I would personally love to know who I was in my past incarnation. That’s if you believe in reincarnation. Since I’m more convinced about the concept of reincarnation than any of the other options, I presume I lived as someone else before this lifetime. I base this theory on my research into historical texts on the subject.
The Vedas are the ancient Sanskrit texts that tell the stories of great kings and mystics who lived in previous ages, which we would call pre-history. They talk not only of pastimes that occurred a few thousand years ago, but also of mythic legends going back hundreds of thousands of years. These tales include interaction with beings from other planets, extraterrestrials.
There are volumes of texts, like the Bhagavat Purana for example, an 18000 verse narration of the histories of the Ayran civilization that existed in a land called Bharat, way before the dawn of what we today call India. In fact Bharat was alleged to have encompassed most of the entire planet, with only a few forest tribes living outside its domain. At that time there was one king who ruled the entire place, so the concept of a global empire is not new.
We hardly know our planetary history beyond two thousand years actually, or perhaps a little more. But anything before 2500 years ago is only a rumor or speculation. The Greeks and Egyptians have left monuments and writings, and they give us some perspective of our past. The Persians and other cultures also have their history, but the Vedas go back even further into the mists of time.
The Vedas themselves allude to a time 5000 years into the past, where the kingdom of Bharat encompassed the planet, for the most part. But even more than that, there are pastimes of previous “Yugas” or epochs in history that apparently go back hundreds of thousands of years. At first this may sound absurd to us, but that’s only because we were raised in the west, with nothing more than fossils and carbon dated archaeological findings.
Also we were hobbled in the past centuries by the Christian church, who were convinced that the planet was only a few thousand years old and that the Creation legend of Genesis in the Bible, took place a few thousand years ago. Scientists now know that the planet goes back millions of years and life goes back perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, based on the limited scientific understanding we currently have.
Even on the shores of India today, there are archaeological ruins underwater just offshore, on the north west coast, near Dwaraka, that appear to be the ruins of an earlier civilization. Besides all that though, the legends talk of an advanced civilization living hundreds of thousands of years in the past. This would make sense if we consider the cyclic ice ages that occur every 12000 years or so.
These ice ages may cover past cultures so that when the ice thaws, the civilizations left do not remember their ancient past at all, and have to almost begin afresh. We can speculate, or piece together scientific findings, and we can also refer to the ancient texts for reference. Whether you take them as literal, or as vague references to an actual civilization or perhaps merely as mythology, still there is a lot to be gained from the ancient Sanskrit texts like Bhagavat Purana, Ramayana and others.
In these texts there are narrations of great kings and mystics who lived vastly extended lifespans. They also tell pastimes of people who died and reincarnated several times, as different people. Some of them remembered their past lives and some did not. But their journey continued into many lifetimes, which were like chapters in a long biography.
Ultimately we simply do not remember a time before this life, so today we can only speculate. There have been rare anomalies of people who have had some sort of recollection, but this is one in a billion. So we may only ever be able to speculate on the concept of having lived before and reincarnated.
Still, the Vedas go into detail about how this is going on all the time. And they tell the pastimes of great people who went through this very process of reincarnation. I personally feel that we have our ancestral genetic make-up that carries memory in our DNA. But more than that, I believe that I’m an eternal soul, who has lived in previous lives, and that my memory thereof is stored in my subtle body.
In theory we all have our previous lives stored in our astral body as memories, and a rare few may be able to glimpse these memories in dreams or visions. However, we don’t want to speculate or romanticize the concept too much, thinking perhaps that we were some great hero of sorts. That concept has little foundation.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to contemplate because it does lead our minds to perceive ourselves as someone greater than this current temporary body and identity. And that in itself is enough to broaden our concept of reality, as well as our understanding of ourselves outside of the box of this human frame.
Have you had any instinctive intuition regarding your identity beyond this current body and personality? Let us know in the comments so that we can hear some interesting insights. After all, the Vedas talk about it extensively, so there may well be more to it than we realize.
(image pixabay)