Karma and Reincarnation: Transcending Your Past, Transforming Your Future (Pocket Guides to Practical Spirituality) by Prophet Elizabeth Clare & Spadaro Patricia R

Author:Prophet, Elizabeth Clare & Spadaro, Patricia R. [Prophet, Elizabeth Clare]
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-932890-28-0
Publisher: Summit University Press
Published: 2009-08-12T18:30:00+00:00

If we have lived before, why don’t we remember who we were? And do we have to know about our past lives to resolve the karma from those lives?

Greek mythology tells us that souls who have just passed on and those ready to reincarnate have to drink from the river Lethe, whose waters make the soul forget her previous life. The Gnostic text Pistis Sophia speaks of the soul drinking “the water of forgetfulness.” Dr. Ian Stevenson reported that many of those in Thailand who had past-life memories claimed to remember being offered the “fruit of forgetfulness” before being reborn.

The veil of forgetfulness descends for a reason. That reason is mercy. As Gandhi once said, “It is nature’s kindness that we do not remember past births.... Life would be a burden if we carried such a tremendous load of memories.” That’s exactly what happened to both Shanti Devi and Peter, whose stories we told earlier. After Shanti met her parents from her previous life, she burst into tears and had to be forcibly separated from them to return to her present-day family.

The young boy Peter, as you will recall, was obsessed with his former life as a policeman. In his case, since his parents didn’t understand what was happening and didn’t know how to handle it—his mother actually told him to stop making up stories—he didn’t have the support or the tools he needed to deal with it.

“It certainly didn’t help Peter [to recall his past life], and seemed to make his adjustment to this life more difficult,” wrote Dr. Helen Wambach. She concluded that “a premature immersion in experiences that may have been traumatic merely adds to the burden of adjustment in our present life.”[40] With the proper teaching and care, however, children who do have past-life memories can be helped to understand and work through them.

Dr. Christopher Bache points out another reason for sealing the memories of the past. “In isolating us from our larger identity,” he says, “our amnesia intensifies our learning experience by focusing us completely on the experience in which we are presently engaged. When we are distracted and give only half our attention to what we are working on, the results usually show it.”[41] Dr. Joel Whitton and Joe Fisher add that “just as it is pointless for a student to be furnished with answers before sitting down to write an examination, so the test of life requires that certain information is temporarily withheld from the conscious mind.”[42]

A past-life memory is not something to be taken lightly. When you become aware of a past life, the karma of that embodiment comes to the fore. You can no longer ignore it. You may even become burdened by the memories. So one reason the records of past lives should not be opened prematurely is that we’re not always ready to deal with them or with the karma they bring into our lives. That’s why God only lifts the veil on our past lives when there is something our soul must learn from that memory and we can handle it.

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