Opening
A midnight vision forges a telepathic thread between Dr. Brian L. Weiss and Catherine, just as their sessions widen from personal healing to a map of the soul’s journey. Across these chapters, messages from The Masters lay out planes of existence and karmic debts, Weiss applies these lessons at the deathbed, Catherine’s regressions resolve, and a final charge sends Weiss forward on his own path.
What Happens
Chapter 11
Weiss bolts awake at 3:36 a.m., seeing Catherine’s anguished face. Later, he learns Catherine wakes at the same moment from a nightmare and calms herself by visualizing him. Rejecting standard psychiatric explanations, he concludes their bond is genuinely telepathic. In session, Catherine first sees a volcanic eruption, then shifts into the life of a fourteen-year-old servant to Belinda. A fortune-teller lays out tarot-like cards, foretelling a future marriage. The brief life closes and she enters the in-between state.
There, the poet Master speaks through her with a stark prophecy: humanity destroys itself by refusing to live in harmony with nature. The destruction is inevitable, though not in Weiss’s lifetime; true peace and learning unfold on another plane, reinforcing Spiritual Growth and the Purpose of Life. As the vision clears, Catherine sees the spirit of Dr. Edward Poole, a quiet, guardian presence.
Weiss then brings these teachings home. His mother-in-law, Minette, is dying of cancer. Sharing Catherine’s revelations eases her fear; she accepts Reincarnation and Past Lives and the soul’s continuity. Guided by Weiss, Minette dies peacefully, and he feels newly equipped to counsel patients facing loss—an intimate testament to Immortality and the Fear of Death.
Chapter 12
Three and a half months in, Catherine’s symptoms vanish; a calm radiance replaces the anxiety that once ruled her life. Under hypnosis she becomes an old man in 1483, a poor villager bracing for war, already grieving a son lost in a prior battle. After this hard, short life ends, a different, lower-level spirit steps in and outlines seven planes of existence. He dwells on the “plane of recollection,” where souls review lives, and the “plane of transition,” where they choose which karmic debts and dominant traits—greed, lust, and the like—to work on next. Souls select their next lives to pay what they owe, explaining Karma and Interconnected Souls.
Catherine then says Edward owes her news about her sister’s child, Stephanie, who was adopted. She shifts to a gentle lifetime as a horse-loving girl and recognizes her “father” there as her cherished grandfather from this life. In a superconscious state, she contrasts her grandfather’s warmth with her own father’s coldness: the grandfather has repaid his karmic debts; her father still must learn to love and nurture. The physical plane is a difficult school with many stages; the astral plane offers rest. She confirms there are seven planes and tells Weiss the knowledge is chiefly for him, calling him her “teacher.”
Chapter 13
As therapy deepens, regressions begin to repeat. Catherine returns to ancient Egypt as Aronda, the statue-maker who lives through a plague sparked by contaminated water. The familiar scenes suggest the wounds linked to this life have been processed. In the in-between, a Master describes a further realm: a plane where souls can contact or appear to the living—but only when an earthly agreement remains unfulfilled, such as after sudden death.
Catherine observes a renewing light available to anyone through deep relaxation. She adds she has lived 86 times and must continue until her accounts are cleared. She then becomes Christian, the 18th-century sailor: a naval battle crushes his hand; he recuperates at a South Wales port. When Weiss calls her “Christian,” she answers in character. The memory turns visceral—she gags as she relives the crew’s bout with spoiled salt pork. Exhausted, she stops before re-experiencing Christian’s fatal heart attack.
Chapter 14
After a three-week break, Catherine reports she feels cured and no longer needs hypnosis. Weiss, though reluctant to lose the Masters’ direct counsel, agrees therapy is complete. Five months pass; a recurring nightmare—being forced into a pit of snakes—brings Catherine back. Hypnosis returns her to an ancient, Egypt-like festival where an animal is sacrificed and blood funnels into the mouth of a serpent statue, pinpointing the dream’s source.
In the stillness between lives, the poet Master delivers a final instruction to Weiss: “What we tell you is for now. You must now learn through your own intuition.” With that, the transmissions cease, and Weiss is commissioned to continue independently—an inflection point in his Transformation from Skepticism to Belief. Catherine briefly glimpses one of Weiss’s past lives: a tombstone bearing “Noble,” dates 1668–1724, marking a red-coated soldier thrown from a horse. The session seals Catherine’s healing and inaugurates Weiss’s next chapter.
Chapter 15
Two months later, a radiant Catherine returns with independent corroboration. She has consulted the psychic astrologer Iris Saltzman, offering only her birth date, time, and place—no details of therapy. Iris proceeds to describe multiple past lives Catherine recalled under hypnosis, matching them with striking precision:
- A life ending with a cut throat in wartime (Johan)
- A sailor with an injured hand and distinctive clothes (Christian)
- A Spanish prostitute (Louisa)
- An Egyptian involved in burial rites (Aronda)
- A German pilot killed in battle (Eric)
Weiss weighs possibilities: perhaps Iris telepathically reads Catherine’s subconscious, or perhaps she accesses the lives psychically. Either way, consistent details from two routes—hypnotic regression and psychic reading—lend powerful support. Weiss ends by calling for rigorous, scientific methods to separate genuine findings from fraud so this field can claim the legitimacy it seeks.
Character Development
Catherine moves from panic-stricken patient to centered seeker, integrating dozens of lifetimes until her symptoms fall away. She takes initiative—visiting a psychic, testing what she learned—and articulates the ethics of karma with clarity and compassion.
- Finds the roots of recurrent fears (snakes) and resolves them
- Recognizes soul ties across lives (grandfather/father roles)
- Speaks from superconscious states to guide Weiss, naming him her teacher
Weiss shifts from cautious clinician to committed messenger. He applies spiritual insights at the bedside, easing Minette’s passing, and accepts the end of direct guidance to follow his intuition.
- Uses afterlife teachings to counsel the dying and bereaved
- Acknowledges telepathy and nonlocal mind as clinical realities
- Embraces independent inquiry after the Masters’ farewell
The Masters evolve from instructors to distant guides. Their final message withdraws the scaffold, requiring Weiss to act from inner certainty rather than external authority.
Themes & Symbols
The arc culminates in the transformation from skepticism to belief. Weiss no longer treats Catherine’s experiences as anomalies; he tests them in life-and-death moments, sees their healing impact, and accepts a mandate to proceed without further dictation. The poet Master’s farewell formalizes that shift, moving the book from dependence on channeled authority to trust in disciplined intuition.
The chapters also systematize spiritual growth and the purpose of life. The planes of recollection and transition, the voluntary acceptance of karmic debts, and the metaphor of the physical plane as a school portray Earth as a curriculum where souls correct imbalance across lifetimes. That framework dovetails with immortality and the fear of death: Minette’s peaceful passing exemplifies how knowledge of continuity softens terror and imbues loss with meaning.
Symbols reinforce these lessons. Repetitive lifetimes (Aronda, Christian) signal the cycle of unresolved karma finally reaching closure in therapy. The snake-pit nightmare—traced to a blood-fed serpent statue—embodies primal fear anchored in a specific ritual trauma, showing how precision memory can release a generalized phobia.
Key Quotes
“What we tell you is for now. You must now learn through your own intuition.”
The Masters’ valediction ends the transmissions and inaugurates Weiss’s autonomy. Authority shifts from external voices to cultivated inner knowing, completing his transition into teacher and steward of the work.
“The physical plane is a difficult ‘school’ with many stages of growth.”
This framing recasts suffering as curriculum, not punishment. It explains why souls choose challenging lives and links hardship to intentional learning and karmic repair.
“There are seven planes of existence.”
The cosmology gives structure to otherwise disparate experiences—life review, transition, rest, and rare interventions from beyond—moving the narrative from anecdote toward a coherent spiritual system.
“You are my teacher.”
Catherine’s acknowledgment reverses the early power dynamic. The patient who once sought relief now confers a role on Weiss, legitimizing his responsibility to study, teach, and carry the work forward.
“Humanity is destroying itself by failing to live in harmony with nature.”
The poet Master universalizes the case study into a planetary ethic. Ecological disharmony becomes spiritual malpractice with civilizational consequences, placing personal growth within a collective mandate.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters resolve Catherine’s healing while widening the lens to a full spiritual architecture—planes, karma, and soul contracts—then test the model in life (Minette’s death) and in method (Iris’s corroboration). The final message withdraws the training wheels, commissioning Weiss to pursue careful, credible inquiry. The case closes, the mission begins, and the book reframes itself from a singular therapeutic marvel into a blueprint for compassionate living, dying, and study.