José Luis Cabouli: «I wanted to be a soul surgeon».
By Luis Aubele. An interview published in «La Nación», Buenos Aires, March 22, 2009.
«What was I before I was José Luis?» he started asking himself when he was 8. That was strange, because at the time he had never heard about reincarnation. Not only didn’t he know what it was, he didn’t even know the word. «Only some years later, when I was about 15 or 16, did I know what it was. But it was only 20 years later, when I already was a plastic surgeon with years of experience, that I understood that reincarnation could have a healing purpose,» remembers José Luis Cabouli, a doctor and therapist specialized in past life therapy.
«As a matter of fact, I never let go of it, I carried on studying it as something interesting, but alongside my professional life. The fact is that, against what is usually believed, surgeons have deep spiritual concerns. We are permanently in touch with such transcendent matters, as the life and death of human beings», he adds.
Cabouli gives workshops in his country, in Chile, Uruguay, Mexico and Spain. He has written several books, among them: La vida antes de nacer (Life before birth), El trabajo del alma (Work of the soul), El viaje del alma (Trip of the soul), and Terapia de vidas pasadas (Past life therapy).
–How did you decide to give up surgery for past life therapy?–
–In 1988 I had a labour problem, a misunderstanding, and decided not to fight for a place I no longer cared about. I resigned and felt liberated, with more time for myself, and decided to take some seaside holidays at Ostende (Argentina). One evening, after dinner I took a deckchair and went to meditate under the stars. I remember that I was near a cabin that Arturo Frondizi had built in his youth with his father and brothers. And suddenly, I cannot explain what happened exactly, I felt that I was no longer interested in my profession as a surgeon, that a new path opened in front of me, and decided that I would take up the therapy and become a soul surgeon. I don’t remember more details, but in a jiffy I decided to completely change the course of my life. That made me understand that when you don’t do what you should, life takes you to do it.–
–What is the past life therapy?–
–It is to let arise to your conscience traumatic events which are repressed down in your unconscious mind and which upset your everyday life. To let them come up and live through them again, with all the feelings they unleash, not only to explain them. The first step to understand the past life therapy is that time does not exist. The linear time, chronological, measurable, is a convention, an agreement we made in the past in order to be able to get around. As a matter of fact, nobody has ever had a second in their hand. There are even different calendars: the Mayan, the Hebrew, etc. I didn’t make it up, it is Sigmund Freud himself who says that the unconscious mind is timeless. But there is something more.–
–Give me an example.–
–The second thing which must be understood is what is called a conscience pitfall. When we react inevitably in face of a given situation, it is because at an unconscious level we are bringing back to life an unsolved experience which remained trapped and which was reactivated by its likeness to the present situation. Let us imagine a woman who is terrified at climbing into a ship, because she is still trapped and struggling in the icy waters in the night of 14th April 1912, when the Titanic was sunk. Or somebody who cannot get into a lift because they are claustrophobic and in the past was buried alive, something quite common at a time, the same as to die through the collapsing of a mine.–
–How comes that a professional scientist becomes interested in such an out-of-the-ordinary therapy?–
–The fact is that I never gave up the scientific method, the three-pillared path: observation, experimentation and verification. Observing phenomena and make the necessary experiences to verify their truth. Past-life therapy has many items in common with classical psychology. In the two instances we must make the unconscious, conscious, as Freud used to point out. The difference in the past-life therapy is that it tries to enlarge the horizon, transcending childhood, birth or the foetal state, and reaching previous incarnations.–
–Are there any cases that you remember?–
–In Spain I visited a woman who was terrified by snakes. You couldn’t even mention their name because she started to scream desperately. During therapy it came out that she had been a girl who while walking through a path with her mother, a poisonous snake appeared, a cobra which was balancing in front of them with its menacing tongue. The mother tried to distract the reptile moving to one side, but when the girl remained alone, the snake bit her and she died. Reliving again that moment freed the woman and the following day she phoned me to explain that she was no longer afraid of reptiles, that she wanted to go to the zoo and that she would do something she had never done before: she would visit the snake farm.–
–Any other?–
–A woman was reliving her birth and exclaimed: but this is not my mother! She did not know that she had been adopted. In some cases a patient discovers that he is the reincarnation of an older brother, who died at birth.–
–What is reincarnation to you?–
–To me it is a reality, an experience, even if I understand perfectly that there may be people who do not think the same.–
Link to the original interview in Spanish in the website «Past life therapy»:
https://www.vidaspasadas.com.ar/articulos/entrevista2.html
Translation: Loto Perrella.