Can you share your interpretation of how it 'felt' before you ever existed?

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Identity is a tricky subject. If you ask me how I identify, I might have two answers. The first would be the normal, boring answer. A living human inhabiting a human body. The second, more interesting answer involves something I can only succinctly call a ‘soul’.

What does this soul consist of? I’m not entirely sure. But I’m reasonably certain that, for some people, what they experience doesn’t completely die when they do.

These two entities are pretty well separated from each other, but not completely. I believe I have a way to communicate with it, but like 95% of whatever is communicated is filtered through my subconscious.

The way I understand it, as our bodies and minds develop, we become more and more like the thing residing in our soul. Eventually, for various reasons I believe this happens in ones thirties, we’re as close to our ‘ideal’ self as possible, and the rest of your life is spent ‘growing’.

I believe this soul still exists outside of you and interacts with you by manipulating the world around you. One day it might decide to bless your day by giving you that perfect parking spot in front of the supermarket. Other days it might decide your patience needs to be tested and makes your day hell.

A lot of people get really interested in this quality of existence and so they’ll come up with schemes like the law of attraction to try to game their souls. The thing to remember about our souls is that they’ve lived way more lifetimes than we have, can see directly into what we’re thinking and so know all our tricks. Our souls are completely uninterested in the things we are and only care about one thing, growth.

So before ‘you’ existed as a human, you maybe spent some time in a realm between temporal existences where you are untethered to a body. Here you could reflect back on your past lives and maybe set some goals for your current one. For example, you might decide that a lifetime as a warlord is the best fit for you.

Some people believe in afterlives rather than reincarnation. I don’t believe in afterlives because when you strip away all cultural and temporal concerns, any ‘real’ afterlife would be indistinguishable from a reincarnation.

I don’t currently believe in an end to incarnation. Ideas of nirvana and moksha to me simply reflect people’s dissatisfaction with their temporal existences. I believe that any existence can be found meaningful, if not exactly enjoyable. Existence pushes us to learn and embody certain universal truths like love and power. As we become more advanced we get better at embodying them. Challenge can be found wherever you are.

If I could hazard a guess I might say that the incarnation cycle could end when a soul simply decides not to incarnate anymore, instead choosing to float around in the ether. I don’t believe time exists in the realm where our souls live, perhaps the souls themselves would feel the passage of time, but it would be meaningless in the eternal realm.

Eventually it would get bored with itself, and incarnate again. I imagine existence there would feel a lot like being in a dream, and being born into a new world as waking up in a different body than the last one you left. In the eternal realm I imagine a soul could have endless power over his own experience, like being on a holodeck. How I imagine a soul controls this realm would feel a lot like thought to me. Imagine if anything you thought became reality. You’d love it for a while but eventually get bored.

I think many of our souls are eternal, i.e. they were created before things like universes ever existed as we think of them. I think a lot of us are also relatively new. It’s difficult for me to get a fix on how old we really are. I imagine we may be remnants of even older entities that broke apart out of sheer boredom after existing through countless ‘universes’.

I personally get the sense that I am much, much older than dirt. For me dying would be like shedding a skin.