magickal diary

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.