Several psychiatrist, psychologist, and physician friends were doing their own research into reincarnation at the time, and we consulted with each other regularly. Finally several of us gathered one weekend for a panel discussion on the subject, in an auditorium.
Before we started, we discussed the possibility of doing a spontaneous past-life regression onstage, on a volunteer from the audience. My colleagues were hesitant about it. My attitude was, as always: if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. But we'll never know until we try.
A handful of people volunteered, and I chose an attractive, well-dressed young man who looked as if he wasn't quite buying this reincarnation blather, but he was patient enough to keep listening on the off chance that we were right.
Before I began the hypnosis process, I asked him if he had any physical or emotional health problems or any phobias that were bothering him. He mentioned a chronically painful right foot, which podiatrists couldn't seem to cure. As for phobias, he confessed a fear that no matter how successful he became or how hard he tried to be liked, people would always see through him, figure out how inadequate he really was, and laugh at him behind his back.
He was a good subject, willing but not too eager, and easy to hypnotize. I took him slowly through the regression to show the audience how it worked, to keep him comfortable, and to prove that I wasn't leading him and that all the information came from him, not from me. We worked patiently back through this lifetime, to his birth, to the moment of his conception, to his death in a life before this one.
And then we all watched as, with no cue from me, his right foot turned in, as if it were deformed, and his whole demeanor changed from a veneer of self-confidence to a shy, sad, apologetic shadow.
I asked him what today's date was. He gave me a date in 1821, which was 154 years ago.
He introduced himself with a name different from the one he'd given when he arrived onstage, and as far as he was concerned we were in a small town in Virginia instead of a city in northern California. His brief life was an embarrassing burden to his parents and a lonely object of ridicule among his classmates.
My subject on that particular afternoon reported several months later that he'd never suffered another moment of discomfort in his foot, and never again had he worried about others laughing at him.
Reincarnation is God's logical, loving, compassionate design for the eternal journey of our spirits.
I didn't just want to believe it, I had too much evidence not to believe it.
