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Originally Posted by Gabryel
From my research over the past few years, and after speaking to another one of my selves (reincarnated within my current time frame - 2002), I've think we don't actually go 'backwards' in our development. We may forget the specific details of a lesson, but the knowledge we've gained and the development we've achieved, is like a foundation to build upon in our next life.
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Your meeting with your own future selves is fascinating! Kind of mind-bending to contemplate, but we could all stand to get bent on occasion
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While reading this thread, I got a sudden, strong mental image of the algebra class I took a few years ago, as part of getting a vocational AS degree.
Now, if I recall correctly, I took two years of algebra in high school, and while I struggled with it, I still got decent enough grades. But as soon as I graduated from high school and quit taking any math at all, I forgot every last bit of it (and the geometry I took, too).
I guess you could say I entered my new, adult life, but despite having learned algebra in my previous life as a child, I had no memory of it. But I never needed it in order to live that particular life. I worked retail, I did office work, and before my life got turned upside down I was the office manager and bookkeeper for a fuel-oil company. (I'm pretty sure that if that "lifetime" had a purpose, it was not to die of boredom.
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Well, fast-forward to taking that algebra class as an adult, 20 years later, at the start of yet another new "lifetime" as an adult student at a community college, preparing for a new career. I had forgotten algebra so completely, I bombed out on the placement test and had to take the remedial (high school level) class first, before I could take the required college-level one. Once I was in the class, actually solving problems, however, it was easy. Suddenly, it all seemed really familiar. It wasn't so much remembering algebra (or any details of my high school algebra classes), as a sense of, "Oh yeah, I've done all this before, in another life" which left me feeling confident I could do it again. I ended up sailing through both the remedial and required class.
Six or seven years later, I've forgotten virtually all of that algebra again, because I don't use more than a tiny bit of it and don't need to remember more than the basics. However, if I was to enter a new "lifetime" where I did need to know more, I know I could pick it back up, probably without even taking a class, because it's still in there, still part of me, but dormant not activated.
And that's a mundane example of how I understand the soul works, as far as learning across lifetimes goes. It learns something through its experiences in a body, and the learning is permanent, but it's not always immediately or easily accessible in other lifetimes. Part of that is because of the larger forgetting of one's true nature that happens in each lifetime; there's always the challenge of the avatar-self to remember who they are within the context of the game-life. Plus, the lifetime may be intentionally designed to make it harder to remember a lesson already learned, adding to the level of challenge (because games that aren't challenging are no fun).
Then there's the possibility that something already learned just isn't all that relevant to the lifetime at hand, so the avatar-self is never challenged to remember it, which either makes it very difficult to do so, or it's only remembered during a very traumatic, life-or-death moment, when you're so sure you're about to leave physical existence entirely that the barriers to remembering get thin.
But that's my understanding ofi t.