and onto the stoned pavement.
“Going deep, even deeper now, dropping down, way down, so easy, so gentle,” I said quietly and rhythmically as her face softened even more. I could see the trance state taking hold. She took a very deep breath and exhaled. The camera, the patio, the cheap lawn chair beneath her, and the moist morning air were all falling away from her now.
“Just like a stone falling through clear water—going down, down, all the way down, even deeper . . .” I intoned.
I took Mary through a series of weigh stations on our way to her past life. There were additional deepening techniques to insure she was in a profound trance. I surrounded her with a brilliant spiritual light to guide her and create safety. Then it was on to a magnificent spiritual garden, a place of safety and sanctuary, where I would introduce her to a spiritual guide, who would take her on her journey.
It was only then that I realized the camera crew had not placed a microphone on her. Also, I had been so focused on Mary (as I should have been) that I completely missed the fact that the camera was no longer on us. Bored, I suppose, they had trotted off to get another bite of metaphysical news, somewhere else. Still, I had a client in front of me, and I felt an obligation to finish what we started. As we explored her past life, an amazing story unfolded.
She reported that she was a man, a Muslim, somewhere in the Middle East, perhaps hundreds of years ago. Yes, crossing genders happens sometimes from lifetime to lifetime. Although Edgar Cayce says that we typically incarnate as the same sex, we occasionally switch to check out what it’s like to have different chromosomes. In that incarnation, as a male, she was on a special mission. She was given a sacred prayer mat that was to be delivered to some holy men for a very special ceremony. She believed that if she did not complete her task, and this sacred ritual went incomplete, then some catastrophe would occur. As she scurried across the city, through crowded bazaars, anxiously moving toward her designated meeting spot, she was suddenly waylaid and dragged into an alley. She was beaten and left for dead, and the holy prayer mat stolen!
As the last of her life flowed from her, her thought was not for herself, but that she had failed Allah and the Holy Ones. She wept with shame. Her life was a failure. Blood, tears, and eventually even her spirit, left her body.
We talked for a few minutes afterward. The intense regret and shame was still with her. In her incarnation now, she had always been concerned that she was fulfilling her life’s mission. But in her current life, she had spent much of it composing, recording, and performing sacred Native American music around the country. Her work and spirit had touched thousands of people. Maybe, I said, she could forgive herself for what happened in her Muslim life. After all, she had died in the service of Allah. And in this life, her efforts to help bring spiritual growth to the planet had found success.
Mary quietly cried tears of relief and forgiveness. Smiling through her grief, she thanked me and told me that the regression was immensely beneficial and that it helped her make sense of a lot of her thoughts, feelings, and fears over the years.
“Most of all,” she said, “I don’t feel like such a failure anymore. That was an echo from my other life.”
Later, the pretty and perky young reporter approached me and asked me to tell her what had happened to Mary in the regression. She shoved a microphone in my face, the camera light clicked on, and suddenly an electric white smile blazed on her face.
“We’re here with Gregg Unterberger, a licensed professional counselor and a national expert in past-life regression. He has taken thousands of people around the country into hypnosis to see who they were in other lifetimes!” she said musically.
I didn’t think I could match her 500-watt smile, but I remembered what my friend and producer Mike Gilg used to say, “Smile big for Mister Camera. Remember, this isn’t real life, this is TV!” As we continued, I tried to share Mary’s experience as briefly as possible. With my every sentence the reporter’s skull nodded frenetically like a bobble-head doll on the dashboard of an ‘86 Oldsmobile with bad shocks. I tried to truncate Mary’s story, but how do you encapsulate a transformative experience into a thirty-second sound bite?
Later, as I watch the recording of Good Morning, Sacramento with my friend Marcie Mortenson, I realized it hardly mattered. Initially during my interview, they let me talk about Mary and cut away to shots of my rapid induction as she collapsed into trance. It was a nice visual. But then as I continued with her story, the audio played an ominous over-the-top piece of music that would be best suited to a horror movie. Finally, they cut back to the anchors, mugging spookily while the lights flashed on and off in the studio and thunder sound effects played on the soundtrack.
Mary had a life-changing experience, and they had made a mockery of it.
I have (last I checked) a sense of humor about all this, of course. If you haven’t figured it out, I think we can find some laughter in almost anything. But I think it is unfortunate that past-life regression therapy—something that has held up in court as a legitimate therapeutic intervention, a topic that has sold millions of books—should be reduced to a scary carnival ride by the media in this day and age.
I remember Dr. Brian Weiss telling me a story about someone who had a near-death experience (NDE). The person reported being tortured by demons and devils, something all but unheard of in the literature. A major network asked Dr. Weiss to regress the person to find out more details. Under hypnosis, the near-death survivor remembered being poked and prodded by EMS workers who missed his veins several times while trying to put in an IV and realized that the demons were a part of his delirium. Cameras recorded the session but, as you can imagine, when the media broadcast the report, they completely failed to include the hypnosis they asked for, instead going with the original interview with the man who said he had been tortured by demons, even though he had now refuted it! The network went with the story they wanted, not the one that was true.
Whether you believe in it or not, the majority of people on the planet believe in reincarnation or rebirth. Even in the Western world, according to polls, nearly a third of Americans and Britains believe in reincarnation—a substantial increase from twenty years ago. It’s amazing when you think about it, since only one Christian denomination—the Unity faith—fully embraces reincarnation as part of their theology. That means that somewhere out there, there are a lot of people that are Lutherans, Methodists, Catholics, and (Holy Christ!) Baptists, who believe they may have lived before, despite their religious affiliation. You may be one of them.
As to beliefs about the afterlife in Judaism, my friend David H. Ehl, author of a remarkable book, You Are Gods6, once told me that he asked a rabbi about the topic.
“He basically told me if you ask ten different rabbis, you will get twelve different answers,” said David with a wry smile.
Still, according to Judaic scholar, Yaakov Astor, for most academics, reincarnation is unquestionably a part of mystical Judaism and is featured in the Zohar, a major source for Kabbalistic teachings. Indeed, Astor points out that many conservative scholars, not known for being sympathetic to mystical thinking, see reincarnation as a basic tenet of mainstream Judaic traditions, however unobserved.7
If a major network made fun of Baptist beliefs or Catholic beliefs, there would be a serious outcry.
Still, it was a wonderful weekend, overall. They pronounced my name right on television. Plus, a lot of people in my workshops remembered their past lives, and some discovered their destiny (sans the scary music).
And Mary isn’t filled with shame anymore.
