Because we come here to live this life, not to remember the struggles, triumphs or horrors of the past.
The early years of each life are spent focusing on learning how to walk and talk and interact with others in a specific family, society and culture. If we were to have easy recall of all our past-life experiences, we would become so distracted by all the scenarios, traumas, romances, losses, wars, tragedies, difficult relationships and personalities we have experienced and witnessed that we would be completely unable to focus on what this life, here and now, is supposed to be about.
Imagine a sweet, little child with vivid memories of every event from his or her previous lives. Or imagine yourself as a newborn infant with perfect recall of every major trauma you have personally experienced or witnessed over a hundred lifetimes, such as —
drowning in a sinking ship;
being eaten alive by wild dogs;
going a drunken rampage and slaughtering innocent people;
being a teenage girl gang-raped by foreign soldiers;
killing a boy in front of his parents;
having to torture someone even though you knew he was innocent;
being an elderly priest with an insatiable sexual appetite;
being imprisoned, abused, beaten, and starved to death in a POW camp …
The thing is, it’s not the actual experiences that matter to us, but the lessons learned. After each life, the old personality is left behind as the soul absorbs any actual wisdom it can learn from its experiences. That wisdom is carried forward into future lives, not as explicit knowledge exactly, but more like a deep inner knowingness, or what we might call ‘instinct’ or ‘intuition’.
We begin each new life as dependent little infants. We have the unconscious biological instincts of our bodies and we have the accumulated wisdom of our soul, but our conscious mind is blank slate. While we don’t (usually) carry specific memories from life to life, we do carry wisdom at a superconscious level, and use it intuitively. The more we manifest our intuitive knowing, the more we are being true to who we are given our soul’s level of evolution.