Past lives, or times we have lived before, are suppressed by the painfulness of the memory of those former existences.
The memory is contained in mental image pictures which, on close viewing, are capable of developing a reality "more real" than present time.
Where a person has been tortured or killed without adequate reason, the injustice of it causes him or her to protest by holding in suspension in time the picture.
To restore the memory of one's whole existence, it is necessary to bring one up to being able to confront such experiences.
A person with amnesia is looked upon as ill. What of a person who can remember only this life? Is this then not a case of amnesia on a grand scale?
Psychosomatic illnesses such as arthritis, asthma, rheumatism, heart trouble, and on and on for a total of 70 percent of man's ills—and women's too—are the reaction of the body against a painful mental image picture. When this picture is cleared away—if it is the right picture—the illness usually abates.
Actual fevers and pain, etc., can turn on just by restimulation of mental pictures in a person.
The recovery of whole memory could be said to be a goal of processing (another term for auditing, the form of spiritual counseling unique to Scientology).
Past lives are "incredible" only to those who dare not confront them. In others, the fact of former existence can be quickly established subjectively.
There are many interesting cases on record. One was a case of a young girl, about five, who, hanging back at church, confided to her clergyman that she was worried about her "husband and children." It seems she had not forgotten them after "dying out of" another life five years before.
The clergyman did not at once send for the chaps in white coats. Instead, he questioned the truly worried child closely.
She told him she had lived in a nearby village, and what her name had been. She said where her former body was buried, gave him the address of her husband and children and what all their names were, and asked him to drive over and find out if they were all right.
The clergyman made the trip. Much to his astonishment, he discovered the grave, the husband, the children and all the current news.
The following Sunday he told the little five-year-old girl that the children were all well, that the husband had remarried pleasantly and that the grave was well kept.
She was very satisfied and thanked the clergyman very much—and the following Sunday could not recall a thing about it!
Past lives are not the same as the theory which has been called "reincarnation" in Hinduism. That is a complex theory compared to simply living time after time, getting a new body, eventually losing it and getting a new one.
The facts of past lives, if you care to pursue them, are best seen from the viewpoint of the person receiving spiritual counseling in the hands of a competent Scientology practitioner. The hypnotic handling of such is not advised. Only by higher levels of awareness does one learn, not deeper levels of unconsciousness.
An amusing sidelight on past lives is the "famous person" fixation. This more than anything else has discredited having lived before. There is always some madman "who was Napoleon," always some girl "who was Catherine the Great." This evidently means that the person, living a contemporary life to a famous figure, was so unsuccessful that he or she "dubbed in" the great personage. A practitioner who runs into "Beethoven," after a while finds the person receiving spiritual counseling was really the handler of a street piano in that life—not Beethoven!
But all rules have exceptions, and a practitioner once found someone who claimed to have been Jim Bowie, the famous frontiersman who died at the doubly famous Alamo in Texas. And after much work and great skepticism found he really did have Jim Bowie!
Viewing children in the light of knowledge of past lives causes us to revise our estimations of causes of child behavior.
Evidently the newborn child has just died as an adult. Therefore he or she, for some years, is prone to fantasy and terror and needs a great deal of love and security to recover a perspective of life with which he or she can live.
Life is never dull in Scientology. The motto is—What is, is, not what we wished it were.
