Hi All,
Interesting discussion which has got me reminiscing about my own perspective & experiences on the matter, thought I would write down some thoughts & experiences, perhaps more for my own benefit more than anyone elses. Will share some personal experiences that I've rarely discussed either online or in real life.
Born into a (UK based and not particularly religious) Sikh family, "reincarnation" is a core tenet of the religion, so I've grown up with the concept. Since a very young age, I was (in contrast to the rest of my entire near-family!) extremely fascinated by religion, mysticism & the nature of our existence, and the concepts and stories of sikh mysticism, buddhism & hinduism (and the person of Jesus Christ, but not relevant here I suppose, at least what I knew of his teachings back then as a child....gnostic verses are a different matter of course) are the ones I resonated with most. Basically, I conceptually fully believed in reincarnation.
It's ironic that the more experiences (and indeed teachings, concepts & experiences of others) I've had over the decades, apparently suggestive of reincarnation, the less certain & more sceptical I've become of the narrative of "reincarnation" - most certainely of the linear kind as taught by Eastern religions. I think there's some sort of profound insight in that fact, somewhere
)
To start before the beginning (an experience I've shared only shared with family, very few close friends, and once on an obscure forum) - my mum was quite old when she had me (my brothers are 10 years older than me), and had a difficult labour (incidentally, my parents tried unsuccessfully to abort me 3 times but were unable to do so each time due to a series of what they call remarkable coincidences!). During that labour, she experienced what she called "God" talking to my "soul", and that I kept begging God to let me be born, and God kept saying back to me "I won't let you be born, you will forget me. See, look how difficult it is to get a human life" or some such. This went on for a while. At which point my mum said that me & God went "spiralling off" into the distance so far that she couldn't hear or see what was said between myself and God, and that all she knew was that I made some sort of "promise" to God, after which he "let" me be born, at which point I was born!
Incidentally, my mum is not at all religious (to Indian standards), never before or since had any such "mystical" experience, and doesn't really know what to make of the experience, though she 100% believes it was "true", and she tells the story with much emotion. Caveats; She was on some sort of medication/gas (whatever was used in the 70s!). And in the Sikh holy book there is an obscure verse where it is said "whilst in the womb we beg God to be granted a human life". Whilst it is highly unlikely she was consciously aware of the verse, it is of course possible she had heard it in the temple and retained it subconsciously. She is certain she has/had no conscious awareness of the idea of begging for human birth.
Much later, following a variety of "mystical practices" (no drugs were used for several years prior or before) I experienced what seemed like millions of "lives" of all types of animals in all kinds of environments. These felt so real, so radically different from human consciousness that I have no doubt it signifies some kind of truth about the nature of our being & consciousness that we simply do not understand. I was a very proficient lucid dreamer, astral projector and had used all sorts of "entheogens" - the nature of these experiences is radically different from those, more "primal" - to be a spider, see and sense and think like a spider in a rainforest (a particular memory of all the thousands or millions of "lives" that remains particularly strong) is beyond anything we could simply imagine - it was primal and raw.
Even at the time, when I was fully immersed & had faith in a paradigm within which "reincarnation" was a given, I got the sneaky suspicion these experiences had more to do with our genetic memory, rather than experiences of literal individual incarnations my "soul" had had. It's just the "feel" I got from them.....
Further along, many years & several "realisations" and "awakenings" later, I started experiencing (somewhat along the lines of Jurgen Ziewe, already mentioned in this thread) some very strange multi-dimensional "visions" where my identity was split up into numerous beings/planes of reality which were all existing simultaneously, only my point of awareness was cycling through them all - it really is an experience impossible to describe, but mind-shattering in it's implications. Identity or "soul" is no longer the simple thing I believed when I followed all the eastern mystical traditions, it is far more profound than any of us can imagine, I feel....
These experiences, alongside an extensive research of all the avenues of data (everything that's ever been discussed on this forum, such as mediums, channelling, hypnosis, Stevenson etc), an analysis of that data, and all the numerous contradictions in that data suggest to me, at least, we are dealing with a phenomena for which there are no current sufficient conceptual models or explanations. Actually, I think all the models I've heard are like clutching at a shifting mirage. (this includes even the more recent, more intellectually sophisticated models such as "higher soul", aspects or dimensions of soul splintering off etc. I guess we can say these are reformulations of older Sufi, gnostic, Greek mysteries etc ideas).
In fact, I don't believe we (certainely en masse, in public) are MEANT to know the "truth"....
I feel I should also mention that, to me, we could be dealing with several types of phenomena which possibly erroneously get lumped together under the term "reincarnation". For me, personally, I'm highly suspect about the true nature of "experiences" had either through hypnosis or "entheogens", both areas I am quite familiar with, experientially as well as conceptually. I know these are, actually, probably the most popular routes to direct "experience" of reincarnation phenomena (outside Stevenson type cases), and people can get highly defensive if you question these methods of "approach", but through personal experience I would be highly sceptical of any experiences through these means, and also an openness to the possibility they are actually a completely different type of "experience" than the "reincarnation" type experiences had through, for example, meditation practices. But each to their own.
Basically, after a shit load of experiences and learning, I haven't got a clue what's happening...at least not intellectually :) However, I feel an information based paradigm, as opposed to individual souls living linear "incarnations", is closer to the "truth"....but that ultimately the "truth" is stranger than what any human has ever conceived conceptually.