To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

Remembering and Forgetting Past Lives / 57
cess of regression with or without hypnosis neither proves
nor disproves reincarnation.
It is regrettable that the popularization of regression
practices has given a confused picture of the doctrine of
reincarnation, due in the main to the overemphasis placed
on the role of the persona, the mask worn by the reimbodying
human monad as it incarnates in life after life on earth.
It is natural to want to know who we were in our last life,
but such knowledge is double-edged. To undergo hypnotic
regression simply to satisfy the hunger of people to know
who they were in a previous life is morally and psychically
questionable. Suªcient unto this life are the challenges
thereof.
We can be certain that — whether in the astral lifeatoms
of our brain or in the higher elements of our constitution,
as well as in the astral light of earth — all that we are,
since we first became thinking, self-choosing humans, has
been and is recorded. This ties in with Plato’s views that the
soul has a memory of its own. In his Dialogues, particularly
in Meno (§81b), he speaks of the process of re-collection or
remembering — not memorizing in the sense of learning
by rote but of reminiscing, re-bringing forth memory of the
wisdom the soul had anciently attained. The soul, he affirmed,
has a reservoir of experience from the past and ‘‘if
one is strenuous and does not faint’’ in his endeavor to recall,
to re-collect this wisdom, suddenly, as in a flash, there
may come a revelation, a light streaming into the consciousness
from within.