By the same author:

*Awakening the Thit·d Eye

* Entities, Pat·asites of the Body of Enet·gy

* Planetai''Y Fol"ces, Alchemy and Healing

* Clait-vision Astrology Manual

This electronic manual can be obtained from the Clairvision School's
Internet address.

* Subtle Bodies- The FoUJfold Model

A book accompanied by 12 cassettes.

To be published in 1997:
Atlantean Secrets
An epic novel on the ongms of the Clairvision tradition and the
spiritual grandeur and downfall of Atlantis. This work comes in four
volumes:

* Atlantean Sect·ets, Vol. 1- Sleeper, Awaken!

* Atlantean Seuets, Vol. 2- Forevet· Love, White Eagle
* Atlantean Seuets, Vol. 3- The Gods at·e Wise

* Atlantean Sect·ets, Vol. 4- The Return of the Flying Dragon.

Contact Clait-vision fo•· a list of all available texts, cassettes and

other learning matel"ial.
 Regression,
Past-Life Therapy for
Here and Now Freedom

Dr Samuel Sagan

Cover by Steve Goldsmith

ClairvisionTM
PO Box 33, Roseville NSW 2069, Australia
Web site: http://clairvision.org/
E-mail: [email protected]
 Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the editors and correctors who have worked on the manu-
script of this book: Catherine Ross, Rosa Droescher, Orna Lankry, Jona-
than Marshall, Anne and Michael Barbato, Peter Twigg, David McKenzie.

Copyright © 1996 by Clairvision School Foundation

Published in Sydney, Australia, by Clairvision
PO Box 33, Roseville NSW 2069, Australia
E-mail: [email protected]

Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of review or research as permit-
ted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any
process without written permission.

ISBN 0 9586700 0 5

Clairvision is a registered trademark of Clairvision School Ltd.

 Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The mechanisms of samskaras 6

Chapter 2 Samskaras and the quest for freedom 17

Chapter 3 Emotions versus feelings 31

Chapter 4 The causality of emotions and feelings 38

Chapter 5 Samskaras and meditation 52

Chapter 6 Samskaras and physical disorders 67

Chapter 7 The end of samskaras 83

Chapter 8 Remembering past lives 96

Chapter 9 The way to recovering memories 106

Chapter 10 Frequently asked questions 116

Conclusion 121
 INTRODUCTION

Regression is one of the great techniques of the future in the

fields of self-discovery and psychotherapy. One of its essential char-
acteristics is that it integrates two dimensions within the same proc-
ess: a psycho-therapeutic dimension, and a metaphysical one.
To psychotherapists, regression is a transpersonal technique
allowing explorations and releases of unprecedented depth, and
through which a much needed metaphysical dimension can be incor-
porated into psychotherapy.
To spiritual seekers, regression is a major tool in the opening
of perception, a powerful awakener of the third eye, and above all a
path of mental de-conditioning. It achieves a profound and system-
atic purification of the emotional layer - not unlike the catharsis
which Bernard de Clairveaux, patron of the Templars, used to de-
scribe with the Latin word defcecatio, considering it an indispensable
preliminary to higher spiritual experience.
Regression aims at exploring and releasing emotional block-
ages and mental complexes, as do many other therapies. The speci-
ficity of regression, however, lies in its unsurpassed capacity to reach
hidden subconscious and unconscious memories. Even in the first
sessions, it is not uncommon to experience flashbacks that cannot be
related to any experience in this life, but are accompanied by a deep
feeling and an inner certitude that they refer to yourself. Hence the
name 'past-life therapy' is often given to regression.
Regarding past lives, however, a few points must be made
clear right from the beginning. First, it is in no way necessary to be-
lieve in past lives to undergo a regression process. ISIS, the regres-
sion technique which I have developed, uses neither imagination nor
creative visualisation. It does not ask you to believe anything, just to
follow a process. Actually the fewer beliefs you bring with you, the
more chance of success, for beliefs generate expectations that tend to
distort the purity of the experiences.

1
 Regression

Some of the flashbacks during regression have an extreme

clarity and leave the client with little doubt that they are real. Yet
what matters with regression experiences is not whether they come
from past lives, but what sort of improvement they can bring to your
present. To use the words of one of my clients just after completing
an intense regression: "I don't know about past lives, but as far as
my life is concerned, this certainly makes a lot of sense!" What mat-
ters is how the client's present life can be changed, and not so much
the origin of the experience. Let people decide for themselves what
the real nature of these flashbacks may be. However, readers would
be poorly inspired to try to make up their mind before undergoing
regressions themselves, for the intensity and sharpness of the flash-
backs are far greater than most people imagine when they think of
past-life therapy. Moreover, some regressions are accompanied by a
'flavour of the Self - a sense of your own continuity in time that
words are powerless to describe as long as you have not gone
through the experience yourself.
A second essential point is that the purpose of the ISIS method
of regression is not to write a novel about your past lives, but to
work at clearing the present. Regression is concerned with the cli-
ent's present emotional and mental blockages, and how to release
them. It may lead to reexperiencing episodes of early childhood, or
possibly certain episodes that cannot be related to any event of this
present life. However, if clients start to be more interested in the de-
tails of past-life stories than in how the regression can help them be-
come freer and more awakened, then the process can quickly be-
come meaningless, and moreover invite all kinds of delusions. This
warning is essential and will therefore be repeated several times
throughout the book. The goals of ISIS are deconditioning, emotional
freedom here and now, and Self-awareness. ISIS aims at unveiling
your real nature, and cares little about who you have been.
Tlllrdly, my intention in this book is not to argue or
'demonstrate' the reality of past lives. Actually I do not believe that
one can prove the reality of past lives, just as there is absolutely no
way one can prove the reality of dreams. It happens that nearly eve-
rybody remembers their dreams, at least from time to time, so that
there is little doubt about whether they exist or not. But suppose you
were living in a world where no one but you remembered dreams.
2
 Introduction

How could you prove their reality? Each time you told your story,
most people would immediately answer "Nonsense!" You could try
to produce an EEG showing that your brain wave patterns were al-
tered each time you dreamt. But then the sceptics would argue this
only proved that your brain waves change, and that there was no
need to invent something as fanciful ali dreams in order to explain
the phenomenon.
Similarly, only direct experience can bring a real understand-
ing of the subject of past lives. It is better to show techniques which
allow this direct experience, and let time do its sublime work. As
Einstein used to say, it is rare that people let themselves be con-
vinced by new ideas. What happens is that the people with the old
ideas eventually die, and those who follow them find the new ideas
very natural and adopt them. Once a sufficient proportion of the
population has gone through the type of flashbacks that occur during
regression, it seems quite probable that past-life experiences will
become as common and accepted as dreams.
Once, I was invited to speak about regression to a society who
had contacted me after reading one of my articles in a health maga-
zine. I accepted without further enquiry. I arrived at their place a
quarter of an hour early and, after their secretary gave me a polite
but distant welcome, I decided to spend the time that was left read-
ing the pamphlets of the organisation. It immediately became clear
that I had landed among a group of sceptics who had invited me only
to attack my views. A short but intense moment of cogitation fol-
lowed, during which I had to find a new strategy and change the
format of my lecture.
I spoke to them in the following way (and I would ask scepti-
cal readers to view this book in the same manner): "Here are the
case studies of a number of my clients. Here are the words they have
said when going through these flashbacks. I do not pretend that this
demonstrates or proves anything. Still, some kind of new experience
must be emerging, because other regressors and I have observed
similar patterns in thousands of sessions. It is up to you to draw your
own conclusions. To me, what really matters is that after these re-
gressions the clients get better. Not all, of course, but a significant
number. They get rid of tranquillisers and sleeping tablets. They find
it easier to relate to others, and their general level of neurosis de-
3
 Regression

creases. A number of them even undergo a deep transformation and

change of values. Some adopt a much more philosophical attitude
towards life and begin to question their purpose on Earth."
By not trying to convince them of anything, I took the sceptics
by surprise. As a result, they proved surprisingly receptive. We
laughed a lot at the awkward character of some of my case studies,
and their president concluded the evening by saying that, after all,
their society was in favour of any technique that allowed one to
empty the garbage cans of the mind- which is exactly what regres-
sion does.
More than a new technique, regression is a new experience, or
rather the dissemination of an old experience in proportions unknown
until now. Throughout history, from the Indian r $iS to Goethe via
Plato and an uninterrupted line of 'seers', there have always been
individuals who recalled experiences of former incarnations on
Earth. But these experiences were rare. In the last fifteen years, I
have witnessed major changes in the way people gain access to past-
life flashbacks (or whatever you may decide to call the experiences).
When I was practising regression in the early nineteen eight-
ies, I had to confine my clients to a house for two weeks, imple-
menting the techniques non-stop. The process was drastic and could
only be undergone by people who had reached a certain degree of
emotional stability through years of working on themselves. Usually,
it was only after seven or ten days spent building up the inner pres-
sure that some of the participants would start having regression ex-
penences.
Now, in the mid-nineties, the situation has become quite dif-
ferent. Residential courses are no longer needed. Weekly private ses-
sions of one or two hours are sufficient. Some clients, when lying
down in my practice room for the first time, even start regressing
before I have finished implementing my techniques! The process has
become relatively smooth and gentle, and therefore open to virtually
everyone. Moreover, the regressions all these people experience are
often deeper and more genuine than those of their predecessors fif-
teen years ago. Obviously something has changed. More and more
frequently one hears of people who go and see their acupuncturist for
a sore neck or some other minor problem, and unexpectedly experi-
ence a momentous past-life flash as soon as the needles are placed
4
 Introduction

on their body - even though neither they nor their acupuncturist

knew anything about regression. Of course, these remain relatively
isolated cases, and it would not be correct to expect that you are go-
ing to know your past lives with a snap of the fingers; any work of
quality takes time and effort. Still, access to the regression state has
become infinitely easier than it used to be, which could end up hav-
ing considerable consequences not only on different fields of therapy,
but on some of the very foundations of our society.

ISIS, connector and client

The ISIS technique of regression is based on three main prin-
ciples:
1) the inner space of the third eye, contacted through the area be-
tween the eyebrows;
2) the interaction between two people, one who lies down and un-
dergoes the regression experience, and the other who sits close by
and monitors the energy during the session. The first one is called the
'client', and the second the 'connector';
3) sourcing, that is, systematically looking for the source of all
emotional imprints and behavioural conditioning.
The initials of the three terms, Inner Space Interactive
Sourcing, happily combine into ISIS.
It must be stressed that the ISIS technique does not use any
form of hypnotic suggestion or hyperventilation. It operates through
an activation of the body of energy, and in particular the third eye. It
therefore leads to a completely new perception of your emotions as
forms and waves in your consciousness. This structural perspective
will provide several opportunities throughout the book to explore
certain basic mechanisms related to subtle bodies and their destiny
after death.

Clairvision School
POBOX33
Roseville NSW 2069
Australia
Web site: http://clairvision.org/
E-mail: [email protected]

5
 CHAPTER 1

THE MECHANISMS OF SAMSKARAS

Sarnskara is one of the most important Sanskrit terms in Hindu

philosophy. Yoga, the union with the Higher Self, is said to be
achieved as soon as the last sarnskara has been worked out. There-
fore the primary objective of all yogas, or paths of self transforma-
tion, is to eradicate the sarnskaras of the mind. This is why it is so
important for those who to want to know themselves, or rather their
Self, to have a clear vision of all the mechanisms of their sarnskaras.

1.1 The fundamental mechanism

You have a car accident at a particular place. Then, for a long
while, each time you drive past that place you feel uneasy; a wave of
fear arises. You may even feel uncomfortable just by thinking of the
episode. The traumatic imprint left in your mind after the accident is
called a sarnskara. The malaise that subsequently appears each time
you drive past the place is called a reactional emotion, or more sim-
ply an emotion. The tendency of the samskara to generate a wave of
fear whenever remembering the accident is called the dynamism of
the samskara.
Basically, all samskaras operate in the same way. Simple. Yet,
according to the Upanishads, the final chapters of the Vedas, as soon
as the last knot of sarnskaras in the heart has been untied, the highest
state of consciousness is cognised, absolute freedom is reached, and
martyo 'mrto bhavati, "the mortal becomes immortal")

1 Katha-Upanishad 6.15 and Brihad-Aranyaka-Upanishad 4.4.7.

6
 The Mechanisms of Samskaras

1.2 How could we define a samskara?

Samskaras are the tracks left in the mind by previous trau-
matic experiences. Roughly speaking, samskaras are the 'scars' of
the mind. (The association samskara-scar is easy to remember.) In
the fourfold model of subtle bodies used in this book, the layer of the
mind corresponds to the astral body. I Samskaras can therefore be re-
garded as imprints or scars in the astral body, as will be examined in
detail throughout this book.
Let us consider a few examples to clarify the concept of sam-
skara. If a woman is raped by her father when she is sixteen years
old, it leaves a track in her psychological organisation, and this track
is a samskara. Her way of relating to men will never be the same
again. In various life situations, this track will deeply influence her
emotional behaviour. This means that the samskara is neither neutral
nor mute. Rather, it is endowed with a powerful dynamism - an
emotional charge. It generates emotions, attractions and repulsions
that will significantly modify the inner life of this person. Being as-
sociated with such traumatic and painful memories, the samskara
cannot remain silent; it has to express itself in a conscious or uncon-
scious way. This applies to all samskaras - not just a few particular
cases. Whether you realise it or not, in the depths of yourself your
samskaras are perpetually crying out to be healed.
Now suppose that this woman, instead of being raped at the
age of sixteen, was assaulted when she was three. Her experience
was even more terrifying and traumatic, because as a little girl she
had no way of understanding what was happening. To her, the as-
sault was like a murder. But the shock was so unbearable that she
forgot everything, completely wiping out the episode from her con-
scious memory. The samskara has been stored with an even greater
emotional charge than in the case of the sixteen-year-old girl; but in
this case, the samskara is completely unconscious. Later on as an
adult, her entire emotional and sexual life will be undermined by a
hidden trauma of which she is completely unaware. She may run
away from men, or run after men, or display all sorts of irrational
behaviour against her own free will. She may develop a major dis-

1 This simple model comprising physical body, etheric body, astral

body and Higher Ego is outlined in section 4.3.

7
 Regression

ease in the pelvic region, or miscarry when she tries to have a child.
Without a process that allows her to explore the depths of her uncon-
scious, she will never be able to understand why her life is such a
mess. Any attempt to reorganise her existence will be doomed from
the start, for she is missing the main piece of her personal puzzle.
Up to this point, all that has been envisaged fits into psycho-
analytic models and common psychological modes of understanding
quite well. Further, one could ponder on the fact that Sanskrit texts
were already discussing these topics a few thousand years before
Freud. But a major difference is encountered when practising regres-
sion - clients discover a number of samskaras that cannot be related
to any experience from their present life.

Case study- Twenty-two-year-old woman. During the beginning

of the ISIS session, a very sore spot was revealed in the stomach
area. After twenty or thirty minutes spent implementing the tech-
nique, the client became very quiet and serene, and started to reexpe-
rience the following episode. 1

What are you feeling? -It just looks stale and grey. It feels very de-
feated. A woman with her head hanging between her shoulders,
backward. She is quite young, with long hair, and a white dress. I
can't see her face.
Does she feel happy, or sad? -She is very sad.
Is she crying? -No.
Does it feel warm or cold around her? -Cold.
Is there any noise? -No. It is dead silent. She is really tired. It feels
tighter now in the stomach.
What does she want? -She wants something back that she has lost.
She knows she can't do anything.
Is she alone? -Yes. She is very young. She is wounded.
Physically wounded?-Yes.
Does she feel any pain? -She has lost a lot of blood. But she doesn't
care. She is very cold.

1 The questions at the beginning of the paragraphs are asked by the

connector. The answers are those given by the client.
8
 The Mechanisms of Samskaras

Can you feel her pain? -It starts in the stomach, in the ribcage and it
goes to the back, between the shoulder blades. She can feel her heart
beat. She has regrets. Her family is gone and they can't come back.
She just wants to die.
Her family? -A man. And her child. Her child was three. He had soft
curly hair... It was an attack. The man was very strong, so he was
taken somewhere.
And the child? -The child was killed. He died in front of her.
How? -It was very difficult, very cruel. She does not remember
much of that.
How did he die? -A spear through him. Her lips have turned blue ...
The woman was assaulted too.
What did they do to her? -About six soldiers.
What did they look like? -Dark coats, short hair, with helmets.
Something on top of the helmets. No beard. They were dark-skinned.
Shorter than the man.
What did they do to her? -I don't know. She does not remember. It
does not matter.
Try to see. -Four men held her. It is hard to say. They held her and
raped her just near the child's body.
Was he dead?-Yes.
And then? -When they finished, the last one kicked her in the stom-
ach and in the ribs. That is why she can taste blood in her mouth.
And then? -She crawls back into her house ... And she dies a mo-
ment later.

As is often the case, this samskara was buried and the young
woman had never suspected its presence before. Yet it was not bur-
ied that deeply, since it could be brought back to the surface andre-
experienced in this regression, which was only the second in the
process. Being endowed with such a dramatic emotional charge, the
sarnskara could not possibly remain neutral and inactive. One year
before the regressions took place, this young woman had lost a child
by miscarrying a few weeks before her delivery. While undergoing
the regression, she immediately recognised that the pain she had felt
at the time of the miscarriage was exactly the same as the woman's
pain when she was raped and her son killed.

9
 Regression

The superimposition of the two episodes is indeed puzzling. It

is as if a drama of the past had to be replayed because the wounds it
had left had not been healed. Without realising that this samskara
was buried in her unconscious and influencing her, what chance was
there for this young woman to understand what was happening in her
present? In cases like this one, it is hard to know whether the miscar-
riage would still have happened, had the regressions been carried out
before the pregnancy. However, as soon as the client discovered this
samskara, her life started changing. Her sadness abated, and the
emotional wound left by the miscarriage started to heal. She regained
a certain centredness and a greater sense of purpose.

1.3 Are samskaras always associated with negative experi-

ences?
The criterion for a major samskara to be imprinted is not pain,
but intensity. Strong samskaras are engraved in the astral body when
an episode is associated with emotional intensity. We all know from
our own experience in this life that we tend to be too unhappy more
often than too happy. The same can be expected to have taken place
in former lives. This explains why major samskaras surfacing from
our past have statistically more chance of being related to painful
events than to joyful ones. Yet any intense joy can create a samskara,
in much the same way as Chinese medicine considers joy can induce
a heart attack.

Case study- Twenty-four-year-old man.

-I am in a very small space, like metal all around me. There is vibra-
tion, a metallic vibration... I see all these people. I know I am
wounded on my right side but I don't even feel it. I am completely
exhausted, annihilated. And at the same time it feels GOOD! As if I
had been fighting for three days and three nights non-stop. It feels
so ... beyond everything. There is nothing left of me, there is just the
sky.
-It's a cockpit. I'm in a plane. I can hear the noise; and there is the
vibration. The plane is going to land. It's more than being worn out,
it's like seeing everything from a distance.

10
 The Mechanisms of Samskaras

-There is a shock when the plane reaches the ground. And I can see
all these people, a crowd waiting for me. There is a feeling of glory...
Oh! my God! It is huge. In my heart, an IMMENSE feeling of glory.
I don't know what I have done, but they seem to like it very much.
It's war ...
-My plane has landed and they are all waving their arms. They run
towards the plane. Oh! my God! [starting to cry] I think that now I'm
cracking up. I have not slept for a long, long, long time ... I did not
know one could feel glory that big.

1.4 How do emotions intensify samskaras?

There are several rea.c;ons why a samskara is imprinted much
more deeply in your structure if it is accompanied by an intense
emotion. Suppose you are going to be beheaded. The experience will
leave a more profound impression in your psyche than if you were
going to visit your hairdresser. You can go to an appointment with
your hairdresser mindlessly and daydreaming, without being really
concerned. You cannot go to your execution without feeling con-
cerned. You may have forgotten many visits paid to your hairdresser
but if you escape the dungeon, there is no way you will ever forget it,
because in the dungeon you are in the very opposite of a mindless
state. All your senses are wide open. You are utterly aware and
vigilant. It is not a blurry cloud that is imprinted in your memory, but
a sharp and precise package of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. If
you get out of it alive, even thirty years later, you will be able to re-
member every single detail. Every bit of information will be stored:
what the place looked and felt like, the colours on the walls, every
noise and smell, all your emotions and feelings. And if you end up
dying in the dungeon, you will keep this package of memories with
you as one of the most vivid of this entire life, and will carry it with
you into the lives that follow.

1.5 Are all samskaras created by major events or emotions?

Some major samskaras can be created by quite minor events,
for the samskara is not due to the event itself, but to your emotional
reaction to it. For instance, a child can be completely terrified by an

11
 Regression

animal. To the child, even a tame dog can suddenly turn into a terri-
ble and life-threatening monster and cause an irrational panic fear,
thereby generating a strong samskara. Conversely, some people re-
main emotionally stable in the most dramatic circumstances and,
therefore, go through intense events without any major samskara
being imprinted.

1.6 Micro-samskaras and samskaras proper

So far we have only considered the samskaras that are en-
dowed with strong emotional charges. Apart from these major im-
prints, myriads of minor ones are also stored in your mind.
The input you are constantly receiving from your sense organs
is kept in subconscious parts of the mind. You know the details are
not lost because they can be recalled in your memory at any time, if
triggered by the appropriate stimulus. For instance, you arrive at a
place where a certain smell is wafting in the air, and suddenly a con-
nection is made with a remote episode of your past. In a fraction of a
second you are transported back into a room where you had been
thirty years ago. The colours, the sounds, the atmosphere of that
room are brought back to your consciousness, because the smell in it
was similar to that which you are sensing now. This recollection
does not take place because of any dramatic event that happened to
you in the room. The situation was quite ordinary, and no particular
emotion or pain was experienced. The same mechanism often takes
place with an old song or a piece of music that can immediately
transport you back to a part of your past, recalling all the corre-
sponding emotions and feelings.
In this pattern, one can recognise the characteristics of sam-
skaras. A package of sensory impressions gets imprinted in your
subconscious or conscious mind. It is stored there without your
knowing it, but it is still vivid, since it can be retrieved at any time.
When the right stimulus is met, such as the smell, or the piece of
music, the imprint is triggered and a reaction takes place. You reex-
perience sensations, emotions and feelings related to this particular
part of your past.

12
 The Mechanisms of Samskaras

1.7 What is the difference between karma and samskara?

The literal meaning of the Sanskrit word karma is action.
Karma refers to all the actions you have performed in your past, both
in this life and in former ones. The mechanisms of karma are such
that each action you perform is like an impulse you send out into the
universe. After a lapse of time that can vary greatly (up to more than
a few lives!), the impulse comes back to you like a boomerang and
generates corresponding circumstances in your life. Negative deeds
tend to create unfavourable circumstances when the corresponding
impulse returns, whilst positive actions come to fruition in auspicious
conditions. This is the aspect of the theory of karma which is
straightforward and which everybody more or less agrees with.
However, not everyone agrees on how directly the circumstances of
the past reflect into the present. Will those who have killed by the
sword have to perish by the sword? As far as this question is con-
cerned, very enlightened people have held quite different views. 1
Samskaras are of a completely different nature. Instead of be-
ing external waves sent to you by the universe, they are internal fac-
tors. More precisely, they are emotional imprints left inside your
unconscious mind, and which in turn tend to influence your present
emotional responses.
Another major difference lies in the fact that some insignificant
karmas (actions) can be associated with huge samskaras (emotional
scars), for example when a little boy is gripped with panic when
meeting the neighbours' well-meaning German Shepherd, or when a
baby is terrified by a storm. Although in these instances there is vir-
tually no action, that is, no significant karma, there may be enough
samskara for the child to display neurotic symptoms for the rest of
his life. Conversely, the most heinous crimes- representing big bad
karma - can be committed coldly and mindlessly, without any deep
samskaras being imprinted. 2

1 Seetwo essential references on the topic of karma: Steiner. Rudolf,

Karmic Relationships, Rudolf Steiner Press. London. (8 volumes); Aurob-
indo, Sri, The Problem of Rebirth, Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Pondicherry,
1952.
2 Those who have practised vipassana, the Buddhist technique of
meditation, have probably heard a lot about the sammkaras, which are the
13
 Regression

1.8 Do animals also have samskaras?

Since animals can become neurotic, we can assume they also
have samskaras. The reflexes observed by Pavlov in his work with
dogs present clear analogies with the conditioning of the samskaras.
Another important Sanskrit word related to samskaras is
manas. Manas refers to the layer in which we think and experience
emotions. More precisely, manas has to do with the thoughts and
emotions which are reactions directly related to samskaras. The con-
cept of 'reacting mind' (manas) will be developed at length later in
the book.
Manas is usually translated into English as 'mind'. The Eng-
lish word 'mind', however, is used by different people with quite
different meanings. In the context of the Clairvision work, I use the
word mind with the meaning of 'reacting mind', which is the same
as that of the Sanskrit word manas, the layer in which reactional
thoughts and emotions take place. There are several reasons for this
choice, as will become apparent later.
When defined in this way, the mind corresponds quite pre-
cisely to what Rudolf Steiner calls the astral body. 1 In the present
context, the reader can equate all the following terms:

mind = reacting mind = manas = manas/mind

= layer of the samskaras = astral body

At times, however, distinctions will be established between the

astral body, which is a vehicle of consciousness, and the reacting

exact equivalent of samskaras. The difference in spelling comes from the fact
that vipassana belongs to Hinayana Buddhism, whose texts were written in
Pali- a language which is derived from Sanskrit. Many Sanskrit words have
been reshaped in Pali so that when two consonants follow one another, the
latter is transformed into the former. Thus 'ms' is turned into 'mm', and
samskara in Sanskrit becomes sammkara in Pali. Similarly 'sy' becomes
'ss'. and the Sanskrit word vipashyana (discerning or penetrating vision),
becomes vipassana in Pali.
1 Defrned in this way, 'mind' corresponds quite exactly to the Greek
dianoia, as opposed to nous. Mind can also be equated with the Latin ratio.
as opposed to intellectus.
14
 The Mechanisms of Samskaras

mind, which is the mental consciousness taking place within this ve-
hicle.
From the point of view of the Hindu tradition, animals do have
a manas/mind, just as according to Rudolf Steiner, they do have an
astral body. Animals can associate facts mentally and draw conclu-
sions, as when a mouse finds its way out of a maze. Animals also
experience emotions such as anger and jealousy. Since the astral
body, in which the samskaras are imprinted, is not a specifically hu-
man attribute but also pertains to animals, samskaras could even be
described as a part of ourselves that we have in common with ani-
mals! This may sound paradoxical because human beings tend to
cherish their emotions and regard them as something specifically
human, something which endows them with human qualities. In re-
ality most of these emotions are of the same nature as those experi-
enced by animals. They may be more complicated and sophisticated,
but their essence is not fundamentally different from those of ani-
mals.
One of the essential tasks of the regression work is to unmask
certain emotions which are not the product of samskaras and are be-
yond the range of animals. To distinguish these from the samskara-
related emotions, the word 'feeling' will be used.
A crucial result of the regression process is to make us realise
that, from morning to night, we tend to react to the world with
stereotyped conditioning, just like Pavlov's dogs, instead of tapping
from our human potential of 'creative being'. In terms of our four-
fold model of subtle bodies, the essential difference between a hu-
man being and an animal is that the human being has gained a
Higher Self. How much of your Higher Self is involved in your
emotional responses? This is a key point, in which lies the answer to
the question: which of our emotions are human and which are ani-
mal?

1.9 The story of King Janaka and the son of the r $i

Let us conclude this chapter with a story from Sanskrit litera-
ture.
Once upon a time there was a great r$i (seer-sage) of ancient
India who sent his thirteen-year-old son to the court of King Janaka,
and asked the prestigious sovereign to perfect the young boy's edu-

15
 Regression

cation. As soon as the boy arrived at the court, J anaka placed a jar of
milk on his head. The jar was full to the brim, and Janaka instructed
the boy to walk around the palace three times, without spilling one
drop of milk.
The palace was full of rare statues and precious stones, full of
jugglers, strange animals and beautiful women dancing - a lot of
tempting things for a young man who had never left his father's ash-
ram in the jungle before. Yet the son of the r ~i was able to see with-
out reacting, and he went round the palace three times without spill-
ing one single drop.
King Janaka was very pleased with the boy. He said to him,
"Son, go back to your father and tell him there is nothing more I can
teach you."
This certainly did not mean that the boy's emotional life was
suppressed. But a certain form of reactional emotion had been eradi-
cated. The boy could love, enjoy and feel, but his feelings were
coming from within his soul, and were not sheer reactions to his en-
vironment. He could walk in the world and remain full inside, what-
ever surrounded him. He had worked out all his sarnskaras and was
free, in the highest meaning of the word. Even the enlightened King
Janaka, legendary for his wisdom, had nothing more to teach him.

16
 CHAPTER2

SAMSKARAS AND THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM

2.1 The tyranny of samskaras

If we are in quest of freedom, then it should be clear that our
main hindrances are our own samskaras. There are circumstances in
life that are limiting and restricting. If the price of oil rises, we cannot
drive our cars as freely as we used to. If an administration asks us to
fill out mountains of forms, then business becomes very difficult. But
even in the most totalitarian country you will never find a dictator-
ship as restrictive and as permanent as that of the samskaras. Most
people are concerned about dictatorships, yet who really cares about
samskaras? This can help you to understand what both Hindus and
Buddhists mean by maya, or illusion. In Sanskrit, maya means
'magic'. Sarnskaras operate an absolute and magic dictatorship
about which no one even cares. The dictatorship starts before birth
and does not stop with death. It obstructs your free will from morn-
ing to night, every single day spent on this planet. And you don't
even see it - that is what is really magic about it. I
Consider again the example of the woman who was sexually
assaulted when she was three years old, and who has totally lost any
conscious recollection of the event. Can we really say that she is free

1 The concept of the magic illusion of emotions is not only to be

found in Hindu philosophy. The Christian mystic Gregory of Nyssa, for in-
stance, used the word gohteia, magic, to describe 'the varied illusions' of
this life, by which men are fooled, and which make them lose their own na-
ture and behave like animals, as if they had drunk a beverage of Circe the
sorceress. The same concept can also be found in Plotinus (Enn. iv,3,17). For
a more detailed study, see Danielou, Jean, Platonisme et Theologie Mys-
tique, Ed. Montaigne, Paris, 1944, p. 126.

17
 Regression

in her relationships with men? Seen from the outside, she is totally
'free'. Nobody forces her to choose such and such a man, and if she
divorces four times it is entirely her responsibility. Yet knowing the
terrible pressure exerted by the latent emotion, knowing the sam-
skara and its dynamism, can we maintain the same assertion? The
woman does not even know that her choices are being influenced by
the samskara. Actually she does not even know that the samskara is
imprinted; she ·may believe herself free while her emotional life is
being manipulated by a force that she never sees. This is the first
common scheme by which a samskara, an emotional imprint made in
the past, can enslave you without you suspecting it.
However, this scheme needs to be extended, for when prac-
tising regression it becomes clear that people are not influenced only
by samskaras from early childhood. Some of the samskaras which
emerge cannot possibly be related to any circumstance of this pres-
ent life. It is to be stressed again that it does not matter whether you
believe in past lives or not. In reality, the fewer beliefs you have, the
better; for beliefs generate expectations, and expectations in tum
tend to distort the purity of the experience. The important point is
that some samskaras are discovered that cannot possibly be related
to this present life. Yet these samskaras prove crucial to under-
standing the likes and dislikes that govern your present choices and
the way you manage your life. Let us look at a few examples which
illustrate the main mechanisms by which samskaras interfere.

2.2 Superimposition

Case study - Mary was a twenty-four-year-old woman, going

through a phase of intense depression. She got married when she
was eighteen, but proved unable to remain true to her husband. She
had a first lover after eighteen months of marriage, and then another
one five months later, which broke up her marriage. Then she went
to pieces. She started going from one man to another, multiplying
short and superficial experiences that left her more and more devas-
tated. Here is the narration of a key experience she had during one of
her regressions.

18
 Samskaras and the Quest for Freedom

What is the feeling now?- Cold. Terribly cold.

Cold inside or outside? -Both.
What does it look like around you? -It's damp. It's cold, cold, cold .. .
made of stones. I can see this big building made of stones, and it is .. .
terrible, worse than anything. It's so cold ... I didn't want to come
here. Or maybe I did, but now I don't want to be here anymore.
What is happening in this building? -It's a convent. I am locked in. I
want to go away. It is horrid, as if the coldness outside was freezing
my heart. Nobody cares. Nobody smiles. Sometimes I cry, but I am
all alone. Sometimes I can't even cry, I am like dead ...
Do you sometimes feel the same coldness in this present life? -Oh!
yes. When I need somebody to care for me. Truly I just want
warmth, and nothing else.
But this feeling, is it yours, or the one of the woman locked in the
convent? -It is hers. It comes from her. But then it comes to me ... it
becomes mine.
Next time when it comes to you, could you recognise that it is her
feeling, not yours?-Yes, that's quite clear.

This example is quite typical of a samskara of a remote past

that interferes with one's daily life. Mary had never stayed in a con-
vent during her present life. Yet since her childhood she had ex-
pressed some very mixed feelings as far as contemplative life was
concerned. She was sometimes attracted, and sometimes terrified by
it. Gradually, her being drawn to religious life became a joke to all
her friends, who knew the promiscuous type of life she was leading. 1
It is important to realise how Mary felt when she was alone in
this present life. The terrible loneliness of the locked up nun super-
imposed itself upon her present emotional life. The feelings of this
young woman here and now were a mixture of the past and the pres-
ent, impossible to disentangle. This superimposed distress left her
devastated, and ready to do anything so that someone would care for
her. Yet seen from the outside, Mary was 'free' to run from one
lover to another- which shows how one can be completely misled

1 In regression, it is not rare to discover such patterns in which an as-

cetic life is followed by one with promiscuous sexual activity and indulging
in sensual experiences.

19
 Regression

when judging somebody according to so-called moral principles. As

soon as the underlying samskara was recognised through regression,
the suffering of this woman could never be as intense as before.

Case study - Samantha, aged twenty-five. The beginning of the

ISIS session revealed a painful spot in the area of the ribcage.
Samantha started feeling very distressed and breathing quickly, as if
out of breath. She looked as if she was suffering considerably.

What are you feeling now? -Fear. I am being hurt. My head and my
back are being kicked. [She was sobbing and panting, curling up on
the mattress, as if she was trying to escape from blows.]
Can you move? -I can only try to protect myself.
Why are they doing that? -Because I am easy to kick aroWld.
Does it feel like being rather young, or old? -Pretty yoWlg. Male.
Does it last for a long time? -For a while. And then they leave me in
the dust and run away laughing. They were yoWig ... about my age.
And then? -Anger. Frustration. Humiliation. [Still sobbing.]
Do you sometimes get the same emotion in your [present] life?
-Yes, same feeling.
Is there anybody aroWld? -No. That was outside the village.
What does the village look like? -Small. Dirt roads. Most of the
houses are flat-topped. Dirt.
Any trees? -No. It is very dry and wann. There is an Arabic-Muslim
sort of feeling about the village. [The client was still out of breath.]
Are there also some good people in the village? -My mother. I do
not have any friends. I can see my father sitting there, drinking cof-
fee. He does not talk to me much. I feel about twelve or fourteen
years old. Sometimes I have to support my ann. It looks withered, it
is not as big as the other one.
Can it move? -A little bit. [For the rest of the session, the client kept
massaging her right ann.]
Are the legs okay? -Okay, but I'm not very strong. I'm tall.
What happened to this ann? -It's always been like this, ever since I
was small. I can't do much with it.
What do you do after you've been beaten? -I just get up and walk. I
walk, I go away from the village. I just walk for hours. I feel so

20
 Samskaras and the Quest for Freedom

hopeless, humiliated. [Crying.] What can I do? I just want to go

away.
And then where do you go? -There is nowhere I can go, I have to go
back to the village. I know it is going to happen again, because it al-
ways does. I can't talk to my father, because he thinks I should stand
up for myself. I go to my mother, but there is nothing she can do.
She just comforts me as much as possible. I keep on thinking all the
time that I wish I were born stronger. I wish I could defend myself...
How weak I am. I don't like myself.
Do you sometimes feel like this in your [present Australian] life?
-Yes, same feeling that I can't stand up for myself.
Does the boy have any friends? -No. I'm not like the others, I am
ashamed and they stay away. And they make fun of me.
Do you also feel that, in your [present] life? -Yes, I alienate myself,
pulling away from people. Not feeling good enough and therefore
not risking the chance of being made fun of.
Can you feel that this emotion is not really yours, but that it is the
emotion of the boy?-Yes. It is his vibration.
And then? -1 am in a street. There are donkeys. No cars, but carts
pulled by donkeys. Whenever I am in the street there are always
comments. People gossip behind my back. It's a pretty miserable
life. I do some work on the land, but it doesn't matter what I do, I
just think about how I am. I feel defeated. I wake up in the morning,
I walk, I work on this land, I walk back, and it is all I have. I'm
wearing a turban. I'm very tall.
[Later in the session, the client came to reexperience the death of the
crippled man.] -I seem to be lying down. It feels as though I'm dy-
ing in my sleep. I am lifting. Something is going out through my
head. I am going up. Then I have the feeling of meeting my mother,
as if she had been waiting for me. There is a sense of relief. And
then, after some time, I get this blackness. Everything disappears in
the blackness.

This is a perfect example of how a samskara is carried on from

one life to another. One can understand why the crippled young Ara-
bic man felt alienated and insecure. Of course, one can be crippled
and extremely enlightened and happy. But at least the despair of the

21
 Regression

Arabic boy had some tangible foundation. It was not necessary but it
was understandable.
Yet, Samantha does not suffer from any illness or infirmity.
When she withdraws from possible friendships, when she feels in-
hibited and rejected in life, due to the same emotions, then it be-
comes absurd and mind-boggling. The crippled arm has long
since disappeared, yet the accompanying emotion has carried
on. The emotional pattern of the cripple has been superimposed on
Samantha's emotions since her childhood, without her noticing it.
Absurd? Indeed! Yet it is exactly how we are functioning, con-
stantly. Modalities and intensity may vary, but it is always the same
scheme. An inappropriate pattern gets impressed deep inside, and it
persists long after its generating cause has disappeared. "I am no
longer locked in a convent, yet I keep on behaving as if I wanted to
be comforted at any cost", or "I no longer have a crippled arm, nor
do I live in a society that would reject me if I had one. Yet I still feel
alienated and left out." These emotions are sheer reflections from the
past. They are illusory and unreal in the sense that they do not rest on
anything tangible, but, at the same time, the suffering and the mess
they create in our minds and in our lives are extremely real.

2.3 Endless repetitions

Case study- Thirty-year-old woman.

What are you feeling? -I can see the house. It is made of light mate-
rial. The colours are really different. I've never seen colours like
these before. 1 There are many more yellow and orange hues. A

1 In regression, it is not rare for clients to reexperience episodes in

which colours appear different from those that are usually perceived. This
could be due to the fact that each time we incarnate in a new body, we get
slightly different eyesight, which transmits different colour signals to our
mind. Another possibility is that the general perception of colours of the
whole of mankind has evolved with time. Many observations have led me to
opt for the second possibility - even though the fust one could also play
some part. In episodes taking place from the 19th and 20th century onwards,
colours and images appear 'flatter' and less endowed with perspective and
dimension. As well, episodes taking place before the 19th century often con-

22
 Samskaras and the Quest for Freedom

beautiful woman with long dark hair. She looks Japanese. She is
standing at the door, looking outside.
What is she doing? -Her husband has gone, he's left her. And her
life stops there. She knows that she will never see him again. It's
finished. It is not even pain, it is worse than that. She is shattered.
She just stops functioning.

In this regression a major samskara of being abandoned is un-

veiled. In her present life, whenever this woman was abandoned by a
man, her suffering was unbearable, because the distress of the Japa-
nese woman superimposed on her 'own' reactions. Her pain took
place on two levels, but she could not see that until she went through
the regression process. Whatever can't be seen is ten times more
painful, because there is no way one can understand it. Being aban-
doned was for her like falling into a bottomless pit, caught in suffer-
ing beyond any possibility of rationalisation.
A crucial detail is that the client, in this present life, had cho-
sen a husband who travelled a lot. Each time the man went away, the
couple managed to have a terrible fight, so that each departure had a
taste of final separation, and the woman would reexperience the
throes of being abandoned. Instead of saying to herself "We had a
good fight because I hate to see him go, but anyway he'll be back in
two months", she would become desperate, like the Japanese
woman. And the same drama was replayed twice a year.
This tendency to always repeat the same ordeal is the direct
product of the dynamism of samskaras. The emotional wound of the
samskara is too painful, it cannot remain neutral. It is crying out to
be healed. The emotional charge associated with the samskara is so
intense that as long as you don't deal with it, it tends to generate cir-
cumstances that allow it to express itself. In many cases, this will
result in replaying similar circumstances, from life to life.

vey the feeling of a much greater variety of colours and hues, and the colours
appear more 'alive'. It is as if something had 'shrunk' in our perception of
colours around the 19th century. If we go even further back in time, before
the Atlantean flood, we discover colours that are more akin to our present
peripheral vision at night, and quite similar to the basic hue of astral light.

23
 Regression

After having seen how samskaras tend to superimpose emo-

tional reactions on top of your present consciousness, we are now
introducing a second major mechanism. Samskaras tend to make you
create life circumstances through which they can manifest. They not
only magnify your present pain and emotions by superimposition,
they manipulate you to create difficulties in which the emotions can
be replayed. They act like latent tendencies, heavily influencing your
destiny.

2.4 Maya, illusion

Until now, we have only considered the big animals in the jun-
gle of samskaras - those major emotional traumas created by dra-
matic circumstances. If we want to get a clear picture of how the
mind functions, we must take into account many other little traces
left by experiences that were not so intense. Yet these traces have
persisted and keep on 'bugging' your present perception of the
world.
Let us take an example. You walk into a friend's kitchen, and
there is a particular smell in the air. Immediately this smell reminds
you of a kitchen where you spent part of your childhood. In this
kitchen there was a cat sleeping under the table, and there was an old
lady working. All sorts of memories flash back into your mind. If
you were feeling good in that kitchen, the good feeling comes back
to you while you are in your friend's kitchen. So, maybe you are go-
ing to feel comfortable and tell your friend "I like your kitchen!"
Now, suppose you were feeling extremely uncomfortable with
the old lady, because she used to force you to eat artichokes, which
you hated. And on this particular day your friend happens to be
cooking artichokes. The malaise will be remembered- the anxiety in
your chest, the tension in your belly. You are not really feeling anx-
ious and tense, but the memories are vivid. By the way, you are
completely split off from your friend's kitchen while the recollections
take place. If the friend is talking to you during this time, you may
well have to ask him to repeat what he just said. You have been ab-
ducted by this past episode.
1lris example assumes that you could consciously remember
the episode during which the sarnskara had been imprinted. Suppose
now that you have completely forgotten all about the old lady's
24
 Samskaras and the Quest for Freedom

kitchen. Something different is likely to happen. You walk into your

friend's place, the general atmosphere and the smell trigger an un-
conscious connection with the forgotten episode, and a certain mal-
aise ensues. There is some degree of anxiety in your chest and ten-
sion in your belly, and you do not know why. You do not remember
any of the actual details of the old lady's kitchen, there is just the
malaise. The emotional package of the past is superimposing itself
on your present consciousness, through the link of the smell - but
you do not perceive this. You are only aware of two things: the
kitchen and your discomfort. So you may well think, "I don't like the
vibrations in this house!", or "I don't feel comfortable with these
people". Of course, the kitchen is exactly the same, it is only your
perception that has changed. So your judgment is completely irrele-
vant and absurd. Yet all this comes to your mind very 'naturally' and
'logically'.
While you are being caught in this mode of reaction, you may
think that what you are seeing is your friend's kitchen. But you are
completely fooling yourself. You are seeing your kitchen, full of un-
conscious projections of artichoke-ghosts, and what your friend is
seeing of his kitchen is completely different. Your kitchen has noth-
ing to do with the real kitchen, it is nothing more than a construction
of your mind. At that moment you are disconnected; you are living in
an imaginary world as if in a cage; you are anywhere but 'here and
now'. Your judgment is impaired by an unseen factor, and any major
decision that you might have to take in this kitchen is likely to be
distorted and lead you astray.
The next step is to see that such superimpositions take place
constantly, not only throughout the day, but even during your
dreams! A simple example of superimposition that many people
have consciously experienced is that of songs or pieces of music they
used to listen to in a certain period of their life. If the same music is
heard some years later, then the 'flavour', the atmosphere and the
feelings of that particular period immediately flash back to their con-
sciousness.
Whether you are aware of it or not, the situation is such that
innumerable similar recollections are constantly clouding your pres-
ent perception of the world. Quite often, several samskaras are trig-
gered simultaneously, each superimposing its own package of emo-

25
 Regression

tions and impressions, which adds to the confusion. Imagine your

friend in his kitchen playing the song you used to listen to ten years
ago, when you had a broken heart, or perhaps when you received the
best news of your life ... what a jam! Many minor samskaras are not
associated with a clear emotion, but just with a vague feeling of mal-
aise or elation. When activated, they just superimpose a little attrac-
tion or repulsion, an indistinct blurriness on top of your present per-
ception.
If we sum up the influences of all the jumbo-samskaras, the
medium-sized and the micro ones, we can get a picture of what
maya (illusion) is. There is absolutely no need to deny the physical
reality of the world to come to the conclusion that we live in a com-
plete maya, or illusion. Whether the universe is real or not is not the
problem at this stage, for we are not living in the universe - we are
living in our samskara-world. We never see our friend's kitchen, or
anybody else's kitchen; we only catch a strange and unclear mixture
of the room itself and of our own projections. We never see the tree
around the comer, because it is like another tree we bumped into
some years ago and some unconscious tension surfaces each time we
approach it. We never see our friends the way they really are be-
cause the way they talk, the way they dress, the way they present
themselves presses our buttons and makes us project impressions
and images onto them. These impressions have more to do with our
pool of samskaras than with who our friends really are. Between our
conscious memories and our unconscious superimpositions, we do
not see the world, we dream it.
Hindu masters often like to emphasise the dramatic character
of this situation. We spend our time getting upset at the dramas of
our life, but all these dramas are but trifles compared to the tragedy
of being permanently isolated in a samskara-generated cloud of illu-
sion- a cage. We never see the world, we can only see our world,
which is full of the ghosts of our past. We are disconnected, living in
a cloud, and we do not even suspect it. Right from the beginning, it
should be made very clear that the purpose of a genuine work of re-
gression is gradually to dispel this cloud of illusion, not to indulge in
following the stories of our past.

26
 Samskaras and the Quest for Freedom

2.5 Likes and dislikes

When you are in quest of your Self, it is always valuable to
ponder on what in yourself feels central and essential - the core of
your 'me'. In this respect, it is interesting to look at the roots of your
likes and dislikes. It is a fact that many people tend to consider their
tastes and attractions as quite a central part of their personality.
Some people have a special affinity with a certain colour, for in-
stance, and choose all their clothes accordingly. If they walk into a
place with the same colour on the walls, they immediately feel,
"That's my colour, that's a place for me." Whether it has to do with
colours, food or anything else, people often tend to look to their likes
and dislikes when they seek to define themselves, to apprehend what
is their 'me', as opposed to 'non-me'.

Case study- Twenty-five-year-old man.

What are you feeling now? -Pain, pain, pain ... always pain. It never
ends.
How does your body feel, big, or small? -Big. It's a big man. He's
got huge shoulders. [Laughing:] I feel like a shrimp compared to
him. [Then the pain gets worse and the young man is nearly
screaming.] This will never end, this will never end!
Does it feel like being indoors or outdoors? -Indoors. It's dark. It's
underground. It's a little room and it's cold. Pain, pain, pain ...
they're torturing me and it never ends.
What kind of emotion goes with that? -Hatred. If only I could move
from that table, I would kill the three of them, absolutely nothing
could stop me. But I'm tightly chained, and it goes on and on. One of
them is reciting verses in Latin. [Yelling:] They're cutting through
my chest!
This hatred, have you ever felt it in this present life?-Yes, unexpect-
edly, I've always hated Latin! When I was at school I had this pas-
sionate hatred for Latin, without any real reason. I had such a con-
tempt for the Latin teacher, I was always trying to be awful to her...
It's not Latin, it's them! I could kill them, and the other hypocrite
who is reciting his Latin verses while they are torturing me. Oh!

27
 Regression

Lord! Oh! Lord! It's like I'm turning towards God with all the forces
I've got left. Oh Lord! Will it never end?
[The quality of vibration changes in the room, as if an angel had ap-
peared; the client can hardly speak.] -There is a white light that's
coming down. It's massive. I'm out. I'm not in my body any more. I
can see what they are trying to do to my body from above. It doesn't
matter any more. Now there is only the light.

A regression process invites you to reconsider many of your

attractions and dislikes, and to discover whether they correspond to
real aspirations of your Higher Self or whether they are nothing other
than the mechanical result of samskaric imprints. In this respect, re-
gression can be regarded as a path of de-conditioning.
However, it must be stressed that this path has little, if any-
thing, to do with 'renouncing your desires'. When people try tore-
nounce their desires, in the great majority of cases they end up sup-
pressing th~m. Conceptually, there is something wrong in trying to
condition oneself not to have a desire. Suppose the desire is itself
coming from the conditioning of a samskara; it can't be satisfying to
try to add another conditioning on top of the conditioning. The aim
of ISIS is de-conditioning. The only thing ISIS asks you to do is to
look systematically for the source of your reactions, including your
attractions and dislikes. It may appear that a number of attractions
and dislikes are obviously the result of the influence of samskaras, in
which case they are likely to fall by themselves once the samskara
has been released. That happens by itself, and has nothing painful
associated with it. It is more like getting rid of an artificial burden
than anything else. The end result of the process is not a wishy-
washy desire-free condition, but a mature state in which one's
genuine spontaneity has been unveiled and one's true purpose has
been found, beyond all conditioning.

Case study- Forty-three-year-old woman.

What can you perceive now? -They're going to kill him. They've
taken him away. It is breaking my heart. I never even had the time to
tell this man how I loved him. And now it's too late. He will be exe-

28
 Samskaras and the Quest for Freedom

cuted tomorrow, and no one can do anything about it. I'll never see
him again ... [wave of despair].
Is there any correspondence between this episode and any event in
your present life? -Once I fell madly in love with a man who had
exactly the same eyes. It was an impossible situation. He was mar-
ried, and I was married. For months I could not get him out of my
mind. It was the same broken heart. It took me one year to recover.

It is essential to understand that when such a 'love-at-first-

sight' connection takes place between two people, it should not nec-
essarily be inferred that they have already met in a former life. This
point can never be emphasized enough, because it will save some
romantic souls from making enormous mistakes and justifying them
through the practice of regression.
Remember the fantastic computer in The Hitch-Hikers' Guide
to the Galaxy? You feed the computer with the decision you have
made, and it immediately comes out with a list of brilliant reasons to
explain why your decision is the only one that makes sense. Inter-
estingly, some people try to do exactly the same with regression.
They have already made up their mind that they want to start a new
relationship or get rid of their partner, and they try regression to find
a past-life reason to comfort them in their decision. They want to be-
lieve that destiny is at play, instead of owning their choice. They
want regression to show that their new partner is a soul mate with
whom they have already been associated in former lives. But, unless
the connector is ready to lull them like the galactic hitch-hikers'
computer, what they end up finding is usually of quite a different
nature.
Past-life connections do exist, but they do not necessarily
manifest in the form of magnetic attractions. Actually, in most cases
when such an attraction takes place, it has nothing to do with a past-
life connection. If we take the last regression, what do we find? The
client has met a man who had eyes similar to those of someone she
was passionately in love with in a former life. This, along with a few
other similarities, has triggered a huge samskara which reactivated
the pain she felt when losing the other man in the past life. This is
where one has to be very careful. The intensity of the emotion only

29
 Regression

indicates that a big samskara is triggered, and is in no way a sign of a

past-life connection. Usually, the louder the emotion in your psyche,
the more likely its source is a samskara.
It may be painful to realise that the same passionate attraction
could happen with any other person who, for one reason or another,
happens to trigger the same samskara. Yet, this realisation could
save you a lot of time and wandering, for relationships based on
sarnskaras are far from being the most fulfilling or the most durable.
The layer of samskaras is comparable to a kaleidoscope. Its polari-
ties, attractions and repulsions are perpetually moving and changing
under the influence of a myriad of irrational micro-factors.
Let this be clear, I am not suggesting that it is only due to
samskaras that people fall in love -just as regression does not imply
that all affective waves in a human being are due to samskaras. Re-
gression teaches us that when a samskara is activated, we are ma-
nipulated. We may believe that we are making decisions from our
own free will, but in reality it is the samskara that projects us in one
direction or another. It is nothing other than a prerecorded reaction -
a conditioning that is triggered and that compels us to move in a
certain direction (unless we become aware of what is going on).
Then, sooner or later, the kaleidoscope rotates a little and the attrac-
tion falls flat. We end up not understanding what we are doing with
such a partner, or in such a job, or in any other situation where we
have put ourselves under the magic spell of the samskara.
 CHAPTER 3

EMOTIONS VERSUS FEELINGS

3.1 The love of the cat and the love of Christ

In English, the word 'love' can be used in quite different con-
texts. For instance, when the cat comes and shows affection just be-
fore you feed it, you easily say that the cat loves you. If you are sen-
sitive enough to know how to talk with cats, you can even hear the
cat whispering, "I love you. You are such a nice person. You are so
smart, for a human." Obviously the cat loves you.
The same word, love, is also used to describe what emanates
from Christ, or from enlightened masters or guides, when they give
all of themselves to a disciple. Some of these masters have an in-
credible capacity for love. Love radiates from them like a breathtak-
ing force; you can feel it 'physically'. Close to them, it is as if you
were bathing in an ocean of sweetness. All sorrow, frustration and
violence in you are softened. Obviously the guide loves you.
However, the love of Christ and the love of the cat are of a
very different order. For instance, kick the cat out of the house in-
stead of feeding it dinner. Instantly, the cat no longer loves you. It
hisses. If you can speak cat, you hear something like, "I hate you!
Sooner or later I'll kill you!" Now, if you kick Christ out of your
house, that is not going to change His love at all. The love of Christ
does not depend on your feedback. It is unconditional. It takes place
on a completely different level from the conditional tokens of affec-
tion of the cat. Yet we use the same word, love, for both cat and
Christ.
In the same manner, the word 'emotion' is used to qualify
psychological tendencies or forces of completely different essences.
This does not apply only to English but to modem languages in gen-
31
 Regression

eral. The irascibility of a driver blocked in a traffic jam, the lust or

the jealousy of a lover, the fear of death, the anxiety that precedes an
exam, the compassion of an enlightened Buddha, the anger of a little
child, the aesthetic feeling that arises when admiring the beauty of a
landscape, the exalted inner wave of a saint in communion with di-
vinity - all these are labelled with the same word, emotion, regard-
less of the fact that they take place in very different spheres of our-
selves. This shows that an enormous amount of confusion has arisen
in our world as far as emotions are concerned.

3.2 Emotions and samskaras

A great secret of wisdom is: to know something, find its
source. This can be applied to a whole range of spiritual mysteries,
including our present topic. In order to learn to discriminate between
the various kinds of emotions, it is essential to find their sources.
Different emotions come from very different parts of yourself, which
will give clues as to what to do with them.
One of the principal characteristics of samskaras is that they
tend to generate emotions. An imprint, or samskara, is left by an ex-
perience. When a related experience takes place, an emotion is trig-
gered. For instance, you have had a bad car accident somewhere in
town. After that, every time you drive past the same place, an emo-
tion arises inside you. The dramatic circumstances of the accident
are recalled and a reaction takes place. Fear, anxiety, or some level
of discomfort is experienced. Three elements can be discerned in this
emotional response:
-the stimulus (driving past the same place);
-the samskara (the emotional imprint left by the accident);
-the reactional emotion (anxiety, discomfort).
We can summarise the sequence:

stimulus -+ samskara -+ reactional emotion

The stimulus triggers the samskara, and a reactional emotion

takes place. At least there is not much doubt as to the nature of this
emotion; it comes from conditioning. The emotion is like a stereo-
typed routine of the mind; it is highly predictable. Each time you
32
 Emotions versus Feelings

drive past the place, the reacting mind plays its prerecorded mes-
sage. It will not be difficult for you to transpose the analysis of this
mechanism to your own life and find a whole range of similar emo-
tions that can be traced back to certain traumatic events.
This type of emotion will not foster inner clarity. It is more like
a wrong chemical reaction that takes place each time the samskara is
triggered. There is something sick about it. It is like a wound which
calls for healing. Moreover, it obviously does not arise from the
spontaneity of your soul; it is sheer conditioning. The emotional re-
sponse does not originate from your true Self. It is nothing more than
a prerecorded message that is repeated each time the right stimulus
is met.
The problem is that you are often unaware of these mecha-
nisms at work inside yourself. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you
miss them completely. Remember the examples of samskaras devel-
oped in previous chapters. It was only after going through the explo-
ration process of regression that the clients could see that their emo-
tions originated from samskaras. If you have lost any conscious
memory of the samskara, it is highly probable that you will miss the
connection. An emotion will spring up into your field of conscious-
ness, triggered by a stimulus, and the same sequence will take place:
stimulus ~ samskara ~ emotion
However, if the samskara has been buried in the depths of
your unconscious, what will you perceive? The stimulus, the emo-
tion, and nothing else. As far as your perception is concerned, the
sequence has been shortened into:
stimulus ~ emotion
For example, someone says a few words to you and a re-
sponse comes immediately, in words or in thoughts, "I like this per-
son" or "This person is stupid", depending on the content of the
stimulus. Or you are driving and you hear the driver behind you
honking, and then you hear yourself answering with an insult. But
the middle element - the key link - is missed. You are completely
unaware of the samskara that makes you react to the stimulus. You
have been tricked. You may think "I responded", but truly there is
nothing of your Self in that response. It is just another prerecorded

33
 Regression

message that is played automatically once the appropriate button has

been pressed.
Extend this model to the myriads of samskaras hidden in your
mind: those you know, and those you do not even suspect exist, but
are still active. It becomes obvious that a large proportion of your
emotions, in all aspects of your life, from the most minute to the
most intense, can be related to this sequence: stimulus 7 samskara
7 emotion. This pattern is too mechanical- too puppet-like to sat-
isfy the aspiration of the Spirit. Yet the bitter fact is that most of your
emotions are reactions to a stimulus that triggers a samskara of some
sort.
Most, but not all. From time to time, a light arises in the heart,
and a different 'frequency of being' is experienced. An emotion
comes that is not the screaming expression of a pressing demand and
that does not come from the mechanical stimulation of a samskara.
In a genuine quest for freedom, part of the work must be
aimed at de-conditioning. Rediscovering spontaneity implies that you
can separate Being from its facade, true emotions from conditioned
ones, and expressions of the Self from reactions of the samskaras.

3.3 Emotions versus feelings

At this stage, we need to introduce two different words for
emotions: one for those related to the affection shown by the cat, and
one for those akin to the unconditional love of Christ. For the condi-
tional ones, I will use the word 'emotions'. For the unconditional
ones, I will use the word 'feelings'.
Some other words might have been chosen. However, the
etymology of the word 'emotion' fits quite well with the use that is
suggested here. Motion means movement. The prefix 'e-' is a short-
ened form of 'ex-', indicating a movement towards the outside, as in
exit or excrete. E-motion means 'movement outside' and emotions,
precisely, take you out of yourself. They come from the layer of sam-
skaras and not from the Self. They make you respond in a way that
does not involve your Self, but is just a mechanical reaction in the
layer of samskaras (astral body). E-motions make you wander far
from your real nature.
The word 'feeling' has the advantage of being used by both
Rudolf Steiner and Hindu masters of Vedanta, with the same mean-
34
 Emotions versus Feelings

ing of 'knowledge by identity' as will be developed in this book.

Thus our vocabulary is consistent with as many sources as possible.

3.4 Emotion and reaction

An essential criterion to discern an emotion from a feeling is
that the emotion is a reaction, whereas the feeling is not. From this
perspective, the terms 'emotion' and 'reactional emotion' are there-
fore synonymous.
The word 'reaction' is extremely appropriate, for it has con-
notations in the fields of chemistry and physics, that is, the mechan-
ical functioning of the world. Think of a chemical reaction. For in-
stance, put a block of metallic sodium into water, and an explosion
ensues. Or mix hydrochloric acid and liquid ammonia, and a spec-
tacular cloud of white smoke is released. A given cocktail of physical
causes always creates the same effect.
Even though emotions may appear more complex due to the
fluidity of the psychological field, they can be related to a similar
pattern. A stimulus comes from the outer world; it triggers a sam-
skara; and an emotional response automatically follows. For exam-
ple, in the days of the Cold War, some people would get angry each
time they heard 'communism'. It worked like a charm every time the
word was uttered in their presence. Other people would get angry
each time they heard 'anticommunism', with just as much consis-
tency. Even if they did not show their emotion overtly, you could see
that something inside them was reacting. They thought themselves
very different from the former group, but in terms of samskaras was
there really so much difference?
Emotions are not only mechanical, but also 'physiological' and
even 'chemical'. This can be illustrated with a simple but striking
experiment - borrow a stethoscope, and listen to your intestines.
Place the flat end of the stethoscope on the skin, somewhere around
your navel or in the right iliac area. Listen to the natural sound that
comes from the unceasing motion of your digestive tract. Next, think
of something unpleasant, such as somebody you dislike, or some-
thing that frightens you, or that makes you feel uncomfortable. hn-
mediately the sound of your intestines changes! As your ear gets
more accustomed to listening through the stethoscope, you realise
that the change is far from minor. The sound suddenly becomes

35
 Regression

much more rough and scrappy, incredibly disharmonious. Obviously

this unpleasant little thought is sufficient to completely modify the
functioning of your bowels, the movement of its muscle fibres, and
consequently the chemistry of digestion. Listen for yourself. How
could a proper digestion process take place with such a sound! You
will easily come to the conclusion that there must be some literal
truth to the statement, "poisoned by your emotions".

3.5 Emotions can always turn into their opposite

A major drawback of emotions is that their magic is transient
and changing. If you have been attracted to a certain person or a
certain professional occupation due to the wind of a samskara, it is
quite likely that sooner or later you will get disenchanted, lose inter-
est, and be attracted elsewhere. Another stimulus will trigger another
samskara, and all former resolutions will fall flat. Samskaras operate
in your mind like a kaleidoscope. Just a little movement, and a com-
pletely different configuration appears. The world was green, and
suddenly it appears pink. In reality the world has not changed at all,
but it only takes a fraction of a second for you to see it totally differ-
ently when looking through the kaleidoscopic goggles of the sam-
skaras.
A good way to know if your love pertains to emotions or to
feelings is to ask yourself what would happen if you were rejected,
or betrayed. A love which is an emotion can easily turn into its oppo-
site. In one second, "You see your friend as a pig covered in filth, as
a chariot full of devils" .1 If your love is akin to feeling, then it will
not be stopped by a negative response on the part of the beloved. The
criterion is a bitter one, but if it is applied with sincerity it may save
you a lot of self-delusion and wandering.

3.6 The one thousand masks of emotions

Anger, rage, frustration, irritation, despair, sadness, depression
-all these can be listed as emotions. Nobody will complain about a
system that allows you to get rid of them. Later on, it may appear
that you are much more attached to these emotions than you thought
in the beginning, and that you actually cherish them as treasures.

I 1-Ching, hexagram 38, 'Opposition', sixth mutable line.

36
 Emotions versus Feelings

Yet, whatever meandering you may have to go through, the intellect

is not shocked by the idea of getting rid of anger or depression.
However, if you start observing your reactions in a systematic
manner, it will become obvious that the pattern 'stimulus ~ sam-
skara ~ emotion' does not only apply to anger and depression, but
also to a number of so-called 'positive emotions'. In many cases,
when you display love, charity, compassion or various forms of
moral behaviour, it is the same sequence which is involved.
To put it simply, you realise that most of the time your love is
similar to the love of the cat. You give as long as you are fed. Of
course, you are not asking for exactly the same things as the cat. You
want to hear or feel that you are beautiful, or something equivalent
that comforts you and makes you feel safe. But the basic pattern is
the same - if you are kicked out, your emotion is immediately modi-
fied, or even turns into its opposite.
The realisation is indeed challenging. It calls unequivocally for
a reorientation of values. If 'good' actions can spring from the pup-
pet-like level of the samskaras, then what truly is good or bad? A
stale sense of the moral cliches of good and bad emerges. These be-
come inadequate to apprehend the reality of emotions and feelings.

37
 CHAPTER4

THE CAUSALITY OF EMOTIONS AND FEELINGS

4.1 Emotions and thought processes

The distinctions we have made between emotions and feelings
can also be applied to different forms of thoughts. Many thoughts are
akin to emotions in the sense that they are nothing more than reac-
tions. Understanding this point win lead us to a broader definition of
emotions.
Try the following experiment. Sit down quietly and start
watching your thoughts. Don't try to stop them. Don't interfere with
them in any way. Just become aware of them as they arise in your
mind. This, by itself, is a major tedmique of meditation. In the be-
ginning you cannot discern much because the mind is too quick; the
thoughts follow one another uninterruptedly, and you end up
'thinking' instead of meditating. As you keep on practising, however,
the mind tends to slow down, and you become able to see each
thought as soon as it appears in your field of consciousness. At this
point you can make an essential observation. If you can just watch
the thought without any form of reaction, it fades away. Then another
thought comes up. Repeat the same process. Look at it without re-
acting to it, and the thought passes away. If you could maintain this
attitude, watching without reacting, your peace of mind would be
permanently established, for the thoughts would be like birds flying
in the background of a landscape. 1 They wouldn't disturb you much
and they wouldn't leave any trace in your mind.
But it is not so. Each time a thought or a perception arises, the
tendency of the mind is to grasp it, and to chain another thought to it

I An analogy taken from Sri Aurobindo.

38
 The Causality of Emotions and Feelings

through some kind of association. For example, you hear a noise

coming from your fridge, and the mind says, "The fridge is empty".
Then it follows with "Bri.innhilde is coming for lunch" and "I have to
go shopping", "But first I have to go to the bank", and so on. Or a
thought arises about your friend Victor, and the mind goes on "He is
not as nice as Zacharias", and then "Zacharias owes me some
money", and "How could I remind him politely?", and so the endless
dance goes on.
It should be clear that this modus operandi is fundamentally
similar to the pattern we have described for emotions.
stimulus ~ samskara ~ reaction
In the case of thinking, the stimulus is the first thought, such as
Victor, or a sense perception, such as the noise of the fridge. The
reaction is the following thought that the mind grasps and links onto
it. Then the second thought in turn becomes a stimulus for the fol-
lowing reaction, and so on:
thought or perception ~ micro-samskara ~ another thought
However, if there was not a micro-samskara making an asso-
ciation between every two thoughts, the mind would simply stop and
become silent. These samskaras may not be endowed with as much
emotional charge as those we have considered so far, but still they
have all the fundamental characteristics of samskaras. They are im-
prints in the mental substance which create a certain reaction when
triggered by the right stimulus.
This approach sheds a different light on the unceasing stream
of thoughts experienced when you close your eyes and watch your
mind. These thoughts are nothing other than the result of the dyna-
mism of your sarnskaras. If you no longer had samskaras, or if you
could switch off the layer of samskaras, then when closing your eyes
you would be able to stop thinking and go straight into higher realms
of consciousness.
In Sanskrit, all the thoughts and little mental movements that
continually take place in the mind are called vrttis. The root of the
word, vrt, means 'to tum'. In the seminal text of the system of yoga,
the Yoga-Sutras of Pataiijali, the very first instruction is, yogas
citta-vrtti-nirodab (1.2), meaning "Yoga is the eradication of the

39
 Regression

vrttis of the mind". The message is clear - as long as samskaras

pollute your consciousness with constant reactional mental move-
ments and emotions, the state of yoga, or transcendental unity, can-
not be achieved. In Sanskrit, the layer in which all these reactions
take place and in which the samskaras are embedded is called manas
(corresponding to the astral body of the system of subtle bodies used
in Clairvision work). Manas is usually translated into English as
'mind' and as we have seen, it is in this sense that the word 'mind' is
used in this book.
It does not matter whether you perceive what comes from this
manas/mind layer as thoughts, emotions, or a mixture of both.
Whether thoughts or emotions, all of these are fundamentally reac-
tions, triggered by samskaras. Their nature is akin to conditioned
responses.
From this point of view, the problem is not so much to discern
between thoughts and emotions, but to discern between what is
reaction and what is not, what comes from samskaras and what
does not. In other words, you want to be able to discriminate be-
tween the puppet-like mechanisms of the samskaras and the sponta-
neity of the Self. For this purpose, just as we have established a dis-
tinction between emotions and feelings, a clear distinction has to be
made between those thoughts which originate from samskaras and
those which do not.
The aim of this work is not to erase any form of thinking and
tum you into a thought-free vegetable. Nevertheless, just as the
emotions of the reacting mind can be gradually replaced by sponta-
neous feelings, so the thinking of the reacting mind can be replaced
by the living thought of the transformed mind, or 'supermind'
(transformed astral body). In order to have a clearer view of these
transformations, we need to understand what feelings are about.

4.2 Feelings
If there was no princess, who would bother to fight the
dragon? If the purpose was only to reach a certain emotional tran-
quillity, why should anybody engage in the long and difficult process
of neutralising the manas/mind? It would be much simpler to learn to
replace negative emotions with 'positive' ones, as with those meth-
ods where people are taught to send positive affirmations into the
40
 The Causality of Emotions and Feelings

subconscious parts of their mind. Such practices can bring defmite

improvements. Conceptually, however, there is a weak point to them
- they pile conditioning on top of conditioning. The depths of the
mind are found to be repeating "I'm ugly and sick, I'm ugly and
sick", so one covers them with "I'm beautiful, I'm beautiful", hoping
that the mind will start repeating the latter even more than the for-
mer. These methods may help you become more successful in your
daily routines, but they do not bring a resolution of the real problem
- the eclipse of the Self caused by the sarnskaras. Positive affirma-
tions may soothe the dragon, but they miss the princess. If our pur-
pose is metaphysical freedom, we have to step out of the layer of the
sarnskaras altogether, not replace a dark conditioning with a rosy
one.
It is easy to talk about emotions, precisely because they belong
to the manas/mind, and because our language mainly takes place in
that layer. It is not so easy to talk about feelings, because by nature
they transcend this layer. Feelings belong to the 'non-mind'
(transformed astral body). Words can only give you an idea about
feelings. But a mental idea about what is beyond the realm of the
mind will never be a real understanding. Direct experience is
needed.
The causality of feelings is completely different from that of
emotions. Emotions often appear stupid, yet they follow a certain
logic and are highly predictable. By contrast, feelings are beyond the
realm of rational logic. For a long time, during your process of de-
velopment, you never know in advance when a real feeling is going
to take place. Feelings are like a gift, and the manas/mind has no
control over them. It can block them, to a certain extent, but it cannot
make them up.
It was said before that emotions can be perceived as waves.
Feelings also can be described as inner waves, but of a completely
different nature. Instead of taking you away from your centre, feel-
ings reveal more of your Higher Self. They throw light on the true
core of your personality. Instead of the superficial trepidation of
emotions, a feeling is a deep and motionless awakening. Instead of
an e-motion (movement outside), the feeling is an 'in-motion-
lessness', a still wave that creates contact with the deeper parts of
yourself. The direction of feelings is definitely centripetal, whereas
41
 Regression

that of emotions is centrifugal. Emotions scatter, they disperse your

life in all directions; feelings centre.
Another characteristic of feelings is their density, or fullness.
On the level of experience, emotions appear empty compared to the
plenitude and the completeness of feelings. People who think that
their life would be boring without the thrill of emotions have no idea
what is on the other side of the manas/mind. Emotions create a
tremulous agitation which remains confined within a thin layer. A
feeling, on the other hand, is a multi-dimensional awakening, through
which a fullness of being is experienced. You are more through
feeling, whereas emotions steal away some of your being.

4.3 Emotions make you bypass the Self

The most essential difference between emotions and feelings is
that emotions make you bypass the Self, or Higher Ego, while feel-
ings are associated with it. To clarify this, let us use a simple model
of subtle bodies. A human being can be regarded as made of:
1) a physical body;
2) an etheric body, or layer of life force, or envelope of prana;
3) an astral body, which corresponds to the manas/rnind of the
Hindu tradition, and which is the seat of emotions as well as of the
thoughts that result from samskaras. Strictly speaking, the astral
body is the structure, and the manas/rnind is its function. The two
cannot really be separated, and so the terms 'astral body' and
'manas/rnind' can virtually be regarded as synonymous; 1
4) a layer of Self-awareness that we call Ego, or Higher Ego,
or Self, or Higher Self, or Spirit.
In this context, the meaning of the
word Ego is quite different from ~ Upper
Complex
that which is used by Hindu or Astral
Buddhist masters. To them the
Etherlc
word ego refers to the 'little ego', Lower
or 'grasping ego' - the condition- Complex
Physical

I The astral body not only encompasses the conscious mind, but also
the subconscious and unconscious parts of the mind. Under nonnal circwn-
stances, the vast majority of hwnan beings are unaware and unconscious of
most of the material stored in their astral body.
42
 The Causality of Emotions and Feelings

ing which is the product of samskaras. This 'little ego' is virtually

synonymous with manas/mind, the layer of reactional emotions and
conditioning, which corresponds to the astral body of our classifica-
tion. For the purpose of simplicity, in the context of this book, as in
Awakening the Third Eye and Entities ... , the terms Ego, Higher Ego,
Self, Higher Self and Spirit are used synonymously.
In terms of this model of four vehicles, the work of self-
transformation can be described as a purification of the astral body,
or manas/mind, following which the Self can be experienced in its
purity and totality. Let us return to Pataiijali's Yoga-Sutras. As we
saw, this handbook on enlightenment begins with, yogas citta-vrtti-
nirodab, "Yoga is the suppression of the fluctuations of chitta"
(1.2). We certainly did not go astray by translating, "Yoga is the
suppression of the fluctuations of the manas/mind", for chitta is
nothing other than the 'substance' of the manas/mind. A more accu-
rate rendering is therefore "Yoga is the eradication of the vrttis from
the substance of the mind". The next verse of the Yoga-Sutras is:
tada dra~!ub svarupe 'vasthanam (1.3)
"Then the seer is established in his own true nature."
Again, the message is clear. Make the manas/mind transpar-
ent, and immediately the Self will be revealed behind it. The
manas/mind and its samskaras are a veil, masking the Self.
If we analyse the functioning of samskaras in terms of this
simple model of subtle bodies, what do we find? Let us look again at
the example of the fridge's noise that reminds you of Bri.innhilde
coming for lunch. The sound is first received through our physical
ears. From the physical body, the perception is transmitted to the
layer of energy, the etheric body, and reaches the layer of mental
consciousness and emotions (astral body). At this stage, however, a
short-circuit takes place. Instead of being felt from the Self, the
sound is received by the manas/mind which creates an association,
and a thought is generated - still in the astral body. Then another
micro-samskara is triggered and another thought arises, always in
the astral body.
Experientially, how does this manifest? You think without be-
ing aware that you think. The Self, layer of self-awareness, is left out
of the process of thinking. By practising inner vigilance, this can
easily be observed. There are times when you are aware, and if a
43
 Regression

thought arises in your mind you can just watch it and let go of it,
without interrupting the flow of your awareness. At other times, you
become caught by a train of thoughts. One thought arises, and an-
other one after it, and you don't even realize that it is happening. It is
not you who thinks, it is the thoughts that think themselves in your
mind. Your awareness is lost, overpowered by the manas/mind. Only
after a few minutes (or hours!) do you remember your purpose and
restore the inner awareness.
The same process of bypassing the Self takes place even more
obviously with emotions. For instance, a driver surprises you by
honking when you least expect it. The sound is received by your ears
(physical body), transmitted through the layer of energy (etheric
body), and reaches your manas/mind. A fraction of a second later,
you find yourself responding with an insult. The fact is that you were
totally unaware of the samskara which was triggered and reacted.
This clearly indicates that the layer of self-awareness was bypassed.
The input went as far as the astral body, and a reactional output (the
words of insult) mechanically followed. The highest of the four vehi-
cles, that of self-awareness, was short-circuited.
Between the thoughts and emotions of the manas/mind and the
self-awareness, the relationship can be described as 'eater/eaten'.
You can either react or be aware, but the two are opposed. When
you react your awareness is lost, as if eaten. It is no exaggeration to
describe the manas/mind as the eater of the Self. Through the work
of self-transformation, this relationship is slowly inverted. The layer
of self-awareness matures into an unfathomable Self that can neu-
tralise any wave of the manas/mind even before it arises. As one of
the fundamental texts of Vedanta puts it, the Self becomes the
'eater', the 'devourer' of everything (Brahma-Sutra 1.2.9).

4.4 Feeling, Self and unity

In contrast to emotions, feelings are endowed with a sense of
Self. As far as feelings are concerned, there are many degrees. Some
feelings have just a hue of self-awareness, hardly more than a back-
ground. Others connect you with the deepest level and make your
Self shine like a sun. However, the common thread to all feelings is
that, unlike emotions, they do not conceal the Self but reveal it.
Feelings establish an experiential link with the 'little flame', the eter-

44
 The Causality of Emotions and Feelings

nal presence of the Self in the heart - whereas emotions take place in
the surface personality, the facade.
This suggests that emotions keep you separated from the per-
son or the circumstances that trigger them, for in an emotion, your
Self is simply not present. It is kept away from the action. How
could there be unity between your Self and the situation, when your
Self is not there?
A feeling, on the other hand, creates a unity between you and
the object or person that it relates to. Let us say that you are watch-
ing the myriads of stars in a night sky, and the beauty of the moment
generates an inner wave; suddenly you are part of the universe.
There is a strong and tangible sense of unity with the starry sky. That
is a feeling. Just before, you were looking at the constellations, and
they were nothing more than white dots on a dark background.
Maybe you were learning to recognize their positions, or maybe you
were caught in other thoughts, hardly aware of the stars. You were
looking from the manas/mind. On one side, there was you on the
ground, and on the other side, the white dots. Now, suddenly, a
deeper part of yourself awakens with an intimate feeling of your
unity with the cosmos. Your whole perception is transformed, as if
you were in a different space. The universe suddenly makes sense to
the soul. A feeling is arising.
Let us take another example, something that will happen to
more and more therapists in the coming decades, and that might cre-
ate a revolution in the art of diagnosis. A friend or a client comes to
see you with a pain somewhere in his body. You feel just an intense
compassion for him. You are in your heart, forgetting all your per-
sonal problems for a while, and being as open as you can. Then,
without having to ask any questions, you suddenly realize that you
are feeling where the pain is. It is not even that you know where the
pain is, youfeel it! You feel his body as if it were your own. There is
a wave of unity between the two of you and as a practical result you
have a flash of, not clairvoyance or clairaudience, but 'clairfeeling'.
You feel what your friend feels as if you were in his body. For these
experiences to take place, you need to be able to totally forget about
your own difficulties and emotions for a moment, and be there only
for the other, opening to him or her from your heart without any re-
striction.

45
 Regression

A crucial point about 'clairfeeling' is that you feel the pain and
emotions of the other person, but to you there is no suffering associ-
ated with them. The friend experiences the pain from his level of
emotions (the manas/mind), but you receive it from your layer of
feeling. You are not suffering with him, you are with him while he is
suffering, which is quite different. It is a closeness, an opening from
heart to heart, by which you hold the other one's intensity close to
your Spirit. But there is nothing unpleasant or painful for you in this
state.
One of the main purposes of the ISIS techniques of regression
is to help you develop this ability to feel what others experience in
their body and mind, from such a space of higher compassion. While
playing the role of the connector, it will happen more and more that
you feel a sensation or receive an image just before the client men-
tions it. These moments of 'shared perception' often go with a tangi-
ble sense that your Higher Self is present and participating in the
process.
Essentially, feeling is a mode of knowledge through unity. It
has to do with tuning into an object or a person and letting their
qualities become alive inside your own Self. More than just resonat-
ing with the object, it is an experience of metaphysical unity. There
are degrees in such experiences of course, but as your capacity to
feel grows, this perception of unity becomes clearer and clearer.
The unity associated with feelings gives you the capacity to
understand things and beings from inside. You stop looking at them
from outside and being amazed at the differences between you and
them. If, through feeling, you can 'become one' with what they are,
be it only for a short moment, then you cannot remain a stranger to
them. This perception, without which love can only be a facade, en-
tails a deep metaphysical acceptance of situations and people. You
may not agree with what a person says or does. You may work in a
different direction and with opposite objectives. Still, feeling makes
you experience a one-ness with that person. You do what you have
to do, even if it does not serve that person's interests; but you par-
ticipate in the cosmic plan, because your action is based on recog-
nising that person's essential nature- not on denying it.
As you advance in the work, you start to experience an unex-
pectedly vast range of feelings and sensations, because you open to
46
 The Causality of Emotions and Feelings

various modalities far beyond the usual limits of the mind. On the
level of the manas/mind and its emotions, you can only understand
what is similar to your own patterns to a certain extent. If something
or somebody is too foreign to your own experience, then it becomes
a complete mystery. The mind can't even get a sense of how it
would feel to be like that. Feeling, on the other hand, is not bound by
such rigid limitations and opens your inner universe to all sorts of
new realisations.

4.5 The vast range offeelings

This last point is important, because it corrects a false idea that
many people implicitly have about themselves. They tend to think
that on the one hand there are emotions; and on the other, uncondi-
tional love and compassion - as if these two were the only possible
feelings. Of course, the idea of unconditional love is very nice, but
try to imagine a life in which all spicy emotions would be replaced
by unconditional love and nothing else. The tableau would be appall-
ingly boring - an insipid paradise in which everybody would be
locked into the same feeling.
In reality it is exactly the opposite. As you develop your capac-
ity to feel, you become able to tune into all sorts of people and know
what they experience inside yourself. Then the striking discovery is
precisely that everybody seems more or less locked into a certain
range of emotions which do not vary much from one person to the
other. It gives the impression of barely a dozen musical notes end-
lessly repeated by millions and millions of people who are impris-
oned in their emotions as in a cage, and unable to open to anything
else.
In contrast, feelings appear as a vast and fluid range of states
and experiences. Being a mode of knowledge through identity, feel-
ings allow you to resonate with various new frequencies beyond the
usual limitations of the mind. This does not only apply to tuning into
other people, but also everything around you - animals, plants and
inanimate objects. This ability for feeling will result in a shower of
gifts such as increased artistic sensitivity and creativity, greater toler-
ance and understanding for others. Paradoxically, human beings ac-
quire much more originality when they open to the sphere of the

47
 Regression

feelings, for they start to experience more varied and refined modali-
ties of being.

4.6 The layer offeelings and the alchemy of the astral body
We have described how emotions pertain to the manas/rnind,
which corresponds to the layer of the astral body. Let us now envis-
age the layer in which the feelings take place.
Even though they have a direct connection with the Self, or
Ego, feelings pertain to a different layer. To use the analogy of an
electric light bulb, the bulb itself could be seen as the Self, while
feelings are akin to the light radiating from it. Feelings pertain to a
sphere in which the Self finds expression, cognizes the world and
responds to it. I
In the system of Rudolf Steiner, the Spirit-Self is what corre-
sponds to the layer of feelings. Unfortunately, following theosophical
terminology, Steiner sometimes used the word manas synonymously
with Spirit-Self. This is quite misleading, for in Sanskrit manas
means precisely the opposite - the layer of reactional thinking and
emotions.
To summarise, just as the astral body is the layer of emotions
and thinking (reactional thinking), so the Spirit-Self, or vijfiana-
maya-kosa, is made of feelings. The beginning of enlightenment
consists of replacing the astral body with this new layer which, pres-
ently, is not very developed in most human beings.

1 In the system of Vedanta, this layer of the feelings corresponds to

vij;fiina-maya-kosa. Kosa means sheath or envelope, maya means made of,
and vijflana is one of those Sanskrit words which should not be translated
too hastily, for it does not really have any equivalent in modem European
languages. Thus the usual translation of vijnana as 'discernment', or
'discerning knowledge', is quite inappropriate and misleading. What is usu-
ally meant by discernment corresponds to a quality of the manas/mind, not to
vijnana. A more appropriate western equivalent for vijnana would be the
Greek word gnosis. Gnosis refers to a form of knowledge based on direct
experience of spiritual realities, beyond the limitations of dogma and the
screen of the rational mind. Gnosis has often been described as a 'knowledge
of the heart', and corresponds to the knowledge through identity that we
have described above. In the terminology used in this book, gnosis and feel-
ing are one and the same thing.
48
 The Causality of Emotions and Feelings

From the point of view of inner alchemy, this means building

up a new vehicle, a 'transformed astral body', seat of feelings. The
term 'transformed astral body' is somehow misleading, for it gives
the idea that the new layer will be made out of the old astral body
after some process of transformation, which is not correct. The new
layer is made out of the very substance of the Self (Ego), secreted
from the Self the same way a spider secretes its web, according to an
example often developed in the Hindu tradition. So, rather than
transformed astral body, it would be more appropriate to use the
term transubstantiated astral body.
A parallel can be drawn with the alchemists' quest for gold. In
astrological and alchemical symbolism, gold stands for the Sun,
which is none other than the Spirit, or Self, or Ego. Pursuing the
same analogy, base metals can be related to the passions, emotions
and reactions of the astral body. Turning base metals into gold corre-
sponds to the transformation through which the astral body is re-
placed by the Spirit-Self, or transubstantiated astral body.
Because it is made of the gold of the Spirit, the transubstanti-
ated astral body (layer of feelings), remains untouched by emotional
fluctuations and can keep its integrity through the process of death. It
can therefore properly be called a vehicle of immortality, or body of
immortality. This is not yet physical immortality, for which a number
of other layers would have to be transformed. Still, the transubstanti-
ated astral body is a vehicle through which the transition of death can
be made in full awareness, and the consciousness and experiences of
this life can be kept and transferred into the following life without the
astral disintegration that usually takes place with death.
The perspective of the Clairvision techniques is resolutely al-
chemical. A central purpose of ISIS is to help you discern between
emotions and feelings, in order to start working at the transmutation
of the astral body into the alchemical gold, the transubstantiated as-
tral body.
Before dealing with this point and going one step further into
the mechanisms of the mind, let us summarise the topic of emotions
and feelings in the form of a table.

49
 Regression

Emotions Feelings

+ anger, jealousy, + higher love, compassion,

passionate love ... warmth of soul, enthusiasm,
aesthetic feelings ...
+ are reactional + are unconditional
+ can quickly transform into + are stable regardless of feed-
their opposite back
+ come from the trigger of a + arise independently of sam-
samskara skaras
+ generate more samskaras + do not create any more sam-
skaras
+ are based on grasping + are based on letting go
+ overshadow the Higher Self + resonate with the Higher Self
and reinforce the tie with the and reinforce the link with it
astral body
+ favour and are favoured by + enhance and are enhanced by
lack of awareness awareness
+de-centre + re-centre
have a centrifugal direction have a centripetal direction
(away from the Self) (toward the Self)
+ cut you off from your envi- + establish a unity with the
ronment object
+ cause a distorted perception + objectivity rediscovered m
of reality due to samskaric in- the deepest subjectivity
terference
+ make you live in 'your' + allow you to live in 'the'
world world

50
 The Causality of Emotions and Feelings

Let us also use a table to summarise the parallels with other systems.

Emotions Feelings

Clairvision astral body transformed astral body

language personal stage transpersonal stage
Sanskrit mano-maya-kosa, vijnana-maya-ko sa,
envelope made of manas envelope made of buddhi
Greek dianoia, the discursive nous, Greek equivalent of
mind budhhi
Scholastic ratio intellectus
Latin
Kabbalah nefesh and ruah neshamah
Rudolf astral body Spirit-Self
Steiner

51
 CHAPTER 5

SAMSKARAS AND MEDITATION

5.1 The monkey connection

Once upon a time there was a man in India who became very
enthusiastic about finding his Self and decided to find a master and
reach enlightenment. He inquired about all the gurus of the state,
until he was told of one who was renowned as the wisest and most
enlightened of his time. Off he went to the ashram of the holy man.
As soon as he arrived, the guru asked him the traditional question,
"What have you come to seek here?''
The man was very straight. "Guruji, I have heard that you are
a great sage. Will you give me enlightenment?"
The guru smiled. "Certainly, son, I will give you enlighten-
ment."
The new disciple was transported with joy. "That's wonderful
Guruji! Thank you, thank you very much. And what will I have to do
to become enlightened?"
"Just go and sit under that tree and meditate."
"And what will I have to do to meditate?"
"Nothing, son. Just sit under the tree with your eyes closed.
But whatever you do, do not think of monkeys. That's all. And you
will reach enlightenment."
Our man was so delighted with the news of his imminent en-
lightenment that he forgot about his suitcase and went to sit under
the tree straight away. And he began his meditation process.
However, ten seconds after he had sat in a beautiful lotus po-
sition and closed his eyes, a first monkey appeared to him in medita-
tion. He immediately chased it away from his mind, but ten seconds
later another monkey appeared inside; and another one; and another

52
 Samskaras and Meditation

one ... To his greatest embarrassment, after half an hour, the man had
seen every possible Indian monkey. And then, relentlessly, his mind
started sending him images of African monkeys. After another hour,
and a few thousand more monkeys, the new disciple decided the
case was hopeless and went back to the master.
"Guruji, you have to tell me more about the nature of the
mind!"
After which the guru started to instruct him in the lore of sam-
skaras.

5.2 Cogito ergo non sum, I think therefore I am not

Making the mind completely silent is not at all impossible, but
it requires a shift into a different state of consciousness. As long as
you remain in the usual layer of the manas/mind, trying to block the
flow of thoughts is a notoriously hopeless enterprise. The more you
attempt to fight it, the more the mind rebels and sends thoughts to
your consciousness. If you have never experienced it for yourself, try
to sit for a few minutes with the firm resolve not to think, like the
beginner-disciple of our story. You will soon be convinced that try-
ing to stop the mind while operating from the mind is a sheer waste
of time.
As we saw previously, these constant mental fluctuations are
called vrttis in Sanskrit. The root vrt means to tum, and the suffix
'-ti' is used to generate action nouns. Therefore vrtti means the ac-
tion of turning, the fact of turning. The word is quite appropriate, for
each of these little fluctuations, or vrttis, tends to tum your mind in a
slightly different direction. One vrtti comes, and another one, and
another one ... and if you are not vigilant, a few minutes later you find
yourself in a completely different state of mind.
As long as your consciousness is taking place in the
manas/mind, the reason why it is impossible to stop the vrttis is quite
simple- the manas/mind is made of vrttis. This layer of emotions
and thinking acts as a veil hiding the Self, as pointed out in the first
verses of Patafijali's Yoga-Sutras: "Make the veil of the vrttis drop,
and immediately your real nature is revealed." As long as the
manas/mind perpetuates its endless dance, you remain assimilated
with the vrttis. This means that your consciousness has been infested
by the vrttis for so long that you can't even imagine that you may

53
 Regression

exist beyond them. You come to believe that thinking means being,
whereas it is precisely when you are in the manas/mind that you are
disconnected from the Self.
A man who came to be regarded as one of the fathers of ra-
tional thinking, French seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Des-
cartes, had impressed generations of philosophers with the statement
cogito ergo sum, "I think therefore I am".
Three and a half centuries later, the time has come to give our-
selves a fresh start with the opposite claim, cogito ergo non sum, "I
think, therefore I am not". Sorry Monsieur Descartes, but it is pre-
cisely when we stop thinking that we start to be. If there is a layer
that can be said to be, it is that of the Self. As long as we are caught
in the mental fluctuations of the manas/mind, we are disconnected
from the Self.
Once more, this does not mean that the purpose of the work is
to eradicate any form of thinking, but rather to replace the mechani-
cal and unceasing thoughts of the reacting mind by the luminous
thinking of the transformed (or transubstantiated) astral body. These
two forms of thinking are so radically different that it is quite mis-
leading to use the same word for both, just as 'emotion' cannot be
used for both the love of the cat and that of Christ. One of the char-
acteristics of the thinking of the transformed astral body is that it can
be switched off at will. Unlike the thinking of the manas/mind, it
does not happen mechanically and involuntarily, but is a fully con-
scious act of will.

5.3 Neutralising major samskaras to pacify the mind

The vrttis are of major interest for our study of the mecha-
nisms of the mind in relation to regression, for they are a direct indi-
cator of the presence and dynamism of the samskaras. We have de-
scribed the manas/mind as being made of reactions: reactional
thoughts and reactional emotions. The manas/mind is full of waves
of reactions, and the vrttis are these waves. Just as on the ocean
there are big waves and ripples, so in the manas/mind there are ma-
jor reactions caused by big samskaras, and endless ripples caused by
myriads of micro-samskaras.
A key realisation is that the astral body is made of sam-
skaras. Its very nature is grasping and reacting, and its substance is
54
 Samskaras and Meditation

like a sea of sarnskaras, some big, some small, some more linked to
emotions, others more to thoughts. Even though the astral body lacks
unity and consists of a bunch of dissimilar and ill-matched patches,
all its parts are closely interrelated. For example, suppose you are
affected by a strong emotion after quarrelling with someone in your
family. If, just after the episode, you sit and try to meditate, your
mind will be much more agitated than usual by thoughts. Many of
these thoughts won't have any connection with the present situation.
They will be regular vrttis, but quicker and more intense than usual.
What is happening? The emotion is stirring the whole layer of
the reacting mind, resulting in an increased activity of the vrttis. The
sea is agitated in depth, therefore its whole surface is covered with
waves. Another way of putting it is that an intense emotional charge
has been triggered, and this is feeding all the other sarnskaras. It is as
if the tension had been increased in the reacting mind, making a
higher voltage and intensity available to all the other sarnskaras. The
result is an increased activity of vrttis of various kinds.
This observation is significant; it provides a clue for reaching
mental silence during meditation. Clearly, we want to get rid of the
vrttis in order to discover the Self that is hidden behind them. We
have found the source of our perpetual thinking to be the countless
micro-sarnskaras of which the very substance of the mind is woven.
But if we had to eradicate each and every micro-sarnskara before we
could reach mental peace, the task would be endless, simply because
one cannot empty an ocean with a teaspoon. The situation is quite
different. It is not the limitless number of micro-sarnskaras that
makes the mind uncontrollable, but the fact that these micro-
samskaras are fed by the emotional charges of a limited number of
big ones.
If you cannot make your mind quiet, it is not so much because
it is made of micro-sarnskaras. By themselves, these micro-
samskaras would not be strong enough to keep your mind frantic.
They would certainly create waves in your consciousness, but you
could just watch them and let them fade, without losing your thread
of self-awareness. If you have no mental peace it is because a few
storms are permanently going on in your reacting mind, due to the
emotional charges associated with a limited number of huge sam-
skaras. You may not see them, not being aware of their presence be-

55
 Regression

cause they have been operating in your mind almost constantly ever
since you can remember. However, it is their energy that feeds all
the other micro-samskaras and makes the reacting mind uncontrolla-
ble due to excessive voltage. More than ninety-nine per cent of your
mental entropy is due to less than one per cent of your samskaras
and the vicious intensity they spread.
This suggests that it is not necessarily by meditating forever
that you will reach a state of meditation proper - beyond the
manas/mind - but by looking at this one per cent of noxiously intense
samskaras and neutralising them. If you have been meditating for a
number of years without any decisive result, you should ponder upon
this point, for it might save you another twenty years of meditation
that leads nowhere.

5.4 To what extent can meditation neutralise samskaras?

The question that logically follows is: isn't it enough to medi-
tate in order to neutralise samskaras, whether they are big or small?
This is a key question, for it allows you to understand the major role
that regression can play in a spiritual path.
In theory, yes, a proper system of meditation is supposed to
allow you to clear the totality of your mind. Some signs indicate that
a release is taking place; for instance when you start twitching, or
when certain emotional or mental activities are going on while you
meditate, it may mean that you are releasing some samskaras. Of
course, one should not be too optimistic about this last point. It is
unfortunately not enough to have one's mind churned by thoughts to
be sure that one is releasing samskaras. Yet, overall, and even with-
out twitching or special mental activity, the general direction of
meditation is to release tension, grasping and samskaras. Each time
you sit and meditate some samskaras are freed and neutralised.
In practice, however, the situation is far from being that sim-
ple, due to several important factors. First, you usually meditate only
once or twice a day. Even if you meditate two hours twice a day,
which is already quite respectable, it is quite easy for your mind to
hide the major samskaras during the meditation time and let them
loose during the remaining twenty hours. This is a gentle warning to
people who believe that it is enough to meditate twice a day for a
great spiritual transformation to ensue, without having to maintain

56
 Samskaras and Meditation

any particular awareness the rest of the time. The manas/mind is out-
rageously clever, and if you offer it any opportunity to trick you, you
may be sure it will grasp it. Nothing is easier for it than to make a
deal with you such as "I will give you a beautiful meditative peace
twice a day, and you will let me go on playing my games the rest of
the time". You cannot find a better foundation than this for the type
of spiritual practice that goes on for twenty years without any deci-
sive opening. There may be improvements in your memory, your
quality of sleep and your blood pressure - but the same results could
be achieved with a few Hatha-Yoga postures and a bit of relaxation.
The great spiritual shifts never happen, simply because the great
samskaras remain untouched by the process.
The situation becomes quite different if, in addition to your
daily meditation, you apply yourself to remaining aware and watch-
ing your mind react from morning to night. Then it is much more
difficult for the reacting mind to manipulate you with samskaras
without you realising what is going on.
Even if you could remain permanently aware, or if you could
meditate from morning to night, the fact is that major samskaras ex-
cel at encapsulating and protecting themselves. If an experience has
been traumatic enough to leave a major samskaric imprint, the re-
acting mind will use any trick possible to bury the imprint and make
it inaccessible to your consciousness. The nature of the manas/mind
is such that it will do anything to avoid facing its own contradictions.
For this, it uses a whole range of mechanisms of protection. The
paradox is that in many cases, the protective mechanisms themselves
end up being significantly more painful, costing more energy than it
would take to find the source of the problem and 'digest it' from the
level of self-awareness. So each time you come close to seeing the
samskara, the mind diverts your awareness. If nothing drastic is
done, this situation can be perpetuated during years and years of
meditation. You certainly release samskaras during meditation, but
they are usually minor ones. The major ones remain unseen.
Fundamentally, meditation techniques aim at developing self-
awareness and, in certain cases, building up subtle bodies. However,
they are not specifically designed to put you in touch with samskaras.
To illustrate this point, I will use the example of a boat, and the force
that is needed to get it to move. You can spend one hour every day
57
 Regression

rowing; if the boat is anchored, twenty years later you will still be in
the same place. Meditation is a process that makes you move to-
wards the light in a general way, without specifically concentrating
on the ties that keep you back. The example of the boat shows that
the solution is not only to row, but to get rid of the anchor.
Of course, you could think of another solution. You could pull
the boat with so much force that the tie of the anchor would break.
That would mean increasing the power of your meditation to such an
extent that even the major samskaras couldn't resist, and would ex-
plode in your consciousness. The problem is that to reach such an
intensity of meditation, you would first have to get rid of your major
samskarac;, for they are the main limiting factor. It is obviously a vi-
cious circle.
Even if you could become a full-time ascetic and do nothing
other than meditate from morning to night for months - which would
possibly allow you to reach the required intensity - there would still
be something conceptually wrong with exhausting your energy trying
to pull the boat while anchored. Why not raise the anchor first, and
then go wherever you want? As soon as a handful of highly emotion-
ally charged samskaras have been neutralised, your mind suddenly
becomes incomparably quieter, allowing a much greater depth of
meditation.
Another point that should be clearly understood is that the in-
fluence of samskaras has become much stronger than it used to be a
few generations ago. In terms of our example, it is not only one rope
but dozens, if not hundreds of ropes that keep us anchored close to
the shore, and the ties have become more solid. In particular, the
meditation techniques imported by most eastern masters were de-
signed for disciples whose emotions were certainly not as harsh and
violent as ours are now in the West. A few centuries ago in India, an
ascetic could probably engage in spiritual practice without having to
worry about whether his emotional blockages were going to sup-
press the intensity of his meditation. However, times have changed.
The general level of people's neurosis has increased to such propor-
tions that it has become unrealistic to deny the psychological dimen-
sion in a spiritual path, and to try to reach enlightenment without
working systematically on eradicating wrong emotional patterns.

58
 Samskaras and Meditation

I am certainly not suggesting that regression should replace

meditation, but that by combining the two, immense time and effort
can be saved in a spiritual path. The present condition of the human
astral body is such that by not dealing specifically with samskaras,
you place yourself in the position of trying to row the boat without
raising the anchor.

5.5 The manifestation of samskaras in meditation

There are many ways in which samskaras manifest while you
are meditating, since all the reactions of the manas/mind can be
sourced to samskaras. Apart from thoughts in meditation, let me
draw your attention to two particular mechanisms.
One common way in which samskaras manifest during medi-
tation is through pain in various body parts. If you have applied
yourself to meditating for long periods, say five hours or more per
day for at least a week, you will have noticed that numerous pains
arise, sometimes in the most unsuspected areas of the body. Parts of
your body in which you normally never feel any discomfort suddenly
become terribly painful.
These meditation pains have a few unusual characteristics.
Firstly, they appear only during meditation, and usually cease as
soon as you get out of the meditative state. Secondly, they are often
quite illogical. For example, you may suddenly feel a pain in your
left shoulder while sitting in a position which should have no direct
effect on this part of your body. Thirdly, these pains are extremely
stubborn. When following a prolonged course of meditation, you
may feel the same pain in the same place every single day, every sin-
gle hour you meditate, for days and days without any relief. Fourthly,
the main feature of these pains is that they increase with the energy
of your meditation. The deeper your meditation and the more you
connect with the energy, the worse the pain gets. As soon as you
stop meditating, the pain stops.
These meditation pains come straight from samskaras. They
indicate that your meditation has been deep enough to contact one of
your major samskaras, and that a 'fight' is going on between the
samskara and the light. To return to our example, you are the boat;
the light of higher consciousness is pulling you, but the samskara is
obstinately resisting, like the anchor pulling you back. In many cases

59
 Regression

this can last for years. Each time you build up the meditation energy,
the pain reappears. Each time you release the pressure of the energy
- for instance if you stop meditating or if you fidget instead of re-
maining connected - the pain diminishes or stops. The pattern be-
comes especially drastic when you endeavour to meditate from
morning to night for a few weeks or months; the intensity of the pain
can take proportions that are simply unreasonable. Unless you un-
dergo such an experience, you just cannot know how much pain it is
possible to feel in your body. At this stage, you can usually realise
that the pain is not only physical, but accompanied by an emotional
pressure. But in most cases you lack the dynamic energy to release
it, simply because your meditation has been designed to pull you to-
wards the light, not to deal with samskaras.
At the beginning of an ISIS session, before entering the re-
gression state, it is quite common for clients to experience pains of
this kind in various parts of the body. The technical term used for
these painful areas is 'spot'. The spots are direct manifestations of
samskaras - the mechanisms behind them are identical to those be-
hind the pains that arise in deep meditation.
The energy of ISIS, however, operates differently from that of
meditation. It does not act as a general uplifter, but is endowed with
a special dynamism designed to reveal the samskaras and neutralise
their power. In other words, it is an energy that does not work at
rowing the boat, but one that specialises in dealing with anchors.
Thus the experience will be completely different; instead of feeling
the pain and nothing else, the pain will quickly tum into an emotion.
For instance, you will feel an intense grief, or anger. You will recon-
nect with the emotional charge attached to the samskara.
At this stage, a common experience is that the pain completely
disappears, which can be quite disconcerting for beginners. How
could they feel such intense pain a few seconds ago, and have the
pain vanish as soon as they become aware of the emotion? The dis-
appearance of the pain indicates that the layer encapsulating the sam-
skara has been removed. You have reconnected with the emotion,
and all the circumstances related to the traumatic episode start com-
ing back to your consciousness. Consequently, there is no longer any
need for protection mechanisms. The conditions are gathered for a
release of the emotional charge associated with the samskara.
60
 Samskaras and Meditation

In this way meditation and regression can work together.

Through meditation, spots (latent samskaras) are revealed, and
through regression they are released. These releases allow a deeper
quality of meditation, in which deeper samskaras can be contacted,
and so on.
Of course, you do not need to meditate to get in touch with
samskaras. Just go through normal life, observe your reactions, and
the circumstances of life will bring about many emotions that relate
to your samskaras. However it should be clear that by practising
meditation regularly, you get in touch with much deeper issues. This
is why people who have done a lot of meditation can have such quick
results when they undergo a regression process. Their meditation not
only allows them to deal with a number of minor issues, but also to
get in touch with the real monsters of the depths, the 'capital sam-
skaras'. They lack the specialised dynamic energy to deal with them,
but they have made contact with them, which is a crucial step in the
process.
Conversely, people who have gone through many regressions
will be surprised to discover completely new samskaras and unsus-
pected core issues after experiencing in-depth meditation. Just as
regression can be a powerful complement to meditation, so medita-
tion will greatly enhance the depth of regression.

5.6Waves
Let us now examine another mechanism through which sam-
skaras manifest during meditation. The experience we are going to
describe is of critical importance. Depending on how you handle it, it
can lead to great progress, or to even greater mistakes. The mecha-
nism has to do with huge emotional waves that suddenly sweep your
consciousness when you reach a certain depth in meditation.
The kind of meditative states we are now discussing cannot be
achieved just by meditating for a few hours a day, whatever your
technique may be. For these waves to take place, you usually need a
total withdrawal from activity, doing nothing but meditation for at
least a few weeks. The experience requires total isolation, or at least
that you do not speak during that period. There should be nothing to
distract your mind, no activities taking place around you, no tele-
phone, no mail - just meditating, eating, and sleeping. In some ini-
61
 Regression

tiation practices, this is canied out in an underground crypt, in ab-

solute darkness; the surrounding rock provides isolation from all the
vibrations of the world.
The principles behind this practice are clear; to a large extent,
you are the product of your environment. A vast part of your emo-
tions and thought patterns come from what your parents, friends and
partners have imprinted in you, as well as from all the sensory im-
pressions collected since you were born. One wonders, therefore,
what exists beyond this accumulation of input and imprints. What
exactly is left of you, if these are taken away? What, inside you, is
eternal and not merely the product of your environment?
Of course, such an intensive period of meditation should not
be attempted without sufficient preparation. It is only once you have
gone through sustained work on yourself and have achieved a fair
degree of emotional stability that such long periods of full-time
meditation may be attempted. Furthermore, even though we are
reaching an age of self-initiation, I would still recommend that you
seek the advice and protection of a competent guide before dealing
with explosive practices of this kind.
What happens after a few weeks of full-time meditation and
isolation? You discover some completely new modalities of yourself.
From time to time, openings of consciousness take place, and you
realise that up till then you had always existed within a certain frame,
without ever crossing its limits. The atmosphere, flavour and stereo-
typed routines in your head had always been the same; but you had
not even noticed them, simply because you were lacking references.
Having never experienced anything else, you believed that it was all
one could be. Then you suddenly realise that one can be completely
different. To take an analogy dear to Hindu masters, until then you
had only seen the world with green-coloured glasses. Now you dis-
cover that you can also see it through yellow glasses, blue glasses, or
even without glasses at all!
Along with these openings, another experience is likely to take
place - unexpected, sudden, and utterly violent waves of emotions or
desires. For instance, you are suddenly taken by an irresistible desire
to go back into the world and study Taoism. Within one minute, it
becomes the most important thing in your life - the one thing you
want and which seems to hold the key to complete fulfilment. It is as
62
 Samskaras and Meditation

if you had reached an absolute inner certitude as to which direction

to follow. While you are supposedly meditating, your mind starts
fixing up all the details frantically: what books to read first, how to
enrol in the next course in Chinese at university, where to buy Chi-
nese-looking clothes, and how to find a Taoist master.
Then, a few hours later, something very surprising takes place;
another wave emerges, completely different from the first one. You
suddenly feel the irresistible need to take the first plane to New
York, join a friend you have not seen for fifteen years, and get mar-
ried. Taoism has completely disappeared from your mind, and the
former certitude has been replaced by a new one: the only thing that
will ever fulfil your life is to go and marry that person - who had
never really been a close friend before, and whom you have not seen
for more than fifteen years. Your meditation changes. The mind gets
hyperactive arranging all the details of the trip: the travel agent from
whom you will get the plane ticket, what you will wear at the wed-
ding, what names to give the children, and so on.
If you can resist these emotional onslaughts and remain in your
meditation retreat instead of taking the first plane to New York, what
happens? A few hours, or maybe one day later, another tidal wave
sweeps your consciousness and you want to start a publishing com-
pany, or take up dramatic art, or become a Methodist minister or a
politician.
The most striking thing about these waves is their intensity.
They seem to be coming out of nowhere, and when you least expect
them. Their violence pushes you to the limit of what you can bear.
You really have to tap from your deepest resources to stay meditat-
ing instead of being carried away by them. Most people tend to be-
lieve they have received an unmistakable sign of destiny when they
are struck by such a wave. They believe that they have found their
true purpose in life.
It could take a whole life to fulfil any of these desires. That is
one of the reasons why you have to be fully prepared before under-
going this type of long and intensive meditation practice. If you yield
to the first wave and end up in Shanghai, which can happen awfully
quickly under such circumstances, nothing good is likely to result.
The decision to fly to China was not taken from a space of free will,
but dictated by the pressure of a samskara. Sooner or later, another
63
 Regression

samskara will take you in another direction. If you let your life be
ruled by the kaleidoscope of the manas/mind, the overall result can
only be chaos. Even if you happened to be successful in China, that
would be a 'samskara-success'. Your spiritual thread would be lost,
and it might take twenty years before you found it again.
If, on the other hand, you can resist the first waves and remain
firm in your meditation, the following ones will have less power over
you. You will be able to compare them to the first ones and convince
yourself that something unusual is going on. Yet, however well pre-
pared you may be, you will probably be taken aback by the cata-
clysmic intensity of the urges. These are the types of desires that
people normally feel only once every twenty years, and which can
make them change everything. Yet, in deep meditation a new wave
can hit you every day, or even every few hours. Having had to with-
stand a dozen of them in a week, you know that they are the product
of samskaras, and therefore fundamentally fake. Still it takes all of
your determination and God's help not to yield to the thirteenth. Fi-
nally, after a time that varies greatly with each individual, the waves
stop, and you discover you have become a completely different per-
son.
The way these waves grasp you and make you frantic for a
short while, before disappearing in an anticlimax and giving way to
another one, leaves little doubt as to their real nature and source -
these waves come from your deepest and most intense samskaras.
Most people do not make much contact with these capital samskaras
during their entire life. The pressure of your meditation makes the
samskaras explode in your consciousness one after the other. In
terms of our example, the force pulling the boat has become so in-
tense that no tie can resist it. What most human beings can't achieve
in several lives is completed in a few weeks.
Once the tidal waves have passed, what follows is the experi-
ence of being 'reborn'. So many emotional charges have been re-
leased that your mind has become totally different, as if tonnes and
tonnes had been lifted off your head. You hardly recognise yourself.
Your life has become incredibly simple.

64
 Samskaras and Meditation

5.7 No major decisions during a meditation intensive

To be able to deal with such waves without being carried
away, you need to have already done significant work on your sam-
skaras. The more you have observed your samskaras, watched your
own reactions in daily situations and looked for the sources of your
conditioned behaviour, the less chance you have of being distracted
by the Sirens 1 when the 'hour of God' comes. In this respect there-
gression work is one of the best possible preparations for withstand-
ing the spiritual intensity of the moments of great awakening, and
avoiding the first samskara booby-trap.
Given the nature of these samskaric waves, it is wise not to
make any important life decisions whenever undergoing a meditation
retreat or an intense regression process. Even though on a much
lower scale, similar waves of desire may be triggered. If you were to
yield to a wave and make major decisions at that time, you might
well regret it bitterly later on. Once more, such decisions would not
be based on free will and on the real aspirations of your Self, but on
the tyranny of samskaras. Wisdom commends finishing the medita-
tion retreat or the regression intensive first, and then taking a few
weeks before making any major decision.

5.8 A note about knees

The knees are an exception to the pattern of deep pains that
occur in meditation due to the emergence of samskaras.
If a spot in the shoulder, the back, or any other body part but
the knees becomes sore under the pressure of deep meditation, the
best attitude is to remain motionless and watch the spot. Just remain
aware of it; by fidgeting you would be diminishing the pressure of
the energy and avoiding the samskara. Simply watch the spot, and let
it ripen through your stillness and awareness. If it does not disap-
pear, regress it! In any case, you will not damage your body by re-
maining still and putting up with the intensity created by a samskara.
If, however, you are sitting in lotus, semi-lotus, or any other
crossed-legged position, the situation is quite different as far as your

1This experience presents obvious similarities with Odysseus' en-

counter with the Sirens, when his crew had to tie him to the boat to stop him
jumping into the water in response to the Sirens' enticing call.

65
 Regression

knees are concerned. Have a good look at somebody taking the lotus
position. What happens when they place their heel close to the groin?
It is not the knee joint that rotates, it is the hip. Contrary to what one
might think, it is from the flexibility of the hips that the lotus position
is achieved- not the knees. The articulation of the knee is made of
tiny ligaments which can't be stretched much without damage.
H after meditating for some time you start feeling pain in the
knees, it is because the hip has contracted. The hip has rotated in-
wards, which results in more tension on the knee ligaments. These
little ligaments are fragile, and it is unwise to try to pull them beyond
their limits. If you damage one of them, it could take months before
you are able to sit cross-legged again.
The conclusion is that a pain in the knees should always be re-
spected. If your knees start hurting while meditating cross-legged,
change position. Sit on a chair if needed. Stoically putting up with
the pain in order to remain motionless is likely to cause more harm
than good.

66
 CHAPTER6

SAMSKARAS AND PHYSICAL DISORDERS

6.1 An example of physical pain created by samskaras

Case study- Lenka was a forty-six-year-old business woman,

who came to consult me after years of heavy depression. Among her
somatic complaints were terrible headaches in the forehead that
nothing seemed to alleviate, and bad colic pains. Before coming to
me and trying the ISIS technique of regression, Lenka had sought the
help of a number of therapists unsuccessfully.
Soon after the beginning of the first session, an excruciatingly painful
spot was located in her left ribcage area. As Lenka connected more
deeply with the energy, the spot suddenly triggered her usual head-
ache and intestinal pain with extreme violence. It must be stressed
that at no time in the session did I touch Lenka' s head or abdomen;
and on no occasion prior to this ISIS session had Lenka experienced
any discomfort in the area of her left ribcage.
After a moment of agonising pain, working on the spot, the quality of
vibration in the room suddenly changed, and Lenka started reexperi-
encing an episode with particularly vivid intensity.

What are you feeling? 1 -I'm cold, I'm so cold. [Lenka is shivering
under a pile of blankets.] Something very big has fallen on me and
buried me. It's a rock. My head hurts. And there is a fire. Lots of
people are being killed ... scenes of devastation. There has been an

1 As before, the questions at the beginning of the paragraphs are

asked by the connector. The answers are those made by the client.

67
 Regression

earthquake and now there is a fire, but I'm buried underneath the
rock so I'm not being burnt.
Now there is water coming. The fire is finished. I can't move be-
cause I'm buried under the stone, and there is water coming over
me. Oh! It's terribly cold [Lenka is shivering more than ever.] It's
absolutely freezing, freezing cold. [Screaming:] The baby! The baby
is dying! It's me under the rock, but I'm pregnant with a baby. Oh!
Pain ... It's like feeling all my usual stomach pains at the same time.
Do you mean they are the same as your intestinal pains? -Same. The
baby is dying! [Flood of tears.] The baby is coming out and there is
no one to help. Oh! I wish I was dead. And it hurts, it hurts to deliver
the baby. [Sobbing:] It's dead. I know the baby is dead. Oh! I've got
the splitting headache again. [Screaming:] It hurts! It hurts! My head
is cracked open, totally cracked open. It hurts! It's horrible! My
brains are coming out! It's here! [Indicating the place in her forehead
where she usually gets headaches:] My head is split open here. The
rock... the rock has smashed my head. I wish I was dead. It feels like
I should be dead, but for some reason I'm not. Oh God! It hurts so
much!

After the session, Lenka told me how she had always been terrified
of having a child, which suddenly started to make sense after reexpe-
riencing this episode. She had been pregnant five times. Two of the
pregnancies were aborted, while the other three ended up in miscar-
riage.
The results of this regression were spectacular. Within a few days
both the headaches and the intestinal pains dropped by more than
half. After a few weeks and a few more sessions, the headaches had
almost completely disappeared. The depression started improving
and Lenka got rid of all her pain-killers, tranquillisers and sleeping
tablets.

6.2 Samskaras do not only manifest in the mind

In this chapter, we will see how some samskaras not only
manifest through emotions and mental reactions, but also through
disorders in the physical body.

68
 Samskaras and Physical Disorders

In the last chapter we saw that in deep meditation, samskaras

often create physical pain in various parts of the body, and that in
ISIS, similar painful spots are experienced. But in ISIS, the situation
is different. Instead of feeling the pain without ever realising what is
behind it, a dynamic energy is activated which reveals the samskara
behind the spot. In most cases, the pain stops as soon as the client
connects with the emotion and the circumstances related to the sam-
skara. This reconnection allows the client to neutralise the samskara
by releasing its emotional charge.
These experiences are of great interest, for they allow clients
to perceive for themselves how much samskaras can 'grasp' the
physical body. The intensity of the physical manifestations during
some regressions is such that clients can't have much doubt as to the
interconnection between samskaras and the physical body. In the
above example, Lenka simply could not believe that just by putting
energy on a point in her chest, I could cause her headaches and
stomach aches to be reproduced exactly. It was a clear demonstra-
tion that something other than just physical factors was causing her
problems.
The concept of psychosomatic ailments, meaning the possibil-
ity of mental complexes creating physical disorders, is not new. The
input regression provides in psychosomatic explorations is to offer a
direct way of finding the real source of the disorder, often far beyond
early childhood traumas. Consequently it allows profound releases
and healing. The essence of regression is to go back to sources. As
we will see, a cure can never really be regarded as complete as long
as the source of the ailment has not been dealt with, no matter what
therapy is implemented.
Before tackling the difficult question of determining what pro-
portion of diseases may be due to samskaras, let us first examine the
mechanisms by which a samskara creates a physical disorder. If we
look at the pattern emerging from Lenka' s regression, we see that it
is quite similar to that of the samskara-related emotions we have al-
ready studied. Samskaras, by nature, tend to repeat the same
'message' endlessly. Their nature is akin to conditioning. If you have
been abandoned and if you nearly died from it, the sarnskara tends to
place you in situations where the same rejection drama is replayed
again and again. If you have felt excessively alienated in a past life
69
 Regression

because you were crippled, your samskaras will make you feel alien-
ated here and now, without any present logical reason for it. Many
samskaric blockages act like prerecorded roles. As long as they are
not eliminated, you remain caught in an endless replay of these roles.
H we analyse Lenka's case study, we can see that it follows
exactly the same pattern. When practising regression, I have often
observed that the loss of a child, especially around the time of deliv-
ery, leaves some of the deepest possible samskaras. Such a samskara
manifested in Lenka's life in her fear of having children. Also the
very dark emotional time when trapped under the rock resulted in a
heavy depression that nothing seemed to alleviate until she under-
went the regression process.
However, the initial traumatic episode not only consisted of
emotional distress; it was accompanied by terrible physical pain. Her
skull was broken open by the rock, and she endured the labour pain
in the most horrid conditions. In this present life, when these sam-
skaras were reactivated, Lenka's depression started. It was not only
the emotional pain that was brought to the surface, but also physical
disorders. Lenka started replaying her head trauma with headaches,
and her labour pain with intestinal colic. The scheme is identical to
that described for emotional patterns, but with an added physical di-
mension. A suffering of the past superimposes itself upon the pres-
ent. Even though Lenka could not perceive it as long as she had not
undergone an ISIS process, her physical disorders were none other
than a replay of past circumstances.
From a medical point of view, it is essential to understand that
the origin of Lenka's illness had little, if anything, to do with her in-
testines. We remain much closer to the truth if we call Lenka's trou-
ble a 'tummy ache', not an intestinal disorder. It happened that in her
case, twisting the chemistry of the bowels was the most direct way
for the samskara to reproduce the labour pain. But the samskara
could also have expressed itself by creating the same pain in another
organ, for instance by creating a disorder in the gynaecological
sphere, anything from premenstrual tension to endometriosis, or even
cancer. This is typically a situation where a medical practitioner's
rigid attitude which focuses on one single organ, be it intestine,
uterus or whatever, completely misses the point and proves unable to
bring about any lasting improvement.
70
 Samskaras and Physical Disorders

6.3 Do accidents happen by accident?

In the case we have just examined, we see a client feeling al-
most exactly the same pain as in the episode that originated the sam-
skara, but expressing it through a different organ and in different life
circumstances. However, in some cases the parallel between the cir-
cumstances related to the samskara and those of the physical ailment
in this life is even more obvious. In particular, the significance of
many accidents is perceived quite differently after undergoing a re-
gression process. Here is a short example, one of many similar ones
I have encountered in my practice.

Case study- Lucie, aged forty-four, had suffered from an un-

comfortable feeling in her left groin as far back as she could remem-
ber. It was a dull sensation, half-way between a pain and a tighmess.
No medical practitioner could ever find anything pathologically
wrong with her, even though she sensed that there was something
wrong. The following regression occurred while working on the left
groin.

How does your body feel, big or small? -1 feel very big; and very
strong. A BIG man. He's totally enraged. It's in the middle of a bat-
tle, like in medieval times. There are people and bodies everywhere.
He's fighting with something very heavy, a kind of mace, or maybe a
sword. It's extremely heavy. He is completely furious. He's roaring
and moving like a madman. He feels nothing can stop him, he's
gonna kill them all!
[Then the client suddenly screams, as if in pain.] Ah! Something has
hit him in the groin. The pain is terrible. He falls on his knees.
I can see him lying on his back. He can't move. There is something
stuck inside his groin, like a piece of metal. It could be an arrow.
What's happening around him? -It feels far away. The battle is going
on, but I hear it as if from a distance. I'm lying on my back, immobi-
lised with that thing in my groin. 1 Now the battle is finished. I can
see bodies everywhere. It's night. He is blocked, he can't go on.

I Notice how clients tend to alternate between the flrst and third per-
son when describing themselves in a past-life episode.

71
 Regression

He's half in, half out of his body, as if nailed to it by the arrow in his
grom.
Does he stay there for a long time? -It feels like a long time. He
knows he is dead and it does not feel right to remain there. His body
is starting to rot. But he can't move away. The groin is keeping him
back.
Coincidentally, Lucie had had an accident when she was in her thir-
ties (about fifteen years after she had begun to feel the dull ache in
the groin, so that the accident could not be held responsible for the
discomfort in this area). She was hit by a car in her left hip, and suf-
fered multiple fractures. It is not unreasonable to want to make a link
between this trauma and the wound of the medieval warrior. Lucie
herself made the connection as soon as this ISIS session was fin-
ished, "The pain in his groin felt exactly like mine when I had my
accident".

Ever since I started practising regression, I have been struck

by the number of occasions where accidents coincided with a similar
trauma discovered by the client while reexperiencing a past-life epi-
sode. Knowing that it takes years to build up the field for cancer to
develop in your body, it is not difficult to conceive how the
manas/mind may play its part. But in a car accident, when some-
one's hip is broken in a fraction of a second, it is not so easy to con-
ceive that the mind may be involved! Yet, whatever mechanism of
synchronicity may be involved, dozens of similar examples have
suggested that it is not by chance that some people break their left
arm rather than their right leg, or their nose rather than their sacrum.
On the contrary, many accidents seem to take place as if the trauma
was prerecorded, and as if the person was unconsciously - but quite
precisely - attracting the blow. In these cases, as long as the sam-
skara is not neutralised it keeps on attracting trouble, just as a lamp
attracts moths at night.

6.4 Different pains, same meridian

In this section we will look at how different physical disorders
may appear from life to life along the line of the same acupuncture
meridian.

72
 Samskaras and Physical Disorders

Case study- Sophia is forty-one and suffers from bad sciatic pain
in the right leg (zu-shao-yang meridian). The surgeons gave her a
grim warning - unless operated on, she might end up in a wheel-
chair. However, she refused to undergo any form of surgery, and
decided to cure herself by other means. Here is a passage from a key
regression that changed the course of her illness.

What are you feeling now? -I'm feeling cold, very cold. [Even
though it is a hot summer day in Sydney, Sophia is shivering with
cold and asking for more blankets.] I was in the water, but now I
have landed on the shore. There's nobody there. I'm all alone. I'm
scared, and cold. It's a huge place. The beach seems to go on for-
ever. I can see the sky.
Can you hear any sound? -Yes, the waves.
Any pain? -No, but numbness. I can't walk. I'm sitting with my legs
stretched out but I can't get up. My right leg feels completely numb.
I feel agitated. First I thought it was fear, but now it's more like
feeling helpless. I don't know what to do! I can't stay there, it's
leading me nowhere. But at the same time I can't move either, be-
cause of my leg. I'd like to be with the others, in the ship. I can't re-
member exactly what happened, how I got there. It's a sailor; and he
is pretty stuck. He just can't move his right leg.
Is the feeling in the leg similar to what you feel now [in this twenti-
eth-century Australian life]? -Yes. The numbness on the beach is
exactly in the same area I feel the sciatic pain now [zu-shao-yang
meridian].
Is it identical? -It is not the same pain, but the feeling behind both is
exactly the same.
When you get the sciatic pain, do you also get any similar feelings to
those of the man on the beach? -Yes, desperation. Because my pain
never seems to go away. He felt desperate too because he had no
way of escaping from that place. The feeling is the same.
When you feel the despair in this [present] life, is it yours or his? -It
feels more like his. Actually, it is completely his.

73
 Regression

From this example we see that the current violent pain of the
client was not part of the original episode. All the sailor was feeling
was numbness in the leg. Yet the location of Sophia's pain has re-
mained the same (the line of the zu-shao-yang meridian on the ex-
ternal side of the thigh and the leg). So has the accompanying emo-
tion, that is, the helpless despair.
Even though the client did not present the same symptoms as
those of the stranded sailor, she had the feeling of a common
'flavour' linking the two. This is quite characteristic of physical pains
which persist from one life to another. In similar cases, clients often
make comments such as, "It's not the same pain, but the feeling be-
hind it is the same" or "It's the same vibration." Such occurrences in
regression are an extremely favourable sign; they indicate a great
chance of improvement. They show that the client has contacted a
samskara underlying the physical trouble. It is therefore likely that an
improvement will take place once the samskara is released.
After this regression, the sciatic pain started to decrease sig-
nificantly, but not totally. Some more episodes related to the same
samskara were still to be discovered before a final healing could be
achieved. Here is one of the regressions that followed.

At the beginning of the regression, Sophia seems to be going through

a lot of pain. She is jerking and jumping as if struggling against in-
visible enemies.
What's happening now? -I can see people sitting around a fire.
Somebody has taken a burning stick. He uses it to bum me there.
[Sophia indicates a spot on the side of her right foot.] I'm sitting, and
they are holding me. It is the same helpless feeling. I'm trying to de-
fend myself, and then I stop fighting. [Sophia becomes still again.]
Why? -I know they are not doing it to hurt me. I know I have to go
through it. So I try to remain quiet. It looks like a cigar... now I don't
feel the pain anymore. The cigar is still there but the pain has be-
come much less. They did it as a treatment because I was wounded.
The man with the cigar was some kind of doctor.

74
 Samskaras and Physical Disorders

Is there any similarity between this pain and your sciatic pain? -Oh,
yes, very much the same! But then it was in the foot, not in the leg.
[In this present life,] I never feel pain in my foot.
What do these people look like? -Not big. Short dark hair. They are
living in the desert. There are some women with them. They laugh at
me gently and they give me something to drink. They say I have been
very lucky they found me and treated me. It was an accident. I have
been hit in the hip by something. A camel. I got kicked by a camel,
and I was lying in the desert, completely helpless, unable to move. It
is always the same feeling - I can't move, as if I was going to die
there. It's sheer despair.

In this regression there was a significant element; the spot in-

dicated by the client on her foot was the acupuncture point zu-shao-
yang 41. In the episode, the pain in the foot was felt quite precisely
along the line of this meridian. The sciatic pain Sophia had felt for
years was on the same meridian, but in the thigh and the leg, not in
the foot. It establishes an interesting continuity between the different
episodes - they all happen along the same acupuncture meridian, but
in different parts of it and with different modalities. This pattern is
not uncommon; I have observed it in a number of clients. Some peo-
ple seem to repeat ailments along the same meridian from one life to
another.
This session brought further improvement, but it was only af-
ter a few more regressions that a final cure was achieved. Here is
another important episode experienced by Sophia.

Where are you now? -I'm walking, I'm walking! I've left them and
I'm going by myself.
Who are they? -The tribe. They wanted me to stay with them, but it
did not feel right. It's me, but me in the future, not in this life. I've
hesitated a long time, and they were putting pressure on me to stay
with them. Like social pressure, the weight of habits and tradition. I
had to stay with them and be like them, but then I dared to leave. I
feel so free! I'm walking, I'm running along the hills and in a valley.
Now that I have made my decision my leg feels completely free. I

75
 Regression

don't have to be like them. I can just be myself, whatever they think.
I know I will never go back.

At the end of this ISIS process, Sophia's sciatic pain had com-
pletely disappeared, without any form of medical treatment, and it
never reappeared. She could not only walk for hours in the bush, but
also carry logs and take part in building projects. Yet surgeons had
previously identified such damage from her spinal X-ray that they
had given her a gloomy prognosis, even with surgery. This example
shows how wrong it would be to believe that ISIS can only improve
psychosomatic types of conditions, and not physical disorders.

6.5 No direct co"espondence between physical disorder and

samskara
So far, only examples with an obvious connection between the
samskara and the physical disorder have been examined. Yet it is
important to understand that in many cases, what is superimposed by
the samskara is quite different from the original imprint. In other
words, the pain or trouble generated by a samskara here and now
may be of a different nature from that experienced when the sam-
skara was contracted.

Case study- David, a thirty-four-year-old AIDS patient.

What are you feeling? -I'm falling in space. I don't have a body, I'm
just in a dark space, falling.
Where does that take you? -Into a strange place. You go there before
being born. You can see what is happening on the Earth from there. I
can see how I am going to have to go into a womb and all that mess.
I just do not want to go. I just want to stay there, in the space, but
there is no real choice. I have to go but I don't want to. I don't want
to go into the mess. I don't want to be born.
Have you sometimes felt the same thing, during your life? -I guess
it's always been with me, in the background, the feeling of not
wanting to be here.

76
 Samskaras and Physical Disorders

Tell me, what's the difference between that feeling and a death
wish? -I don't think there is much difference! Deep inside I know
that the only way to get out of here is to die.
Do you mean that you have been living all these years with a death
wish at the back of your mind? -Mm, yes, I guess so. [David
laughed and then became very silent for a minute.]
The next step of the regression process would have been to find the
source of the desire not to be on Earth, in other words the traumatic
imprint from which the death wish originated. However, this was to
be David's first and last regression. He had to be hospitalised before
our next appointment, and died a few days later.

The 'I-don 't-want-to-be-on-Earth' syndrome is far from rare.

Regression shows that a large number of people carry such sam-
skaric patterns with them, and only incarnate in their mother's womb
with the greatest reluctance. In many cases, however, these patterns
do not manifest as a death wish and do not create any major disease
- only a lack of motivation and a reluctance to get involved in
worldly occupations.
Let us be clear, I am not suggesting that regression can cure
AIDS! If I were to draw any conclusion from this case study, it is
that if a patient carries a major death wish, whatever the disease may
be, I don't see how a final solution can be brought to the problem
without dealing with the death wish, regardless of other treatments.
Once an illness has appeared in the physical body, erasing the nega-
tive mental conditioning may not be enough to bring about healing. It
is therefore quite sensible to use forms of therapy that will improve
the physical state. But would a physical treatment by itself be
enough? Is it reasonable to hope to cure a disease without dealing
with its cause? And even if such a cure was possible, would it be a
lasting one or just a palliative measure before the real problem reap-
peared somewhere else?

6.6 Can one heal a disease without treating its cause?

Primum non nocere, "First, don't make things worse," was an
essential principle of Hippocrates' medicine. Nowadays, unfortu-
nately, it seems to have been forgotten. Conventional modem medi-

77
 Regression

cine aims at getting rid of patients' symptoms. Little, if any consid-

eration is given to the fact that some of these symptoms may actually
be used by the body in an attempt to correct deeper disorders. When
this is the case, suppressing the symptom does not necessarily help
the patient. If the real cause (which may have nothing to do with the
apparent symptom) is not dealt with, what happens to the patient
once the symptom is 'cured'? This question is particularly relevant
as far as samskara-related diseases are concerned.
Suppose a physical disorder is due to a samskara. The emo-
tional charge of the samskara finds a temporary outlet through a
physical symptom. Suppose the patient is given pills that kill the
symptoms without dealing with the samskara. What will happen?
The samskara will have to find a new outlet to express its emotional
charge. This will manifest through other symptoms, either mental or
physical, which may well end up being worse than the original trou-
ble! Sooner or later, new disorders will appear, possibly with a much
greater intensity, for the natural release of the emotional charge has
been blocked. This means one does not necessarily help patients by
getting rid of their symptoms, if one does not give them a chance to
get in touch with the samskaras behind them. The following case
study is typical of a medical history that could have gone on end-
lessly, had the samskara behind it not been neutralised.

Case study - Alexander is twenty-seven and has always been

quite healthy, apart from an accumulation of problems all located in
the same area: the right side of the abdomen. At the age of eight, he
started suffering from recurrent pain in the right iliac area. One day
the pain suddenly got acutely worse, and a surgeon decided that it
was probably a case of appendicitis. Alexander underwent an opera-
tion for nothing, for the appendix proved to be perfectly normal. Yet,
five days after the operation, the scar broke open again, and a second
operation was needed. A big scar resulted, which worsened the
problems of energy circulation in the area
Five years later, exactly the same pain reappeared, but much more
intense. This time all the surgeons agreed that it really looked like
appendicitis- apart from the fact that the appendix had already been

78
 Samskaras and Physical Disorders

cut out. Various tests were performed to try and find a cause, but
without any success.
At the age of twenty-four, the young man went through violent at-
tacks of renal colic, always on the right side. He even ended up
passing a stone, confinning the diagnosis of lithiasis.
Even though the surgeons' diagnoses had changed with time, this
young man had always felt that it was the same pain that kept com-
ing back. The intensity was sometimes more, sometimes less, but the
'flavour' of the pain was exactly the same. The same 'flavour' was
immediately identified when he reexperienced having been mortally
wounded.

What are you feeling? -Despair. This time I'm not going to fight.
I'm ready to die. I can see them coming. It's so easy, I just wait one
little second instead of shooting. They shoot first. It feels as if I'm
already out of my body, looking at the situation from above. I can see
the man shooting, and the bullet travelling incredibly slowly, and
reaching my body. The pain in my right side, it's my old pain, ex-
actly the same. It pulls me back into my body, for a second. Every-
thing becomes black. I can't see anything after that.
After four more regressions on the same episode the pains disap-
peared and never came back.

6.7 Samskaras and the genesis of disease

In this chapter, we have looked at a few examples of physical
disorders that were caused by samskaras. This obviously leads to
questions such as "Are all diseases due to samskaras?" and "Which
diseases can be cured through regression?"
Our physical body is an extraordinarily well-constructed and
durable instrument, considering we do not take much care of it, and
that it usually takes more than half a century before we wreck it. In
terms of robustness, not many of our technological achievements can
compete. The body is also capable of many adjustments. For in-
stance, one can live very well with only ten percent of one kidney,
and one lung is plenty for a prosperous existence. For a disease to

79
 Regression

take place, it is usually not one single factor that is needed, but an
accumulation of causes, some internal and some external.
It would be unreasonable, and a trifle dogmatic, to deny the
importance of external factors in the genesis of disease. If your body
absorbs more than a certain quantity of radiation, either from a man-
made nuclear source or due to the depletion of the ozone layer, it is
quite likely to manifest cancer. If you ingest certain toxins, you cre-
ate irreversible body tissue injury, and so on. Nevertheless, it may be
that several of these external factors reach you because you attract
them. For instance we have seen how it is possible that accidents do
not happen entirely by chance. We also know that when there is an
epidemic, some people don't fall sick even though exposed to the
germ. Clearly, certain individual factors greatly modify your sensi-
tivity to external causes of disease.
It would be extremely difficult to try to determine in a scien-
tific manner the part played by sarnskaras in the origin of diseases.
Let's face it, nowadays, in the sphere of biology and psychology,
something is declared scientific if it works on rats and if one can
produce statistics about it. In that respect, rats do have sarnskaras.
And one could probably do statistics on regression. But there is an
obvious need for new models of understanding in the field of life-
sciences in order to grasp why different individuals may react so
differently to similar external conditions. The material emerging
through regression certainly brings many elements in order to answer
this question. From what we have seen of sarnskaras, we can draw
the following conclusions:
1) Some sarnskaras do create physical disorders, and not only
'functional' ones. All kinds of ailments may result from the influence
of sarnskaras, from simple headaches to cancer.
2) Once a sarnskara has generated a physical disorder, the lat-
ter gains its own momentum and won't necessarily disappear just by
dealing with the sarnskara. Therefore, it seems logical to implement
any appropriate physical treatment that may be required. But treating
physical disorders without dealing with the sarnskaras behind them
won't solve the patient's problems; it may even make them worse.
3) In most cases, it takes quite a long time before a disease
develops out of a sarnskara. For years. the disorder is purely func-
tional, or there is just an 'uncomfortable feeling' somewhere in the
80
 Samskaras and Physical Disorders

body, without any other symptoms. The earlier the problem is dealt
with, the more chance there is that the physical disorder will be ter-
minated just by releasing the samskara, without the need for any
other treatment.
4) Feeling a 'spot' somewhere in your body does not indicate
that a disease will one day arise in this particular area! Firstly, most
samskaras never generate any disease or physical disorder. Secondly,
if they do create some kind of aihnent, the 'spot' where a samskara
is felt in regre·ssion or in meditation is often located in a different
area from the physical disorder.

The accumulation of samskaras in the astral body has reached

a level that could easily be called 'collective neurosis'. Our society is
sick with samskaras, and on the brink of disaster. By a systematic
eradication of samskaras through regression, incalculable future
problems- both mental and physical- can be avoided.
What kind of diseases can be cured by regression? As with
most forms of healing, the efficiency does not depend so much on
the type of disease, but on the type of patient. Regression does not
require that you believe in past lives, but it does require an open
mind and a certain determination to face problems instead of trying
to escape them. Falling sick is a way many people use to avoid
looking at the source of their inner conflicts. If this is the case, suc-
cess can only come if the patient is ready to acknowledge and own
the conflicts- and not everyone is ready to do that.
I have seen regression bring spectacular results in a vast range
of physical disorders, from skin troubles to abdominal tumours, from
bladder incontinence to certain forms of paralysis. I have witnessed
many improvements that amazed fellow physicians or made them
pretend nothing had happened, because the results were irreconcil-
able with their present understanding of disease. However, I would
certainly not present regression as a panacea. For I have also seen it
to be inefficient in bringing physical relief for many other patients
suffering from exactly the same types of disease.
To conclude this chapter, it may be of interest to ponder on a
simple fact I have observed over the years. When working with ISIS,
the clients who seem to go through the most spectacular healings are

81
 Regression

usually those who do not use the technique for the purpose of healing
themselves, but for knowing themselves.

82
 CHAPTER 7

THE END OF SAMSKARAS

7.1 Turning snakes into ropes

A significant result of ISIS is to make you become aware of
the presence and the action of samskaras. By understanding the
mechanisms of samskaras and analysing your emotional behaviour,
you will identify certain patterns. Then through ISIS a number of
totally unsuspected samskaras will be revealed. Some traumatic im-
prints of your past will be brought back to your consciousness, and
you will immediately be able to make connections with present emo-
tions and conditioned behaviour. The simple fact of seeing how a
wrong mechanism operates in your mind already does half the work
of neutralising it. The samskara is still there, superimposing its emo-
tions on your awareness - but you can see it happening, and there-
fore it becomes much less of a problem.
There are many reasons why this is so. When the source of a
pain cannot be recognised, the pain automatically tends to be magni-
fied. Suppose you are on a beach and you put on your shirt after
swimming. Suddenly, you feel a stabbing pain in the left side of your
chest. It is so intense that your breath is taken away and you have to
sit down. Immediately you start thinking of a heart attack or some
other terrible disease, and a chain of associations follows - hospital,
health insurance, and so on. Despair takes over! Then one minute
later, you suddenly realise that a wasp was trapped inside your shirt,
and that the pain came from having been stung. This brings instant
relief! The 'injury' is exactly the same, but your suffering drops by
more than half. The reason is simple; a few seconds ago you had a
heart attack, and now you have just been stung by an insect. Even

83
 Regression

though the cause of the physical pain is exactly the same, your suf-
fering is greatly diminished.
A classic example from the Hindu tradition illustrates this
pattern. It is a story told by many masters, from a text of Vedanta
called the A$!avakra-GYta. This GYta was named after the great
sage A$!avakra who was physically 'eight times crippled' (a$!a =
eight, vakra = twisted), and yet was one of the great teachers of
eternal bliss of his time. A$!avakra used the example of a snake that
creates a big turmoil at a meeting. When the snake is discovered, the
crowd is panic-stricken; everyone starts screaming and running in all
directions. Then someone suddenly finds out that the snake is not a
snake, but a coiled rope! Immediately, the agitation stops. Everything
goes back to normal, and the people start laughing at their own reac-
tions.
Each time you are afflicted by an emotion, the fact of seeing
the samskara behind it completely changes your perspective, as
when the snake becomes a rope, or as when the heart attack turns
into an insect bite. It is not your boss or your boyfriend who is being
cruel, it is not the world that is deliberately trying to hurt you. It is
just a little mechanism inside that is playing its prerecorded message.
It is a samskara, and nothing more.
However, a mere intellectual understanding of these processes
is not going to help you much. A person trying to apply these prin-
ciples without the direct experience of regression (or some other
metaphysical way of consciously exploring deeply-rooted samskaric
imprints) would be similar to a man who, facing a snake, tries to
convince himself, "It is not a serpent, it is a rope". The whole enter-
prise would turn into a mockery. What you need is to be able to see
the samskaras and reconnect with them consciously, which is exactly
what ISIS allows you to do. For the 'magic' (maya) of the sam-
skaras is such that one may cheat oneself, but one cannot cheat them.
As long as you do not see that the snake is a rope, the rope will bite
you just as violently as the serpent would. It is by practising a tech-
nique such as ISIS and watching your reactions during your daily
activities that you will move towards freedom, not by reading books
about the topic.
The example of the snake and the rope also allows you to un-
derstand why young children are so vulnerable to emotions. Their
84
 The End of Samskaras

logical mind is not yet developed. When something happens to them,

they have no way of rationalising - no protective barriers; therefore,
each time they come to mistake a rope for a snake, there is no way of
getting them to see reason. The situation may be quite harmless, but
to them it is as if their life was threatened. They can only panic, as
you would do if you were attacked by some unknown beast in the
middle of the night and had no way to escape or defend yourself.
This explains why minor circumstances can create major samskaras
in young children.

7.2 Samskaras are ridiculously small

There is another reason why seeing samskaras automatically
neutralises a great deal of suffering; no matter how big the emotions
arising from them may be, the samskaras themselves are nothing
more than tiny seeds, ridiculously small compared to the upheavals
they generate in your consciousness. Impulses arising from sam-
skaras are artificially amplified by the astral body, as when an image
is endlessly reflected by a set of mirrors. Were it not for this mecha-
nism, emotional upheavals simply could not happen, or at least, they
would never reach the same intensity.
The ISIS techniques aim at reaching a direct perception of the
samskaras as seeds in the astral body. Before you can be shaken by
anger or any other emotion, a wave has to arise from a samskara. Let
us refer back to the sequence we previously described: stimulus ~
samskara ~ reaction/emotion.
At the core of our method of regression is the ability to per-
ceive the waves of emotion coming out of the seed, or samskara.
This requires the development of new qualities. To begin with, you
must learn to perceive how samskaras make themselves felt in your
body of energy. This is one of the first results from practising ISIS-
you clearly feel your samskaras as 'spots' in various parts of your
body of energy. This perception is neither vague nor ethereal, but as
tangible as that of heat when putting your hand close to a fire. Sud-
denly samskaras stop being theoretical, you can feel them for your-
self.
Another essential quality that needs to be developed is a cer-
tain awareness during daily activities. Whatever your method of spir-
itual development may be, without the cultivation of awareness

85
 Regression

nothing decisive can happen. If you try to work on your samskaras

without watching them when they manipulate you, the fight is lost in
advance. A key part of the process is to watch your own reactions in
various situations in your life.
This does not mean that you have to suppress your emotions.
This method does not ask you to stop being angry, yelling at your
friends, or breaking plates. But while going through these daily rou-
tines, what you have to do is to be aware, meaning to watch yourself
getting emotional and to feel the sarnskara behind the emotion. Per-
sistent vigilance is required during your daily activities. In this
awareness work, you do not need to see why and how the samskara
originated. You do not need to reexperience the episode during
which it was imprinted. All you need is to feel the seed of the sam-
skara in your body of energy- the spot- and to sense the emotional
wave coming out of it.
This process does not require special gifts or supernatural per-
ception, but it does require strong perseverance. It implies that hour
after hour, minute after minute, you watch your reactions to people
and situations. If you persist in this direction, you will gradually be-
come able to see the emotional waves at earlier and earlier stages of
their emergence out of the samskaras - a great achievement. You
will then discover that between the triggering of the angry samskara
and the moment when you start breaking plates, there is quite a long
way to go. The problem is that, if you had not done the work of
awareness, all the reactions leading from the triggering of the sam-
skara to breaking the crockery would have taken place extremely
quickly, without you noticing anything. By systematically watching
your reactions, you become aware of a number of intermediary
stages during which the emotion is artificially amplified.
A great discovery is that the emotional wave, if you can see it
as it first comes out of the samskara, is unexpectedly tiny. It is just a
little vibration, it has hardly any emotional flavour attached to it.
Then it takes all the magic (miiyii) of your astral body to over-
amplify this micro-vibration into a proper emotion, and to make you
react and do all sorts of things that you would never choose to do if
moved only by your own free will. Moreover, a lot of this amplifica-
tion is not even due to what is related to the sarnskara itself; it is due
to a kind of habit of your astral body. The astral body magnifies
86
 The End of Sarnskaras

emotional vibrations; it is the way it has been conditioned to operate.

Also, everything happens so quickly, you do not even realise that it is
happening.
The situation becomes quite different if you systematically
practise being aware. Each time the emotion takes place, you can see
it evolving, phase after phase. You can even anticipate each phase
while the process is happening: "I'm feeling the spot of the sam-
skara, so I know I'm going to feel the vibration coming out of it
soon. Now I'm feeling the vibration, and I know it is going to grow.
Now the vibration has grown, so I know I am going to start feeling
the emotion. That's it, the first hue of anger is appearing in my mind.
Now it is growing, I can feel the anger vibration reaching my blood
and flowing through it; just a bit more to go and I'll start yelling.
That's it, I'm yelling and trembling. I'm going to start throwing the
plates soon."
Of course, once your awareness has become that refined, it is
highly unlikely that you will reach the stage of throwing the plates so
readily. Under constant observation, many repetitive emotional
patterns become so unbearable that they end up dropping. You
see yourself always reacting the same way: "Now I'm going to feel
that again. And then I'm going to say the same words, once more.
And then I'm going to do that again", and so on. If you realise you
have been carried away by destructive emotions only after they have
happened, there is not much you can do about it. If you become
aware while it is happening, the situation is quite different.
Another important outcome of being aware is that certain
mechanisms of amplification by the astral body simply cannot take
place. Let us look again at the diagrammatic representation of the
subtle bodies we introduced in Chapter 4.

87
 Regression

The stimulus is received

through the senses of the physi-
cal body, transmitted through
the etheric body, and reaches
A Astral
Upper
Complex
the astral body. Then the action
of the samskara is to make the
Etheric
impulse bypass the layer of Lower
self-awareness. A chain of re- Complex
Physical
actions takes place inside your
astral body, which corresponds
to the amplification mechanisms we have just described. H, however,
the layer of self-awareness is not bypassed, then the scheme be-
comes completely different. The astral body loses its supremacy, and
much of its 'chemistry' is automatically neutralised by the light of
the Higher Ego. This means that if your self-awareness is strong
enough, then the mechanical reactions of the astral body fall flat,
automatically. The weak point of the astral body is that it can
operate freely only if you are unaware. The more self-aware you
become, meaning the more you involve the vehicle at the top of our
diagram when receiving sensations and perceptions from the world,
the less the astral body can manipulate you like a puppet. The leader-
ship of the Self takes over and the power of conditioning drops.
It must be stressed again that, in this process, no suppression
is implemented. H some emotions stop occurring, it is not because
you are doing anything to block them. It is because their maya has
fallen away. Anyhow, what is the value of an emotion that vanishes
as soon as you become aware of it? H an emotion disappears just by
looking at it, it cannot be very real. This is another way of under-
standing the difference between emotions and feelings. When a
feeling arises inside you, the more aware you are, the stronger
the feeling becomes. When an emotion arises, the more aware
you are, the quicker it tends to vanish. H you can experience this
yourself over and over again, the illusory and artificial nature of re-
actional emotions will become so clear that your views on what is
real or unreal in your psyche will change completely.
Let us try to understand more precisely the difference between
clear vision and suppression. as far as emotional waves are con-

88
 The End of Samskaras

cemed. When an emotion arises from a samskara, it is quite tiny and

harmless. The stronger the awareness of the Self, the less it is possi-
ble for this minute vibration to blossom into a major reaction with
adrenalin discharge, etc. It just remains as it is, and fades away. In-
stead of turning into an elephant, it remains the size of a cockroach.
Suppression corresponds to quite a different mechanism: the vibra-
tion blossoms into an emotion, anger for instance, and then you hide
the anger instead of expressing it. The main problem is that the anger
energy is likely to play the kind of havoc inside you that Vedantic
masters would compare to that of a mad elephant in your backyard.

7.3 Reaction versus awareness

The scheme we have just described suggests that at any stage
of the development of an emotional wave you can either react or be
aware, but not both. There are times when you are not aware and the
reactions run their course mechanically. But when you are aware, the
chain reaction stops. The original vibration arising from the samskara
does not blossom into a fully-matured emotion, it gently dissipates.
Of course in the beginning, the situation isn't always so clear-cut. In
a number of cases you are aware that you are reacting, but even
though you are aware, the chain reaction still follows its course to a
certain extent, and reactional emotions still take place.
In this process, there is a conflict between two different parts
of yourself: on the one hand, self-awareness, and on the other hand,
the astral body and its automatic responses. The more the light of the
Self shines in your self-awareness, the more it neutralises the wrong
chemical reactions generated by your astral body. Yet there is a vi-
cious circle, because it is precisely the samskaras which prevent the
light of the Self from shining! So the process of liberation is twofold:
on the one hand, reinforcing the awareness of the Self, and on the
other hand, decreasing the power of the reacting mind by neutralis-
ing as many samskaras as possible. The first part corresponds to the
various processes of meditation, initiation, rituals, and so on, while
the second can be dealt with through ISIS.
In an over-simplified way, one could say that in the beginning
of the work, consciousness consists only of the reactions of the astral
body with no self-awareness. At the end of the work the self-
awareness of the Higher Self radiates unobstructed, for the reactions

89
 Regression

of the astral body have been eradicated, and replaced by feelings.

While accomplishing the work, various proportions of both self-
awareness and reactions are present and interactive.

7.4 Releasing emotional charges

To weaken the grasp of the reacting mind, one thing will prove
particularly potent - the release of the emotional charges associated
with a limited number of extremely powerful samskaras. Some sam-
skaras are endowed with devastating emotional energies, either be-
cause they were imprinted during dramatic circumstances - if you
have been tortured, for instance, or if you have seen your children die
in front of you - or because traumatic circumstances have hit you
when you were especially vulnerable, as in the case of a young child
who does not have the protection of a rational mind and magnifies
some events out of proportion with their real nature. Those capital
samskaras are stored with momentous emotional charges which raise
the level of tension in the whole astral layer.
H you examine the way in which the reacting mind operates,
you will see that everything in it responds to a law of polarities. A
common point to all emotions is that they either attract you towards
something, or repel you from it. An emotion is never neutral; it al-
ways has a polarity that pushes you in one direction or pulls you in
another. This could be a good definition of an emotion: an astral
polarity that compels or repels. From the point of view of the as-
tral body, it is not the direction that matters, but the fact that there is
a polarity, a charge. In simple words, to the astral body it does not
fundamentally matter whether you love/desire someone or whether
you hate/despise them. What matters is the intensity with which the
inner charge is felt, and how irresistibly you are thrown into loving or
hating.
This leads us to discern two distinct reasons why an emotion
takes you over. Of course, there is the particular samskara that is
triggered and reacts through the emotion; and behind this samskara
there is a certain episode of your childhood, or your past lives, or
both. Another essential reason, however, is also the general 'voltage'
of your astral body. The more capital samskaras you have, the more
their emotional charges will feed all your other samskaras and make
them react violently. Consequently, as soon as you start releasing

90
 The End of Samskaras

your capital samskaras, your emotional life becomes considerably

simpler and much less out of control. lbis is because the general
tension, the 'voltage' of the astral body drops significantly.
A further consequence is that an emotional problem can never
be considered independently of the whole emotional layer. If you yell
at your partner, it is probably not only due to the particular samskara
related to this angry emotion, but also to several monsters of the
depths. It is the charges of these mega-samskaras that feed your an-
ger. Therefore only a global approach, dealing with the reacting mind
as a whole, can bring real improvement.
As your vision expands you will come to realise that the situa-
tion is further complicated by the interactions with your environment.
It is not only the emotional charges of your own capital samskaras
that keep the voltage of your astral body artificially high, but also
those of the people with whom you live and work. lbis influence
should not be exaggerated, for it is active only within certain limits.
Moreover, it is not healthy to blame your neighbours for your own
moods. Spiritual history is full of people who reached metaphysical
freedom in the most adverse circumstances. Nevertheless, the astral
body is not as separate a layer as the physical body is, and it does
receive emotional impulses and energies from our environment.
Once more, this level of understanding should not be used as an ex-
cuse, and everyone remains responsible for the way they behave. For
if your astral body was completely transformed, it would not be af-
fected by disorganised collective astral waves. Yet this may give you
clues as to why you may suddenly start feeling depressed or 'heavy'
when certain world events causing widespread distress occur.

7.5 The metaphysical shift

Having discussed how necessary it is to cleanse the astral
body and its many samskaras to reach freedom, it is now time to
emphasise the reverse statement. If the work deals only with sam-
skaras, it ends up going round in circles. If you focus only on emo-
tions without ever experiencing higher states of consciousness, then
you might well end up working on your emotions forever. lbis, of
course, applies not only to regression, but to any form of psychother-
apy or psychological exploration.

91
 Regression

We have discussed how, if you meditate without dealing with

your samskaras in a systematic way, there is a major risk of reaching
a certain height and never being able to go beyond it, because you
are tied to samskaras like a boat to an anchor. But if you do the op-
posite, if you work only on samskaras without meditating and devel-
oping higher states of consciousness, then you reach a certain depth
of emotions and you stagnate. You clear some emotional blockages,
you resolve some issues, and then you fall into a stalemate because
your consciousness is lacking higher light to work more in depth.
There is a correspondence between how high you can ascend and
how deeply you can descend. As long as you are not in touch with
higher qualities of consciousness, it is extremely difficult to reach the
deepest layers of the astral body and its capital samskaras.
The problem is insidious because one can be completely
blocked in one's progression and still have lots of emotional releases,
which may give the false impression that one is advancing. You
probably know some people in that situation. They get caught in
some form of emotional therapy and never seem to be able to get out
of it. They become better and better at expressing emotions, they can
cry more and more, scream louder and louder. They keep on attend-
ing workshops in which they 'clear heaps'. But ten years later they
are still working on similar emotional blockages, attending therapy
workshops and 'clearing heaps'- nothing fundamental has changed
in their life. This means that their work is purely horizontal. They
explore more and more issues related to the same level of their mind,
and are never able to go deeper.
When working on samskaras, one fact should never be for-
gotten- samskaras are endless! It is not by clearing more and more
samskaras that one gets somewhere, but by clearing deeper and
deeper ones, until one reaches the very source of all the graspings of
the reacting mind. This cannot happen without regularly entering
higher states of awareness of the Self, which usually implies some
form of meditation. This applies not only to regression, but to any
form of psychotherapy or psychological exploration. If a metaphysi-
cal opening does not take place at one stage, the process will go on
forever without ever reaching a final resolution of the problems.
Fundamentally, it is not on the emotional level that emotional prob-
lems can be solved, but through a metaphysical opening.
92
 The End of Samskaras

Consequently, for a real transformation of the psyche to take

place, a strictly psychological form of work is insufficient. The more
you incorporate a metaphysical dimension into the work, the more
chances there are of a real breakthrough. A key point about the ISIS
techniques is that they take you into various experiences of expan-
sion of consciousness, of which reexperiencing past-life episodes is
but a by-product. For example, the ISIS techniques allow you to
travel far into the inner space and to peep into intermediary worlds,
in which you have journeyed between death and birth. They also en-
able you to get in touch with angels and recognise the influence of
various non-physical beings. All this creates an awakening of your
spiritual vision. In order to understand what makes people change in
the ISIS process, it is important to realise that the awakening of inner
vision is at least as important as neutralising samskaras. Higher vi-
sion allows you to continue the process of psychological exploration
in a vertical way. Instead of wandering endlessly around the same
type of issues, it allows you to dive into the deepest layers of the as-
tral body, and reach metaphysical experiences of the Self.
Of course the more emotional charges you can neutralise, the
better. Clearing samskaras will bring definite improvements to all
aspects of your life: physical, mental/emotional and spiritual. How-
ever, in itself, clearing samskaras is not enough. If you want to de-
rive the most benefit from the ISIS regression techniques, it should
be clear that their purpose is far greater than just dealing with sam-
skaras. ISIS will take you on a number of journeys in your time-
track, and in different worlds and planes of consciousness. A deep
maturation of your spiritual being and of your inner vision will result
from these experiences. They will bring about as much change in
you as the mechanical clearing of some samskaras, if not more.
As far as spiritual transformation is concerned, there is no di-
rect causality. When dealing with day to day material tasks, you can
draw up lists of problems and solve them one by one. As a result,
your enterprises progress. You can see how solving each particular
problem has helped you to advance. In spiritual work, however, pro-
gress is far from being so mechanical. There are problems and you
work at clearing them, but real changes do not seem to come as a
direct consequence of one particular process. You engage in various
practices, and at some stage you realise that you have become differ-
93
 Regression

ent, and that a number of your past problems have disappeared. It is

often impossible to pin-point when, how and why they have disap-
peared. You have gone through a deep maturation and you have be-
come different, slowly. You have shifted into a different quality
of being, and in this new condition yesterday's problems simply
can't be found anymore. You realise that the problems you used to
have were the consequence of how you were, more than anything
else. Having become different, these problems are no longer with
you.

7.6 The end of samskaras

What happens to samskaras after you have neutralised them
through practising regression and awareness? They do not disappear,
they remain as seeds. 'This is already a major improvement- there
were twenty-four elephants in your loungeroom, and you turned
them into twenty-four cockroaches. That is going to make life much
easier. Yet, even though neutralised, the seeds remain; and even if
they were to disappear completely, others would appear. Samskaras
are like waves in the sea. 'Destroy' a wave and another one emerges,
and so on forever. Samskaras are endless, and as we saw there is a
very simple reason for this - the very nature of the manas/mind is to
be 'samskared'. The very substance of the astral body is made of
samskaras. Spending your life exploring one samskara after another
cannot make sense.
The solution is of a different nature - shifting into a different
layer of consciousness altogether. One cannot empty an ocean. One
can make it somehow less murky by eradicating the main sources of
pollution. However, the real answer to the problem is different -
come out of the murky water and start existing in the open air. 'This
means a shift of consciousness from emotions to feelings, or in other
words from manas to buddhi, from the unaware consciousness of the
astral body to the awareness of the transformed astral body (the
Spirit-Self of Steiner's terminology), in which the Self radiates like a
sun. 'This corresponds to an alchemical transformation through which
the astral body is replaced by the transubstantiated astral body.
'This transformation is gradual, and for a long period the re-
acting mind and its samskaras are still there, but they become less
and less important. The reacting mind progressively loses its capac-
94
 The End of Samskaras

ity to grasp you with its mechanistic routines. Your self-awareness

grows in intensity and presence, up to the point where, being no
longer obstructed by the reacting mind, self-awareness becomes
awareness of the Self.
As the transformation takes place, you gradually lose your ca-
pacity for suffering. A beautiful gift you can hand to children is to
help them learn the difference between pain and suffering. In the
present human condition, pain is unavoidable. As long as you inhabit
a physical body, you have to experience pain from time to time.
Suffering is of a different nature. It is a reaction of the manas/mind
that magnifies the pain and adds various emotional frills and thrills to
it. In many cases, pain is only transient; but if one wishes one can
always add to it and suffer more - there is no limit. This know ledge
can easily be communicated to young children. For instance when
they hurt themselves a little, mimic terrible suffering. Roll on the
floor for fun, yell loudly, saying, "I suffer, I suffer" using all your
melodramatic resources - they will get the message. The irony, of
course, is that adults do the same all the time on another level, when
they keep magnifying insignificant vibrations into huge emotions.
One of the lessons of ISIS is that even if pain is unavoidable,
suffering is not; it can be completely eradicated. This is not a remote
metaphysical ideal, but an achievable goal that you can reasonably
set yourself, if you are prepared to put the method into practice with
perseverance. If you combine ISIS with watching your reactions
systematically, it won't be long before a substantial part of your suf-
fering drops, having been exposed as unnecessary grasping of the
mind.

95
 CHAPTER 8

REMEMBERING PAST LIVES

8.1 Why don't we remember our past lives?

Before analysing the mechanisms by which past lives can be
remembered, let us look at why most people, under usual circum-
stances, are unable to remember them.
Firstly, people are unable to remember most of their dreams. If
they are not even able to remember their dreams, how could we ex-
pect them to remember their former lives? Fundamentally, the rea-
sons for not remembering past lives are the same as those for not
remembering dreams. To understand this situation fully, let us reca-
pitulate a few details of subtle anatomy, that is, the knowledge of the
subtle bodies that constitute the totality of a human being.
1) Everyone is familiar with the physical body- the one that
surgeons can open and cut. As it is made of the nutrients we eat, the
Vedantic tradition has called it anna-maya-kosa, the 'sheath-made-
of-food'.!
2) Beyond the physical is the etheric body, made of vital en-
ergy which is the Qi of traditional Chinese medicine and the prarza
of Sanskrit literature. Hence the name prarza-maya-kosa, 'envelope-
made-of-prarza' given to this layer in Vedanta. Just as water perme-
ates a sponge, so the envelope of prarza, or etheric body, penetrates
the whole of the physical body.2 It also extends a little beyond the
limits of the physical body.

1 Anna= food; maya= made of; kosa =sheath or envelope.

2The hardest substances of the physical body, mainly the bones, are
not penetrated by the etheric as much as the soft tissues are.

96
 Remembering Past Lives

As long as you are alive, your physical and etheric bodies

never separate. Therefore we can regard the two of them as an indi-
vidualised structure, which for our purpose will be called the 'lower
complex'.
3) Beyond the physical and etheric bodies is the astral body,
layer of the manas/mind, or reacting mind, in which emotions and
most of our thoughts take place. As discussed earlier, the samskaras
have their seat in the astral body.
4) The Ego is at the centre of all the other bodies. At a later
stage, when dealing with more advanced alchemical processes, I will
make clear distinctions between Ego, Self and Spirit. But in the
context of this book, these distinctions would not be of any real use.
So, to simplify, we can consider the words Ego (or Higher Ego), Self
(or Higher Self) and Spirit as synonymous and referring to the im-
mortal flame which is the core of human beings.
It is important to note that the astral body and the Ego are
closely tied. One could even say that the Ego is tangled in the web of
the astral body. That is why when you close your eyes, unless you
have followed a path of self-transformation, you are not able to dis-
criminate what in your consciousness comes from the mind and what
belongs to the Self. You may know intellectually that you have a
Higher Self, and that this Self is the background of your conscious-
ness, like a white screen on which various movies are projected. But
in practice the Self is hidden by the reacting mind, so that it is im-
possible for you to connect directly with its light. Therefore the first
purpose of a spiritual path is to separate the Self from the astral
body.
As long as this has not happened, to cite an analogy often
found in Sanskrit literature, the two remain mixed like milk and wa-
ter in the same glass. The astral body and the Ego are bound to-
gether. Consequently we can simplify
our four-storey structure by splitting
it into two: ~ Upper
Complex
Aatnll
• an upper complex, made of
the astral body and the Self, which do Etherlc
Lower
not separate as long as you have not Complex
Physical
'found your Self';

97
 Regression

• a lower complex, made of the physical and etheric bodies,

which do not separate as long as you are alive.

8.2 FuU of holes like a colander, or gruyere cheese

What happens when you sleep? The lower complex (physical
body + etheric body) stays in bed, while the upper complex (astral
body + Ego) departs and wanders into different spheres. The two
complexes remain linked by what some esotericists call the silver
cord. So the waking and sleeping states correspond to two different
directions taken by the astral body. During the day the astral body
cognizes the physical world through the physical senses of the physi-
cal body. During the night it withdraws from the physical body and
directs its activity towards the various astral worlds, which results in
dreams and other deeper states of consciousness. When it is time to
wake up, the astral body leaves the astral sphere and re-enters the
physical body.
The reason why we do not remember much of our dreams and
other nightly astral activities is that in the present stage of human
development, the astral body leaks like a colander. It is full of holes,
like gruyere cheese. Moreover, the bridges of communication be-
tween the lower complex (physical body+ etheric body) and the as-
tral body are not properly developed. So even if the astral body can
retain some of the night's experiences, the corresponding memories
have little chance of passing through and reaching your waking con-
sciousness.
In its present condition, the astral body is painfully lacking
structure, and even more, lacking unity. It appears like a bunch of ill-
matched patches. We could compare it to a jigsaw puzzle whose
pieces do not fit with one another. Each piece of the puzzle has its
own samskaras and its own emotions, desires, attractions and dis-
likes. Each piece corresponds to a different facet of your personality.
In terms of past lives, each of these pieces has been wrought at dif-
ferent periods of your past, under the influence of various life experi-
ences.
In practice this means that as a psychological being, you are
made of parts, each with its own flavour, its own past and its own
desires. For instance, a part of yourself may love to read books about
spirituality, while another part is interested in gambling on the
98
 Remembering Past Lives

horses, and yet another in travelling around the world. Each of these
parts is one of the multiple 'characters' that constitute your person-
ality. The word character is quite appropriate, for in ancient Greek it
meant a mark impressed, engraved or stamped, as on a coin or a seal
- which fits very well with the mechanisms we have described about
sarnskaras. In this context we could define a character as a bunch of
sarnskaras imprinted on a particular piece of the astral body, and
working at satisfying its own desires according to its own past.
The drama of life is that each of these characters works for it-
self and does not care about what the other parts want. For instance
the part that loves gambling does not care about the wisdom de-
scribed in the books your spiritual character hoards. So the interplay
of the characters will often put you in painfully contradictory situa-
tions. Each character is like a potential dictator which aims at taking
over your life and transforming it according to its own likes and dis-
likes. For example, the 'reader' in you wouldn't mind turning your
house into a gigantic library, while the 'gambler' would love to see
you get a job as a sports reporter. The only common interest shared
by the characters is to alienate your Self as much as possible, be-
cause if the Self was to start ruling, it would mean the end of any
possible supremacy for them. Consequently the reality of life for
most people is that the Self is anaesthetised and kept dormant in the
background, while different characters fight for rulership.

8.3 The exploded mosaic

What happens when you die? The up-
per complex (astral body + Ego) separates
from the lower one (physical body + etheric
body), just as when you fall asleep. But this
time the silver cord is broken, and the lower
complex is abandoned. The physical body
starts to rot, and the etheric body disinte-
grates into the global etheric layer of the
planet. It would be inaccurate to believe that
the upper complex will go and travel in
spiritual worlds and come back just as it is for a new incarnation,
after perhaps a bit of cleansing and a few improvements made by
angels.

99
 Regression

The reality of the situation is dramatically different. When

most people die, their astral body is turned into chaos, due to the lack
of unity we have described. The multiplicity of the characters is not
only functional; it reflects the fact that the very structure of the astral
body is a mosaic, or patches artificially kept together as long as you
are alive. When the time of death comes, this illusion of unity is dis-
pelled. The facade of the personality falls and the astral body is expe-
rienced for what it really is- an exploded mosaic.
Practically, this means that soon after the silver cord is broken,
most of the astral bits are going to fly away, each in their own direc-
tion, like birds escaping when you open their cage.
For the person who has just died this is quite a dramatic expe-
rience. Picture yourself dead, floating in the purple astral space. You
see your 'reader' character move away from you in one direction, the
'gambler' in another, the part of yourself that could speak Japanese
in another... You are literally stripped, dismembered. The parts that
were more related to enjoyment, sexuality and instincts move to-
wards the vital worlds, while your mental parts depart for the mental
worlds - and what is left? Your Ego, or Higher Self, with a few
remnant shreds of astral body. Then the stripped Ego can start its
journey into the worlds of the Spirit.
1bis explains what Gurdjieff meant when he said that for the
great majority of human beings, it does not make any sense to talk
about reincarnation, simply because they do not have an astral body.
More than ninety-nine percent of human beings have an astral body
that is nothing more than a bunch of butterflies. Of course these peo-
ple will reincarnate, but what exactly will reincarnate? Their Higher
Self, which is precisely the part of themselves they never became
aware of during their life, and which took virtually no part in their
activities. Nearly everything they used to consider as 'themselves'
will disintegrate and return to astral dust. It is no wonder they will
not be able to remember much in their next life, since they have lost
most of the astral substance in which the impressions of this life
were recorded. Gurdjieff sharply summarised this situation by say-
int, . ''The dust returns to dust''.

100
 Remembering Past Lives

8.4 White as the real colour of mourning

Unfortunately, all astral bits do not return to astral dust. Many
of them tend to remain as they are and stick to living human beings
to try and perpetuate their activity.
This explosion of the astral body is why the traditional Hindu
custom was to wear only white and perform a semi-fast, avoiding
mainly proteins, during the weeks following the death of someone in
their family. The Hindus consider that some of the lower vital parts
of the dead may try to stick to other members of the family in a para-
sitic way. Wearing white, the colour of purity, and avoiding meat and
grains, are regarded as protective measures to diminish the possibil-
ity of such 'bugging'. 1 The custom is still observed, even in modem
and educated parts of India.
A very similar theory can be found in traditional Chinese lore.
The Po, corresponding to lower vital parts of a human being, is said
to remain on the Earth after death, while the Hun, made of the more
spiritualised parts, ascends to heaven. The Po can even appear to
family members or friends as a frightening replica of the dead, in the
hours or days after the latter has passed away. The parallel with a
number of ghost stories is obvious. A detailed analysis of these
mechanisms can be found in my book, Entities, Parasites of the
Body of Energy.

8.5 Forgetfulness due to lack of presence

Let us now focus on the part that is not annihilated. The Self,
or Ego, being the eternal flame in a human being, remains untouched
while going through the transition of death. The question is, of
course, what else persists? What are the mechanisms by which some
astral parts are lost, while others remain attached to the Self and fol-
low it in its journey between death and the next birth?

1 White appears white to our eyes because it reflects all the frequen-
cies of the visible spectrum. Keeping nothing and reflecting everything,
white has universally been attributed with a symbolism of purity. Black, re-
flecting nothing and keeping everything, is the absorbing colour par excel-
lence, and therefore the worst possible colour to wear in situations such as
funerals, where there is a high risk of catching negative energies.

101
 Regression

The matter is of importance, for the astral parts that persist and
accompany the Self will be the core of your personality in the fol-
lowing life. After death, the Ego passes through various astral layers,
and then departs to the Spirit worlds. After staying in these worlds, it
returns to the Earth via the astral worlds. It is while passing through
the astral layers on its way back to the Earth that the Ego collects the
matter of its future astral body. The astral parts that the Ego had kept
around it act as a core, gathering astral substance according to their
own dispositions - which will result in likes and dislikes, as well as
emotional and mental potential in the following life. So whatever re-
mains attached to the Ego after death conditions what we will be in
our next life.
Before trying to understand how some memories can be kept
in the central astral core around the Ego, let us first see how most are
lost. While performing the great majority of the actions in their life,
people are totally unaware. We tend to go through our daily activities
mechanically. We talk without real purpose. We do things without
even knowing that we do them. We are not really present to what we
are doing. Even if we practise being aware, entire portions of our
days can elapse before we retrieve our thread of awareness. In short,
we are not living our life, we are sleeping it.
In terms of subtle bodies, this means that the Ego does not
take any part in these actions. Sensory perceptions are received in the
astral body, in the pieces of the astral puzzle. Then these pieces react
mechanically according to their own likes and dislikes, meaning their
own sarnskaras. Reactional actions are performed more or less me-
chanically, and the Ego is bypassed. Everything remains in the pe-
riphery of the astral layer. Nothing is imprinted close to the Ego,
simply because the Ego is absent from the episode. How can the Ego
remember the episode if it is not involved in it? Here lies the main
reason for the forgetfulness of the Spirit: unawareness. In terms of
astral imprint, there is nothing more than dust, which will later return
to dust.

8.6 Remembrance type 1 - intensity

There are a few situations where this scheme of forgetfulness
does not apply. Suppose you are lying on a riverbank and a crocodile
appears out of the blue and rushes at you. It is quite likely that you
102
 Remembering Past Lives

are going to be very aware for a moment. Imagine ... The whole of
yourself gets involved in the situation, you are totally present. Any
emotions you may feel, together with sensations and perceptions, are
impressed in the deepest layers of your astral body. The climax of
awareness indicates that your Ego emerges from its slumber for a
while. There is a breakthrough of the Ego into the physical world and
simultaneously, a breakthrough of information into your deepest as-
tral layers. A whole package of perceptions, sensations and emotions
is stored close to the very core of your inner architecture. The track
left in your astral body by such an 'emotional package' can indeed be
regarded as a major sarnskara. Due to the depth of the imprint, all
the conditions are gathered for you to keep the corresponding astral
fragment with your Ego, even after the stripping at death, and bring
it back with you in your next life.
So the first category of past-life remembrance is made of vari-
ous experiences which share one common feature - intensity. Ex-
tremely painful experiences can be related to this category. When-
ever you experience a climax of physical or emotional pain, you
automatically become acutely aware. Pain, however, is not necessary
for intensity. For example, if you see land appearing in the distance
after crossing the Pacific on a raft, or if you suddenly succeed in get-
ting what you want after years of effort, the intense elation of the
moment will secure a deep imprint, the source of possible future
recollections. This is of course why many past-life regressions unveil
intense episodes.

8.7 Remembrance type 2- spontaneous openings

From time to time, without any reason in the external world,
the Higher Self breaks through and opens to the surface. A sponta-
neous and temporary awakening takes place. It can be experienced
as an inner revelation, one of those rare, clear moments when one
can see forever. One sits at a crossing of time, with an intuitive feel-
ing of one's eternal nature and vastness. But the experience does not
have to be grandiose, it can simply be a magic moment, a few sec-
onds during which the heart explodes with causeless joy. Then the
sanctuary closes again, because our whole structure is not ready to
maintain the connection.

103
 Regression

During this moment of opening, a link has been established

between the surface and the deepest, between the consciousness of
the physical world and the awareness of the Higher Self. The neces-
sary conditions are fulfilled for an imprint deep enough to last be-
yond the astral shattering after death. The circumstances, feelings,
sensations and perceptions of such a moment are memorised beyond
time.

8.8 Remembrance type 3 -the body of immortality

The constant practice of vigilant awareness, which is the basis
of many paths of self-transformation, tends to multiply the occasions
when the Higher Self involves itself in daily life. This results in mul-
tiplying the seeds for future remembrance.
In former chapters we have outlined the transformation that
leads from emotions to feelings, from manas to buddhi, from reac-
tion and conditioning to the spontaneity of the Ego. This gradual
metamorphosis goes with the development of a new layer, a
'transformed astral body' called Spirit-Self by Steiner, and which
corresponds to the vijfiana-maya-kosa of the Vedantic tradition. The
astral body, seat of the samskaras, loses its predominance and is
progressively replaced by this new layer in which the Ego expresses
itself directly. In parallel with the replacement of emotions by feel-
ings, a new mode of thinking emerges that is no longer disconnected
from the Ego, but radiates from it. The development of the trans-
formed astral body corresponds to the blossoming of a new inner
consciousness directly connected with the Higher Self.
Another major difference between the astral body and the
transformed astral body is that the astral body is made of separate
parts constantly trying to escape the rulership of the Ego. The trans-
formed astral body on the contrary is united around the Ego, com-
pletely permeated by its light and its life. It can't be separate from
the Ego, for it is none other than the Ego's radiation. The astral body
is made of coagulated astral dust, whereas in the matter of the
transformed astral body, the Spirit itself is alive. The substance of
the transformed astral body can virtually be regarded as Self-ness.
The Self generates it as the spider secretes its web.
Consequently the transformed astral body remains intact after
death, while the astral body is shattered. Therefore the memories

104
 Remembering Past Lives

stored in the transformed astral body are kept forever. So from the
point of view of structure, we can discern two different types of past-
life material: the sarnskaras that were imprinted so deeply in the as-
tral body that they keep hanging around the Self from life to life; and
the memories of the transformed astral body which persist in the im-
perishable substance of the body of immortality.
Yet the situation is not so clear-cut, because there is a long
transition period during which consciousness operates partly in the
astral body and partly in the transformed astral body, the proportions
depending on your level of development. Structurally this results in
an astral web made of tangled patches of these two vehicles. Some
memories are stored in both the astral body and the transformed as-
tral body, or even half in one, half in the other.
Let no one be confused; as far as the vast majority of human
beings are concerned, the transformed astral body remains a remote
ideal. The mechanisms of past-life remembrance through the body of
immortality do not apply, simply because the transformed astral body
is not built. Only people who in this life or in former ones have fol-
lowed a long process of development, have acquired rudiments of
transformed astral body. In the great majority of cases when a past-
life experience takes place it is through the imprints left by the sarn-
skaras, as described in the section, 'Remembrance type 1 - inten-
sity'.

105
 CHAPTER 9

THE WAY TO RECOVERING MEMORIES

9.1 Breakthrough into past-life memories

Having analysed the ways some memories are kept from one
life to another, let us now look at the problem from the other end;
through which mechanisms can one recover some of these memo-
ries? How can one remember elements about one's past lives?
If there is an inner sanctuary where the memories of our re-
mote past are to be found, then this place is beyond our daily waking
consciousness.
The conscious life of most people is confined to the 'talking
mind', the most superficial layers of the astral body. Remember the
path followed by the Ego after death: having cast off most of the
patches of the astral body, it journeys through various astral layers,
and then into the Spirit worlds. Then the Ego returns to the astral
worlds, gathering astral matter around itself. The astral core that per-
sists after the shattering plays a key role in what type of astral mate-
rial is gathered. The transformed astral body, or even the beginning
of it, could play an even greater role in structuring a harmonious as-
tral body. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of human beings, the
transformed astral body is barely developed and only plays a negligi-
ble part. So it is the hard core of the samskaras from past existences
that plays the dominant role in attracting the astral matter of our next
astral body. This hard core is very tiny indeed, and surrounds itself
with a number of layers.
After birth you gradually learn to use your mind, meaning you
experience thoughts and emotions in your astral body. But this hap-
pens mainly through external stimulation. The superficial layers of
the astral body are moulded from outside by your education and all

106
 The Way to Recovering Memories

that you receive from your parents and your culture. In the superfi-
cial layers of the astral body, you operate with the elements received
from the outside world. This results in a polarity in the astral body, a
tension between the deep impulses coming from the impressions
brought from past lives, and the impressions collected in this life. A
great part of your mental abilities, artistic sensitivity, emotional sta-
bility and other qualities depends on how harmoniously the marriage
takes place between inner and outer impulses, that is, between the
material you brought with you and that which you accumulate in this
present life.
The surface layer, meaning your conscious mind, is constantly
influenced by emotions and various reactions coming from the sam-
skaras of the depths. But it never sees these samskaras, because the
buffer zone is too thick.
H you want to remember your past lives, you need to dive into
the deepest layers of the unconscious mind. This requires an energy
that allows you to break through and reach the parts of the astral
body close to the central core of the Self- the parts in which past-life
memories are inscribed. This breakthrough energy makes all the
difference between regression and other techniques of psychother-
apy. Why does psychoanalysis not lead to past-life regressions? Sim-
ply because psychoanalysts lack this breakthrough energy. Why did
so many initiates, Christian Gnostics, Hindus and Buddhists remem-
ber their past lives? Because having found their Self, they had access
to the breakthrough energy and the material inscribed close to the
Self. Why is regression much easier to reach now in the nineteen-
nineties than in the late seventies, and why is it spreading quickly?
Because due to an awakening in collective consciousness, the
breakthrough energy is far easier to access than it used to be.
The fact that the regression state comes from this energy ex-
plains why, once familiar with the ISIS techniques, you have to do
very little to regress a client; the energy does the work through you.
For the same reason, you need to know very little to be a good con-
nector. What you need is to be able to tune in and let the force act
through you. H you know a lot, then you have to forget all you know.
All the information required to conduct a good regression is con-
tained in the energy, and if you try to apply what you know rather

107
 Regression

than what the energy dictates, the results will be mediocre and you
will often miss the most important issues.
It also explains why, after you have conducted a number of
ISIS sessions, your clients will often start regressing even before you
begin implementing the techniques. The energy flows through you
like a living stream, it does not care about techniques.
Who are good subjects for regression? Those who can connect
with this energy, who can open and receive it, whether young or old,
healthy or sick. It does not matter whether they believe in past lives
or not, provided they can be open. Some great disbelievers prove
able to connect immediately, while some people who believe too
much in reincarnation tend to build up expectations that block the
flow of energy. Their preconceptions leave no space for the energy to
work.

9.2 The flash of astrality

Since the samskaras are stored in areas of the astral body that
lie beyond the usual field of your waking consciousness, it follows
that for past-life remembrance to take place, a link has to be estab-
lished between the conscious mind and these deep layers of the astral
body.
Certain signs indicate when this connection has been made.
For instance, a special feeling arises in the room. The 'atmosphere'
changes completely, as if a flash of astral energy had been brought
down around you. H you have practised the techniques indicated in
Awakening the Third Eye, you may be familiar with some of the
other signs. In particular, the room suddenly appears darker to your
eye. In this darker space, the colours look more luminous, as if each
colour was actually made of thousands of tiny shining points. Of
course it is not the room that becomes dark, but your perception that
opens to the 'darkness visible' superimposed on the light of the
room. You can also sometimes feel a characteristic sensation in the
kidneys, due to the intense connection of these organs with the astral
body.
Even if you are not familiar with these signs, you can easily
learn to recognise the 'flash of astrality' that accompanies the regres-
sion state. The energy in the room suddenly becomes 'denser'; and
the 'flavour of consciousness' becomes somewhat similar to that of
108
 The Way to Recovering Memories

the dream state. (Remember how you feel when waking up just after
a dream.) This does not mean that regression and dreams are similar!
The two states are quite different. Yet both involve a redirection of
consciousness towards astral layers, which explains why their
'flavours' are related.

9.3 The content of past-life memories

From the mechanisms of past-life remembrance we analysed
in the last chapter, we can draw a few conclusions about the content
of past-life memories. Of course, we must keep in mind that we are
dealing with a field which is beyond the ordinary aspects of exis-
tence, and therefore in which one should not generalise too quickly.
With regression, virtually anything is possible! Let us therefore not
presume that all past-life regressions will necessarily follow the pat-
terns indicated below. Still, a clear understanding of certain mecha-
nisms will allow connectors to be more helpful to their clients. Igno-
rance of these principles may lead to gross mistakes that cause the
regression state to abort in the first minutes of the experience.
Let us go back to the example of the fierce crocodile that sud-
denly rushed at you in a former life. What exactly will be stored in
the astral body? The content of your mind at that moment, starting
with the fear, of course, and the whole emotional atmosphere around
it- we could say the 'flavour' of the situation - the thoughts that
came to you, and all the perceptions and sensations of the instant: the
colours of the landscape, the smells of the marsh, the feeling of heat,
the contact of your clothes and the wind on your skin ... a movie-like
recording of these instants with the most minute details, outside and
inside you.
Now, what has not been stored? All the elements of your life
that were not in your mind at that precise moment. Your address, for
instance, or the date, the name of the country, even your name. For
the first reflex, when confronted by a crocodile, is not to say, "It is
1854, I am in Africa, my name is Wolfgang and I am an explorer".
Another thing that is not stored is the judgments you may have
made later, such as, "How brave I was!" or "How stupid I was!" or
"I could have done this differently". All these judgmental comments
could not be recorded in the 'movie', because they came later on.

109
 Regression

The recording process can be compared to a plane's black box,

which registers all the parameters at a critical moment.

9.4 The art of giving birth

So a genuine past-life remembrance is usually very simple. It
is a package of emotions, sensations, feelings and images related to a
particular moment - the moment when the pressure of the emotion
made your Self 'reopen'. Everything has been precisely recorded and
stored, and the client reexperiences the scene exactly as if the croco-
dile was in front of him. His body can even take the same attitude as
in the scene, and all the emotions and sensations are recalled as if
they were happening here and now.
Yet reexperiencing the episode is far from being traumatic, for
the client remains perfectly conscious of who he is now, of the room
in which the session is being conducted, of the mattress on which he
is lying, of the connector's voice, and so on. Moreover, whenever the
ISIS state is reached, a certain metaphysical opening takes place
which adds a background of great serenity to the experience, how-
ever intense the episode may be. Also, to the client, the emotional
charge of the samskara was a heavy burden, and therefore reexperi-
encing the past trauma is accompanied by a great feeling of relief, as
if poison was being eliminated.
Let us go back to the way the client enters the regression expe-
rience. In some extreme cases the whole scene will flash back in one
second, with all the details. But in most cases, all the components of
the scene do not come back at the same time. The beginning of the
experience is gradual, with only a few details arising in the client's
consciousness. For instance the client has a glimpse of an emotion
and tells the connector, ''I'm afraid" or "I hate this person". Or
maybe the experience starts with a sensation such as feeling cold,
and the client starts shivering, even on a hot summer's day. Or the
client says, "I'm being kicked in the ribs" or "There is a heavy
weight on my shoulders". These first impressions are often faint.
They are the first thread that has to be followed carefully in order to
gradually recover more and more elements of the scene, until the full
tableau is unveiled.
The connector faces a delicate task; a misunderstanding of the
mechanisms of remembrance may lead him or her to ask clients the

110
 The Way to Recovering Memories

wrong questions, possibly resulting in losing the thread instead of

stepping more finnly into the regression state. At this stage the cli-
ents are drifting between two states of consciousness: the usual
waking state, and the regression state. They are only perceiving a
few sensations or details of the scene. They need some help to enter
the regression state more deeply, and it is the connector's function to
provide this help, by asking certain questions. But the questions will
have to be carefully chosen.
Suppose the connector asks, "What is your name?" or "Which
country are you in?" Clients will only be confused, for at this stage
they do not have the faintest memory of such details. They are not
seeing even ten percent of the scene yet. So how could they know
what country it was? As discussed before, when being attacked by a
crocodile one does not usually ponder upon geographical considera-
tions. From the state they are in, clients simply cannot answer such
questions - these details are beyond their reach. So what will hap-
pen? In order to find an answer, clients will have to think, meaning
go back into their usual mental consciousness. In one second they
will be out of the regression state, and the experience will be lost.
For the same reasons, at this fragile stage if clients cannot answer
one of your questions, do not insist; ask another one. Later on, when
clients are firmly established in the regression state, the situation will
be quite different; if no answer is given to a question, it is more
likely to be due to a mechanism of resistance, and the connector
must insist.
In the first minutes of a regression, the right questions are
those which bring an immediate and effortless answer. They refer to
elements that are within reach of the client, even though he is not
fully aware of them yet. For instance, "How does your body feel, big
or small?" or "How does it feel around you, warm or cold?" To an-
swer, the client does not have to think, but just to feel. In this way
you allow him to penetrate further into the scene by gradually adding
more elements, until he sinks fully into reexperiencing the episode.
Altogether, the process is not so different from giving birth.

111
 Regression

9.5 Examples of successful sinking

These mechanisms do not only apply to the remembrance of
past-life episodes, but also to scenes of early childhood, as shown in
the following example.

Case study- Simone, aged fifty-two.

The beginning of the session was painful and agitated, as if Simone
was pregnant with the experience but unable to let it out. After half
an hour of work - should we say labour? - the atmosphere suddenly
changes in the room, and all the above-mentioned features of the
flash of astrality can be sensed.

What are you feeling now? -1 don't know, I just feel very strange.
[At this stage, the client cannot see anything of the episode. But the
experience is close, hence the strange feeling.]
Does it feel more like being male or female? -Mm... Neither male
nor female. [This question is premature and does not really help to
engage the process. 1 But the following ones make it click.]
Does it feel more like day or night? -Night.
Does it feel like being big, or small? -Little, little... empty... all
alone ... [Simone curls up and crosses her arms against her chest. She
is one step further into the experience, but everything is still blurry.
Through the following questions the situation starts to appear clearly
to her.]
What do you want? -My mother! I want my mother!
Is she with you? -No! No! No! I'm hungry and nobody is feeding
me. [Simone starts crying with huge sobs, sucking her thumb. From
there she can see all the details of the scene: the furniture in the
room, the colour of the curtains, etc. From this point on the regres-
sion unfolds more or less by itself.]

1 When contacting an experience related to early childhood, it is quite

common for clients to find it difficult to decide whether they are male or
female.
112
 The Way to Recovering Memories

Case study- Twenty-seven-year-old man. At the beginning of the

session, a very painful spot is revealed under his left shoulder blade.
After working on the spot for a few minutes, the energy starts
changing in the room. The pain disappears, and the client becomes
very quiet.
What are you feeling? -[No answer. Everything is still extremely
blurry.]
How does your body feel, big or small? -Big.
Does it feel like you are moving or motionless? -Motionless.
In which position? -Lying on my back. On a bed.
Do you feel young or old? -Old. [All these answers come out imme-
diately and effortlessly, without thinking. The tone of the client's
voice gradually changes, indicating that he is starting to feel surer of
what he senses. The click comes after the next question.]
Healthy or sick? -Tired, very tired. It is like I am going to die ... and
accepting it. It has been good! But at the same time I feel angry.
[The client has completely entered the episode and from now on
stays in it.]
Is there any reason for this anger? -I was going to tell my son
something.
Like what? -I was going to tell him that I love him. It feels like my
life has been wasted, because I could never tell him that I loved him.
Does it feel as if you are alone, or with someone around you? -I'm
not alone, there are some spirits around me.
What do they look like? -Friendly. They know me. They're around
my body and they're waiting for me to die completely. They are
saying, "You've gone through this before". They're like friends that
you've not seen for a while. But I want to talk to my son.

9.6 The metaphysical opening

Once clients are more firmly established in the regression
state, all sorts of questions can be asked. The way each sentence is
weighted and formulated is still important for the session to continue
properly, but there is far less risk of the experience being suddenly
lost.

113
 Regression

The content of the clients' consciousness while in the regres-

sion state is a strange melange in which past and present are super-
imposed on one another. The clients reexperience the episode as if it
was happening right in front of them, feeling the corresponding
emotions and sensations. It is like entering another body and being
another person- yet this other person feels extremely familiar.
You can get a sense of this continuity when you recall how
you felt as a very young child. That was quite a different 'you', but
still there is an inner certitude, beyond any possible doubt, that it was
yourself. During regression it is an extension of this experience that
arises. You get the same inner certitude of your identity, even if the
past-life 'you' is far more different from the present 'you' than the
'you' of early childhood. But it is still the same 'you'. This experi-
ence of identity is of a metaphysical nature and can't be fully under-
stood as long as you haven't gone through it yourself.
So, during a regression, we have the superimposition of two
'you'- you in the past, and you in the present. For in the ISIS tech-
niques of regression, no hypnosis is used, nor any device that would
aim to diminish your present awareness. You remain fully aware of
yourself now, and at any instant you can choose to disconnect from
the regression state and be only aware of the room, your body, and
the present 'you'.
The superimposition of the two 'you', past and present, is a
most fascinating experience. For you have changed. The 'flavour' of
your inner environment has become completely different. And yet it
is the same you, there cannot be the faintest doubt. It does not matter
how far back in time the episode may have taken place, whether
hundreds or even thousands of years - the continuity of the Self is
unaffected by time.
So here you are, standing at the crossing of times, suddenly
realising that 'you' can be quite different from what you are used to.
You suddenly become aware that you live your life in a matchbox.
You realise that you tend to confine your existence within a limited
range of emotions and feelings, always the same repetitive routines.
At the same time you can see it doesn't have to be so, for you are
infinitely vaster. The superimposition of the past you on the present
you, allows you to peep into the incredible depth of your Self. It is a
vasmess without end, a motionless explosion. Suddenly you are.
114
 The Way to Recovering Memories

This is the most central experience regression can give - and the
most healing as well. Just a glimpse of your real nature can bring
more change in your life than years of discussion and analysis of
your problems. For ultimately, one does not get rid of problems by
dealing with sarnskaras, but by stepping into the Self.

115
 CHAPTER 10

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

10.1 Why focus on negative emotions, instead of working only

on the light? Isn't it giving power to negative conditioning to
spend energy looking at it? Why not just expand our light?
Suppose there is a dead rat rotting under your sofa. You can
put a few nice blankets over the sofa, so nobody can see the rat. You
can buy flowers and try to cover the stench with a lovely fragrance.
Then each time you are in the room, you will focus on the lovely fra-
grance in order not to give power to the foul stench coming from the
rat's corpse. But is that really a solution?
Another common attitude is to avoid that room from now on,
and live only in the rest of the house. Many spiritual people proceed
in this way; they build up more and more light in certain parts of
themselves and leave a few dark comers without ever looking at
them. The result is that the disparity between the clear side and the
dark side keeps increasing, which cannot be completely satisfying.
When some people follow a spiritual path and have the feeling that
they are doing 'all the right things', and yet enlightenment never
seems to come, it is usually because they have adopted this attitude.
Another problem is that human beings have reached a stage
where there are dead rats in virtually every single comer of the
house, which makes the ostrich attitude more and more difficult to
sustain. You are left with only a tiny cupboard on the top floor, in
which you can be 'fully enlightened'.
Or maybe you will choose the attitude of the ascetic. "This
house is pure illusion; I have always hated it. I'll stand on top of the
roof and never get back into this mess." Then you can be fully en-
lightened on your roof, and not have to worry about the corpses in-
116
 Frequently Asked Questions

side the house. But then, that is it! You are dead to the world, you
are out of it. The only thing you can do for other human beings is to
teach them too how to leave the house and be enlightened on the
roof.
The perspective of inner alchemy is different, it aims at trans-
fanning the vehicles of consciousness. It aims at an enlightenment in
the world, not out of it. In that case you have to clean up the mess,
you can't simply ignore it. You have to work at bringing the light
into every single room of the house. It is unreasonable to expect this
to happen until you take the trouble to move the sofa and get rid of
the corpses.

10.2 Do we really need to go through regression to get rid of

samskaras? After all, many Hindu masters have reached en-
lightenment by meditating, without bothering about emotional
catharsis.
First you should consider that the psychological environment
of Hindu disciples half a century ago cannot be compared to that of a
seeker brought up today in Los Angeles or Milan. Our civilisation
has reached an unprecedented level of neurosis, and before trying
to become supernormal, it is wise to work at becoming normal.
As long as the Daddy-Mummy, girlfriend-boyfriend level of exis-
tence has not been sorted out, why fool oneself by pretending to live
a divine life? Such an attitude would mean running the risk of medi-
tating for fifty years without any real breakthrough, simply because
the tangled webs of your reacting mind can in no way be compared
to the emotional simplicity of Indian people a few decades ago.
Nowadays India has changed a lot, and the level of neurosis of its
people is not very different from ours.
Apart from that, it would be utterly untrue to say that Hindu or
Buddhist disciples did not have to go through a long and painful
process of emotional catharsis before stepping into their glorious
meditation. But this work on samskaras was done in a different way.
Finding a teacher was not an easy enterprise. In India or Tibet
until not so long ago, would-be disciples often had to travel for sev-
eral years and face all kinds of perils before they could reach a
teacher- which represented an initiatory trial in itself.

117
 Regression

Having found the guru, the disciples' troubles had only just
begun. The Hindu and Buddhist traditions are full of stories of mas-
ters who drove their disciples to the borderline of insanity in order to
help them get rid of their mental preconceptions and their samskaras.
Only after having been 'cooked' like this for years would the disciple
be given initiation.
Take the story of the great master Milarepa, for instance.
During his years of preparation his guru, Marpa, asked him to build
a circular house on a hill, after which Milarepa was to receive initia-
tion. When Milarepa had built half the house, Marpa came back and
said, "Look son, I think this is not really a good place for a house. So
demolish it and put the stones back where you got them." Milarepa
found the news difficult to cope with, but did as he was told. A week
later, Marpa took Milarepa onto another hill and told him, "This is
where I want the house, and it should be semi-circular." Anxious to
receive his initiation, Milarepa started the new building immediately.
When Milarepa had erected about half of the semi-circular
house, Marpa came back and said, "What is this ridiculous shack
you are building here?" Milarepa was bewildered, and when he
managed to articulate that he was only following the instructions he
had been given, Marpa answered, "Did I say that? I must have been
drunk that day. But today I am not drunk, and I have had a good
think about the house. A Tantric mystical building should be trian-
gular. So you will demolish your shack, carry all the stones to this
other hill, and build me a triangular tantric house." Milarepa nearly
collapsed when he heard these words. Marpa, drunk, how could that
be! And the house to be rebuilt again! Milarepa was exhausted, his
hands were full of blisters, and he had a big wound on his back,
which he did not want to show Marpa for fear of displeasing him.
Milarepa was disheartened and confused, but he really wanted to
find Truth. He had two choices, either leave and renounce initiation,
or trust Marpa unconditionally and keep on building. So he gathered
his last forces, and started demolishing his beautiful semi-circular
house, carrying the stones to the other hill.
After Milarepa had completed about a third of the triangular
house, Marpa arrived on the site. He looked very angry. He shouted,
"You filthy sorcerer! Do you realise that the shape of this building is
going to attract all the demons of the area? Are you trying to destroy
118
 Frequently Asked Questions

me and my family? Who told you to build such a monstrous house?"

Overcome with despair, Milarepa could hardly answer, "But you
asked me to!" Marpa was getting angrier and angrier. "Ignominious
liar!" he said, "I never ordered that! How can you be so insolent?
And you would like me to initiate you! Demolish this house immedi-
ately and put the stones back where you found them!" Then Marpa
left. The night that followed was a moonless night - the darkest night
of Milarepa's entire life. He was purely and simply cracking up; his
whole mental structure was being shattered. But for some reason he
did not leave.
The following morning, Marpa sent his wife to get Milarepa.
They fed him a good meal, and suddenly Milarepa saw his troubles
corning to an end, thinking he was going to be initiated. Not at all!
Marpa kept him building and demolishing houses for years, some
square, some nine storeys high, and he used many other subterfuges
to throw Milarepa into constant pangs of desperation. Milarepa
nearly committed suicide a number of times.
Then one day the path of disintegration was completed, and to
his greatest surprise, Milarepa suddenly received the long-awaited
initiation. After this Milarepa became one of the most enlightened
gurus of the Tibetan tradition.
Similar stories, in which gurus put their disciples in impossible
situations in order to help them work out their sarnskaras, could fill
entire books. These trials can be regarded as an equivalent of the
work done through regression - which, seen from this new perspec-
tive, is not so hard after all!

10.3 How come so many people seem to find out that they have
been somebody important in a past life?
Precisely, they don't! After having witnessed thousands of re-
gressions with clients and students of the Clairvision School, I have
only come across one person who reexperienced having been a
member of a royal family in Europe. The statement that everyone
discovers they were someone important in a past life is a fanciful
one, usually supported by people who do not have the faintest expe-
rience of true regression.

119
 Regression

10.4 How come, when reexperiencing a past life, people do not

start speaking in the language that was theirs in that life?
Before coming to Australia, I lived in France for twenty-seven
years. French was my mother tongue. Then I came to adopt English
as a language that felt more natural to me.
I have had an experience several times, which may shed some
light on this question. When remembering episodes or conversations
that took place in France- and in French- it often happens that the
words come back to me in English! If this transfer of language may
happen within one life, it is quite easy to conceive that it may also
happen from one incarnation to another.
Perhaps we do not realise exactly what language is about. We
think languages are made of words. But maybe languages are made
of forces, and the words we put on top of these forces to express
them are of less importance than the forces themselves. When we die
the words fall, but the forces remain, and we carry them with us
from life to life. People who are used to operating in more than one
language at a time will probably find it easy to relate to this concept.

120
 CONCLUSION

To conclude this study of the mechanisms of regression, I will

extend both an invitation and a warning.
First, the invitation. What if your life could be completely
transformed by a regression process? Could it be that what we have
discussed in this book also applies to you? Could it be that, unknown
to you, your life is presently influenced by some major samskaras,
and that by revealing these samskaras and working them out, com-
pletely new avenues would open in your life?
Next, the warning. If you are to undergo a regression process,
make sure you do it with a qualified connector. In particular, the di-
rection of the process should be to reach clarity in your present life,
rather than write novels about your past lives. Having understood the
sound principles presented in this book, you will be able to detect the
less serious practitioners (those who are only too happy to tell you
that you have been a king or a queen in your past lives) and stay
away from them.
If you wish to know more about ISIS, you can obtain publica-
tions and other learning material from the Clairvision School's Inter-
net site. (The address is indicated at the end of the introduction.)
I wish you the best in your quest.

121
 INDEX

bypass the Self, 42

defined, 34
A I turn into their opposite, 36

Accidents, 71
Animals F !I
samskaras, 14
Ashtavakra Gita, 84 Feelings
Astral body defined, 34
and remembering past lives, 106 in Vedanta, 34
full of holes, 98 vast range of-, 47
is a mosaic, 99
made of samskaras, 54
of animals, 14
transformed through feelings, 48
G
II
Gnosis, 48
Gregory of Nyssa, 17
B II
Black colour, 101
Body of immortality, 104
H II
Higher Self, 97
Hippocrates, 77
c I Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy,
29
Cog ito ergo sum, 53
Conditioning. 28
J
II

'
D Janaka, 15

De-conditioning, 28
Descartes, 54 K II
Karma
E I and samskaras, 13
Knees, 65
Ego,97 Koshas, 96
Emotions
and reactions. 35
and samskaras, 32

122
 Index

and animals, 14
L and emotions, 32
and illnesses, 67, 76
Likes and dislikes, 27 and karma, 13
Lotus position, 65 and meditation, 52, 56
Love and sammkaras, 13
conditional and unconditional, 31 and superimposition, 18
Love at first sight, 29 and thoughts, 38
deepest-, 61
M II defined, 7
endlessly repeated, 22
Manas Self, 97
defined. 14 Snakes and ropes, 83
Meditation Spirit-Self, 48
and knees, 65 Superimposition, 18
and samskaras, 56
Metaphysical shift in psychotherapy.
91 I T II
Maya Transformed astral body, 49, 104
and samskaras, 17, 24

p II v II
Vijnana-maya-kosha, 48
Past lives
Vrittis, 39
remembering, 96
Plotinus, 17
Prana, 96 II w I
White colour, 101
R !I
Reactions
and emotions, 32, 35
z II
Rudolf Steiner, 34 Zu-Shao-Yang Meridian, 73, 75

s II
Samskaras
and accidents, 71
and acupuncture meridians, 72

123