Notes & Quotes: Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss, M.D.

The following are my favorite quotes from Dr Brian Weiss' Many Lives, Many Masters:
  1. There were indeed references to reincarnation in the Old & New Testaments.  In AD 325 the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, along with his mother, Helena, had deleted references to reincarnation contained in the New Testament.  The Second Council of Constantinople, meeting in AD 553, confirmed this action and declared the concept of reincarnation heresy.  Apparently, they thought this concept would weaken the growing power of the church by giving humans too much time to seek their salvation.
  2. Groups of souls tend to reincarnate together again and again, working out their karma over the span of many lifetimes.
  3. "Our task is to learn, to become God-like through knowledge.  We know so little.  You are here to be my teacher.  I have so much to learn.  By knowledge we approach God, and then we can rest.  Then we come back to teach and help others." Catherine
  4. I was fascinated by the way her [Catherine's] concept of death and the afterlife changed so much from lifetime to lifetime.  And yet her experience of death itself was so uniform, so similar, every time.
  5. I struggled to believe.  I was overcoming years of alternative programming.  But in my head and in my heart and my gut, I knew she was right.  She was revealing truths.
  6. Was my son as spiritually advanced as Catherine had said?  Did he agree to be born to us and then die twenty-three days later in order to help us with our karmic debts, and, in addition, to teach me about medicine and humankind, to nudge me back toward psychiatry?
  7. We are frightfully concerned with our own deaths, sometimes so much so that we forget the real purpose of our lives.
  8. The reward is in doing, but doing without expecting anything...doing unselfishly.
  9. The sands of her [Catherine's] theology were constantly shifting in the hourglass of her lives.  Only after death, in the spiritual state, was there a welcoming and reassuring constancy.
  10. Patience and timing...everything comes when it must come.  A life cannot be rushed, cannot be worked on a schedule as so many people want it to be.  We must accept what comes to us at a given time, and not ask for more.  But life is endless, so we never die; we were never really born.  We just pass through different phases.  There is no end.  Humans have many dimensions.  But time is not as we see time, but rather in lessons that are learned.
  11. Under hypnosis, she [Catherine] possessed a vast store of knowledge.  Only a fraction of this knowledge, however, was available to her everyday, conscious mind.
  12. Our body is just a vehicle for us while we're here.  It is our soul and our spirit that lasts forever.
  13. Everything must be balanced.  Nature is balanced.  The beasts live in harmony.  Humans have not learned to do that.  They continue to destroy themselves.
  14. We are all the same.  One is no greater than the next.  And all this is just lessons...and punishments.
  15. Reincarnation and the in-between planes are basic tenets of kabbalistic literature yet most modern-day Jews are unaware of this.
  16. We have debts that must be paid.  If we have not paid out these debts, then we must take them into another life...in order that they may be worked through.
  17. We will all have...a dominant trait.  This might be greed, or it might be lust, but whatever is determined, you need to fulfill your debts to these people.  Then you must overcome this in that lifetime.  You must learn to overcome greed.  If you do not, when you return you will have that trait, as well as another one, into your next life.  The burdens will become greater.  With each life that you go through and you do not fulfill these debts, the next one will be harder.  If you fulfill them, you will be given an easy life.  So you choose what life you will have.  In the next phase, you are responsible for the life you have.  You choose it.
  18. There was much practical advice along the way: the value of patience and of waiting; the wisdom in the balance of nature; the eradication of fears, especially the fear of death; the need for learning about trust and forgiveness; the importance of learning not to judge others, or to halt anyone's life; the accumulation and use of intuitive powers; and, perhaps most of all, the unshakable knowledge that we are immortal.  We are beyond life and death, beyond space and beyond time.  We are the gods, and they are us.
  19. You develop through relationships.  There are some with higher powers who have come back with more knowledge.  They will seek out those who need the development and help them.
  20. Theoretical knowledge without practical application is not enough.
  21. There is too much black-or-white thinking.  All or none.  This is not the way of nature.  In nature there is balance.  Beasts destroy in small amounts.  Ecological systems are not eliminated en masse.  Plants are consumed and then grow.  The sources of sustenance are dipped into and then replenished.  The flower is enjoyed, the fruit eaten, the root preserved.
  22. Humankind has not learned about balance, let alone practiced it.  It is guided by greed and ambition, steered by fear.
  23. It as if a large diamond were to be found inside each person.  Picture a diamond a foot-long.  The diamond has a thousand facets, but the facets are covered with dirt and tar.  It is the job of the soul to clean each facet until the surface is brilliant and can reflect a rainbow of colors.  Now, some have cleaned many facets and gleam brightly.  Others have only managed to clean a few; they do not sparkle so.  Yet, underneath the dirt, each person possesses within his or her breast a brilliant diamond with a thousand gleaming facets.  The diamond is perfect, not one flaw.  The only differences among people are the number of facets cleaned.  But each diamond is the same, and each is perfect.
  24. I listen to my dreams and intuitions.  When I do, things seem to fall into place.  When I do not, something invariably goes awry.