Psychic Memory

We tend to fix in our memory, whether it is the physical memory, the vital memory, the mental memory or the psychic memory, those events, circumstances, situations, critical junctures that were important to the particular part of the being that holds the memory. If we look back at our current lifetimes, we do not remember every detail, and even, the events of the very recent past only can recall highlights, not every detail of every moment. The further back we stretch our memory the less complete the memory turns out to be, until we find that we remember very little, if, indeed, anything at all, for our time as a young child.

The psychic memory, which is focused on our progress in the evolution of consciousness and our growing oneness with the Divine, clearly has very little use for all the minute details of what we ate yesterday, who we met on the road, or what particular mental ideas we had tracking through our minds yesterday. It cannot therefore be expected that the psychic memory would bring forward from birth to birth all of these essentially meaningless and transitory details.

Those who have psychic or spiritual experiences, when they relate the experience to another person, for instance, to their Guru, speak of the light, the sound, the vision, the insight, the sudden inspiration, the feeling of the moment, the change it brought about in the inner being. These are the essential points that the soul holds onto and treasures. To the extent that such an experience holds a seminal place in a particular soul’s growth, it may carry that memory with it, not necessarily in a conscious way that can be verbalised, but possibly as a sense of recognition when a similar experience arises in the current lifetime, and they then can correlate it with a truth that their soul holds deep within itself.

The Mother notes: “Only when one is consciously identified with one’s divine origin, can one in truth speak of a memory of past lives. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the progressive manifestation of the Spirit in the forms in which it dwells. When one reaches the summit of this manifestation, one has a vision that plunges down upon the way traversed and one remembers.”

“But this memory is not a thing of the mental kind. Those who claim to have been such a baron of the Middle Ages or such a person who lived at such a place and such a time, are fanciful, they are simply victims of their own mental imagination. In fact, what remains of past lives are not beautiful pictures in which you appear as a mighty lord in a castle or a victorious general at the head of an army — that is only romance. What remains is the memory of those instants when the psychic being emerged from the depths of your being and revealed itself to you, — that is to say, the memory of those instants when you were wholly conscious. That growth of consciousness is progressively effectuated in the course of evolution, and the memory of past lives is generally limited to the critical moments of evolution, to the decisive turns that marked the progress of your consciousness.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 4 The Afterlife and Rebirth, pp. 152-153