With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove Spirit Releasement Therapy With William Baldwin, DDS Narrator: Welcome to Virtual U, the radio program of self exploration, where the focus is on our capacity to live consciously and fully, integrating the wisdom of spirit with practical affairs of science, business and culture.
Virtual U, presented by Wisdom Radio.
And now your host, Jeffrey Mishlove.
Dr. Mishlove: Hello, Wisdom Land.
Today we’re going to focus on the subject of spirits and their interaction with humans.
My guest, Dr. William J. Baldwin, is the author of "Spirit Releasement Therapy." He is not with us just now, but I expect him to be joining us presently. While we’re waiting for him to join us, let me tell you a little bit about this remarkable man.
He is a pioneer in a whole new form of psychotherapy, involving releasing spirits who have attached themselves to people. You might think of it as a form of exorcism, but it’s really nothing at all like exorcism. It’s a form of therapy that uses hypnosis. It is related to past-life regression therapy and it came out of a tradition in which many therapists -- not just Dr. Baldwin -- but others as well, working in the field of hypnotic regression began to uncover in hypnosis entities that appeared to be spirits, spirits of the deceased. You might call them, in the Tibetan phrase, "hungry spirits," or wandering spirits. Sometimes they didn’t know they were dead or sometimes they just didn’t understand how to move on in their own spiritual evolution in the other plane, or perhaps they have a certain hankering, a certain habit. They like smoking or they like drinking or they like gambling, or other addictions, attachments, to the physical plane.
Sometimes it happens that, quite by accident, they sort of jump right into the life space, into the aura or life field of another person. That personality changes. My guest is here now.
I’m going to allow him to speak with us in his own words -- Dr. William Baldwin, welcome.
Dr. Baldwin: Hi, Jeffrey, glad to be here.
Dr. Mishlove: It’s a pleasure to be with you.
I was introducing your work, and presenting it in a somewhat larger context as an outgrowth of work involving hypnotic regression. You have a background in dentistry, and I gather that’s initially how you used hypnosis.
Dr. Baldwin: I started learning dental hypnosis my freshman year in dental school. I practiced 12 years in dentistry in Southern California, 1970-1982. It’s very effective for many people who have fear of dentists, as you know. It may come from a childhood trauma, it very often does. I used hypnosis for swelling for gagging for bleeding, all sorts of things. It’s a wonderful tool in dentistry.
Dr. Mishlove: Gradually, that led you into other areas of hypnosis. If I am correct, you began exploring the field of past-life regression.
Dr. Baldwin: You can learn everything there is to learn at the professional conferences, everything you need to know about hypnodonics in about two weekends. Although I was using it in my practice, when I went to the hypnosis conferences for continuing education credit, I’d go to the medical side or the psychology side.
I began to learn about regression therapy, mostly in this lifetime. The professionals didn’t acknowledge that, accept for very few, including our mutual friend, Edie Fiore.
I began getting interested in the farther reaches of the human mind, including past-life regression. I had a past-life regression in 1978, it got my attention, I began studying everything I could read, including Edie Fiore’s book "You Have Been Here Before." I began doing regression therapy in 1980 or 1981 as sort of a part-time practice while I was still doing dentistry. So it went from there.
Dr. Mishlove: For clarification, when you talk about regression therapy in the conventional sense, that would be when a hypnotist would ask a person to re-live experiences, say, from their childhood.
Dr. Baldwin: Yes. In hypno-analysis you ask the client to recall the first time they felt this way, or to locate the source of this particular problem, whether it is bedwetting or over-eating or relationship problems, anything that people come to therapy for traditional psychology. Traditional regression therapy would be within this lifetime. And people were surprised, therapists were surprised, when people started recalling their birth experience. Freud suggested that the birth experience is the most traumatic experience that we survive in this lifetime. And some people began to recall pre-birth memories, and then people began to recall what appear to be other lifetime memories. There is no way to prove it, but these experiences are set in other times and other places. For want of another term, it is called past-life therapy. So it was a gradual progression.
Dr. Mishlove: I should also point out that although we have modern disciplines of psychotherapy and hypnosis that if we look at the history for psychological problems, no matter which culture you go to, you arrive at a time and a place in which it was universally believed that psychological problems were related to various forms of spirit attachment and spirit possession.
Dr. Baldwin: That’s true. The first record that’s considered to be a record of torment of a spirit was on an Assyrian clay tablet several thousand years ago, way before the time of the birth of Christ. Zoroaster was a renowned hypnotist and Zoroastrianism was developed 500 years before the birth of Christ. Buddha’s mother was a renowned exorcist as well, and King Solomon.
So the notion that spirits cause illness is really quite an ancient notion.
The term animism indicated to more primitive peoples -- I hesitate to use "primitive" -- animism suggested that everything , every plant, every rock, the streams, the mountains, all were animated with living force. Maybe they’re not so far off after all. Some of these living forces could interfere with living humans. That’s the notion of spirit possession or discarnate interference.
Dr. Mishlove: It’s useful to say that for 100 years or so now, researchers in the field of cyclical research and parapsychology have been trying to investigate this very hypothesis using scientific methods. While many of their results, especially with regard to the spirit hypothesis, are still somewhat inconclusive, the researchers themselves, including America’s greatest psychologist, William James, felt that we really had to take the spirit hypothesis seriously. It couldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
Dr. Baldwin: The group of people surrounding William James and James Hisloff and Carl Wickland, the psychologists in that period of time, these were wonderfully professional people and very curious and they had not rejected the notion of spirit. And they explored deeply into these fields.
Dr. Mishlove: We’ll explore more explicitly your own work in spirit releasement therapy after these messages from Wisdom Radio.
(Break for messages)
Dr. Mishlove: Welcome back to Virtual U. I’m your host Jeffrey Mishlove. My guest is Dr. William Baldwin, author of "Spirit Releasement Therapy" and the founder of the Spirit Releasement Therapy Movement.
Bill, can you describe the process that led you to develop this form of therapy?
Dr. Baldwin: I studied the farther researches of human consciousness as I was studying hypnosis. I tried out-of-body experience; that never worked. I tried channeling; I never could channel anything. Some people said they felt something when I passed healing energy to them. And when I started doing regression therapy it seemed to work pretty well.
My mind is very logical. Being a dentist, I’m very methodical and scientifically oriented. A clinical therapy approach like that seemed to work best for my way of thinking.
I began to do the past-life regression work and I studied with Edie and several other past-life therapists who teach this material. I started a year and a half before I quit dentistry and my clients were some of my dental patients who had experienced good benefits with hypnosis. Within six months of starting the past-life therapy practice -- and I was seeing five or six people a week -- I started to see signs that looked like not the past-life of the person but something else. As I would ask what this something else was, it very often turned out to be a mother or a brother or a child or a grandmother. For a solider, it might be a buddy that had died in battle, that sort of thing. They had different names, different personalities. And these people were not multiple-personality disorder patients. It was really something else going on here. I began to study not only the church’s approach to exorcism and spirit possession, but the spiritualist approach.
Carl Wickland and William James and James Hisloff and some of the others -- they had studied this many decades before. I began without any background one way or the other, without any belief interfering, either religious or spiritualist. I discovered all kinds of things that seemed to be interfering with people. Instead of possession, I called it attachment, because they seemed to be attached. While possession seems to be real, it happens rarely. What the condition is in most cases, and most people seem to have some interference at some time in their lives, we call it spirit or entity attachment or energy attachment. We could use different terms. I just use the term that had been in common usage for decades, spirit possession, and changed it to spirit attachment. From that it grew to the therapy, which I call spirit releasement in keeping with spirit attachment.
Dr. Mishlove: The distinction here is that we are not necessarily talking about an unfriendly entity. It could be a very friendly one.
Dr. Baldwin: It could be a mother that has died and has not wanted to go on. A husband who is very loving of his wife and passes and he may hang around. He may also be a little bit jealous and possessive. That can cause problems. A drunken uncle may hang around somebody in the family and attach to them and that younger person may start to drink just like the uncle did. Whatever problems, and who among us doesn’t have problems of some sort, behavior problems, attitude problems, addiction problems, these things would be passed on to the person that this entity or the consciousness, the soul consciousness of the deceased person -- I call it an entity for, again, it is just a definition -- the entity would attach to a living person and impose its habits and behaviors and addictions. Now, that’s not fair. This is not an unloving person. It is an interference.
Dr. Mishlove: I guess there are a spectrum of phenomenon. On the one end, I suppose, you’ve go the really extreme cases that seem like demonic type of possession. On the other end, you have people who are channels and mediums and they have guides who come through them and it seems to be, at least in some instances, a very positive teaching relationship that many people benefit from. Then there’s a wide range of experiences that people have in the middle.
Dr. Baldwin: It would seem so. As we teach it in the class, the differentiation here is that -- your listeners are certainly familiar with the near-death experience, where the person leaves the physical body, aware of themselves as a being separate from the body, moves toward a beautiful, golden white light and even as they move into the light they are told or they feel or they know they simply most go back to their body. In past-life regression people describe the same thing except they keep going. They don’t come back to the body until next time. What "next time" seems to mean -- and many nice books have been written on this subject --
Dr. Mishlove: The between lifes.
Dr. Baldwin: The space between life. And it’s just not the same as Earth life. I can’t imagine it. I can’t remember being there myself.
There’s a wonderful book called "Life Between Life" by Joel Witt, a Canadian psychiatrist and Joe Fisher, a ghost writer. A great term.
(Laughs)
It’s about the review stage at the end. You hear people talk about their lives flashing before them if they get in an accident. Maybe there’s some truth in that because this is what seems to happen in this review stage. There’s a book by Michael Newton, a psychologist in California, called "Journey of Souls," a wonderful book about the space between that review stage and the planning stage. There was a movie called "Defending Your Life" some years back. There’s another book, by Helen Wombach, who’s now deceased, who was a psychologist from California, called "Life Before Life." She interviewed several thousand people and they described the space, the planning stage -- it’s like going to . . . It’s more than going to the Auto Club and getting your trip planned. But that’s part of it. We actually plan details of the life to come, like choosing our parents. Some people laugh at that notion. In regression we can see, indeed, how we have chosen our parents. Why and how we’ve known them before -- to talk about it is to limit it. All I can do is give you the words of it.
The planning stage is very important in past-life therapy.
Then we come into the physical dimension once again, conception, birth and life. It seems to be a cycle of re-birth. As I draw this in a sort of map when we do the training classes or lectures, people who have studied Buddhism will say, "That’s very much like the Buddhist map of the territory." I think we have discovered something here. Largely, this comes empirically derived from my practice over the years.
Dr. Mishlove: From the reports of the people under hypnosis.
It seems paradoxical -- on the one hand it is all very well organized. We have teachers and guides and we plan for our lives and after we die we review our life with the help of our guides and yet then there are these -- I guess you might call them -- unsupervised or rogue situations where people die and they are kind of wandering around and they attach themselves to other people. They’re not in touch with guides or helpers or spirits. They’re lost, in a sense.
Dr. Baldwin: How many people do we know who are in touch with their guides? An awfully lot of people are not aware of their guides or the spiritual nature of reality. And it is very easy to get lost once we’ve passed out of the physical body.
What I described is the ideal cycle. It’s usually at the time of death. If it is a death by trauma or drug overdose or murder, or if there’s anger or fear or violence involved, it is very easy for the newly deceased being to get lost. Appallingly easy. As I learned this over the years, and it really was by trial and error -- I keep asking so many questions -- it is appalling how easy it is to get lost and how many souls don’t make it back to the light but hang around. They’re called Earth-bound spirits or souls. This notion has been around for centuries.
Dr. Mishlove: In fact, many of the ancient traditions of the Greeks and the Hebrews and the very idea of a ghost is this flitting creature with very little consciousness lost in a fog of darkness.
Dr. Baldwin: Yes.
Dr. Mishlove: I’ll return with my guest Dr. William J. Baldwin after these messages from Wisdom Radio.
(Break for messages)
Dr. Mishlove: Welcome back to Virtual U. I’m your host Jeffrey Mishlove. My guest is Dr. William Baldwin, author of "Spirit Releasement Therapy" and the founder of the Spirit Releasement Therapy Movement.
We’ve been talking about how you came to discover how people had spirit attachments. The next step, of course, is to develop treatment for that.
Dr. Baldwin: Yes. And again I want to credit Dr. Edith Fiore for giving a lecture on past-life therapy in Orange County, California, where I was practicing as a dentist. She came to the Professional Hypnosis Society, talked about past-life therapy, and also talked about entities that interfere. She gave me the titles of a couple books that I read. This was in 1980.
When I started my practice in past-life therapy a year later, I was sort of on the lookout for this condition. When I found these things and asked so many questions, my intention was to get them gone and was starting to do therapy, just plain, old, kitchen-table therapy on these Earth-bound souls that had attached to these humans. Very often they were angry or fearful or hungry or lost. Sometimes it was a child. How do you treat a child? If you see a lost child, you see what they want and need and help them be warmer and perhaps give them some nourishment.
It came out of that kind of compassion and caring, almost asking them what they wanted and needed, yet knowing that the destination was, as I described in "The Ideal Cycle," to go home to the light. My questions, my efforts were focused in that direction. With a near death experience, descriptions of the light, with my past-life knowledge, my knowledge of past-life therapy, I knew that that was the next place to go. So it wasn’t difficult to start to develop the techniques of getting them to want to go home. And you can’t force them out. It’s not exorcism, which is without love, without compassion, a forceful ejecting of the entities. It is totally with compassion, caring, respecting the entity as a being, the same as the person in the chair. So, the efforts became focused on getting them to want to go.
Sometimes it was a matter of "I never had a chance to say good-bye."
"We had a fight when I left home that morning and I was in an accident and I died. I never a chance to tell my wife good-bye, I love you."
Sometimes it was that simple.
A mother who dies when a child is very young may attach the child. When the child grows up, there’s a problem there. "What’s going on here? I act so much like my mother. I eat like her, I dress like her."
"Mother, what’s going on here?"
"My child was so young when I died," she would say through the client’s voice, "I felt guilty about leaving and I just wanted to stay to take care of her."
That phrase comes through so often. This is the lost soul of a human being, not an evil spirit, not a demonic being, but a lost human soul. And you work it around to the point that they want to leave. They love the other enough and they know that love does not die, no matter how far away they go, love cannot die and they’re willing to move on into the light.
Now, from the light they can actually come back as a spirit guide. But only from the light can a being come back as a true teacher of light, as a true spirit guide, and they never attach. They never use the energy of the host. They never impose their own agenda, their needs, their wants, their habits.
It is the Earth-bound soul that attaches, that hasn’t been -- well, the Bible calls it the unclean spirit. They haven’t been through the cleaning process. So they still have their own baggage. They impose that on the host when they attach. The guide never does.
Dr. Mishlove: A relative or a spouse who’s attached -- what might the symptoms of that be?
Dr. Baldwin: There was one woman who had heard me lecture and she wanted to come in just to check it out. She said, "I’m almost 40 and I’ve never had a relationship that lasted over about three months or so."
I think that’s a little bit abnormal and maybe we can work on that as well.
She leaned back in the recliner and, laughing, she said, before she closed her eyes -- I don’t use hypnosis but a person does close their eyes and go into an altered state; they just focus within -- she said, "By the way, I had polio when I was two years old and I sometimes get leg cramps."
I marked that down on my chart. I used a direct method that I learned from Edith Fiore, and as she relaxed I did a little light induction -- it’s an induction and a protection and an invocation of light -- I said, "Is there anyone else here with Jane? Is there anyone else here in Jane’s body? Is there someone else with Jane right now?"
And she raised up off the recliner and she said, "My head! My head hurts!"
I took that as a response and I said, "You, come out of her head! Stop hurting her! We recognize your presence!" This is a clinical assumption, I admit -- her head stopped hurting.
She laid back down, and her leg kicked up. And she said, "That’s what happens! That’s what happens when I’m in bed with a guy, a boyfriend -- my leg kicks. And they don’t stay around very long."
It turns out that the entity was her husband from 42 lifetimes ago, around 500 A.D. He went off to war across the Mediterranean. He died in Italy someplace, some war. She was on to North Africa, probably Egypt. She knew right when he died. She welcomed him back and he had made the soldier’s impossible promise, "My beloved, I will return to you." without realizing that he was going to be returning as an Earth-bound soul rather than as her living lover-husband. He had attached that long ago.
In the meantime, when she had died, her body had gone to the light, and he had broken away, had waited for her to come back in again. When she came back in to reincarnate, he found her, recognized her vibration -- it’s different for everyone -- and attached again. He had attached 42 lifetimes.
"I don’t care," he said. "She’s my wife. I promised to come back to her."
I had her do a brief scan of her own past lives and she had been male in a couple of lifetimes, when he was attached. And he was a little confused by this, but then he said, "I don’t care. She’s my wife."
This had caused her not only confusion in the present lifetime, interruptions in her relationships, this husband from so long ago was literally kicking her boyfriends out of bed, using her muscle spasms from the polio. He wasn’t doing her any good.
He finally left because he was willing to love her enough to let her live her life, knowing that they would be together again in the light when she made her own transition
-- even perhaps he could help her across, which would be a very loving thing. As he helped her across, perhaps they would choose to be together again, but only if they both chose it. This was enough for him to finally leave and go to the light.
She came back a few weeks later and I said, "How have been things been?" She said, "I haven’t noticed any changes." But two of her friends called and said, "There’s such a change in her! I want to come in for a session." So other people had seen the change that was so total that she wasn’t even aware of it herself.
Dr. Mishlove: Many therapists work with mental imagery. If they are not inclined to accept the spirit hypotheses and reincarnation, they might say, well, you were able to use mental imagery in a powerful way to relieve this woman of her symptoms and you can do that without necessarily having to subscribe to the belief system entailed by the imagery that you used.
Dr. Baldwin: The imagery comes from her, not me. I never suggest imagery. What you say is true. It could be just internal imagery. It doesn’t have to be a past life. It certainly doesn’t have to be an entity.
We do want to schedule some research. It requires some good research design, control and funding. To use consciousness measuring instruments, like the brain map and other instruments to see indeed if there is another consciousness present. It certainly could be guided imagery, but I don’t guide them in it. It comes from within themselves.
Dr. Mishlove: My guest is Dr. William Baldwin, author of "Spirit Releasement Therapy" and the founder of the Spirit Releasement Therapy Method.
We’ll be back after these images from Wisdom Radio.
(Break for messages)
Dr. Mishlove: Welcome back to Virtual U. I’m your host Jeffrey Mishlove. My guest is Dr. William Baldwin, author of "Spirit Releasement Therapy" and the founder of the Spirit Releasement Therapy Movement.
It’s really become quite a movement at this point.
Dr. Baldwin: I guess a lot of people are aware of it. I’ve been lecturing on the subject since 1981. I started lecturing at small bookstores, local metaphysical bookstores. In 1983 I spoke at the Association for Past-Life Research and Therapies in Southern California. I spoke at a fall session of the association in Northern California and I think you were a member of that class.
Dr. Mishlove: I’ve been aware of your work for a long time.
Dr. Baldwin: I was so honored to have you there as the author of "Roots of Consciousness." I felt like a neophyte at that point.
So I’ve been lecturing for almost 18 years on the subject, so people around the country have heard about it. It was surprising, as I lectured in different parts of the country, I found that people had discovered much the same thing and had developed somewhat similar methods.
While I coined the term "spirit releasement therapy" and actually trademarked it after my book was published, there are people who have been using similar methods for years, decades, centuries.
Dr. Mishlove: You might say that it is consistent with what is sometimes called the "perennial philosophy." That you’re dealing with a kind of core understanding of the nature of the human soul that transcends cultures and religions. You’re just as comfortable dealing with Tibetan, Buddhist mythology, as Christian.
Dr. Baldwin: Yes. It really is that. As far as the philosophies, and there is this concept really inherent in just about every religious philosophy that exists, it also is a practice.
We visited Japan a few years ago as a guest of a healer, a very prominent healer in Japan, and we had a translator. Japanese and English aren’t all that compatible. Even a translator might have difficulty in moving the meanings back and forth between languages. We did a session on a Buddhist’s monk’s wife who was a kindergarten teacher -- he asked if we would do a session and he, in turn, would do a healing of his methodology on us, energy healing -- and through the translator I proceeded with the same questions I ask clients here, the same approach, and the Japanese woman through the translator, came back with the same exact responses. Nothing to do with guided imagery. This was in her subconscious mind. She simply used different words to describe it. The results were the same. She discovered several entities very similar to what we discover here. They wre released in the very same way they are released here.
I know it’s been done in India. I know a Yugoslavian hypnotherapist -- we used to communicate by e-mail before the bombings -- who had bought my book
I have a second book "Close Encounters of the Possession Kind" which rather ties in with what appear to be aliens who attach to living people for specific purposes, quite different from the earth-bound souls, and over the last year he was saying, "Hurry up with your new book. I’m finding aliens in many of my clients."
A friend of mine, a therapist in Australia, was very happy I was putting the book together because he was finding aliens as well.
So it is not just Bill Baldwin who is discovering these things and getting the results. It is people, literally, around the world. We’ve spoken with Israel, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Mexico -- there is a universality about this. It really is connected to the universal wisdom, the ancient wisdom.
Dr. Mishlove: It’s quite remarkable. What you seem to be doing is not only helping people through your therapy but through the theoretical work that you’re doing. You’re creating a blueprint, a map of a whole new model of reality in which we can see ourselves, not only in this three-dimensional physical space, but we have a space of our life in a larger space, beyond this.
Dr. Baldwin: It certainly seems that way. It’s not a map that I’m actually developing. I’m drawing from history’s maps. The mystics have pointed at this direction for centuries. We mentioned Buddhism. A fourth of the healings connected to Jesus were the casting out of unclean spirits. This concept is not new. Of course, the Catholic Church has tried to turn away from that, in keeping with modern scientific keeping. And yet there are exorcists in the Catholic Church that are very busy these days. It really is part of the ancient wisdom as well as religious philosophies.
What I’m doing is attempting to bring it in to the clinical world, the mental health world. Science and spirit parted company a long time ago and I’m attempting to bring this in a methodical, logical way back to mental-health practitioners. And physicians, for that matter. It’s something that can’t be separated. The mind- body-spirit trio is part of holistic health. It cannot be ignored.
Dr. Mishlove: I wonder if you draw at all on the work on the of the spiritista movement, particularly the writings of Alan Cardack from the last century.
Dr. Baldwin: Spiritualism in this country began with the Fox sisters in the middle of the last century. It became very popular in this country. The movement went to Europe under the term "spiritism." Cardack channeled a great deal of information in his two books, "The Book of Mediums" and "The Spirits Book."
Dr. Mishlove: He didn’t channel that information. It was the result of what he called pedagogy.
Dr. Baldwin: Okay.
Dr. Mishlove: He was a scholar and he used a very disciplined method. He interviewed mediums and interviewed their spirit guides. When seven different mediums and spirit guides agreed on a particular description of the other reality, then he would include it in his books.
Dr. Baldwin: Okay. I didn’t realize that detail.
Dr. Mishlove: He was quite a scholar.
Dr. Baldwin: Okay. I knew that the material came from the spirit world. I assumed it came through him. Now this became very popular in Brazil.
Dr. Mishlove: Extremely so.
Brazilian spiritistas, as they’re known, practice forms of therapy very similar to yours.
Dr. Baldwin: I was there. I gave a paper at the first International Congress on Alternative Therapies in 1985. The people there were very interested in my methods. I had studied past-life therapy with Morris Nebatin. A number of people in Brazil had also studied past-life therapy with Nebatin. The Nebatin method is quite an unusual method.
We were taken around to the Medical Spiritists Association, the healing centers -- there are about 4,000 healing centers in Sao Paulo alone. They have no welfare system. So, largely, this is done by volunteers, very kind people. This one particular center we went into, we laughed, because he said, on Thursdays we do the exorcisms. They call them the dis-obsession, where the term in the past has been de-possession here. I got away from the term and it was what Edie Fiore talked about at first. I learned that from her. I didn’t see the condition as possession. But they call it dis-obsession there, and the way that they showed us in this one center, was four mediums sitting in chairs facing a fifth who sits in the center. A sixth medium, then, has a name and address of the identified patient or client on a piece of paper. Once the medium in the center goes into trance, then the sixth medium will call in the spirit that has been interfering, and he reads the name and address of the afflicted person. The theory is, and what actually happens -- I’ve seen it on video but did not see it in practice -- that that spirit will leave the afflicted person and on that call come into the medium in the center of the circle. Then they proceed, with mesmeric passes over the body in a number of other techniques and they actually release that entity into the light.
Dr. Mishlove: Let me interrupt you right now because we’re coming up on a break.
I want to let our listeners know we will be back in six and a half minutes after the top of the hour for another full hour of discussion on spirit releaasment therapy.
For those of you that have been enjoying so far the first hour of my interview with our guest tonight, let me invite you to log on to my Web site
www.mishlove.com
From there you can link to Web sites of all of my guests, past, present and future, of my guests who have Web sites.
And, of course, your Web site, Dr. Baldwin, is
spiritreleasement.org
and it will be linked.
(Break for messages)
Dr. Mishlove: Welcome back to the second hour of my discussion about spirit Releasement therapy with Dr. William J. Baldwin, the founder of the Spirit Releasement Therapy Movement.
You were talking about your experiences with the spiritistas in Brazil.
Dr. Baldwin: I was fascinated to learn all the different ways that people in this world, both present day and past times, have dealt with this problem. They’ve seen the problem, have assessed it as spirit interference, and have developed different types of methods for releasing. They were quite interested in the clinical way I was putting it together. It was a mutual respect.
Dr. Mishlove: In Brazil, they work with mediums, whereas you work with hypnosis, in more of a psychotherapy context.
Dr. Baldwin: We work with an altered state of consciousness. Like asking the woman, "Is there someone else here?" It may cause a disassociation. There are many professional therapists who would criticize that. I need that disassociation because the "other" is not part of the person. That’s the basic part of this hypothesis. It is a hypothesis, a working, clinical model hypothesis, that there is something else, a different consciousness that is not part of the person. And I need to talk to that other part. Actually, I am seeking to induce in that way a disassociation so I can talk to the other part. It isn’t the disassociation of multiple personality. It is separating the one consciousness from the other.
Really, it is about developing a clinical model, a clinical hypothesis that says, "Yes, maybe we are all one at some higher level, but at this level -- where you are (California) and I’m in Florida -- and even though we’re one, we’re separate. I feel the same way about consciousness, that there are, perhaps, bits of the oneness of consciousness that have different agendas, different bodies. They’ve lived in different times. This is a philosophical issue that I don’t get much into. I just deal with what comes up in clinical sessions. It isn’t actually as much hypnosis as it is an altered state. The client goes into an altered state. I don’t induce a hypnosis by any classical hypnotic method, though I’m trained in that. They focus inside and that’s what comes out. I deal with what comes.
Dr. Mishlove: Even with separate human consciousness, there are many theorists today like Howard Gardner who have developed the idea of multiple selves, multiple intelligences, that a normal human being has many, many sub-personalities.
Dr. Baldwin: Yes.
And there are ways to differentiate, clinically at least, between the sub-personalities ,the parts of self, the fragments which is what I call the sub-personalities. Their fragments can be of any age, and the fragments can actually leave the body. This is where we often find not only an Earth-bound soul of a deceased human, but the mind fragment of a living human as an attached entity.
We all have these different parts. There are some people who say that channeling -- even Jane Roberts suggested that "Seth" might be a higher part of her own consciousness.
These are grand theories. In a clinical sense, one of the differential diagnostic questions is "are you part of this person or are you something or someone else?" And it’s pretty clear what it is. Then to locate the source of it. Again, at a higher level, we are all one. So what! We don’t operate that way here on Earth. These methods ease the pain of people. It brings them more integrated. It does not cause disassociation. It leaves them empowered, not weakened. And what helps people -- I’m for it.
Dr. Mishlove: Many times people actually are relieved of disturbing symptoms.
Dr. Baldwin: Oh my -- yes.
Alcohol and drug use -- I worked for a time in a woman’s prison in Southern California. One was a rehab center for just drug abuse. The women were incarcerated. The other was an actual prison where there were women in for various reasons and crimes. Out of 19 women I worked with, 15 of them had attached entities who had died of a drug overdose and had attached to these women and had caused them to use drugs. The recivitism rate is between 60 and 90 percent in our rehab programs -- not very successful. Of these women, they self reported at the end of the year, seven of the 15 used less or desired less or not at all after a year’s time. One of the women was back in the rehab center because she had gone to a party, someone had spiked the punch with LSD, she was very angry. I believed her. That would have been number eight, or more than half of the women in the study. It was a very brief study -- and self reporting, which is not scientifically valid. But, yes, there was a difference in these women’s drug habits. That could be a major change in our system.
Dr. Mishlove: One of the most disturbing symptoms that people develop is what we conventionally call the psychotic, the schizophrenic systems, which are the ones that are most like the symptoms that used to be called demonic possession.
I’ve dealt with clients of this sort in my own psychotherapy practice and it is really heart wrenching to be with people who are constantly being plagued by voices that are saying the most belittling and nasty comments to them.
Dr. Baldwin: I met my wife, Judith, who is a gifted clairvoyant, a mystic in her own rite, 10 years ago and she joined me not only in my life but in my work. As a clairvoyant, she can see the disturbed energy which is the true schizophrenia, the true mental illness. She can also see the different types of entities. She sees them as energy forms, but it has become very clear to her now what the different energy forms stand for. It is consistent after several thousand cases. She has seen the entities that plague the labeled schizophrenics, the diagnosed schizophrenics, but the ones that we have seen are pretty well under the control of drugs and we can’t do much about it. That is painful to see that. I have to say that spirit releasement therapy works best on the person who has not been diagnosed with something like that, though clinical depression very often is eased somewhat with the recovery of these soul fragments that I mentioned. Some of the fragments can actually leave the premises. Some of the mind fragments can attach to other people, much like attaching entities.
When we find a person who is severely fragmented like that, we can help them with attention span and depression and raising their mood by gathering some of their fragments back, their immune system. Physical ailments don’t take such advantage of them.
But, yes, the mental illness, the true schizophrenic is a very sad situation. There’s not much we can do about the mental problem, although we can do some work on releasing the entities. It is better in that way as they do in Brazil, to do a remote spirit releasement. And we’ve had some success with that. But certainly not any cure.
Dr. Mishlove: You’ve used another term here -- soul recovery. There’s a new book out on the subject. Sometimes we leave pieces of our souls in different places and they can be recovered and restored to us. It is sort of like spirit releasement therapy in reverse, I suppose.
(Laughs)
Dr. Baldwin: It is. The first book I read on the subject was by Sandra Ingermann, a therapist in New Mexico and works with Michael Harner, called "Soul Retrieval." An absolutely beautiful book.
Dr. Mishlove: We’ll be back with Dr. Baldwin after these messages from Wisdom Radio.
(Break for messages)
Dr. Mishlove: Welcome back to Virtual U. I’m your host, Jeffrey Mishlove.
If you would like to speak with us directly, you can call Wisdom Radio's toll-free number, 1-800-655-2112.
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William James was one of America’s greatest psychologists and researchers, a pioneer in investigating the spirit hypothesis. I see you have a quote from him in your book in which he says eventually the demon theory is going to have to be re-examined.
"That the demon theory will have its inning again, to my mind, is absolutely certain."
Dr. Baldwin: Yep. There it is. I think so, too.
I have taken great strength from these intellectual giants -- James Hisloff, who spent 10 years in research before he was convinced that even this could be possible. William James, whom many consider the father of American psychology. To make such a statement was a tremendous boost to me in dealing with what I was discovering in clinical practice. I thought I was a nut discovering this stuff that couldn’t possibly be real. And, here it is. These are the intellectual giants of the times. I was thrilled to find those things.
Dr. Mishlove: Has doing this work affected your own religious orientation in any way?
Dr. Baldwin: (Pause)
Spiritual, Jeffrey, spiritual, not religion. Religion is a philosophy made up by men distorting the truth of masters that have spoken to us through the centuries. And I certainly go along with a spiritual reality. The Archangel Michael -- who existed long before any church was formed here.
So it certainly is a spiritual -- a feeling that there is a spiritual reality. There are greater being than we. There are masters. But it is not religious, it is spiritual.
Dr. Mishlove: In doing some of your healing, you call upon guides and masters to help with the spirit releasement work.
Dr. Baldwin: Yes. When we find the dark force energies, which is one of the things we do, indeed, find. I didn’t for several years. The first few years I was discovering only the Earth-bound souls. Then I began to discover what could only be described as dark forces. I didn’t want to believe in that. The clients would sometimes come out of the altered state and say, "I don’t believe in this. I can’t say that." And I would say, "That’s fine. I don’t believe in it either."
What does it say?
This sort of thing would come from minds of the clients.
They never call themselves demon. They call themselves dark. Demon is a human term, a sign to these dark force energies. They’ve never been human in their own physical bodies. Their intention is to cause much chaos and destruction. I was doing the work for about five years before I even went back to the Bible of that particular section -- it is Revelations 12, which talks about Lucifer being cast out of the heavens. Is that a myth? Is that a metaphor? Is that part of the legends of the past transformed into the religious literature? But other belief systems, other religious systems have similar notions of the dark energies that influence and inflict themselves upon humans. For these we call on Archangel Michael, and he seems to get the job done. I call on the rescue spirits of light, the angelic beings of light, whose job it is to handle this. I don’t remember now how it is I came on to these terminologies. Of course, Archangel Michael, classically, is the foe of the Lucifer energy. But it works clinically.
I can’t say that this is absolute truth, but it is a hypothesis that works at the clinical level. It’s not a belief system. So I do call on these beings, yes.
Dr. Mishlove: When you call on these beings, what do you experience?
Dr. Baldwin: I don’t experience much of anything. I never have in these sessions. I’ve had a few sessions of my own and I actually feel some sense of something going on with me, but not like the clients describe. I’m never left-brained in that way. I can only describe what the clients say.
Cardack, when he heard it seven times, he would pay attention and right it down.
But I hear it once or twice from the client, even if something similar a second or a third or a fourth time -- I’m interested. But when it gets up to five or six times and I get the same results, then I write that down and that becomes part of the training and that’s what the technique manual is about. It is 480 pages of clinical experience that I learned from my clients.
They often describe a great deal of light coming in. There is no religious figure of Michael with a sword and shield and so forth, but it is a great deal of light coming in. Very powerful. And the dark ones take notice. That’s a tough one to talk about in a public forum like this because there are so many belief systems and so much -- especially after the movie "The Exorcist," which had a pretty tremendous impact. So I hesitate to get into it. But it is essentially a spiritual process from Earth bound souls of humans to what I’ve come to call dark force energies into the other kind of entities that we have found.
Dr. Mishlove: You have a new book coming out and it deals with extraterrestrial entities.
Dr. Baldwin: I call it other-worldly beings. It came out in January and is called "CE6: Close Encounters of the Possession Kind."
In 1986 I had the first client, who was psychic herself, find this entity within herself.
I never tell them what to look for. I say, look inside, locate the cause of this condition. Locate the source of this, the origin of this problem.
What they find is a glob, a shape, a face and, if it had words, what would it say, I ask. So it speaks. We get into conversations that way. Some people would call that channeling. Some people would call it disassociation.
This thing was neither human nor dark energy and it was here gathering information.
I said, "Locate your next superior."
This woman, who was quite psychic, she said, "I see a black cord going up three dimensions."
I didn’t even know what that means. I go along with what the client describes.
And here was a craft and here was the commander of the craft. I said, "Are you commander of the craft? What is your purpose for being here?" And she straightened up in the chair and got very imperious and asked, "‘Why are you interfering? What are you doing here? What do you want to know?’" Either she’s channeling or she’s a multiple or there is somebody else here talking through her. So that was my first experience and what we find is that more than half our clients now discover a similar sort of thing. And I’ve written a book on it.
Dr. Mishlove: Your conclusion is, indeed, other dimensional entities of some type?
Dr. Baldwin: Not other dimensional. Other worldly beings. Some of them seem to have a physical planet much as ours is. The first one talked about going up three dimensions, so maybe other-dimensional being is a good term.
When people talk about UFO abduction, there’s something that changes in the physical body because they are lifted against the forces of gravity, they look back and their body is not in bed, so it is not an out-of-body experience. They’re lifted into a craft and sometimes people observe, sometimes not. I don’t know really what that means. Is it that the human is taken into another dimension? Is it somehow the human is altered so now they can through walls and defy gravity? I just don’t know. There has been so much literature on UFO abduction and I hesitate to that into that at all.
But what we find is that one of the types of entities that attach and interfere are other worldly or other dimension or alien or extra terrestrial beings. They have a planet, they have civilization, they are highly technological group. Of course, the Earth-bound souls or the dark force energies have no technology. They are simply spirits. These, even though they are not physical, have a technology, they have appliances attached. It is very strange. I call it the weird of the weird, Jeffrey.
(Laughs)
Dr. Mishlove: I imagine that cases like this will certainly arouse some of your own skepticism as to "what is going on here?"
Dr. Baldwin: Always.
Dr. Mishlove: We’re speaking with Dr. William Baldwin. And what is the title of your new book?
Dr. Baldwin: CE-VI: Close Encounters of the Possession Kind."
Dr. Mishlove: We’ll be back.
(Break for messages)
Dr. Mishlove: We’re back with my discussion with Dr. William J. Baldwin on spirit releasement therapy.
If you would like to speak with us directly, you can call Wisdom Radio's toll-free number, 1-800-655-2112.
Or, you can send us e-mail by addressing it to
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There are six phases in the spirit releasement therapy work. I think it would be useful for our listeners to have a sense of the whole process.
Dr. Baldwin: In a therapy session, we don’t bring up to the client, "Well, let’s look for entities now." Or, "Let’s do a past life now." Or, "Let’s look for a soul fragments that have been lost."
We have the client describe the problem areas. As they describe the problems they will get emotional. They will usually start to feel emotion about a particular problem -- anger or fear or sadness or grief. And I ask, "Where do you feel that in your body right now?" As they point to the chest or the stomach or the throat, I’ll say, "Focus on that -- what size, what shape is it? Does it have a color? If it has sound, what would it be? If it could speak, what would it say?" This is how we usually uncover something. This can be a past life, an accident when they were three years old, a physical abuse situation when they were a kid, it can be almost anything. As we continue to ask these questions, it becomes clear what it is -- if it part of the person or something else.
So the first step is discovery.
And differential diagnosis. And differential diagnosis questions. The first one is, "Are you part of this person or are you something or someone else?" The skeptic would say, "Well , they could say anything, couldn’t they?" Yes, of course they can say anything. So, why do they say "I’m part of her." Or, "No, I’m not part of her." No, there is a reason why they answer what they answer. And the second step is, "Have you been alive in your own human body." These are the differential diagnosis questions.
So first is discovery of something -- a disruption of energy, a painful memory, an attached entity, a soul fragment lost, whatever it happens to be. As we go on in, we ask the differential diagnosis questions.
Once we differentially diagnose what type of entity it is, a human soul, a mind fragment, the soul of a terminated pregnancy, which has no name, by the way, there are specific ways to tell the difference, or one that has never been human in its own physical body, which could be a dark force entity, it also could be an alien. We ask what color is the light in your place? Now the alien or other worldly being , the E.T., will give us some other color other than gold and white, which is typically the light of the near-death experience. This is diagnostic of the E.T. The dark force entity will say there is no light or it’s just black. There are specific ways to differentially diagnose.
Then each particular type of entity or attachment -- and it could be a thought form or the person a curse, a hex, that sort of thing, a thought form sent by another person -- once we’ve determined what it is, and there are very specific questions and there’s no doubt about it before we start the treatment.
The next step is the actual treatment of the entity, very specific for the type of energy or entity that it is.
And finally the release -- the actual release into the light where the E.T.s -- they go back to the light where they came from, the color of light where they came from. The dark ones are taken to our own light once they discover that they have their own spark of God consciousness at their center. The Earth-bound humans are sent to the light, the gold and white light of our own ideal cycle. The treatment and release are different for each type of entity.
Finally, after the release, there is a feeling light meditation -- it’s to feel a space, to fill the space left by the entity, whatever it was.
We do attempt to recover soul fragmentation at that time, to fill the space with the client’s own energy. There’s always the possibility of other entities coming in. The entities that we release, we release in a way that they do not come back. They like where they go. They don’t come back again.
A person is always susceptible, like we’re susceptible to colds every winter.
Then the sixth step is ongoing therapy. We see clients in follow up sessions, we help them gather more soul fragments to inner child healing, maybe do some therapy on this lifetime. We may discover more layers of entities. That’s not unusual at all. We may do past-life therapy to solve problems in the present life.
So the steps are:
Discovery.
Differential diagnosis.
Treatment.
Release.
Filling the space with light.
And, ongoing therapy.
It’s a very methodical, very step-by-step process. There’s nothing magical or ritual about it all.
Dr. Mishlove: One of the things that you point out is that is rare for a person to have only one entity attached to them.
Dr. Baldwin: We never find that.
If we’re open and vulnerable and susceptible in our life, then we’re open and vulnerable often. If we get a little too angry. If we bump our head or have an accident. If we’re ill and our resistance is low. If we have one too many beers. Any number of reasons that we are vulnerable in our lifetime and most everybody goes through this. There are several people, including Edith Fiore, who suggest that between 70 and 100 percent of the people have entity interference at least some time in their life. I agree. Of course, I haven’t seen everyone in the world, but when I ask the entities -- and I ask so many questions -- "Doesn’t this happen often? Are there entities in other people? Are there entities in other members of her family?" And the answer is always yes. There are lots of entities. Everybody has them.
Dr. Mishlove: I think of it as an other dimensional plane beyond these three dimensions and it intersects with ours. It seems so far away, and it is so very close to us.
Dr. Baldwin: It seems so.
Dr. Mishlove: When we dream we enter into some connection with these other dimensional spaces.
Dr. Baldwin: Psychic abilities and clairvoyant abilities -- even some of the drug experiences when used as a sacrament will take people. LSD certainly. Some people simply aren’t ready for it and have bad trips on these drugs. Yes, it does seem to be interspersed in our own reality.
Dr. Mishlove: Are there hygienic practices that people who are not necessarily possessed can practice but in order to prevent this sort of thing from occurring?
Dr. Baldwin: People often ask that question -- what can do I prevent this from happening to me? And I suggest that the first step is to see someone and get rid of the ones that you already have and then the practices you take up will be effective.
Judith is writing a book on spiritual protection. It is going to be a major work, I think. She does a lecture on this and she teaches this as part of our basic spirit releasement therapy training. We do a five-day training for therapists.
Judith mentions several different things. One is, pay attention to what you’re doing, to what you’re thinking. "Thinking thinking." Remember, that came out in the new age. If you’re angry at someone, if you feel like you want to get even with someone, these are things to pay attention to.
She promotes people following a spiritual discipline of their choice. A number of other things that she talks about. Yes, there are things you can do to ward off these attachments. Even the most aware of us are susceptible from time to time. She does sessions on me and I on her from time to time. Anybody who practices releasement therapy should have sessions on themselves regularly. They’re like a spiritual bacteria. It’s like everybody has bacteria on their skin and their eyelashes and in their gut, but nobody gets freaked out about it. These are like other-dimensional bacteria, parasites, and we needn’t get freaked about it. There is something we can do about it. There is something we can do to prevent further adjunction.
Dr. Mishlove: My guest is Dr. William J. Baldwin. We’ll return after these messages from Wisdom Radio.
(Break for messages)
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This is Wisdom Radio.
Dr. Mishlove: I’m your host Jeffrey Mishlove and this is the final segment of my two-hour discussion with Dr. William J. Baldwin, author of "Spirit Releasement Therapy."
One of the interesting sections of your book refers to group regressions and dual regressions where couples can go into an altered state of consciousness or groups of people can together.
Dr. Baldwin: This is not unusual with either small seminars or individuals. I have regressed a therapy group here in Florida where there were five people and all of the people were able to answer back during the regession and find themselves together in another time and another place. Again, if this is true or not true -- I really don’t know if it is perhaps psycho-drama. It certainly isn’t guided imagery because that’s not what I was doing. But they found themselves in another time and place in similar situations with similar problems.
Couples can be dual regressed. I don’t think couples counseling can be complete without an exploration of both past lives and entity attachment. We’re in the process of putting together a book on relationship and spiritual releasement therapy, because it interferes so much, like the woman with the leg kick. She was unable to get into a relationship in this lifetime because of the spirit of her husband from 1500 years ago. But dual regression -- some people can’t find the same lifetime together, but with the proper instruction and guidance many people can find a lifetime together which holds the source of their present conflicts and problems. It’s a wonderful way to look at it. You can argue the rest of your life, this life, and you’ll never get to the source of the problem like you can with past-life regression. A very important tool for couples counseling.
I also do 25-30 people at a time where we do a group regression. I have people choose a happy event in this lifetime and I guide them back to another lifetime that was happy. And it’s amazing how many people in an audience of 20 or 30 or 40 will say they can’t remember a happy time in this life. But group regression is possible. We have a weekend seminar and there several regressions -- one to the source of their anger, one to the source of their fear, sadness, guilt, relationship problems, purpose in life. Many people have lost their purpose in life. And, also back to the source of feelings of rejection and abandonment and separation. And that always goes back to connection source, to the original oneness. It’s a wonderfully moving experience for people.
Dr. Mishlove: Do you find cases in which groups are being regressed together that there are also entities present?
Dr. Baldwin: There are always entities present. When we do a group regression, some people will come up at the end of the regression and say, "Something is still here. Something is going on." And it turns out to be an entity. The same techniques uncover or access the subconscious mind which is where our memories are stored, it seems, and where the energy is attached. Yes, this sort of regression can uncover an entity. It may be the past life of an entity. We will sometimes have to do an entity releasement in such a group regression.
Dr. Mishlove: Sometimes the entities are attached to us because of past life, a karmic connection.
Dr. Baldwin: Yes.
Dr. Mishlove: At other times it is more happenstance.
Dr. Baldwin: About half the cases in the first few years I was doing this and studying and learning so much -- the entity and the person knew each other either in this lifetime or some past lifetime. About half the cases there was no connection whatsoever. What happened to karma? What happened to free will? What happened to the planning stage in the light? Well, the Earth-bound soul never gets back to the planning stage in the light and so they’re not part of the plan. And about half of them are just a glitch in the system. There may be some meta-level, some higher level where it’s all planned out, but I haven’t found that place.
Dr. Mishlove: You’re helping the attached entity want to go into the light themselves. They need to somehow be educated.
Dr. Baldwin: Yes. It’s largely a process of education.
A big part is love. Like the husband who stays around for 42 lifetimes because he loves her. But he’s also confused and he’s possessive and jealous and he made the promise that he’d come back. We find that when we get through the anger and the confusion and the jealousy, what is love but love.
Very often to get to that point, what is required is forgiveness.
Forgiveness and love are major points of these therapies.
Dr. Mishlove: I imagine a scenario where you in a future lifetime will run into somebody who will remember they were once a possessing entity and you helped them to move into the light and free themselves. I guess the point of the education here is that even when it is done with good intentions, an entity who is attaching themselves to a living person isn’t really fulfilling their own spiritual evolution.
Dr. Baldwin: Exactly. That have come to a dead stop, so to speak. By attaching to a living person, they have not gotten on with their next step of evolution, their spiritual evolution, which is to the light. They may come back in another human form, they may not. They may go to a different place. But they can do none of that as long as they are attached to another living human. It certainly is part of that spiritual evolution of the entity as well as the host to get rid of that entity.
For those of you that have been enjoying my interview with Dr. Baldwin, let me invite you to log on to my Web site
www.mishlove.com
From there you can link to Web sites of all of my guests, past, present and future, of my guests who have Web sites.
From there you can link on to Dr. Baldwin’s Web site which is
spiritreleasement.org
We post photographs of our guests and audio clips of our guests and we publish transcripts of many of the interviews, so, you can get a flavor for interviews you have missed from the Virtual U series.
The Web site is a resource that I've created for the benefit of you, the listeners, and I invite you to take advantage of it.
Bill, it has been a real pleasure sharing these two hours with you. This has been a very enlightening program for our listeners.
Dr. Baldwin: It has been a pleasure on my side.
Dr. Mishlove: Dr. William J. Baldwin. My pleasure, thank you.