Michael Newton is author the books "Journey of Souls", "Destiny of Souls" and "Life between Lives". He is a skilled hypnotherapist, starting from a skeptic's perspective (and one of an atheist) who discovered that he could not only regress people into their past lives, but beyond their death in those lives forward into their "life between lives", the return of their souls into the spirit world. Having worked on thousands of subjects over decades he calls this "spiritual regression" and "regressing into the superconscious mind", a deeper trance than the one used for past life regression.

In "Journey of Souls" he described the full journey a soul takes from after death into their next incarnation - how they meet their guide, their soul group, how traumatised souls receive healing, how some souls go into seclusion, the meeting with the council of higher beings who help evaluate the past life, that souls study and evaluate their incarnations, and how the soul choses its next incarnation and slowly merges with its next human baby host. This is derived from a case file base of thousands, which gives it great credibility.

In "Destiny of Souls" he fleshes out more detail about some things in the first book. In "Life between Lives" he appeals to other therapists to reproduce his methods. While the first two volumes concentrated on his case files, the later one is more theoretical and technical in nature.

Newton claims that soul's have a very high degree in chosing their destiny, their incarnations, what they want to learn, and get to preview their lives. There is little chance in our lives, but free will is respected. Not-incarnated souls however tend to see their choices differently than incarnated beings, because body and body ego tend to merge into the soul's reasoning. This is the problem with this kind of learning - but it seems the whole business of incarnating is about learning lessons about life and achieving a state of perfection out of the clean slate souls are created with. It is also stated souls are inherently good, and that evil acts are regretted most strongly by the souls themselves. The energies of souls that have taken on too much negativity and did evil are healed. Free will is respected, but souls in spirit form have an inclination towards self-improvement, learning and growth, and therefore chose to incarnate.

It is surely an interesting read. BeeK and my wife inspired me to read it.

Oliver