In reincarnation there is an immortal entity, the soul or psychic being, which survives death and is reborn in a new physical body. In Hindu thought, it is like a thread which strings together the separate lifetimes of its incarnations. During each lifetime, the soul accumulates experiences which alter its nature and guide the development of its individuality.
Amit Goswami theorizes in Physics of the Soul that the soul is a set of propensities for certain mental, emotional and vital responses to the events experienced by incarnate beings in the material world. The propensities come about through conditioning, which alters the dynamics of manifesting the possibilities latent in the mental and vital realities. A particular response increases the likelihood of a similar response in the future. Thus a person develops a tendency to favor certain ways of thinking and feeling over others - a character.
A soul is not a thing, it is a confluence of conditioned possibilities transcendent to the material world, and so it is not affected by the death of the physical body. It survives and is reborn in another incarnation. Over the course of many births and deaths, the conditioning acquired in each lifetime accumulates and alters - it becomes the soul's karma. When a soul creatively learns new contexts of thinking and feeling that bring it closer to fully realizing its potential, we say it has built up good karma. But the propensities which limit it and block it from creativity and love we call bad karma.
The soul's mission is to live out all of the archetypal themes of human experience, learning their lessons and ultimately achieving a perfected state. To complete this mission, the soul must rid itself of all of the bad karma it accumulates. This is very difficult, and so the soul must reincarnate over many, many lifetimes.
With this understanding of the soul as a conglomerate of tendencies and habits which form a character, we can speculate on the implications of the existence of generational archetypes on the soul's progress through the incarnations.
The generational archetypes exist because, in a society, each generation encounters the different eras of the saeculum during different phases of life. For example, during the tumultuous Crisis era, the Hero generation is in young adulthood and develops a strong sense of community and accomplishment, while the Artist generation is in childhood and develops timidity and sensitivity. We say that each generation has a unique age location in history and a distinctive generational character, or peer personality.
From the soul's perspective, age location in history is a condition of birth which determines, in part, the sorts of propensities it is likely to develop in a particular lifetime, depending on the archetype of the generation into which it is born. This is not absolutely determined; there are always individuals who go against the trends of their generation, and there is more variety of character at the specific level of the individual than at the general level of the generation.
There are also propensities carried in a soul that are not connected to generationally shared experience. For example, in reincarnation research one type of propensity that is often studied is phobias - fears of very specific things or places. These are usually traced to a traumatic event in a previous lifetime which is connected to the object of the phobia. This sort of propensity is not likely to be related to generational archetype or age location in history.
But for those propensities which are connected to generational shared experience, there may be a relationship between a soul's incarnational history and the particular generational archetype into which it is being born. Two opposing forces are at work - the tendency to repeat past patterns, and the need to fulfill unfulfilled themes. The fact that souls carry propensities from lifetime to lifetime suggests that they are likelier to reincarnate into the same generational archetype time and time again. But the need to live out all of the themes of human experience suggests that a soul must eventually incarnate into every generational archetype before its journey is complete.
Perhaps those people whose thinking and habits go against the trends of their generation have souls which in past incarnations were repeating thought patterns and habits characteristic of a different generational archetype. Now they have been thrust into a circumstance where they are challenged to learn unfamiliar new contexts of their previously lived themes. This accounts for a feeling they may have of being out of place, of being born into the wrong time. But it also represents for them a chance for a quantum leap in soul evolution.
It is probably best to think of age location in history as just one type of circumstance available to influence the soul's chances of discovering new contexts of experience. Many others exist. To whatever extent a soul can choose the circumstances of an incarnation, it has the four generational archetypes available for this purpose.
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