Key Papers on Deep Memory Process

Death and the Spirit Realms:

Past-Life Therapy and Tibetan Buddhism.  (2001)

I have worked with a number of people who have clinically died in this lifetime then returned to earth. They usually remember it as a decision, and often the common element is that in the out of body state they are shown the beings on earth that they are connected with. Then they are shown the ancestors or the spirits of members of family who have already died and they are asked to make a choice of who they want be with.  I remember one case where a woman with a one-year-old son had aphasia from a pulmonary embolism and died on the operating table.  The infection had actually been caused by an abortion, which she had earlier.  She saw the spirit of the dead child in the other world and she also saw the one-year-old son on the earth. A guide told her she would have to choose whether she wanted to be with the living or the dead. She chose to come back to earth to be with her one-year-old son. (Extract)

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The Body in Past Life Therapy (2002).

In line with the more physical releases sought by Wilhelm Reich, past life therapy very frequently brings about the spontaneous dissolving of bodily armoring and the recovery of blocked physical libido.  Indeed, a striking aspect of much past -life therapy, when seen for the first time by an observer, is the obvious physical involvement of the client in the story that is being relived. In many sessions the client doesn’t just sit or lie passively recounting an inner vision of a past life with his or her eyes closed. Instead, he or she may be subject to the most dramatic convulsions, contortions, heavings, and thrashings imaginable. One client may clutch his chest in apparent pain as he recounts a sword wound, another may turn almost blue during a choking fit as she remembers a strangulation, while yet another may become rigidly fixed with arms above the head as he remembers being tied to a post during torture. (Extract).

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What Happens After Death: Navigating the Bardos (2002)

A past life therapist learns to become a kind of shamanic guide between different realities as he or she works. And like any travel guide he or she knows where to take short cuts and how to get quickly out of dead ends or stuck places. In fact there are so many similarities between guided and unguided journeys through these realms beyond death and out of the body that it is totally appropriate to talk of a common psycho-spiritual territory…..I’m  therefore going to call the state after death simply the bardo realm.  Scholars of Tibetan Buddhism know that there are many bardos or in-between states and that more correctly the one we’re referring to here is called the bardo of becoming. This is actually a  the kind of waiting place or time  between lifetimes, when one life is finished and your consciousness  may be preparing for another. (Extract).

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Beyond Death: Understanding the Afterlife (2004)

What I want to show is that there is a vast amount of information about the phenomena of death, transition and “otherworlds” available to us that is much more sophisticated that most people realize. Not just the widely known studies of Kenneth Ring and Raymond Moody on actual Near Death Experiences, but detailed cross cultural comparisons of how different cultures experience and envision the afterlife, reports from shamans of “journeys” to the spirit realms, or realms of the dead, elaborate accounts of the soul’s port-mortem encounters and movements from the Tibetan Buddhist and Indian traditions, as well as from my own field, past life regression, where thousands of accounts of death transition phenomena have been recorded.   (Extract)

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Deep Memory Process and the Healing of Trauma (2003/2010).

When the psyche is shattered by an overwhelming or horrific event it has long been observed how the personality seems to splinter into different fragments or part selves; the deeply traumatized part stays frozen in the original event, which is often forgotten, another part of the self dissociates or “goes away”, often to another “world” that is safe or far from the pain. (Rossi, 1994, Steinberg, 2000, Ingerman, 1991) At the same time a strong “survivor” self will emerge as an adaptive mask, helping, getting on with life, impervious to pain. In extreme cases, as in so called multiple personality disorder, a whole host of part selves will appear, each protecting or hiding from each other in a highly complex web of dissociation from the memory of the original wound. (Extract)

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Related Papers and Chapters

The Presence of Other Worlds in Psychotherapy and Healing (2002)

No matter how ingenious the theories of physics and biology, as long as such disciplines fail to find ways to acknowledge those higher dimensions that are not of time and space and which transcend and subsume the physical realm, physical science will never fully embrace and become fruitfully united with meta-physics. Without this step all the enterprises of science, no matter how grand or sublime, will remain one dimensional and reductive. What is sought, in the words of Henry Corbin, is "a cosmology of such a kind that the most astounding information of modern science regarding the physical universe remains inferior to it."

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A Sceptic Encounters Past Lives (2002)

The imagination is one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time. I believe that in its higher form (as opposed to fantasy, its lower or ego related form) imagination is the bridge to the transpersonal realities of the soul, that transcendent part of the personality we have called the Self. This other level of reality is sometimes called the subtle world, or the spirit world. Platonism, Hinduism and Buddhism, all of which subscribe to the idea of  the transmigration of the soul, called it the intermediary world, a reality midway between this and the world of pure light. In Tibetan Buddhism this “in between” is called a bardo,

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The Secret History of Reincarnation (2002)

Not long ago, I saw a slogan on a bumper sticker: Reincarnation is having a comeback. It’s a sad fact that the scientific establishment in the United States still marginalizes most work that even hints at realities beyond our own, including regression therapy, parapsychology, and a vast body of research into paranormal phenomena, from out-of-body experiences to children’s spontaneous past-life memories.  By clinging to such a narrow protocol, mainstream psychology risks becoming, in George Orwell’s memorable phrase, one of “the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” ....

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