past lives/parallel lives

What we used to call past lives, I now call parallel lives.  What we used to call soulmates, I now believe are just people we already know from one of our parallel lives.  When I was a professional public interest advocate, people rarely talked about past lives or soulmates to me.  But in the years that I trained for and have been a woo-woo Centers for Spiritual Living minister, they do.  A fair amount.

Something about past lives never really rang true to me.  I remember my kids, when little, once trying to do the math on past lives.  "Mommy, if there are millions more people today than there were 200 years ago, how could all the people today have past lives?  would there have been enough lives to have?"

People with psychic abilities have sometimes volunteered that I was all sorts of mostly terrifying things in a past life.  I've been told I was a high level inquisitor in the Spanish Inquisition (which nobody expects, by the way), a Kamikaze pilot in WWII, and, a fearsome pioneer woman on the Oregon trail (what a relief after the first two).

Having studied our version of quantum physics with Amit Goswami at Holmes Institute for Consciousness Studies,  I know that at the level of the quantum field there is no time.  At the ground of all being is only space and light. In the quantum field the exact same particle can be in multiple places at the exact same time.  This is practically impossible for us time-based beings to understand but it is one fact that even "real" scientists (Goswami is a real physicist who dumbs it down for the rest of us) agree upon.  

Meanwhile, mathematicians (without whom physics would be impossible) mostly agree (something about String Theory I think, totally don't understand any of this but like to throw it around as if I do) that is it mathematically probable that there are multiple universes and timelines existing simultaneously.

A minister friend and I were talking yesterday about how this makes more sense to us than past lives: parallel lives.  Since consciousness, or choice, collapses possibilities into probabilities and reality and since the exact same object can being in different places doing different things at the same time, to me that means that there are multiple versions of my life happening simultaneously.  

In some of them I am thinner; in some I am fatter.  In some of them I am still practicing law.  In some of them I agreed to run for public office.  In some of them I'm an episcopal priest.  In some of them I'm probably in jail.  But right now, in this timeline, I'm in my mother's new home in Davis watching her "pack" to go "home" and I have no idea how I'm going to handle this delusion.  Maybe in another timeline, I do...