Skip to content
From the High Desert book cover

From the High Desert

A Cultural History of Art Bell

Thumbnail for December 11, 2004: Past & Future Lives - Dr. Brian Weiss

December 11, 2004: Past & Future Lives - Dr. Brian Weiss

Dec 11, 2004
2h 53m
0:00 / 0:00
Art Bell welcomes Dr. Brian Weiss, psychiatrist and chairman emeritus at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, who describes how traditional hypnotherapy with a patient named Catherine unexpectedly led to vivid past-life memories dating back 4,000 years. When Catherine channeled specific details about Art's deceased father and infant son that she could not have known, including his father's Hebrew name Avram and his son's rare heart condition, Weiss became convinced these experiences transcended ordinary imagination.

Weiss shares several cases supporting reincarnation, including a Chinese surgeon who spoke fluent English during regression despite never having learned the language, and Jenny Cockell, a British woman who located her past-life children in Ireland using childhood maps and memories. He explains the process between lives, describing how consciousness persists after death, encounters spiritual figures and light, undergoes life review, and plans future incarnations with soul families across changing races, religions, and genders.

Art opens the show with reports of deep mysterious tremors beneath the San Andreas Fault near Parkfield, record-breaking temperature spikes in Tokyo, and scientific warnings that the brutal 2003 European heat wave that killed up to 35,000 people was largely caused by human activity. A caller shares a Federation of American Scientists report on a U.S. Air Force study validating psychic teleportation as physically real.

Key Moments

  1. Catherine, the drowning, and the slip-up that started it: Weiss describes asking Catherine under hypnosis to go back to when her symptoms first began, expecting childhood, and instead getting a 4,000-year-old lifetime in which she drowned in a flood, fitting her present-day fears of choking and water.

  2. Catherine names Weiss's dead father and infant son: Catherine, in trance, tells the skeptical Yale-trained Weiss that his father Avram and his son are present, that the father died of his heart and his daughter was named after him, and that the son had a heart turned around backwards, all medically true and unknowable to her.

  3. Art presses Weiss on the materialist consensus: Art tells Weiss that the majority of doctors and researchers he interviews, when pinned to the wall, dismiss the tunnel of light as a dying-brain artifact and don't believe in afterlife; Weiss replies they have only opinion, while he has thousands of cases.

  4. Earth as a school and the test of nonviolence: Asked why we don't carry forward the wisdom of past lives, Weiss says patients in deep states tell him this is a test, an earth-school, and the question is whether you've truly learned the lesson, like becoming nonviolent, without remembering the punishment.

  5. Patrick's migration from another planet: Weiss describes Patrick, a patient who in deep regression went back 60,000 years and described being part of a migration from another star system to Earth, greeted by descendants of even earlier migrations from different planets.