Wisdom Snippets: The Murkiness, Blocks And Obstructions Of Past Life Discernment

During the resolve to not get up from under a Bodhi tree until realizing full awakening, the Buddha recalled previous lives. How did he, and how can we tell what is really and truly an authentic past life? There are scientific studies of past lives, but what follows is about what could be mistaken for past lives, and some of them are pretty far out, perhaps boarding on science fiction for some:

• mistaking for dream(s)
• racial, group or collective memories
• forgotten media consumption
• imagination
• hypnotic(-like) suggestions
• influencing past life memories by wanting to have certain types of past lives
• mistaking memories of someone who you really admired, or despised, or even a captivating popular figure in a past life as oneself
• mixing (portions of) anything mentioned here (with partial past life memories)
• various technological means and methods known and unknown
• (temporarily) taken over by an entity or spirit and experiencing their memories
• false memories
• memory insertions
• memory distortions
• parallel timelines and realities
• relooped timeline(s) with slight alterations
• (those from “your”) clones, duplicates, replicates
• ai (or other beings or other technology) with copies of real past lives when detecting the start of a past life recall then splice in an edited version, or something like a deep fake (which could then act as a red herring to seed in higher probabilities for future distorted past life remembrances)
• What if so connected or entangled in a past life with someone that discerning who was who — individually and both of each other’s memories (and maybe past life recalls at the time) — became difficult?
• That entertaining any of the above can keep you from discerning past lives(?)

Bonus: a perhaps somewhat related, very short story The Egg by Andy Weir

Ideas on how to address:

[Note: Purely intuitive speculation and for experimentation as this has yet to be put into practice]

What are the major perceptional altering shifts in general and amongst the individual memories in/for each past life? Where and how does the reality seem to significantly and unmistakably change? The big ones might seem to be birth and death; perceived losses of innocence; and anywhere/anything where intense energy is involved. What are the consistencies for all these? What sticks out as incongruent? How does perception itself operate as far as mechanics, fluctuations, (in)stabilities, and the degree(s) of all this over various timespans?

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