Let us now turn to our pioneering therapists’ case studies in order to attempt to understand more about how repetitive karma works in practice. How can we attempt to break out of repetitive karmic cycles? And, in particular, do their case studies actually support their suggestion that such karma involves paying off debts, either by compensation or even by direct retribution?

The first thing we notice is that the current lives of their patients – even when beset by a variety of phobias, obsessions and other psychological or psychosomatic problems – are in most cases nowhere near as fraught as many of their previous ones; perhaps the main exceptions are those cases in which the patient has suffered terrible abuse of one form or another as a child. There are some obvious reasons for this. For a start, they are all still alive – or were at the time of their therapy – so they have not suffered the sort of violent and traumatic deaths they often have in past lives, which are frequently a major source of their problems. Allied to this, for all that our modern society is clearly far from perfect, in the developed world at least life is in general far less harsh than it has usually been in the past. At various times and in various cultures, the law of the gun, savage wars fought one-on-one with crude weapons, human sacrifice, slavery, contemptible attitudes towards the female of the species, and various other factors – not to mention a multitude of untreatable diseases – meant that appalling violence and trauma was commonplace. So we must not ignore the fact that the dynamics of changing cultural conditions are having a major impact on the mechanisms through which karma operates.

If we commence by looking at what appear to be some relatively simple cases, in her first book Fiore documents a number in which apparently a single major trauma in a past life lies at the heart of the patient’s current problem. As a result she derives the following list of general linkages, which are confirmed fully by Modi and at least partially by most other pioneers. Patients who are chronically overweight or, by complete contrast, have anorexic tendencies, have often been close to starvation in a past life. Fear of the dark and insomnia often relate to previous lives in which the patient was either molested or killed while asleep. Assorted phobias of fire, water, guns, knives, snakes, flying, crowds, enclosed spaces, heights and so on can often be traced to related past-life traumas. And chronic pains in various parts of the body often stem from injuries, usually fatal, received in previous lives – which appears to be consistent with some aspects of Stevenson’s research into birthmarks and defects.

Of course, it is important to emphasize that not everyone who suffers from one of these obsessions, fears, phobias or even psychosomatic physical pains will be carrying it over from a past life. But, even when they are, the current symptom is rarely anywhere near as bad as the past-life experience that brought it on, as debilitating as it might still sometimes be. In fact, in many cases it appears that the symptom is carried over not primarily to inconvenience the subject but instead to act as a major reminder – the idea of triggers once again springs to mind – that they have a past-life problem that must still be karmically resolved. In these apparently relatively simple cases it is almost impossible to judge whether the subject is primarily in the repetitive or progressive karmic stage without further investigation of other past lives – although clearly a degree of repetition does seem to be involved.

By contrast, most of Whitton’s, Woolger’s and Netherton’s case studies reveal a number of interwoven past lives in which their patients appear to be placing themselves in related traumatic situations repeatedly in successive lives, and in at least some of these cases the patients’ current lives are again pretty traumatic. This is clearly indicative of repetitive karma, so they should be able to tell us far more about the nature of the beast.

Woolger provides one example in which a patient that he refers to simply as Chris had definitely had one of the more traumatic current lives. Abused as a child in a drunken and harsh environment on a farm, he repeatedly attempted to run away, and had been in and out of prison in a dismal spiral of depression, alcohol and suicide attempts. Even his efforts to start a family had been thwarted by the cot death of his infant son. His opening statement to Woolger said it all: ‘I’m all alone. I’m a piece of shit. I want to die.’

When regressed back to his birth, Chris discovered that his mother had not wanted him and had attempted her own abortion by falling down the stairs; as a result he was born three months premature, and was placed in an incubator for an equivalent period. Alone and isolated, he already knew he was not wanted, and just wanted to die. We might note at this point that many of Fiore’s, Netherton’s, Woolger’s and Modi’s patients find that past-life traumas are often mirrored in utero and at birth. This might be by the negative emotions of the parents or obstetrics staff, or by physical complications: for example, the umbilical cord being wrapped around the neck is often mirroring a prior hanging or strangling; the use of forceps, prior blows to the head; and caesarian sections, prior stabbing or cutting. Again it seems that these may be acting as deliberate triggers to remind us of something that requires karmic resolution – although it must be said that very few people would be likely to remember these triggers in adult life, let alone understand their significance, unless they were to be regressed to their time as a fetus by a professional.

A number of Chris’s past lives revealed a depressingly similar pattern. As a prisoner in a dungeon in Scotland he had been beaten and was sick with dysentery when he was left alone in chains to die a slow and lonely death – full of hatred for his callous English captors. He had been a sickly adolescent in a besieged native tribe in the American Northwest where, unable to fight and with the medicine man proclaiming his sickness as a sign of evil, his father left him to die – again without food and alone – in the tribal burial grounds; this time his dying thoughts were that he was no good, and deserved to die. In a much earlier tribal life he recalled having been an old man abandoned to die alone in a cave, where he was eaten by a bear while still half-alive.

But further investigation of Chris’s case revealed at least two lives that might be thought to justify so much suffering. In one in China his intense anger at his prostitute mother for whom he acted as lookout – and whose only affection lay in attempts to seduce him – boiled over into a life of violent crime and a hatred of all women; and one pregnant woman whose house he was robbing tragically bore the full brunt of his frustrations when he stabbed her and cut out both her heart and her unborn baby. This time his feeling was one of intense remorse. But in another life as an uncontrollably psychopathic Eskimo he took out his hatred of women in general by forcing himself sexually upon as many female members of the tribe as he could, and of his shrewish wife in particular by murdering her. The tribe staked him out in the cold to die – but this time a polar bear provided the finishing touches and he apparently remained unrepentant.

We do not know in exactly what order Chris’s lives took place, but this is clearly a case in which the subject alternates between being predominantly perpetrator and victim. Woolger and Netherton describe a number of similar cases, and on the face of it these seem to be reasonably understandable within a classical karmic framework of supposed action and reaction, or more particularly of paying off debts. But what about cases in which the subject is the consistent perpetrator of misdemeanors from life to life, with their only element of victimization being that they were often provoked?

Such was the case with one of Whitton’s subjects, Ben Garonzi, who relived a succession of male and female lives in which he killed those who treated him badly. In his current life he had been so brutalized by his father that, at the age of eighteen, he took a knife from a kitchen drawer with every intention of murdering his alcoholically comatose tormentor. But an inner voice told him to resist the temptation, which he did. When regressed into the interlife, Ben found out that he had chosen this incarnation as yet another test to see if he could resist the temptation to react to extreme provocation with equally extreme violence – a test that he finally passed. He retrospectively reported that as a result of his therapy his characteristic aimlessness up to that point had been replaced by ambition, and he had gone on to pursue a successful career. These are all sure signs that he had finally broken free of the cycle of repetitive karma and moved on. It seems he had learned a lesson – which was not to repeat the mistakes of the past. There is no obvious paying off of debts here.

Even less readily understandable are those cases reported by both Woolger and Netherton in which the subjects are consistently the victims – and where regression uncovers no lives in which they were the perpetrators of significant misdemeanors that might account for their apparent punishment. For example, one of Netherton’s patients came to him suffering from impotence, and abdominal pains that signaled a potential ulcer brought on by the stress of running the business he owned. Under hypnosis he revealed that he had had an early tribal life in which his lover’s husband caught them together, cut his penis off and ran him through the stomach with his spear. A later life was that of an aristocrat in which this former guilt resurfaced when he was about to have sex with a mistress; it was sufficient to cause a perforated stomach from which he eventually died – even though such behavior was generally regarded as perfectly acceptable at the time. And a later one still was that of a businessman whose wife conspired with her brother to obtain the money from his business by setting him up to be caught with a prostitute – his recurring guilt this time unhinging him mentally so that he was committed to an asylum in which he died from the plague. On the face of it this man had repeatedly been the victim, and had done nothing of real note to deserve his succession of unpleasant lives.