Have I met you in another life?

I was trying to focus on reading a Dan Brown book over the din of the crowd at the Ciampino airport lounge in Rome. I looked up over my glasses and found a middle-aged woman staring at me. When she knew she had caught my eye, she walked up to me slowly and smiled. Oddly, I experienced a sense of déjà vu; there was definitely something familiar about her but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

“Hi,” she said. I smiled back in response. “I feel I know you from somewhere,” she said. “I’m only backpacking here. I don’t remember ever meeting you,” I said slowly trying hard to think if I might have met her during my stay in London.

She said I looked familiar to her. Not knowing what to say, I simply shrugged. She quickly got up, said she might have been mistaken and returned to her seat. I went back to reading, but I could feel her eyes on me.

This happened some five years ago, but it’s certainly not the first time I’ve encountered this. Something similar happened again last week, which set me thinking (and had me almost convinced) that I might be what the witches and psychics might have called an “old soul”. I was walking out of a shopping centre in Koramangala and saw a man outside the store. There was something familiar about him. We looked at each other for some time before I walked out of the store. It’s as though we might know each other.

So when random (sometimes good-looking, I must admit) men have approached me with the over-abused question: “Have we met before?” I haven’t always gone for a cocky comeback. Who knows, it might be true, especially when the question might not have applied to this lifetime alone.

The theory of soul recognition says that it is possible to recognise other people around you at the level of the soul. Shepherd Hoodwin, author of The Journey of Your Soul says the average person has a substantial connection of some kind with around 300-500 human souls, some of whom you are likely to meet in any given lifetime.

“Meeting someone and having a very positive and powerful attraction to them right away is a sign that this is someone we have loved well before. We might define a soulmate as someone that we feel a very positive immediate attraction to, and someone we feel compelled to be with or know better,” says Julia Jablonsk, editor, Psychic Journal. Listen to stories around you and instances of such uncanny encounters are not that uncommon.

Whether you agree or not, it’s definitely an idea that’s unusual enough to give some thought.