The Psychic Being and Its Form of Memory

We pay attention to things that interest us, that capture that attention for a reason. Our mind notes, and files away a memory, of important meetings, events, circumstances, situations that we are faced with during our lives. Our vital being creates memories based on strong emotional or vital actions, fulfilled or unfulfilled deisres, etc. Our physical being creates memories based on major stresses it undergoes, physical difficulties that lead to pain or suffering, for instance. So we can ask ourselves, what does the psychic being pay attention to to create its form of memory?

The psychic being focuses on its development in the evolution of consciousness. It clearly is not interested in the fears or traumas we faced when we had to take a test, or go on a date, go for an interview or make a presentation for our educational or work advancement. The psychic being certainly is not interested in the new car we acquire, the fancy foods or dranks we consume or the kind of movies, music or recreational activities we enjoy. It cannot be concerned about the networking we do, the people we meet, our influence in the society. All of these things are interesting to our physical body, our vital being or our mental being, but fall outside the range of what the psychic being is concerned with.

There are moments in our lives when all these external factors recede and we experience something of a different order, what we call a ‘spiritual experience’. In these moments, we can feel the active presence of the psychic being. These experiences tend to be highlights and when we recall them to mind, they help to transport us away from all the physical, vital and mental concerns that usually occupy our external lives and which are so important to our ego-personality. We can thus appreciate that the psychic being is concerned with our spiritual growth and development and it takes the opportunities when it has come forward to create its own form of memories, the stages and incidents of its development in its own natural process.

We then have to consider what it is that the psychic being remembers, or even wants to remember, from past lives. It is essentially irrelevant what external life it led, what it did in that life, or how it experienced success or failure, joy or sorrow, acclaim or approbation in some life. What it captures is the essence of what it experienced as it grew in its evolutionary development, the inner experiences that developed, the stages of its transformation to a status of consciousness beyond that of the body-life-mind complex or any individual ego-personality.

The idea that the psychic being carries forward all the details of lifetimes, or that it can even identify specific personalities from past lifetimes is therefore not simply unlikely. While a serious researcher may be able to trace backward the stream of consciousness energy to some degree, that does not reconstruct the mental being, the vital being or the physical being that each captured their own forms of memory.

The Mother notes: “In ordinary lives — and by that I mean the life of a certain elite of sufficiently well-developed people — the contact between the external being and the psychic being is quite intermittent; it is the result of certain experiences or certain inner needs. At that moment the psychic being is ‘in front’, as Sri Aurobindo says, that is, it comes to the surface of the consciousness, it is in direct contact with material circumstances, with forms and words and sounds, etc., for a very short time; so it records all that like a photograph or a cinema, but it is just a minute, a few moments in a lifetime. These moments may repeat themselves several times, but they do not last; and it is this the psychic being remembers; and when you have real psychic memories, sincere, spontaneous, not fabricated by the mind or the vital, that is, purely psychic, exact, your memory is intermittent. And it is often very difficult to locate your past lives, to say: ‘I was this or that.’ It is only when the psychic experience has taken place at a very important moment of your life and a whole set of circumstances gives you, so to say, the key to the story (dresses, spoken words, customs or an environment giving you the key) that you can say: ‘Oh! that life, I have lived it.’ But if someone comes and narrates to you all his previous lives from the monkey onwards, with a mass of details, you may be sure that he is a humbug!”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 4 The Afterlife and Rebirth, pp. 149-150