Why can't we remember past lives (some can, I know)?

My question is what is the wisdom behind deleting our memories of past lives? I realize this question does not resonate for people that don't believe in reincarnation, but for those that do, it is a big question.

The standard explanation for the forgetting is that it would be confusing to remember that our husband was our son in a previous life.
This makes sense.

But it is also possible that the forgetting is a device to keep putting us in the 3D world for the benefit of others.

Other than remembering a previous life, does the forgetting also involve forgetting basic lessons about how to behave in the physical world with other humans? How to avoid stupid conflict situations?

Are we trapped by this forgetting? I think, maybe.

I reckon our 'spirits' come from one source and are made up of many different 'spirits'. When we die, we get put back into the blender and combine with other spirits and little cookie cutter bits are spat back out into physical forms. Some people don't get blended well enough and therefore hold onto the big chunk of their past life whereas others don't.

Assuming people die and that their spirits often come back in different human bodies at birth, why would we need to forget past lives? One answer might be because if we came back to learn certain lessons, we might need to forget all the stuff we learned in a past life that might prevent us from looking at everything from a different perspective.

If in a past life, I used to routinely kill people and was real good at it and thought killing people solved a lot of problems, then forgetting what I learned before would be necessary to look at everything from a different perspective. Then when we die again, we can put all the puzzle pieces back together and realize we might have been living a lie in a past life or that everything is not always black and white.

Another option is that the physical process just makes you forget all the spiritual information like rebooting a computer wipes out what is stored in temporary storage memory. Everytime we get reborn our computer minds reboot to this world just because that's the way things work. There might not be any other reason. If someone came up with a method of retrieving information from the spirit world, maybe past life memories could be restored somewhat. I'm not sure how many memories the human mind can remember.

reply to post by droid56


If someone remembered all their past lives, they might get bored before they were 6 years old. I do not believe in reincarnation myself, mainly because I have no memory of a past life nor wish to create one but if I think about reincarnating I would get bored doing this over and over again if I could remember more than about three past lives. Even the memories of one past life plus the existing life would be hard to assimilate into my brain.

The details of your past life are not important, it is the end effect, or final synopsis of the quality of your past life that is important to spirit and soul.

The details would be a bias in your present life, and may only be glimpsed fleetingly in dreams, perhaps on purpose as a subconscious guide to substantiate one's progress, or remind one of paths to avoid. Truly a fantastic exercise in our journey through the many lives it must take to understand who or what we really are.

Since memories are encoded in the brain, the question should be reversed. How are memories transfered from one brain to another. And why would it be necessary or desirable to do that. I'm not going to say there is no way that could possibly happen, but if there is no physical way to do it, it implies the existence of some agent or mechanism that isn't bound by the usual laws of nature. Although isn't there a physical way to do it? Mediums like written or spoken language, film, and music can carry the subjective experiences of one mind and transfer it to other minds in the future.

Why can't we remember past lives?

Maybe because the brain you've got now has no memory of anything that happened to your consciousness before it was formed. Memories are restricted to the life you are currently living, because your brain wasn't around before you were born; you had a different brain then.

You can't even remember everything about this life, never mind previous ones.

And what about dementia, where you lose your memory altogether?

Memory is a physiological process which is mediated in the brain...mainly the hippocampus, amygdala and striatum.

You might have had a million previous lives, but your current brain knows only the present one.

reply to post by droid56

There is a Video on Youtube where Remoteviewers checked the Afterlife. They said all the same.
After someone died, 2 lightbeings (Angels?) came, who took all the memories and the soul to an unknown place.
To cut right to the chase of the matter, you`re being stripped from your memories for your next life.
Seemingly it not always seems to work, otherwise there wouldn`t be people who can remember their past lives.

Remote viewing the Afterlife


btw. very, interesting topic!

S/F

Once i did some meditation to remember past lifes and i actually saw vision, it start walking trought mirror to another world, i end up in the water but i could walk on it, next i was running in the jungle as wolf and in the end i run to Jesus and soon as i saw Him i snap out of the vision.
Now im newbie as meditation, i have no idea what kind of vision was this but it was very clear and i was not dreaming either, i remeber the feeling when i got there i was so excited i was there and the running as wolf kind of expressed this happiness and free feeling but i didnt get it why i saw Jesus there middle of the jungle, did He end my vision for reason? Or was other reason for it, still wondering sometimes about it

Other than that i have mixed theories and feelings of past lifes/souls etc, i do believe but i leave always room for been wrong since i dont really know much of anything really..

Remembering past life is a curse.
I do not want it, but its interesting to know.

In past life, you are Jack The Ripper, how about that, painful ?
In past life, you are Cinderella, now you are nobody, still painful isnt it ?
In past life, you are 300 years old tree, still painful.
Again, do not attempt to live forever or/and remember past life, its a curse. You have been warned.

I'm starting to move away from the reincarnation theory, more to the theory our brain is on an electrical frequency, and what we feel is reincarnation is only your brain picking up another's frequency that happens to be close to your own......and even after death your brains record of events through your life are left in the surroundings for others to pick up on.

That could also account for deja vu, remote viewing and mind reading.....maybe

reply to post by CJCrawley

Why can't we remember past lives?

Maybe because the brain you've got now has no memory of anything that happened to your consciousness before it was formed. Memories are restricted to the life you are currently living, because your brain wasn't around before you were born; you had a different brain then.

I starred you on that answer as it makes all the sense in the world, from a physical point of view.

Problem is, I do remember certain past lives and many others do as well. Could be all imaginary, or maybe not...

Here is an example of a story with so much details, that the new brain could not just create, or maybe it could, after all we only use a small percentage of our brain, so who really knows??



Raises questions though, doesn't it...

I think it would be traumatic if we in fact remembered too many details of our previous lives. As we are here to learn (my belief) then past traumatic events would seriously get in the way. But that's just my opinion...

S&F for a cool topic !

reply to post by SonoftheSun

I've watched this young mans story several times now, along with some others on YT. I've read a few books on the topic, too. I can't argue there's something to these stories. I just don't know what. Reincarnation? Memories from the collective unconscious? I have done regression on my own. If I did have a past life, then I might have been a young girl in the early 1900's.

If reincarnation is fact. I can see a reason for those memories to be repressed to some extent, but not completely.

reply to post by droid56


For me it is more like information on old life would be more in the way than helpful to this life. I have certain indications to that this is my first human experience and have been very uncomfortable being in this body. The body just felt really weird for a long time and I had extremely bad motor control as young. You get used to it. But now with a lot of meditation it seems to be closer to what I think it should be.

droid56
My question is what is the wisdom behind deleting our memories of past lives? I realize this question does not resonate for people that don't believe in reincarnation, but for those that do, it is a big question.

The standard explanation for the forgetting is that it would be confusing to remember that our husband was our son in a previous life.
This makes sense.

But it is also possible that the forgetting is a device to keep putting us in the 3D world for the benefit of others.

Other than remembering a previous life, does the forgetting also involve forgetting basic lessons about how to behave in the physical world with other humans? How to avoid stupid conflict situations?

Are we trapped by this forgetting? I think, maybe.

Well, we can't remember just by default to protect us and preserve the integrity of our destinies. Fortunately, we can remember our past lives but we have to actively seek out those memories. This gives us the best of both worlds.

Your body and mind are just filters for the real you. Part of what it filters out is harmful and traumatic experiences. If you had countless lifetimes of tragic loss and atrocities that were within your default bank of memories, you would go insane before you reached your teen years.

Even if that had no bearing, just think about why we keep coming back. We place ourselves (or get placed) into life scenarios that provide us with an ongoing spiritual dialog. The whole purpose of that would be countered if you knew the whole story. It's like a movie where the viewer (the soul) gets to see the main characters (your incarnations) but, if those character could see each other all the time and know what the other was thinking, the movie would be short and stupid.

As of now, scientific consensus is that past life memories are the result of Cryptomnesia. I personally don't think this explanation explains all cases, but it's a good, and perhaps more realistic, theory.

I don't have exact memories of past lives but more general memories of times past. For example as a child I'd cry in old churches and when hearing medieval music, I then got the same pain of something 'lost' that I have when I hear music from when I was a teenager for example.

Furthermore I have these two very strong memories [people will explain them as false memories or memories I had later and inserted into the setting, but I could draw you a picture, I KNOW when I had them] of when I was a baby [I even remember which way my cot was turned but of course the wallpaper is a blur] and I was trying hard to touch those plastic rattle things strung across my woven basket. I got really frustrated that my arm felt like I was drunk as I really had not much coordination, and then I thought [in a quite adult language way] "Oh #, I am so new that it will take me weeks to get better and month to even walk and learning how to talk will take ages as well, what am I going to do up until then...yet again?"

It almost seemed that I had been there before and the frustration to have to learn everything again really got to me.
After that I was just a dumb baby again.

The other memory is from being around one yr old. I was sitting in my high chair and my mum was crying quietly and mumbling about bills and said that she is glad I am so young and carefree; and I was desperate to let her know that I understood everything and I could have answered back [or so I thought, knowing somehow that my tongue wasn't quite capable of forming proper words yet] but the strangest thing was that I felt that it was totally forbidden to let her know that I understood and that there would be problems if I did. So I just did my baby babble and got a hug.

If those thoughts came from a previous life, they soon disappeared when I grew older but I never forgot them. Rather than specifics however they seemed as if general adult thinking was still there intermittantly until my own [new] memories were forming.

How does that fit in with everything?

reply to post by SonoftheSun


I'm well aware of the Leiningers' case (and others).

Very interesting but the kid's memories just seem a bit too accurate for me...I could imagine there might be a vague inkling of being a pilot who was shot down somewhere or other, but by the Japanese in WW2? And knowing the make and model of your aircraft? And then to accurately locate where it crashed...??

I smell BS and parent manipulation.

There's so much we don't know about memory, but one thing we can be pretty clear on is that it's not too accurate. Accurate enough to go about our lives, but pin-point accuracy isn't common.

There's masses of studies that display the problems of relying on eyewitness testimony, for instance.

And, like I say, what about dementia and suchlike, where the memory (of the present life) fails completely?

I personally believe that reincarnation is a reality (at least for some of us) but no one has reliably demonstrated that memory can carry over from one life to another - still less, how this can even happen, given what we know about its physiology.

reply to post by Klassified

Memories from the collective unconscious?

Could very well be.

But some of the recollections I've had brought back some emotions with them. Not all good ones...

I don't know, to be honest. I think reincarnation is a possibility, not a certainty but it does explain a few things.

To me, in any case...