Question: Is there any benefit to going for past life regression hypnotherapy?
Sadhguru: At least they are getting little more sincere. Regression hypnotherapy. All these days, they were saying Past Life Regression. This is a better terminology. At least they are a little more straight forward about it now.
Hypnosis essentially means, that you’re not really trying to access reality through a process. You’re trying to establish whatever you wish, isn’t it? Isn’t that the basis of hypnosis? If you hypnotize a person, you’re not hypnotizing him because you want to take him into reality. You want him to invent reality, isn’t it?
If you want to take somebody into reality, you need awareness
If you want to take somebody into reality, you need awareness, which is just a reverse of hypnosis. Now that they are saying it’s hypnotherapy – so they’re going to invent another reality, which they believe is going to correct you. So you’re in one kind of problem, you’re trying to balance it off with something else. It may work in short. If somebody is very sick, anything is okay. If it’s going to help them a bit, it’s okay.
But if you’re asking me as a spiritual process – definitely no. Regression, it’s all just psychological nonsense, generally. But suppose you can do it, let’s say. You could go into past life regression. What I would say is – most human minds right now the way they are, they cannot even handle one lifetime’s memory. Just 1 lifetime’s memory is freaking the hell out of them, isn’t it? If you remember 10 lifetimes, your mind will crack up. Don’t you think so? One lifetime’s memory, people have become miserable. Just remembering the past 20-30 years, people have become utterly miserable. If you remember 10 lifetimes, I can imagine your state. So, nature has put a certain barrier, and it’s good.
If you remember 10 lifetimes, your mind will crack up
There are other more responsible ways of doing this. Where we remind you not in terms of memory, but it works itself out in the form of energy. People been to samyama meditations? Are there any? Okay. Samyama is essentially this, that layers of unconscious mind can be brought to a conscious level and worked out. But not on the memory level, on the energy level. Because if memory comes, people will just crack up. They cannot handle the load of two, or five, or ten lifetimes. Your mind is not capable of handling that. It will definitely crack you up and confuse your life completely.
If you remember things from past life, and there are all over people. Let us say – in your neighbourhood, your neighbours whatever, your neighbour’s husband, or let’s say your neighbour’s dog, happened to be your child in past life. I can’t imagine you. With the kind of emotions you have right now, you will not be able to manage this. It would drive you crazy. So it would be utterly irresponsible. If somebody is capable of opening our past lives, it would be utterly irresponsible to open it.
We do such things in very controlled conditions for specific purposes for certain people. But that’s very rare. It’s not necessary on a daily basis. Samayama is a good way to go through it, because it works out on an energy level. You never come to the mental level of remembering the actual detail of it. But you’ve seen something working itself out, which is very obvious to you. That is good for you, because it cleans up. But remembering is not good.
But if it’s hypnotherapy, it’s definitely not a regression. It’s just a – it’s an attractive name. Probably it’s intriguing for people to call it regression. The moment you say it’s hypnosis, I don’t think it can be regression. Most of the regression processes that are happening are purely psychological manipulations. They don’t touch anything within.
