42 pages • 1 hour read
Brian WeissMany Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Catherine is a 20th-century, blonde-haired, blue-eyed pilot during her next regression. She knows pilot lingo under trance which she does not know in her waking life. Her daughter Margot is also Catherine’s closest friend in the present lifetime. She dies painfully and discovers that the purpose of this lifetime is to learn about the irrational and evil nature of hate. The first Master that Catherine ever channeled reappears and affirms that Weiss is performing exactly the right kind of treatment for people in the physical realm. He explains that the spiritual state is normal, and the physical state is not normal, adding that Weiss has “almost succeed[ed] in reaching that state” of renewal (121).
The Master indicates that “fear of death is the main concern” of people in the physical realm and that “if they knew that they had lived countless times before and would love countless times again, how reassured they would feel” (122). Traditional religion and science are both inadequate to solve the deepest concerns of humanity. Catherine says that she feels the presence of a guardian spirit named Gideon who makes her feel safer. In response to Weiss’s question about why people come back to the physical realm to continue their learning, Catherine answers that there “are different levels of learning, and we must learn some of them in the flesh” (124).
Catherine jumps into another lifetime where she is named Mandy, and her older sister, who is Becky’s sister in Catherine’s current lifetime, is getting married. Catherine resents Becky’s “judgmental attitude and her intrusiveness” (126). Her father in the past life is Stuart, her current lover. This father has no time for the children, who bother him. After the session, Weiss writes about his anxieties related to sharing his findings with his colleagues who might not understand or believe him. He determines to collect even more information about these spiritual phenomena.
Chapter 10 Summary
Catherine tells Weiss about a dream she had in which her parents’ house is on fire, and her father takes his time evacuating and even sends Catherine back inside to fetch a metal box filled with coins and things her father was keeping. Then she enters another hypnotic trance and enters a troubled lifetime in Ukraine from 1758 CE in which a boy is sad that he may never get to see his father again, who is taken and executed “for no reason at all” (137). The lesson of this lifetime is that being quick to judge is a mistake, and treating people fairly is the correct behavior.
Before Catherine jumps into another lifetime, Weiss revisits the dream of the housefire and asks why she thinks her father was so leisurely about escaping. She answers that this is because “he tries to hide from things” (139), and Weiss suggests that this dream represents time running out in their relationship. Catherine has more to teach her father, who doesn’t want to learn. Catherine agrees with this assessment just as a Master appears to explain “our body is just a vehicle for us while we’re here. It is our soul and our spirit that last forever” (140). The Master explains that beings in the spiritual realm can contact people in physical space “if you have to tell them something that they must know” (140) and that contact can happen on various levels, including mentally, physically, or through cryptic messages.
Catherine explains that the lesson she needs to learn now is trust in addition to faith. She discusses the harm she fears she could experience at the hands of Stuart, who wants to keep her “in prison,” and Becky, who is “constantly trying to break down my faith in the people that I have faith in” (142). Weiss asks Catherine if she can see the future, and she explains that the Masters, who “monitor everything,” (144) prohibit her from looking into the future. While under trance, Catherine tells Weiss that while she was under anesthesia during a recent surgery, she heard the doctors talking about “the possibility of me choking” (146) and that this deeply affected her in waking life.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
The Masters continue affirming that Weiss is conducting the correct form of treatment for his patient. The reader already knows that Weiss has stumbled upon useful avenues by accident and has engaged in some trial and error in his sessions with Catherine, so this can’t mean that Weiss is already an expert at hypnotic regression. It is more likely that the Masters’ affirmation of Weiss’s practice is designed to encourage his reliance on intuitive knowledge, which is the key to becoming a successful spiritual practitioner. The Masters’ mysterious statement that Weiss has “almost succeeded in reaching that state” (121) of spiritual renewal also suggests that the Masters’ advice has to do with helping Weiss’s spiritual intuition to thrive so he can become better at helping more people. These interactions invite the question of whether Weiss is some sort of “chosen one.” Are the Masters having these sorts of interactions with other practitioners around the world at different times, or is Weiss special?
Weiss continues to hide his spiritual discoveries from everybody except his wife Carole because of his “anxiety about the reactions of my professional and scientific colleagues” (128). This is a well-founded fear; despite a resurgence in research and interest in paranormal matters in 1970s America (including research about reincarnation by Ian Stevenson, whose work Weiss studied and references in this book), interest in psychic research was already beginning to drop off by the time of the publication of Many Lives, Many Masters. At the best of times, the traditional scientific community is generally dismissive of psychic claims as they are often difficult to verify with double-blind studies, which makes Weiss’s insistence that psychic claims be verified using the tools of traditional science even more compelling.
Although there is still not enough information to understand it completely, by Chapter 10, we have seen the hypnotic regression cycle go around enough times that we can chart a basic structure of how healing occurs. Catherine enters a lifetime under trance and relives some key moments. If all goes well, she emerges from the experiences understanding the important lessons from each lifetime. This includes recognizing spiritual fellow travelers who have been with her throughout various lifetimes and whose past relationships can help explain current dynamics with those people (such as Stuart or her father). After floating into the in-between in the warmth of spiritual light, Catherine can reflect on the experience and gain more insights available only in the spiritual dimension. This process yields fruit in the current lifetime the same way confronting traumas in traditional therapy can resolve negative symptoms but with a much larger scale and with access to more dimensions of reality.
