Greentext

Concurrent incarnation is not a rare belief.

Then again, the concept of a soul as an individual thing rather than part of a continuum isn't necessary for reincarnation. So, baby bird could definitely have soul, just like any other living, and one viewpoint of the universal soul that is everything is simply shifting awareness from one physical extension to the next, with no real need for it to not be happening to every living thing at any given point in what we call time.

Okay, that's pretty thick there. Damn near opaque.

To rephrase. Imagine that there are no souls. There's one soul. Only one. The soul is everything, everywhere, all at once. What the dying uncle told his family was nothing more or less than an echo across the universal soul between the bird state and the uncle state. The uncle part simply perceived the universe from the perspective of the universe, but could only glimpse the part closest to him in the limited perception of time that a living human has, i.e. linear.

The uncle saw his future as a bird in a straight line, but there was no line at all, and the bird was born prior to the death, but it looked like the future to him because it was the future for that part of the universal soul.

It's all timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly soul stuff.

I'm not espousing this as my belief, nor as some kind of objective truth. Just saying that if we accept the possibility of soul as a state, we may not be able to quantify the entirety of it, so there's no limits to what might be the actual experience of the soul. Kind of a thought experiment that isn't an experiment, but more of a koan.