My déjà vu experiences

[Ninshub]

When I have deja vu it generally feels as though the event/situation has happened some time before. That explanation sounds as though it should feel as though it's only just happened.

Mine distinctly felt like it was another life - or rather the same life, but way "earlier"/repeated. Not a vague sense of "recently happened", or even "some time before".

Of course now I'm going on my memories of my subjective experience of a while back, so I can't feel anything remotely certain about it, or too attached to whatever the truth of it was.

I seem to recall reading an explanation for deja vu which amounted a kind of “double reading” of an occurrence. It went something like... the external senses detect the event which is then communicated to the brain but that due to  some kind of unusual delay in processing it, we perceive it as having happened twice: once when it hits the senses and again when it is processed by our consciousness (I accept I probably haven’t done the idea full justice).
Not sure what people think about that?

This I think is the same idea that I tried rather poorly to describe above:

I've heard quite ordinary brain-based explanations, for example that a signal might travel by two different paths, with one arriving slightly ahead of the other, so that the second signal, even though it represents 'now' already matches something from the past, the first signal. That may not be the exact theory, but something along those lines. Nevertheless it struck me as profound.

However, I know someone who had some sort of stroke or related medical occurrence which disturbed the physical workings of his brain, and he said he had experiences of deja vu literally all the time, even right there as he was speaking to me he was experiencing a form of deja vu. I dare say when it is so commonplace it may not seem so profound. On the other hand such experiences may be hard to describe unless one goes to a great deal of effort, so I may have been making assumptions about what he meant by the term.

When I have deja vu it generally feels as though the event/situation has happened some time before. That explanation sounds as though it should feel as though it's only just happened.

Time itself is a strange thing. On a different, but again ordinary topic, I remember once when I stood up quickly to reach for a book on a top shelf. I felt faint, leaned on the wall for support and felt the palm of my hand sliding down the wall. I never hit the ground. There was a blank. Then I woke up, with little stars briefly whirring past my eyes. Having no idea of when or where I was, the first words I spoke were "Where am I?", in genuine disorientation as to where I was, or why, or what time or even what day it was. The people around me explained that only a few seconds had passed, but it felt like it could have been at least a whole night's sleep.

Returning to the deja vu topic, the physical explanations can only go so far, it is like sketching out an outline drawing of something, with all the colour, shading and detail missing. The remainder of the picture can only begin to be filled in when we have an explanation of consciousness and its relationship with the body.

It could still be that we have some sort of pre-planning to our life, certain events, though seemingly trivial, may be genuine recollections from having literally seen that moment or scenario before, during that planning. This of course opens up the wider question of free will and predetermination. Personally I think free will is primary, and any planning is by agreement. I liken this sometimes to an actor in a stage play. The scenes are pre-planned, and we enter the stage to play our role. I know one of the greatest difficulties I had earlier in my life were not with a lack of free will, but almost too much of it. I found myself thrust centre stage into this life, and to all appearances, those around me seemed to know what to do, they knew their lines and roles, whereas I had a blank, I had to improvise, ad-libbing wildly in each and every scene. Such was my life for a very long time. After a while I constructed some sort of semi-consistent character, but it didn't feel at all predetermined, very much the opposite, it flowed from some unknown creative well within myself.

Ok enough rambling.

Thanks Typoz - I must have missed that. Your explanation was better.

[Ninshub]

This is an interesting little piece that speculates about what the experience of déja vu means. It doesn't assume nondualism - Rupert Spira is simply reflecting on what the phenomenon tells us, possibly as a fracturing of our sense of time. The idea is that we don't experience time (we only ever experience "now") but our localized, contracted minds are somehow designed to experience "time", and the experience of déja vu is a momentary shattering of that illusion.

[Ninshub]

I like this bit especially:

The value of these experiences is to shatter our model of experience: "it's all made out matter, it all takes place in time and space, time and space are the ultimate nature of reality". The value of these experience is to shatter that model raher than to give us a new model. The fact that it's happened it makes you think "Wow". The déja vu experience is so powerful, you know you're not imagining it, it's just a little fracture when the doors of perception open, and you... "Oh my God, things are not the way I thought they were. Time is not what I thought it was". That's the power of an experience like that, and that opens you to a new possibility.

When he describes our (incorrect) experience of time as a horizontal dimension, and eternity as a vertical dimension, I can kind of make sense of that with my own experiences of "déjà vu", where it felt the experience "had happened" (my mind interpreting in the horizontal dimension) perhaps an infinite number of time.

I get a picture in my mind of something like this:



That would fit how my normal (but fundamentally erroneous), great majority sense of "time" as happening in a horizontal dimension, where suddenly my experience provides me with a fracturing glimpse of the vertical dimension that is real instead.