Dowsing and past life regression (PLR) are parallel through to a greater understanding of the worlds behind the everyday world, and both can deliver great benefit in the hands of a skilled practitioner.
Originally from the midlands, but now an East Cornwall local, Chris Hytch has been regressing clients for a couple of decades, and he has a weighty portfolio of personal case histories. However, the first part of this presentation covered the nature of the subject, and an outline of its modern historical development.
Evidence for the existence of past or previous lives comes from a number of sources. Perhaps the most common, and the most graphic, is the recollections of children, usually between the ages of three and seven, of information about other lives that they could not easily have derived from elsewhere, nor would it be readily available to any human of such tender years.
A plethora of well-documented examples relate how some small children have been able to describe the internal configuration of buildings that they could never have visited, or the private and intimate relationships of people they could not feasibly have met. The sheer detail, and the astonishing accuracy of these stories, usually retold calmly and with no hint of mischief or boasting, is testimony to their potential scientific value.
Similarly, certain adults can also relate cameos from apparently previous lives. These episodes can be triggered by a confluence of time and place, or possibly by a reaction to trauma. Occasionally, information or realisation can come completely out of the blue, or be a more generalised sense of déjà vu. Whilst there is little overall pattern to the recollections of adults, many do concern extreme situations, such as the experience of war, or personal suffering through crime, oppression or serious injury.
The access to details of one life from another can be readily understood by any dowser with a worldview based on access to a ubiquitous ‘information-field’. However, even that outlook is stretched to its limits by the occasional, but by no means unique, appearance of birthmarks or healed wounds, seemingly connected with violence from another time altogether. Comparing it to the similarly rare occurrence of stigmata in the Christian tradition gives the process more credence, but does little to help us understand the mechanism involved.
There are plenty of well-known names in the burgeoning catalogue of those who have claimed at least one past life experience - from classical figures of Greek and Roman history, right up to present day statesmen and business executives.
Millions of adherents to the world’s major religions implicitly subscribe to the existence and relevance of past lives. Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism and Taoism all take past, and often sequential, lives as a basic tenet of their belief system - as do most of the pagan, animist and nature-based philosophies. The Abrahamic traditions have generally turned away from the acceptance or recognition of past life experience in their later incarnations. However, Gnostic, Essene and Cathar Christians all held to their existence, as do Sufi Muslims and some Judaic groups.
The modern investigation into the phenomenon of past lives really started in earnest in the mid-twentieth, with the life-long research and extensive archive of Dr Ian Stevenson often being quoted as the gold-standard for this type of work. The explicit findings of Stevenson’s painstaking investigations into thousands of diverse cases of past life experiences seeping into present ones is difficult to ignore and even more difficult to deny.
While the jury may still be out as to whether these are all personal previous lives or just other past lives, derogators would need to take a very oblique and perverse approach indeed to explain away the phenomenon altogether. Such is the weight of evidence coming from credible academics such as Stevenson, Weiss and Cayce, that the burden on proof has been shifted to the sceptics, who understandably fear that a de facto acceptance of PLR will collapse their entire house of cards.
Initially, much of the research was carried out in Asiatic countries, where the concept of sequential lives is not seen to be anything particularly exceptional. But there are now plenty of meticulously-recorded similar types of cases of individuals, who have been brought up with modern and post-modern western views about life, death and the hereafter.
Chris’s involvement in PLR is no mere academic interest. Although there are those who have a fascination is discovering who and what they might have been in times gone by - and are therefore fellow travellers of those of us mildly addicted to genealogy - most of Chris’s clients are people with unexplained physical or mental health issues. When medics and therapists run out of straightforward options, PLR - as with other aspects of dowsing and healing - can be something of a port of last resort.
Chris was able to provide several real-life examples from his own practice, where clients, who may have suffered trauma in one existence, have apparently experienced the resurfacing of related symptoms in the current epoch. He was keen to explain that our current lifetimes, for all their stresses and demands, are actually quite a quiet passage of history when compared to many of the more brutal and lawless ages that have preceded it. PLR is not for the faint-hearted, and it should certainly not be regarded as a party-trick. And that appreciation is yet another parallel with the approach and the worldview of the dowser.
There are plenty of solid case histories whereby specific traumas and unresolved issues from one life appear to resurface in a subsequent incarnation. There are those who would argue that this has some similarity to the concept of karma - where significant imbalances and injustices are felt to require rectification, or at least acknowledgement, either later in the same lifetime, or maybe in a subsequent existence.
PLR is yet another striking example of how information appears to be accessible from one realm, and one space-time, to another. It reinforces the view that potentially all information is conceptually available to any number of other recipients under certain conditions - and that the information ‘closest’ to the receiver is probably more easily obtainable and decodable in our human circumstances.
Any phenomenon of this type raises as many questions as it provides answers. One of the basic tenets of dowsing implies that information is only available on request, and when needed. Here we seem to have vast amounts of detailed and often verifiable, sensible information breaking or leaking through from another dimension or reality. Yet the recipient, often a very young child, is usually unaware of any making any such request. This implies that the intangible membrane between lives is remarkably thin under certain circumstances, and that there is more of an intentional push from the other side than most of us are used to accepting in our current understanding of the realms beyond. Even the most respected of dowsers will be at pains to explain that all information is available to you; all you have to do is ask. However, in the PLR scenario, we seem to have an outpouring of data, sometimes of almost cinematic proportions, seemingly unbidden by the recipient.
The talk was received in attentive silence, and the questions and contributions of the TD audience afterwards clearly displayed an active appreciation of both the speaker and his material.
Many thanks to Chris Hytch for his excellent and very well-pitched introduction to such a vast and complex subject and, of course, for taking time out to address the TDs.
Many thanks, too, to all those who helped to put on this excellent curtain-raiser for 2020.
