42 pages • 1 hour read
Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives
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Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Weiss plays the tape recording of the previous session for Catherine, which she finds too weird to listen to. Despite some lingering issues, including her relationship with Stuart, Catherine’s progress continues. Weiss muses that hypnotic regression could be of greater assistance to some patients than traditional therapies, including medicines like antidepressants.
Catherine enters another trance and describes a lifetime in a village where everybody is affected by a leprosy-like illness. Weiss notes that Catherine’s ideas about death and religion inside these various lifetimes vary widely but that in the in-between “spiritual state” there is “a welcome and reassuring constancy” (93). Death comes as a relief for Catherine in this painful lifetime, and before the Masters have a chance to emerge, Catherine jumps right into another past life which appears to be the same ancient Greek one in which Weiss is Catherine’s teacher, Diogenes. The Masters never intervene during this session, and Weiss finally brings Catherine out of the trance.
Chapter 8 Summary
Weiss reiterates that Catherine is not suffering some sort of schizophrenic delusion and that her experiences appear more authentic with each passing session. The knowledge she shares under trance could not be retrieved elsewhere. He continues to highlight the benefits of past-life regression therapy over other kinds of therapies, including the ability to examine and resolve trauma from thousands of years ago which might otherwise be inaccessible and which deeply affect the patient’s current lifetime.
After three weeks, Catherine comes back for another session. She experiences living with her parents in a stone dwelling, and Weiss encourages her to move on to “something significant that explains [her] symptoms in [her] current lifetime” (108). She fast forwards to a mass death by plague which she already lived through in a previous session. The lifetime ends before Catherine experiences death. When Weiss asks if she can “come to the light” (111), the Master who speaks poetically explains that people never really die but “just pass through different phases. There is no end […] time is not as we see time, rather in lessons that are learned” (112). The Master urges continued patience on Weiss, and the session ends.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
Weiss imagining that hypnotic regression could be of greater benefit to many people than traditional therapy indicates his progression toward Reconciling Science and Spirituality, one of the book’s major themes, although his statements thus far are mostly critical of traditional practice and laudatory of spiritual practice. This will change by the end of the narrative into a position that reconciles both worlds. Despite the routinization of these sessions, by this point Weiss is still exploring new territory with Catherine and can’t be sure that the next session won’t be unpredictable in a negative way that could harm his patient.
In Chapter 8, Weiss continues to use significant space in the book to convince his audience that Catherine really had these experiences and that Weiss is accurately reporting them. He explains that “Catherine is a relatively simple and honest person,” that she is “not a scholar,” and that she suffers no “symptoms or syndromes” that would show delusional thinking, like schizophrenia (104). The author’s insistence that there are no smoke-and-mirrors at play here could be interpreted by his audience generously as either a good-faith attempt to be transparent and make his case or cynically as the tool of an unscrupulous salesman putting on a false front.
Weiss is now actively using his intuitive knowledge to interpret his own experiences rather than leaning on logic all the time. When it comes to the veracity of Catherine’s past-life regressions, Weiss intuitively knows that the detailed information she relays must be acquired from a mysterious spiritual source rather than from an explicable earthly one: “[his] brain with its years of careful scientific training knew this, and [his] bones also knew” (106). There is a greater attempt by Weiss at this midway point in the narrative to meld the worlds of traditional science and spiritual knowledge, and he draws from both traditions to assess therapeutic outcomes with Catherine.
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