A friend and I formed what we call an LBL Talk group in November of 2017 for the purpose of gathering together with people who share similar views about the afterlife — that it is real, that spirits are real, and that there is a life between lives as well as a process of reincarnation that involves the active choice of the person or spirit reincarnating. These are the main lines of thought expressed by Brian Weiss in his very well-known book, Many Lives, Many Masters. Also in Michael Newton’s equally well-know book, Journey of Souls.
We tend to think of ourselves as a support group for people who believe in ghosts, and about half of our membership is Jewish – as befits the self-deprecating humor of that way of naming ourselves. As I write, it is not long after the Squirrel Hill attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue. Our group has been watching a documentary film by Richard Martini that is based on the work of Michael Newton. The film, Flipside, is based on a book by the same title. In the film we witness brief excerpts of actual hypnotic regressions of subjects into recent past lives and on into the time in between lives right after that. In the book, we can read extensive verbatim quotations from those sessions, which were held at the Newton Institute when Newton was still alive and could be interviewed for the film.
A subject called Noreen in the book and film is shown reliving her life and soon death in a Nazi camp and gas chamber. This makes up Chapter Three, Humanity in the Holocaust. Noreen’s recounting under hypnosis of her days and minutes in the gas chamber are to me utterly stunning for the complete absence of any expression of anger or even rebuke towards her persecutors. She is, instead, concerned to help, reassure and huddle with her doomed friends. There is fear, but she overcomes it and dies rather peacefully and quickly.
The discussion in the life between lives part right after this is not given in much detail in the film. We do see and hear her say how much more difficult it was for the souls who chose to be the persecutors rather than those, like herself, who chose to be the victims. But in the transcript of the session found in the book there is much more of the talk there with her guide on “how she did.” I highly, highly recommend the book and this chapter to the reader.
For purposes of this section on how to deal with tragedy and grief, I will copy and paste below here the supplementary page I prepared for our LBL group after they watched the entire documentary. There is great concord and harmony between this dialogue and the actions I commend and resonate so strongly with in the pages earlier than this one — with Angle Le and his son Brandon in Paris, with Denise Peraza and her friend Shannon Johnson in San Bernadino, and with Nurse Brown in Orlando. That concord is for me, profoundly instructive.
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This is from page 34 of Richard Martini's Flipside. Noreen is a participant in a Michael Newton Institute training session for past-life and LBL regression. Herself a hypnotist and therapist, she has volunteered to be regressed before the other participants by Paul Aurand, president of the Institute. Part of her regression in which she relives her death in a Nazi gas chamber is one of several featured in Martini's documentary film by the same name, Flipside.
For me, the striking aspect of her reliving that death and her life leading up to it, was the absence of anger or even, it seemed to me, resentment towards her persecutors. She reports objectively and simply about her and the other victims' fear and huddling together. But there is no rebuke.
The Kindle screen grab below is not in the documentary itself. The dialogue concerns Noreen's return to the life between lives. Paul Aurand's words are in italics.
