IN one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the generic shrink décor of his office — leather couch, granite-topped coffee table — makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring.It's a nice echo of the Akashic Field gurus questioned in this blog over the past year, whose patients - in 'recovering' memories from 'past lives', on occasion with the help of LSD - typically report that they were Marie Antoinette or Cleopatra or a photogenic victim of oppression rather than someone particularly nasty or merely particularly humdrum. Strange how people don't seem to remember being paedophiles, accountants, actuaries ... (Only a hoary sceptic - true believers are, sigh, pointed to the health warning here - would wonder whether the oh-so-scientific memories of pharaonic excess, glittering guillotines and crinolines are attributable to a recollection of B grade movie rather the quantum holotropic memory in which the 'oneness of the universe' allows communication across time and space with snakes, cows, carrots, coffee cups and cleopatras ... and, according to Ervin Lazlo of World Futures in one of his funnier videos, extraterrestrials!)
In that earlier incarnation, "I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten," said Dr. DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in hypnotizing those hoping to retrieve memories of past lives. Dr. DeBell likes to reflect on how previous lives can alter one's sense of self. He, for example, is more than a psychiatrist in 21st-century Manhattan; he believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk and a conscientious German who refused to betray his Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust.
Belief in reincarnation, he said, "allows you to experience history as yours. It gives you a different sense of what it means to be human."
Paul Bostock, another believer, reportedly
says that in the early 1880s he managed a large estate — possibly Chatsworth — in Derbyshire, England.Oh dear.
In a twist that would make Jane Austen blush, he thinks he was in love with the soul of his current wife, Jo-Anne, then embodied as a cook in the estate's kitchen. Married to someone else, Mr. Bostock could not act on his feelings.
He says he and his wife share the kind "of attraction and recognition that a soul makes when it encounters the familiar.” In that spirit, the couple traveled last month to Rhinebeck, N.Y., where they and more than 200 others paid $355 each to attend a weekend seminar run by one of America's pre-eminent proselytizers on the subject of reincarnation, Dr. Brian Weiss.
I'm more struck by the incredulous comments on the Times site in response to the article -
I think that I was a gazzilion-aire in my previous life! A recent check of my bank account seems to indicate otherwise! No, wait! I think I was a porn star in my previous life? My gal, Suzy, seems to disagree....not sure why she disagrees? In this life I am a premier athlete. Just ask my worn out remote and the dent in my couch cushion that looks suspiciously like my flat butt! Okay, that was fun, but I must admit that I sometimes wonder how I can dream about something and then have something similar to my dream occur in everyday life ?Or
I remain perplexed by Western approaches to reincarnation, and how past lives often appear to be educed by an adherence to a perpetual (and presumably eternal) form of narcissism. Isn't it convenient that Dr. DeBell was not only a Tibetan monk, but also a conscientious German during WW2? Or that Julia Roberts was a "peasant revolutionary"? And finally how Catherine, the patient, was an Italian merchant and a freed slave who healed and ministered the needy?Or
Why weren't any of these people slave owners? German SS army members? Non-revolutionary peasants who worked and toiled the land? Or like my recently deceased Italian grandfather, an immigrant who worked as a garbage collector?
This article should be the inspiration for a really funny movie. The fact that these people take themselves so seriously and that they get any credence at all for their nutty beliefs is a comic goldmine. But in fact I only believe that because I was a frustrated joke writer in a previous life.Or, most succinctly,
There's no business like show business.
