Forgetting

Let me use the analogy of a person who descends into a very deep cave on an elaborate spelunking expedition. He carries a radio. His team of supporters is above ground monitoring his progress below; they’re leaning into computer screens. Now the explorer has reached such a depth that the interfering rock formations cause him to lose communications. The radio sputters, here and there he can make out a phrase, but not enough to carry on a meaningful conversation.

Let me apply the analogy. The cave and the rock that forms it represent the material order. The surface represents the order of the soul. The explorer is one soul descending into the density of matter. The radio is his mind communicating rather well with his base camp at first, but then interference all but cuts off his contact. His descent is what Wordsworth means by our birth; the failure of the radio is our “forgetting” of a previous existence. The analogy isn’t perfect. It merely illustrates that “interference” may explain our forgetting. A situation like the one described might be elaborated to explain plausibly the Hindu concept of reincarnation, structurally an emanationist concept. To make this case we need just a few elements.

These are (1) some evidence that souls have really preexisted before; (2) an understanding of memory as a field phenomenon, and (3) a conceptualization of orders based on some kind of density.

Evidence for Preexistence. In eastern culture people accept reincarnation as a traditional belief; it’s been around a long time, not least in the West, if we go far enough back. The first westerner to give it scientific study was the Canadian, Ian Stevenson, a professor at the University of Virginia. The late Stevenson’s studies of people who claimed to remember an earlier life represents an opus of evidence not as extensive but as persuasive as the corpus of NDE reports. It represents empirical proof, as best as we can get it, for preexistence. Others have continued such studies after Stevenson.

Memory. No one questions the role of the brain in memory, but the subject of where memories reside is more controversial. The orthodox answer is that tissue holds memories, but proof of that is speculative. New theories therefore keep springing up. The Austrian, Karl Pribram, has been the latest theorizer, suggesting a holographic storage of memory across tissues. This suggestion has not firm proof either. The British biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, is the chief proponent of a theory that memories reside in what he calls morphic fields, thus fields analogous to the electro-dynamic kind, but not detectable by our instruments. He offers some intriguing empirical support for this suggestion (see The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance & the Habits of Nature (Park Street Press, 1995). This alternative fits a metaphysical perspective better—without in any way denying the role of the brain.

Concerning memory, especially in this context, it’s worthwhile reminding ourselves that in daily awareness we don’t actually remember our entire life in full detail. What we have is a very compressed précis of our past. But if we want to remember something, we have potent powers to evoke those things by effort. The day-to-day functioning of our memory is in response to stimuli. Those things not “evoked” by something lie dormant. We have enormous stores of memory that we never visit—and when we do, we tend to be amazed. I’d completely forgotten that, we say—but evidently we have not. We need to keep this in mind in reflecting on the subject in this context.

Orders of Density. There is ample philosophical as well as experiential evidence for a subtle reality—that which I keep calling the “soul-order.” Its most obvious proof is human consciousness. I include life itself as an element of proof—although that’s more controversial. Tradition supports the concept. People believe in other words, and NDE reports appear to back up those beliefs. If such orders exist, however, science cannot prove them by definition. If those world are more subtle, our physical instruments can no more detect them than they can detect consciousness.

With these elements in mind, let me suggest the following model for explaining why we can’t remember previous lives. I assume, for starters, that when a soul is born (unites with matter), it enters a realm of greater density. The soul-order is subtle, in other words. The “noise” of this environment, to change the metaphor, overwhelms the channel by means of which we gather knowledge (memory is knowledge). What we hear across this channel reaches us almost too faintly to decode: intuitions, intimations. When our souls form new memories, our brain mediates their storage. But when the brain retrieves memories in response to stimuli, it always fetches the most recent deposits to this store, especially as we age. In rare cases only, the brain may actually bring back memories created in times predating our current life, but these would have less context. After we die, presumably, we shall recover our older memories, but only after appropriate stimuli, those arising in the soul-order, actually evoke them. What I’m suggesting as a reasonable assumption is that we never really lose contact with our continuous memories, but our ability to evoke them from within this dark spelunking cave becomes much weaker.

How then can some people remember earlier existences while the great majority do not? While I’m into idle speculation, why not tackle that one too. The remembering of some is no idle claim of this or that small thing remembered. On the contrary. Stevenson’s work indicates that the recovery of memories is quite complete and quite detailed. One explanation might be that, in childhood, many of us do remember previous lives but too fragmentarily. We’re unable to link up enough of them to reproduce a sense of forgotten self-awareness. The shock of entry into this world may have been greater for most than some. Other explanations might be that the tuning powers of the brain are better is some than others, that the environmental stimuli are sharper for some, and finally that some have been gone but a short time. Concerning the last point, the point is that the memories remembered would be more current. In most of the cases Stevenson reports, the life remembered had been lived but a few miles away and ended just a few years earlier. For most other people, possibly, the last stretch of existence may not have been physical but “subtle,” thus in a quite different order, the soul-order. Physical stimuli here may not evoke memories of that one, except perhaps for feelings. The two orders may be very different in character. Remembering lives may therefore be rare because the conditions necessary to evoke earlier memories may also be rare.

What I’ve managed here, perhaps, is to show that some element of plausibility attaches to the reincarnation scheme and, therefore, indirectly, to the proposition that another realm might be invading matter or—what may be a rougher row to hoe—may have been caught here involuntarily.