“Our task is to learn, to become God-like through knowledge. We know so little… By knowledge we approach God, and then we can rest. Then we come back to help and teach others.” Brian Weiss, MD, Many Lives, Many Masters

When I was in my first year of graduate school, working my Master of Social Work degree in, GASP, 1996, my first internship was at Catholic Charities, with another grad student who asked me one day, “Have you ever heard of Brian Weiss? And his book, “Many Lives, Many Masters?” I replied that I had not, and she told me a bit about the book, primarily that it was about reincarnation. I was intrigued, and, in spite of a very heavy academic load, which involved TONS of reading, managed to fit in this life changing book.

I was raised in a fairly conservative, traditional Presbyterian household in 1960s Kansas. So reincarnation wasn’t exactly something that I was raised to believe in or even consider. However, a crisis of faith at age 15 led me to an ever-expanding view of the world, indeed, even life.

Even with the crisis of faith in my teenage years, related to the death of my mother, my traditional religious upbringing stayed with me until, in my mid 30s, I was finally comfortable to explore other options, including religious tenets of the world’s great religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, among others.

Reincarnation really resonated with me, as did Hinduism and Buddhism, and so when I was introduced to the works of Brian Weiss, himself a Columbia University, Yale University-educated psychiatrist, and his inadvertent exploration of reincarnation, I was inspired and felt that I finally found the answers I’d been inadvertently looking for ever since my mid-teens when my mother suffered and eventually died of cancer.

In the course of his years-long treatment of “Catherine,” he discovered the Masters, who were present in the in-between states, after the end of one life and the beginning of another. “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 help and teach others.” She later identified the Masters, highly evolved souls not presently in body, as the source.”