Why can’t we remember our past lives?

Question: If we are souls who have been transmigrating for many lives, then why can’t we remember our past lives?

Answer: Firstly, it’s our tendency to forget; can we remember what we were doing at this very moment one year ago, one month ago or even one week ago? Unlikely. Similarly, to remember our past lives is highly unlikely. Just because we can’t remember a past event doesn’t prove the non-occurrence of that event.

Secondly, scientists have found that the chemical oxytocin is associated with both amnesia and pregnancy both. So the biological cause of our past-life amnesia could be the oxytocin secretion in our mother’s womb when we were there.

Thirdly, it’s our innate psychological defense mechanism to forget painful incidents; in this very life, we get over traumas only by forgetting them with the passage of time. Between our present and past lives lies the trauma of death. Suppose we had died in a car accident and could remember it; we would likely be paranoid of cars throughout our lives. To save us from such psychological malfunctioning, nature arranges to erase our past-life memories.

Fourthly, in our current times, most people are prejudiced against reincarnation by pseudo-scientific materialism and misconceived Semitic dogmas. This leads to the phenomenon that researchers call “childhood suppression of past-life memories”: when a child spontaneously recalls her past life, but finds her parents neglectful or skeptical or dismissive of her memories, then, out of the fear of being chastised by her parents, she stops speaking those memories.

Considering all these filters to past-life memories, what should serve as persuasive evidence is not the forgetfulness of past lives that characterizes most people, but the remembrance of past lives that characterizes even few people. And open-minded researchers like Dr Ian Stevenson have documented not just a few but many such cases of spontaneous past-life memories among children, who have neither the tendency nor the ability to orchestrate meticulous frauds.

Why are these children able to remember their past lives while most of us can’t? It’s due to some peculiar karma from their past lives. Our past karma leads to varying memory power even wrt events and facts of this life: some people have meager memory power; some, mediocre, and some, photographic. Similarly, some people have no memory of past lives, some, mysterious feelings of déjà vu, and some, clear memories of past lives.

Through the past-life memories of these exceptional individuals, God is giving us telltale evidence of reincarnation. As is often said, even one sign is enough for a wise person; now the onus to be wise is upon us.