Osho on Past lives, Osho on Past life remembrance

Osho : 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. I

t 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