Dr. Raymond Moody became world famous after the publication in 1975 of his book "Life After Life", in which he analyzed the stories of people who practically visited the other world and came to life when doctors had already stated their death. The book instantly became a world bestseller, and Moody began to study another curious phenomenon, the so-called travel to past lives. What came of it? Judge for yourself.
With the help of hypnosis, a person can return to childhood or adolescence and determine which event in the past traumatized his psyche, having a significant impact on his mental and physical condition and subsequent years. Having “replayed” this traumatic situation with the patient, the psychotherapist often achieves a significant improvement in the patient's condition, or even his complete recovery. This practice is called hypnotic regression. In this therapy, the patient is immersed in time no further than the date of his birth. However, in the process of such journeys into the past, it sometimes happened that the patient seemed to skip his life and suddenly moved through time and space, feeling like a merchant in Ancient Egypt or a witch at the stake of the Inquisition.
This unusual phenomenon has come to be regarded by some as evidence of reincarnation, the belief in which since ancient times has been the central idea of the main beliefs and religious practices in the East. Reincarnation provides for the immortality of the soul, which is reborn again and again in new bodies. Each new life is a kind of lesson, as a result of which the human soul becomes more and more harmonious. It is worth noting that the sage Plato also believed in reincarnation, and the great mathematician Pythagoras even claimed that he lived quite a few lives, including the lives of a Trojan warrior, a shopkeeper and even … a prostitute. According to a number of researchers, with the help of hypnotic regression, people simply fell into their past lives.
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Many researchers are rather skeptical about past life travel using hypnotic regression, considering them to be simply daydreams or latent fantasies of patients. Raymond Moody had a similar attitude to this phenomenon, but after the publication of his famous book "Life After Life" hundreds of letters began to come to him, in which people shared with him their memories of past lives. These letters prompted the scientist to take this issue seriously, and the researcher's personal experience served as a powerful impetus to the start of an exciting two-year study.
It is one thing to hear about travel to past lives, ironically declaring that everyone is sure to be Napoleon or Cleopatra, but another thing to experience such a regression on yourself. When psychologist Diana Denholme, a friend of Dr. Moody's, invited him to visit her past lives, the scientist could not even imagine how exciting and vivid his impressions of this trip would be. Books download txt.
So, Moody sat comfortably in the chair, and Diana Denholme plunged him into a deep trance. In his first incarnation, Moody turned out to be a kind of protohumanoid, a kind of transitional link between a monkey and a man … He lived in the trees with his relatives, building huge nests on them. “I moved in a bent position, with my arms dangling at the feet. I could hardly straighten up, but if speed and agility were required, I walked on four limbs,”Moody writes in his book. These proto-people still did not know how to talk and experienced a certain fear of life below, outside the trees. The sensations from this incarnation were so vivid that Moody literally felt the juice from the fruit he had chewed in the distant past flowing down his chin …
In his next life, the scientist turned out to be a black teenager in one of the African tribes, it was difficult to determine the historical era, it could have been both BC and in relatively closer times. In the third incarnation, Moody saw himself as an old shipbuilder. He was busy in the workshop with his little granddaughter, telling her about the purpose of various instruments. Then he took her with him for a boat ride. And then the unexpected happened: suddenly a huge wave hit the boat and turned it over. Going to the bottom, Moody experienced a nagging sense of guilt for being responsible for the death of his granddaughter.
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Immediately after this disaster, the scientist found himself in a detachment of primitive hunters desperately attacking the mammoth. The animal's hide covered only the chest and shoulders, it was cold and scary, especially when the mammoth caught one of the hunters with its trunk and crushed his skull … Let's not dwell on the incarnation in which Moody was a simple worker at the dawn of civilization and literally died of hunger along with his wife, let us go straight to the sixth incarnation, which, perhaps, most of all struck the traveler through past lives. This time he found himself in a civilization that he finally could recognize, it was Ancient Rome, Moody found himself in a pit, into which a lion was about to be launched … In this life, the scientist was a prisoner of the Romans, from the pit he looked at the public, which was looking forward to the bloody spectacle. Here the latch clicked, and the lion jumped …
When the terrible beast was already clenching its jaws on the skull of its victim, Moody was transported into his seventh life. It also took place in Ancient Rome, but this time he was not a prisoner, but a noble man, the magnificent apartments testified to this. However, in this life the end was clearly sad, when Moody in a white toga, enjoying himself, was lying on the couch, his agitated son rushed in and announced that a crowd of commoners was rushing through the gate. He began to calm him down, but when he looked out the window, he was seized by genuine fear: a huge angry crowd could no longer be held back by a handful of confused guards, there were clearly not many left to the terrible end …
In the next incarnation, the scientist felt like a merchant somewhere in the Middle East, he had his own small jewelry store. Trade was going well, and he was especially proud of his red brick house, which adjoined the mountain with one wall. Once, when he returned home, he felt a strange oppressive silence, his heart sank with a premonition of trouble. Entering the bedroom, he saw his wife and three small children dead, being stabbed to death by robbers. The feeling of grief was so piercing that it became clear that his life ended immediately after this tragedy.
The last incarnation gave Moody another surprise, this time he turned out to be … a woman, a Chinese artist. The joy of creativity, admiration for the splendor of nature, close relationships with friends and relatives - everything was in this life, but its end was also terrible - an impoverished old artist was strangled by some young scoundrel. He took nothing from her house, he killed only for the sake of the murder process itself …
When Denholme brought Moody out of his hypnotic trance, it turned out that he spent only one hour traveling through his nine past lives. The impressions of the experience turned out to be so vivid that for some time the scientist was simply stunned and silent, and questions caused by such an unusual experience for him sounded insistently in his head. “Regressions are neither dreams nor daydreams. They carry a sense of familiarity with them. It was as if I was remembering them, but I wasn’t making them up.”This is what puzzled Moody the most. The scientist was also struck by the fact that in some incarnations he sometimes, as it were, observed everything from the outside, only at times feeling himself in the body of the next incarnation. Curiously, although the scientist experienced such an unparalleled journey into the past, he did not consider it convincing evidence of reincarnation.but decided only to conduct his own research on this phenomenon.
“Moody’s fifty psychology students enthusiastically agreed to participate in his experiments. As a result of a 2-year study, the scientist was able to identify 12 signs that somehow characterized the hypnotic regression in past lives, here are just a few of them: images of past lives, as a rule, visual
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Did Raymond Moody believe in reincarnation after his research? According to the scientist, we still know too little about our brain, perhaps regressions in past lives are the fantasies of our brain, with which it fills the resting phase, when the hypnotist kind of disconnects it from the problems associated with the current life.
Yet the title of the book, Life Before Life, which ultimately reflects all of Moody's research on this topic, speaks for itself. And the attitude of its author to the reality of past lives is most of all characterized by the following lines: “I was asked recently:“If there was a court session at which it was necessary to decide whether reincarnation exists or not, what would the jury decide?” I think he would have ruled in favor of reincarnation. Most people are too overwhelmed by their past lives to be able to explain them otherwise."
Fyodor PERFILOV