The Psychic Being’s Memory of Past Lives

Past life regression therapy has gained visibility and popularity in recent years. The concept is that the soul has assumed many different lifetimes, different bodies, different personalities in its long evolutionary cycle of growth and development. The theory holds that relationships and events that occurred in past lives may account for issues, traumas or difficulties faced in the current life, including relationships with individuals in this life who may represent kindred souls, soul-mates or those with whom we have some karmic connection spanning a number of lives. Some practitioners of past life regression therapy even try to take the memory back to lifetimes at the animal stage. Many times, when an individual has a ‘vision quest’ he identifies with a particular ‘totem animal’ and this connection is said to relate to past connections.

There are serious limits and questions around the use of regression therapy. The nature of memory itself, and the way memories are stored or purged create serious limitations to what can actually be done. Using various tehcniques, incuding the use of hypno-therapy, regression to events in the current lifetime, such as bring forth details from childhood, are generally accepted as both possible and potentially providing a therapeutic understanding of suppressed traumas. Going back into prior lifetimes becomes much more problematic, as the mental sheath that stores memories is not the same as the mental sheath of a former lifetime.

Past life regression therapists acknowledge that it is the soul that survives and changes bodies as we change clothes. Thus, the memories of past lifetimes would necessarily only be those that the soul, the psychic being, carries with it.

Many individuals believe they can remember and describe past lives, without the use of a specific therapeutic approach. They get a sense, in their meditation, or in dreams, in feelings of coherence or ‘deja vu’, or just events that seem to be unexpected rewards or punishments, that these things are potentially related to events in a past lifetime. In some cases the mind fills in the data gaps with plausible scenarios about these past lifetimes and the story comes alive in the mind of the individual, subjectively, without any way to either prove or disprove these events. The subjective certainty becomes the standard for determining the reality of these past lifetime memories.

For most people, any such memories from past lifetimes must necessarily be highly limited and fragmented, focused on the soul’s own areas of attention. In the case of an avatar, such as that of Sri Krishna, who related to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, that he differed from Arjuna in regard to memory of past lives, the implication is that someone who is fully and completely identified with the divine consciousness has no barrier to memory of any or all past lives.

The Mother adds perspective regarding the psychic being’s stages of growth and the impact this has on whether, and to what extent, as well as what type of memory, the psychic being brings forward from one lifetime into the next.

The Mother writes: ” It is very true that the earliest lives are very rudimentary; very few things subsist out of that, scattered memories few and far between. But the more one progresses in consciousness, the more the psychic being is consciously associated with the outer activities; the memories grow in number and become more coherent and precise. But still, here also, the memory that remains is that of the contact with the soul and at times that of things which were associated with the psychic revelation — not the civic status or the changing scenes around. And this will explain to you why the so-called memories of past animal lives are the most fantastic: the divine spark in them is buried much too deep down to be able to come up consciously to the surface and be associated with the inner life. One must become a wholly conscious being, conscious in all its parts, totally unified with one’s divine origin before one can truly say that one remembers his past lives.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 4 The Afterlife and Rebirth, pp. 155-156