Afterlife Interviews is one of those books I don't remember buying and just came across it on the shelf. It's an easy read so I leave it out and pick at it like a box of candy. Code for 'bathroom reading' I eventually did get to a section where the author sort of coughed up his sleeve and devoted the tens of words to the explanation. Basically, you wind up in a 'no time zone' which are the author's words not mine. Maybe I'm splitting hairs with his words but he places far greater emphasis on 'past' lives than 'future' ones because they're more appealing. Being the reincarnation of an ancient warrior or whatnot is cool. Most people don't imagine themselves a serf who died uneventfully after a short life of dirt farming. Or pig farming
All the reader gets is a glossing over of the topic. I see it as tripe, just paying the bills by marketing this topic at an extremely receptive audience. Paying off the boat.
As for the past - at least the
Enterprise or the
HMS Bounty Bird of Prey are a self contained starships. Marty's DeLorean is definitely NOT so if you are really going back in time to 1985 you'd best get your orbital calculations correct or you're floating in a vacuum with a problem. The Earth
moves you know.
The layman's description of the physics I recently read says the 'the future' including the state of Schrodinger's cat exists in a cloud of possibility. It has no state until it is observed. So by extension if a tree falls in a forest and nothing is around to hear it does it make a sound? By that logic it doesn't even fall until it is observed, which makes my head hurt. Best analogy that I can fit my small mind around is say, Luxembourg. I know it's really there and is easily verifiable but in my head it isn't really. I'd have to observe it myself to make it 'real' to me. Ugh.
But perhaps that may shed some light on the common concept of pre-planning your lives while hoovering around The Ether while in a discarnate state; free will exists because of the endless series of choices. Maybe our lives follow a general path but not a fixed path like railroad tracks.
Just trying to sort the pop culture from something more academic and Mr. Marks really falls into the former category.