Once both entities had a chance to speak, a profound healing and reconciliation took place. The energy forms evaporated when my client regained consciousness. Her eyes seemed as big as saucers as she launched a volley of “oh-my-goshs.” She had hated her mother since childhood, without any logical reason to feel that way; she had been drawn to law in college and excelled on the debating team; and she never had a love relationship that interested her, preferring study to dates. The next morning she and her mother listened to an audiotape of the actual regression. The last part between mother and son did not record; only my words could be heard. But to them that was enough. Again, a profound healing and reconciliation occurred; the past had become the present so that an old wrong could be righted. The intensity of reactions, the utter realness of the session, challenged everything I thought I knew about life and death, reincarnation, and time and space.
Not long after, a young man from northern California made an appointment with me. He, too, was curious about hypnosis and whether or not there was anything to the notion of past lives. He was unusually receptive and quickly slipped into a deep trance. His consciousness shifted to life in ancient Greece where he captained a large army. A patriot, he relished all aspects of war and soldiering, from torturing spies to killing hordes. He also took great pride in his wife and four children, remaining as faithful to them as he was to his calling. He died in what for him was the glory of battle after thirty years of defending his sovereign.
Next, my client moved in consciousness to a life at the foot of the high Himalayas, where, as an itinerant healer, he roamed from village to village with little but a beggar’s bowl and the rags on his “toothpick” of a body. He never had a love affair or fathered children, but delighted instead in the opportunity to help others, which he did for thirty years. While stumbling along a mountain road one day, he suddenly collapsed. No one offered a hand. He died as if he were but a wad of dust hardly distinguishable from the dirt under foot and sandal.
I was aghast at the story the hypnotized man relayed. So, before I brought him back to full consciousness, I decided to try an experiment. I wanted to see if I could make contact with the all-knowing voice that spoke to me through his mouth. That voice wasn’t like the ones I had heard from previous clients. It was wiser, special. I verbally requested permission to do this, unsure of “who” or “what” might answer.
Immediately, the room in which the session took place, with me sitting in a chair and him outstretched on a sofa, became incredibly hot. Although it was night, everything began glowing with a light far brighter than that provided by any of the lamps. A voice spoke that seemed to emanate from a source other than the man’s lips and it permeated every cell in my body. I searched the air around me for the source of the voice, but nothing caught my eye.
“What do you want?” it boomed. I hesitated; then, gathering my strength, I asked, “The two lives just described to me, what do they mean?” A roar of laughter that seemed to shake the very walls preceded these cryptic words: “Thirty years killing. Thirty years healing. Now, all is well.” Nothing more was offered. The session ended. The man “woke up.” Yet he never looked or acted quite the same after that, nor did I. I was deeply affected by this session and the one before it, so much so that I eventually closed my practice of hypnotherapy.
I decided to initiate my own “inner journey to the truth of being.” I knew from my earlier studies and through the activities of “Inner Forum” (a nonprofit organization I had incorporated in the state of Idaho to educate the public on the difference between exaggerated and evidential claims of the paranormal), that what unites the human family and all of creation lies within the heart of each person—internal to us, not external.
Our core self, what I discovered to be resident deep inside every client who ever came to me, was later termed by other professionals as our “Inner Self Helper” or “ISH.” “Multiple personalities,” wherein a single individual behaved as if more than one personality-self possessed him or her, was the research venue from which this term emerged. Almost invariably, the cause of this mental disorder was traced to child abuse. What puzzled researchers, though, was the consistent presence of a knowing and wise, stable, self-organizing “self” always found as central to each person’s being. This Inner Self Helper, the one all else revolved around, I came to recognize as the soul.
My journey inward to verify this and other spiritual truths took me to places I was not prepared to go—through death’s curtain. I died three times within a span of three months, and each time I experienced a near-death scenario. Each was different, yet one experience somehow led into the next as in a progression.
A miscarriage and severe hemorrhaging caused death number one, on January 2, 1977. I died again on January 4 when a large blood clot in a vein in my right thigh dislodged. Because of what I experienced, I became “lost between worlds,” unable to reclaim my place in the life I once had. This inability to relate was a major factor in leading to the collapse I suffered on March 29, when my body ceased functioning and I died a third time. Never was I hospitalized, although it is obvious in looking back that I should have been.
Bits and pieces of what happened to me are in all my books: a more in-depth account about my three deaths is included in Coming Back to Life, and many of the revelations that were given to me are recalled in Future Memory. No one book contains the whole of it. My passion has been research, not storytelling. In all fairness, though, I’ll fess up—at least a little.
5
When I Died
“When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’”
—Sydney J. Harris
I didn’t recognize death when I died the first time.
One minute I was standing in front of the toilet staring at a somewhat whitish-looking sac I had just passed. Blood was splattering everywhere while a pain like a hot poker pierced my heart, clamped my gut, and loosed a scream I could not identify as mine. The next minute I was bobbing along the underside of the ceiling, drawn to the light fixture with a bright, switched-on bulb inside. Like a moth to a flame, I would bump that bulb again and again before I paused long enough to look around. The bloody body on the floor meant nothing to me, except for the difference in space relations. Suddenly, it was a long way down to the toilet, sink, and bathtub. How did that happen? How could the ceiling be scarcely an eyelash away?
Never was there darkness. All my faculties were alert, heightened. Pain vanished. As I began to question what might be going on, “blobs” formed in the air around me. I didn’t know what else to call these strange shapes. They were dark gray, misshapen things that looked like ink blots, but fully dimensional and buoyant. In nothing flat, the air was full of them. I heard an audible “snap,” then felt myself jerked back into my body like an overstretched rubber band when it’s suddenly released, entering through the top of my head where my “soft spot” had been as a baby and feeling myself shrink in size so that I would once again fit the confines of my physical form. A strong pulling sensation ensured that I made it all the way back in. Back to the pain. Back to the mess.
That’s how my three deaths started—with a miscarriage and a doctor who paid no attention to the symptoms I presented when I collapsed in his office after being barely able to drive the five blocks from my home to his door. Without reading my chart and shaking with laughter that