I have a different take on these.
When we are born, we are influenced by everyone around us, and their histories.
When we die, how we lived influences everyone around us.
Those are our connections with the past and the future.
It is possible that karma and past lives have their origins in our earliest experiences of our parents.
Young children are extremely perceptive long before they learn language.
I have seen evidence recently (Baby Mind Reader - UK television, also Family Constellation workshops in Europe)
which suggests that when parents carry unresolved trauma, their children pick this up and may be very disturbed. For example, a mother had a miscarriage, a grandmother had been raped, a family member had died, and none of these issues had been talked about or properly grieved by the family.
A child picks up the feelings surrounding these events and in later life in order to deal with them creates some scenario from imagination and puts a label on them e.g. past lives, karma.
These experiences can be resolved with the help of a skilled therapist. The feelings need to be brought back into the body and fully experienced so that the proper grieving or other process can take place.
If you believe in reincarnation, my question is why? How does that belief serve you?
Are you trying to deny some part of your own potential?
Are you refusing to take reponsibility for who you truly are?
Life is here and now. Live it with all your heart!