Distinguishing True Psychic Memory from Fictional Storytelling About Past Lives

There are countless people who earn their livelihood by doing ‘readings’ of people’s past lives. They weave romantic tales, or provide plausible backgrounds to bolster the sensibilities of the person sitting in front of them for the reading. In some cases, they do this purely to take advantage of the other party, to earn their trust, to take their money, or in other ways to gain benefits. These can be classified as simply fraudsters. This is similar to those individuals who prey upon family members of a deceased person to put them allegedly in contact with the dead person on the other side of the grave. Various individuals have actually gone undercover and exposed the gimmicks used to gull the innocent grieving husband, wife, son or daughter.

In other cases, there is a more benign explanation for weaving these tales; namely, to help the person gain perspective, overcome trauma, doubt or lack of self-worth. In other words, they choose to do therapy through creating a fictional account that addresses some of the issues they see.

What we do not see is an actual case of someone reciting all the details of someone else’s past lifetime, and for good reason. When an individual dies, the physical body disintegrates and goes back to the elements of which it was made. The vital sheath and then the mental sheath also begin to dissipate after a shorter or longer period of time, and generally do not stick with the soul as it traverses the psychic world and eventually takes birth in a new body, a new life, a new mental development and a new personality.

The external details of the former life were embedded in the physical, vital and mental framework which was dissipated. The psychic being does not carry all this detail with it, so when an individual in the present lifetime is confronted with a tale of explicit detail of the past lifetime, one needs to question how the ‘observer’ can see what the soul has not brought with it, when the memories or the life details were dissipated with the dissolution of the external sheaths.

The Mother recognises that the memory of the psychic being could contain certain correspondences or glimpses associated with major psychic events of a past lifetime, but that is vastly different than a recitation of an entire life circumstance with extensive and colorful detail.

A disciple asks: “There are people who tell the life of others.”

The Mother responds: “Yes, I know. I know many things. I have heard all that one can hear. They tell stories after stories…. They look at you and say: ‘You were so-and-so in that life, you did such and such a thing.’ Well, I guarantee, it is not true. For I know how one can find out where one has seen a person and what he was and how it is — it is not just a little story that you can write in a book. When you look within a person, when you have the perception, precisely of the psychic world, which enables you to recognise the psychic there where it was, then all of a sudden you can see a scene, an image, a form, a word; there is a sort of association due to which even in the present being of this person there still remain certain sympathies and attractions which come from previous lives. But, as I was saying, these are ‘moments’ of life. And so one sees, one can see these various moments, but one cannot narrate a whole life.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 4 The Afterlife and Rebirth, pg. 156