Past Lives 
Key to The Life You Now Live

"Have we had  Past Lives, in other words, have we lived a life before the one we are currently living?  And if we have indeed had past lives, what purpose have they served?"

While we are in the midst of the day-to-day routine of life -- going to work, paying our bills, socializing with friends -- we tend to overlook the fact that there is a great deal of mystery about our lives that we just don't question. We rely on science to explain many aspects of the unseen facts which shape our lives, such as the law of gravity, yet some of the factors which affect us greatly cannot be measured or evaluated by  traditional scientific means. They have thus been overlooked or ignored. However, overlooking our past lives may not be in our best interest, particularly if we are interested in our spiritual growth.

Many of the world’s foremost religions cite reincarnation as a fundamental aspect of human existence. This is the belief that each person is actually a soul within a physical body, and each soul has had many incarnations in the past and will continue to live many more lives. Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu religions revolve around this theory. Each of these religions views a human lifetime primarily as an opportunity to evolve spiritually. Judaism also includes the concept of past lives within its theory of Gilgul, the belief that the soul passes to another body after death. While the Bible neither upholds nor denies the concept of past lives, eminent scholar Emmet Fox surmises that this is due to the Bible’s foremost focus on inspiring people to concentrate strongly on doing their spiritual work in this lifetime. According to Fox, past lives and reincarnation is a solid fact which, when understood, can relieve us of the enormous pressure of believing that we will stop progressing and growing, and will even cease to exist when our current life ends. 

       How can past lives influence current lives? Fox suggests that a potentially negative way that past lives could affect us would be to cause people to sentamentalize over the past, longing for days gone by, not living in the present. He surmises that this is the reason why there exists a veil of amnesia between lives. However, when we reach a stage of spiritual growth where we are able to view ourselves and our growth in a detached way, past life information can be quite helpful. Researchers have found that the talents that we have developed in past lives stay with us. Exploring past lives can uncover talents and abilities that we may not have noticed within ourselves. We begin to glimpse a greater variety of opportunites for growth.

Likewise, our personal characteristics and our belief systems are often rooted in past lives and can continue to influence our choices. Understanding that these aspects of ourselves are not inherent to our core, but are patterns developed through many lifetimes of holding similar focus and making similar choices, can bring a sense of empowerment as we realize we can now begin to choose differently.  A study done in 1982 revealed that over 90% of people who used past life therapy experienced improvements in fears, physical ailments, and relationships. Understanding that we have lived many times before can also end the deeply rooted fear of death that most people hold in their subconscious.

       Past lives have been explored through various methods. Cayce went into a trance state and gave readings for his clients of their past incarnations. Therapists today often regress clients through hypnosis, until they begin to perceive aspects of previous lives. Researchers suggest building up the ability to recall dreams by taking 5 mg of zinc daily or by writing down remembered details upon awakening, as aspects of past lives can surface in the dreamstate. A Buddhist-based meditation for recalling past lives consists of watching one’s own face in the mirror in darkened room, lit with two candles placed out of the mirror’s range. You attempt not to blink, concentrating on watching your reflection. After several minutes of this, the face may begin to alter and change and take on a successive variety of appearances. For some people, this may be accompanied by internally received information about the faces they are seeing. Technological advancements continually improve our abilities to receive information in this field, such as computer software that uses information from our astrological chart to explore and explain characteristics rooted in past lives. All of these methods allow us as individuals to delve deeply into an area that traditional scientific research cannot yet reach, empowering us by revealing more of who we are.