Good question. Here's a short pop quiz which may help to explain. Quickly now, what were you doing on the third Tuesday in July of last year? No checking your appointment book or diary. Can't remember? Of course not. Now, if you can't remember the third Tuesday in July of last year, just how do you expect to remember a past life?

There are limits to conscious human memory. In general, this is a blessing for it would make our current life ever so much more complex than it already is by cluttering it up with the complexities of who knows how many past lives.

Depends on what you mean by important. Ultimately, the events of a past life, per se, amount to very little if anything. What is important are the learned and unlearned lessons associated with those events. It is the lessons, learned and unlearned, which are carried forward that count and not a specific event. Those lessons form a script or a filter through which you experience your current life until the unlearned lessons are learned.

Yes, but it is usually buried so deeply in the unconscious realm of the mind and soul that it is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to access it. For the most part that is just as well.

A computer analogy is crude but helpful. Think of conscious human memory like the 500MB of RAM in an average computer. That's not a lot of space, and it's constantly needed for whatever task the computer is working on right now. RAM can't be cluttered up with old data. So the old data is sent into storage on the hard drive which is much larger, often 160GB these days.

That's fine, but data on the hard drive require sophisticated software and a knowledgeable user to access and use properly. Your conscious memory is like the RAM. It is needed for your day-to-day life tasks and simply cannot be cluttered up with conscious access to every little event of your past without bogging you down into inaction. So those events are sent into your unconscious (some say subconscious) to be filed away.

Access to the unconscious requires great skill on the individual's part to handle safely and constructively. In the same way it is possible to call up a computer program improperly which will crash your computer, be respectful of trying to call up past life memories.

Even a skilled past-life therapist will caution you that such activity must be handled with great care.

You don't. You deal with the outstanding issues you carry with you from those past lives. Where you once were, and what you might once have done (or not done) simply is not the point. The point is the life you are living right now.

The issues are staring you in the eye right now, right here. Stay in the now. Is there something in your life which is not joy, peace and harmony? There's your issue. Deal with it in the now. It's source might be a past life or it might be cultural programming from your childhood in your current life, and to be blunt, it makes little difference. Deal with it. Right here, right now. Once it's dealt with, it goes away.

Does this take time? Of course. Does it take effort and work? Naturally. Is it worth it? You tell me: would you rather be stuck in the same old rut with the same old misery day after day, or would you rather greet the dawn of a new and glorious day?

Most commonly that awareness came to the individual when they were busy looking for something else. The rule of thumb for this question is that when you launch upon a spiritual path in life, those past lives which you need to know about are brought to your attention at exactly the moment you need to know about them and not a second sooner.

If you haven't reached that point yet, fine. Stick with the life you know about, your current life. If you have gleaned a glimpse of your past, treat it for the sacred message it is and learn from what you have been shown.