If we turn now to Goldberg’s experience with what he describes as ‘hundreds’ of progressions, he accepts that many people are fearful of them and that this in itself acts as a block, making them much less easy to initiate than regressions. He also indicates that even when subjects are progressed, their experiences are far less stable than in regressions, and tend to swap from one scene to another without warning or continuity. As to why he experiments with them at all, he argues that the past, present and future are all happening now, so that in some cases progressions can have as much therapeutic effect as regressions. He accepts that karma involves choice, and that to some extent this might act as a further intrinsic block, but also insists that ‘if we weren’t supposed to know the future, progressions simply wouldn’t work’. We will return to these issues later, but for now we might note that he summarizes the future of life on earth over the next five centuries based on these cases, and his summary does not seem to correlate with the Cayce predictions of catastrophe – and remember that at the time Goldberg was writing, 1998 was still some years away. Instead, Goldberg’s patients predict that a major nuclear war will decimate the population, but not until the twenty-fifth century, after three hundred years of world peace.

As part of his desire to see hypnotic regression demonstrated on television, Goldberg worked with a presenter from his local network in 1980. But when the following year this subject indicated a willingness to explore progression into the future as well, he decided that the best way to try to prove its validity would be to take him forward one week and look at the news he would be presenting. In two sessions he came up with six news items that on subsequent checking proved to have some validity, although any skeptic would point out that at least some of the items might have been expected to happen anyway – such as house fires, road accidents and political developments. But while in most of these cases few details were provided, in some they were sufficient to seem impressive. A balanced view would be that the information was by no means foolproof, but may have been more accurate than pure guesswork or chance. Of course, one thing that everyone wants to know is, if it is possible to look into the near future, why do people not do it to predict lottery numbers and so forth? The standard response to this is that karmic dynamics do not allow for such greed-motivated activity, so such details would be blocked.

One case in which Goldberg felt that progression had a therapeutic effect was that of Janet, a dietician who came to him suffering from low self-esteem after the break-up of a relationship – one in a long line of bad experiences with partners, apparently caused by her choosing the wrong sort of men who regularly cheated on her. Two past-life regressions revealed some repetitive group karma between Janet, her most recent ex-partner, and his ex-wife to whom he had returned. But Goldberg wanted to go further, and to take her into the future. So he progressed her to an apparent life in the year 3015 – considerably further ahead than any of the other cases we have studied so far – where she described her life as a confident, assertive and successful scientist on another planet, who ended up having a highly successful relationship with one of her senior colleagues who was unknown to her in her current life.

Goldberg reports that Janet subsequently became more self-confident and gained a far more suitable partner. But he also asserts that it was her progression more than her regressions that led to this improvement, because it assured her that by that time in the future she had worked out her karma with her ex-partner in that he was no longer present. However, he provides no details of how many sessions he had with her, and he certainly does not indicate that, for example, he only took her into the future because she had failed to respond to past-life therapy alone. Indeed, I suspect that the karmic ties revealed by her regressions would probably have satisfied most of our pioneers in terms of their therapeutic benefits. Nor does he allow for the fact that her ex-partner might simply have been absent from that particular future life. So, all in all, his suggestion that the progression itself had significant therapeutic effect is somewhat unproven. Having said that, if it were clear to any of us that our current problems were definitely going to be resolved by the time of a future life, it would almost certainly make us feel better. But can such guarantees really be given? Would they not act as a short cut to violate the basic concept of ongoing choices dictating future events? We will return to this issue shortly.

The case that I want to examine in some detail is that of another patient called Pete. He came to Goldberg with a hand-washing obsession, something he readily recognized as a clinical psychologist himself, and which he said was related to an intense but apparently illogical fear of contamination. He was regressed into three past lives that again threw up details pertinent to his compulsion, and this time Goldberg indicates that his symptoms were starting to be alleviated after these sessions. Nevertheless, in the next session Pete progressed into his next life, and it appears this was spontaneous rather than as a result of a deliberate instruction by Goldberg. He found himself as a young man called Ben Kingsley attending a high-school physics class in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the year 2074. He reported that his father was a psychiatrist, his mother an architect, and that he had a loving and stable family background. The only problem was that he had a tendency to lose his temper, and was being treated for it by one of his father’s colleagues. This was an especially sensitive issue because he wanted to work as a technician at the local nuclear power plant, and if his problem was revealed his hopes would be dashed. So his father ensured that it stayed off the record.

Ben’s life progressed well. He went to work at the plant, fell in love, married, had children and gained increasing responsibility in his job. He was something of a workaholic, but even this did not seem to be a problem for him or his family. His temper tantrums had not surfaced for some years, and his psychiatric treatment had been discontinued. Goldberg kept progressing him forwards in that life, probing for further causes of his current problems, and it must be said that his commentary is illuminating. He was clearly adamant that Ben’s temper problems would resurface at some point, even though the patient himself was equally adamant that they were under control – and understandably expressed some irritation that Goldberg should keep coming back to them. From the transcripts one could certainly argue that Goldberg was leading his patient far more than most of our pioneers would, based on his own subjective judgment of the situation and his desire to find an incident related to the current compulsion. One might even use the term ‘bullying’ to describe the tone of his questioning, and as we will see there are other examples of this in his work.

In any case, his relentless pursuit appeared to pay off when eventually Ben found himself alone one night at the nuclear research facility that he by now headed. His calculations contained a mistake that produced an emergency he could not control. Apparently unable to accept his failure, instead of requesting assistance he went into meltdown himself. He knocked a security guard unconscious, sealed off the unit, and let it blow up. Not only did he kill himself and the rest of the skeleton crew, but the surrounding area was heavily contaminated by the blast. After death, he realized his stupidity. But, more tellingly, Goldberg had apparently uncovered the major cause of his current compulsion.

But that is not the end of the story. Clearly this was a highly negative scenario that hardly inspired Pete to look forward to his next life as Ben. Nevertheless Goldberg had an answer for this as well, and it was based on certain assumptions he makes about the way in which different spiritual planes operate. He separately describes five lower vibrational planes – the physical, astral, causal, mental and etheric – and seven higher ones, and states that we cannot progress from one to another until we have raised our vibrational rate sufficiently. As we will see in the final chapter this bears some resemblance to Qabalistic ideas, although his descriptions fall well short of providing a coherent practical framework in my view. In any case, with even less discernable logic he then suggests that any future life has five alternative frequencies that apparently correspond to the lower planes: these are then labeled very bad, below average, neutral, above average and excellent. Nevertheless, they all share the same basic patterns in terms of family circumstances, key people and so on. So all he had to do was progress Pete through his four alternative-frequency lives and let him choose the one he liked best – in this case, not surprisingly, one in which he did not go into meltdown along with the research facility, and lived on happily. According to Goldberg, merely ‘programming’ Pete to this ‘ideal frequency’ was sufficient to finally alleviate all his problems.

It will perhaps be obvious by now that I have certain doubts about the reliability of Goldberg’s work. These stem from other issues as well, which I must mention before we can draw any proper conclusions. For example, if I have understood him correctly he reports that he had performed of the order of 25,000 regressions and progressions by the time he published this first book in 1982. This seems a great many in only about six, or at the most seven, years. Even if he worked seven days a week and took no holidays, it would require him to encounter of the order of ten different past or future lives with his subjects every single day throughout that period – and even if this were possible, one wonders where he got the time to simultaneously carry on with his dental practice. The only pioneer who comes even close to this degree of activity is Edith Fiore, but her report of 20,000 regressions was achieved in some twelve years of full-time dedication. It is therefore only reasonable to suggest that Goldberg might be somewhat prone to exaggeration.

It is also clear that he is something of a self-publicist who consistently sought television and other media exposure at the earliest opportunity. I do not automatically denigrate such an approach – indeed I applaud his efforts to gain further public exposure for the benefits of hypnotic regression – but I cannot help but report that his whole demeanor appears somewhat different from that of most of our pioneers. A further example of this is related to my earlier suggestion of his occasional bullying tone, when we find that in another case he had apparently regressed a patient to his time as a ‘light being’ with a higher than normal vibrational rate, and the patient had questioned Goldberg’s authority to interrogate him about what he was doing while in some sort of apparent interlife state. As a result Goldberg issued this threat: ‘It is your function to report your progress to me at this time. Your vibrational rate will be altered downward if you don’t cooperate.’ This is hardly the sort of respectful approach to sensitive issues adopted by most of our pioneers.

Worse, though, was my personal experience with him. Despite these other reservations, I was deeply troubled by his work. Although most other commentators summarily reject hypnotic progression as far less reliable than regression, it was clear to me that the level of detail emerging in many of his progression case studies was just as impressive as that contained in the best past-life regressions – Pete being an obvious example. He identified key dates, the names of all key people in his life, and even the detailed names of the different units at his research facility. So how could I reject them like other commentators without being guilty of double standards?

Yet if I were to accept them I would have even greater problems, because I do not find Goldberg’s suggestion that karmic free choice is maintained by having the choice of five alternative frequencies for future lives at all persuasive. For him these alternatives still share the same basic circumstances in terms of parents, environment and other key people and interactions. But, according to our interlife pioneers, these are exactly the things we choose as probabilities only for the life we are about to enter – that is, effectively, the current one. To fix them for all future lives as well would drastically reduce, indeed completely minimize, the extent to which ongoing events, actions and decisions would have an impact on our choices of future lives – in fact, it would border on predetermination. Even Pete, discussing his life in the late twenty-first century, was progressing at least one life in advance. And even though we are given no details of her other future lives we can only assume that Janet, in progressing over a thousand years ahead, was going far farther than this.

It is precisely because this issue is so important that I have spent some time discussing my general reservations about Goldberg’s work. It is also why I wrote to him expressing these concerns, and asked him in the politest possible terms whether he felt he could shed any further light on this important conundrum that his research had raised. His somewhat curt response was as follows:

I suggest you read my later books Custom Design Your Own Destiny and Time Travelers from Our Future for answers. Check my homepage for fees and procedures for consults. I charge for my time.

I was somewhat taken aback at this insistence that he charges for his time, when I was clearly asking a research question related to my own book rather than requesting therapeutic assistance. Moreover, subsequent investigation of his own summaries on his website and various less than positive reviews gave me no confidence that these two further books would be at all relevant to my enquiry. So again I responded politely but pressed him on the important point. His reply was again a curt one – that being so ‘cheap’ as to not buy his other books would not ‘win me any friends in this or any other field’. At this point I must admit that I sent him a rather stronger-worded reply, not to continue a pointless disagreement but as a last attempt to elicit some sort of meaningful response to my question. And, given that being polite had not worked twice, I changed tack and goaded him that if he did not attempt to answer my question I would have to assume that it was because he could not. This did indeed elicit a reply, but not one that I expected even from someone who had been as unhelpful as he already had. I will not reproduce it in full, but suffice to say that he called me some rather rude names, accused me rather strangely of trying to ‘weasel free consults from him’ and, above all, resolutely refused to make any attempt to answer my question. Arguably this reveals more than anything else about the strength and validity of his arguments about how progressions operate.