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Yes, I see what you mean, but that doesn't necessarily negate the possibility. It only makes it harder to prove. Although, I could be saying that only because it's what I want to believe.



I also believed in reincarnation long before I had ever had it explained to me or was told the word for it. That's the only reason I have to believe in it. I really haven't ever experienced a past life regression, but I have felt that connection to a person that one only feels with those that one has known before.



Couldn't the things that happened to us in our past lives effect the choices we make today the same as the things that happened to us in our current lives do? I mean, bad things happen, and we learn from them. In the present life, we use what we learned in the previous life to make choices, get through things, etc, so that in the next life, we can use what we learned during this one to further progress in our "spiritual education," if you will.



Who's to say what the soul is even made of, let alone whether they can carry memories.



It's a fascinating idea I've never thought of that more than one soul could share bodies and then later "split" for whatever reason. That would explain the increasing population and where all these "new" souls are coming from, since I believe that, like matter and energy, whatever souls are made of is something that cannot be created or destroyed. But what would cause souls to split? Extreme trauma? Not learning the lesson they wanted to learn? Or the inability to learn from eachother any longer because you've simply been together too long and know eachother too well to learn anything new? I wonder if any of that could also be connected to how chaotic our world has become.



As for abortions and Infants that die in the womb very soon after birth:

From what I understand, babies do not have an "ego," i.e. something to tell them emotionally what they want and need. Instead, they have an "id." They are at this point in life, only bodies that need food, warmth, and shelter, but they cannot provide it for themselves because they are so helpless. They become attached to parental figures because parents provide these things. If this confuses you, do some research on baby monkeys and surrogate mothers.

Armed with that information I want to propose a theory; perhaps one does not acquire one's "soul" until one has passed this point in life. At first this does not make any sense --but after hypothesizing this theory and temporarily assuming it, we can answer the question of why babies die, which, under these theories, would be this:

Abortion and miscarriage does not only effect the baby in question. It effects the mother, the family of the mother, and probably countless others. Maybe the true reason for all of that is not a "lesson" for the one not being born to learn, but a way for the mother or the family to learn how to cope with loss, or some other "lesson" that is equally difficult (although quite possible) to fathom or explain.

Of course, all of that is only a speculation, and all theories are only theories and therefor subject to question.



http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.asp

The name of the doctor is Duncan MacDougall. And upon searching his name, I also found some stuff about bagpipes that were made around the time he was living. I don't know if this is the same Duncan MacDougall, though.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=343392

This place had some people talking about the experiment and a number of other links that I didn't care to look at, but if you really want to explore this idea, both of the above links are good starting places.

I think I'll make a seperate post as to my own veiws, as this one has gotten way too long.

I wonder if an explanation for De Ja Vu (sp?) would be that we can choose to live the same life more than one time but make different choices. I'm imagining flipping through one of those "you choose the scare" books R.L. Stine used to write. I was so fond of them. Perhaps De Ja Vu (or however you spell it,) is the memory of a metaphorical "page," or event that we've already "read," or experienced.

I have also wondered about past lives on other planets and why we don't ever remember living in other solar systems. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could learn things about places millions of light years away through spiritual introspection? Imagine how we could grow sociologically as a race of people through the history we would learn of another world.

Although most of the ideas on this thread are pretty far fetched, you can tell I love to think about them. They can't be proven or disproven, and they would make a heck of a great novel.

Pretty much


1. Everyone has one or more lessons.
2. There is no reason for me to believe that this/these lesson/s differ from person to person; in other words it is very possible for everyones lesson/s to be the same.
3. Every life our soul has, it has the same lesson/s from the previous life, all the way back to the creation of that soul. In other words, our lesson/s do not change from life to life.
4. Each new life is a situation in which to test how strong/weak our souls are.
5. Our soul holds our characteristics/personalities, there is no need to hold memories, as they will not help.
6. I believe that our lives end when we have had enough lives to show that we are strong, and that it ends much the way buddhism ends, nirvana.