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As I type this, I am sitting in a labor/delivery room waiting for my fiance to give birth to our second son, Desmond Jay. Yesterday, prior to leaving for our induction, my mom informed me that my aunt had a stroke on Tuesday and probably won't make it through the weekend. What are your feelings on re-incarnation and/or past lives...can/do these past lives skip generations or continue as soon as another ends....If re-incarnation takes place, then what is the bright light all about, that wouldn't make much sense, because your spirit would know at that point of seeing the bright light that you are dead, so therefore you would know that you can start over if you go into the light, but many spirits/ghosts do not go to the light, which is something that if re-incarnation takes place the spirit would know/remember from past experience. If anyone can give me some feedback/input on the subject I'd greatly appreciate it....please leave all crazy scientology explanations at the door.

OK, scary, you asked . . .

I, for one, don't believe in reincarnation as a general personal belief . . . but . . . I have encountered events where I will, on occasion, stop and wonder for about half a second if it just, maybe, could happen on extremely rare instances. I have a very good friend who is into the whole psychic "thing" (for lack of a better description). She believes in reincarnation quite a bit more than I do, and she swears that her nephew is the reincarnation of her grandfather. She has told me of instances where he behaves JUST LIKE her grandfather in reaction to certain instances, even though her nephew never knew his great-grandfather. (Does that make sense the way I posted it? I tried to explain it in a clear way.)

I told her about my encounter with the musket last summer, regarding my vision of the pirate-guy standing on the ship (posted in "Haunted Musket"). She thinks the guy in my vision was me in a past life, but I tend to believe that he was an ancestor of some sort. She asked me to re-think that belief when she found out I have a fear of deep, dark water. Her response was, "You fear it because you know what lurks in those waters, don't you? You saw unwanted prisoners thrown overboard to the sharks when you served on that pirate ship all those years ago." I conceeded to her that she did have a smiggen of a point, of sorts. I couldn't come up with a good argument to that at the time.

The one thing I have with people who claim to believe in reincarnation is most if not all of them claim to have been Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Mary of Scots or Robert E. Lee. Its always someone famous and/or powerful from history. I don't seem to remember anyone claiming to have been Joe Bl0w who shoveled horse p00p out of the barn back in the 1716 Ireland, what gives ?!

Let me get down from my soap box . . . there, I'm done now. I don't mean to mock others' beliefs or anything, so I apologize if that's what it seems I'm doing. I just don't see any concrete proof that reincarnation is real.

I look forward to reading others' ideas about this issue. Don't worry, I'm not looking to "belief-bash", I'm just interested in reading about others' ideas about this.

Love y'all!