This is one of my favourite topics. I believe in reincarnation. Apparently early versions of the Bible included reincarnation, but they were edited out by Charlemagne. Obviously, I am not a Bible expert though, having never read anything other than a Children's Bible.

I've read a couple of great books, including Life between Lives by Michael Newton, and Many Masters, Many Lives by Brian Weiss. These two are both psychiatrist/psychotherapists who separately have used hypnosis to investigate life in the Afterlife. I read both books thinking oh yeah. A lot of it reconfirmed my own beliefs. A lot was new. The hypothesis is that all souls are reborn many times. The Creator or God creates us to incarnate on this or other worlds. We choose the life ahead of time, based on lessons we need to learn. We are then born but lose our memory of the Before life, in order to be able to express free will. The lessons we learn in our life help us to evolve as souls. Over many thousand of lifetimes, we evolve in to perfect souls until we no longer need to be reborn and merge with the Godhead.

Life between lives is like a community and school for souls. We evolve in groups of like souls. Our soul group is at a similar level of evolution. We have soulmates who we meet over and over in our lives. Some souls act as our guides in life. In some lives, as we evolve, we become guides to others. So your grandma, uncle or fabourite techer may not be part if your soul group, but they may be your soul teachers. After we die, we go through different levels depending on our soul evolution. Older souls go through fewer steps than new souls. We debrief with our guides and then meet with our soul group to go over the lessons in life.

Eventually, after a period of rest, we choose our next life with guidance from others. We are then born to parents we choose and the next life brings us opportunities to further evolve.

All this reinforced things I already believed on some level. I always knew or hoped I'd meet my soulmate. I was certain he would come from overseas, which he did. My biggest struggle with this is, did we choose to have two babies die? If so, what lesson are we supposed to learn and have we learnt it? It's something I've been talking with someone who is schooled in Buddhism about. Something about having agency in our choices. Obviously we didnt choose for our babies to die. I just need to understand it more on a spiritual level.

I suppose one reason I've always felt so sad about people who commit suicide. Not only is it a complete waste, with a whole heap of pain and suffering left for friends and family to live with, but also because I believe by taking a shortcut like that, it means that person will have to cone back and do it all over again next time and that next time it may be more difficult. It's that thought that has sustained me at times.