This business of recalling past lives sure confuses me, but I'm learning.

For starters, I'm not sure whose past life I'm recalling. I mean, maybe we can remember anyone's life from the past and take it as our own. There could be a gigantic memory pool we can draw upon for added experience. This memory pool could even exert a subliminal influence on our current lives. I don't know if my own life is all my own creation.

What I mean is, there is, believe it or not, a series of "Henry Reed" books. There's Henry Reed, Inc., Henry Reed's Babysitting Service, Henry Reed's Journey, and Henry Reed's Big Show. I haven't met any other Henry Reeds in my life, but this supposedly fictional character and I have a lot in common, much more than I have with anyone else I've ever met. I was so intrigued by these "coincidences," I once sought out the author, Keith Robertson, who lived in Hopewell, New Jersey, to find out who was copying whom. He was clearly puzzled, even disturbed, by the resemblance. Maybe his books and my life are both the result of the same story floating in the etheric memory pool.

How do you separate fiction from fact? I've had my share of past life regressions. It's usually impossible, however, for me to tell the difference between a real memory and a story that I've created. The feeling in these "memories," I've noted though, usually has a haunting mood. I can feel there's truth somewhere in these stories even if I doubt the facts. The've gradually grown in importance for me simply because their feelings have proven to have so much meaning. The question of meaning for me, then, moves away from concerns for the reality of reincarnation, or the reliability of past life memory, and turns toward making a connection with a story and learning from it.