This is the first time I have bookmarked a comment.

I had not seen the painting, so thanks.

As for my theory of souls, I just realised that no philosophy I know has spoken of souls having lived on other planets in their previous lives.

I wondered why and I think I have a sort of explanation.

Let me preface my explanation by mentioning another (acceptable) oddity. If souls evolve, why has no retrogression taken anyone to a life before they evolved (as a soul) to inhabiting the bodies of sentient beings?

I think the answer is the same as it is for alien previous lives - they are too different for them to 'merge' with terrestrial/sentient lives.

Maybe I lived three lives as a Martian and had to evolve away from that because there were no more births there, so I came to be born on Earth, and had to live my first lives as a pre-sentient (or partly) man. Therefore the layers in my soul are grouped separately, the three martian ones seeping and identifying with each other, my pre-sentient lives doing the same, though in a less self-aware manner - and the rest are the ones I can more easily contact.

What if a soul is only 'whole' and advanced to the point where it nolonger needs to be reborn, once it can identify with all its previous personalities? But then, maybe there are advances in the physical plane we must also experience before we can 'consider' ourselves complete?

Perhaps my Cherinian mutants are such?