Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives

“She believed that if you were a good Catholic and lived properly by observing the faith and its rituals, you would be rewarded by going to heaven; if not, you would experience purgatory or hell. A patriarchal God and his Son made these final decisions. I later learned that Catherine did not believe in reincarnation; in fact, she knew very little about the concept, although she had read sparingly about the Hindus. Reincarnation was an idea contrary to her upbringing and understanding. She had never read any metaphysical or occult literature, having had no interest in it. She was secure in her beliefs.”

Weiss sets up Catherine’s background and religious beliefs to illustrate the authenticity of her experiences with past lives and her eventual embrace of the concept of reincarnation. Catherine’s story would be less interesting, or perhaps even suspicious, if she was someone who had a vested interest in her story being true. Part of what compels the audience of this text is that Catherine’s religious upbringing is both at odds with her experience while also serving as a kind of character validation since, in Christian thought, lying is a sin.

“The concepts of past lives and reincarnation were alien to her cosmology, and yet her memories were so vivid, the sights and sounds and smells so clear, the knowledge that she was there so powerful and immediate, that she felt she must have actually been there. She did not doubt this; the experience was so overwhelming. Yet she was concerned about how this fit in with her upbringing and her beliefs.”

Catherine herself required compelling evidence of her own experiences under trance because she was not predisposed to believing in such things as past lives or wise spiritual beings who existed outside of Christian cosmology. Weiss moves to convince his audience of the validity of these claims by exposing Catherine’s struggle to reconcile these baffling traversals through ancient lifetimes with her existing faith and belief system. If Catherine was putting on a show or otherwise faking her experiences, why would she be troubled by the way her experiences with hypnotic regression affected her pre-existing understanding of the world?