Who or What Experiences the Growth of Consciousness Through the Process of Rebirth and the Evolution of Forms and of Consciousness?

There are quite a few anecdotes and statements by individuals about remembering past lives, and there is an entire field of study dealing with what is called ‘past life regression therapy’. Some of the more intriguing incidents involve young people who can describe a village in some distant land, and even recognise or speak in a language they have not learned in this lifetime. There is some amount of uncertainty as to whether this is evidence of an actual past life experience, or possibly an alternative such as accessing what some call the “akashic record” that records all events through time and which, when accessed, can open up past, present and future since in the field of consciousness the ‘three times’ are all concurrent and present. The theory of relativity lends credence to the idea that time is elastic and changes based on speed of movement, for instance. Other explanations that science puts forward, such as multiple universes that interweave with one another and portals that may allow for information to pass that seems to be past life experience but is actually a form of tapping into another line of experience. 

Regardless of whether memory of past lives, including those prior to the human incarnation, is possible, or not, it must be acknowledged that this does not represent proof, one way or the other, of the process of rebirth! Many sages, seers and philosophers throughout the world have pointed out that the soul, when it leaves the body, leaves behind eventually the individual personality, the mental and vital development and the ego personality; thus, it is stripped of the lifetime of actual memories and experiences, and carries the essence of its maturation process in the psychic being, or soul entity however it is called.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead outlines the stages of separation of the soul from the body, the life-energy and the mind, and its subsequent process of choosing its next birth distinct and separate from its prior life experience. Other traditions also hold that there is a complete break, with the concept that the stream of consciousness flows but it is not connected to a particular individual ego. It leads to the question of “who am I” that is supposed to be connected to a specific past birth.

The Mother writes: ”There are people — there used to be and there still are, I believe — who say they remember their past lives and recount what happened when they were dogs or elephants or monkeys, and tell you stories in great detail about what happened to them. I am not going to argue with them, but anyway this illustrates the fact that before being a man, one could have been a monkey — perhaps one doesn’t have the power to remember it, that’s another matter — but certainly, this inner divine spark has passed through successive forms in order to become more and more conscious of itself. And if it is proved that one can remember the form one had before becoming a psychic being as it is found in the human form, well, one might very well recollect climbing trees and eating coconuts and even playing all sorts of tricks on the traveller passing beneath!”

“In any case, the fact is there. Perhaps later we shall see that a certain state of inner organisation is necessary for this psychic being to be able to have memories in the way the mental being has them — we shall speak about it later, when we come to it in the book — but in any case the fact is established: it is this double movement of evolution intersecting and complementing itself which gives the utmost possibilities of realisation to the divine light within each being. This is what Sri Aurobindo has explained. (Turning to the child) This means that in your outer body you belong to the animal species in the course of becoming a supramental species — you are not that yet! but within you there’s a psychic being which has already lived in many, many, countless species before and carries an experience of thousands of years within you, and which will continue while your human body remains human and finally decomposes.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pp. 218-219