An openness to spirituality came to me by small steps. Or rather the wall of skepticism I had built concerning spiritual matters and all things spiritual fell brick by brick until one day it just toppled over. And the best part of it now is that I even know the book that gave me the push. I could have even told you the date, since I always jot down in books the date in which I read them, but I have lent the book out to someone and it has not yet come back...
The story of how the book found me, and books often seem to have that ability, is as good as the book. A dear friend of mine in Israel fell into a deep depression just after getting married. My attempts to talk to him from Paris were thwarted as he did not want to talk to anyone and his fresh wife was transformed into the role of gatekeeper. I had really only met his wife on a couple of occasions and had no idea how she would be able to cope. I had no news for some time until at one point she wrote me an e-mail to tell me that he was doing better and that a friend of hers was coming to Paris to live for a while and that she was sending me a present from her with her friend. To this day I have no rational explanation as to why she decided to send me a present and why she would send me that book. I later learned that she is someone who is into spirituality, but really I hardly knew her and she knew even less about me. But send it she did and the arrow hit the bulls eye - the right book at the right time.
Anyway, the book in question is Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss MD. The author was head of the psychiatry department at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach and had a rational-scientific-empirical approach to life (kind of like mine at one point) until he started working with hypnosis with his patients. The author shares his own story of being a skeptic, of being overly rational, of having had to wait several years before having the courage to come out and tell his story for fear of being ridiculed in his profession and about his 'spiritual coming out'. While our stories weren't perfectly parallel, I felt like I was reading someone who was telling a spiritual tale despite his rational self, and that struck a chord from the beginning.
So about the book. The book is mostly the story of his experiences with one patient, Catherine, who he attempts to treat for many phobias, fears and personal problems through regression hypnosis. The idea is to take the person back in time through hypnosis to earlier traumas that they may have suppressed from their conscience. Although he found traumas, many of her phobias persisted and he kept regressing until one day she was talking to him differently and describing a different time and place. It took him a while but he understood that she was in a past life. The book goes over the different past lives and how each was linked to a health problem of phobia. In one life, Catherine was a soldier and was killed by a sword through her throat. After the hypnotic session in which she told the story her chronic sore throat cleared up.
The stories themselves are interesting but to me the most interesting was the occasional regression that went to a kind of waiting station between lives in which Catherine, under hypnosis, tells the Doctor/author that there is someone there who wants to talk to him. There begins a series of dialogues between the Doctor/author and those that identify themselves as Masters (thus the title of the book). The Masters at first distill spiritual wisdom that is intended to help the Doctor help his patient and then becomes more general spiritual wisdom. Apparently each Master spoke differently, which was manifested by Catherine (always in a hypnotic trance) speaking or acting slightly differently (channeling, although the author doesn't use that term). It was first the situation, then the author's background and finally the words of the Masters that somehow broke down my resistance and I found myself asking myself "what if?" What if this was not ridiculous, what if it was real? I then turned the question around, made it more personal, and reread the words of the Masters. My thinking was then something like 'if I did believe this was true, and lived by these words/precepts, would my life be worse or better?'
For those who know me, you know that I write all over my books and underline the best parts. Normally I would have shared a few quotes, probably from the Masters, but it looks like I will have to buy the book again, unless the person I lent it to is reading this blog and would like to give it back : )
As for the answer to my 'question to self', well if you are reading this, you know the answer. And Brian Weiss, his book and my friend's wife who sent it to me started my own spiritual ball rolling, a ball that hopefully will roll for a long time and gather no moss...
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