Today I'd like to expound upon an idea which has been going around in my head for many years now. It was my father who first informed me of this supposition many years ago, when he was reading some Lobsang Rampa books. Like Erich Von Daeniken, Lobsang Rampa has been branded a charlatan in many circles, but it's not really about belief in my opinion, but rather about getting new ideas out into the open.
The premise put forward by Lobsang Rampa was as follows:
We each of us are linked by a silver thread (symbolically) to a higher-self, but several others are also linked similarly, by silver threads, to that same higher-self. When the threads get crossed, that's how people become schizophrenic, their personalities have in essence merged with anothers, although they are in some way connected.
To be honest with you, I quite like this suggestion, but I've considered several other possibilites tied in with it. Suppose, that all the individuals connected to the higher-self, live in different times, and that time therefore is linear. This would acount for cases of past lives remembered by some individuals, in other words, not past lives, but lives of other individuals connected to the higher-self. Alternatively, all of the lower-selfs are the same self, but time is irrelevant. This would make for a great pub discussion, don't you think?