Tapping past lives is much in vogue, especially in California. Since the proposition cannot be disproved, the claimant's wax poetic. All the past lives are invariably romantic or impressive - they lived in interesting times, in elegant surroundings, and were always hale and hearty, intelligent, and attractive. Although the vast number of past lives on Earth were marked by struggle for health, with broken teeth, missing or maimed limbs, and the health problems that plague mankind today present in the extreme - the past lives trotted forth all seem to involve health and even vibrant health. Where all but perhaps 5% of the world's populace is of average or dull intelligence, the past lives claimed invariably involve stations in life which would require a relatively high IQ. And where most of mankind's history has gone down ignominiously and unrecorded, past lives published seem to all be placed smack in the center of either momentous historical times or well-recorded historical times. What is going on here? Are these past lives remembered simply fiction or are the memories selective?
Humans delving into their past lives face many hurtles. The human form has no memory of past lives, and the spirit has difficulty speaking to the mind about matters it has no concept of. Concept building, in the small child or the adult, is a step by step process. Complex concepts are built from many small ones, and where the small concepts do not exist the way is blocked. Past lives are a leap into history recorded nowhere on Earth - living conditions, cultures and traditions, and physical appearance all beyond the imagination of humans alive today. A past life spent as a cave-man, where the diet consisted of bugs and worms and even on desperate occasions of the feces of herbivores, would not be remembered. Thus, past lives remembered do tend to fit into written history. Add to this selective memory the human tendency to deny unpleasantness. A past life where the human was ugly and behaved atrociously would likely not be given center stage, and past lives that passed the minimum acceptance criteria are pruned and amended by humans remembering them just as they have selective memory about their current incarnation.
Past lives are most often remembered by subtle message the soul gives to the current incarnation, the body. If the soul is strongly into integrating, fixing past mistakes, it may be firm during these messages, so the human has no rest until they are in sync and with the program. It is during such incarnation that humans report they have uncovered past lives. But unless such a situation exists, mediating and begging the soul to play out in full color and sound and fury the interesting past lives is not honored. The soul considers this idle curiosity on the part of the human, who is treated not as an equal during incarnation. Thus, such attempts, where not called for, are futile. Thus, humans seeking to reconstruct their past lives are fighting an uphill battle, and will never get close to the hoary truth.