OTHER LIVES, OTHER SELVES -

A JUNGIAN PSYCHOTHERAPIST DISCOVERS PAST LIVES

by Roger Woolger

 

Click here for Chapter One:

 

FOREWORD

 

Comfort and security levels often cloud our abilities to move deeper into knowledge of the images that impel and regulate our lives. Yet we yearn for ways to clear the clouds of unknowingness. In ourselves and our society, we are bound up with patterns that perhaps no longer serve us. If anything, these patterns which focus on materialistic values and self-centered orientations seem to create ecological havoc within ourselves and on our planet. On the other hand, these patterns have given rise to crises that are forcing individuals, groups, and nations to question old assumptions, models, and structures - and to develop a different perspective in order to deal with the perennial problems we face. As Ilya Prigogine, who won the 1977 Nobel Prize for a theory describing transformations, emphasizes, we are perhaps at a turning point where the stresses and conflicts of our time can thrust us into a new higher order. He is stating what Thomas Kuhn, a science historian and philosopher, calls a movement toward a paradigm shift - a paradigm being a scheme held by a community of individuals for understanding and explaining certain aspects of reality. We are presently emerging from a materialistic, control-oriented, self-centered scheme of reality into one which perceives life as an inseparable web of relationships. This new paradigm supports an awareness that there are intrinsically dynamic processes (forms of consciousness) that articulate the patterns and struees of our lives. We are still hesitant to give up the belief that science deals with absolute truth rather than with a limited and approximate description of reality. It must be considered that personal truth is never an objective endeavor within the realm of science, but rather a personal path and inner revelation which all great spiritual teachers have revealed.

 

If we can understand that transformation is what we are seeking, we will see that the basic tenet of this book is not about past life therapy, but about personal transformation. By weaving his knowledge and understanding of the poets and philosophers who provide intimations of an open, creative universe with his own clinical material, Roger Woolger presents a transformational perspective exploring the creative possibility that we are related to a pattern of consciousness that goes beyond ordinary awareness.

 

Roger has had the courage to undertake this book as a participant-observer of the past life therapy process. In that role, he discloses his own doubts and the pathways of self-examination he traveled trying to make sense of the material of past life images. In doing so, he finds himself, like others who have journeyed beyond socially accepted conventions, having to discard traditional models of the universe and human nature. Whether we believe in past life irnagery or not, it is of little consequence. In his use of literary and philosophical metaphors, Roger Woolger creates an understanding of the images which bind us in a universal way to one another. He brings to the reader a cluster of ideas which serve as a catalyst for personal change.

 

This book is timely. Several years back, it could easily have been disregarded and placed in the category of the occult. But now it has personal relevance outside of that category. In Other Lives, Other Selves Roger addresses the issues of our relationship to the process of life, the question of our own personal identity, and the issue of the purpose of life as we witness it. This book, in many ways, gives a pathway to those who want to find their own natural depth and a form of self disclosure that provides an added dimension to the therapeutic process. The hope of past life images is that they provide a vision that all of us, whether we choose to recognize it or not, are living within a spiritual ecological terrain which embodies our sense of humanity.

 

- RONALD WONG JUE, PH.D. President, Association for Transpersonal Psychology

From the back cover:

"IT DOESN'T MATTER WHETHER YOU BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION OR NOT.

THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND WILL ALMOST ALWAYS PRODUCEA PAST LIFE STORY WHEN INVITED IN THE RIGHT WAY... EVEN IF THE CONSCIOUS MIND IS HIGHLY SKEPTICAL, THE UNCONSCIOUS IS A TRUE BELIEVER!"

 

In this fascinating and provocative new book, Dr. Roger J. Woolger, a graduate of Oxford University and a certified Jungian analyst, presents a firsthand look at the emerging psychology of reincarnation - and the dramatic power of past-life regression radically to transform and heal our lives. Other Lives, Other Selves reveals an exciting new psychotherapeutic technique that produces astoundingly beneficial emotional and physical results - whether you believe in reincarnation as a literal or a symbolic phenomenon.

 

Drawing on both Western science and Eastern spirituality, Dr. Woolger shows how patients have unlocked the secrets of their innermost memories-the often self-destructive cycles that are repeated life after life - to overcome the insecurity, depression, guilt, inhibition, family dysfunction and physical illness that they have inherited from their past lives. A lucid, compelling account of a revolutionary therapeutic technique, Other Lives, Other Selves offers an alternative path to self-improvement and self-enlightenment that addresses the whole person: mind, body and spirit.

 

'A HIGHLY READABLE AND GENUINELY INTERESTING LOOK AT PAST-LIFE THERAPY. ITS 'INSIDER'S' VIEW OF THE SUBJECT IS ESPECIALLY APPEALING"

 

- D. Scott Rogo, Body, Mind & Spirit

 

And from the book jacket:

 

After many years of witnessing, guiding and recording hundreds into thousands of past life stories...I cannot pretend that I have not speculated a great deal about the tantalizing questions of whether all this is memory or fantasy, whether these are really our other lives and whether there is truly a continued existence of the soul as so many religious traditions assert. But as a therapist and not a philosopher I am perhaps fortunate in that I am not shackled by the problem of belief or disbelief; I am not obligated to delay my sessions until the learned jury of parapsychologists and metaphysicians is in on these matters. Not that they do not have important observations to make...but for the therapist there is another kind of truth, psychic truth: that which is real for the patient...As I always tell my clients, "It doesn't matter whether you believe in reincarnation or not. The unconscious mind will almost always produce a past life story when invited in the right way." Indeed, I am sometimes inclined to think that even if the conscious mind is highly skeptical about the reality of past lives as historical memories, the unconscious is a true believer and was simply waiting to be asked!

- Roger Woolger

 

In this fascinating and provocative new book, Dr. Roger J. Woolger, a graduate of Oxford University and a certified Jungian analyst, presents a firsthand look at the emerging pyschology of reincarnation - and the dramatic power of past-life regression raqdically to transform and heal our lives. Other Lives, Other Selves reveals an exciting new therapeutic technique that produces astoundingly beneficial emotional and physical results - whether you believe in reincarnation as a literal or a symbolic phenomenon.

Drawing on both Western science and Eastern spirituality, Dr. Woolger shows how patients have unlocked the secrets of their innermost memories - the often self-destructive cycles that are repeated life after life - to overcome the insecurity, depression, guilt, inhibition, family dysfunction and physical illness that they have inherited from their past lives. A lucid, compelling account of a revolutionary therapeutic technique, Other Lives, Other Selves offers an alternative path to self-improvement and self-enlightenment that addresses the whole person: mind, body and spirit.

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