I thought I'd throw in my two cents, as I had similar experiences a while back. So here's a take on reincarnation:
Imagine that the Chaos of pre-existence is made up of every possible combination of vibrations, waveforms of every frequency in eternity, mixed together in a non-dimensional potential consciousness outside of reality all together as we conceive of it. This is the prima materia which manifests all aspects of existence, including itself. Every shape is made up of this Chaos, this primal conscious energy, and so everything is conscious, although our consciousness as human beings is not the same as the consciousness of a less evolved organic form like an animal or plant. Each thing in existence as a context, though, just as you do.
The nature of our organic bodies, this shape of energy, facilitates perception, thought, individualized ego, etc., which is what we commonly identify ourselves as. If we are the energy, though, then those things are just the current frame of reference our true consciousness is operating from at the moment.
Reincarnation comes in, when we look at the context of this physical body to it's place in the world and the factors that are affecting the course of our lives. In my personal opinion, we experience 'past lives' due to a resonance with other 'lives' within the chaos - a place where all experience and knowledge, all of existence possible and manifest, exists at one, outside of space and time as we understand them.
What lead me to this idea some time ago was the exploration I did into a particularly fantastic feeling past life. I had these consistently continuitous dreams in which I was some sort of medicine man, but of a race I'd identify as elven. Long, pointy ears, almond eyes, silvery hair, strange color tones, rather classic fantasy, which is what I read a lot of at the time. Now, at first I would have a dream every few weeks, in the same setting, as the same character, and after a while i'd start daydreaming new parts of the dreams while I was awake. I developed an emotional investment in the events that took place there, and was even able to recognize congruencies between what was happening there and what was happening in my own life. I was alienating people in both lives, but in different ways. I was tasting power in both worlds, but in this one I thought I was handling it well, where in that one I was abusing it, and that's what was pushing others away.
All of this lead me to the conclusion that I had been an elven shaman in a past life.
I'm not going to go on at length about my belief in past, present, or future elves, suffice to say I don't think I would find them in the jungles, hiding away their civilization in a barrier of fog, nor the remains of their kind as some pre-human world of myth, although I'm not going to say it's outside the range of possibility - it is an interesting universe, after all.
However, at great length I began to translate the images and scenes I had seen into symbols. I turned images into concepts, events into movements of energy, and stripped away the labels and symbols that clothed the true essence of these dreams, this past life that felt so close to who I was. Suddenly I realized that it didn't matter if I litterally was or was not an elven shaman in a past life - what I had in my hands now was a pattern of energy that i could clearly tell was manifesting in my life - either recurring only in this one or in several, didn't really matter, because one way or another it was here then, and needed to be dealt with. Even some of the influences - my parents, my peers - factored in the same kinds of rolls.
So, boiled down, sometimes the images we see of past lives aren't litteral images - they can be patterns of energy present here and now in our lives, or for that matter they can be our subconscious mind's method of expressing information to our organic consciousness in the only way possible - by using imagery already available to us in our minds. Which is to say, something that is the same event energetically as the event you are (re)experiencing, may have happened in a past life, and this is your mind's method of communicating that re-occuring trend.
it's a thought.
peace
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The world is complicated - that which makes it up is elegantly simplistic, but infinitely versatile.
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