cryptomnesia

17
Oct
2018

Past Lives: Confirmation and Cryptomnesia

I recently shared a piece on past life memories, and how they are prone to distortion if not outright fabrication. Now I want to look at what can be done about it.

Also I will restate because it is hilarious and frustrating how many people misunderstand what I’m saying: Distortions and fabrications of memories aren’t intentional, they aren’t your conscious fault. When I say something will taint your memory by including new information, I’m not saying you do it on purpose, I’m saying that’s just the way our brains work. If I see memories are fabricated I’m not saying you’re lying, I’m saying your brain created the memories. Memories are really sketchy things, even just from this life. Look it up if you’re curious, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of experiments that show how false memories are made, or how unreliable memories are.

I have one piece of foundational advice regarding past life memories: Record everything, research nothing

Basically all my advice will stem from this.

Record everything. I know I’ve talked about the importance of magickal diaries before, and here it is no different. Record everything. I mean everything, every little meaningless piece of data in a memory, try to record it. As much as we want to focus on the narrative of the past life memory, the details are generally more important for verification.

Record the memory in a narrative form, this is what I remember and then I did this and then that happened. Note details, I often like recording them separate from the narrative, or in both sections, but the details are what I will come back to in order to verify. Sometimes with a past life memory there is a knowing that comes with it, you might not know enough about European cultures in history, but for some reason you know that this memory is in France, record those details. What senses did the memory come through? Record that. What sensations accompanied them memory here and now? Did your neck burn when you had the memory flash, did you get dizzy, did you blank out or did the memory run in the back of your head? Record that. Personally, the most important factor to me, but not everyone has the same strengths in memories, is try to pull out some words or names. If you can pull out words and names for languages/cultures you’re not familiar with that’s a great piece of data to verify.

Now that you’ve recorded everything, it’s time for step two: research nothing

Our first impulse is often to research the past life, to find evidence for or against it. Do not do that.

How much did you remember? Did you get an entire lifetime and all the associated information? I’ll go ahead and say no you didn’t. There is so much more to remember, and the moment you start to research it, you’ve tainted your memories, set yourself up for cryptomnesia, and made your memories harder to trust. You’re pretty sure that memory was middle ages in Ethiopia, but the moment you research it, even if you just want to verify one detail, anything else you read gets tucked into your brain and can get called out (falsely) with the next memory. You might have wanted to verify the buildings looked like you remembered, but you might have seen fashion, or read about a great building that was completed in that time, something. Something will get in and corrupt your memories. If you ever want to truly trust your memories, I repeat, research nothing.

I personally have past life memories around specific lives that I’ve been recording for a few years, and I haven’t researched yet. In fact in one of my more recent cases, I was watching an episode of X-Files, and their monster of the week came from the same time and culture I was remembering, so I turned it off. Yes it’s a fun fiction, and yes X-Files doesn’t have a good history of getting things right, but nonetheless I didn’t want that information getting wrapped up with my own.

The different elements of your memory that you record will help you verify your memories in different ways.

The narrative is what most people think of, but ironically it generally won’t be enough. You could have lived in Italy at the height of the Renaissance, but despite the way history romantically paints it, the Renaissance only really impacted the elite, less than one percent of the population was directly impacted by it. The life of an Italian cobbler at the height of the Renaissance would be nearly identical to the life of a cobbler a hundred years before. Unless your life was impacted by a major event, you probably won’t have enough to verify your life. Despite not being American, I’ll use an American example. All of us, American or otherwise, remember 9/11. An event like 9/11 would be past life gold, it’s a clear, hard to mistake, important event. If your four year old talks about being up high in a building and a plane coming, and the other building on fire…well…they might be onto something. The trouble is, as important as 9/11 was culturally, honestly it only directly impacted a very very small group of people: Those who saw it, those who lived it, those who died in it, maybe those who helped in the aftermath cleanup, and maybe people who lived nearby, even if they didn’t witness it, and maybe those who lost someone close. For the rest of us, it’s not really a memory we actually have, just what we know of. We might be affected by the aftermath, but not the event, so it’s unlikely we’d remember it next life around. It’s a great event for verification, but it honestly impacts so few people. That’s why we need to rely on more than just the narrative for information. Also the farther we go back, the less records there are. So you may very well have been the daughter of a wealthy Persian spice merchant, and you might have traveled the Silk Road having adventures, but chances are little to none of your history was recorded.

Get all the details you can.

Along with research nothing, another related piece of advice, is don’t reread your records. This might seem odd. These are your memories after all. Well…maybe… If you remember something false or wrong (by which I mean totally false, or a memory that you misunderstood), then if you reread your records you’re reintroducing that errant memory, reinforcing it, whereas if it was wrong in some way there is a chance that over time that memory will drop off, or be contradicted by a later memory. Also humans are storytellers, if you reread the memory of being a Greek sailor, the back of your brain might wonder what sailing adventures you had, and then the back of your brain starts storytelling to itself, grabbing appropriate stories you might have seen or read, and later on pulling up as memory. It seems unusual, but we can be the source of our own corruption to memory.

Where do you go from research nothing?

If possible, you go to a friend. A friend can do all the research they want, and unless they say too much, they won’t corrupt your memories. (Excluding something telepathic, but let’s keep this simple) Give them the names and words, the stories and the details, and send them off to the library or internet, and see what they can find.

Now it is up to you, you can either ask for no input, or maybe general verification, but don’t ask for details.

With one of my more recently emerging memories I toss details to a friend of mine on occasion. She has never given me more information than what I gave her, but she has told me when stuff seems to match. Yes, that’s a real name. Yes, something like that event happened. Yes, this makes sense. She hasn’t said “Yes, that’s a real name, turns out Jameel Singh was a farmer in…” No, she has just said “Yes, that’s a name.” Or in one case the “name” I gave her turned out to be a description or nickname, but that the nickname made sense for my memories.

This has been invaluable to me, it allows me to continue to let memories surface without worrying that they are being influenced, I can trust my memories are “clean” of outside influences. But it also lets me know there is something too these memories, that I’m not just storytelling to myself.

The reason I ask for yes/no verification is it helps me fine tune my memories. Remember above I said to record how you remember, and what happens? These meta-experiences of the memory can be helpful in vetting your memories. If every memory that has been verified has been accompanied by dry itchy eyes, then that implies that if you have that response it’s more likely to be a real memory than not. If all your memories come in the form of visual memories and are verified, but the memories which are more sound or knowledge base are discredited or can’t be confirmed, you know you’re better off trusting memories that are visual. We all have some quirk in the way we remember, both the way the memory is perceived, as well as our responses to it. By knowing what quirks are correlated with verified memories we learn where we can focus our attention and be more likely to get results.

Next I’ll talk about verifying memories that can’t be supported, dealing with memories that are both wrong and right and sorting that out, and other considerations.

Posted by kalagni
22
Sep
2018

Past Life Contamination and Cryptomnesia

The below is actually an old article I wrote. I can’t find the exact date, but I have another piece of writing referencing this nine years ago, so at least nine years old. It was written for a group I’m no longer a part of and used as an evaluation.

As much as I’ll tell people not to bother doing past life regressions, and to focus here and now, I can’t deny that past life memories are an important thing to me and my tradition. This was written to help address some of the common issues regarding the recall of past life memories.

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When dealing with the worlds of subtle perceptions, magick and the mind, a wise explorer seeks to be aware of the places where their results and perceptions can become contaminated. Memory, in several different ways, is one of the main culprits of contamination.

First off, there is the simple issue that despite what we’d like to believe, our memories are very flawed devices when it comes to the recall of our experiences. Anyone talking with a friend about the details of a specific event after the fact quickly becomes aware of it; different sentences were said, it was in a slightly different area, different people were also there, and a hundred other variations from what your memory says is correct.

This flaw in our memory applies as much to the subtle experiences as the “mundane” experiences, if not more. It is horribly easy, to talk to someone about an energy body reading a week later, and “remember” things that didn’t actually come up in the reading, but are now present. Someone mentions a stomach pain, and you “remember” getting a blip in the stomach, something that now relates to this new information. This isn’t a matter of being a liar, or easily mislead, but when you don’t have a concrete record, it is very easy for your mind to fill in the gaps with what you think should be there. Maybe you felt something over the stomach, just a flash, could have been a finger twitch, or a dozen little things, but it was so minor you ignored it. Now that someone mentions something important about the stomach your mind latches onto that almost nothing you sensed and builds on it.

A classic example of this flaw is to remember what you or someone else wore on your last birthday. You may not remember what you wore unless you have a reason to (someone making fun of it, spilling something on it and ruining it, etc.), but you know you wore something, so your mind will fill in the gaps through a complex process of memory and guesswork based on what your favourite outfits are, where you went to dinner, and many more variables. It isn’t your memory lying about what you wore, it is just supplying you with information that you ask for, even if it isn’t there or readily accessible.

The same thing goes for perceptions, hearing a piece of information after the fact, it is far too easy for the mind to fill it in for you. To prevent this, or minimize its effect, it is recommended that you use a journal for your experiences.

On a more complex level, there is cryptomnesia or misattribution. To put it bluntly and simply, the mind remembers information, but not necessarily the source of the information. Just as with the above memory issue, this isn’t a conscious or deliberate thing, it isn’t about lying to others or yourself, it is quite simply how the mind works. Everyone remembers things, but not always their source, how often have you said a quote, or a fact to a friend, only to blank on how you know it. Cryptomnesia (I’ll stick with referring to everything as cryptomnesia, even though it may occasionally be misattribution, strictly for ease of writing from this point on) takes this one step farther, as you search for the source of this knowledge, if it isn’t found your mind may generate the answer that it is self-generating. Put another way, if your mind can’t find the source of the knowledge you may attribute it to arising internally rather than learning it from outside.

If a parent was a war-buff and growing up you were constantly exposed, even in passing, to war movies, discussions of battles and weapons, all this information is potentially retained in your mind. Then at a later date when seeing a gun, or a battlefield you might remember the information from your childhood, but not the source. You might know what battle happened, maybe even see or hear flashes of it (from the movie), or know how to reload the gun, but you can’t say how you know. Since you know your parent has an interest in war, it is easy to trace that knowledge back to some vague point of your childhood, but what if it isn’t that easy?

Imagine now that as a kid you spent time in front of the TV, and in this case, perhaps you just wandered onto a station playing a war movie, or a documentary, and you watched it. In the same way, you can pick up the information, but lack the source, and you are far less likely to remember 10, 15, 20 years later that when you were 6 you watched a documentary on the Battle of Dieppe. In the future, whatever triggers the memory, another movie, a class in school, even just a sound, suddenly you’re remembering what happened at Dieppe, possibly in vivid movie-like detail. Now without knowing the source, you’re remembering the battle, on its own, it is possible that you would start to consider this flash a potential (or actual) past life memory.

Such a false memory can be triggered in the attempt to find a real memory as well. If you’re going through a past life regression, and for some reason, your mind latches onto the documentary, again you’ll pull up war images, assuming that you were there and that is the source of the memory.

Cryptomnesia applies to information, as well as events obviously, so you could remember a myth or a god, that you may have studied in elementary school, when you come across them in a dream, a vision or a book, and misunderstand your intuitive knowledge or resonance with them as something more meaningful than it is. Just as you might remember something and attribute it to a past life insight, when you remember something about a myth or deity you may attribute to having a connection to the deity, a good intuition, rather than a forgotten storybook from school.

You might remember the basics of the colonizing society of French Canada in the 18th Century from elementary school, but again, if drawn up from your memories without context, it isn’t impossible that your mind conscious or otherwise interprets it as a personal memory.

It is very difficult to rule out the possibility of cryptomnesia, but there are ways to try to prevent it which will be discussed in the next piece.

Posted by kalagni in blueflamemagick