Stuck In The Airport — Burnt At The Stake

Have We Lived Before?

The airport was full of suntanned, frustrated travellers trying to get on a flight home.

“The baggage handlers have gone on strike,” I told my wife.

If you were lucky, your flight was just delayed. If not, they cancelled it until further notice.

The great ‘wait’ had begun.

Little did I then realise that Mohan airport, on the beautiful island of Menorca, would be a shared bedroom for the next two nights. The hard benches would serve as our beds. Hundreds of others surrounded us in exactly the same position.

Of course, the tour operators were excellent liars.

“There will be another flight in about two hours,” we were initially told. It never arrived. Nor did the one promised after that, or the one after that, or the one after that. Eventually, we stopped asking.

So, we settled down and made ourselves as comfortable as possible.

After several hours wondering and trying to get an honest appraisal of the situation — all to no avail — I casually struck up a conversation with my neighbour, a middle-aged, distinguished man with a silvery goatee beard.

I soon discovered that he was a psychiatrist. A learned man who had been attending a conference on regression into past lives; using hypnosis to uncover the memories of a past life on this earth.

I wondered to myself what had I done wrong, in a previous existence, to deserve to be stuck in a noisy, crowded airport in the heat of a Menorca summer.

But I was intrigued and showed a genuine interest. He was happy to tell me more.

He explained some people believe they can return to their past lives almost at will. Using hypnosis, an area of the brain that stores all or part of such lives can be accessed. It then reveals the memories of a previous existence.

I was silently sceptical.

Couldn’t someone just recall something from their current memory that they had read about, seen at the cinema or heard on the radio?

Past-life regression

My doctor friend explained that hypnotically exposing past lives is known as ‘past-life regression.’ And the patient, in his view, passionately relives events they had experienced in a previous existence.

I had heard of this type of hypnosis before. I vaguely remembered a television programme, possibly in the early 1990s, dealing with this subject and listening to a patient recalling his previous life as a sailor aboard a ship at the time of Nelson.

A commotion in the corner of the airport lounge suddenly interrupted our conversation. An angry traveller, impatient to get out of the airport, had berated some airline official. The local police had intervened as tempers flared.

“So this is a recognition of reincarnation?” I inquired, continuing our conversation.

My friend was non–committal on this point. Regression was not a definite proof of reincarnation. But one aspect of this procedure that had made him rethink its usefulness was its apparent ability to heal.

I asked him for more information and he detailed a case — using no name, of course — that he had found interesting.

Fear of fire

His patient was a young lady who had such a powerful fear of fire that she couldn’t light a match without becoming hysterical. She could not sit by a fire without having a panic attack and was averse to any kind of candlelight or open flames.

Her situation reached a crisis when even the talk of a fire, or burning caused her to hyperventilate. So, she sought the help of a psychiatrist to deal with her extreme pyrophobia.

When hypnotised, she recounted a disturbing memory.

She was a young girl, aged about fourteen, who was being tied to a stake in a country she recognised as being France. A screaming, yelling crowd surrounded her. She struggled to free herself, but it was of no use.

Her memory allowed her to understand why she was being burned alive.

She had mistakenly aborted her child by taking medicine given to her by a woman accused of witchcraft. By taking such medicine, the judging elders and officials had accused her of being in league with demonic forces.

During hypnosis, she could see herself screaming and choking as the flames scorched her legs. The pain of the fire surged through her body. Her hair caught fire and hot, acrid smoke burnt her lungs. Dying was a slow and painful process for her.

Healing

But, the doctor explained, the regression hypnosis helped the patient because she now knew why she had been having the fear attacks whenever she found herself in the presence of fire. The nightmares she used to have slowly disappeared. Although she didn’t actually seek fire, she was no longer ruled by any fear of it.

We talked some more about his experiences and then, being one of the lucky ones, he got a later flight out of the chaos and bedlam of the airport. We, unfortunately, remained behind, still waiting for a suitable flight.

Reflection

Our conversation had definitely been of interest.

This occurred a few years ago now, and I have read some more on this subject since our chance meeting.

Interestingly, there is an increasing belief that we humans could survive our physical demise in some form. Many cases of N.D.E. (Near Death Experience) offer such accounts of life beyond this one.

So, the idea of a previous existence may not be that fantastical.

Or is it?