What is déjà vu?
A bizarre conjecture
Sometimes when I'm moving about my daily life, moments from my past will flash into my mind.
I have this mental experience visually: a moment reappears, where I might see the particular pattern of light on my cat's fur again, dappled in the light from the open window she lay next to. Or I see my hand and my friend’s hand reaching toward the game piece.
These short seconds from the past naturally arise from time to time in my mind. (The mind is just another sense gate, like our eyes and ears.) Lately, I seem to be remembering more random, smaller moments. I honestly can't tell why they're triggering, flashing up again on the internal screen of my consciousness.
At various points in my life, I've experienced déjà vu. The words are French, and mean "already seen." You may also know this feeling, that sudden sense in a given moment that you've been here before, done this before, seen this before. There's something familiar yet eerie about the texture of the action, like it’s something I’m repeating when that exact situation can’t have previously occurred.
Have you ever wondered what déjà vu was, really?
I have a bizarre conjecture.
What if, each memory of the past that pops into our heads has us re-experiencing our life on a sort of time loop? These memory flashes I experience today via my capricious consciousness have me visiting my past self, voyaging across time.
As living beings, we always exist in the here and now, even as the scene around us changes. Yet mathematics allows for the arrow of time to move backward and forward, while debates about what consciousness is are endless and as yet undetermined.
If time is malleable and our consciousness exists above or independent of time, then what if we are hopping back and forth in our own life’s timeline via our consciousness?
So then, perhaps the feeling of déjà vu is a sort of echo, a felt sense of my future self remembering this moment I’m now in?
Author’s Note: I told you all sorts of weirdness might emerge in this publication! Now, I don’t necessarily believe everything I think, although it’s enjoyable to entertain oddities. I also want to acknowledge that last week’s poem about Political Weather was probably too soon for most to get on board. Let’s keep fighting the good fight, friends — which includes maintaining space for creative possibilities.
Below, my paragraphs one by one reply to yours.... + a few. I'm embarrassed it's so long. But it's from my heartmind. It may sound like I know what I'm talking about, but don't let me fool you like I fool myself. I wish to communicate with only verbs, not crazy self-obstructing English. Also the pronouns are problematic. Below, when I write "you are this or that" it smells to me like mansplaining. It's not!
What means past? Something retrieved from mental memory, stored like fermented sense data.
In present moment awareness, ego separates and peeks in through the open window, recognizes the light on your cat’s dappled fur and attributes to it special meaning. It whispers you are special for remembering. Would deja vus dissolve if ego didn't take such notice?
Mind is not a sense gate. If sense gates are the surface of a multi-dimensional sphere, mind would be its spacious content. Light on your cat’s fur connects to your inner light somehow. Though it feels incomplete and magnifies the immediate future, the deja vu completes a cycle which is mostly hidden, like an iceberg, and our own depth is the ocean that obscures most of it.
What if consciousness creates time? We build one side of a bridge that cantilevers into the unknown, sensing for, reaching for a similar bridge spanning from the dark. You dance along its precipitous jutting edge, calling out like a songbird from a cloud, listening. Suddenly in service, you make offerings to what is mostly unseen, the unknown learns to hunger for your capriciousness.
Mind talk is not here and now. Presence remains in the multiverse of senses and walks through an ocean of awareness. Ego turns and talks about it, innocently standing in the way, oblivious it obstructs original flow. Maybe ego simply wants a sun-tan - wants to be beautified by our intense inner light, wants to bask and be made more attractive. Consciousness need not explain itself when its desires are met. It would be off cavorting in love. From the sun’s perspective, your skin is a fine place to land because you are alive. Bioluminescent quantum you.
(Dzogchen says we're made of light.)
Explaining consciousness is as futile as describing taste with words and a lot sillier. You know what consciousness is: it’s what you’re tasting now.
(All life is conscious. All consciousness is light. (Please forgive my over simple abuse of the verb 'to be.' Using the verb 'is' this way IS nonsense! :) ))
If consciousness creates time then life is the missing variable in cosmic equations and unified theories. We ride a chariot of light at light speed. According to special relativity, as light, our perspective is timeless, so we use consciousness to create time instead. Why? So that Source can delight in itself in another way called you.
Echo is profound. Future calls to past. Past calls to present. Across generations of time we mirror and radiate light. Consciousness is an evanescent wave formed by self interfering with self. Radiant centroid interferes with surface, identity interferes with face. Your body made of ancestral grace both proceeds and trails you like a wake in the ocean of what is, and reflects off the boundaries that contain you, as memories from the future and deva vus to the past.
If I believed in absolute truth, I'd say I'm absolutely full of shiny shit!
Thanks, muse!
An intense subject that's subject to itself! You're not afraid of tasting the enormity of space and time itself. And why not? We open wide. I could talk about this stuff forever!