To everyone who is interested in the question of reincarnation, you know, I was thinking... what if instead of one side being absolutely correct and the other side absolutely incorrect, could it be that there is some kind of more complex metaphysical explanation that is like a middle ground, that some people would interpret as reincarnation whereas other people would be justified in saying it is not reincarnation?

For example, there is Bruce Moen's theory of "disks" of individual souls that are connected to one another as a higher "group soul" entity.  Maybe it's like each individual soul is like a finger on a hand, and the other fingers could be viewed as the "other lives" of the entity, but actually they retain a distinct individuality within the context of the whole.  Going with the hand analogy, maybe one life is like one finger, and another life is like another finger, and so forth, and the hand has all of the fingers as part of itself, but it is a higher self than the individual fingers themselves.  See what I mean?  Some people might interpret that by talking about reincarnation, though it would be a technically incorrect way of explaining what is really going on.  However, it would be more correct than simply saying that each person's life is totally independent of all other lives.

Another useful analogy that relates to this idea is the Christian concept of the metaphorical "Body of Christ" that the Apostle Paul often wrote about.  There are different cells and organs in the Body of Christ -- different people, churches, and types of believers -- and they are each individual, but all profoundly interconnected so as to be inseparable.  An idea like this could be more literally true than we might think, and could provide a way of understanding how one life could be inseparable from another related life, while remaining individuals at the same time.

Such an idea of a corporate body of souls, or a group soul entity of some kind, could bridge the gap between those who believe in reincarnation and those who don't, and could perhaps be a good explanation for why some people come back from NDEs convinced that reincarnation is true while others come back believing it is false.  Maybe both sides are not seeing the full picture, but only an oversimplified view of individuality that fails to account for the greater degree of connectedness between souls in the spiritual world compared to earth.

Just some thoughts I've been chewing on lately.  I'm really trying to figure out if a lot of the apparent contradictions among different NDEs could be somehow reconciled.  It really bothers me that people come back from profound spiritual experiences with totally different ideas about how the universe works.  Probably I won't ever feel comfortable drawing a firm conclusion on some issues such as reincarnation, but at least it might be worth exploring some possibilities that could account for the vast differences of opinion on this and other matters.

Any thoughts?

Freebird

Swedenborg's astral exploration and Classical Channeling have independently arrived at an alternate conception of the group soul to that of Robert Monroe and Bruce Moen.  In Swedenborg's era, there was no New Age movement to either shape his bias or to elicit his critique. 

Swedenborg's astral travels prompt him to vehemently oppose reincarnation.   Yet he experiences what is apparently the equivalent of a group soul.  Consider these 2 sets of provocative quotations from his book "Heaven and Hell":

""People are borne by their own natures...towards those who are like them (43)...There was a face like an angel's that appeared to me.  The face varied according to affectons...[that] occur within a single community.  These variations lasted quite a while; and I noticed that the same general face stayed all the way through like a background, and that the other [facial] appearances were simply offshoots or projections from it.  So there was shown through this face the affections of the whole community, the sources of the differences in looks of the people there (47)...For leaving a community is like leaving oneself and one's life (49)."

"From time to time, therefore, a whole angelic community may appear as a unit in the form of an angel, a sight which the Lord has in fact let me see ...Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel are nothing but angelic communities, given their names by reason of their angelic functions (52)."

Similarly, in Classical Channeling, the group soul is not like the Monroe/Moen soul Disk composed of multiple selves of the same soul unit.  Rather, the group soul is composed of originally distinct individuals with a common purpose.  Yet this channeled conception might easily be confused with the soul Disk conception.  For example, consider this quote from Paul Beard, "Living On":

"The group as a whole is in a real sense itself a soul also, a group soul, and [the discarnate person] is in very truth part of this soul.  The bond, the common purpose, will not all be seen in a flash.  This [life] review...will be carried out gradually, until the various parts are gathered together and make a whole (135)."

This alternative understanding may be the key to solving a significant contradiction between Bruce Moen and Robert Monroe.  Bruce claims to be a parallel incarnation from the same Disk self as Monroe.  But Monroe is astrally informed that he has only one parallel incarnation--a female one.  He is also told that "she would seem like a long-lost sister (UJ 174)."  Bruce reports no such sense of intimacy in his earthly meeting with Monroe.  Perhaps, Bruce, Monroe, and this unknown female are totally separate souls bonded not by a shared identity, but by a shared purpose that destines them to participate in a group soul in this new consensual sense. 

This consensual notion of distinct souls comprising a group soul gets rid of the implausibilities posed by the troubling notion of parallel incarnations from a timeless astral realm.  Consider the contradictory nature of Seth's perspective on the timeless interval between lives.  In "Eternal Validity of the Soul" [151-152] Seth says, "There is no time schedule, and yet it is very unusual for an individual to wait for anything over three centuries between lives, for this makes the orientation very difficult, and the emotional ties with the earth have become weak."  But Seth also assumes that time is irrelevant for entities between lives.  The earth ties can only become gradually weakened if there is in fact a passage of time in the astral realm!

Both Classical Channeling [Paul Beard 80] and Robert Bruce report that time, though still operational, can be greatly compressed in the astral realms.  Swedenborg adds: "Angels [= discarnate humans in heaven] have no idea of the concepts of time and space...The reason...is the absence of years and days in heaven (162-163)."

Beard explains the momentous implications of the channeled notion of group souls: "[The deceased soul] sees that others in the group are dependent for the fulfilment of the common task...on his efforts, as he is upon theirs.  Success and failure occur individually, but their real meaning lies within a group context...in various ways members of the group have let one another down, hampered each other's purposes, just as at other times they have enriched...one another (137)."

Bruce Moen and Robert Monroe may have underestimated the importance of memory fusion.
Through years of astral exploration, Swedenborg discovered that the spirits who are with us can access everything in our memories.  This is not something they do consciously.  It comes to them automatically whenever they are with us.  They may even think that the memories are their own:

"Angels who talk with us do not talk in their own language, but in our own language or in some other language with which we are acquainted.  This is so because when angels speak with us, they turn themselves to us and connect themselves with us.  This connection...causes the two to be in like thought since our thought stays wit h our memory, and this is the source of our speech...; The angel enters the person's entire memory, so that the angel is scarcely conscious that he does not himself know whatever that person knows, including his languages (246)."

Discarnate souls in the heavens [= angels] agreed with Swedenborg about this process, but souls confined to "the World of Spirits" [= Focus 25-26] were unwilling to believe this due to the threat of a belief system crash forcing them to reject reincarnation.  As Swedenborg puts it,

"When I also talked about this with spirits, they were unwilling to believe that it is the [other] person that speaks, insisting that they spoke in that person, also that his knowledge is their knowledge and not that person's, consequently that everything that person knows is from them.  I tried to convince them by many proofs that this is not true, but in vain ("Heaven and Hell" 246)."

Interesting thought, freebird.

MS