The feeling at the center of this question is familiar to almost everyone. A person meets a stranger and is hit by a sense of already knowing them, of comfort or unease that seems to skip past the usual slow work of getting acquainted. Some describe it as instant familiarity, and within belief systems built on reincarnation, it gets read as recognizing a soul carried over from another life.
That feeling is real and quite ordinary. Psychology has a few plain explanations for it, and they fit the experience well. The brain is a pattern matcher, and a new face, voice, or set of mannerisms can resemble someone from the past closely enough to trigger a sense of knowing without any conscious memory of the resemblance. Researchers call the snap judgments people form in the first seconds of meeting the thin-slice effect, the mind reading a great deal from very little and arriving fast at like, trust, or wariness.
Projection adds another layer. A person often meets a stranger already carrying a hope or a fear, and a face that loosely fits the template gets filled in with feeling that was waiting for somewhere to land. Shared mood, mirrored body language, or simple physical resemblance to a parent or an old friend can all produce the same flush of recognition. None of this requires a previous lifetime to explain it.
Within regression and similar work, the strong reaction is sometimes taken as confirmation that two people share a long history across incarnations, with the intensity read as a measure of how deep the karmic bond runs. The honest reading is more modest. A vivid feeling is evidence of a feeling, not of a past connection. Instant aversion gets the same skeptical treatment as instant attraction; a wave of distrust says something about the person experiencing it, not about a betrayal in a former age.
The experience can still be worth taking seriously, just not as proof. Noticing a strong pull toward or away from someone is useful information about one’s own patterns, and it can prompt a closer look at why a particular kind of person lands so hard. What it cannot do is verify a shared past, since there is nothing to check the impression against.
The answer is yes to the feeling and no to the conclusion. A sense of immediate recognition happens often and means something about the present, and treating it as a memory of a past life claims far more than the feeling can support.