I suppose I was raised to believe in reincarnation. My mom claims to remember past lives, well, mostly past deaths, and she talked about it quite a lot while I was growing up. If you would have asked me if I believed in reincarnation ten years ago I probably would have said yes. What I often used to think about back then was that there were some people that we were connected to beyond this life. Maybe my brother was my best friend, my best friend was my husband or wife, or my mother was my child. Ask me today, and I’d have to say that I’m not sure exactly what my opinion is on the whole matter. In some ways it would be nice to believe, because then no one would ever truly be gone from your life. On the other hand, it can become depressing to think that you might have a soul mate lost in time or space that you might never meet in this life. One of my theories is that humanity is a temporary state where individuals are separated into vastly differing experiences. In the end, whatever the end might be, everything will be reunited and there will be a realization that there is no separation between me, you, animals, plants, the earth, the universe or anything. Time and space will not exist, and there will just be the whole and the knowledge of everything in that whole regardless of when it occurred in human time. What if the idea of reincarnation comes from a collective unconscious (not in the Jungian sense) that we all share, and people who “remember” past lives have somehow stepped out of the space-time continuum for just a bit? Sometimes when I see a homeless person on the street, dirty and begging for food, I think about the idea that there might be one greater state of consciousness that connects us all. I try to imagine how that person might feel, and it makes me wonder if in the end there will be enough joy to balance all the suffering.