Reincarnation, time and space....

[catmeow]

Hi Michael

I think you make some good points and indeed it does make a huge amount of sense to consider reincarnation to be a simple recollection of different life-experiences which have been lived by our common "higher-selves".  I came to the same or similar conclusion myself in another thread on this board.

I also have posted in the past that "90% of all people who ever lived are alive today".  However after researching this I discovered that this statement is wrong.  Currently the world population is about 6.6 billion.  From memory, about 26 billion people have lived and died before us. So that means that on average each individual could have had one or two linear past incarnations (the figure is not "four" btw because of the way in which population grows).

So technically we can not rule out the possibility of linear reincarnation.  However, it does seem to follow that this is not the case, based on the fact that as you say, the common notion of the afterlife does not include the idea of a "flood" of memories of past incarnations.

Eastern mysticism does include the notion of discovering your past incarnations via mediation and reaching into the higher planes, but this is consistent with the idea of contacting a higer self which contains the accumulated memories of all of its past lives.

You made some good points....