A
Buddhist Dialogue with Science
By Timothy
Harada
Dr.
Weiss and others who study past life regression therapy think that there could
be many explanations as to what actually occurs during a patient’s regression.
1. A patient could be experiencing his or her own past lives.
2. The patient could be experiencing someone else’s past lives-somehow
taping into what Carl Jung
would call a “collective
unconscious.” 3. That patient
could be recalling something he or she read in a book about the past.
4. The patient could be having wild dilutions of fantasy.
However, after detailing so many regression cases from his patients,
comparing these recollections to historical evidence and finding out what his
patients had or could have studied about the past, Dr. Weiss and others have
come to the conclusion that the evident points more toward one of the first two
possibilities. Therefore, many of
these therapists believe that either their patients are experiencing their own
past lives or they are experiencing the past lives of other people.
If these therapists’ conclusions are correct, then the Buddhist idea of
consciousness can be an interesting insight, which could offer a new way of
understanding these cases of past life regression.
The
concept in Buddhism known as the nine
levels of consciousness states that all living things have the potential
of experiencing nine levels of consciousness.
The first five levels of consciousness are the five senses:
taste, smell, touch, sight and hearing.
The sixth level is the regular conscious thought process.
The seventh level is the subconscious mind, which is very active when a
person dreams at night. The eighth
level is known as the “karmic storehouse” level.
This level is like a bank account of all negative and positive actions
(thoughts, words and deeds) a person has performed in this life and all their
previous lives. The ninth level is a
level of omniscience and omnipotence, where a person has access of all that is
known or can be known throughout time and space.
Buddhism calls that 9th level, a person’s Buddhahood. This
ninth level has many similarities to Jung’s idea of universal consciousness or
collective unconsciousness.
The
views expressed in Mr. Harada's article are his
and not necessarily those of the publisher or editors of FortuneChildBooks.com.