosis mentions about his own child’s death. A personal tone can always mislead even scientists of high skepticism.

He was able to ‘evidently’ remove nightmares and traumas of his clients by this technique. Here is the catch. A late researcher had also mentioned, these revelations from the clients and their traumas was result of their own ‘imagination’ and not past-life memories. It is arguable. It cannot be proved. The researcher also compared such memories to dreams. Though few psychic people claim dreams to have hidden meanings and blah blah. I would go with Freudian view that the dreams are part of “wish fulfillment” attempts by the unconscious. Again, our own imagination, similar to an illusion like déjà vu.

Probably, Dr. Weiss was able to successfully remove fears and nightmares with the help of psychoanalysis just like many other psychiatric practitioners. That doesn’t entitle to him to have proved the fears stemming from past life. The most famous reincarnation researcher Ian Stevenson had a more methodical research, he did his case studies on children. He never was a firm believer of reincarnation, but he was into science of it than superstition. He made strong supporting reports of birth marks and congenital defects as the cause of past life incidents as he identified a deceased person’s family from a child’s memories by using a wide network of volunteers.

Rebirth and reincarnation will be a matter of speculation, science and superstition for quite sometime. We all can only speculate and (not)believe.

My take is not on rebirth, but to the direction which Weiss stretched his study from there, in his subsequent books about soul-mates, love, spirituality etc.

I started the article mentioning Weiss as a smart psychiatric practitioner. He identified/believed that anxiety or frustration was the major trouble for human problems(just like Buddha and Schopenhauer).

A psychiatrist (also an astrologer, in India) is THE resort for people in metal trauma resulting from various reasons. The major reasons being the worry of future, death and such anxieties.  As a psychiatrist, he wanted to reply to the questions posed by his clients and help them, hence he adopted the theory of rebirth. Fair enough, as long as it serves purpose. He was able to quench their thirst and say “its not over”, there will be more chances for you to live it out.

I guess more questions started coming to Weiss. More that had to do with love (may be lust too). This chemical imbalance his clients had dragged him down some unconvincing roads. He had adopted the theory of soul along with the ‘rebirth’ theory. He stretched it with the concept of soul-mate.  His idea that they come back and join during every life. IF your love stint is not working, then that is due to the fact that the person you are dating is not your soul-mate. Wait and you will meet your soul mate. Makes sense? It was utter stupidity. May be that might have satisfied few of his clients or his own inquisitive mind for a while.

He hit a dead-end when whiny women started coming with claims of loving more than one person. After pondering, he stretched it with theory of multiple soul-mate theory. No trouble, along with that he mentioned that the soul-mates come to your life for a purpose and then they leave you, once their deed is done. So his advice was not to worry about when someone leaves you geographically, emotionally or even mortally. Bulls eye. No trouble there.

That might have worked wonders with his patients, so much so that he himself believed it completely and got the confidence to even write books on it. He went on with saying love is the only real thing existing in the world. He was preaching many things probably along with it, love (chemical imbalance as many call it), tolerance and lots of other stuff.

However flawed or untrue his findings and writings may be, his intentions was genuinely noble to solve the mental troubles which had inflicted on thousands of his patients. He might have been even successful in solving many troubles using this theory along with his psychoanalysis. He may not be able to prove it to the scientific community, but at the same time, no one can disprove him just like the argument surrounding a personal God.

-Santhosh K Ramachandran