You could read Jeff Green's "Pluto; Evolutionary Journal of the Soul." It's just dripping with past lives.

Question "HiIts.." What if you removed the "past lives" from the nodes and just looked at their effects? Would they still work? Or is the concept of past lives a necessary part of them?

Have you ever calculated the number of your ancestors who were all alive during the same time? I have. And guess what....About 1200-1300 AD the number of your ancestors who were all living during that period exceeded the whole human population on Earth. That is a fact. But then if you turn the tree upside down and instead of going from present toward past go from present toward future....well, suffice it to say I have 40 or so living descendants and I ain't dead yet. All people in the U.S. with the surname Axtell are descended from a single individual, Thomas Axtell, who came to Massachusetts from Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire, England about 1641; and we, his descendants, number over a million today. He had 3 children. The mathematics of population are rather mysterious and intriguing. And they certainly do pose some interesting questions regarding past lives, unless of course we reincarnate as sponges and aardvarks.

To calculate the number of your ancestors is simple. You had two parents; each of them had two parents; each of those grandparents had two parents......it is a biological necessity to have a mother and a father to create a new life. A human generation is about 25 years; follow your ancestry back for 400 years and you will find about 16 branchings on the tree. So to know how many people were simultaneously alive, producing the next generation which ultimately leads to you, simply calculate 2^n (generations). Example: Mom and dad, the four grandparents, then their parents....how many were the grandparents' parents? That is the third generation back, so 2^3=8. Voila. There were 8 people all alive at the same time who are your direct and indispensable ancestors, your great-grandparents. Now, if we wish to find out how many people were all alive at one time having the children who became you....for say the year 1200 AD (We are at 2000 AD-1200 AD = 800 x 4 (generations/100 years) = 32. So we crank in 2^32 and the answer is: just under 4 billion 300 million.......and the whole population of Earth didn't reach 1 billion until 1800. Go back one more generation (33) and the answer is over 8.5 Billion, which is more people than are breathing right now. The population of western Europe in 1342 was about 75 million, of whom 25 million died in the next three years due to the Black Plague. So where did our ancestors come from? [The same population math applies to China, and the Middle East/North African peoples, who suffered from the Black Plague too at about the same time as Europe, with the same death rate.]

Can you imagine your Soul, awaiting reincarnation, sitting in a waiting room reading a June, 1942 Reader's Digest (over and over again).....and the lady behind the counter says "Take a Number Please." First there weren't enough Souls to fill the biological requisites, and now there aren't enough vacancies. Supply and demand is a tricky business. But then I suppose reincarnation is the preferred alternative when compared to going to Hell after only one time around.