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 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Catherine’s negative symptoms are completely gone. She has repeat experiences under trance. The session that opens the chapter is her last for five months. In this session she is training to make religious statues with a strange red substance for the gods who are “angry” and “punishing us” (183). A Master intervenes to tell Weiss that souls wishing to manifest to people in physical form have many options to do so but may “only go to this plane if it is useful […] to go there,” for example if you “leave an agreement that has not been fulfilled” (185).
Catherine floats into the light with its renewing qualities. She notes that she has not yet fulfilled the various debts and agreements accrued throughout her 86 lifetimes. She also explains that “some people access the astral plane through drugs, “but they do not understand what they have experienced. But they have been allowed to cross over” (186). Catherine says that psychic powers such as hers “develop through relationships” (187).
Chapter 14 Summary
Catherine wonders if more hypnosis would be helpful at this stage, and Weiss agrees that continuing at this point would likely be more for his benefit than hers. Within five months, Catherine “felt some joy and real happiness in her life” (193). She schedules another appointment with Weiss to discuss “a recurring dream about a religious sacrifice […] that involved snakes in a pit” (194). She enters trance during the session and describes a lifetime as a member of a royal household. The poet Master speaks through Catherine to advise Weiss that moving forward, he must “learn through [his] own intuition” (195). This is the final session with Catherine, whose symptoms are cured.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
The Master who appears in this chapter seems to be explaining phenomena like house hauntings and ghost sightings when they explain that “some souls are allowed to manifest themselves to the people who are still in physical form” (185). If the reader is interested in the concept of past lives and reincarnation but is uncomfortable with the idea of ghosts and hauntings, this may be a difficult point to reconcile. The wide spectrum of paranormal occurrences that Weiss becomes comfortable exploring by the end of this narrative might stretch the credulity of a general readership.
While under trance, Catherine reveals that people who take hallucinogenic drugs are able to access the astral plane just as Catherine is doing under hypnotic regression, but the drug user is not able to fully comprehend their experiences. The suggestion here is that the mind-expanding experiences caused by hallucinogens cannot be fully explained by science; a spiritual force is also at work. Catherine’s claim that a drug user is not able to “understand what they have experienced” (186) must only refer to the ancient wisdom of the Masters and past-life lesson-learning. However, many drug users, such as Aldous Huxley in his celebrated book The Doors of Perception, are able to eloquently discuss their experiences under the influence of mind-altering substances.
At the start of the book, Weiss was all logic and reason and expressed little to no intuitive knowledge. Now, following Catherine’s final session and the poet Master’s declaration that Weiss “must now learn through your [his] intuition” (195), one gets the sense that Weiss is balanced between these two ontologies, with his intuitive side growing larger by the day. Despite this chapter feeling like a goodbye to an important relationship, it is not the end of Weiss’s hypnotic regression journey as he will go on to treat thousands more patients using and refining the techniques he used with Catherine.
