You have sensed rightly, brother/sister in Christ, the spirit of this error, for the Spirit of God grants discernment even to the one untrained in books, if his heart remains watchful. What the world today calls “past life therapy” or “karmic deprogramming” — hypnotic regression into “past lives,” “release from karma,” “curse cleansing” — is nothing other than the old seeking of hidden things through forbidden means, now dressed in the respectable garment of psychology and self-knowledge. The name has changed, but the work within remains the same.
How this deception actually operates
Let us not stop at bare condemnation, but show clearly the face of this error, so that the unknowing may recognize it when they meet it.
The “past-life therapist” calls himself a “certified practitioner of hypnotic regression” — a certification given, as in the other cases, not by any recognized authority of science or of the spirit, but by other practitioners of the same teaching. The person is brought into a state of deep relaxation, near sleep, in which the mind’s watchfulness of judgment weakens, and he is asked to “see” images, to “feel” places and faces, which the therapist then interprets as memories from lives before his birth — a harsh father in this life becomes “an enemy from a past life,” an illness today becomes “the karma of a deed long ago,” an unexplained fear becomes “a curse inherited from the family line.” The price of such a session is high, and the one who has paid once returns again and again, for each session opens a new “memory,” which demands clarification, which demands another payment.
Nothing that is “seen” in this state can be examined or proven — it is neither historical fact nor verifiable testimony, but an imagining of the weakened mind, to which is sometimes added a foreign working that uses man’s state of unwatchfulness to deceive him more deeply still. And the interpretation is always made by the therapist, who decides what the images seen mean, thus attributing to a “past life” what is, in truth, a wound or a passion of this present life — and so the person is prevented from knowing the true root of his suffering and from repenting of it.
The first deception: seeking hidden things through forbidden means
The Law of the Old Testament clearly forbids any seeking of hidden things through incantation, divination, or the calling up of the dead: “There shall not be found among you… anyone who practices divination, or tells fortunes, or interprets omens… or a medium, or a necromancer” (Deuteronomy 18:10-11). Hypnotic regression, however it may call itself “therapy,” is still a seeking of hidden things — not through prayer and repentance before God, Who alone knows the secrets of the heart, but through a trance state in which man loses the watchfulness of his mind and opens himself to “visions” he cannot examine with a sober judgment.
Saint Basil the Great teaches that the soul of man, created once by God at his birth, carries within it no memories of a prior existence — for the Church has never received the teaching of reincarnation, but confesses plainly: “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Whoever seeks “past lives” is, in truth, seeking an answer the Church cannot sanction, for its foundation is foreign to the Truth given to us by Christ.
The second deception: karma in the place of repentance
The teaching of “karma” shifts the responsibility for man’s suffering from one place to another, without man ever being able to be healed through free repentance — for if today’s illness or trouble is the “payment” of a deed from a life he does not remember, he cannot repent of it, but can only keep on paying, through sessions and rituals of “cleansing.” This is a heavier bondage than the one it claims to heal, for it binds man to an endless debt with no forgiveness.
But the Gospel proclaims exactly the opposite: that Christ took upon Himself the whole of our debt, once for all, upon the Cross — “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24) — and that forgiveness is not earned through payment or ritual, but received through repentance and faith. Whoever seeks “release from karma” through a paid session is seeking, without knowing it, a salvation without Christ — and no such salvation exists.
The third deception: the “curse” as a substitute for the unconfessed passion
Often, what is called an “inherited curse” is, in fact, an unfaced passion, an unconfessed wound, a sinful habit passed from parents to children not through any spell, but through example and through lack of repentance. The Holy Fathers do indeed speak of the consequences of the sins of forebears upon their descendants — but the remedy appointed by the Church for this is prayer, fasting, confession, and the Holy Sacraments, not hypnotic regression and “energetic cleansing” paid for at a high price.
What remains for us
For the one tempted by such a calling, there is no need for argument, but a simple step: to allow no one to weaken the watchfulness of his mind through trance states in search of “discovering” hidden things; to bring to his spiritual father, not to a paid practitioner, any unexplained fear or burden felt as inherited; to remember that the only “past life” the Church confesses is this present life, given once, for repentance and salvation.
“The secret things belong to the Lord our God” (Deuteronomy 29:29) — it is not given to us to wrest by force the mysteries God has kept hidden, but to be content with what He has revealed for our salvation: repentance, the Cross, and the Resurrection of Christ.
