Guys, why are you making it so complicated? Not even reading esoteric stuff I got so confused!
Let's see, this is how I understand it: a human being is body + soul. The body changes, the soul is always the same.
When we die, the soul goes to an intermediate plane, where time is already different to the time we experience on Earth. If the soul chooses to stay in this plane for whatever reason, it would be what humans call "ghost" (or spirit), but it's a normal soul, only it can't reincarnate because first it has to reach the spiritual world so that it reflects about its last life and plans the next life. While you don't do this, you keep most of the characteristics of the last person you were, including attachments and human desires.
Once we are in the spiritual world, we can have access to all our previous incarnations, and the soul is the same, but it has more experience. When this soul acquires a new body, it will have a new personality, and the old personalities can also influence to a certain degree, but it keeps being the same soul. There are no past lives spirits, neither other kind of spirits. That's all (at least for my comprehension).
So, to answer mnrjpf99's OP: a soul is timeless, because time only exists in the physical plane (the Earth), or so they say... You feel your "pl soul" as if it was in present life because your memories are the same even when you lived that pl thousands of years before. Souls don't die. We all are immortal souls living in mortal bodies.