Exploring Past Life Memory and the Role of the Vital Being’s Persistence After Death

When we read or hear about documented cases of remembrance of past lives, it is natural to wonder about how these actually occur. Substantial effort has been made at the Division of Perceptional Studies (DOPS) of the University of Virginia, School of Medicine in the USA to follow up and document reported cases and eliminate risk that there has been some kind of fraudulent effort. They do this through interviews, checking out the details of the stories and review of relevant factors which could not have been known to the party with this type of remembrance. There are cases where young children were able to provide specific information, names, locations, street layouts about far distant locations they had never visited. Similarly there are cases where chidren who are native speakers in a particular language are able to recall and speak perfectly in another totally different language, with a dialect and speech pattern that matches the place and time they were describing, without any relation in the current life to any of the remembered factors. Certain key characteristics help us define what is taking place here. First, the recall generally begins to appear between ages 2 and 4 but tend to fade away by ages 6 or 7. Of the documented cases, around 70% show that the prior lifetime was ended unnaturally or violently., and the gap between the death and the birth of the child averages just 16 months.

These are not characteristics of the persistent psychic being bringing forward its past life memories; rather they seem more likely to stem from a vital formation or sheath that did not completely disintegrate after the prior death, and were thus able to inhabit, at least temporarily, a newly born individual.

It is a recognised phenomenon that when the body dies, the vital sheath and the mental sheath may still be intact for some time. To the extent that the dissolution is interrupted by accessing a new physical frame, the experiences related begin to make sense to us. The experiences themselves do not appear to be serious or permanent formations that accompany soul into the next lifetime, as they tend to fade away after a brief appearance in childhood.

A disciple asks: “How is it that in newspapers one quite often reads stories of small children who remember their past lives and that the details have been verified? And it is the study of such events that leads parapsychologists to assert the existence of reincarnation. So are they not on a completely wrong track? And how can reincarnation be demonstrated scientifically in any other way?”

The Mother replies: “The memories you refer to, which are mentioned in newspapers, are memories of the vital being that, exceptionally, has gone out of one body in order to enter another. It is something that can happen, but it is not frequent.”

“The memory that I refer to is that of the psychic being, and one is conscious of it only when one is in conscious relation with one’s psychic being.”

“There is no contradiction between the two things.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 4 The Afterlife and Rebirth, pg. 150