Past-Life Narratives and Meaning Transformation: A Wilberian Three-Eyes Hermeneutic Approach to Hypnotic Regression

Abstract

This article develops a Wilberian Three-Eyes hermeneutic approach to interpreting past-life narratives in hypnotic regression. Positioned as a conceptual-hermeneutic narrative review, it does not seek to prove reincarnation, verify postmortem survival, or establish hypnotic regression as a clinical intervention. Instead, it examines such narratives as symbolic, phenomenological, and transpersonal materials through which suffering, death anxiety, guilt, and self-identity may be reinterpreted. Drawing on Wilber’s Three Eyes of Knowing, the article distinguishes empirical caution, symbolic interpretation, and contemplative meaning as complementary but non-interchangeable modes of inquiry. Stevenson and Tucker provide empirical caution, Spence, Knight, and Woolger support narrative and symbolic interpretation, and Weiss illustrates the psychological transformation of postmortem imagery. The article argues that hypnotic regression may function as an epistemological injunction that opens a disciplined space for meaning transformation while avoiding both reductionist dismissal and metaphysical overstatement. It contributes a non-reductive framework to transpersonal psychology, death studies, and the study of altered states of consciousness.