~What Is Past-life Regression?~~
· Regression is a recognized hypnotic state in which the patient finds him or herself immersed in memories from another time, language or age.
· In many cases the patient returns to childhood, reliving past experiences with all their corresponding emotions.
· Generally it is possible to lead a person to the period before birth, and thus reveal details from that time.
· At times, it is possible to return a person to his or her earliest life. For example, a Mexican hypnotist succeeded in transporting a patient through several previous lives, to the age of the Pharaohs. The woman recalled a military parade that was part of a pilgrimage to the pyramids in honor of one of the Pharaohs.
· In most cases the patient does not recall anything after awakening from the hypnotic state.
~The Past Lives of Glenn Ford~~
A summary of a long account that appeared in World of Mysteries (vol. 11, pp. 31-36), concerning regressive therapy performed by the hypnotist Dr. Maurice Benjamin of Los Angeles, on the famous movie actor, Glenn Ford (1916-2006):
The first séance took place on December 1st 1975 in the home of Dr. Benjamin. Three additional people were present – two clinical psychologists and a friend who was a journalist. Everything that took place during the session was recorded.
The séance was organized for the purposes of a single goal: releasing Ford from mental inhibitions that prevented him from accessing his subconscious. This first experiment lasted one hour and ten minutes. The sessions took an average of one hour and thirty minutes.
In the second session, which took place three days later, Dr. Benjamin began a process of age-regression, returning Ford in stages to the ages of six, four, three and then one.
In the third session at the end of the same week, Ford began his first foray into a previous life. “You are leaving the process of birth behind you, and traveling into the past… to other lives… towards a person who once was,” Dr. Benjamin told the hypnotized actor. ‘Who are you now?’ he asked him.
“Charles Stewart,” said Ford, whose words unexpectedly took on a strong Scottish accent.
As the dialogue progressed, the people present learned much about this mysterious Charles Stewart. It became apparent that he was a Scottish gentleman who had lived at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, born and bred in Elgin, Scotland, a place he described as a “gray valley, cold and muddy.” He had a younger sister, Aliza, who married at a young age and moved to Edinburgh. Charles Stewart himself had lived in Elgin all his life, making a living from teaching music.
In order to manage his loneliness, he built a stall in his backyard and dedicated himself to raising horses in his spare time. “They were my only true love in life and I had no reason to regret it,” he said. “I raised them with love and total commitment and I received love and total commitment from them in return.”
Charles Stewart did not live a long life. He died at the age of thirty-two, in 1812, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery of Elgin next to the plot of the Baker Family.
“When I awoke from my hypnotized state and listened to the recording,” Glenn Ford said when interviewed for the article, “I didn’t know what to make of it. The Scottish accent, of course, was not a convincing element. I am an experienced actor and I can imitate any accent without difficulty. What troubled me when I listened to the tape was the mention of music. As Charles Stewart, the music teacher, I had risen from my place in the middle of the séance, at Dr. Benjamin’s request, and played music by Chopin, Beethoven, and Mozart at the piano for a short time. I, as Glenn Ford, never studied music and I can’t tell the difference between classical and jazz. Meanwhile, the wife of Dr. Benjamin, who was a pianist in her youth and was present at the séance, said later that I had played extremely well.”
Ford and Benjamin then took a two-week break from their sessions in order to investigate the truth about the details that had been presented at the séance. Glenn Ford took advantage of one of his friend’s trip to England, asking him, if he were able, to look into the various details that had been mentioned about Charles Stewart’s life. The answer, which was received in a long telegram, would have astounded anyone who had not already heard the story of Bridey Murphy. The friend had located a city in Scotland called Elgin, describing it in the very same terms that had been used during the séance. In the Protestant cemetery of the town, amidst a jumble of bushes and brambles that had not been trimmed in decades, the friend was shocked to find a tombstone with the name “Charles Stewart” etched into it. The man described on the tombstone had died at the age of thirty-two in 1812 and had been buried in a line with five other family members.
Ford was overwhelmed when he received the telegram, even though he had expected something like it to arrive. If he had had even a shadow of a doubt before the telegram, it completely disappeared the moment he read it. “Until this day,” he said in the interview, it was difficult for him to digest the fact that “Glenn Ford is only a reincarnation of the Scotsman Charles Stewart.” Ford believed that his acceptance of this fact would come with time. And indeed he decided that after three or four months, when he completed work on a film, he would travel to Scotland to personally visit the grave of Charles Stewart. He said that he thought that he would like to stand before the old gravestone and say something like, “Hello, Charlie. Do you remember me? It’s me, Charlie.”
At the fourth séance, which took place in January 1969, Dr. Benjamin tried to bring Ford back to experiences before Charles Stewart, to see if he had any previous incarnations. The experiment did not go well. Ford became embroiled in unexpected nervousness and discomfort, and the doctor was forced to wake him. Another séance was attempted two days later. Again Ford was trapped in a restless state preventing him from advancing before that of Charles Stewart.
Ford described his trip into the past as a journey on a night train through the fog, where previous lives are like lit-up stations appearing in a flash, as the subject passes quickly by. Ford believed that the particular station to which he had arrived had been darkened for some reason. He had tried to reveal more details without success, for the darkness was all-encompassing. (It is likely that this darkness represented an abortion. Z.C.)
The doctor suggested that if this was the case they should pass over the dark station and move further back towards another one.
Ford agreed and Dr. Benjamin led him into a deep hypnotic trance using a previously agreed upon signal. “You are continuing further into the past…you travel deeper…the dark station is now far behind you…Do you begin to see light? Can you begin to make out any details? Where are you?” asked Dr. Benjamin. “Versailles,” said Ford. Surprisingly, he began to speak casually and fluently in French. Ford had been able to speak sluggish French, if not worse. In his youth he had been able to speak passable French with his French neighbors from Quebec, but since then he had forgotten much of his vocabulary which was now quite weak. But now, under the influence of hypnosis, French flowed off of his tongue in a manner that would have made any Frenchman jealous.
After the séance, Dr. Benjamin took a portion of the recording of Ford’s dialogue to the University of California, requesting experts in French language to give a professional opinion on what they heard. A group of three experts analyzed the material and their response was unequivocal: Glenn Ford had displayed – completely without warning – total mastery of Parisian French common in the 1670's and 1680's.
Let us return to the séance.
“You are at Versailles?” asked Dr. Benjamin. He switched into French and asked: “Can you describe it?”
Without hesitating, Ford described how he had just walked through the front gate of a castle. (He used the word “chateaux,” an idiom that had denoted the castle at Versailles in the second half of the 17th century). “All of the roads and sidewalks are covered with dust. I hope it will rain soon,” said Ford. “This dust is killing me.”
‘What else do you see?” asked the doctor. “Horses, lots of horses,” said Glenn Ford with surprise in his voice. “Your horses?” asked Dr. Benjamin. “No,” he answered. “Only one of them is mine. They are in the stable on the left side of the castle.” The doctor nodded his head. As a great lover of French culture, Versailles was well known to Dr. Benjamin. He was convinced that there had never been a stable on the left side of the castle. “You are not being precise,” the hypnotist said to the subject. “It is not possible that you can see a stable on the left side.”
But Ford insisted that there were stables on the left side of the building and he began to grow angry when the doctor continued to press him on the issue. He relaxed only when they changed the topic.
It came to light during the continuation of their conversation that the Frenchman speaking out of Glenn Ford’s mouth was named Launvaux. (He refused to divulge his first name). He claimed to have an extra sensitive sense of smell, and began to recite all of his most beloved scents – his favorites amongst them being the smell of horses freshly groomed in the stable and the sharp scent of the refuse of the stable drying in the sun for an entire year after the cleaning of the main sewage line. Based on these descriptions, as well as much time spent with research in the university library, Dr. Benjamin was able to determine the exact year that Glenn Ford had described. The year had been 1684 during the reign of King Louis, the XIV. Launvaux had been killed in a duel.
The conversation between the doctor and the mysterious Launvaux – despite all of its strangeness – raised several important points. Over the next two weeks, the doctor spent day and night in the university library, reading through scores of history books to bring together the best description of the castle at Versailles possible. He studied manuscripts of historians from the 17th century, even ordering a rare manuscript to be sent from Paris. His research confirmed that Launvaux had been right about the location of the stable he had described. The documentation from Paris contained a map of the castle at Versailles from the period of the reign of Louis the XIV. The map confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the horses of the royal guard were located on the left side of the castle at this particular point in history. Only later were they moved to another venue in order to make room for a luxurious addition on the left side of the main building. In the majority of the books that had passed through the Dr. Benjamin’s hands, it was also confirmed that many people died during duels throughout this period.
The period between the death of the Frenchman Launvaux (1684) and the birth of the Scotsman Charles Stewart (1780) spanned some one hundred years, and between these two well-lit “stations” laid an unidentified station representing an additional, hidden link in Ford’s past lives. This station remained dark and did not allow the subject to enter it. Despite three additional attempts (the last of which was particularly long and intense) Ford did not succeed in passing through this dark obstacle and into his past. Why? Did this particular incarnation represent a time of great suffering and pain from which the soul was protecting?
“I don’t know why it is like this,” said Ford, “however, I’m not giving up without a fight.” Ford believed that the continuing attempts would eventually lead to unraveling the mystery of the darkened station, if only partially.
In summarizing the turning point in his life inspired by his travels into the past, the actor said: “I was full of doubts before we began the sessions; however, today I don’t have a shadow of a doubt. By the way, I have told you only part of what took place in the séances. The tape recordings are loaded with intimate details that I am too embarrassed to describe. In my incarnation as Glenn Ford, I am a shy person and I would not relate such embarrassing details even under hypnosis. In my opinion, this is proof that the stories that were recorded were not the words of Glenn Ford, but of Charles Stewart and Launvaux…”
Adapted from The Revolution by Rabbi Zamir Cohen
