Have you ever thought what if? What if I had gone to another college? What if I had married someone else? For me, what if all of my babies had lived? What if I had moved to another city, another country? Well, you did, and they did. All of your what if scenarios are actually happening right now. And for every what if you have thought about or considered, there are 100 others that you haven't.

All of those are parallel lives/alternative realities. When you feel the sensation of deja vu, that's because you literally are doing those things at that very moment in a different dimension. You are the same person with the same looks and same destiny. Your pathway has changed in some way for each lifetime, but your reactions to events are the same, just as they are here.

These souls look like you, are born and die at the same time you do, and even share the same name, parents, family and friends. These rarely exist in the same realm, which is why you don't run into yourselves. Occasionally, however, there is a thin veil or psychic overlap. When alternative reality souls all die at the same time, they meet up in heaven and re-integrate. Then they evaluate all of the different experiences: what worked, what didn't, what was enjoyable, what they would like to try again, what things to avoid.

Because there are so many possibilities that change literally by the minute, there is no way one human incarnation or even a million human incarnations at different times could experience them all. So the soul divides itself up and sends a part to different experiences of the same essential lifetime. Think of it as a flip book. Each page of the book is basically the same except for a tiny change. When you put all the pages together and flip them, you see movement as if the pages were just one image. That is what alternative realities are like: you are one image with many slightly different pages.

Parallel Lives

There are other parallel lives too. These are lifetimes in other dimensions, worlds and realms where the soul essence incarnates as someone different in looks, gender, needs and/or location. They are still as much a part of us as the soul essences of alternative realities, and can result in the sensation of deja vu, but these souls are born at different times and places, and die at different times. When they die, they send reports back to the soul spirit about the experiences they encountered, just like the alternative reality souls do.

This relates to the things we are interested in and the places we explore and experience right now because we are living in those times and places right now as well as in our past lives. Though we think of our past lives as being in our historical past, they can take place concurrent to this lifetime or in the future as well as the past. Those various times are illusions because time itself is a man-made concept that helps us track events. Also, these soul essences of ourselves can be other people we might meet face to face in this lifetime, though they will usually only be aquaintances.

Twin Flames

Twin flames are another part of your soul essence. You can easily come face to face with them, and you probably have. Twin flames can be of either gender, any age, and any race. They can be soul mates but don't have to be. In fact, because a twin flame can be a mirror image of yourself, you might not even like them. They may be siblings, parents, friends, romantic interests, neighbors or teachers.

Soul Mates

Everyone thinks that soul mates are people who are destined to be with each other through thick and thin for the rest of their human lives, and that we each have only one of them. This may or may not always be the case. You might not always encounter your soul mate in each lifetime, and when you do, it might not last a lifetime. Also, you may have several loves that are soul mates, but in most cases, each of these different loves is actually the same soul essence - you are just needing to see different sides and have different experiences of them. Soul mates can be twin flames, but they don't have to be.

Copyright 2008 by Cindi Wafstet/Epona'Bri. Printed here with permission. To read more of Cindi's work, visit her website: http://visitingsummerlands.blogspot.com.