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.