At about four years old, I had my own past life memory. I was playing in my sandbox in the picket-fenced play yard my father had built for me. I was alone, enjoying myself in the sun, watching the sand slip through my little fingers.

Then all of a sudden, as though someone had turned the dial on a radio, I was on another frequency—playing in the sand along the Nile River in Egypt.

It was just as real as my play yard in Red Bank, New Jersey, and just as familiar. I was idling away the hours, splashing in the water and feeling the warm sand on my body.

My Egyptian mother was nearby. Somehow this, too, was my world. I had known that river forever.

How did I know it was Egypt and the Nile? My parents had put up a map of the world over my toy chest and I already knew the names of the countries. My parents were both world travelers and my mother would tell me stories about the countries.

So, after some time (I don’t know how much time had passed), it was as though the dial turned again and I was back at home in my little play yard.

I wasn’t dizzy. I wasn’t dazed. I was back to the present, very much aware that I had been somewhere else.

I jumped up and ran to find my mother. I found her at the kitchen stove and I blurted out my story. “What happened?” I asked.

She sat me down and looked at me and said, “You have remembered a past life.” With those words she opened another dimension.

Instead of ridiculing or denying what I had experienced, she spoke to me in terms a child could understand: “Our body is like a coat we wear. It gets worn out before we finish what we have to do. So, God gives us a new mommy and a new daddy and we are born again so we can finish the work God sent us to do and finally return to our home of light in heaven. Even though we get a new body, we still have the same soul. And our soul remembers the past, even though our mind may not.”

As she spoke, I felt as if she was reawakening my soul memory. It was as though I had always known these things. I told her that I knew I had lived forever.

Over the years she was to point out to me children who were born maimed and others who were gifted, some who were born into wealthy homes and others into poverty.

She believed that their past actions had led to their present circumstances. She said that there could be no such thing as divine or human justice if we only had one life.

We could only know God’s justice if we could experience the consequences of our past actions returning to us in our present life.

I was very comfortable in the awareness that I had lived before. Fortunately, I did not have anyone near me who denied this gentle experience and the tender musings of my soul.

Although you may not have had a memory of a past life, you’ve probably had the sense of being familiar with a person or place on first contact.

Perhaps it was meeting someone for the first time and feeling that you were already old friends, or having an instantaneous and inexplicable loathing for someone who just walked into the room.

There is a good reason why we don’t usually remember our past. God pulls down the shade, so to speak, when we enter the birth canal.

This curtain of forgetfulness is an act of mercy. We have an assignment for this life and we can’t really focus on more than one life at a time and make a go of it.

Now and then God may show us a frame or two from a previous life episode. When we are allowed to take a peek at our karmic book of life, it is for a purpose.

It may be to quicken our souls to remember the commitments we made before coming into embodiment. Perhaps we need to understand the underlying cause of a negative episode from the past so we can have compassion, forgive and move on.

But it’s not essential to know all about our past lives in order to deal with our karma and make spiritual progress, and we shouldn’t force it. If God wants us to know, he will show us, one way or another.