Episode 5 - Brian Weiss, M.D., Same Soul, Many Bodies

Brian Weiss, M.D., Same Soul, Many Bodies

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Dr. Brian Weiss:  I’m Dr. Brian Weiss, author of ‘Many Lives, Many Masters’ and “Same Soul, Many Bodies’ and I would just like to say that Living Dialogues with Duncan Campbell is one of my favorite shows. 

Duncan has such a rich and textured experience that he shares with his listeners.  And being a guest on this show is so wonderful to me because the integration of Duncan's experiences and my experiences is so perfectly blended.  It's not one-sided as so many shows are.  This gives me an opportunity to think.  The questions are provocative. 

And to listen and learn from Duncan's experiences is really part of the show.  It makes it special.  The nature and essence of this show is shared communication, shared experience, and shared wisdom.  And then almost the dialectic, the one stimulating the other and bringing it to a higher level, a higher octave than could be just from me hearing myself talk.

So I want to express my appreciation to Duncan for having me on the show and for the wonderful format that you present.  Everybody that listens to your show is very privileged.

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Duncan Campbell:  From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions, through the work of Western visionaries such as Plato, Galileo and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning, a dia - flow of logos - meaning, beyond what any one individual can bring through alone.

So join us now as together with you, the active, deep listener, we evoke and engage in Living Dialogues.

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Duncan Campbell:  Welcome to Living Dialogues.  I'm your host Duncan Campbell.  With me for this particular dialogue I am truly delighted to have as my guest Brian Weiss, M.D., author of many books, most recently ‘Same Soul, Many Bodies - Discover the Healing Power of Future Lives Through Progression Therapy’.

Brian graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University and received his medical degree from the Yale University School of Medicine.  He served his internship at New York University's Bellevue Medical Center and went on to become Chief Resident in the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.

He is now Chairman Emeritus of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai medical center in Miami.  Brian Weiss is the author, as mentioned of a number of best-selling books including ‘Many Lives, Many Masters’ and ‘Through Time Into Healing’.  He leads seminars, workshops and professional training programs throughout the world.  He is married and lives in Miami, Florida.

So Brian, it's really a true delights to have you back on this program, Living Dialogues.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  Thank you very much Duncan.  It's great to be back with you.

Duncan Campbell:  In the past, we visited the extraordinary story that you tell in ‘Many Lives, Many Masters’ of how you first came into this awareness that became your life work.  You were, we might say, a very accomplished psychiatrist in a conventional modality and had written a number of monographs, maybe 30 or 40 monographs within the parameters of, again, we might say, the psychiatry as is known in the mainstream.

And then, one day, you were regressing one of your patients, Katherine, and she just kept going past zero and into the past, into past lives.  I think, maybe just to give people a sense of it, hearing about you for the first time, I'd like you to tell if you wouldn't mind the story of your son, and how moving that was.  And how it really changed your life that she began speaking about your first son who died shortly after childbirth.  Maybe you could just take it from there.

Dr. Brian Weiss:            Absolutely, because that was the epiphany for me.  That was the moment in which my whole world changed.  A few weeks before that, she had started to remember past lifetimes.  I did not believe in this.  They don't teach this at Yale Medical School.  It's a very conservative place.

Duncan Campbell:  Even today.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  Even today, they do not.  I have spoken back at Yale, but in the theology school, not in the medical school.

Duncan Campbell:  Very interesting, yeah.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  So, when she started to remember past lives - and this came about somewhat I'll say coincidentally even though there may not be coincidences -she had been suffering from panic attacks, phobias, fears.  She was a Catholic woman.  Katherine at that time was in her late 20s.  And I had treated her for more than a year with psychotherapy, because she wouldn't take any medication because of a fear of choking or gagging.

Finally, she let me use hypnosis.  She had visited Chicago and the King Tut exhibit that was touring the country and began to correct the museum guide about every day Egyptian artifacts.  And she was correct.  But she didn't know where this information came from.

So, what I was telling her was that perhaps she had repressed or forgotten childhood memories that might be accurate.  We used hypnosis.  We went back and found traumas in her childhood, but no real change in her clinical status.

So the next week when she was in, I told her to go back to the time when her symptoms first began.  That's when she started remembering past lives, because she went back about 4000 years into an ancient Near Eastern lifetime.

I'll just digress a little bit.  I did not let Simon and Schuster, the editor, change any of the audiotapes I was making of the sessions, hoping that people would get in touch with me and fill in the missing pieces.  This is what happened.  For example, in that first lifetime, she drowned in a flood or tidal wave.  There were 80 foot or 60 foot waves, knocking over trees or buildings in her village which was somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

I couldn't fathom how 80-foot waves could exist in the eastern Mediterranean.  This is like tsunami stuff.  This is not in the Mediterranean.  By the way, her lifelong fear of gagging disappeared after that memory.

Duncan Campbell:  So she must have drowned.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  She drowned, yeah.  And the gagging disappeared.  This is how past life therapy has its therapeutic effects.  A geologist wrote to me that that was the story of the eruption of the great volcano on Thera, which is now known as Santorini.

The time was correct.  It caused 80-foot waves, all the way to Greece and Asia Minor and to the northern coast of Egypt.  So, actually, she was describing what is described in Exodus, day turning into night.  There was so much ash that there was no summer of that year on the earth.  That was the eruption of the volcano on Thera.

Duncan Campbell:  Amazing.  Now just to interject here, one of the persons that has been on this program as well is Graham Hancock whose work, ‘Underworld’ verifies that the story of the great flood, that appears in the Bible is a story that is told in many, many different traditions. 

And, in fact, he shows through the latest archaeological evidence from his own deep diving off the coastal plains of various places around the world that there is evidence to show that there was indeed a great flood in many of these places.  And it is in the living memory for legends.  But our ‘modern scientific minds’ just drew a line between our history and ‘prehistory’, thinking that everything before that was just fanciful and made up or did not have any actual reality to it.

And then to have someone like Katherine in this progression come forth with what amounts to living testimony is quite extraordinary.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  Yes, it was.  I didn't realize it at the time though, because I wasn’t aware of the eruption myself.  That's why I wanted the experts to fill in the blank.

Duncan Campbell:  Yeah.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  So, even that though wasn't enough for me because I thought, well maybe this is imagination or fantasy or metaphor or a symbol like in a dreamlike state or in a Freudian psychoanalytic sense.

But about the fourth or fifth lifetime - and her symptoms were disappearing too, which doesn't fit clinically.  Imagination doesn't cure were such chronic symptoms - she was floating in a space in between lifetimes.  And she said to me,  “There are two people to see you, your father and your son.” 

Nobody knew about my father and my son.  I don't even have my diplomas hanging in my office.  One theory of psychotherapy is that you don't want your patient to know about you.  You want them to project their feelings and –

Duncan Campbell:  Like a tabula rasa.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  Exactly right.

Duncan Campbell:  A blank slate.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  Yes, yes.  The transference reaction.  And so she started talking about my father and my son with a great factual accuracy.  She said, “Your father is here.”  She gave me his name.  “He died from his heart.  Your daughter is named after him.”  All of this is true. 

“And your son is here.  He is very tiny and shining brightly.  His heart is important also because it is turned around backwards.”  And then she went into why he died and the importance of that and what it meant.

Nobody knew about my first son who had died a decade earlier in New York City.  This therapy with Katherine was happening in Miami, Florida.  There was no place for her to look it up.  She was a laboratory technician in the hospital, not an FBI agent, not an investigative reporter and certainly had no money or interest.  Even if it were findable, she would not have found it, and it wasn't.

So, that is exactly what my son had died from a decade earlier as an infant.  And this shocked me because I knew that this was not imagination.

Duncan Campbell:  And more than that, she knew why he had come here and what effect he had on you and your wife Carol. Perhaps you could share that.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  Absolutely.  He came here to help us learn our lessons and to teach us.  I have been thinking about this a lot Duncan since then.  Without my son's death I probably never would have written ‘Many Lives, Many Masters’.  And I would not be doing this work now, eight books later, traveling all over the world, helping people and learning from people and teaching people.

Going through a personal grief - and this was way before Katherine - of that nature, losing a child, you never want any other living being to suffer from grief.  So anything you can do to help them, you do.

So as I was beginning regression therapy with my patients, I was finding that patients with grief were feeling better, doing better, and wanting to know more.  So I decided finally after five years of foot dragging, hedging and worrying about my professional reputation - I was Chairman of the Psychiatry Department and had an international reputation in psychopharmacology by this time –

Duncan Campbell:  Very respectable.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  Very.

Duncan Campbell:  Within the profession.

Dr. Brian Weiss:  Oh, yes.

Duncan Campbell:  And accomplished.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell