Taking a New Age Tour Through Past Lives

Some people like to know the answers, and some are content with questions. Some people are convinced that reincarnation is a matter of fact, and some are convinced that it is pure fantasy. And some of us are content to shrug and grin and say, “Hey, if it works for you . . . “

I’d like to think that it was with healthy skepticism, and not cynicism, that I allowed myself to be lured to the Woodland Hills home of Dr. Bruce Goldberg, a dentist turned cosmic tour guide. Goldberg is a New Age shaman, a hypnotist who claims to lead people not merely through “past life regression” but into “future life progression” as well. He can do this, he explains, because quantum mechanics teaches that “all time is simultaneous.”

Hey, whatever. It works for Goldberg. By all appearances, it works very well. His books include “Past Lives--Future Lives” and “The Search for Grace,” recently made into a CBS movie. He sells tapes with such titles as “Out of Body Experience” and “Soul Plane Ascension.” He appears on TV talk shows and at such conclaves as the upcoming Los Angeles Whole Life Expo at the Pasadena Convention Center.

When Goldberg suggested I might want to check out where my spirit’s been and where it’s going, I was dubious. He told me beauty-queen-turned-TV-news-anchor Tawny Little was skeptical too until he hypnotized her. Hey, if it works for Tawny Little. . .

My sweetheart wanted to go too. Kyrstin is a tad more open to this sort of thing--and she had a specific agenda.

She was especially intrigued by “The Search for Grace,” Goldberg’s account of a patient in an abusive relationship who learns that in 46 past lives, she’d been murdered 20 times--and always by the same co-dependent soul! Yes, the same one who was now her abusive boyfriend! Talk about bad karma.

Just because that tale interested her, don’t get the wrong idea. Kyrstin sometimes worries about the dreams that resemble the shower scene in “Psycho.” In these nightmares, she isn’t the victim, she’s the perpetrator. So if we have past lives, my sweetie wonders whether she might once have been, say, Jack the Ripper or Lizzie Borden.

“I want to find out,” Kyrstin said, “if I killed Scott in a past life.” For some reason she giggled.

We were sitting in his office, the blinds drawn to mute the light. Kyrstin leaned back in the easy chair and stared into the “hypnodisk” on Goldberg’s desk, a spinning spiral. A metronome went ticktock, ticktock, ticktock . Goldberg suggested she close her eyes. “So deeply relaxed, so deeply relaxed,” he said, in such a relaxing way. “So deeply, deeply, deeply relaxed.”

Now, supposedly, she had achieved the creative “alpha” state to visit her past. A full-blown hypnotic trance, Goldberg says, is a rarity and not at all a necessity. As a cosmic pal of mine used to say, “You have to surrender yourself to the art.” You have to play along. You say whatever pops into your head.

Kyrstin described herself as a small African girl whose name, phonetically, would be spelled “Noree.” Goldberg didn’t quite catch it and called her “Lenora” throughout the session. Noree didn’t bother correcting him and proceeded to describe herself as an adolescent, giddily pointing out a certain boy to friends.

Later, she described a man carrying a baby on his back and fleeing. The man was her husband. And from what was he fleeing?

“He gets stomped by an elephant.”

Again, she giggled. Kyrstin did, not Noree. As for Noree, she grieved for her husband and child, though not to the extent she would have grieved for the boy she had pointed out earlier. The elephant, it seems, put an end to an arranged marriage.

I’m pleased that she didn’t recognize my soul as anybody in this past life. And Noree saw herself dying old, tended by her surviving daughter.

Then it was my turn.

Me, I was a ship’s mate named Nicholas who left England as a teen-ager and after 20-odd years of seafaring settled down in a village on the coast of colonial New England. My guess now is that I had Portland, Me., in mind. And I suspect it was Portland because I’d been there a couple of times, visiting my friend Bernie. It was as cold and gray and stormy as Capt. Ahab chasing his whale.

Then we searched for a future life. Next time out, apparently, I’ll be a Greek businessman with a wife and four kids. We didn’t figure out my name. Another Nick? Zorba, perhaps?

Hey, whatever. I was just pleased to learn that both Nicholas and the Greek would die of natural causes.

Then again, in another life I may have been Lizzie Borden’s father.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.