Welcome to Gaia! ::

I do, and I believe in it for many reasons, first being, if you look at most religions in the world from the point of view that reincarnation is real, they just seem to make more sense.

Secondly, and much more importantly, I have gained contact with several major elements of my past lives. Tigress is my soul mate. I know alot of couples who say that are mereley thinking wishfully, but we honestly know that we are. I also met up with another friend who was in a more recent life.

The story of my (and Tigress's) soul: The earliest reckoning we have is from around the year 500 CE, at the height of the time of the druids. And we were a druid. Our name was Arthus. We would teach the younger students and live and work in the forest as though it was our master.

The next life we can remember came about a thousand years later (there may be one or two in between). We were a peasant woman in some European country. After refusing to be married away like property, we were burned at the stake for witchcraft. This life was most fascinating, because it is the one where mine and Tiff's souls split from one soul to two. Even more fascinating is the fact that before we knew we were soul mates, we both had a vision of this life shortly after we started seeing each other. I had my vision while visiting church with Tigress. It wasn't fun to be sitting in church and suddenly "burst into flames" for being a witch.

We had lives after those, apart, of course. I became a medicine man for a tribe of Lakota Souix native americans. Another person I know today was in that life with me. One of my friends who used to live down the street was my kola (best friend, or brother-not-of-blood) about a hundred and fifty to two hundred years ago. Tigress, in the meantime came back a little after that and ended up as a 9 year old Jewish girl during the second world war. She went to a concentration camp and never made it out alive.

Our souls met between lives, before this current life. We wanted to be one again, but knew that travelling apart had changed us and to joint together again, we'd have to live and grow together. So we descided to meet in our next life. I was born on July 30th 1984, at 10:59 PM, and Tigress was born EXACTLY, down to the minute, one year and ten months later. Before this life, we changed destiny so that we should come in contact with each other again, and now we've found each other.

Yeah, I believe in it..for the reasons Murder said.

He stole my post!! gonk crying

I have to disagree with you here. When Tigress and I "uncovered" our past lives, we learned what happened through trances. Right after we met but before we even considered that we were soul mates, we both had visions of different parts of the same live, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. It wasn't until a year or two later when we realised that honestly ARE soul mates, and that those were pieces of a past life.

We were just lying in my candlelit room one night and started remembering these things as we stared into each others eyes, like we were remembering parts of a dream.

Now I do agree that MOST past lives people remember are merely self-fabricated dreams. A good saying that applies to many things is, "If you have to ask yourself if it's real, it's probably not. When it's real, you'll know." That's why I can't give any advice for people who want to know their past lives but don't. And as far as commercial psychics and fortune sellers go, most of the time, they're just professional bullshitters anyway. I've never been able to keep a straight face when someone says to me. "I was nefretiti (or king tut) in a past life!!" (Those are apparently the most common past life personalities people claim to have been.)

You're beliefs are close to mine, except that intead of a soul splitting and becoming a ghost or going to heaven (both of which can and do happen), it is more likely to become another person. When it does this, the two souls are soulmates.

I believe that in the VERY distant past, every single living thing came from one single soul (remember the "divine spark" I talked about in the evolution thread?) and it has since split trillions of times to create every single living thing today.

I sometimes get random flashes of being a Jewish Rabbi, not too sure when. My suroundings are hay; I must have been in a barnyard. I have those sideburn-curl-thing (sorry, but their name escapes me). Some other rabbi calls to me in a launguage that sounds remarkably like Hebrew, but, since I don't know Hebrew, I can't make out what he's saying. IN another scene, I'm in what looks like a synagogue. (sp?) These flashes are weird and often freak me out.

Here is why I do not believe you can know what you were in a previous life:
1. The subconcious is mostly unexplored, we know less about it than we do of deep space.
2. The mind is very powerful.
3. That life is over, our memories of that life die when we die.
4. Memories are not connected to our soul, they are merely part of our physical body.
5. Since those memories are part of our physical body, they deteriorate with it, meaning that when the brain dies, the memories die.
6. That life is over, there is no need to look back at it. The mistakes we made will have no impact on what we do in the next.
7. This is because, after we die, we start the next life with a clean slate, in other words, we start out as if it were a brand new life, each time.
8. Since we start each life with a new slate, we have no need to remember what we did in our past life.
9. This is enhanced by the idea that we have one goal in life, that goal is either attained or not. When it is attained, we move on somewhere else.
10. When that goal is not attained, and we have exhausted our physical resources (a.k.a. our bodies) we gain another life. This life is not a continuation of the previous. It is a new start.
11. The only way we can attain our goal is to go from a new start to the goal. In other words we cannot look at the past lives, they will not reveal answers, they will only reveal what we didn't do.
12. To look at a past life is to look at a wrong note played in a song, but not correct it. Meaning that if we could look at a past life, we would not know how to analyze it.
13. Lastly, we are in a plane of existence in which we cannot look at past lives, because they are attached to physical memories. Physical memories which die when we die, because they are not attached to our soul.

Now, what I am saying is that any view of a past life is an image or memory made by your mind. I hokd a theory that those who believe they can see their past lives are only seeing a memory they want to see. That memory is made in the subconcious. That memory was made for any number of reasons. E.g. person A was thinking about philosophers when they heard of the concept of past lives, thus they are a philosopher in their past life memory. Person B has an extreme like of tigers, thus they were a tiger. Person C has an affinity for medicine, so they were some kind of physician, etc.

Now AMOA, you were talking about how you and tigress are soul mates, in the true sense of the words. Now, what I am saying is that your memories are in essence a lie; that does not mean that you and tigress are not soul mates. In fact, maybe your goal was to find your true soulmate, in which, you may have completed that, and when you have exhausted your resources, you will move on to another plane.

Hopes that makes some kind of sense

I won't get into it right now, because I know that if I do, I'll go on a rant that will literally take up pages, but I know of many reasons why you are wrong about this particular issue. I'm not asking you to change your mind. I'm simply asking you to see my point of view.

First and foremost, I agree with you about MOST people who think they know what their past lives are. Thinking you were something simply because you like something right now is ludacris. (I used to believe I was a hippy with a gambling problem simply cause I liked Pink Floyd and played way too much solitare xd ) And I definatley agree on the whole issue about your memories fading with your brain.

However, I must mention that each and every time Tigress or myself had a vision, it was always from a third person perspective. It was as though we were outside of our bodies watching things happen to ourselves. The only time I EVER saw the vision from a first person perspective is after I was consumed in flames. I felt the hands of deity itself lifting me out of the flames, comforting me and telling me not to worry.

And as for what we actually DO remember, we only remembered things that had a direct impact on this life, but I know for sure that we had more lives than just the ones I mentioned.

In my life being a Souix medicine man, I never got to say a proper goodbye to my best friend. In this life, after remembering the past, I was able to change that. The life I remember before that is five hundred years earlier, and it's the one that cause mine and Tigress's soul to split. The life I remember before that is a whole thousand years earlier. We're not sure why we were a druid named Arthus, but we know that it's important, otherwise we would not remember. I intend to find out.

So know that I understand your point of view, but I believe based on personal experience that there's an even larger picture out there.