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Part V : Osho’s experiences with people remembering Past
Lives
Nature has a beautiful arrangement: with each death, a thick
layer of forgetfulness comes over your memories. You are carrying
all the memories of all your lives. But a small human being finds
it so difficult to live with a small conscious mind of one life - if
so many lives burst upon him, he is bound to be insane. It is
a natural protection.
It happened....
I was in Jabalpur and a girl was brought to me. She must have
been, at that time, nine years of age. She remembered her past
life completely - so realistically that it was not a memory
for her, it was a continuity. It was just some accidental error
in nature that there was no barrier between the past life and
this life.
There is a place just eighty miles away from Jabalpur, Katni.
She was born in Katni and she remembered that she had her family
in Jabulpur. She remembered the names, she remembered her husband,
she remembered her sons, the house - she remembered everything.
One of my friends brought them to me.
I said, "This is strange, because the people she is remembering
are living just three or four blocks away from my house."
They had a petrol pump, so I used to go for petrol at their petrol
pump every day. But I said, "You wait. You wait in my house
and I will call them - the Pathak brothers - I will call
them and we will see whether this girl remembers them or not."
So they came with their servants and a few other neighbors. There
were twelve, thirteen people in the crowd, so that they could
see whether she could find out.... She immediately jumped,
and said, "Brother, have you recognized me or not?"
She caught hold of both brothers, among thirteen people, and she
inquired about the mother and the children...and father had
died, and she was crying. It was not a memory, it was a continuity.
They took her to their home and then it was a problem: the girl
was torn apart about whether to go to this family's house in Jabalpur
and live there, or to go back to Katni to the new family where
she had been born.
Of course, in this family she had lived for seventy years, so
the pull was more towards the past-life family. And in the new
family she had been born only nine years before; there was no
pull - but that was her family, her real family. This other
family was only a memory, but to her, it was such a heart-rending
problem.
And both the families were disturbed about what to do: if she
remained in Jabalpur, she would remember the other family continuously,
worry about what was happening to them and feel, "I want
to go there." If she was there, she would be thinking that
she wanted to be in Jabalpur.
Finally I suggested that the only way - it was a freak case,
there was nothing spiritual in it - was that she needed a
deep hypnosis for a few days, so the barrier could be created.
She had to be hypnotized to forget the old and the past. Unless
she could forget the past, her whole life was going to be a misery.
Both families were ready to accept that something had to be done.
She was hypnotized continually for at least ten days, to forget.
It took ten sessions to create a small barrier so that the old
life's memories didn't float into the new life.
I have been inquiring about her. She is now perfectly okay - married,
has children, has forgotten completely. Even when those people
come to see her, she does not recognize them. But her barrier
is very thin and artificial. Any accident, and the barrier could
be broken, or any hypnotist could break it very easily within
ten sessions; or some great shock, and the barrier could be broken.
There is no need for you to remember. It is perfectly good.
We have to get free from the mind.
The East has known all the layers of the mind, but the East has
emphasized a totally different aspect than the West: ignore it - you
are the pure consciousness behind all these layers.
Western psychology is just childish, just born at the end of the
last century. It is not even a hundred years old. They have taken
up the desire to enter into dreams and to find out, to dig deeper
into what is there in the mind.
There is nothing. You will find more and more memories, more and
more dreams, and you will destroy the person because you will
make him vulnerable to an unnecessary burden which has to be erased.
One has to go beyond mind, not within the mind.
And you don't have any memory as far as the state of beyond mind
is concerned.
Just drop the idea of the mind. Don't meddle with it; it is getting
into an unnecessary trouble and nightmare. You have to surpass
the mind, you have to transcend the mind.
Your whole effort should be one-pointed, and that is how to be
a no-mind: no dreams, no memories, no experiences.
Then you are at the very center of your being.
Only then do you taste something of immortality. Only then, for
the first time, do you know what intelligence is. enligh08
Let me tell you of an incident so that what I am saying becomes
clear to you. For about two or three years, in respect to meditation,
a lady professor stayed in touch with me. She was very insistent
on experimenting with jati-smaran, on learning about her past
life. I helped her with the experiment; however, I also advised
her that it would be better if she didn't do the experiment until
her meditation was fully developed, otherwise it could be dangerous.
As it is, a single life's memories are difficult to bear - should
the memories of the past three or four lives break the barrier
and flood in, a person can go mad. That's why nature has planned
it so we go on forgetting the past. Nature has given us a greater
ability to forget more than you can remember, so that your mind
does not have a greater burden than it can carry. A heavy burden
can be borne only after the capacity of your mind has increased,
and trouble begins when the weight of these memories falls on
you before this capacity has been raised. But she remained persistent.
She paid no heed to my advice and went into the experiment.
When the flood of her past life's memory finally burst upon her,
she came running to me around two o'clock in the morning. She
was a real mess; she was in great distress. She said, "Somehow
this has got to stop. I don't ever want to look at that side of
things." But it is not so easy to stop the tide of memory
once it has broken loose. It is very difficult to shut the door
once it crashes down - the door does not simply open, it breaks
open. It took about fifteen days - only then did the wave
of memories stop. What was the problem?
This lady used to claim that she was very pious, a woman of
impeccable character. When she encountered the memory of her past
life, when she was a prostitute, and the scenes of her prostitution
began to emerge, her whole being was shaken. Her whole morality
of this life was disturbed.
In this sort of revelation, it is not as if the visions belong
to someone else - the same woman who claimed to be chaste
now saw herself as a prostitute. It often happens that someone
who was a prostitute in a past life becomes deeply virtuous in
the next; it is a reaction to the suffering of the past life.
It is the memory of the pain and the hurt of the previous life
that turns her into a chaste woman....
Their interests and attitudes, so totally opposite each other's,
so totally different from each other's, had completely changed.
This often happens - and there are laws at work behind these
happenings.
So when the memory of her past life came back to this lady professor,
she was very hurt. She felt hurt because her ego was shattered.
What she learned about her past life shook her, and now she wanted
to forget it. I had warned her in the first place not to recall
her past life without sufficient preparation. now02
Nowadays...no one has the desire to probe into the secret
memories of past lives. If any of my friends wish to carry on
experiments of this nature I am willing to guide them. I give
my word that at a signal from any of them I am ready for such
experimentation. If anyone comes forward it will make me very
happy.
Only yesterday I received a few letters from friends saying
they were ready, that they were waiting to be called. Now that
the call has come I trust they are prepared to come forward. I
am ready to guide them on the path of exploration into the past.
I will accompany them as far as they want to go. At this stage
of the world's progress and development, we badly need people
who possess this ability. If only a few men can attain to this
knowledge I am certain we can remove the darkness that is so quickly
enveloping the whole world. long05
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