Ever Ever After

I've never ever deeply thought about death or the life after death. But lately, have been thinking about it quite a bit. Two people who I cared for passed away recently. One was an old family friend turned into a relation (his brother married my sister) who I knew for more than 15 years. Such a tragedy.
The other was a friend who I got to know when I came to Singapore who unfortunately lost his battle against cancer, just one day after he celebrated his 34th birthday. My heart goes out to the respective spouses and parents. The fact that both of them (though unrelated to each other) passed away within 15 days of each other made me start thinking more about death, about what happens after, the reason for existence and such questions.
While my mind has been searching for answers, R gave me a book to read. Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian L Weiss. This book is a true story of a young psychiatrist and his patient. Its quite interesting about how this patient, Catherine is able to remember a lot of her past lives right from 1836 AD under hypnosis. Fascinating. She claims that she so far has had 86 lives. Still have not finished the book, but what I find intersting is that when talking about her past life, she mentions the people she knows in this life. In one such life, the psychiatrist was apparently her teacher. Her daughter in one of her past lives is apparently her neice in her current life. Apparently groups of souls tend to reincarnate together again and again, working out their karma. This reincarnation happens till the soul acheives their karma and then moves on to an "in-between" state. Riveting. Can't wait to finish this book ...but would recommend everbody to read this one. It is an eye opener.