almost four years have passed since Catherine and I shared this incredible experience. It has changed us both profoundly.

On occasion, she drops into my office to say hello or to discuss a problem that she is having. She has never had the need nor the desire to be regressed again, either to deal with a symptom or to find out how new people in her life may have related to her in the past. Our work is done. Catherine is now free to fully enjoy her life, no longer crippled by her disabling symptoms. She has found a sense of happiness and contentment that she never thought was possible. She no longer fears illness or death. Life has a meaning and purpose for her now that she is balanced and in harmony with herself. She radiates an inner peace that many wish for but few attain. She feels more spiritual. To Catherine, what has happened is all very real. She does not doubt the veracity of any of it, and she accepts it all as an integral part of who she is. She has no interest in pursuing the study of psychic phenomena, feeling that she "knows" in a way that cannot be learned from books or lectures. People who are dying or who have a family member dying often seek her out. They seem drawn to her. She sits and talks to them, and they feel better.

My life has changed almost as drastically as Catherine's. I have become more intuitive, more aware of the hidden, secret parts of my patients, colleagues, and friends. I seem to know a great deal about them, even before I should. My values and life goals have shifted to a more humanistic, less accumulative focus. Psychics, mediums, healers, and others appear in my life with increasing frequency, and I have started to systematically evaluate their abilities. Carole has developed along with me. She has become particularly skillful in death- and-dying counseling, and she now runs support groups for patients dying from AIDS.

I have begun to meditate, something that, until recently, I thought only Hindus and Californians practiced. The lessons transmitted through Catherine have become a conscious part of my daily life. Remembering the deeper meaning of life, and of death as a natural part of life, I have become more patient, more empathic, more loving. I also feel more responsible for my actions, the negative as well as the lofty. I know there will be a price to pay. What goes around truly does come around.

I still write scientific papers, lecture at professional meetings, and run the Department of Psychiatry. But now I straddle two worlds; the phenomenal world of the five senses, represented by our bodies and physical needs; and the greater world of the nonphysical planes, represented by our souls and spirits. I know that the worlds are connected, that all is energy. Yet they often seem so far apart. My job is to connect the worlds, to carefully and scientifically document their unity.

My family has flourished. Carole and Amy have turned out to have above-average psychic abilities, and we playfully encourage the further development of these skills. Jordan has become a powerful and charismatic teenager, a natural leader. I am finally becoming less serious, And I sometimes have unusual dreams. During the several months after Catherine's last session, a peculiar tendency had begun to appear during my sleep. I would sometimes have a vivid dream, during which I would either be listening to a lecture or asking questions of the lecturer. The teacher's name in the dream was Philo. Upon awakening, I would sometimes remember some of the material discussed and jot it down. I am including a few examples here. The first was a lecture, and I recognized the influence of the messages from the Masters. "... Wisdom is achieved very slowly. This is because intellectual knowledge, easily acquired, must be transformed into 'emotional,' or subconscious, knowledge. Once transformed, the imprint is permanent. Behavioral practice is the necessary catalyst of this reaction. Without action, the concept will wither and fade. Theoretical knowledge without practical application is not enough.

"Balance and harmony are neglected today, yet they are the foundations of wisdom. Everything is done to excess. People are overweight because they eat excessively. Joggers neglect aspects of themselves and others because they run excessively. People seem excessively mean. They drink too much, smoke too much, carouse too much (or too little), talk too much without content, worry too much. There is too much black-or-white thinking. All or none. This is not the way of nature.

"In nature there is balance. Beasts destroy in small amounts. Ecological systems are not eliminated en masse. Plants are consumed and then grow. The sources of sustenance are dipped into and then replenished. The flower is enjoyed, the fruit eaten, the root preserved.

"Humankind has not learned about balance, let alone practiced it. It is guided by greed and ambition, steered by fear. In this way it will eventually destroy itself. But nature will survive; at least the plants will.

"Happiness is really rooted in simplicity. The tendency to excessiveness in thought and action diminishes happiness. Excesses cloud basic values. Religious people tell us that happiness comes from filling one's heart with love, from faith and hope, from practicing charity and dispensing kindness. They actually are right. Given those attitudes, balance and harmony usually follow. These are collectively a state of being. In these days, they are an altered state of consciousness. It is as if humankind were not in its natural state while on earth. It must reach an altered state in order to fill itself with love and charity and simplicity, to feel purity, to rid itself of its chronic fearfulness.

"How does one reach this altered state, this other value system? And once reached, how can it be sustained? The answer appears to be simple. It is the common denominator of all religions. Humankind is immortal, and what we are doing now is learning our lessons. We are all in school. It is so simple if you can believe in immortality.

"If a part of humankind is eternal, and there is much evidence and history to think so, then why are we doing such bad things to ourselves? Why do we step on and over others for our personal 'gain' when actually we're flunking the lesson? We all seem to be going to the same place ultimately, albeit at different speeds. No one is greater than another.

"Consider the lessons. Intellectually the answers have always been there, but this need to actualize by experience, to make the subconscious imprint permanent by 'emotionalizing' and practicing the concept, is the key. Memorizing in Sunday School is not good enough. Lip service without the behavior has no value. It is easy to read about or to talk about love and charity and faith. But to do it, to feel it, almost requires an altered state of consciousness. Not the transient state induced by drugs, alcohol, or unexpected emotion. The permanent state is reached by knowledge and understanding. It is sustained by physical behavior, by act and deed, by practice. It is taking something nearly mystical and transforming it to everyday familiarity by practice, making it a habit.

"Understand that no one is greater than another. Feel it. Practice helping another. We are all rowing the same boat. If we don't pull together, out plants are going to be awfully lonely."

On another night, in a different dream I was asking a question. "How is it that you say all are equal, yet the obvious contradictions smack us in the face: inequalities in virtues, temperance, finances, rights, abilities and talents, intelligence, mathematical aptitude, ad infinitum?"

The answer was a metaphor. "It is as if a large diamond were to be found inside each person. Picture a diamond a foot long. The diamond has a thousand facets, but the facets are covered with dirt and tar. It is the job of the soul to clean each facet until the surface is brilliant and can reflect a rainbow of colors.

"Now, some have cleaned many facets and gleam brightly. Others have only managed to clean a few; they do not sparkle so. Yet, underneath the dirt, each person possesses within his or her breast a brilliant diamond with a thousand gleaming facets. The diamond is

perfect, not one flaw. The only differences among people are the number of facets-cleaned. But each diamond is the same, and each is perfect.

"When all the facets are cleaned and shining forth in a spectrum of lights, the diamond returns to the pure energy that it was originally. The lights remain. It is as if the process that goes into making the diamond is reversed, all that pressure released. The pure energy exists in the rainbow of lights, and the lights possess consciousness and knowledge.

"And all of the diamonds are perfect."

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers simple. "What am I to do?" I was asking in a dream. "I know I can treat and heal people in pain. They come to me in numbers beyond what I can handle. I am so tired. Yet can I say no when they are so needy and I can help them? Is it right to say 'No, enough already?'"

"Your role is not to be a lifeguard" was the answer. The last example I will cite was a message to other psychiatrists. I awakened about six in the morning from a dream where I was giving a lecture, in this instance to a vast audience of psychiatrists,

"In the rush toward the medicalization of psychiatry, it is important that we do not abandon the traditional, albeit sometimes vague, teachings of our profession. We are the ones who still talk to our patients, patiently and with compassion. We still take the time to do this. We promote the conceptual understanding of illness, healing with understanding and the induced discovery of self-knowledge, rather than just with laser beams. We still use hope to heal.

"In this day and age, other branches of medicine are finding these traditional approaches to healing much too inefficient, time-consuming, and unsubstantiated. They prefer technology to talk, computer-generated blood chemistries to the personal physician-patient chemistry, which heals the patient and provides satisfaction to the doctor. Idealistic, ethical, personally gratifying approaches to medicine lose ground to economic, efficient, insulating, and satisfaction- destroying approaches. As a result, our colleagues feel increasingly isolated and depressed. The patients feel rushed and empty, uncared for.

"We should avoid being seduced by high technology.

Rather, we should be the role models for our colleagues. We should

demonstrate how patience, understanding, and compassion help both patient and physician. Taking more time to talk, to teach, to awaken hope and the expectation of recovery-these half-forgotten qualities of the physician as healer- these we must always use ourselves and be an example to our fellow physicians.

"High technology is wonderful in research and to promote the understanding of human illness and disease. It can be an invaluable clinical tool, but it can never replace those inherently personal characteristics and methods of the true physician. Psychiatry can be the most dignified of the medical specialties. We are the teachers. We should not abandon this role for the sake of assimilation, especially not now."

I still have such dreams, although only occasionally. Often, in meditation, or sometimes while driving on the highway, or even while daydreaming, phrases and thoughts and visualizations will pop into my mind. These often seem very different from my conscious and usual way of thinking or conceptualizing. They are frequently very timely and solve questions or problems I am having. I use them in therapy and in my everyday life. I consider these phenomena to be an expansion of my intuitive abilities, and I am heartened by them. To me, they are signs that I am headed in the right direction, even if I have a long way to go.

I listen to my dreams and intuitions. When I do, things seem to fall into place. When I do not, something invariably goes awry.

I still feel the Masters around me. I do not know for sure whether my dreams and intuitions are influenced by them, but I suspect so. EPILOGUE THE book is now completed, but the story goes on. Catherine remains cured, without any recurrence of her original symptoms. I have been very careful about regressing other patients. I am guided by the patient's particular constellation of symptoms and by his or her refractoriness to other treatments, by the ability to be easily hypnotized, by the patient's openness to this approach, and by an intuitive feeling on my part that this is the path to take. Since Catherine, I have done detailed regressions to multiple past lives in a dozen more patients. None of these patients was psychotic, hallucinating, or experiencing multiple personalities. All improved dramatically.

The twelve patients have widely disparate backgrounds and personalities. A Jewish housewife from Miami Beach vividly remembered being raped by a group of Roman soldiers in Palestine shortly after the death of Jesus. She ran a nineteenth-century brothel in New Orleans, lived in a monastery in France in the Middle Ages, and had a distressing Japanese lifetime. She is the only one of the

patients other than Catherine who could transmit messages back from the in-between state. Her messages have been extremely psychic. She, too, knew facts and events from my past. She has even more of a facility for accurately predicting future events. Her messages come from a particular spirit, and I am currently in the process of carefully cataloging her sessions. I am still the scientist. All of her material must be scrutinized, evaluated, and validated.

The others were not able to remember much beyond dying, leaving their bodies, and floating to the bright light. None could transmit messages or thoughts back to me. But all had vivid memories of previous lifetimes. A brilliant stockbroker lived a pleasant but boring life in Victorian England. An artist was tortured during the Spanish Inquisition. A restaurant owner, who could not drive over bridges or through tunnels, remembered being buried alive in an ancient Near-Eastern culture. A young physician recalled his trauma at sea, when he was a Viking. A television executive was tormented six hundred years ago in Florence. The list of patients goes on.

These people remembered still other lifetimes as well. Symptoms resolved as the lifetimes unfolded. Each now firmly believes that he or she has lived before and will again. Their fear of death has diminished.

It is not necessary that everyone has regression therapy or visits psychics or even meditates. Those with disabling or bothersome symptoms may choose to do so. For the rest, keeping an open mind is the most important task. Realize that life is more than meets the eye. Life goes beyond our five senses. Be receptive to new knowledge and to new experiences. "Out task is to learn, to become God-like through knowledge."

I am no longer concerned with the effect this book may have on my career. The information that I have shared is far more important and, if heeded, will be far more beneficial to the world than anything I can do on an individual basis in my office.

I hope that you will be helped by what you have read here, that your own fear of death has been diminished, and that the

messages offered to you about the true meaning of life will free you

to go about living yours to the fullest, seeking harmony and inner peace and reaching out in love to your fellow humans.