Many people report past-life experiences as the result of entirely spontaneous memory recall. For others, such as myself, having deeply buried experiences of excruciating pain and sorrow not easily accessed, a more systematic approach is perhaps required. In any event, it is said in many traditions, that the ability to remember any past-life experiences at all comes about as the result of "grace". In other words one earns the right of recall through either right action or right thinking or a combination of both.

Perhaps you may be considering the possibility of trying to identify past-lives. This might best be undertaken after you have asked a critical question. What if the possibility of having lived before, of having experienced previous lives, was actually the case? What if this so called "past-life nonsense" was actually true what then? What might follow from such a possibility? How could one begin to determine if it might have been the case that "I had actually lived before"?

After first daring to consider this shocking question I turned to books. I read many books over the years, some helped a bit but none contributed greatly to any profound insight. All in all, over a period of about 4 years or so I followed the method outlined below. Perhaps it is an old formula and perhaps not but at the end of that time I received the biggest shock of my life when the procedure yielded results. It has continued to do so, off and on. The following outline covers the steps that I took in navigating the razor's edge. This procedure represents but one way to achieve self-realization. Many other paths exist and one should obviously stick to previously explored territory if adequate progress is being achieved. However, for those that are faltering and for those that are encumbered by the excess objectivity of scientific and technological certitude, this outline may be of some value.

1) First: think back step-by-step and recall your life in detail from the present moment back to your birth. Start with the current day and recall every detail from morning to night. Persist in this till you can work through your whole life. It may take several months. You should pay particular attention to emotionally difficult areas. They are generally difficult for a reason not always associated with this life. Try to go back farther and at least arrive at the process of birth and perhaps as far back as something following conception or, more properly from the time you came into body. If details refuse to flow, it is ok to cheat just a little and miss some experiences out; it is the serious intent that is most important. However, one should persist with these items because they have been veiled for a reason, possibly one that is important to your quest.

Note: most people have probably done some work in this direction already. It takes quite a bit of time so I did this, in the main, before falling asleep at night.

2) Second: this step can provide you with evidence of past lives! The most important activity in this stage consists in identifying all the major turning points in your life. The kind of turning point you should seek to identify is an instance where you turned your life so as to go one way instead of another. Not because of something you were already aware of as the result of experience in this life but for no apparent reason at all really. Such turning points are likely governed by influences from previous lives.

For example, a person might start life as a driver (of a car) by approaching intersections confident that the rules of the road will prevail and drive through with little concern. However, if one is involved in a serious accident where another car has failed to give way (according to the road-code rules) then the emotional "colour" of intersections changes forever and a continual expectation of a possible accident will develop under all circumstances. The reason for this turning point in one's attitude is obvious. It depends on the instance of the accident - an obvious experience in one's (current) life. We may call this an "attached" tendency. What one should to look for however, is an "unattached tendency", some characteristic of personality that cannot be tied into one's current life with a simple direct cause.

A concrete instance of the kind of "key" tendency to look for can be illustrated by a personal example. I never cared much about money, having it or wanting it until the university in which I was employed failed to renew my contract for organizing an environmental group that became a social-power. Very soon I was without money and blacklisted. I could not even support my family. Now all around me there were people that were very careful about money and would not have been dismissed from their jobs for persisting with such activity. To maintain my job, all I had to do was to stop organizing the environmental group. When I truly looked at it, my rationale for persisting with the environmental work could not be tied to anything in this life. As a child our family had not had much money in ready-cash form. As children we always wore hand-me-downs and sometimes there was no cash for shoes. Yet, it seemed that I had no particular care for money from the start so the idea of having to perform for expectations in order to continue an income flow was not uppermost in my mind. Much later in life, and after considerable thought, I concluded my attitude might have had something to do with a previous life. This was mainly because I could find no real reason why I should have had such a dismissive attitude to money. Later I succeeded in identifying the background life that had determined this attitude. It consisted of two major elements, a will to power and a surfeit of riches. Money was thus not a problem in that there was always more where that came from.

There are many particularities to look for in one's own personal character. They are tendencies of such strength that you might otherwise think you must have experienced hard and intense lessons in this life to account for them. As a further example, theoretical in this case, consider the behavior termed "sleeping around". Suppose a person has never participated in such activity and has no trace of a causal event in life to account for this particular tendency. No attacks have been mounted by a jealous spouse etc. Never the less the person concerned somehow knows better than to be involved in such activity. The knowledge involved being completely internalized. That kind of tendency is often an indicator of a lesson well learned in a past life.

3) Try to identify important places you have been for any time in this life together with the things you have done there. Then try to match these events with what you think you might have done in past lives. This can be termed "parallel tracking" and may be sufficiently strong to trigger connections during meditation. Instances of this nature are quite common because unsatisfied desires pull the soul from one life to another.

4) Dig-back by dream recording (set yourself to dream about the experience in your past lives and record results in a book as soon as you wake). Sessions of this nature can alert you to past lives. Once alerted, one can often gain access to the lives concerned thereafter through meditation.

5) In family conversation, practice allocating apparent past-life lessons to tendencies expressed by family-members. Some can be humorous; a child may not like tomatoes so you might hint that the individual must have been suffocated under a load of tomatoes in a previous life or, died in prison on a diet of tomatoes. But be careful, one could go too far and cause considerable grief. A person with sinus-trouble in the presence of smoke might have been burned to death in a savage ritual in a previous life etc.

6) When you are ready, when you have identified a dominant inexplicable tendency in life, which you wish to investigate, contact a past-life regression person for further help. Ask a main life-question of yourself something like "what am I doing all this" in the case of something you feel "driven" to do. Alternatively take one of the turning points identified (see item 2 above) and try to identify the life that caused you feel that particular way. The cost per session should be about $50. You may wish to know that assisted regression techniques are not always successful since the overall effect is dependent on the twin factors of "grace" and self-will. This in turn means that the initial steps described above are actually quite important, essential even, as the results can otherwise be either zero or somewhat confusing.

7) Note that it is entirely possible to conduct past-life regression on your-self and there are several books available that describe how this can be done. One such is: "Discovering Your Past Lives and Other Dimensions" by Bettye B. Binder published by Reincarnation Books/Tapes, PO Box 7781, Culver City, Calif. 90233 fax (310) 397-5757