Blavatsky Blogger
Taking Theosophical
ideas
into the 21st
century
Why
Our Past Lives are Forgotten
By
Annie
Besant
This
is a chapter from
The
Riddle of Life
No
question is more often heard when reincarnation is spoken of than: 'If I were
here before, why do I not remember it?' A little consideration of facts will
answer the question.
First of
all, let us note the fact that we forget more of our present lives than we
remember. Many people cannot remember learning to read; yet the fact that they
can read proves the learning. Incidents of childhood and youth have faded from
our memory, yet they have left traces on our character. A fall in babyhood is
forgotten, yet the victim is none the less a cripple. And
this, although we are using the same body in which the forgotten events were
experienced.
These events,
however, are not wholly lost by us; if a person be thrown into a mesmeric
trance, they may be drawn from the depths of memory; they are submerged, not
destroyed. Fever patients have been known to use in delirium a language known
in childhood and forgotten inmaturity. Much of our subconsciousness consists of these submerged experiences,
memories thrown into the background but recoverable.
If this be
true of experiences encountered in the present body, how much more must it be
true of experiences encountered in former bodies, which died and decayed many
centuries ago. Our present body and brain have had no
share in those far-off happenings; how should memory assert itself through them?
Our permanent body, which remains with us throughout the cycle of
reincarnation, is the spiritual body; the lower garments fall away and return
to their elements ere we can become reincarnated.
The new
mental, astral and physical matter in which we are reclothed
for a new life on earth receives from the spiritual intelligence, garbed only
in the spiritual body, not the experiences of the past, but the qualities,
tendencies and capacities which have been made out of those experiences.
Our
conscience, our instinctive response to emotional and intellectual appeals, our
recognition of the force of a logical argument, our assent to fundamental
principles of right and wrong, these are the traces of past experience. A man
of a low intellectual type cannot 'see' a logical or mathematical proof; a man
of low moral type cannot 'feel' the compelling force of a high moral ideal.
When a
philosophy or a science is quickly grasped and applied, when an art is mastered
without study, memory is there in power, though past facts of learning are
forgotten; as Plato said, it is reminiscence. When we feel intimate with a
stranger on first meeting, memory is there, the spirit's recognition of a
friend of ages past; when we shrink back with strong repulsion from another stranger,
memory is there, the spirit's recognition of an ancient foe.
These
affinities, these warnings, come from the undying spiritual intelligence which
is ourself; we remember, though working in the brain
we cannot impress on it our memory. The mind-body, the brain, are new; the spirit furnishes the mind with the results of
the past, not with the memory of its events. As a merchant, closing the year's
ledger and opening a new one, does not enter in the new one all the items of
the old, but only its balances, so does the spirit hand on to the new brain his
judgments on the experiences of a life that is closed, the conclusions to which
he has come, the decisions at which he has arrived. This is the stock handed on
to the new life, the mental furniture for the new dwelling-a real memory.
Rich and
varied are these in the highly evolved man; if these are compared with the
possessions of the savage, the value of such a memory of a long past is patent.
No brain could store the memory of the events of numerous lives; when they are
concreted into mental and moral judgments they are available for use; hundreds
of murders have led up to the decision 'I must not kill'; the memory of each
murder would be a useless burden, but the judgment based on their results, the
instinct of the sanctity of human life, is the effective memory of them in the civilised man.
Memory of
past events, however, is sometimes found; children have occasional fleeting
glimpses of their past, recalled by some event of the present; an English boy
who had been a sculptor recalled it when he first saw some statues; an Indian
child recognised a stream in which he had been
drowned as a little child in a preceding life, and the mother of that earlier
body. Many cases are on record of such memory of past events.
Moreover,
such memory can be gained. But the gaining is a matter of steady effort, of
prolonged meditation, whereby the restless mind, ever running outwards, may be
controlled and rendered quiescent, so that it may be sensitive and responsive
to the spirit and receive from him the memory of the past. Only as we can hear
the still small voice of the spirit may the story of the past be unrolled, for
the spirit alone can remember and cast down the rays of his memory to enlighten
the darkness of the fleeting lower nature to which he is temporarily attached.
Cinder
such conditions memory is possible, links of the past are seen, old friends are
recognised, old scenes recalled, and a subtle inner
strength and calm grows out of the practical experience of immortality. Present
troubles grow light when seen in their true proportions as trivial and
transient events in an unending life; present joys lose their brilliant colours
when seen as repetitions of past delights; and both alike are equally accepted
as useful experiences, enriching mind and heart and contributing to the growth
of the unfolding life.
Not until
pleasure and pain, however, have been seen in the light of eternity can the
crowding memories of the past be safely confronted; when they have thus been
seen, then those memories calm the emotions of the present, and that which
would otherwise have crushed becomes a support and consolation. Goethe rejoiced
that on his return to earth-life he would be washed clean of his memories, and
lesser men may be content with the wisdom which starts each new life on its
way, enriched with the results, but unburdened with the recollections of its
past.
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The Blavatsky Blogger
Taking Theosophical
ideas
into the 21st
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