“We are all immortal”

Psychiatrist and past life regression therapist Brian Weiss tells Nona Walia why he firmly believes in the continuity of individual souls.

It was quite by chance that psychiatrist Dr Brian Weiss started believing in past life regression. It was back in the mid-1980s, when he was treating a woman patient. During psychotherapy, he asked her to look into her past when she was a child, but she went back a thousand years to another life, with vivid memories of herself as another person. After successfully treating her, Weiss started researching on the subject and came out with his bestseller Many Lives, Many Masters. Since then, he has written several books, Through Time Into Healing, Only Love is Real, Same Soul, Many Bodies, among others. In his latest book, Miracles Happen, he talks about everyday miracles in people's lives, which they fail to recognise. "Our rational minds often attempt to minimise or negate the mystical encounters. We forget the power of our experiences. We mustembrace the reality of that event, which is a miracle," says Weiss. Excerpts from an interview:

Do people find it difficult to believe in reincarnation?

I have been documenting physical and emotional healings in my patients and workshop participants over the past 32 years. These are amazing accounts of the power of past life memories to transform people's lives. The Greeks and Indians have always believed in thetheory of reincarnation. I firmly believe karma is not punishment but an opportunity to learn our lessons. If the lessons have not been learnt in a previous lifetime, we come back to work on them. The lessons are about love, compassion, non-violence, patience, understanding and non-prejudice.

When do we attain moksha?

When the lessons and learnings are complete. Then there's no reincarnation.

Why don't we remember our previous lives?

I see that changing, that's what my past-life therapy is all about. We're trying to remember our past lives and learn from our mistakes. In my experiments, people are remembering through therapeutic techniques such as hypnosis, dreams and meditation. According to mythology, if you were born again and you drank from the River of Lethe, you would forget your previous lives.

You say, before we are born, our soul plans the trajectory of the life that lies ahead. How?

Every individual soul chooses the significant people in that life. Destiny will place you in the particular circumstance; it will dictate that you will encounter a particular person, at a certain time, place. The people it arranges you to meet are frequently the people with whom you have lived or have known in your past life. Once you meet them, you then exercise your free will: Do you stay? Or do you leave? You may love them, work with them, befriend them, or marry them. Or you might reject them. These are your choices and this is how you learn. Everything is part of the master plan of the soul's growth. We are here to learn deep lessons.

What is the biggest thing that stops people from living their lives in the present moment? Fear and we must learn how to overcome fear.

How can people eliminate their fears, which often draw them back?

Understanding dissolves fear. When we understand the true nature of our being, fears dissipate. We are spiritual beings, not human beings.

Your belief is that miracles may be large that affect an entire group, or they may be small and silent. How do we recognize miracles?

It is not the size of the healing or transformation that matters. It is the powerful spiritual effect that manifests at the physical or emotional level. It is evident when it occurs.

How can we go back in our past lives?

We can pray and ask for divine intervention but to experience the transformational power of past life memories, one needs to experience a regression. The human body is a vessel for the soul. With each life, we complete some part of the whole learning process. That's why I believe human beings are essentially immortal.

How can we experience magic?

You can experience magic when you are mindfully living in the present moment. It's a matter of awareness and mindfulness. It's also important not to live with any regrets of the past or worries of the future.

In what way does past life regression help a person?

It's very important to remember and remind yourself of the unfulfilled goals from your past lives. It eventually helps you get past all the obstacles of the present life. Past life regression therapy permanently heals the body and the mind.You have to know about the exact nature of the problem before seeking answers or solutions to overcome them.

We are living in a world full of anxieties that cripple us. How can we heal and be free of them?

This is a matter of recognising our true nature. We are spiritual beings. We are immortal and eternal. Anxieties and other negative emotions are merely temporary states.

yog

The export of Sunya aka How did Europeans learn to count correctly aka History of the seed of Modern Science

Historical scientists categorize the types of number systems peoples use, much the same way philologists break down languages into "analytic," "agglutinative," "inflectional," etc.

The path that leads to the discovery of "0" lies only in the most advanced type of number system, which is called "positional" because the value of a character depends on its position. Our modern way of counting is positional. The base figure "5" has a different value in 514 and in 145, determined by its position.

The Romans, Greeks, Hebrews (and Aztecs and pre-Islamic Arabs and a great many others) used an "additive" system, which is fundamentally a transcription of counting. A Roman "V" meant "five" and that's all it could mean.

An additive system can develop into a positional one -- the abacus has a tendency to suggest the positional model -- but as far as we know, the positional concept has emerged in only four places: c.2000 B.C.E., in Babylon; around the start of the Common Era, in China; between the 4th and 9th centuries C.E. among the Mayan astronomer-priests; and in India.

Positional systems have certain features in common. One is that each base number is denoted by a discrete symbol, purely conventional and not a graphic representation of the number itself (i.e., not "four slashes" for "four," as the Greeks and Romans had). Imagine the scribal confusion if the Romans had tried to use positional mathematics with their numbering system: "423" would be IIII II III, while "342" would be III IIII II.

Another feature of positional number systems is that they lack special symbols for numbers which are orders of magnitude of the base number. Romans had a symbol for "10," and a separate symbol for "100" (10 x 10) and another for "1,000" (10 x 100) and so on. This is necessary in an additive system, for simplicity of notation and record-keeping, but it is incompatible with a positional system.

But think about the positional system. You come across a big stumbling block when you try to write a number like 2,002. For a Roman, that's no problem: MMII. But in a positional system, you have to find a way to indicate the absence of "tens" and "hundreds." You could leave a gap (the Babylonians did this at first), but that opens the door to more scribal errors, and anyway how do you indicate two gaps, as in 2,002?

It becomes necessary to have a "zero," a character that signifies "empty." Maybe not necessary, because the brilliant Chinese mathematicians somehow managed to run a positional system without making this discovery. The Babylonians (eventually), the Indians, and the Mayans did discover it, however.

But the next step, the true miracle moment, is to realize that that "symbol for nothing" that you're using is not just a place-holder, but an actual number: that "empty" and "nothing" are one. The null number is as real as "5" and "2,002" -- that's when the door blows open and the light blazes forth and numbers come alive. Without that, there's no modern mathematics, no algebra, no modern science.

And as far as we know, that has only happened once in human history, somewhere in India, in the intellectual flowering under the Gupta Dynasty, about the 6th century C.E. There was no "miracle moment," of course. It was a long, slow process.

The daunting realization, for heirs of "Western Civilization," is that the Greek and Roman cultures we revere were benighted mathematically, plodding along in the most primitive of number systems. But as champions of these cultures point out, we can admire their accomplishments all the more for that.

Some authorities, however, put up strong resistance to the theory of the Indian origin of modern mathematics. At first, they were mired in the same religion-based worldview that denied the Indo-European linguistic link: the number system simply had to be Hebrew in origin, because nothing else would comport with the Bible (so they thought). Later, however, resistance took refuge in unwillingness to concede cultural superiority to non-Western civilizations.

It does seem to be a glaring omission in the "Greek miracle." Historical scientists in the early part of the 20th century (such as G.R. Kaye, N. Bubnov, B. Carra de Vaux, etc.) argued strongly against an Indian origin, insisting the numbers evolved in ancient Greece, perhaps among neo-Pythagoreans, were taken to Alexandria, and from there spread to Rome and Spain in the west (from whence medieval Europe rediscovered them), and, via trade routes, to India in the east.

Among the many problems with this idea is the utter lack of documentary evidence for anything like a positional number system in Greece or Rome, and its requirement that we believe ancient people had made this wonderful practical discovery, yet did not put it to any use.

Speculation about a Greek origin of the ten "Arabic numerals" goes back to the 16th century in Europe. But before that, there are many sources in Europe and the pre-Islamic Levant that frankly attribute them to India. The earliest depiction of them in English, "The Crafte of Nombrynge" (c.1350), correctly identifies them as "teen figurys of Inde."

The Arabic sources, from the earliest times, refer to them as arqam al hind -- "figures from India" -- or some such name. The Muslims of that day, generally contemptuous of non-Islamic culture, had no problem conceding the invention of this number system to India.

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That is in Rikved

The abstract-

The rigveda contains and seems to preserve more common elements from 

the Proto-Indo-European Culture than any other branch of the family. This

essay  examines  various  points  of  language,  poetry  and  philosophy  but  it 

focuses mainly  on  grammatical  elements,  lexical  and syntactical,  and  on 

aspects  of  (fine)  poetry.  This  is  one  aspect  showing  that  Vedic  and  its 

culture  is  much  closer  to  the  PIE  language  and  culture  than  any  other 

branch in that family. Moreover, it shows that it is most unlikely that Vedic 

moved across thousands of miles over difficult terrains to come to rest in 

what is today N-W India and Pakistan, in Saptasindhu or the Land of the 

Seven Rivers. Certain  other  aspects show that Iranian moved  away from

Vedic and Saptasindhu and most probably the other branches did the same 

at  a  very  distant  but  undetermined  period.  Finally, monotheism  is  also  a 

notable feature in the RV despite its pronounced polytheism.

 Also to note the truthfulness of the indologist when he says

''I have not spoken explicitly of the origins of Indian Civilization. It should be obvious, however, 

that I regard the rise of the Vedic Culture as indigenous and not the result of an (Aryan or protoIndo-European) invasion or immigration.

I cannot speak of the origin of this Civilization because I do not know it. And I don’t think 

anybody  else  does.''

so guys say something that comes to your mind.

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