I love this idea.  The Course teaches that we see only the past.  And if everyone we see is really just a thought that we projected, then each “person” I see is “me”, living in a past life.  This points towards the truth, yet we rarely think of it that way because we are so addicted to identifying with the person we think we are in this lifetime, or even to the “soul” that has lived many lifetimes.   

To flesh out the metaphysics of this truth, and understand it on a deeper level, consider the following teachings of the Course…

In that original, insane moment of seeming separation, the Son of God splintered into billions and billions of fragments, each fragment becoming housed in a body.  It doesn’t matter whether that “body” is one that we’d call “animate” or “inanimate”.  Within this dream, every fragment of the Christ is seemingly housed in some form.

Also in the original unholy instant, all the scripts of time and space were written.  We as the decision making part of the mind, joined with the ego and wrote a COLOSSAL movie full of separate “lifetimes” for each of these bodies.  At the same instant, the Holy Spirit corrected all of these scripts, providing the Atonement principle that the separation never happened.  We, then, as the one Son of God would always have a choice as to whether to watch these movies with the ego and stay in “hell”, or with the Holy Spirit and return to where we never left in Heaven.

Now, it SEEMS, as if the one Christ Mind splintered into billions of fragments and that each of these fragments would identify with a particular body.  For example, I (referring to the fragment of the Christ Mind that I am) at this point in the dream, am identifying with a body named Erik.  When Erik dies, if I haven’t forgiven all my unconscious guilt yet, then I will be reborn into another body (and this other body will likely be human, but not necessarily.  It could be a rock for all I know…)  And before Erik, I was identified with probably hundreds, if not thousands of other bodies in my so called past lives.

But the point I’m getting to here is that even though it seems like I’ve only identified with a particular string of bodies (all my past lives), the truth is that my True Identity as Christ has identified with ALL bodies at one point or another.  Therefore, everyone I see is one of my past lives.  The reason why everyone is a past life as opposed to a ‘present’ one is because as the Course teaches, everything we see is in the past.  The dream has already been corrected.  It’s long since over, but we still cling to an old memory because of our fear of the Present.

So perhaps you’ll find, as I have, that it can be VERY helpful to keep this idea in mind as you go about your day.   Everyone you see is YOU in a past life.  You’ll be more inclined to forgive and be kind, which is the true measure of progress with this Course.

Peace…