I’ve blabbered about this in other threads and so I will limit my commentary about this here, but in short yes. However, I don’t believe we live this life, die and then get recycled into a new life that we start, live through, and recycle. That model is dependent on linear time, and I now think that linear time is only way by which our processors organize our lives into stories.
In short, I had an experience with ayahuasca that sent me to many different ‘elsewheres,’ and I thought I had lost this life. I came back to it. The following description isn’t exactly literal but it’s the best way I can describe what happened: I was “out there,” far away from this life. I came back to it by falling back into it. As I fell back to the position I am in now, I had the sensation of crashing through events of my life, past and future. If you can imagine a lifetime written out like an encyclopedia set, stacked high, and all the pages are thin glass sheets, it was something like that. I fell through them, they shattered along the way, and I saw these refractory glimpses of different vignettes of life. Except that as with happens with ayahuasca, I didn’t only see them but I was there and then for a time in every instance.
The whole thing felt more real than this reality, which is something I felt during every breakthrough ayahuasca experience. Anyway, this one left me with a feeling that life really is like a book. It is written. It exists “from beginning to end.” The pages of it, so to speak, the events of it, all exist intermixed in a sea or a sky of all events. Our minds organize these events into a beginning, middle and end because it gives life moments of meaning and it organizes the chaos. But like a book, it’s all always written. So we move from page to page, but we remember what we have read and sometimes we flash back to those moments. Some of us have skipped ahead in various ways to future scenes (which exist now as much as now does and as much as the past does), and we have memories of having read those scenes, and the explanation that we give those viewings is that they are premonitions.
This relates to reincarnation because I believe that while we only have the capacity to be aware of progressing through one life in a linear way, we are doing this simultaneously in countless different stories that all coexist simultaneously. It’s not live, die, live, die. It’s more like changing the channel at any given time, understanding that “time” is like the binding of a book: the stories exist whether bound or unbound, but we can only make sense of them if the pages are in order.
Just because you are presently reading one novel, and you read it to the end and move onto a novel, that does not mean that the first novel now ceases to exist. You’ll retain a vague memory of it, and it remains in existence even as you’re experiencing one or more different stories now.
