Anyway, I doubt that it would ever occur to a practicing Hindu or Buddhist to engage in past-life regression, because what's past is past. In the final analysis, people who do religious healing should do religious healing, and not call it psychotherapy. After all, genuine faith healers don't call what they do medicine. One correspondent has agreed that religious belief is beside the point, but argued that past-life recall offers the person profound insights, analogous to remembering infantile sexual feelings. I'm sorry, but I don't know what kind of profound insights are to be had from an experience that is wholly illusory.
Hypnotic effects are products of the imagination, closer to delusion than anything else.
Let me be clear that anyone who treats the past lives produced through hypnotic regression as historically accurate is making this assumption. It is an assumption as old as Bridey Murphy, likely older. But everything we know about hypnosis tells us that hypnosis is first and foremost an experience of the imagination. The analogy is to hypnotic age-regression where we suggest to adults that they are children once again. For a discussion of hypnosis as a delusion, see the chapter by Hoyt and myself in Oltmanns and Maher's Delusional Beliefs .