--- In [email protected], bob_brigante <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "Jeff Fischer" > <jeffcandace@> wrote: > > > > As anyone reading this is back walking around in a body, > > where did you > > go the last time you dropped your body? > > ************ > > One of Patanjali's sutras not taught by the TMO is for > knowing past lives, so this knowledge is certainly > doable, and the Vedic lit is full of sages who recalled > all their past lives. Apparently going to hell first > (and heaven afterwards, before rebirth on earth) when > you die is a good thing, as it means that your life was > predominately good -- people who go to heaven first > spend a longer time in hell(s) ):
Remembering one's past lives can also happen spontaneously, without any technique. Just as information, another way of seeing the same phenomena (subjective experience of "heaven" or "hell") is that between lives the being passes through experiences *of his own making* that he *interprets* as either "heaven" or "hell." In this view, there is no such "place" as "heaven" or "hell," merely the individual experiences that an individual being puts himself/ herself through between death and rebirth. The Tibetan view is that one passes through illusory experiences that reflect *all* of one's attachments to "good" experiences (which some may "map" to the experience of "heaven") and another set of equally illusory experiences that reflect all of their aversions (which again, many may interpret as "hell"). > "18. By perceiving the impressions, (comes) the knowledge of past > life. > > Each experience that we have, comes in the form of a wave in the > Chitta, and this subsides and becomes finer and finer, but is never > lost. It remains there in minute form, and if we can bring this wave > up again, it becomes memory. So, if the Yogi can make a Samyama on > these past impressions in the mind, he will begin to remember all > his past lives." > > http://www.yoga-age.com/sutras/pata3.html True, but (IMO) of limited value. Sure, we can remember not only our past lives but the past transitions between those lives and the next, and all of the Bardo experiences "in between," but IMO all of this is of no more *value* than going to see a movie. The only *value* that is possible from knowing one's past lives is that one could learn of samskaric patterns in them and thus try to avoid those same patterns in the present incarnation. Unfortunately, what seems to happen is that the very people who become obsessed with discovering their past lives become equally obsessed with the exper- iences they had in them, *without* trying to discern which of those experiences led to the illusory experience in the Bardo of "heaven" and which led to the illusory experience of "hell." Thus they just *repeat* those same experience-patterns, and go through it all again, in a new incarnation, having made no real progress. So in many ways, forgetting one's past lives may actually be more valuable in the long run because one has the ability to have a "fresh start," without attachment for past actions that -- after all -- did nothing more than land us here in the present with pretty much the same karma and pretty much the same set of samskaras that we had before. :-)
