Personally I feel that reincarnation is real, but not in the sense the “soul" being like the immaterial form of the ego body-hopping. More, life itself is the spark, forming collective consciousnesses from more or less complex forms, from death to life and splitting and recombining into new forms and new ways of experiencing. However as well as that, the words, imagery and emotions, the stories and archetypes that float on the social collective consciousness across time, as humans die and are born their ideas travel through time, taking root in other lives. An archetype is basically a way that an ego can survive the death of an individual, passing from mind to mind. Thus humans may find themselves feeling deja vu or a sense of having lived a life before as their ego — because their archetype has.