Destiny of Souls: New Case Studies of Life Between Lives Book

Destiny of Souls (DoP May 1, 2000) is the second book from psychologist Dr. Michael Newton following the world-wide success of Journey of Souls published in 1994. Both books are published by Llwellyn.

I have had several 'out of body' experiences which may explain my interest in the subject of whether there is anything after physical death. My abiding interest is in the origin, nature and uses of consciousness and these areas of human experience coalesce in Dr. Newton's 30 + years of work with hypnotic subjects who revealed details of what seemed to be 'life between lives'. I should make it clear that Dr. Newton did not start out with any assumptions about what happens after physical death. He seems to have been a fairly conventional professional hypnotist and qualified counseling psychologist working with clients with common problems such as anxiety disorder, panic attacks, difficulty with anger, compulsive behaviours - a standard smorgasbord of complaints that most counseling psychologists help people with everyday. Dr. Newton also offered hypnosis as a method of breaking unwanted habits, regaining memories after trauma, etc. In the midst of his busy practice a patient who was being regressed to birth to release the trauma of that experience suddenly 'slipped into another life' without warning. Since Dr. Newton didn't believe in life after death much less in multiple incarnations he was alarmed at this development and brought the patient back into the present lifetime and then out of the trance state. However, this disturbing experience was not to be a one-off in his career. When regressed to the birth process, other patients also slipped into another lifetime or into the even more bizarre memory of a spiritual existence between lifetimes. Thus began Dr. Newton's 30 year long odyssey in the realms of life after life.

In Destiny of Souls, he examines 70 cases that are representative of the variety of 'between lives' experiences of most of his roughly 1000 cases. As an agnostic, I was not prepared for what these 70 clients revealed. I could accept an afterlife in which consciousness gradually faded into oblivion but what these clients revealed was far more sophisticated and far more demanding of us than I could have anticipated. As a lifelong student of whatever interests me I could accept that this life is a sort of school but in preparation for what? The answer seems to be a succession of lifetimes - many thousands in some cases - designed as challenges to gradually refine our consciousness to the point where we can participate in the ongoing work of... creating universes and populating them younger consciousnesses who will eventually be re-absorbed into the massive consciousness which is all there is and the source of all that is. Whether you 'buy that' or not, the revelations coming from Dr. Newton's clients are consistent across cultures, generations and genders in such numbers that we cannot write them off as co-incidence or mass fantasy. His clients came from all over the world and most of them were atheist or agnostic or just plain uncommitted. The few who had religious convictions worked to reconcile what was revealed in their sessions with what they "believed". For some that proved impossible but their memories of the life between life experience re-assured them that there is a spiritual reality that underlies material life. Case after case revealed a bit more of the process that we apparently are all undergoing but the essential steps of the process apply across the board. All that I say about it is that I found it worthwhile reading and it opened even further what I had considered to be an already open mind. I can't explain away these cases. Dr. Newton's methods are fully transparent with no 'leading statements or leading questions' so I can't fault him there. He did not ask for this bizarre twist in his career but he could no longer dismiss it and finally wrote up the cases from transcriptions of thousands of hours of audio/video recordings.

Would I recommend it? Yes, especially to "sceptics". It is food for thought no matter your views on life after death.