In an attempt to find answers I began taking psychedelic drugs, to open my mind and gain insight. I also delved into Eastern religions. Such studies convinced me that we have an immortal soul that survives the death of the physical body.

Accepting this belief, I found logical the teaching of certain religions, that we have lived before as other people. Our souls, according to this teaching, have experienced a series of reincarnations. I wanted to know about my past, and I was led to believe that the use of “mind-expanding” LSD could help me to investigate.

After taking the drugs, I would be drawn to a mirror where I peered for long periods of time into the pupils of my eyes. Under the influence of the drugs, the pupils would increase in size to almost the size of the iris. After many minutes of intense observation, I began to hallucinate and see what I believed were previous incarnations of myself. For instance, I saw myself as an evil warlord and an egocentric dictator who were responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.

Once while observing such an evil person in the mirror, I heard a voice saying: “You’ll have to suffer for these evils that you have done!” It was terrifying.

As a result, I felt I was destined to suffer and die, and then suffer again and again in successive reincarnations. I wished it could be avoided! But how could I deny what I had seen and heard when peering into the mirror? Other persons I knew were also led to believe in reincarnation by such experiences, for, as they say, “seeing is believing.”

I felt myself in a terrible dilemma, with no way out.

I started to investigate Eastern religions, spending entire days reading about occultism, astrology, palmistry, I Ching, Buddhism and other Eastern thoughts.

Convinced by these studies that the soul survives death, I took a dose of LSD seven times as potent as the regular dose, with the hope of peering into my past. It was then that I saw the visions that I considered to be scenes from previous lives and heard the voice saying that I had been a vicious killer.

This horrifying experience marked a turning point in my life. From this time onward I felt uneasy with myself. I could not understand why I had been so wicked.

Deeper Involvement with Spiritism

Once I left India, I thought that my days of dabbling in spiritism were over. But I was wrong. In Holland I met an Indonesian man who had supernatural powers. He told me he was a guru, and I accepted him as my teacher. Through him the spirits worked amazing feats, such as mind reading, precognition, telepathy and hypnotism. Soon I totally believed whatever he told me, because he appeared so wise. I was convinced that spirits really exist since I could see evidence of their power.

My guru offered these powers to me, saying that he had connections with the spirit realm. But I had not been searching for power. Rather, I wanted to know the purpose of life. I told him that I must first find this out.

However, he was not pleased and tried to discourage me. He reminded me of what I had seen in the mirror a few years before while under the influence of LSD. He said that now, in this life, I would have to reap all the evil that I had sown in past incarnations. He embedded this thought so deeply in my heart that I could not forget it. I felt haunted by spirits and was in a state of terror and utter confusion.

Early in 1971 I left this guru and joined the Hare Krishna Temple in Amsterdam, shaving my head for the second time. Every day I studied the Bhagavad Gita and chanted the Hare Krishna mantra (prayer) for a few hours with the hope that this chanting would purify my soul and provide relief from the spirits. But, instead, they intensified their haunting of me. At times I begged only to die and never be born again​—to become nothing.

I still felt haunted by spirits. They tormented me to the point that I thought I was losing my sanity. I was terrified. Desperately, I kept searching for a way out. As my depression grew, I never smiled or had a happy moment for weeks. Finally, I made several attempts to commit suicide.