
STORIES FOR SEEKERS
The Day the Children Remembered
A Rebirth of Memory, a World Unraveled
When children around the world begin recalling vivid past lives, society is thrown into spiritual, political, and psychological turmoil. From a tech prodigy to a haunted teenager, from a modern-day slave survivor to a seeker yearning for liberation, five unforgettable stories unfold—each revealing the strange beauty and haunting burden of remembering too much.
VI. Clara​
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Clara—another “karma baby,” as they would later call them—was born in Mexico City. Her mother was a professor of archeology at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and her father was a diplomat who made frequent trips to the US and Canada. Clara’s case was unusual, but in a different way. She was one of the very few children who could remember multiple past lives dating back centuries. Numerous studies had been done on her, including those carried out by her own mother, whose expertise was Spanish colonial history and archeological finds. This created some suspicion about Clara’s knowledge of past events. Some accused her mother of feeding her daughter historical information to make it appear that she had experienced certain historical events. Eventually, the media got wind of it and turned it into a scandal. Reputations were held in balance, and Clara was declared a fraud. Her mother was forced to step down from her teaching position, and her father almost lost his job as chief diplomat to the US.
This was just another example of how society would eventually turn on many of these children with a viciousness seldom seen before. What people couldn’t understand, they chose to silence and condemn. What was at first welcomed as an evolutionary step for humankind had been morphed into fear and skepticism by politicians and religious leaders. Children were told by their parents to stay quiet and keep their memories to themselves.
For Clara, it was all too suffocating. She never again took part in any studies or interviews or spoke of her past lives to anyone, including her own family. As soon as she graduated from high school, she begged her parents to let her go to school in England, far away from Mexico City and la prensa amarillista.
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However, leaving her memories behind wasn’t as easy as leaving Mexico. Inevitably, they followed her to England, where they continued to haunt her. Clara began to see her cyclical existence as similar to Bill Murray’s in Groundhog Day. But instead of waking up every morning to the sound of the same alarm clock, she imagined herself being born every day in a different body. Different body, but the same existential suffering as life went through its usual ups and downs in what, she concluded, was a zero-sum world.
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One day, it occurred to her that instead of seeing her memories as something personal, she should look at them objectively. This time, she decided, she would do her own scientific study. She eventually concluded that there was something to be learned from seeing her experience as a linear progression of various incarnations. After some vigorous self-analysis, she found that what was consistent in each of her past lives was a sense of longing and confusion, which she theorized somehow propelled her into the next one.
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While attending the university, she sought historical commentary and learned that samsara, or the cycle of birth and death, was typically portrayed as a kind of incarceration—that is, until one gained the secret knowledge that set them free. Clara loathed the idea of a perpetual existence that involved ongoing sorrow and confusion. She likened each incarnation to stepping into the same bear trap over and over again. This made her determined to find a solution to her problem in this very life, while she still had all her faculties, time, and resources.
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Clara had no idea where to find whatever it was she thought she was missing. She felt like a rudderless ship in an ocean of competing ideas. Some told her that what she was lacking was a special event that would permanently set her on a course for spiritual enlightenment and everlasting freedom. She was instructed to learn the disciplines of various Eastern traditions, and to learn the ability to navigate the mind, which would eventually lead her to an answer to her predicament.
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So, she became a yogi, and at first, she seemed to have a knack for entering samadhi, a kind of deep meditative state where all thoughts are silenced, and the perceiver, perceiving, and perceived become one. When she awakened from samadhi, she would feel refreshed and enjoy a profound sense of calm. Many teachers told her that with this experience, she had reached the pinnacle of spiritual endeavors—but she didn’t feel that way.
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As much as she enjoyed the profound sense of peace, she complained that it never lasted. “Enlightenment,” she would write in her journal, “can only ever be a temporary experience.” She also felt that while she now knew much about the mind and how to manage her memories, she had still learned nothing about that which would release her from the cycle of birth and death.
Disappointment settled in. After years of intense spiritual practice, she had gotten no closer to her goal. As a result, her meditation began to feel mechanical, and she no longer experienced the bliss she had experienced before. Eventually, she would stop, no longer interested in gaining the altered states of consciousness that she had believed would somehow magically break the chain of rebirths.
They say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. One day, exhausted from all the seeking and with nowhere else to turn, Clara did something she never tried before: she appealed to the universe for help. She realized that there was nothing else she could do without some kind of divine intervention. She wasn’t even sure what form that divine intervention might take. She could only rationalize that whatever was enabling her to have repeated lives could just as well disable it.
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It happened while she was on a train coming back from work. She was now living in a quiet suburb east of San Francisco and took rapid transit every day into the city, where she had a job as a project manager for a small startup.
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Getting on a train at Market Street Station, she took a seat next to a woman, in her mid-sixties, with long silver hair beautifully braided in the back. One of the old, albeit more refined hippies from Berkeley, Clara thought. Nevertheless, the woman had a certain nobility about her that she admired.
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As Clara took her seat, her attention was immediately drawn to the graffiti written on the back of the seat directly in front of her. It read in all caps, as if it were shouting at her:
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WHERE ARE YOU GOING THAT YOU NEVER ARRIVE?
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“¿Dónde vas que nunca llegas?” Clara said out loud.
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“Excuse me, did you say something?” the woman sitting next to her politely asked, as the train roared through the tunnel that went under the bay.
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“Oh. No. Sorry, I was just thinking about this,” she said above the clamor, pointing at the graffiti on the back of the seat.
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“Yes,” the woman remarked, turning closer to her. “Well, at least now they’re writing legibly and showing some sign of intelligence.”
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“In Latin America,” Clara explained, “the graffiti is often poetic, like this one. The truth can sometimes be found written in the most inconspicuous of places—overpasses, benches, even in bathroom stalls.”
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“I’ve seen the same in my own travels,” replied the woman. “In the US, most graffiti is just someone’s brand—like dogs pissing on a wall to mark their territory.”
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“Well, you know,” Clara said, leaning over so the older woman could hear her, “America is a very competitive place.”
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This keen cultural insight made them both chuckle.
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“What do you think it means?” asked the woman in a quieter voice as the train came out of the tunnel onto the other side of the bay.
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“What, the graffiti? I think it’s written for the seeker,” said Clara, “which is really all of us. We constantly seek people, places, and things, but when we finally get what we want, we aren’t satisfied and immediately begin looking for something else.”
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“A very astute observation,” remarked the older woman.
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“What’s your perspective?” asked Clara.
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“Well, I would have to agree with you. It’s written for the person who believes they’re traveling somewhere, making progress, but all they’re really doing is just running in place.”
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“Like a treadmill.”
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“Yes. And the place they’re trying to get to, of course, is where they’ve always been standing.”
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This made Clara think. “A teacher of mine used to say, ‘You are what you’re seeking.’”
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“That’s right.”
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“I never understood what that meant,” admitted Clara. “I always thought it very abstract and a bit mysterious, like a Rumi quote. It’s a riddle, don’t you think?”
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Now pointing out the window as they arrived at the first Oakland stop, the woman answered, “It means you’re the train station and not the train.”
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“Wait… What?” replied Clara, bewildered.
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“Only once you identify with the unchanging station and not the passing trains can you really begin to relax in life.”
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This baffled Clara, who instead replied with uncomfortable silence.
The older woman, she thought, had answered the riddle with another riddle.
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Sensing that Clara was having some difficulty, the woman continued, “Who is it that has watched you be born, get your first set of teeth, learn to walk, go to school, turn into an adolescent, become a woman, get a job…”
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“… And watch one life change into another, and then change into another, and so on?” added Clara.
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“Oh, I see. Karma baby?” asked the woman.
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Clara confirmed with a nod.
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“Well, good for you!”
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Clara was dismayed. “Good for me? You have no idea what I’ve had to endure.”
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“And look at how far it’s brought you! You should thank your lucky stars that your pain and suffering have brought you to this point of discovery.”
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“Discovery of what?”
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“Of what you are! The discovery that what you really are is the witness to it all, and not the passing experiencer,” she said, now turning to look directly at Clara. The woman’s piercing blue eyes made Clara feel uneasy. “Do you see all the zombies on this train who are sleepwalking through life?” She shifted her gaze to the rest of the passengers and waved her hand around. “You should be grateful you’re not one of them!”
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Clara felt like she was being scolded, but she was also intrigued by the woman’s insight and frankness. What were the chances of striking up such a conversation with a stranger? If this was the universe’s answer to her prayer, she thought, she would take it!
As the train approached the next stop, the woman wished Clara luck on her journey and then joined the crowd of passengers pouring out of the train car and down a stairway, like a school of fish lost in a current.
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Clara thought about her conversation with the stranger for weeks afterwards. She could now see that the answer she was seeking had always been right in front of her. Each of her remembered lives had been like passing trains she had watched from the point of view of someone standing at a train station. This was made clear by the fact that she could remember each of them thinking, “I was so-and-so. I knew these people and experienced these events,” etc. But her error was that she was always identifying herself from the position of the passing trains and not from the position of the train station. She could now see that in each of her past lives, she was not the person (the moving train) but instead, the non-experiencing witness (the unmoving train station). Many passing trains had come and gone since beginningless time, but through all the apparent movement and drama that had ensued, her true essence remained as a witness to it all!
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This realization came as a great relief to her. She no longer needed to feel bound by memories or identify with any of her past perceived successes or failures. She no longer felt like a victim or perpetrator of injustice. She was no longer an innocent bystander trapped in a vicious cycle condemned to perpetuity. It didn’t matter whether she had a next life or a thousand lives after this one; they were all just passing trains. The waking dream had finally subsided, and samsara could no longer confine her to an existence of suffering. She was now free to just be and claim her identity as the witness to it all.
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And for the first time in her life, she thought, everything was fine with the world.
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