Why Don't We Remember Our Past Lives? (Episode about Past Lives) - Teal Swan

Hello everyone. Today I'm going to talk to you about past lives. We're eternal beings and so we have been projecting forth into physical life and we've been withdrawing from physical life back to non-physical existence, over and over again. For most of you, we can't even count as high as you have had past lives. But what we need to understand about past lives is that you are the culmination of all of them. When you are living your physical life, every time you experience something that you don't like, you give rise to the preference. And that preference is a vibrational set point, which you add to your greater self. Your non-physical self becomes the vibrational equivalent of that thing which you have desired. So you can think of the universe like a bank. Every time you experience something you don't like, like a negative relationship, you add what your idea of a good relationship is to the bank. Desire is what tells the bank what to become, what's in it. And so every time you manage to line up with the vibration of that thing which you have put in the bank, you achieve the physical manifestation of it. But here's the other thing. When you die, if you don't manage to line up with that thing which you've put in the bank, when you die, you line up with everything you've put in the bank, vibrational. So if you have experienced a negative relationship, and that's caused you to desire a good relationship, when you die, you line up with the vibrational equivalent of that positive relationship. Desire is what tells the universe what to vibrationally become. So when you die, you re-emerge with that pure positive energy. It is wiping the slate clean of all of your resistance, all of the contrast which has given rise to these preferences, and you line up in one swoop with all of those things which you've put there in the bank. And it's that vibrational set point from which you choose your next life. There are some things in a physical life which you allow yourself to line up with in that physical life. And there are other things which you didn't allow yourself to catch up with while you were in your physical life. The most important part about the story though, is that you did catch up with all of those things that you set up in your vibrational bank when you die. You don't drag any baggage with you, but you can potentially choose to opt into contrast based on the past life that you have lived. For example, if you experienced a lot of expansion because of the contrast of being really poor in one life, you may, from non-physical set point, even though you lined up with all of the wealth that you put in your vibrational bank, you may choose to come in as a poor person in a subsequent life because of how much that aided your expansion. Or, let's say you were a butcher in one life. If you achieved all of the expansion out of that one perspective, you may choose to come in on the other end of the knife as an animal that's being butchered, because we are after perspective. The universe is here trying to realize itself through your physical perspective. So if the universe is trying to explore what it is, it needs to have an experience of as many perspectives as it possibly can. So you would choose to be both the butcher and the animal that's being butchered. So you may opt into an experience being an animal who's butchered in one life and in the past life be someone who butchered animals, not because of some karmic have to, not because the universe says this is what perfection is and you have to understand this so you have to go back to a life like this. It's because if you're trying to gain all perspectives that you can possibly gain, you would choose to understand all perspectives relative to one situation. So because of that, you would choose from your non-physical perspective to come into a life as an animal that's being butchered for that reason, not because there is some universal God who's saying you have to catch up to a perfection which I've already decided on. Our eternal aspect is never oriented towards the past. It is always using the past as a platform from which to become more, from which to expand. So it is always oriented towards the improvement, it is always oriented towards expansion. Imagine the heavy burden that you would have to carry if you currently were to remember each and every one of your past wrongdoings, traumas, mistakes and even crimes of all of your past existences. You would get so bogged down in all of it you could not find forward movement. Just ask someone who has post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of something that they have experienced in this life. You close your eyes to the past in order to reopen them to a new existence. The benefit of a new life is a new perspective, not the accumulation of every perspective that you have ever been. That would be like listening to all the radio channels that are floating around in the air at one time. You couldn't do that. And it wouldn't lend to your own expansion. Our eternal self, often called your soul, manages to be all of these channels at once, which is why when you are able to sit in meditation or something of this sort, you can, when you re-emerge and re-experience your non-physical perspective, you can listen to any one of those channels that you want. So you can re-emerge with your non-physical perspective, like you would in meditation, and you can experience any of those lives that you have been, because your non-physical self is still the culmination of each one of those vibrations, of each one of those lives that you've lived. In a dark room we can easily see the pictures on a movie screen. But suppose we open a window and allow the rays of the midday sun to fall directly on the screen. We would not be able to see those pictures because the more powerful light of the sun will subdue the light of the pictures. But although they are invisible to our eyes, we cannot deny their existence on the screen. Similarly, those pictures of the events of our previous lives upon the screen of the eternal self may be invisible to us at present, but they still exist there. They are invisible to us now because the more powerful light of sense consciousness, in other words, our one singular physical storyline and the sensory input that we experience as a result of that choice, has subdued them. If we close the windows and doors of our senses from outside contact and peer into the dark of our self, we can know and remember our past lives and all of the events and experiences thereof. Memory is nothing but the awakening and reactivating of vibrations which exist above the threshold of current, in-the-moment consciousness. They are dormant expressions of energy. They are not gone. Every thought that has ever been thought exists. You can still access them, but the question is, why do you feel the need to? We come into this one singular life focused on this one singular life. Jokingly, we often call this going balls deep into the program. Think of it like walking into a movie theater. Most of us, when we walk into a movie theater, we don't lose our memory of our life outside of that movie theater, so it becomes less real to us. It's not like the minute you walk into the movie theater, you forget who you are and now all you are is the experience that you're watching on the screen. But if you can do that, those of you who get very involved in movies will understand what I'm about to say. If you walk into the movie theater and forget the rest of your life and you are completely immersed in the story on the screen, how much more emotion does that a movie give rise to? So when you're going balls deep in the program here, meaning you are this one singular experience and expression of Source Energy, you have forgotten all that you are eternally, that gives rise to so much more expansion. Experiencing something firsthand is so much different than experiencing it when you understand that it's just a hologram. This is why we choose to forget our past lives and our eternal selves when we come into this life, because of the amount of expansion that you get out of really experiencing this one expression which you call by your name. Much more intense preferences, much more intense vibrations and deliberate vibrations are born from an experience where you feel an intense attachment. So think about when you're watching a movie and you get very involved in the plot line to the extent where you forget who you are sitting there watching the movie. You're actually in the movie. How much more intense is your desire for the bad guy to meet with the end which he deserves when you're that involved versus when you're just watching it like it's something to entertain yourself with? There are many people who do not want to accept that they're the creator of their own experience. This is the real reason that we want to say that because we were destitute in one life that we're obsessed with saving money in this life. It's because we give the power over to another being without understanding that we chose into this and all of the contrasts you're experiencing you're experiencing because of this life. I meet with a great many people who are not able to access some of the emotions they had relative to experiences earlier in life. So a lot of these people are the kind of people who may have grown up in a depression mindset household with parents who are always scrimping for cash but they don't understand the impact that that had on them and their vibrational set point here in this life. It doesn't seem like it's enough so they downplay that experience and instead they think that the amount of intensity they feel relative to poverty has to be the result of a past life because they don't understand how much impact something like that experience can have on their vibration and on their thoughts now. So let's say you walk into a past life regressionist and they are able to express to you a past life which really resonates with you. It's something that you relate to it's something that explains a lot of what you're going through in this life. The problem is, is that the practitioner very often is picking up on a life any life, not even necessarily yours maybe even their own or one that they're just pulling out of the Akashic record that relates to your current vibration now. So that life which they're telling you about is a vibrational match to your vibrational set point here in this moment. That's why it resonates with you not even because it's necessarily your past life. The idea that we must be here in order to clear karma accumulated in past lives is another very outdated human understanding of this universe. The current understanding of karma makes God or the universe out to be a kind of parental figure that gets to dictate what lives you live based on what he or it sees as essential for you to live in order for you to achieve his predetermined idea of perfection and make up for past mistakes and learn the lessons that the universe wants you to learn. This is a primitive vindictive God we think we're dealing with when we approach past lives from this limited understanding. It's a vindictive God we have created that decides that you are paying the price for a past life that you can't even remember. A bit like punishing a 6 year old child for something they did when they were 6 months old, something which they do not even remember doing. The universe does not work like this. Our minds work like this when we're out of touch with our thoughts and are trying to justify why things are happening to us. As I said earlier, as extensions of God, you continue to come into life after life after life to see what you really are. You come in to see how far you extend. You have to do this if you want to know who you really are. And because of this, because you need to know how far you extend, you already know what you were. You need to know how much more you are. You are always facing forward. Your eternal aspect is always using the past, even the now, as a platform for what to discover that it really is. For what more to become. Your past lives do not hold the key that you were looking for. If it seems like a past life did hold the key, it is because you managed to relate to a past life, maybe not even your past life, that better symbolically represented your current struggle. And when you released the pain relative to the symbolic past life, you also released your resistance relative to your current struggle. You opted into the contrast, into the negative vibrations in this life. That's why this life actually holds the keys to all of the resistance which you're experiencing in your physical life. It's not your past lives that hold the key to the resistance which you're feeling in your life. This is why it can be very helpful for some people to do past life regression. It's because when you deal with anything symbolically, on a mental level, you have released the vibration. So it's not like when people go into past life regression therapy, they're never helped at all. It's just that often they're using a symbolic past life to improve their vibration which they're holding relative to some situation in this life. We are here to facilitate our soul's expansion in this lifetime. We cannot do this and be continually immersed in the past. This is a vibrational contradiction. We can't be looking behind us and be moving forward at the same time. This is why when we chose to opt into this individual perspective, a great many of us chose to close our eyes to our past experiences, including our past lives. Have a good week.