by Michael Talbot
One of the most important prerequisites to beginning to explore your past lives is to set up a past-life journal and get in the habit of using it. The journal should be loose-leaf so that you can add pages when necessary, and large enough to accommodate a lot of material. You will also want divider sheets or subject tabs so that you can organize the journal into sections.
How you set your journal up will depend in part on your own idiosyncrasies and on which techniques of past-life recall you choose to explore. Some basic organizational suggestions follow.
In one section of the journal keep a chronological record of any information you discover that you think may involve a past life. There are several reasons for having this record of the order in which you remember things. First, you may not immediately recognize the meaning of some of the information you unearth, and by keeping a record, you will not forget anything that may later have significance. Second, sometimes the sequence in which your unconscious mind divulges information is important, and the chronological record may help you recognize hidden patterns and repetitions that might otherwise escape your attention. For example, by going back over my own journal notes I discovered that although I was not consciously aware of it, again and again my psyche kept returning to the image of a falconer. Seeing this image crop up here and there throughout several years’ worth of notes made me start to pay attention to it, and it subsequently became a key symbol in helping me unravel a past life I had had in ancient Persia.
Last, by regularly committing the information you uncover to a journal, you will help communicate to your unconscious mind the seriousness of your intent. Although it is a subject that will be discussed at greater length later in this book, it bears mentioning now that you should begin to view your unconscious mind as almost a separate entity, a secondary and vaster “you” which stands behind the chatter of your everyday thoughts. It knows much more than you do about who you are and what you have been in previous existences, but like a wise old yogi sitting in a cave, it must be persuaded that you are serious in your desire for greater self-understanding before it will help you in earnest with your quest. Since no language speaks more powerfully to the unconscious mind than habit and repetition, by getting into the habit of bringing past-life information up to the surface and writing it down, you will also help strengthen your past-life “remembering muscles.”
As you begin to remember your past lives, devote a page (or more, if necessary) to each of the different past-life personalities you begin to discover in your unconscious. For example, you may have a heading called the “17th-century priest” or the “Old West barmaid.” You may also list personalities that you have not yet pinned down in history, such as the “woman who died in childbirth,” the “leather worker,” or the “man who died from a sword wound.”
It is imperative that you have a loose-leaf journal for this section to allow you to move pages around, because as you gather together a body of potential past-life information, you will most assuredly make a mistake here and there and occasionally confuse or even imagine a few past-life memories. For this same reason you should also always keep an open mind about the various personalities that you list. Do not become so attached to your notion that you were a courtesan in the court of Louis XIV that you cannot replace this sheet in your journal if your unconscious mind supplies you with evidence to the contrary.
Similarly, remember that the only good reason for finding out about your past lives is to grow and benefit from what you learn, and this will not be the result if you allow ego-aggrandizement to become a factor in compiling this section. Be discerning, and remember that your interest in any one of your previous personalities should always be commensurate with what that incarnation has to teach you about your life in the here and now.
Once you have amassed a sufficient amount of information about any given past life, create a subheading in your journal beneath that personality, and then try to answer the following questions:
- What was/were the most important lesson(s) I learned in that life?
- What do I like most about the person I was in that life?
- What do I dislike most about the person I was in that life?
- What negative influences from that life (situations, events, character traits, etc.) are still affecting who and what I am in this life?
- What positive influences from that life (situations, events, character traits, talents, etc.) are still affecting me in this life?
- Are any of the individuals I know in my current life people I knew in that life, and how has our past-life relationship affected our current circumstances?
After you have unearthed enough past-life information to be able to answer some of these questions, you should devote another section to your journal to the goals and changes that you would like to effect in your current life as a result of what you have learned. For example, if you unearth a past life in which you were a leader, but in your present life you are now a shy person, or unable to manage even simple situations effectively, you should use the information you have uncovered to help you realize that leadership qualities are still latent within you. Thus, in the goal section of your journal you might write, “I would like to reawaken the bravery, assertiveness, and ability to manage complex situations, which I possessed during my life as a naval commander in ancient Rome.”
Because of the tremendous potential for past-life information to heal, benefit, and transform your current life, you will want to set aside room for a lot of entries in this section.
Category headings and sample entries might look like this:
* Past-life strengths, talents, and wisdom that I would like to enhance or reawaken in my current life:
- I would like to reawaken the ability to play the piano that I possessed during my life in 19th-century London.
- I would like to reawaken the psychic abilities that I possessed when I was a seer in ancient Greece.
- I would like to call upon the endurance I possessed during my life as a soldier in World War I to enhance my ability to reduce the stress I experience in my current job.
- I would like to call upon the compassion I possessed when I was a Buddhist monk in India to enhance my current ability to love and be generous with others.
* Past-life traumas, pains, and negative patterns I would like to heal or overcome in this life:
- I would like to let go of the great sadness I feel as a result of the persecution I experienced when I was a slave.
- I would like to let go of my tendency to overeat as the result of my having starved to death in a previous life.
- I would like to heal my inability to love as the result of the past lives I have had in which I was ill-treated.
- I would like to heal the fear of flying I have as the result of having died by falling.
- I would like to heal the back pains I have as a result of having had my back broken in a previous life.
* Things I would like to forgive myself for or atone for in a positive way:
- I would like to learn how to forgive myself for having been so cruel during my life as a warrior.
- I would like to help others more in this life to atone for having been so selfish during my life as a ruthless landowner.
- I would like to learn how to be more accepting in this life to atone for the life in which I participated in the persecution of others.
- I would like to learn to forgive myself for the guilt I continue to experience as the result of the past life I had in which I had to survive by stealing from others.
* Things I would like to heal or forgive in others:
- I would like to heal my current relationship with my husband and forgive him for having brutalized me in a previous life.
- I would like to heal my current relationship with my friend and forgive her for the role she played in my death in a previous life.
There are several reasons why writing down your goals will help you in your past-life explorations. First, objectifying them in written form once again helps communicate your desire to your unconscious mind. In fact, sometimes writing down your goal is all the prodding the unconscious mind needs to initiate the processes necessary to fulfill your request. However, this is not always the case and should follow-up work prove necessary—such as further past-life exploration, dream work, or work with a therapist—writing down your goal will at least help set the process in motion.
Second, writing down your goal will also function as a reminder. For instance, you may find that your mind has grown so accustomed to ignoring various pieces of past-life information that it will take a concerted effort on your part to keep some realizations from slipping back into the mists of the unconscious. As you continue to unravel still more information about your past lives in the months and years ahead, the goals section of your journal will help you keep track of continuing themes and threads you might otherwise forget.
There are several reasons for devoting a section of your journal to each of the different methods of past-life exploration you choose. The first is that after you have spent some time experimenting with different methods, you will be able to see at a glance which methods tend to produce the most information for you. By keeping the methods straight, you will also be able to see what type of information each method helps you unearth. For example, although I have found that meditation and the Resonance Method (to be explained in a future article) help me remember the most information in terms of sheer volume, the most specific information—people’s names, words in foreign languages, and place names—tends to come through when I employ dreaming techniques.
One word of advice: To avoid having to write down the same information in both the chronological section of your journal and in the section devoted to the particular technique you are employing, you may want to develop some system of cross-referencing. For example, in the chronological section of your journal, instead of keeping a verbatim record of every memory you unearth, you might simply enter a one-line summary of the information or experience and then list the journal page where the more complete records can be found.
Excerpt from Your Past Lives