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 11-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary
The chapter opens with Weiss jolting awake at 3:36am with a vision of Catherine’s face. He did not know at the time that moments before, Catherine had awoken panicked from a nightmare and visualized Weiss’s face for comfort.
Under trance during their next session, Catherine describes a lifetime as a teenage servant to a black-haired woman, and Weiss finds that when he speaks to Catherine in this lifetime it is much like speaking to a real teenager. She exits this lifetime before experiencing death, and the poet Master intervenes to discuss the importance of balance and harmony, which nature and animals understand but humans don’t. For this reason, humans “will eventually destroy themselves” (159).
Weiss muses about how much more knowledge could possibly be gained through these sessions. He discusses his experience with his mother-in-law Minette, who met Catherine once and whose “sincerity and honesty helped convince Minette that the existence of an afterlife was indeed true” (162). The sessions with Catherine improved Weiss’s intuition and abilities as a therapist, and if some of his other patients appeared ready, he would share his knowledge about reincarnation with them. The game-changing message he has for his patients now is that “we are immortal. We will always be together” (164).
Chapter 12 Summary
Catherine enters her next session “radiant” with symptoms that have “virtually disappeared” (167). She enters a trance easily and experiences a difficult lifetime of war which ends with the usual floating. An entity, who is later revealed to be not a Master but a being who occupies the lower planes, speaks through Catherine explaining that there are seven planes each containing many levels, “one of them being the plane of recollection” where one can “collect your thoughts. You are allowed to see your life that has just passed” (171). At the higher levels, one can observe history, while at the lower levels it is only possible “to see our own life […] that has just passed” (172). Of the seven planes, the Master only reveals the plane of transition, which is the waiting area, and the aforementioned plane of recollection.
This entity further explains that during one’s lifetime people carry debts that they are required to repay and that these debts are carried over into new lifetimes. Failure to pay a debt means one has to wait until that debtor comes to visit again, and then they can return to the physical realm together. Catherine emerges from this experience understanding that Edward owes her a debt, which she determines must be some information about her sister’s child Stephanie, who was put up for adoption.
Catherine enters another lifetime on a farm and finds her current grandfather there in the form of a man taking care of the horses. She determines that her grandfather has done a better job of learning and repaying debts than her father, who “has come back […] without understanding” (177).
Chapters 11-12 Analysis
When Catherine awakes from a nightmare and visualizes Weiss’s face, she shows a “telepathic bond along a wavelength outside the normal channels” (153), according to Weiss. With this anecdote, Weiss broadens his scope of what kinds of psychic phenomena could be valid in the physical world. It is clear by now that Weiss is not simply advocating for a general acceptance of hypnotic regression for therapeutic purposes but for the acceptance of any verifiable psychic phenomena from any variety of practitioners, including the existence of forms of extra sensory perception (ESP).
We get a glimpse of Catherine’s character growth, when she corrects Weiss when he suggests she is old during one of her lifetimes by saying, “but I’m not very old” (171); just as Weiss is getting better at utilizing intuitive knowledge for therapeutic ends, Catherine is mastering her experiences under trance and flows through these spiritual realms with ease. Her growing comfort under trance mirrors her progress in the current lifetime in which she is almost healed of her symptoms and in which her psychic powers are growing.
A spiritual voice delves more deeply into the details of the spiritual planes than ever before in Chapter 12, explaining that there are seven planes “through which we must pass before we are returned” (172) and discussing how existence at different planes gives access to different insights. This book advocates for a specific version of spiritual reality the details of which can be accessed through hypnotic regression. At this point, the reader might ask why this version of spiritual reality is compatible with other spiritual systems. Could the Masters or other spiritual beings described in this book be the same kinds of beings, like gods and angels, described in some of the great world religions?
