Recapitulation - Remembering Past Lives

Image by Owensart from Pixabay

According to Carlos Castaneda, through the shamanic technique of recapitulation, this is possible. In recapitulation you spend months, even years, systematically remembering everything you did in life, everyone you met. Of course nowadays with our busy lives this is harder to do, so remembering at least the important impressionable and meaningful events in full detail is demanded. The idea being, that by doing so you create a copy of your life, so that at death when your original set of memories dissolve back into the universe as supposedly happens, you still get to keep this copy.

What recapitulation may do is transfer memories to a part of you that survives death, rather than the part that is dissolved by death. Kind of like creating a printout of documents so that when the hard drive gets wiped out you still have something.

Why learn all this knowledge just to lose it? Well, the thing is this — anything you truly learn, you don’t forget. In fact, it’s not that you “remember” it anymore so much as it’s lodged so deep within you that it becomes you. In the next life, this could manifest as a knowingness that you don’t know how you know, you just do. It means that if you did have to learn again next life, it would be very quick because you’d merely be reminded of what you already know subconsciously rather than having to go through trials and pains to get it stamped into your soul as with new lessons. Amnesia is a true filter between separating what is superfluous and what is universally important. That’s why we don’t remember how to do math, how to speak a particular language, or how to drive a car necessarily because these are mechanical programs that disappear with the death of the physical memory system (brain, body, etc.). However, those soul aspects of it, like say the love and appreciation of mathematical beauty, the enthusiasm for a particular language, that alone can carry over into the next life and form the impulses to pick those up again.

Neither is always fully a good thing. With amnesia does come repeating mistakes, wasting time learning superfluous things over again. But with full memory… ha, ever notice a lot of people in their 60s and 70s who are just drained from life and bitter and crotchety? Imagine if they were to keep that state permanently. For those kinds of people, maybe getting the crud wiped out before next birth is a good thing. On the other hand, if you are a higher soul here on a mission, then remembering and staying true to your True self is absolutely important… therefore I’d say it depends on the individual, whether it’s more positive than not or vice versa to have the amnesia upon incarnating.