Past lives can be easily invalidated because, without processing, it is difficult to remember them. An individual’s own will has a great deal to do with this. One should not look for outside sources as to why his memory is shut off. Just as he must grant permission to be trapped, so must he grant permission to be made to remember. He is more or less convinced that a memory, remembering back past this subject called death, would cause him to reexperience the pain he already feels has been too much for him. Thus he is very reluctant to face up again to this mechanism, and in facing death almost always goes into a degree of amnesia.
Now, it is all very well to take a scientific attitude towards death, but after all it does carry with it a little shock and upset. Until you have been dead a few times you wouldn’t understand how upsetting it can be!
We are actually indebted for a considerable amount of our material on this subject to the odd fact that I have been officially dead twice in this lifetime. I died in an operation one time back in the 1930s, and went outside above the street, felt sorry for myself and decided they couldn’t do this to me. The body’s heart had stopped beating, and I went back and grabbed the body through the mechanisms in the head that stimulate its heartbeats. I just took hold of them and snapped the body back to life.
The only reason I mention this is because it happens to so many people and they never mention it. They die and come back to life again. Then somebody invalidates them, and they never say anything about it again. Ordinarily when a person dies, he backs out of his body thinking of his responsibilities, knowing who he is, where he has been and what he has been doing. If he is in any kind of condition at all this is what occurs. He backs out at the moment of death with full memory.
Something kills a person’s body—an automobile, too many court suits, an overdose of widely advertised sleep-producing agents. The moment he conceives it to be no longer functional in any way, he backs out. Usually a total occlusion does not occur at this point.
It is not true that a thetan gets some distance from the body and then doesn’t care about it anymore or forgets all about it. In support of this, incidents have been recorded of times when a thetan backed out of his head and was as mad as the dickens and just kicked the stuffings out of the fellow who had killed him. This made the whole theory of spirits very unpopular. People tried to forget this, so that when they ran around killing people they would get no immediate kickback. Some people would want to forget about it, thinking that in this way they could commit a crime without having to suffer for it.
Man has capitalized on the phenomena surrounding death enormously. Look around in any neighborhood—you will find that if there is any building which is well kept, it is normally an undertaking parlor. Why is it easy to capitalize on death?
Because when people think of death they think of loss and grab something.
This explains the behavior of relatives after one of their family has died. Everybody gets in there and tears apart all of the person’s clothes and they fight with each other over the possessions. They are still alive, but they have experienced a loss of havingness and they pore over this particular person’s effects. They are really to some degree trying to get the person back. They think if they can grab enough possessions, they will get the person back. It actually is not quite as greedy as it looks, it is just obsessive.
I have seen relatives, for instance, pick up some of the weirdest things. I once saw an old lady just screaming over the fact that someone wouldn’t let her have a fellow’s meerschaum pipe. I pointed out to her that she didn’t smoke a meerschaum pipe, and she looked at me sort of dazedly and came out of it and said, “So I don’t,” and handed it to somebody else. It was a token, a symbol of the person who had just left.
