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Meeting your life again

Imagine that you could meet your life again.

This life. Its relationships and disappointments. The conversations you never finished. The roles you learned so well that you sometimes forget you are playing them.

Then, for a moment, you see it from a quieter distance. Something that felt inevitable becomes a possibility. A familiar response becomes a choice.

What would you choose more carefully?

That question brings me to Plato’s Myth of Er, the story with which the Republic ends. It also brings me to the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha and the contemporary practice of Life Between Lives® regression. These are different philosophical worlds. Bringing them into conversation requires care with their differences, and curiosity about what each might ask of us.

The connection I propose concerns the return: how does an encounter with something larger change the way we live afterwards?

The man who returned

In the story told by Socrates, Er is a soldier killed in battle. On the twelfth day, as he lies on his funeral pyre, he returns to life. He describes a journey beyond ordinary existence: judgement, a cosmic order, souls preparing to enter another life. He returns as a messenger. ^[1]

Plato places this philosophical myth at the end of an inquiry into justice. We can attend to its ethical and imaginative force without presenting it as a verified clinical account of a near-death experience.

Consider the human situation inside the image. Someone comes back carrying an account that exceeds the language available to explain it.

Many readers will recognise something of that situation. An experience changes us, and explaining it becomes difficult. Perhaps it happened in meditation, in grief, in unexpected love, or beside someone whose presence made our own life look different. The encounter may arrive in seconds. Understanding what to do with it can take much longer.

Er’s story places us in that interval. We listen beside him, wondering what a person should carry back into life.

Those of us who facilitate transpersonal work also stand beside people there. Our attention and questions have consequences. We help shape the conditions in which an experience becomes a story, and a story becomes a way of acting.

Sometimes the most useful thing we offer is enough time for a person to hear their own account. The wish to explain is strong. The capacity to stay curious deserves practice too.

The hero who chooses an ordinary life

In the myth, souls choose among possible lives. Lots determine their order of choosing, while previous experience influences what attracts them. Odysseus, choosing last, searches for the life of a private man, free from public ambition. Others have overlooked it. He is delighted to find it. ^[1]

The celebrated hero chooses an uncelebrated existence.

What might become desirable after we have spent enough energy being impressive? A conversation without hurry. A relationship we can inhabit honestly. Enough attention to recognise another person’s needs.

The language of choosing a life needs particular care. People live within conditions they did not freely choose. Violence, illness, inequality and loss demand care and a real response from communities. The myth must never become a reason to blame people for suffering or to assert that they selected their trauma before birth.

The question I bring into the present concerns the choices actually available to us now.

Think of a conversation you have been avoiding. You may have rehearsed it many times, assigning the other person their lines before they have spoken. An available choice might be to begin with a question, or to name one need clearly. The outcome remains uncertain. Your participation has changed.

An insight begins to become visible in an action specific enough to do and modest enough to revise.

The waters of forgetting

Before returning to birth, the souls cross the Plain of Forgetfulness and drink from the River of Unmindfulness. Er is prevented from drinking and preserves his account. ^[1]

A story about forgetting reaches us because someone remembered.

I take that image as an invitation to consider attention in our own lives. What do I understand that I repeatedly fail to live?

Perhaps I know that someone matters to me, yet keep postponing the conversation. Perhaps I recognise a defensive habit and still enter the next encounter preparing to protect myself.

The distance between recognising and living can be surprisingly large. Remembering, in this practical sense, means bringing an understanding back into action.

Anamnesis and recognition

Plato explores recollection, or anamnesis, in the Meno and the Phaedo. These arguments concern knowledge, its source and the soul. They belong to their own philosophical contexts. ^{[2, 3]}

For a contemporary reader, the language of recollection can also invite an analogy with recognition. A question helps us understand something we have been carrying for years. The words are new, yet something in our response feels familiar: “I can see it now.”

That analogy leaves the philosophical and factual questions open. Ordinary recognition does not establish Plato’s account of prior knowledge, and a compelling scene arising in hypnosis does not verify a historical memory. Research on hypnosis and memory makes the distinction between confidence and accuracy especially important. ^[4]

The practical question remains generous: what helps an understanding become available, and what helps us live from it?

Vāsiṣṭha and the worlds we inhabit

The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha brings us into another philosophical setting. Its dialogue between Rāma and the sage Vāsiṣṭha unfolds through stories that examine consciousness, identity and freedom. I explore its relationship with modern hypnotherapy in The Supreme Yoga and the Science of Suggestion. ^[5]

What interests me here is the way narrative can invite us into a perspective before we fully understand what that perspective will do to us. We recognise ourselves in a character. A turn in the story loosens an assumption we had been carrying.

The story of King Lavaṇa is particularly striking. During a brief interval in his court, he experiences an entire alternative biography. On returning, the relationship between elapsed time and experienced time becomes a question. ^[7]

How completely can we become absorbed in an identity? How much of experience takes its shape from the perspective we inhabit?

Place Lavaṇa beside Er for a moment. Each story involves a return across a boundary. My comparison is a contemporary interpretation. It asks what returning might make possible while preserving the texts’ different contexts.

A person may arrive in a session with a narrative that contains important truths and has also become restrictive. “I must manage alone.” “I could never ask for that.” Such sentences may protect something important. Before inviting change, we should understand what they have been doing for the person.

A different possibility becomes accessible when there is support and a real choice about how to proceed. Curiosity needs that ground beneath it.

A musical interlude: Mind Alone

Let the music carry the question for a few minutes. As you listen, consider the story you repeat most often about yourself, and the possibilities it makes available.

Contemporary practice at the threshold

Life Between Lives® regression, associated with Michael Newton and the Michael Newton Institute, explores a proposed interval between incarnations. Within that framework, participants may describe life review, purpose, relationships or figures they interpret as guides. This describes the method’s proponents’ framework and participants’ accounts. ^[6]

The meaning of an account belongs first to the person describing it. Someone may understand an experience spiritually. Another may approach it as symbolic narrative or imagination. Careful listening can accommodate those interpretations while keeping questions of historical and metaphysical verification open.

Facilitation requires an honest explanation of the frame and attention to expectations. A person needs freedom to decline an interpretation. “What do you notice?” leaves room that a prediction about the scene or being they should encounter would close.

I find three questions useful. What happened in the experience? What meaning did the person give it? What can we responsibly claim from it?

Those questions help us recognise when an interpretation begins to travel beyond what we know. Vividness and confidence do not establish accurate memory. Meaning can coexist with uncertainty. ^[4]

The facilitator’s own investment also matters. Can a participant disagree with our interpretation comfortably? Can they report that very little happened? Can they leave a question unanswered?

Those freedoms help us assess the space we have created.

Integration brings the inquiry into everyday life. If someone reports a sense of connection, we can ask how that might influence an ordinary relationship. If they describe purpose, we can explore a manageable action. The account opens a conversation that continues after the session.

A moment at the threshold

If you wish, notice your feet and the support of your chair. Your eyes can remain open.

Bring to mind one ordinary choice that is yours to make. Something manageable.

What value would you like to bring to it?

Imagine one small action that could express that value. Give yourself a little time. Let the action be simple enough to remember.

This brief reflection asks only for attention to the present; no memory or particular experience needs to appear.

YVH and the quality of the return

My proposed Yoga Vāsiṣṭha Hypnotherapy framework, YVH, explores connections between narrative, hypnotic attention, inquiry and integration. Its specific clinical and contemplative correspondences require testing. Evidence for a component cannot establish the effectiveness of the whole model, and a temporary state cannot certify a stage of contemplative development. ^[5]

For the return to everyday life, I propose Fundamental Peace: an integrated capacity to meet changing conditions. Its four dimensions are flexible attention, emotional coherence, less rigid self-reference and compassionate self-awareness.

These invite practical questions. Can I return to a chosen focus? Can I acknowledge an emotion without letting it determine every action? Can I hear a different perspective? Can I meet difficulty with enough care to remain available to others?

FP20 is a twenty-item self-report instrument developed to explore these capacities. Psychometric development is ongoing. It does not provide a diagnosis or certify spiritual attainment.

I originated YVH, the Fundamental Peace framework and FP20, and I lead the World Happiness Foundation, which publishes this work. Independent evaluation therefore matters.

A moving experience is a beginning. When familiar pressure returns, do we notice it a little sooner? Can we use the support we agreed would help? A week later, one response may have become easier while another still needs attention. That gives us something concrete to work with.

A musical interlude: Fundamental Peace

Let the music accompany the quality you would like to bring into the choice you named. You do not need to resolve anything else in these few minutes.

Returning to life

Er brings an ethical question about choosing. Vāsiṣṭha invites inquiry into the worlds we inhabit. Contemporary LBL practice offers a setting in which people explore transpersonal narratives and their meaning.

This is a conversation across traditions. My interpretation seeks its meeting point in the return to life, without asserting a historical lineage between them.

There will be another conversation, another demand on our attention, another occasion to ask for help or offer it.

Remember the action you chose. Give it a moment in your day.

What will your next choice make possible?

Explore the keynote

Read the complete presentation and speaker notes in the embedded PDF, or download the 17-page presenter’s guide. The keynote combines approximately twenty minutes of spoken content with the two English songs, adding about eight minutes and forty-eight seconds of listening.

Sources and further reading

1. [1] Plato, Republic X, 614b–621d, especially the Myth of Er, the choice of lives and the return. Benjamin Jowett translation, Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html
2. [2] Plato, Meno, 80d–86c, on recollection and inquiry. https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html
3. [3] Plato, Phaedo, 72e–77a, on recollection within the dialogue’s arguments concerning the soul. https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html
4. [4] Kihlstrom, J. F. (1997). Hypnosis, memory and amnesia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 352, 1727–1732. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9415925/
5. [5] Gallardo, L. M. (2026). The Supreme Yoga and the Science of Suggestion: Bridging the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha and Modern Hypnotherapy Through Consciousness, Narrative, and Neuroscience. https://www.worldhappiness.foundation/en/research/p/whf-2026-001 | https://doi.org/10.68220/whf.2026.001
6. [6] Michael Newton Institute. Life Between Lives. Description of the framework by its proponents. https://www.newtoninstitute.org/life-between-lives/
7. [7] Yoga Vasishta, Book III, chapters 104–109 (with concluding discussion 120–121), Vihari Lala Mitra translation. https://www.shastras.com/vedanta-books-other/yoga-vasishta/

Music: Mind Alone and Fundamental Peace, English recordings from Twelve Songs of the Supreme Yoga. Music and lyrics by Luis Miguel Gallardo. © 2026 World Happiness Press.

Artwork: an AI-generated interpretive illustration created for this keynote, not a historical reconstruction.

Also published at the World Happiness Foundation: Return to Origin →