Concern About Negative and Positive Past Life Memories

[NoddyTheDragon]

I suppose some folks would call me lucky to have a lot of memories from multiple past lives, but in all honesty I'm not so sure that the memories I have are a blessing or a curse.  The problem is that my negative memories are exquisitely detailed.  I can tell you what someone was wearing right down to the metal of their belt buckle in the negative memories.  But positive memories are more... emotional.  There's no real detail involved.  I know what happened but not much else.  This has me wondering why this is, and so I thought I'd bring this up here, since this is the Support and Advice forum and I am seeking advice here, or more specifically, I'm looking for answers.

I guess the main thing I need answered is whether or not this disparity in detail is normal.  Why can I remember every tiny detail in an extremely negative memory, but I find almost no details in positive ones?  It's bothered me for quite a few years now.  I've also noticed that my positive memories are only a recent development.  I originally Awakened in early 2009, and I think it was just within the last year or so that the first positive memory appeared to me.  I know these detail-less positive memories are memories, because they keep enduring in my mind and my soul won't let go of them.  It's this same endurance that helped me realize that my name is actually my real soul name and not just wishful thinking, and it's also this same endurance that has kept the negative memories firmly established as fact for me as well. 

Now, I was very badly abused as a child, and I was conditioned from an early age to only focus on the bad things in life.  I am aware that such constant negativity can have an adverse effect on my life, and if that is what's going on here (or if there's more to it than just that), I want to know about it so I can deal with it.  And if you don't know outright, do you know of a way I can find out?

Thanks in advance.


~Inanna

[Deebles]

(I know I'm rather late, sorry.)
This is a perfectly normal phenomenon and is based on one simple thing: you are more likely to survive if you remember things that threatened your survival. If a snake bites you and makes you ill from its venom, it's beneficial to have the ability to remember that illness and avoid that snake.

Unfortunately while this is a biological advantage, it means you'll stay up until 3 AM beating yourself up for something dumb you said 20 years ago but you won't recall the song that played 20 minutes ago. This seems to transfer to past life recollection as well; my first two memories were a near death experience and a death experience.

This also colors childhood recollection. I do not intend to lessen your position but it's easy to remember your dad losing it out of nowhere and punishing you for no reason. It's harder to recall that actually it was not a random assault, you had been badgering him for hours and he got tired of polite, gentle corrections. I am not attempting to dismiss your experience, merely point out that your brain will only readily recall the sting of the snake bite, and won't bother reminding you that technically you poked it with a sharp stick first. It is only useful to remember that X is dangerous, fear and avoid X.

There's not much you can do about this other than make a conscious effort to experience and recall positive events and dismiss negativity from your mind. It'll never go away but you can train your brain to change its focus.

Good luck!

[CrystalisRC]

it is discussions like these that go un noticed that the project was revived to begin with

keep up the good work rebuilding the archives and discussions

(I'm just enthusiastic a little...but it warms my heart to see such positive reinforcement)

[Rakeela]

I have a similar issue.  Negative past life memories are clear, positive past life memories are not.  What I usually do is I build approximations of the positive memories.  I load them up repeatedly and try to expand on them creatively, even a little recklessly, aware that I'm adding details that may fall away later in contradiction.  From the point of view of anyone on earth I'm just writing fiction either way; it's only from my point of view that the memories can be more or less true.  I find that I value the imperfectly detailed versions of the positive memories more than I value the sense of perfect truth from the undetailed versions that lodged more naturally in memory.

It's been the work of years to reconstruct some of these ideas, but sometimes the feel of memories will flare and crystalize, sealing in portions of the added detail, and unlocking new vague memories between the corrected details.  That recently lead me to realize that something I was heavily involved in dragonside is not actually out of reach, earthside.  There are rewards to exercises of pervasive affinity.  Survival demands focus on the negative, but oh, we do all long to move beyond the crass demands of mere survival!