Oprah’s
guest for this particular show was Dr. Brian Weiss, who uses hypnosis to facilitate memories and impressions of former lifetimes.
Dr. Weiss attempted mass hypnosis of Oprah’s entire audience. A recap of the show on her website states:
"Between one-quarter and one-half of the audience say they had some success being hypnotized
and recalled old memories from their current lives. Some even say they experienced visions of past lives.
One woman says she recalled how, in a previous
life, she was a man who was murdered by someone while in a swamp. ‘I could feel blood running out and I could see my
attacker and I was killed with a knife’", she says.
Another woman who was childless experienced
several past life-times in which she had children, but they lived and she died each time.
An African-American
woman said she was a nun in a past-life and was white.
“Dr. Weiss says these experiences
are all quite common. ‘We change race, we change religions because we have to learn from all sides. Souls don’t
have those characteristics. We’re all connected. It’s not about color or race. You have to learn from all sides,
and that’s part of our learning here on the planet.’”
Reincarnation is a Premise of … The
Secret of the Veil
That we all live multiple lifetimes
is a premise of my novel, The Secret of the Veil. I believe, as Dr. Weiss does, that we are here on earth to learn …
to elevate our level of spiritual consciousness during each lifetime.
I also believe that children have natural
memory and impressions of past lives, perhaps the most recent one lived, but don’t have the ability or understanding
to articulate those memories.
In my book, the strange occurrences
experienced by the heroine, Alexis Ashley are based on her eventual awareness, and acceptance of the connection of all life,
including hers … to the past, present and future.
Not to give anything away to those who haven’t … but might read the book, one such
passage that deals with the subject of past lives is found in book two, chapter two. It is an instance where the past and
the present inadvertently meet.
It looks like someone turning to go into the dining room. I run down the hall into the
dining room and turn on the light. There’s no one there. I run through the dining room into the
parlor and then, across the hall into the sitting room. Nothing. I don’t feel it is a trick
of light as I had that first night. This time I definitely made out the figure of a woman … a woman in a long, dark
dress.
(Skip several paragraphs)
I look around but there’s nobody in the room, which is quite a switch. It is the first time
I have walked into an empty vision. I check the furniture, and except for the chandelier and the basic design of the
room, it is totally different from the one I so recently walked through.
Then, a movement at the front of the large room catches my attention. I look down
and there she is. She’d been there all the time .. on her knees, scrubbing the floor. I know
it’s the woman I glimpsed earlier, only this time I’m looking directly at her.
She’s a black woman who’s perhaps around thirty, maybe a little younger or older.
She has on a plain, floor length rustic dress, and a wrap on her head that’s knotted in front. With a pail of soapy
water at her side she’s scrubbing the floor with long, slow strokes of a brush. Her dress, covered in front by a long
apron, is damp but she doesn’t seem to notice.
Alexis has walked into another time. The woman scrubbing the floor, and some others that she will meet
has a special relevance to her life. The whole point of the book is her discovery of that relevance.