I would plant one thought in your mind: Without God-realisation, you wouldn’t care to know about your past lives, lest you learn of the terrible happenings that have taken place in those previous incarnations. Think of the troubles and sorrows you have had in this life, and then think of your many past incarnations. Do not believe for one moment that you have not had equally painful or worse experiences in those earlier lives. Would you want to remember all you have gone through from the beginning of your creation? No. Because to do so would so depress and discourage you that from the beginning you would have no strength, no will, to keep on.
For instance, suppose you died of cancer in your last life. Would you want to remember that suffering now? Your fear of that experience might produce the condition again. If you had continuity of remembrance, and could recall that as John in your last life you were poor and died of a terrible disease; and that now you have come back in this life as Jack, and again you are afflicted with poverty and sickness, you would be hopelessly discouraged. It would paralyse your will to succeed.
We don’t want to remember things that are unpleasant or evil. That is why nature obscures our memories from one lifetime to the next. In going from one body to another, something happens that makes us forget our past existence. God is good to us in that respect.
Of course, if we were wonderful in our last life, we might want to remember that, especially when facing some trouble in this life. People who go to fortune tellers or others to try to learn about their past incarnations really want to be flattered. They don’t want to hear that they were an average or an evil individual. They want to be told they were a great king, a famous person, or a saint. False prophets tell people what they want to hear because they want to increase their following and the contents of their coffers. In one of my classes there were three ladies, each of whom confided to me that a certain fortune teller had revealed to her that she was a reincarnation of Mary, Queen of Scotts. I brought the three “Marys” together and asked them to tell me which was the real one!
Extract from the book “The Divine Romance” by Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda.
