Blog Chapter 4

Blog Chapter 4
Michael Newton, PhD, a psychologist in southern California and a seasoned hypnotic regressionist, wrote a book titled “Journey of Souls”, which is included in my book list. His book describes his experiences regressing his patients to their previous lives, with their permission, beginning in the 1970’s. He says his book is “an intimate journal about the spirit world”, a compilation of cases from more than 30 years of practice.
The fascinating impact of his writing for me is his reporting on what souls encounter after their deaths. Up to this point I had read only about near-death experiences where all the NDE, s were resuscitated after only a brief exposure to the spirit world. Dr. Newton goes on to describe what souls encounter during their time between incarnations.
He has recorded 67 hypnotized patients’ accounts of their earlier lives in this book. He actually lists their verbal responses to his questions unless he notes he has edited their replies for brevity. I realize that critics of hypnotherapy state that the validity of patient responses to the hypnotist’s questions is limited his leading the patient by the manner of his phrasing. I didn’t notice any evidence of this in what I read. And for the benefit of confirmed skeptics, how would 67 separate individual private patients be able to get together to cook up a well-integrated fictitious group story of their experiences after dying when they came from all over the U.S., Canada and even a few from Europe to see Dr. Newton? I’d better leave it to interested readers to make their own judgements, since I admit to being prejudiced in favor of all I’ve read. But I’d like to add here that five editions of Dr. Newton’s book have been printed, beginning in 1995. Over 300,000 copies have been sold since then. Interested readers should have no difficulty in picking up a copy.
Back to my blog. Dr. Newton’s hypnotic regression accounts assert that we have lived many lives going back thousands of years and that those lives have been interspersed with extended periods of existence in the spirit world. Probably this is the appropriate opportunity to explain why we don’t have any recollection of those earlier lives. It is because before each new incarnation we are given a gift of amnesia. Why do I characterize it as a gift? Because amnesia allows us to begin each new life with a clean slate. The mistakes and failures of the previous life and lives, the inability of us to measure up to our beginning potential, in this way do not interfere with the opportunity to do a little better job in the upcoming life.
One of our popular and persistent beliefs that many of us carry forward from childhood is that we each have spiritual guides helping us. Dr. Newton’s book confirms this belief. Our spirit guides have an important function in our lives. Between lives they may greet us as old friends from a previous existence as we transition again into the spirit world. If we are interested in learning more about ultimate reality, which many arriving souls are, our guides may find a place for us in an appropriate classroom. They are our mentors or representatives before the council of elders when we are asked for our appraisals of our performance in the life just terminated, again later when we are asked for our preferences for our upcoming incarnation. Guides usually are advanced souls destined for increased responsibility and for ascension to higher levels in the spirit world.
According to what Dr. Newton has learned from his regressions, most souls find incarnating on Earth somewhat daunting. It is considered a challenging environment, with earthquakes, floods, wildfires and also, the disruptiveness of many of its inhabitants. They choose to do because of the probability for more rapid advancement in their mental evolution by successfully surmounting its challenges, the growth many souls yearn for, this said however, many souls defer the Earth reincarnation until a later birth. There are some brief references in Dr. Newton’s book about the possibilities of incarnating in other worlds peopled by beings with different life forms, but this is not something the author explores at any depth. He suggests that many souls appear to desire to remain in the spirit world for their entire existence, which gives the reader some indication of the vastness of that world when one considers there now are nearly 8 billion human souls in our world.
In his conclusion Dr. Newton says that the world we humans inhabit is not the real world. He posits that when in a human body a soul is essentially alone, and the spirit world is our ultimate destination. We seem to learn best by wrongdoing. When asked by Dr. Newton why a loving God would permit such suffering as exists here, the souls he regressed were nearly unanimous in opining our Creator placed a more peaceful world just out of our reach so that we would try harder.