It is indeed lost, openmind, if one cannot consciously access these memories.
If you can’t access your memories of lessons learned, then it appears that when you are eventually fit it is through* chance*, but** not through learned experiences.
Hi there PR Merger,
The following is not an argument for the existence of reincarnation – I’m not attempting to offer it as proof, nor is my goal to persuade you it exists – but this is my understanding of how many in the so-called New Age movement understand reincarnation, as respects not remembering past lives:
----forgetting actually serves a purpose, which is being able to focus completely on the life at hand – a particular station or frequency, if you will – without distractions or interference from “other channels.” If there were, fundamentally, a great deal of conscious bleed through, many individuals would be perpetually dwelling on the past, in a way that impeded their progress in the current life. My mother? Someone could say, “that’s not really my mother; my mother was born in 16th century China, and I will never forget
her!” Or, “my husband? I lost my husband in 1851, and I don’t want another.”
The handiest analogy I can come up with is that of watching a movie; it would be distracting, to say the least, if two movies were being played simultaneously, superimposed.
–remembering; it’s the lessons – in the abstract – and the general insights that you’ve acquired, that stay with you. This is not determinism but rather a sense of “as you reap, you will sow.” Thus, perhaps – in your past life – you were a person born into great wealth, and you never cared about those who were less fortunate than you. You took it for granted. Then you had a reversal of fortune, and ended up losing everything, and winding up penniless. Then, on top of that, you became very ill, and depended on the charity of others in order to survive. You may have experienced some cruel hurts, where you “saw your former self, as it were” (people who were rich), look upon you with contempt and bemusement. You wept bitter tears and could not understand how others could be so callous. It squashed all of your pride and presumptuousness, and gave you the lesson of humility and compassion (which you freely consented to learn; it was a golden opportunity to learn it, and you did not resist the opportunity). Now, in a subsequent life, you have no conscious recollection of any of this. You don’t even
believe in reincarnation. Yet, when you were a child and someone told you, “don’t look down on those who are poor and unfortunate; there, but for the grace of God, is all of us” it resonated with you. It stirred something in you, emotionally. It “clicked”, whereas another young person could have listened to words like that and they could have gone in one ear and out the other, or been greeted with a smirk. But you’ve learned that lesson, through hard experience, even though you don’t remember the details. All you know is that it hits home, and you agree that’s it’s true. You *understand *what they’re saying; you get it. In fact, it puzzles you, even hurts you, to think that there are others around you who
don’t seem to get it; you don’t understand why it is not self-evident to them.
