Many times, people ask: why is it that we don’t remember our previous lives? When we say that we have a spirit and have taken many births, we could have been something in a previous birth, and in the future, we will take birth and be something else. Quite often, the question that comes up is: why don’t we remember the previous birth?
Srila Prabhupada used to answer these kind of questionsvery nicely. He would ask, “What did you have for breakfast one week ago?” It’s hard to remember such details from just one week ago—where was I, what did I eat? Our memory fails, so we cannot remember.
That is how this body, the mind and the intelligence system are designed. We can have memory to some extent, but by and large, we dispense with things, take them out of our memory and forget them.That is because this body has a certain purpose. The body that we have, the life we are going through and the world that we are in—all of this has a certain significance. And it is designed so that we forget these things. Actually, when people ask, “Why don’t I remember my previous life?” they are not really understanding the significance and the gravity of that question.