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ok, well this is going to take a lil bit and hopefully not get too convoluted, anyways, here goes.
I believe that there are different plains that we exist on at different times, at least two. one plain is this one, where we live and learn whatever it is that we are here to learn. spirits from the other plain can interact with ua as well, tho some are better at it than others.
we die,either randomly or when we have finished what we have come here to learn. when we do die, we go to the other plain that could be perceived has heaven. here, we look over our achivements in this life and all other past lives. there is a never ending loop that one goes through. if one feels that there is something that still needs to be learned/experienced, then we return to the live plain where we only have some memory of any past lives. when on the ?higher? plain, we can interact with the ?lower? plain as chosen,depending on our experiences. some spirits chose to act as a guide and therefore spend very little time in the ?higher? plain.
hmm, now that i think ive gotten off topic and rambled for awhile, i'll be going to ramble elsewhere whee

this is a really interesting topic. it seems all the answers i want to give rely on making one's soul "better" or "more perfect". but then what defines what's good for a soul? i guess my problem with souls that get better with each reincarnation is that people don't seem to be getting any better, but then that's just one definition of "better". wow, im getting more confused the more i think about it. i don't know what i believe, but perhaps it's something like what heiwa/Astra said, where what actually happens depends on what you believe in. except then how could someone like Hitler go to a place where he would be told about the mistakes of that life, when to him he didn't make mistakes? i mean, his derranged mind told him that was what he was supposed to do. so im confused. maybe i believe that the universe is just one big jumbled mess, and we're all rattling round in it, past lives and future lives and summerlands and heavens and hells and reincarnations and gods and goddesses and just everything, and we're all mixed up in it somehow. it would explain a lot, but it's not a very comforting theory, im afraid. im so confused!

there's so many answers, and no way to know if one is more right than another! i was thinking, maybe all of time happens all at once. instead of just being one long stream of events that happen one after another, everything happens at exactly the same time. so, while you're living today, you're also living tomorrow, and yesterday, and somewhere in there Alexander the Great is living too. another idea would be that we each live in our own world, and no two worlds are the same. that's sort of like what you were saying with the dimentions thing, i think. or maybe there's loads and loads of dimensions that represent one world but changing every detail to what could have been. so there's a world out there in which i decided not to type this but wrote about chocolate chip cookies instead. only that doesn't seem like a very plausible idea, because there would have to be soooooo many worlds. wow, there's some worlds i would love to visit. this seems like something from Phillip Pullman's books, doesn't it?

I really think this is hell sometimes lol

You know, I just though of this a few days ago- If the afterlife is so perfect and we're going to reincarnate anyway, or something, why live life, if the hereafter is so much better? And if we think that it could be so much better, why do we stick around? It must be the instinct to survive, because in this day and age, the afterlife seems like a pretty welcome choice. But I don't want to die (yet).

I know I probably just through a wrench in the works of this thread, but that was a voice in the back of my mind, and it just had to get out in the open you know? I can't say I don't believe that, but, I can't explain it, it was just something that needed to be said. I need opinions.

There are a lot of ideas as to what happens after life but I've never even considered why we want to live for so long if death is so great. According to Catholics, we need to serve god and live our lives as best to serve him and help others, suicide is a sin. I think in wicca, we need to live out our lives to do they things we need to go on to the after world or we are just reincarnated yet again.

I agree with all of you. Though I don't believe in Hell.