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The Ninth Lesson: Metempsychosis.855
And as they gaze he passes into unconsciousness. Much of his description
concerned points of which he knew nothing from any other source, but all
was true to the life, and enabled me to fix on India as the scene which he
recalled.”
While comparatively few among the Western races are able to remember
more than fragments of their past lives, in India it is quite common for a man
well developed spiritually to clearly remember the incidents and details
of former incarnations, and the evidence of the awakening of such power
causes little more than passing interest among his people. There is, as we
shall see later, a movement toward conscious Metempsychosis, and many
of the race are just moving on to that plane. In India the highly developed
individuals grow into a clear recollection of their past lives when they reach
the age of puberty, and when their brains are developed sufficiently to
grasp the knowledge locked up in the depths of the soul. In the meantime
the individual’s memory of the past is locked away in the recesses of his
mind, just as are many facts and incidents of his present life so locked
away, to be remembered only when some one mentions the subject, or
some circumstance serves to supply the associative link to the apparently
forgotten matter.
Regarding the faculty of memory in our present lives, we would quote
the following from the pen of Prof. William Knight, printed in the Fortnightly
Review. He says: “Memory of the details of the past is absolutely impossible.
The power of the conservative faculty, though relatively great, is extremely
limited. We forget the larger portion of experience soon after we have
passed through it, and we should be able to recall the particulars of our
past years, filling all the missing links of consciousness since we entered on
the present life, before we were in a position to remember our ante-natal
experience. Birth must necessarily be preceded by crossing the river of
oblivion, while the capacity for fresh acquisition survives, and the garnered
wealth of old experience determines the amount and character of the new.”