Why reincarnation doesn't exist (and why that's great news for hypnotherapy)

Reincarnation does not exist. Boom. Right back at it. In this article, I'm going to explain to you exactly why this is so, how I came to this insight and what this has to do with the way our brain really works.

Maybe you're shaking your head right now, or maybe you're really curious about my explanation. Whatever your background: take a moment, clear your head and let yourself be taken into a completely different view of reality.

Watch the video:

The French basement and my childhood sin

Let me be honest with you: I used to believe in it wholeheartedly. As a young boy (I think I was somewhere in my teens, around 14 or 15), I was fascinated while watching a television show. In that show, people were put under hypnosis and taken to a so-called “past life.”

It was my very first touch with the power of the human mind, and I didn't know what I saw. There was a lady who went into a deep trance and suddenly started speaking French fluently. The bizarre thing was: she had never been to France, had never learned the language and had no connection to the country.

Moreover, in that trance, she was able to tell very specific details about a historical location. She pointed to a specific spot and said, "There, underground, is a basement." The programmers at the time went to investigate that. They had to dig the whole thing out, and guess what? It was right down to the millimeter. They found an old basement, historic tiles and all sorts of things.

My teenage brain was blown away. I thought: Wow, this actually exists! This is the ultimate proof. I’ve seen it myself, experts have studied it, so reincarnation is real.

For years, I was a firm believer that after we die, we are simply reborn in another body. Now? Totally not anymore. What has happened in the meantime?

Should I believe everything you believe?

Since taking this position, I have been getting an awful lot of questions from clients and fellow therapists. People then ask me, "Hey Edwin, but how on earth can you do hypnosis and hypnotherapy if you don't even believe in past lives? You take people there yourself in your sessions, don't you?"

To answer that question, we must first look at how therapy works. The crucial question every therapist must ask themselves is this:

Do you have to completely and totally believe the client (i.e., believe yourself what the client believes) in order to help them?

The answer is a very clear and resolute no.

I don’t have to believe everything you believe. But what I do believe is that you believe what you believe[1]. Do you see what I mean?

The client's world model

Imagine this: you believe in God. I don’t have to be religious myself to help you with your anxiety or your burnout. It works exactly the same way the other way around: if you have absolutely no interest in religion and I do, does that stand in the way of a successful therapy session?

Absolutely not. After all, it is not my job to convert you to my "church. There are thousands of different religions and movements worldwide. So which one should I choose to convince you? That makes no sense at all.

The same goes for a wide variety of beliefs:

• Extraterrestrial civilizations: If you believe you’ve been abducted by aliens and I don’t, that’s fine. If you come to me because you’re terrified of dogs, then we’ll work on resolving that fear. Unless you think that dog is an alien, your belief in extraterrestrials has zero impact on the effectiveness of the therapy.
• Past lives: If you are convinced that your current relationship problems come from a trauma from the Middle Ages, that's where we go.

As a therapist, I always align 100% with the client’s worldview. My personal opinion on the matter is completely irrelevant. In the twenty years I’ve been doing this work, I’ve noticed that my personal beliefs don’t matter one bit. The only thing that counts is that I align myself with the person sitting across from me and, from there, create change.

The Cross of Richard Bandler

This principle of aligning with the client’s world model always reminds me of a fantastic story about Richard Bandler, one of the founders of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming).

Bandler once walked into a mental institution where there was a man who was firmly convinced he was Jesus Christ. The psychiatrists there had been trying to counter the man for months: "You're not Jesus, just take your medicine." It didn't help one bit, of course.

Bandler took a different approach. He walked into the man's room and asked:

"Are you Jesus?"

The man solemnly replied, "Yes, my brother."

Bandler said, "Okay, I'll be right back."

Moments later, Bandler re-entered the room with two huge wooden beams, a hammer and a handful of giant nails. The man who thought he was Jesus was already starting to pinch him a little.

Richard began hammering the beams into a cross. This happened to be around Easter, which means Jesus is going to hang on the cross. This was also clearly communicated to the man who began asking what was going to happen to the cross.

The man was instantly cured of his delusion. This is, of course, an extreme (and hilarious) example, but the philosophy behind it is worth its weight in gold: fully and completely immerse yourself in the client’s worldview.

If someone thinks they are Jesus, treat them like Jesus and see what happens. I am absolutely of that movement. If you come into my practice and you say you were a French peasant in a previous life, that's our starting point.

Your brain is not a hard drive, but a radio

When I work with people under hypnosis, we regularly end up in past lives. I’ve been there myself. I’ve even been to future lives. I’ve seen the future; I know what it looks like. It’s a lot of fun for me, but does that mean reincarnation exists? No.

I used to think that our brain was a kind of gigantic storage facility for memories—a hard drive where, somewhere in a back-alley folder, all those unconscious memories from past lives were stored.

Science has since agreed that this model is wrong[2]. Although it is still controversial in traditional science, for me it is an absolute certainty: our brain is not a storehouse, but a receiver.

You can best compare the brain to a radio station. I am currently tuned into Edwin FM. I know all about this man, I receive all the data associated with this station. But can I also tune in to you? Of course.

You probably recognize it: you've been friends or married to someone for a long time and you finish each other's sentences. Or you walk into a room and immediately feel: we're on the same wavelength. That's not a vague metaphor; that's literally what happens. You tap into the same frequency.

From matter to information

When we look at the history of physics, we see an interesting shift in how we understand reality:

1. Matter: We used to think everything was made up of solid matter.
2. Energy: Then quantum physics came along and said, "No, everything is fundamentally energy."
3. Information: Today we are to the point where top physicists say, "Wait a minute, the universe is fundamentally made up of bits. Everything is information."

Information emits energy, and that energy eventually condenses into the matter we see around us. And the beauty of information and energy? It’s never lost. Napoleon’s information is still there. Jesus’s information is still there. The information from that French farmer from 1863 is still there.

Why everyone used to be Napoleon or a princess

Have you ever wondered why so many Napoleons, pharaohs, princesses and high priestesses always show up in reincarnation therapy? It's almost a cliché: everyone has a past life in which they were incredibly important. Hardly anyone finds out in a trance that he used to be an insignificant medieval brat who died of the plague at the age of thirteen.

How is this possible? The answer is simple: data density.

There is simply far more collective information worldwide about Jesus or Napoleon than there is about you or me. There are billions of people who have focused their attention, energy and thoughts on these figures over the centuries. As a result, that particular "info channel" in the universe is tremendously strong. There is an awful lot of data available to tap into.

When a medium tunes into a deceased person, or when we do deep-trance identification in hypnotherapy, we step into the energy of that specific frequency. The moment I tune into Anja FM, I suddenly feel what Anja feels and know things that Anja knows. This is not hocus-pocus or spirit summoning. It is simply putting your radio receiver on a different station.

The download from 1863

What really happens when I put you under hypnosis and you shoot back to the year 1863?

At that moment, your critical mind (your ego, your everyday consciousness) shuts down. Your brain tunes into the frequency of a farmer in nineteenth-century France. Because you’re in that deep trance, you believe 100% at that moment that you are that farmer. And when you believe something without any critical interference, all the information from that specific frequency is downloaded into your brain at lightning speed.

Suddenly you speak French, suddenly you know where the basement is, and suddenly you feel that person's emotions.

However, this is not proof that you were that person in a past life. Why not? Because there is no time at all in the universe.

Time is not linear (past, present, future) as we experience it here on Earth. Time is vertical. Everything is now. All information, from all times and all places, is present simultaneously in the ether at this exact moment. So you don’t travel back in time with your soul; you simply tune into a stream of information that is available now.

Believe what works for you

So I don't believe in reincarnation. I do believe that you can tap into it and experience that information as if it were your own life. That's a substantial difference. It does not mean that you have actually been that person. It means that your brain is a fantastic antenna that is able to connect to the great universal field of information.

At the end of the day, what do you think of this yourself? That's entirely up to you. If you want to continue to believe firmly in reincarnation because it feels good to you: all good. I'll go right into it in a session if that's what it takes to solve your problem.

Most importantly, insights like these make you think. Sometimes it is refreshing to be led astray for a moment (false memories also exist, but they too can help you[3]), because it is precisely at that crossroads of confusion that you begin to learn and can decide for yourself what you reject or what you want to explore further.

What is your take on this? Have you ever had an experience that felt like a past life, and how do you view it now after reading this article? Leave your comment below, I'm incredibly curious to hear your story!

Helping people with past lives

Do people ever come to you indicating that something is blocking them, but that it's from a past life? In our more advanced training (from the 2.0), we move to the more advanced forms of regression with hypnotherapy.

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Also pin this handy infographic:

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