A reader once wrote to Back to Godhead with a simple, honest question: if the Bhagavad-gītā teaches reincarnation, why can’t we remember our past lives? It is one of the most common questions newcomers ask at our temple, so here is an answer drawn from Śrīla Prabhupāda’s books.
We Forget Even This Life
Start with something closer to home. Can you remember being one year old? Most of us cannot, yet we were certainly there. Krishna explains that the soul passes through childhood, youth and old age in this body, and in the same way passes into another body at death BG 2.13. If we forget much of this body’s childhood, it is not surprising that we forget a previous body altogether.
Back to Godhead’s editors compared it to amnesia: just as a severe shock can wipe a person’s memory, the trauma of death and birth erases the memory of the previous life.
Only One Person Remembers Everything
In the fourth chapter of the Gītā, Krishna tells Arjuna that both of them have passed through many births. The difference is that Krishna remembers them all, while Arjuna does not BG 4.5. This is one of the clearest distinctions between God and the individual soul: we are eternal, but our memory is limited; His is complete.
We do not carry our memories into the next life, but we do carry our desires and tendencies, just as the air carries the scent of a flower.Based on Bhagavad-gītā 15.8
What We Do Carry Forward
Although the details are forgotten, the Gītā explains that the soul carries its mentality from one body to the next, as the air carries aromas BG 15.8. This helps explain why children are born with such different natures and talents, and why some people feel drawn to spiritual life from a young age.
The Memory That Really Matters
Does it matter whether we were a king or a cow last time? Śrīla Prabhupāda’s teaching points elsewhere. The crucial thing is not to remember the bodies we have worn, but to remember who is wearing them: the eternal soul, a loving servant of Krishna. That memory changes how we live today, and it can end the cycle of forgetting altogether.
The good news is that this is the memory that bhakti restores. Chanting Krishna’s names, hearing the Gītā and serving with devotees gradually awaken our original identity, which no death can erase.