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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
I have had people tell me that a fortune-teller revealed a past life to them when they were a teenager, and they still can’t get it out of their head a decade or two later.
They became preoccupied with that one piece of information rather than keeping their attention and their energy focused on moving forward and balancing their karma in the present, which is where we must deal with it. In some cases, they became overwhelmed by self-condemnation and guilt.
An additional word of caution: Just because someone is psychic or claims to be, it does not mean that everything that comes through him or her is 100 percent accurate or that it’s the full picture.
Also, it’s important to keep in mind that the place where our past-life records are sealed is a very private place within us and one that we may not want to readily invite others into.
Every one of us has had constructive lives as well as lives that were not so constructive.
We do not, however, have to know all the details to transmute the negative karma and make spiritual progress.
The conditions right in front of us are a road map to our assignments for this lifetime.
Whatever you are or are not, you earned it— the good, the bad and the irksome.This is the nature of karma.
Whatever you are or are not, you can change it. This too is the nature of karma. That’s because karma isn’t fate.
Karma can help us understand how we got where we are—the circumstances of our life, the events that take shape around us, the people we seem to magnetize.
But it doesn’t tell us how we will respond to those circumstances, events and people.
That’s entirely up to us, and that’s what determines our destiny. We exercised free will to create karma. We can exercise free will to transform it.
The only boundaries to our progress are the ones we ourselves have put in place.
If our karma dictates an untimely death, it is possible, for example, to earn a life extension by a change of heart.
When we serve life with all of our heart, life will give back to us.
Nothing is final until we make it final and nothing is predestined until we make it our destiny.
Dr. Whitton’s research into what takes place between lives also reveals that there are karmic “tests” built into our life plan.
Whether or not we pass these tests determines how fast we will progress in this life.
He gives the dramatic example of a young man, Steve, who disliked his father.
When his father lay ill in a Miami nursing home, Steve rarely went to see the old man. One day he had an impulse to visit his dad.
While there, he noticed that his father’s respirator tube had become dislodged and he was therefore having a hard time breathing.
Steve had a choice— he could either let his father die or run for the nurse. He thought it over for a moment and then shouted for the nurse, who replaced the tube.
Later, at age twenty-nine, Steve was hit broadside by a truck while riding his bicycle.
The accident could have been fatal, but he was fortunate to have escaped with only a fractured femur.
In his early forties, Steve learned under hypnosis that there was a strong connection between these two events and that he had known about it before he was born.
“My karmic script clearly stated that the life-or-death incident with my father was most definitely a very important test that I had set myself,” he said.
“If I could forgive him his transgressions against me—which appeared to extend over several lifetimes—I would not be killed in the bicycle accident.”
What is even more interesting is that Steve said that based on his past behavior, it was expected that he would probably allow his dad to die.
Since he passed his test instead, his first life plan had come to an end and “sketchy plans for future lives had been brought forward to operate in the current life.”
His choices determined his fate, not the other way around.
The best way out is always through.
—ROBERT FROST
Another karmic trap is the temptation to avoid our karma.
Lifetime after lifetime we may bump into a certain challenge, but because we don’t realize that it is an opportunity in disguise, we run in the opposite direction to avoid the karmic encounter.
Or we react the way we did when we first made the karma—with anger or impatience or criticism—which only gets us more entangled.
When we start seeing things from the perspective of karma, we realize that unless we embrace the karmic tests staring us in the face, we will have to keep reincarnating with the same individuals or in the same kinds of circumstances until we determine to pass those tests.
Turning our back only postpones the day when we must stand, face and conquer.
It’s natural to want to avoid the friction of karmic encounters. Those clashes often make us look at a part of ourselves we would rather not look at.
Yet God deliberately brings together individuals whose karmic patterns grate on each other so that they can knock the rough edges off of one another, so to speak.
As the master El Morya has taught, “There is a certain friction that is required for all attainment on the path.”
If someone in your life brings out the worst in you, praise God. You might never have seen that sharp edge otherwise; and until you make it smooth, everyone who bumps into you will feel that sharpness.
Recognizing when we’re going nowhere fast because we are trying to avoid our karma can be subtle, especially in a culture that tends to breed the desire for quick fixes to life’s inconveniences and pain.
Yet pain is an incredible teacher. It signals us that something in our life is out of kilter, out of alignment with our inner blueprint.
Whether it’s soul pain or physical pain, all pain is a growing pain.
Someone may come along and rearrange the molecules of your life and you may suddenly have comfort instead of pain, wealth instead of poverty.
But you may not have begun to deal with the deep things you came into embodiment to resolve.
We may find it easy to take a job like our neighbor’s and have a comfortable lifestyle like our neighbor’s because it insulates us from our karma or our duty to life.
That cushion, however, may be compromising our spiritual path if our karma and our duty is calling us elsewhere.
Maybe our parents expected us to be a lawyer or a doctor, but our heart tells us we need to be a social worker or an inner-city teacher.
Perhaps the most extreme form of avoidance is suicide.
Yet suicide is never an escape. Leo Tolstoy once wrote in his diary, “How interesting it would be to write the story of the experiences in this life of a man who killed himself in his previous life; how he now stumbles against the very demands which had offered themselves before, until he arrives at the realization that he must fulfill those demands.”
Tolstoy was right. Those who commit suicide will have to face the same karmic dramas once again—and quickly—for they will be immediately sent back into embodiment to pick up where they left off.
They will be born into a situation where they will have to deal with the same karmic issues all over again.
Those who suffer and are suicidal need our prayers and support.
What greater lifeboat can we offer than the story of their soul’s journey, their true reason for being and the beautiful possibilities that are open to them?
Every one of us needs to feel valued for the spiritual being that we are and encouraged to press forward on our individual path of spiritual growth.
In this lesson, the concept of karmic tests was described. These are events that share the same pattern.
Can you think of any of these tests in your life? Are there problems that happen over and over again? What is a new way to handle these events?
This beautiful prayer was written by a Master and teaches you to visualize and surround yourself with a transmuting light that brings protection, mercy, freedom and guidance.
Use this daily and you will feel the difference!
Tube of Light Decree
Beloved I AM Presence bright,
Round me seal your tube of light
From Ascended Master flame
Called forth now in God’s own name.
Let it keep my temple free
From all discord sent to me.
I AM calling forth violet fire
To blaze and transmute all desire,
Keeping on in Freedom’s name
Till I AM one with the violet flame.
Have you ever listened to waltz music? Try it sometime.
It may lift your energy and your mood! This music was considered revolutionary when it was first composed. The three-quarter time of the music nourishes the energy of the heart and of love.