Sivason: I'm not ignoring your post on past life remembrances, I'm just not ready to respond. A partial response....

I don't question people's past life experiences because I'm trying to be a dick, though there's always some of that. I'm trying to make sense of my own experience. I don't doubt that there are psychic connections between past and present lives. I just can't find a way to relate one human life to another and say they're the same individual. I can't even make sense of the concept. It would be like selecting an orange then asking whether or not its the same individual as another selected apple. When I experience myself as another person, for that moment, within the scope of the experience, I am that person. I don't understand what kind of a 'me' there can be that's not contextual. I also don't see how a projection of a spiritual condition can be assumed to be authentic in any particular form. Every past life experience that I've ever seen anyone describe looks to me like a metaphor for some significant aspect of the person's current existence. This includes the genocidal images - those dynamics underpin our existence in other forms, notwithstanding the lengths that people go to to avoid seeing and feeling this. Of course, this correspondence of 'past life' and present life experience is accommodated by ideas about karma. But it doesn't seem to me that they are uniquely or very well explained that way. Here Occam's razor applies, and not in the usual fallacious way of "Occam's razor requires us to reject any explanation that seems to us to be unfamiliar or complicated". If B, C, D, and E all imply A, then the existence of A does not imply the existence of B.

Often I have tended to think of dishonesty as being close to the root of evil, since its harmful affects are so apparent. I'm starting to think that its not so fundamental. There seems to be a lot of evidence that an essential thing can have a lie built into it that can't be ironed out.

Here I could free myself and spew forth 'answers', turn my fear inside out, armor it with ignorance, and send it into battle alongside my understanding. How exhilarating that would be! But every month a new troll has that covered. So I'll just stop with my partial response, with the understanding that its inadequate.