The Psychic Being and Memory of Past Lives

Every plane of being has its own mechanisms for what we may call ‘memory’ and how it functions. Memory in physical matter is different than memory on the vital or mental planes. Physical memory is based on the long-term atomic structure and the physical changes we make to it. Physical matter can hold various forms of energy, for example, a rock will heat up from the sun shining on it for some time. It retains the heat and slowly ratiates it back out as the environment it is in becomes cooler than the heat now being held within the rock.

We can train our vital being to respond in certain ways, which is the basic element of learning how to create ‘muscle memory’ (which relies also on a certain amount of influence being subjected to the physical substance of the muscle). It is also the basis for dieting, celibacy, and other forms of control of desires. We also have vital responses to situations that become engrained in our vital being, calling forth specific responses when certain triggering factors arise.

We normally tend to associate memory with the mind. We remember circumstances, events, conversations, relationships, facts, etc. Mental memory, however, does not constitute the entirety of memory, as it does not actively control either the forms of physical memory or vital memory; and, mental memory is not absolutely solid, nor comprehensive. Over time, facts and details that are not being actively called upon tend to fade into the background, and in some cases, are simply eliminated from our active capacity. While hypnosis might be able to bring out more details, that is an exceptional technique, not a standard function of the memroy capacity of the mind.

Each type of memory has its own criteria for what is retained, how long it is retained and how it can be recalled. This brings us then to memory of the psychic being. Just as the mental memory does not incorporate the types of memory on the physical and vital planes, it also does not encompass the type of memory held by the psychic being.

Just as each type of memory has its own mechanism, and its own type and time of storage and method of retrieval, so we need to look at what the focus and intention of the psychic being is, and what it may want to hold onto and potentially retrieve from past lives. For the psychic being, which is focused on development and the growth of consciousness, it is not essential for it to remember all the minute details of a particular lifetime of the past; rather, it extracts the essential significance of the experience and tends to either offload or suppress the rest. If the essence of a past life had some very strong impacts on the psychic being, it may get a feeling, what many call ‘deja vu’ or something similar when similar events or circumstances occur in the present lifetime. This is not necessarily a full memory of the past life, but a ‘correspondence’, a sense of similarity, that strikes the psychic being as something it ‘knows’.

The Mother observes: “In rebirth it is not the external being, that which is formed by parents, environment and circumstances — the mental, the vital and the physical — that is born again: It is only the psychic being that passes from body to body. Logically, then, neither the mental nor the vital being can remember past lives or recognise itself in the character or mode of life of this or that person. The psychic being alone can remember; and it is by becoming conscious of our psychic being that we can have at the same time exact impressions about our past lives.”

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