Why Don't I Remember?

You don't have to say it. I know you're thinking, " If we lived before, how come we don't remember?" Shanti Devi may have recalled her previous life, but most of us sure don't.

Actually we do, according to the Hindus. The very fact that we're drawn to certain people and certain places is a reflection of the dim memory of previous lives we all possess. The fact that most of us don't remember our last life in detail like Shanti Devi is due to the nature of the soul.

In the West, those of us who believe in a soul at all think of it in a very straightforward way. There's the body. it dies. There's the soul. it lives forever.For Hindus the topic is not so simple. Hindus believe the universe is multidimensional, and so is the soul. What the soul is for anyone who wants to understand Hinduism. I'll go into it in a lot more detail in Chapter 8, " Turning on Your Inner Light".

Now to answer your question about why we don't remember our past lives. At the moment of rebirth, Hindus believe, the infant takes its first gulp of air and becomes a breathing being. This jolts the brain and subtle body, causing a force called Vaishnava Shakti to act. In most people, it cuts off detailed memories of the past life.

In fact, it also cuts off detailed memories of this life, which is why most people don't remember much of current life either. The soul is still completing its "hook up" to the new physical brain, and not all the data from the previous life is downloaded. It's still there though, preserved in an internal drive called the karmashaya, a storage brain previous thoughts and actions that' s a little hard for us to access because it's buried deep in the subtle body, not the physical brain.