I have always been intrigued by the interconnection between my Past Lives work and my fascination with UFO phenomenon. The first time this came to my attention was when I saw researcher Rey Hernandez speak at the 2019 Contact in the Desert conference. Hernandez, at the time one of the co-founders of astronaut Edgar Mitchell's Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences, or FREE, featured lots of data and screens full of numbers logging the accounts of contactees, including this:
26% of contactees have received information about past lives as a result of their contact
(Hernandez is now working with CCRI - the Consciousness & Contact Research Institute)
On a 2023 road trip and listening to the Our Strange Skies podcast, I heard another reference to Past Lives in connection to the UFO phenomena. This was from an unexpected source: John E. Mack’s 1994 book Abductions- Human Encounters With Aliens. Checking out the book, I was surprised to find 28 references to Past Lives in the book! The publication of Abductions got Mack in so much trouble it almost cost him his job as head of the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He had to go to court to fight for his job and won with the help of noted attorney Daniel Sheehan.*
But the Past Lives angle was superseded by the spiritual connotations of people’s experiences, and linked up with what I was experiencing in my latest research and in my personal sessions.
I will devote more attention in this book to the transformational and spiritual growth aspect of the abduction phenomenon that has been the case in other literature on the subject.
I have come to appreciate how simpatico I am with Mack’s methodology, even though he uses a “modified version of hypnosis” including breathwork based on Stanislav Grof’s research. Mack wins me over with this:
I explain to the abductee at the beginning of the session that I am more interested in their integration of their recalled experiences as we go along than in “getting the story.” The story, I explain, will take care of itself in due time.
I advocate that the most important question to open a session can be, “What do I need to see next?” Mack seems to be using this same approach:
I found that the psyche’s own wisdom would take the experiencer where he or she needs to go in the trance and that the healing, integrating, and information-gathering process is better served by not “targeting“ a specific…event.
Mack is a trained psychiatrist and scholar who understands the importance of allowing his client to tell their own story, and I was never concerned about any leading questions, although only excerpts were included in the book.
The abduction phenomenon, I have come to realize, forces us, if we permit ourselves to take it seriously, to reexamine our perception of human identity and to look at who we are from a cosmic perspective…
This “cosmic perspective” becomes the main takeaway from the book, and what drew me to explore his work. As a scholar, he categorizes: “experiences reported by abductees for which we can conceive of no explanation within a Newtonian/Cartesian or even Einsteinian space/time ontology.”
The Past Lives angle was mentioned most prominently in the section titled, “Types of experience during abductions that appear to be related to personal growth and transformation.”
Past lives are experienced during the sessions with strong emotion appropriate to what is being remembered…Complaints, or simply observations of being here on earth “again,” of being “back,” or having “returned,” are voiced (about which I then inquire). The past lives that are recalled seem to have relevance to the personal development or evolution of the experiencer.
I would offer that all Past lives have relevance to the personal development/evolution of the experiencer, but it is gratifying that Mack, who was not conducting past life regressions in his practice, came to this conclusion. I have heard from clients what he calls “complaints” being voiced about having to be returned to Earth “again.” I addressed this in my Past Life Journeying book as my surprise at discovering a Future life:
Because I’ve been one of many people who declared, “This is my last life. Let me finish my work here and go ‘home.’ I am not coming back to this planet.”
I also refer to many clients expressing this same emotion after accessing that sense of “home” that Mack reports.
Because there was so much information in Mack’s Past Life reportage, I had to break them down to bullet points to address them adequately:
Past life experiences provide abductees (and the investigator) with a different perspective about time and the nature of human identity
Cycles of birth and death over long stretches of time can be relived, providing a different, less ego derived sense of the continuity of life and the smallness of an individual lifetime from a cosmic perspective
Consciousness is experienced as not coterminous (sic) with the body; the notion of a soul with an existence separate from the body becomes relevant
Once the separateness of consciousness from the body is grasped, other kinds of “transpersonal” experiences become possible
The frequency with which past life experiences are recalled during the hypnotic regressions relates also to the idea of expanded identity, i.e., In some sense the human spirit or soul is not limited to this lifetime, but may have extended over hundreds and even…thousands of years
Past life recall becomes particularly powerful when it makes it possible to see…a continuity of personal growth over more than one lifetime
A number of abductees with whom I have worked experience at certain points an opening up to the source of being in the cosmos, which they often call Home, and from which they feel they have been brutally cut off in the course of becoming embodied as as a human being
Related apparently to this opening to the divine source is the experience that some abductees have of great cycles of birth, life, and death, repeating over long stretches of time
This may become particularly apparent when past life experiences are relived and the abductee is permitted to recall the actual experiences of death and rebirth.
(This last point seems to refer to a session focused on accessing a past life rather than Mack’s ongoing abduction research.)
I have seen in my clients/participants, and experienced in myself, this “transformational and spiritual growth aspect” from deeply exploring Past and Future lives. That Mack saw this in individuals who reported abductions by, and ongoing contact with, what appeared to be extraterrestrial beings is equal parts challenging and uplifting. (And I recognize that Mack published Abductions in 1994!)
I offer Past Life and TimeLine Journeying as a safer, more controlled method of accessing this “cosmic perspective” alluded to by Mack in Abductions.
*I watched Sheehan’s workshop at the 2001 online version of Contact In The Desert, (the “Woodstock of UFO events,” according to USA Today. It has inspired my ongoing examination of “Species-ism.”