Children's Past Life Memories

Reincarnation and Memory

Children remember far more than we might ever imagine. Not just their recent postnatal past, but life in utero, past lives, life between lives, and the decision to reincarnate. Even at the very young age of two or three children can share memories with parents but their odd or precocious comments are often rationalized away as coincidence or confusion on the part of the child. 

We discount verbal references to "my other mother" or detailed knowledge about things the child just simply couldn't know, or off-hand  comments to parents saying they were "chosen" by the child while in heaven. Sadly, less benign memories such as how the child died in a previous life can cause extreme emotional reactions to loud noises like fireworks or recurring night terrors or unexplainable fears and phobias misunderstood as pathology by medical professionals to whom parents and caretakers turn. 

As adults we can access past life memories in a number of ways, including: regression, hypnosis, dreams, even unsettling and unexplainable waking visions. But young children's past life memories are much more immediate, vivid and spontaneous. 

Up to about the age of seven, children have the capacity to spontaneously remember previous experiences (physical and spiritual). But without language, the new-born or infant child cannot communicate their inner thoughts or memories.  Behaviors or tendencies and accelerated development might suggest an unspoken story.  Still, it is not until the child becomes verbal that they can speak in ways that often surprise and puzzle adults. 

Useful Resources

[Babies are often] barely old enough to find the words to express their memories, yet they make natural, unprompted, off-the-cuff revelations. Parents expect to hear simple baby chatter and are blindsided when their 2- and 3-year-old children begin to spout spiritual and philosophical concepts. If they listen closely, they may be gifted with their children's recollections which are often more precious than their first utterances.

The child is from birth far more aware of all kinds of physical events than is realized...[A]lso, the child uses the early years to explore--particularly in the dream state--other kinds of material that suit its own fancies and intents, and it constantly receives a stream of information...not at all dependent upon its heredity or environment.... [T]he child knows, for example, of its contemporaries born at about the same time. Each person's "individual" life plan fits in somewhere with that of his or her contemporaries.....

The Newborn: 

Straddling Two Worlds

In essence, we are spiritual beings living a physical existence. We’ve done it before. We will do it again. Children, even newborns, know this. Adults have simply forgotten. Perhaps we have forgotten too much. However, before the veil of forgetfulness descends, newborns and very young children find themselves in many respects living in two worlds. Two realities. Not fully in one or the other. And there is the spiritual interlude between each life (if experienced) which the child also can remember. 

The question that arises is "How can parents and caretakers guide children through their multidimensional beginning here on earth?"

How can we help the child navigate a journey that we ourselves have forgotten or perhaps vehemently reject as possible. Accepting as valid a child's prenatal or even preconception experiences may force parents and caretakers to suspend their own fundamental beliefs about reality, life and death, science, religion, consciousness, even the human capacity to align with a spiritual realm. It is no small task.

Brian Weiss,, MD is an early pioneer in past-life studies. He is a traditionally trained psychiatrist A graduate of Columbia University and Yale Medical School and Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. As a traditional by-the-book medical professional, Weiss was astonished and skeptical when a patient began recalling past-life traumas that seemed to hold the key to her recurring nightmares and anxiety attacks. This experience and many others to follow eroded Weiss's skepticism and put him on the path to profoundly new ways of treating patients and normalizing the practice of their treatment with past-life therapies. Other clinicians who came before and after Weiss's discoveries stumbled into the subject of past lives in just the same way, through unbiased treatment of patients. Weiss himself came to a new more intuitive way of understanding reality when he wrote these three simple words:

Experience Transcends Belief

To acknowledge and validate a child's very real memories and experiences, no matter how against the grain they may seem, requires a suspension of certain beliefs: unquestioned  or unexamined beliefs that we learned as children ourselves; religious dogmas,  basic assumptions (time is linear, the sky is blue); rigid social norms, fears of the unknown, beliefs about ourselves (good or bad) that blind us  to the extra-ordinary in every day life.

Let our children teach us as they help pull back the veil of our own forgetfulness.

Useful Resources

Why does the incarnated spirit lose the remembrance of his past?

Man cannot, and may not, know everything.... Without the veil which hides certain things from his view, man would be dazzled, like one who passes suddenly from darkness to light. Through the forgetfulness of his past a man is more fully himself.

[If your life is organized around a core belief] then this will automatically make you blind to experience that is not connected with it. A core belief [becomes] invisible...when you think of it as a fact of life and not a belief about life.

Throughout history, humankind has been resistant to change and to the acceptance of new ideas. Historical lore is replete with examples. When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter, the astronomers of that time refused to accept or even to look at these satellites because the existence of these moons conflicted with their accepted beliefs. So it is now with psychiatrists and other therapists, who refuse to examine and evaluate the considerable evidence being gathered about survival after bodily death and about past-life memories. Their eyes stay tightly shut.