3 Books That Inspired I’Eternal: Many Lives, Many Masters, Journey of Souls and Shantaram
What if this is not the first time you have been here?
It may be the oldest question we ask. For me, it began with one book that quietly rearranged my life, deepened with a second, and found its shape, fifteen years later, through a third that showed me how big a story could be. Together they became my new novel, I’Eternal, the story of one soul across four lifetimes. These are the three books that inspired it.
Why We Keep Telling Stories About Past Lives
Long before the novel existed, the idea that the soul returns was already ancient. Pythagoras taught it to his students. At the end of Plato’s Republic, a soldier named Er wakes on his funeral pyre and describes souls choosing their next lives, then drinking from the River of Forgetfulness before they are born again. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that just as we cast off worn-out clothes and put on new ones, the soul casts off worn-out bodies and enters new ones. The Tibetan tradition maps the bardo, the in-between state a soul passes through from one life to the next.
Most of us have felt some version of it ourselves: the stranger who feels like an old friend, the city we have never visited that feels like home, the talent or the fear that seems to have arrived with us. The books below gave that feeling a language for me, and then a story.
1. Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss
Dr. Brian Weiss was a traditionally trained psychiatrist and a skeptic. Then a patient he calls Catherine, under hypnosis, began describing what sounded like memories from other centuries, and with them, messages about the purpose of life that he could not explain away. Many Lives, Many Masters is his account of those sessions and of how they changed the way he practiced medicine and understood the soul.
I read it years ago, and it fundamentally changed my life. It was the moment I began to understand that we live more than one life and that the soul is on a journey of evolution. We learn lessons, we accumulate karma, and through each life we are given the chance to take part in dharmic acts that release what we carried in. Every page of I’Eternal grows out of that understanding.
Read it if: you want to know where the modern conversation about past lives began, or you have ever wondered why certain people feel so familiar.
2. Journey of Souls by Dr. Michael Newton
Where Weiss opened the door to past lives, Michael Newton asked what happens between them. A hypnotherapist, Newton guided his clients beyond their past-life memories into what he called the life between lives. Journey of Souls, first published in 1994, gathers their case studies: souls returning home after death, being met by guides, reuniting with the soul groups they have traveled with for lifetimes, reviewing what they learned, and choosing the next life and the lessons it will hold.
Journey of Souls made me understand that not only do we live multiple lives, we live them with some of the same souls, all of us trying to find our way back to the remembrance that we are One with God. These souls help us on our journey. Sometimes they take on roles we might not care for in our earthly incarnation, yet they are our teachers. We choose our parents, our siblings and our friends to help us return to that remembrance: that we are all connected. Ego eimi. I Am.
Read it if: you have ever wondered whether the people you love are souls you have known before, and whether we choose the lives we are born into.
3. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
Shantaram is set firmly in this world, not in past lives, and yet it is one of the most deeply spiritual books I have ever read. Inspired by the author’s own life, it follows a man who escapes from an Australian prison and loses himself in Bombay: its slums, its underworld, its friendships, its faith and its love. There are drugs and guns and crimes, things that hardly seem spiritual on the surface, and yet they are. Across more than nine hundred pages, it never stops asking what makes a life meaningful and how a soul finds its way through the darkness.
Shantaram inspired me to write a novel of big scope. It showed me that a story could be vast and still intimate, sweeping across worlds while staying close to one human heart, and that the sacred often hides in the most unlikely places. Telling the story of a soul across four lifetimes needed exactly that. Very few people I know have read it, and for me, it is a must-read.
Read it if: you believe the sacred can be found in the darkest corners of this world, and you love an epic you can disappear into for weeks.
Why I Wrote I’Eternal
After I read Many Lives, Many Masters, a question would not leave me alone: how could I bring this understanding of the soul’s journey into narrative fiction? Fifteen years ago, I knew the story I wanted to tell, but I did not yet have the skills to tell it. So I kept living, kept writing, and kept listening.
Along the way, I came to feel that I carry three past lives with me. In one, I was a wealthy man in England in the early 1800s who lived only for money and possessions, and who died alone of a heart attack in a town square as the clock struck 9:09. In another, in Persia in the fifth century B.C.E., I was the son of a harsh king who left the palace to meditate beneath a tree in protest. In the third, I was a poor writer in early-1700s Paris, ink on my fingers and fingerless gloves against the cold, watching two young sisters play in the courtyard below. One of them, I have always believed, was Adi. Whether you take these as memory or metaphor, they taught me what these three books taught me: that each life is a lesson, and that the soul keeps returning until it learns to love.
I’Eternal is the novel those years made possible: the story of one soul across four lifetimes, in ancient Egypt, Renaissance Florence, occupied Paris, and present-day Newport. You can read more on the I’Eternal book page or in my essay The Only Lesson We Came Here to Learn.
Watch more I’Eternal Shorts on my YouTube channel, Memoirs of a Renaissance Man.
The Kindle edition is available for pre-order now, and the hardcover and paperback arrive November 25, 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Many Lives, Many Masters a true story?
Dr. Brian Weiss presents it as a true account of his sessions with a patient he calls Catherine, written by a psychiatrist who began as a skeptic. Readers have been weighing it for themselves for decades.
What is Journey of Souls about?
Journey of Souls by Dr. Michael Newton collects case studies from hypnotherapy sessions describing the “life between lives”: what souls experience after death, the guides and soul groups they meet, and how they choose their next lives.
What is I’Eternal about?
I’Eternal is a novel by David Ahearn that follows one soul across four lifetimes: ancient Egypt, Renaissance Florence, occupied Paris, and present-day Newport. The Kindle edition is available for pre-order now, and the hardcover and paperback arrive November 25, 2026.
Have you read any of these three? Which book changed the way you see the soul? Tell me in the comments.
