How Reincarnation Exists Simultaneously with Ancestor Spirits

My ex-husband didn't believe in anything outside of materialism, but he did once state he was concerned that if I had a past life regression I would find myself in the Holocaust or somewhere similar. When I suggested, "Maybe in my past lives, I wasn't Jewish." he looked about as disturbed as I had felt when the possibility first occurred to me. There is very little about me that seems so intrinsic and permanent as my Jewishness. Even my womanhood came into question before my Jewishness!

And yet, I haven't uncovered a past life where I was also Jewish.

A couple of my occultist friends have expressed curiosity about how I can hold two seemingly contradicting beliefs with lived experience at the same time. The first being that I am definitely a spirit that reincarnates, having psychically perceived the span of my other lifetimes. The second being that I have directly worked with and spoken with my dead ancestors, happily keeping an ancestor veneration practice.

What it comes down to for me is a 3-part soul system. This is something that solidified for me upon reading this paper "The Soul and Personal Identity in Early Stoicism: Two Theories?", particularly these points:

The notion of blending is important for understanding the way in which Chrysippus theorised personal identity because it shows that he might have thought of living humans, in terms of identity, as blended entities, that is embodied souls. The idea that identity depends on being an embodied soul means in order to understand what humans are, we have to think of them as souls present in bodies. Of course, the soul is the active and, more importantly, the best part of a human being, according to the Stoics. ^[40] However, in terms of personal identity, or to use the Stoic term, peculiarly qualified individuals, to be a particular human being is to be a rational soul blended with a human body.

The Chrysippean fragments containing the claims that the soul is engendered after the body also suggest that personal identity is grounded in the interaction between the body and the soul.

This leads to a conception of those three parts of the self being 1) The Body, which comes from and ultimately returns to the Earth, 2) The Divine Soul, which reincarnates and is otherwise* heavily connected to timing  and 3) The Personality, which is a contract of sorts between them.

My presumption is that our ancestors are primarily linked to us via the Body. We have their DNA, their physicality, and their trauma embedded in us. Our linkage to them is as material as any spirit work or relationships can get. The Body is also from the Earth itself and helps root us into the numerous ecosystems we are integrally part of.

The Divine Soul with its own goals and desire for experience sets the term for the person's existence, starting with the specific moment and place of birth. I am unclear on if this part of the self deliberately chooses a specific family line to enter into, as some children evidently choose their parents (I say evidently because I have had my own child linked to me since I was 16). I imagine the answer is probably yes based how my Jewish-American identity dovetails with the supposed goals my reincarnating soul seeks out for my lifetime. Namely, it wants to learn how to be independent after spending many other lifetimes in more collective species and societies. Coming from a family with a certain communal ethnicity that is weighted by assimilation into a larger, more individualist culture has been certainly illustrative of that idea.

The existence of reincarnation is not to say that the Personality** is ephemeral. Indeed, my ancestors are certainly still full of personalities long after their passings. There are many other religious systems that hold that the soul is in multiple parts and make room for something similar to the Personality. Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, teaches that there is a part called the la, which can get damaged or lost in life or take the shape of a ghost in death.

So you can be simultaneously alive and dead. A ghost and reincarnated. Or an ancestor and reincarnated. Time is not chronological or functional the same way as this realm everywhere, even off the planet Earth alone. As a result, it's not that hard to imagine that different parts of you may be in 3 places or more at once throughout all of existence. Wild, huh?

*Timing is an almost annoyingly overt part of my everyday. I once decided I was going to take a walk outside only to be so forcefully turned around I'm sure it looked like a shot from a comedy movie. Apparently it was Time to go to a mechanic to get some transferred paint off my car. Why was I needed there at that time? Who knows. The Divine Self has its own reincarnation journey, but they're extended opportunities in which an embodied soul follows larger movements of existence.

**Some people ask if our Personalities are like the other Personalities our Divine Soul has had. A reader once imparted to me that I always tended toward high drive and energy, and I suspect that may be the case because of a link to my soul's inherent vitality. But otherwise, I can't hold this as true. Recalling the last time I saw my past lives and how they were so clearly shaped by context—as well as our scientific knowledge of our families and how they raise us having significant influence on our characteristics and behavioral habits—incarnations are more often quite disparate.