What past lives are for.

(Note: This article was originally published December 6, 2016)

What past lives are for.

by Sara Dechen Lhamo

 

 

I thought I would write this article on what past lives are pragmatically useful for, in the context of spiritual training. Specifically I am writing this from a Buddhist perspective, but presumably since these experiences are universal, this would be just as useful to any spiritual trainee, regardless of tradition. The reason I am writing this, is because I’ve often seen, especially in Buddhist circles, the question of “why should I believe in past lives?” And/or “what practical use is it for? This teaching?" Indeed, it is perfectly true that one can go years, a lifetime even, without having any past lives come up, and do perfectly good training. In fact, I’ve known many monks who have done so in just that way.

However, there IS a point, to past lives, and for those of us who have had them come up, they can be an invaluable aspect to our training.

The purpose of past lives, is to show us WHY we are suffering, and *what* specifically happened, so that we can learn not to repeat it again. This is *very* important, because what most people don’t realize who are doing spiritual training (even for many years) is the mistakes we make, we tend to make over, and over again, from life to life. In a sense, what we do is oscillate back and forth between opposite reactions and extremes. Going from one extreme of one bad habit to the opposite other extreme, and back and forth again from life to life.

The *reason* why seeing past lives is important, and why it’s *very* helpful to us in spiritual training, is because it allows us to get a glimpse into this larger pattern that we have done, over life to life. This allows us an incredible key, a key insight that allows us to then see a larger, macro middle path if you will, that allow us to notice that when we engage in certain behaviors, we are engaging in a pattern similar to what we have done before, and that by doing so, we are starting to swing the pendulum from one side to the other again.

In my own life, this has been extraordinarily helpful. It has allowed me to see insights into behaviors, fears, and tendencies that I normally would not have seen, and start to “get the larger picture of things." In a sense, it opens up our memory to not just this life, but to others as well, which allows us to see that we are much older beings than we imagined.

Part of why, this life is considered like a dream state, is because each life we go through, is not separate. They are really one life. Death as we know it is really just like going through a sleep/wake cycle that we do every night. Only its like every day, we wake up with amnesia of the previous day. As though we are trapped in the movie Groundhog Day.

When we start to experience previous lives, it is the same as though we start to remember what we did yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that. When we start to see the longer term picture, it allows us a perspective on our own lives, and we can see that the consequences of our actions effect us not only in the immediate future, but also years and lifetimes down the road. I can say with personal experiences, that intense, deep sufferings that I had, were not caused in this life. And when I experienced this, and saw that much older cause, it amazingly opened up a wider view.

One of the perspectives of this, is it takes away a victim view. As we come more and more to see that we ourselves are responsible for many of our own circumstances, (due to our choices in previous lives), what remains is not blame of other people, but rather compassion for them, humility, and a deep desire to train to root out the habits and klesha that caused us to do those choices in the first place. We begin to see, that “Wow, I really was an ass, in that life, and that anger carried forward and caused me to continue to make angry choices in this life, and that’s effected me here, and that’s why this situation with this specific person went down the way it did, because I was an jerk and was perpetuating a karma from a previous life that had nothing to do with this present situation."

We learn that a lot of our negative emotional states, really have nothing to do with this life at all. And are simply perpetuated habit energy left over from conflicts, choices, and confusions from previous lives. And this is incredibly liberating. Because it means, by seeing it, and understanding it, we can do something about it. And prevent it from happening again, not only in this life, but in future lives as well. Which really, are all just the same life. Just with different bodies.

So why the amnesia? Why don’t we just remember the previous life at birth? Well some of us do. Actually I know some people who have very good recall of their previous existences, beings we might call “very old souls”. Also many children remember their previous lives better. But for most of us, the reason has to do with kindness. As we become spiritually older beings, (learning and gaining wisdom and experience from life to life) we do start to remember such things more. However, the reason why we don’t remember them so easily at first, is because if we did, we would have an unfortunate tendency to want to repeat the same mistakes again, and try to re-live the circumstances of the previous birth.

And the problem with that, is so many of our tendencies are pure ignorance and fear-based confusion. Forgetting the specific circumstances of our previous lives until we’re ready to remember them, helps us experience those same bad habits in different circumstances, without understanding why we do them. This helps us see that these habits are problematic and don’t really work. Over lifetimes, life after life, we learn and realize that certain kinds of things, just ultimately don’t get us what we really want. They don’t bring us true and lasting happiness.

This gets back to the pendulum. Over time, as we learn and spiritually age, what tends to happen is as we swing back and forth between extremes, eventually we start to back it off a bit in how extreme we swing it. We realize, “going that far with it, really led me to suffering and hurt, so I won’t go that far this time, I’ll just go a little less far, but still indulge it.” Of course, this doesn’t work either, and we learn that indulging those bad habits still causes us suffering and to be dissatisfied.

So the next life we back it off a little more, and a little more. Eventually, we come to stop doing the same things very much at all. And especially, if we are actively engaging in spiritual practice and training, we can greatly accelerate this learning process, in effect, doing lifetimes of training in a single life, gaining huge amounts of wisdom and experience in a very short time. Eventually this leads to Buddhahood, or us evolving into very spiritually advanced beings, such as great Bodhisattvas. This is actually the meaning of the Buddhist symbol Unalome:  

Where the spiral at the bottom represents the aspect of our lives where we spiraled away from harmony with the Eternal; the middle section representing where we have finally had enough and are spiritually training, (yet still oscillating between extremes); and the final section where we are coming back into harmony with the Eternal, leading to full Buddhahood.
 
-A side effect of this also, is that as we stop indulging these habit energies, we become much happier! And much more at peace. Much more centered and at tune with the universe. And so real joy can start to develop, or and real peace and freedom from fear. We start to see, in effect what fools we’ve been, and start to act more sensible! And this is one of the great effects of this.

I will add one note before I end this. And that is that NOT experiencing past lives in one’s spiritual training, is not an indicator of poor spiritual training. In fact, one can be doing SUPERB spiritual training, and never experience this. I know personally many monastics who have been training for over 30 years in a monastic environment. Some of those monastics have had some or many past lives come up over the years, and have talked about them. Others, have had none, and yet are considered some of the most respected monks and nuns in the monastery. If someone does NOT have such experiences come up, they should not take it as an indicator that they are doing bad Buddhist, or otherwise spiritual training. It should just be understood that these things can and do come up with people, and they can be invaluable to spiritual training when and if they do.

So I hope this has been helpful in explaining a little bit about the point of past lives, and what they are useful for, in a pragmatic sense, in spiritual training. I hope you all have enjoyed this, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions that I can.

Homage to the Buddha,

Homage to the Dharma,

Homage to the Sangha.

-Sara  




© 2019, Sara Dechen Lhamo