People talk about their experiences in previous lives. They refer to these lives as if they were in the past and included the same personality, that same "I", the same mind as they currently have.

This perception provides these people with some false comfort to deny the frightening idea of them being temporal, instead of realizing that what is temporal is their individual identity manifested in their body and mind while they are actually eternal souls happened to identify with their body and soul and thus forget that they are eternal.

Time is a concept of the mind. Beyond mind there is no time, only the now exists. Speaking about previous lives in the past therefore is completely ignorant as incarnations are beyond mind.

Some of these people who speak about their past lives experiences do indeed recall these experiences that indeed did not take place in their current life. But due to their ignorance (and sometimes vanity) they hastily ascribe them to past lives while actually they occur in what we can call other lives or parallel lives, lives that are taking place outside the confinements of time. These can be alternative life options, parallel lives, lives of other (individual) people living, by current mind's time concepts, right now, in the future or indeed in some cases in the past.

The memories that these people ascribe to themselves as happened to them are actually mental leaks from the the collective mind and thus do not have any relevance to the current individual identity or mind.

Though the dealing with "previous" lives is intriguing and comforting, one who wishes to develop in the spiritual life should therefore leave aside these anecdotes and focus on dwelling in his eternal soul by letting go his identification with the body, mind and the individual "I". Only this will bring upon him the real awareness of being eternal.