The ongoing debate on this subject tends to categorize opinion into two opposing camps. Most popular with traditional schools of psychology is the view that so called past life memories are just some manifestation of subconscious processes where Freudian symbolism meets with Jungian archetypes, the collective unconscious. The often-cliched excesses of reincarnationalism insists on the literal view of past life recall. Dianne Seaman proposes that neither are true, and yet in a paradoxical way, both are true simultaneously. It is not a matter of either one or the other theory being correct. For outside either of these two camps is the growing number of psychologists amassing considerable evidence that, in the way the deep subconscious is organized, both the archetypal level and the literal experience can and do co-exist.

Comfort with paradox and with both/and thinking is helpful in this debate. This is in contrast to the either/or approach of the intellect...the realm of logos, Apollo, the sky god, the favored style of archetypal masculine in our culture for centuries. It is this Apollonian logic which has embroiled us in the eternal debate of whether or not past life memories are literal or symbolic. This rational worldview could never accept that they might be both.

The Past Life Phenomenon is much more in the realm of Persephone and her masculine counterpart, Hades. One has to make the descent into the underworld to experience Past Life contents. While the philosophical and theological questions about reincarnation can be explored and debated--endlessly I might add--by the intellect, the mind alone can never really KNOW or understand the phenomenon. Experience is essential. As Kabir says, “Experience, O Seeker, is the essence of all things.”

The linear cause and effect models in western psychotherapy, which echoed Newtonian physics, assumed causality for personality, starting in childhood, that was structured in a linear arrangement in the subconscious. (The further back in linear time, the more difficult for the conscious mind to access) However the psyche may be arranged in a non-linear, more holographic way than the linear model assumes.

The Western bias toward materialism has accepted only physical, genetic inheritance of temperament…What research in past life therapy is revealing is that there may also be a type of non-physical soul, or psychic inheritance from our own past life history, which swirls together with archetypal material and a person's current biography to blend into the unique personality of a given individual.

As a result of Dianne’s experiences, both professional and personal, she believes there is no black and white answer to whether or not past lives are real. For some people, recall may be a completely accurate past life…for others, a total fantasy. And yet for others, their experience may be a blending of an actual lifetime, metaphor and fantasy…all mixed together.

The following material in The Journal of Regression Therapy, Volume XII, pp. 94-95, by Dr. Janet Cunningham succinctly confirms what Dianne has intuitively sensed for years. Here are some possible distinctions to various material that emerges during a regression:

“Experiencing past lives energetically through the mind-field can come from different subtle energy bodies:

a) actual past life memories filtered down from the sahu (Egyptian term for Oversoul)
b) metaphor or allegory from the personal unconscious, the haidit (Egyptian term)
c) fantasy or ego based imagination, from the lower ka (Egyptian term)

"The experienced past life practitioner will admit to having some clients who appear to reach actual past life memories, others who seem to be reaching a metaphor from the unconscious, others who might be tapping an archetypal personality, and still others who move into fantasy about who they were in a past life.”

Which subtle body energy he or she is reaching seems to depend on the consciousness of the client. For some clients, actual last life memories may be stored in the sahu and filter down into the unconscious mind to be retrieved. For others, who may not be able to reach higher vibrational dimensions, their experiences in regression may be a combination of various energies that include imagination and metaphor, and perhaps some portions of actual past life recall.

There are subtle, yet quite distinctive different energies present in various regressions. What ultimately matters is the therapeutic benefit the client receives as a result of this work. For some people, Past Life Regression Therapy provides the key to break through unwanted patterns that had been resistent to change, in spite of various attempts at healing using other therapeutic modalities.