According to the religious and philosophical teachings of the East, the soul of a person after death migrates from one body to another until it reaches its highest perfection. Only after that the cycle of births and deaths ends, and the soul of each individual merges forever with the World, One. This process of rebirth is called reincarnation.
The possibility of the existence of a human individuality (soul) separately from the body has always been believed, and will always be believed. Another outstanding German poet Heinrich Heine wrote: “Who knows, in the body of which tailor is the soul of Plato, in the body of which school teacher is the soul of Caesar? Who knows! Maybe the soul of Pythagoras is now in the body of a poor student who failed the exam because he could not prove the Pythagorean theorem …”.
Some people who were in a state of clinical death later told about their unusual dreams. Curiously, they were very similar to the wanderings of the souls of the "Tibetan Book of the Dead." But is this really the only available way to "walk" through your past lives?
Fortunately, it turned out that you didn't have to die for that. You just need to "plunge" into an altered state of consciousness. This state can be achieved in different ways. One of them is through holotropic breathing. "Holotropic" means "aimed at restoring integrity."
Such immersion in an altered state of consciousness, according to experts, has a beneficial effect on human mental health and relieves of many ailments.
For the first time, the Holotropic Breathwork technique was proposed by the famous American researcher, chairman of the International Association for Transpersonal (that is, transcending personality) psychology, Doctor of Medicine Stanislav Grof in the 1970s. The technique of immersion in an altered state of consciousness with the help of hyperventilation (rapid and deep breathing) has received universal recognition today. It is used in many countries around the world.
At a Holotropic Breathwork session.
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Participants in Holotropic Breathwork sessions experience experiences similar to memories. The experiences and visions of people are so clear that for a long time they cannot get rid of the feeling of the reality of what they saw. Is this not evidence of the existence of "past" lives? No, S. Grof answers, but it is necessary to reconsider scientific ideas about the human psyche.
Traditional psychology claims that the consciousness of a newborn baby is like a blank sheet of paper (tabula rasa). Only a year later, when the cerebral cortex of the little man is formed, he is able to remember the events, and the first notes appear on the "sheet". Everything that happens in the human psyche is explained by the impressions of conscious life.
The revision of the established views on psychology has long been engaged in Western countries. For example, a disciple of the world famous creator of psychoanalysis, the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, the outstanding Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, created a theory of the collective unconscious that is common to all people. And modern transpersonal psychology believes that at the unconscious level, each person has access to information accumulated by humanity throughout the history of development.
A person can receive peculiar clots of this information - archetypes - in an altered state of consciousness. For example, an American can see images of Indian gods, even if he did not know about them before. Or he is surprised to realize that he is a different person in one of the ancient civilizations, although he did not suspect about the possibility of previous lives.
One of the authors was fortunate enough to plunge into an altered state of consciousness under the guidance of holotropic therapy specialists trained in the United States. Therefore, you can talk about your own experience.
In a large empty room, 10 people lay down on thick blankets. A sitter was sitting next to each of them. This person controls the movements of the recumbent as he plunges into an altered state of consciousness. Often, a person loses control over the body and makes dangerous movements that can cause injury.
“The Holotropic Breathwork session began with loud, unfamiliar music. I closed my eyes and began to breathe deeply and often. At first, my fingers and toes tingled slightly, then my head started spinning, and I seemed to fly somewhere. And suddenly I saw myself from the side. Only a little girl who sat under a tree and watched as her parents, together with other peasants in bast shoes, reaped rye with sickles in the field. (My parents never did this, and even my grandfather lived in Petersburg!)
I was small to work in the field, and so that I would not go anywhere, I was tied to a birch. Having gotten exhausted from the heat, I fell asleep. And I saw that I was running away, clattering my heels, from some terrible guy who was almost overtaking me in a dark alley. It was clearly Petersburg at the beginning of the 20th century. I am terribly afraid of my pursuer, suffocate from running and almost fall, but at that moment I suddenly again feel myself lying on the floor in a room where loud unfamiliar music sounds …
Where did these experiences come from? Maybe I really connected to the single information field of the Earth, in which the entire history of our planet is indicated? And one of the levels of this field is the collective unconscious? But it cannot be ruled out that these were memories from “past lives”.
After this session, almost all of its participants claimed that their personality had undergone a radical transformation. They felt in harmony with the people around them, starting with their family, and with nature. They were happy, which they could not say about themselves before. Personally, changes have also happened to me."
In a group Holotropic Breathwork session.
It is surprising that personality restructuring took place with people under completely different circumstances, in no way connected with holotropic breathing. According to S. Grof, similar mental changes were observed in 11 surviving suicides (out of a thousand and a half) who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
All illnesses, including mental ones, which caused the suicide attempt, have disappeared from these people. They changed their attitude to life and death, found peace and harmony with the surrounding world. Perhaps this happened because at the time of the fall, those striving for non-being involuntarily experienced an altered state of consciousness, which led to fundamental changes in their psyche.
From the book “Phenomena. Secrets. hypotheses"