The Nature of the Psychic Being’s Memory From Past Lives

In the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter IV, Verse 5, Sri Krishna states: “Many are my lives that are part, and thine also, O Arjuna; all of them I know, but thou knowest not…”

Remembering past lifetimes is possible for a divine incarnation, an avatar, but even one of the most evolved human beings, Arjuna, does not have that capacity. That one verse describes the rarity and the difficulty involved in remember past lives in dea

The Mother observes: “In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, it is just the tiny psychic formation at the centre of the being that continues after death; all the rest is dissolved, goes to pieces, scattered here and there, the individuality exists no longer. Now, how often in the physical life does the psychic being take part consciously in what the physical being does?… I am not speaking of people who do yoga and are a little disciplined; I am speaking of average people who have a psychic capacity in the sense that their psychic is already sufficiently developed to be able to intervene in life and guide it — some pass years and years without the psychic intervening. And they come and tell you in which country they were born and what their father and mother were like and the house they lived in, the roof of the church and the forest that was by the side and all the most casual events of their life! It is absolutely idiotic, for it is all rubbed off, these things don’t exist any longer; whilst the memory that one may still have is that of the particular moment in life when there is a special circumstance, ‘vital’ moments, so to say, in which the psychic suddenly takes part, through an inner call or an absolute necessity — all of a sudden the psychic intervenes — and that then is engraved in the psychic memory. When you have the psychic memory you remember a set of circumstances at one moment of life, particularly of the inner emotion, of the consciousness that acted at that moment. And then that passes into the consciousness along with some associations, with all that was around you, perhaps a word spoken, a phrase heard; but what was most important was the state of the soul in which you were: for that indeed remains very clearly engraved. These are the landmarks of the psychic life, things that have left a deep impression and taken part in its formation. Hence when you find your psychic being in you again constantly, continuously, clearly, it is things like these that you remember. There may be quite a few, but they are flashes in one’s life, and one cannot say: ‘I was such and such a person, I did such and such a thing, I was called by this name and I was doing this or that.’ Or otherwise it would that at that moment (a rare one) there was a combination of circumstances good enough for one to be able to fix the date or the place, the country and the age. That can happen.”

“Naturally the psychic takes a greater and greater part, and the larger does the set of memories grow. And then one can retrace one’s life, but not in all its details. One can say that at certain moments, ‘it was like this,’ or ‘I was that.’ Certain moments, yes, very important moments of a life…. What’s necessary is a being wholly identified with the psychic, one that has organised its whole existence around it, unified its whole being — all the tiniest parts, all the elements, all the movements of the being around the psychic centre — that has made of itself a single being, solely turned to the Divine; then, if the body falls off, that remains. It is only a completely formed conscious being that can remember exactly in another life all that has happened before. It can even pass consciously from one life to another without losing anything of its consciousness. How many people upon earth have reached that state?… Not many, I believe. And usually they are not in the least inclined to narrate their adventures.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 4 The Afterlife and Rebirth, pp. 150-152