Brian Weiss
1988
New Delhi
Piatkus (Hachette India)
p. 218
Many Lives, Many Masters, is supposedly a factual account of the events that unfolded through the interaction of author, psychiatrist Weiss and his patient, Catherine. While Weiss claims to have concealed the identities of his patients, he has shared the details of his sessions in which the patient underwent hypnosis and was able to recall her past lives. He claims that it was through insights from her past lives that she was able to find solutions to overcoming fears and anxieties in this life.
The book talks of guardians, spirits and masters. Weiss maintains his diminishing skeptic stance till the end. However, he is increasingly convinced by the unscientific data that comes pouring at him. Whether the reader wants to believe in his experiences, or read them as a fictional tale, or dismiss them as just another publicity gimmick is the choice that each can exercise.
To me, what this tale revealed was what the power of belief in religion and spirituality can do. If these hypnotic sessions and the stories that were recounted were all games of the mind, and the psychiatrist, for his own personal reasons, overthrew his years of training as a cognitive-behavioural specialist, it still shows that hope and faith can change the way you perceive life and bring peace and happiness to it. That this is the only way to achieve peace and happiness is ofcourse not true. Yet, that this is one way, although unscientific, cannot be denied. To each his own.
Every book has a story
This book has come my way at a time when I needed to delve deeper into events around me. In ways that cannot be expressed entirely, reading it has helped me to relax.