by Brian Weiss, M.D.

EACH OF US IS IMMORTAL

I don’t mean simply that we pass on our genes, our beliefs, our mannerisms, and our “ways” to our children and they, in turn, to their children, though of course we do. Nor do I mean that our accomplishments–the work of art, the new way of making shoes, the revolutionary idea, the recipe for blueberry pie–live after us, though of course they do. I mean that the most important part of us, our soul, lives forever…

I believe that each of us possesses a soul that exists after the death of the physical body and that it returns time and time again to other bodies in a progressive effort to reach a higher plane. (One of the questions that comes up frequently is “Where do the souls come from since there are so many more people now than when the world started?” I have posed this question to many patients, and the answer is always the same: This is not the only place where there are souls. There are many dimensions, many different levels of consciousness where there are souls. Why should we feel that we’re the only place? There is no limit to energy; this is one school of many schools. Also, a few patients have told me that souls can split and have simultaneous experiences.)… The anecdotal evidence is overwhelming and to me unassailably conclusive. I have seen it virtually every day in my patient Catherine as she takes me with her to past times as disparate as Arabia in 1863 B.C. and Spain in A.D. 1756.

For example, also, there is Elizabeth and Pedro… lovers in former lives who came together again in this one; Linda… guillotined in Scotland, married in Italy centuries later to her present-day grandfather, and later still growing old in Holland, surrounded by her large and loving family; Dan, Laura, and Hope… and some four thousand others–some I’ve written about, most not–whose souls have journeyed through past lives, carrying the immortal part of themselves to the present. (Some of these patients could speak foreign languages in their past lives that they’d never learned or studied in this one, a phenomenon called xenoglossy and a remarkable “proof” that what they were reporting was true.)

When my patients remembered themselves in their other lives, the traumas that had brought them to see me in the first place were eased and in some cases cured. That is one of the soul’s primary purposes: to progress toward healing.

If it were only I who had seen such cases, then you might be right in thinking I was hallucinating or had lost my mind, but… hundreds of other therapists have taped thousands of past life sessions, and many of their patients’ experiences have been verified. I myself have checked specific details and events recorded in Catherine’s and others’ past life memories–accurate details and events impossible to ascribe to false memory or fantasy; I no longer doubt that reincarnation is real. Our souls have lived before and will live again. That is our immortality.

Just before we die, our soul, that part of us which is aware when it leaves the body, pauses for a moment, floating. In that state it can differentiate color, hear voices, identify objects, and review the life it has just departed. This phenomenon is called an out-of-body experience, and it has been documented thousands of times, most famously by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Raymond Moody. Each of us experiences it when we die, but only a few have come back to present life to report on it. One was reported to me, not by the patient herself but by her cardiologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, a scientist who is very academic and very grounded. The patient, an elderly diabetic, was hospitalized for medical tests. During her hospitalization she had a cardiac arrest (her heart stopped beating), and she became comatose. Doctors held out little hope. Nevertheless, they worked feverishly on her and called on her cardiologist for help. He rushed into the intensive care unit and in so doing dropped his distinctive gold pen, which rolled across the room and under a window. During a short break in the resuscitation process, he retrieved it.

While the team worked on her, the woman reported later, she floated out of her body and watched the entire procedure from a point above the medicine cart, near that window. She watched with great concentration since it was she the doctors were working on. She longed to call out to them, to assure them that she was all right and that they didn’t have to work so frantically, but she knew they couldn’t hear her. When she tried to tap her cardiologist on the shoulder to tell him she was fine, her hand went right through him, and he felt nothing. She could see everything that was going on around her body and hear every word her doctors said, yet, to her frustration, nobody would listen to her.

The doctors’ efforts succeeded. The woman returned to life.

“I watched the whole process,” she told her cardiologist.

He was flabbergasted. “You couldn’t have. You were unconscious. You were comatose!”

“That was a pretty pen you dropped,” she said. “It must be very valuable.”

“You saw it?”

“I just told you I did,” she said and proceeded to describe the pen, the clothes the doctors and nurses wore, the succession of people who came in and out of the ICU, and what each did–things nobody could have known without having been there.

The cardiologist was still shaken days later when he told me about it. He confirmed that everything the woman related had indeed taken place and that her descriptions were accurate. Yet there was no question that she was unconscious; moreover, she had been blind for more than five years! Her soul had sight, not her body.

Since then the cardiologist has told me of dying patients who have seen familiar long-deceased people waiting to take them to the other side. These were patients who were not on medications of any kind and were therefore lucid. One described his grandmother waiting patiently in a chair in his hospital room for his time to come. Another was visited by her child who had died in infancy. The cardiologist noted that among this population of his patients there was a calmness, a serenity about dying. He learned to tell his patients: “I’m very interested in what you feel and what you experience. No matter how strange or unusual it may seem, you’re safe in talking about it to me.” When they did, their fear of death decreased.

More commonly, those who are resuscitated report seeing Light, often golden and at a distance, as though at the end of a tunnel. Andrea, a news reporter for a major television network, allowed me to regress her as a demonstration and describe her life as a Great Plains farm woman in the nineteenth century. At the end of her long lifetime she floated above her body, watching it from afar. Then she felt she was being drawn up into a Light, in her case a blue one, becoming increasingly distanced from her body and going toward a new life, one that was as yet unclear. This is a common, almost classic near death experience except that Andrea was describing the experience of someone in a past life–herself–who had been dead for more than one hundred years.

Where does the soul go after it leaves the body? I’m not sure; there may be no word for it. I call it another dimension, a higher level of consciousness or higher state of consciousness. The soul certainly exists outside of the physical body, and it makes connections not only to the lifetimes of the person it just departed but to all other souls. We die physically, but this part of us is indestructible and immortal. The soul is timeless. Ultimately, there is probably just one soul, one energy. Many people call this God, while others call it love; again, the name doesn’t matter.

I see the soul as a body of energy that blends with universal energy (still maintaining its own identity), then splits off again, intact, when it returns to a new life. Before it merges with the One, it looks down on the body it has left and conducts what I call a life review, a review of the life just departed. The review is undertaken in a spirit of loving kindness and caring. It is not for punishment, it is for learning.

Your soul registers its experience. It feels the appreciation and gratitude of everyone you have helped and everyone you have loved in a heightened way now that your soul has left the physical body. Similarly, it feels the pain, anger, and despair of everyone you have hurt or betrayed, again magnified. In this way the soul learns not to do harmful things but to be compassionate.

Once the soul has finished its review, it seems to go further from your body, often finding the beautiful Light as Andrea’s ancestor did, though this may not happen immediately. It doesn’t matter; the Light is always there. Sometimes there are other souls around–you could call them masters or guides–who are very wise and help your soul on its journey toward the One. At some level your soul merges with the Light, but it still retains its awareness so that it can continue to learn on the other side. It is a simultaneous merging with a greater Light accompanied by feelings of indescribable bliss and joy, and the awareness that it remains individuated and still has lessons to learn, both on Earth and on the other side. Eventually–the time varies–the soul decides to come back into another body, and when it reincarnates, this sense of merging is lost. Some people believe there is a profound sadness at the separation from this glory, this bliss in the merging of energy and light, and it may be so.

On Earth, in the present, we are individuals, but individuation is an illusion characteristic of this plane, this dimension, this planet. Yes, we are here, as real and substantial as the chair on which you may be sitting as you read. But scientists know that a chair is just atoms, molecules, energy; it is a chair and it is energy. We are human, finite, and we are immortal.

I think that at the highest level all souls are connected. It is our illusion or grand delusion that we are individuated, separate. Even as that pertains here, we are nevertheless connected to every other soul; thus, in a different sphere, we are all one. On this world our bodies are dense and physically heavy; they suffer from illness and disease. But in higher realms, I believe no physical illness exists. In still higher realms there is nothing physical, only pure consciousness. And beyond that–and beyond that–in realms we cannot comprehend and where all souls are one, even time doesn’t exist. This means that past, present, and future lives may be occurring simultaneously.

I’m a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, and healing is my life’s passion. I believe we are each instinctively motivated toward spiritual healing and spiritual growth, toward understanding and compassion, toward evolution. I believe we move spiritually forward. The unconscious (or subconscious or superconscious mind or soul) has built within it a mechanism that steers it along a positive path of spiritual evolution. In other words, the soul always evolves toward health. At a higher level, time is measured in lessons learned, though on Earth it is chronological. We live both in time and out of it. Our past and future lives converge in the present, and if they can induce us toward healing now so that our current lives are healthier and more spiritually fulfilled, we will make progress. The feedback loop is continuous, trying to get us to improve our future lives even as we live out this one.

I think many of us spend too much time worrying about what the higher levels of comprehension might be. The question is fascinating to contemplate, but our goal here is to heal ourselves as we are in our physical world. I see a lot of people, particularly New Age people, who aren’t well grounded in this world–being right here, now. Progression in the areas of contemplation and meditation is important, but those who spend their lives in seclusion should understand that we are a social species and those who do not experience the joys of the physical, the pleasures of the senses, aren’t learning the full lesson this present life has to teach them.

As I said, until recently I have only regressed patients so that they see and understand their past lives. Now I have begun to progress them into the future. But even if we study only our past lives, we can see how we have evolved within them. Each of our lives is a learning experience, and if we gain wisdom from our past lives, then through free will–conscious free will, that is, and the free will of the soul–we can affect the present.

For the most part, souls choose their parents, for our impulse is to continue the learning process so we can proceed toward healing. We choose what we do in our present life for the same reason. We do not choose abusive parents, for no one wants to be abused. Yet some parents become abusive (it is their free will) and in a later life, or perhaps in this one, they will learn the lesson of compassion and stop that behavior.

I chose to come back as the son of Alvin and Dorothy Weiss, and to be a psychiatrist. In my previous life I was an underground Czech resistance fighter, killed in 1942 or ’43. Perhaps the way I died led me to my present study of immortality; perhaps my desire to study and teach was a carryover from an earlier life as a priest in ancient Babylonia. Whatever, I chose to come back as Brian Weiss so I could maximize my personal learning and share it with others by becoming a healer. I selected my parents because they made it easier for me to learn. My father revered academics and wanted me to become a doctor. He was also interested in religion and taught me about Judaism, but he didn’t force it. So I became a secular rabbi, a psychiatrist. My mother was loving and nonjudgmental. She gave me a sense of safety that in later life allowed me to risk my career and financial security by publishing Many Lives, Many Masters.

Neither parent was spiritual in the New Age sense, nor did they believe in reincarnation. I chose them, it seems, because they offered me support and the freedom to go on the life path I eventually selected. Was anyone involved with me in that decision? I wonder. Spirits, guides, angels, all of them part of the one soul? I don’t know…

Students ask me why anyone would choose to come back to live in a rat-infested slum in Bogota or Harlem. The Buddhist monks I’ve met, the entourage of the Dalai Lama, laugh at the question because they see life as a stage performance. The man in the slum is just a role; in the next lifetime the same actor will appear as a prince. I believe we choose to come into a rat-infested apartment because we have to understand what it is like to be poor; in other lifetimes we will be rich. We must be rich, poor, male, female, healthy, sickly, big, small, strong, and weak. If in one lifetime I’m wealthy and someone else is living as I once did, in the slums of Bogota, then I will want to help that person because it will be a step in my own growth. There are two vital elements at work here. First, we cannot learn everything in one lifetime. That doesn’t matter because there are numerous lifetimes to come. Second, each time we come back, it is to be healed.

Our lives are a series of steps up the evolutionary scale. Where are we, then, when we are completely healed, when we reach the top of the staircase? Probably at a higher spiritual level, which some call heaven, others Nirvana.

I believe that our planet was created as a place to experience emotions, sensations, feelings, and relationships. Here we can be in love and feel great pleasure and joy. We can smell flowers, touch a baby’s skin, see the glory of a landscape, hear the music of the wind. That was the intent. What a classroom!

In the next years our great test will be whether we want to honor this school or destroy it, as modern technology has made it possible for us to do. I’m not sure our free will can make that choice; it may be our destiny. If a higher mind, the Oneness, decides that our planet is worth preserving, then it won’t be destroyed. If it does not, and we vaporize the world, our souls will nevertheless endure; they would find another school. But it may not be as beautiful as our world; it may not be physical.

Our souls are all the same age, which is ageless, but some souls advance more quickly than others. Saddam Hussein may be a third grader, while the Dalai Lama is in graduate school. In the end we will all graduate to the One. How quickly we progress depends on our free will.

The free will I am writing about here isn’t the same as our soul’s ability to choose our parents and our circumstances. Rather, it is human will, and we are in control of it on Earth. I distinguish it from destiny, which often brings us together with another for good or for ill.

It is free will that lets us choose what we eat, our cars, our clothes, our vacations. Free will allows us to select our partners as well, though it is probably destiny that draws us to them and they to us. I met Carole, my wife, in the Catskill Mountains; I was a busboy, and she was a guest at the hotel where I was working. Destiny. The course of our relationship–like the course of hundreds of millions of other relationships–depended on our free will. We chose to date, and we chose to marry.

Similarly, we can choose to increase our capacity to love or be compassionate; we can choose to perform the little acts of kindness that bring us internal satisfaction; we can choose generosity over selfishness, respect over prejudice. In every aspect of our lives we can choose to make the loving decision, and by doing so, our souls will evolve.

John E. Mack, M.D., the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, points out that

“We are now witnessing a coming together of science, psychology, and spirituality after centuries of ideological and disciplinary fragmentation. Both modern physics and in-depth psychology are revealing to us a universe in which… all that we can perceive around us is connected by resonances, both physical and nonphysical, that can make the possibility of universal justice, truth and love more than just a utopian fantasy…

“At the heart of this possibility lie what in the Western secular world are called “non-ordinary” states of consciousness, but in the world’s great religious traditions is variously called primary religious feeling, mystical oneness, connection with the ground of being, or universal love. …At the heart of these states of consciousness or being is a potential extension of the self beyond its usual boundaries.”

I would substitute “soul” for “self” and add that the boundaries exceed the measurable universe.

It has taken me twenty-four years to reach the simple truth at the core. We are immortal. We are eternal. Our souls will never die. This being so, we should start acting as if we know that immortality is our blessing. Or, to put it more simply, we should prepare for immortality–here, now, today and tomorrow and each day for the rest of our lives. If we prepare, our souls will move up the evolutionary scale, come closer to healing, come closer to the higher state. If we don’t, we will recycle our present lives–in effect, march in place–and postpone to a future life the mastering of the lesson we might have learned in this one.

How do we prepare? How do immortal people act? In this life we prepare by learning how to have better relationships; how to be more loving, more compassionate; how to be healthier physically, emotionally, and spiritually; how to help others; how to enjoy this world and yet advance its evolution, advance its healing. By preparing for immortality we will quiet present fears, feel better about ourselves, and grow spiritually. And we will be healing our future lives at the exact same moment.

Now, thanks to the progressions that my patients have experienced and reported back to me, we can see the results of our present behavior and thus shape it for the future. If we can accelerate the healing process, the evolutionary process, that is the most therapeutic action we can take, the best thing we can do, not only for our own souls but for everyone in the world. This is what I have learned from my patients.

“Love is an absolute quality and energy. It does not stop with our death. It continues on to the other side and returns here again. It is the epitome of the spirit’s quality–and the body’s. It is life and the afterlife. It is our goal, and all of us, in this or future lives, to attain it.”

Fourteen Soul Guiding Principles

1. I am no longer afraid of death, since I know that I have almost definitely lived before and am likely to reincarnate on earth again after an in-between life in a less dense reality.

2. When someone close to me dies it is natural to be sad. But my sadness is much reduced knowing that he (or she) has not died but continues to live on another plane of existence. I know that he is likely to be with me often, even if I cannot see him. I also know that I will see this person again after my death and/or in a following life on earth. Goodbyes forever do not exist.

3. I am tolerant towards all people as long as they do not restrict my freedom and that of others. I tolerate any form of religious practices and other people’s opinions as long as they give others the same right to express themselves freely. By continually developing from one life to the next, we humans broaden our awareness. I am never arrogant in my response towards other people’s ways of thinking. I may have been that way in a previous life, and for that reason I never push my convictions onto others. Every human being reaches his time for broadening his consciousness when it is right for him. Besides, it is clear to me that it is most likely that I will often change, i.e. broaden my outlook in my future lives.

4. I will never discriminate against other people no matter who they may be. I know that it is futile for me to discriminate against someone of the opposite sex since I most likely belonged to that sex at some time myself. I will not condemn someone with a different skin color or of a different nationality or race, since I could easily have been of this color or race at some point in time, or possibly will be in the future. If I discriminate against someone on the grounds of his affiliation I will then have to experience being part of that nation, ethnic group or race in order to broaden my understanding and love for them. I will never look down on other people because they are poor, disabled, unattractive or in some way different, since every person has chosen precisely their circumstances, looks, and their particular disposition in order to learn from it.

5. I will never envy others, be they richer, more powerful or more respected, cleverer, healthier or physically more beautiful, since they have created this learning situation for themselves in their life. They can use these means at their disposal to learn whatever they can in order to grow spiritually. I could possibly have had the same means at my disposal in a previous life or will have in a future incarnation. It seems necessary for us to experience all learning possibilities in order to evolve spiritually.

6. If I have a child I will give him the chance to develop his talents as long as they are not destructive. I will not force my will on him or attempt to break his, since I know that this child’s past lives have played a major part in forming his present life. He will want to live out his learning program in this life, which may be completely different to my own. This is why I will respect his individuality. Apart from all this I know that he has been an adult in a past life, possibly even one of my deceased relatives or friends. I would watch carefully whether he mentions anything about past lives. I will not forbid him these expressions or dismiss them as crazy talk. Perhaps this child has been my partner, mother, father or friend in a past life. I also know that it is possible that I could be reborn to my present child in a future life.

7. I know that I did not choose my partner by accident. I already knew her or him from an earlier life. We decided during our life after death to return to earth to continue learning from each other. Each partnership is a learning situation in the school of life. I wish to make the most of all situations from which I can learn something.

8. I am able to accept my parents just as they are, since I freely chose them before my birth. They provided me with precisely those conditions that I need to accomplish my specific tasks in this life.

9. I see people, events and tragic blows which come my way as important pointers, which enable me to learn exactly that which is of importance to me. I allow no envy to develop in me towards others, since they most likely have very different issues to deal with and different means at their disposal for dealing with them. This is why I calmly face my specific life conditions seeing them more as learning opportunities than anything else. I do not complain about them but ask myself what it is I could learn from each situation.

10. The earth is a school of learning. With each incarnation we learn to be more understanding, more tolerant and above all more loving. If after many incarnations we have become totally loving, then we are free to leave this earthly school having passed our examinations. We will then be allowed to move on to higher universities, where we are taught greater wisdom and deeper love.

11. I know that whenever I violate love I myself will one day be the one who is treated unlovingly. It is only through this that I learn to be more loving with my thoughts, words and deeds. Everything I do to hurt others will one day hurt me. The Laws of Karma that govern this learning process are always just. Unfairness does not exist for me. This is why I don’t put blame onto other people or situations; instead I ask myself what it is I need to learn from a situation in order to balance things out from an earlier life. Nothing happens by chance.

12. I know that everything in life has a purpose. Nothing is senseless. Everything that comes my way has some kind of meaning for me. This is why I will endeavor to find the purpose behind everything that happens to me.

13. I know that it is entirely up to me how quickly I evolve spiritually. I myself am responsible for whatever happens to me, since all these things are born out of the thoughts I held, words I spoke or deeds I acted out in my past lives. In order to live another life on earth in joy and love I will use my present life to give others much joy and love. I alone am the architect of my fortunes. I can hold no one else responsible since I am, was and will be responsible for everything that happens to me whatever that may be.

14. I see life as a gift, in which each life on earth is an opportunity to develop myself more and more in love and understanding. It pleases me to help others in their development and to allow them to help me on my journey. Therefore I am grateful for each day I am given to learn and discover more about love. I am grateful to be given the chance to turn my consciousness more and more towards the laws of life and love.

Excerpt from The Veil Has Been Lifted