Many of you are curious and very excited to know about your past. It’s not difficult to find out what you were before. Initially, don’t go to previous lives. Instead, you can easily find out what were you when you were five or six years of age. There is a big difference between what you were in your childhood and who are you today. I am not talking about regression. That is not the right way.
Yogis can know about their past births by systematically going to the bed of memories in the unconscious and by finally directly perceiving those impressions that are the source of motivation to come to this world. When you leave this world, you leave with certain unfulfilled desires. When you go to the unconscious and come in touch with those impressions that were the real motivation for you to come forward in this life, you can easily find out what you were in your past births. But why do you want to waste your time to know what you were before? If you come to know something about your past, how is it going to help you? This is why religious scriptures do not lead the student toward knowledge of past births. It would be better to use your time in what you want to become in the future.
When you go to sleep you go with certain unfulfilled desires. The next day, you wake up with those same desires and again you start to think about fulfilling those desires. You try to fulfill those desires in the daytime and again go to sleep. This has been going on for many centuries. When you die you still have certain desires to fulfill, and so you come back. Those desires again become motivation for you to return.
You will never be able to successfully do something for which you have not come, and you cannot continue to do something for a long time if you were not prepared to do that. Many people are not successful in what they are doing because they are not doing what they were meant to do. To educate a child, you should study the child’s particular tendencies. Are they learning those habits from the external world, or are those habits based on past impressions and memories? Don’t believe that anybody else is responsible for forcing you to come to this world or to go to another world; similarly, no one forces you to go to hell or to heaven. These are your own mental concepts. Each individual is fully responsible as they are the architect of this life and of their future life. One who studies and thus becomes aware of this will get freedom from the bondage of karma.
Reprinted from “Samyama the Power of Self-Transformation” by Swami Rama