When I was eight and nine years old, I started to think a lot about death. There was one summer, when I realized that I would be dead one day, with absolute certainty, that my mind would no longer form thoughts, my senses would no longer receive information from the world around me. I would no longer exist. At night I would lay awake and think of the nothingness, and I felt an absolute despair. I felt like life was meaningless if there was death.
My belief system didn't allow me to resolve these feelings, because the only thing I learned was that one day I would die and go to Heaven, which was no consolation to me at all. Today I was thinking about it and realized why that wasn't a consolation. Because "Heaven" is a static entity. "Death" is a static entity. "Life" is ever-changing, and this is what my spirit desires.
I believe in reincarnation, and I have always believed in reincarnation. I never felt the need to resolve this belief with the idea of "Heaven," I more felt that I had lived past lives, I could recall moments from those lives in my childhood, but it never occurred to me that this was a continuing cycle, that there is no death. But that's actually what I believe now.