– Photo by Jan Ketchel
In a separate reality, I was in a new school, small and simple. It was the first day of school. Another student and I were called to stand in the front of the class. We were being recognized for the papers we had written from a summer assignment. I was amazed, as the topic was science or engineering, something I hardly felt knowledgeable in.
I remembered to remember that my task was to remember. Remember people’s names, remember the layout of the school, how to get to the lunchroom, where to sit, the protocols around being served and eating. I was painfully shy, not wanting to stand out by making mistakes. The imperative was clear—remember everything so that you can smoothly fit in and navigate the school.
The evening before this dream journey I was back at The Training for Living Institute, remembering being hired as a promising prospect, though still a teenager. The layout began to materialize, the large pop art rendition of the TFL logo painted on the wall, encircled in bright colors. The spacious outer reception area with modern, comfortable chairs.
Amazingly, the names of my colleagues began to materialize as my focus opened the Akashic record of this earlier lifescape. My school dream was validating the importance of remembering, the key to retrieving all of what we are. What really is the challenge of remembering? And why do we ‘forget’ to begin with?
Children often remember their families from a prior life. Parents must quickly talk them out of it, lest they be identified for medication assessment. The truth is, however, that children do go on to forget because the main attraction is the life they are currently in, not past lives lived.
Remembering a past life is as valuable as an astrological chart. It explains the influence of indelible prior experiences and predicts future possibilities, but ultimately the action is in the free will choices of the current life.
We do not continue a prior life; we take up the issue of a prior life in a totally new context. We will meet incomplete challenges, which we might complete in this life. Future life will pick it up from there. Perhaps a life is an opportunity to pay forward the evolution of a greater life. And so, we forget past lives so that they don’t interfere with our current opportunities.
Of course, from the perspective of our greater wholeness in infinity, indeed, we must ultimately claim all of our lives. We must be able to handle the emotion of that integration as we bring together all of our varied adventures in infinity. This level of Enlightenment is generally the challenge upon leaving this life.
When the challenge is at this level of consolidation of our wholeness, we must be capable of radical acceptance of everything. This can only be accomplished with the most refined level of love for everyone and everything—with total equanimity. Until we are ready to love at this level, many memories must be anesthetized.
In trauma, the contents of an experience are separated from consciousness to protect the stability of the personality. These ‘forgotten’ experiences nonetheless include a portion of our vital energy. Thus, loss of memory, in this case, is loss of self.
Reliving a forgotten memory through recapitulation is a soul retrieval process that restores one’s lost vital energy. Key to this restoration is the ability to experience, release, and neutralize the emotions bound to the memory. The complete acceptance of self and other, as well as the circumstances of the memory, requires achieving the refined love of equanimity. If we can’t love every experience we have ever had, we are rejecting a part of our truth.
Morality has no value in acceptance. All that happened is valid because it happened. If we remain judgmental, we are not fully accepting of a part of ourselves and a part of our history. Our future lives will continue to reflect future attempts to reach total acceptance, as we relive new permutations of our unaccepted themes.
Thus, in the context of a current life, remembering the fullness of this life is essential to fully achieving the goal of the life one is in—to resolve the major theme and core issue of this life.
From the context of our greater Soul, in infinity, wholeness requires the remembering of all the lives, all the characters, all the partners and parents, all the loves, all the losses, all the supposed sins—all with total radical acceptance and total loving equanimity.
At the greater Soul level of acceptance, we must be ready for the big bang encounter with our fuller operating system, our multi-lived selves, at the time of transition into infinity. This might require extended time in purgatory bardos, as we slowly complete our cosmic recapitulation, resolving all of our lives and all of our issues. Remembering is the ticket to consolidation of our greater wholeness.
The order of challenge is to first remember and accept everything from the life we are in. With the wholeness of our current life achieved, it’s far easier, in infinity, to remember and accept every life lived. With this consolidation of cosmic Self, perhaps we approach the ultimate memory of oneness, with Source, the single being of everything and from which we all come.
Remembering to remember,
Chuck
