Tobi, and Psy... love the conversation! Putting myself into each of your thread-of-thinking on this, I can see the empathetic wisdom as the base of each! A part of me has long given up attempting to describe any of this. For each time I try and frame these experiences I'm left realizing that we're dealing with shadows. How can we hope to explain something with any effectiveness if all we can see are the shadows?

This seems to be both the limitation and yet the benefit of being human.. It may be as "souls" that we're here for the experience, that we're born for the memories, that we're composed as a life for the sake of the journey. If this was the case, then the dog that had died a year ago, may well have taken his historic shape, in the way that he/I remembered, in order to share yet another moment, as we were back-when. On a soul level, there may be great value in memory and association. And though the forms may change, the earned-memory may well be still cherished.... While my dog that just died was still defined by this life and was mostly in search of immediate comfort. He may truly be quite different by now... but should the situation arrive he may possibly return to this form in celebration of the memories we shared.

The Definitions of ourselves are conditional, based on time and environment. We no longer see ourselves as we did as young children, and yet the child that we were is still there. A good hypnotist can verify that for us.... :^)

So we're experiencing and we're guessing... perhaps the more we experience the better our guessings... but I suspect that as long as we're human we'll be anchored to mostly knowings based on our five senses,, with the occasional peek into what's-more. That morning with the dogs for me was one of those glimpses. It was one of those moments when, I knew, I knew nothing.. and when I returned to my body I was okay with that... it's kinda cool being human and limited... how else would I have known my dogs for the sharing of such intimacy... perhaps it's these connections that we make every day, and over our lifetime, are ultimately what we're here for... it's these that we get to keep, as a state of blending in relation to each other... :^)