A Very Odd Kind of Déjà Vu

[ecosophia]

A little while ago I picked up a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's hefty philosophical tome Being and Nothingness at a used book store in Providence. I know, I have odd tastes, but there it was, and Sartre's one of the thinkers who's been on my get-to list for a long time. I also know that most people don't do well plunging headfirst into an 812-page doorstop of a book with no previous exposure to existentialism other than a few scraps in college thirty-five years ago, but that's also my style -- put it down to a youthful infatuation with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, but big books don't scare me, and I'd rather get the whole picture in a single massive lump than have to piece things together from more obviously accessible books. 

So I launched into Being and Nothingness, and as I got used to Sartre's technical language, which is fairly opaque -- he's a twentieth century philosopher, after all -- I noticed something very odd: a peculiar kind of déjà vu. 

It's not as though I've read Being and Nothingness before -- I'm quite sure I haven't. It's as though I'm encountering, for the first time, the systematic logic behind the way the world has always appeared to me. 

Sartre makes sense to me. The way he puts consciousness at the center of the human experience, rather than (say) the reasoning mind or the will; the way that he distinguishes between the ordinary engagement of consciousness in the details of everyday life, in which the big questions stay hidden, and the experience of disengagement through reflection, in which a dizzying gap opens up between consciousness and all its objects; the incisive way in which he shows that deterministic theories that reject the freedom of the will (as popular in his time as ours) are simply ways to try to evade the consequences of reflection, and try to be something the way a rock is a rock, which is the one thing consciousness can never do -- it all makes a very peculiar kind of intuitive sense, not as though I've thought these things before, but as though these things are implied by the way I naturally think, and I'd have known them if I'd followed things out systematically enough. 

It's an intriguing experience. I'm left wondering if I read the existentialists in my last lifetime -- I died around 1960 that time around, so the time factor works out nicely -- and they made enough of an impression on me that the habits of thought made the leap between lives. Or is it just that my mentality is the kind that fits an existentialist model unusually well? 

Comments

Interesting

[(Anonymous)]

That sounds like the way I felt when I first started reading your work all those years ago. It was like coming home; there were so many ‘but of course’ moments, with a heck of a lot of new thinking to go with it. :)

I’ll put Sartre on my lengthy get-to list.

previous life and this one

[(Anonymous)]

It fascinates me that I could have known and learned from you when I was in high school, attended your funeral confident in the knowledge that I would be studying your work later on.
Michael Clark

Re: previous life and this one

[ecosophia]

Well, if you'd known me late in my last life, you would have known a thirty-something Los Angeles housewife who read a lot but had turned her back on the esoteric philosophy she knew at a gut level she needed to study and eventually teach. It's possible that if she'd accepted her destiny, she wouldn't have been in the head-on car crash that killed her. One of those things...

[(Anonymous)]

I had this same feeling when I first read about socialism. I was talking to someone about this and we agreed some people become socialists, while others always have been and then discover there is a word for what they believe. How you described what it was like when you found out magic was possible, finding socialism was a lot like that for me. (Although I've now made myself a pariah on the left by thinking things through and ending up disagreeing with a lot of their current positions.) I've got a birth mark on my back that looks remarkably like a gunshot wound and now I'm wondering what I got up to in my previous life. :)

[ecosophia]

Fascinating. This doesn't surprise me at all.

[booklover1973]

Do you happen to know the book "The Souls Code: In Search of Character and Calling" from James Hillman. It may be relevant to the subject of last few lines in your post.

[ecosophia]

It's been a long time since I read Hillman, and I honestly don't recall if that's one of the books of his I read. Thank you; I'll put it on the look-at list.

[(Anonymous)]

That’s exactly how I felt when I read the Archfruid Report and then went on to buy and read your peak oil themed books. I am too old to have come across those ideas in a previous life. But it is a very odd sort of déjà vu. A pleasurable one though - wishing you much joy of Satre.

[(Anonymous)]

This describes me when I found Druidry. It was as if I knew it already...

[ecosophia]

Nearly everyone I know who's into Druidry has said something like that to me! As far as I can tell, nobody goes through a conversion experience to become a Druid; they encounter Druidry and say something on the order of, "Wow -- that's what I've always believed anyway. I guess I must be a Druid." Certainly that was the case with me...

Druidry

[(Anonymous)]

It really does feel like coming home, doesn’t it?

- Brigyn

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry about the car crash.

How can you tell when and how you died? And can you tell when and how you will die on your current go-round, and, if so, how?

[ecosophia]

I remember a fair number of details from my past lives, largely as a result of practicing discursive meditation daily for the last thirty years. Sudden deaths seem to leave fairly vivid memories -- for example, I also remember in rather unpleasant detail getting run down by a horsedrawn cart as a child in 19th-century Dublin -- while peaceful deaths in old age leave only very faint traces behind.

As for my next death, I have no idea, since it hasn't happened yet! Remembering your last death is like remembering what you had for breakfast yesterday; remembering your next one is like "remembering" what you'll have for dinner tomorrow, when you don't choose you own menu...

[(Anonymous)]

Hello John,

What do you make of this?

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/05/a-diary-of-the-damned/

[ecosophia]

Funny. I adored The Mothman Prophecies when I was a kid.

It's very easy to get caught up in a world of spooky events if that's what you really want, as Redfern pretty clearly does (and as John Keel certainly did). All you have to do is neglect even the most basic magical protections and never learn anything about how to stay out of trouble when dealing with the inner planes. The kind of basic daily practices every operative mage does as a matter of course will keep such things from happening -- but here again, it depends on what you want out of life.

[(Anonymous)]

On some level, I have long been convinced that I was some variety of theatre artist in a past life, probably in the early 20th century. Interestingly, I have no particular performing talent in this life - and yet, ever since childhood, theatres - especially old theatres, especially backstage areas - as well as the rhythms of the performing life, have always felt eerily familiar to me. Photos and tales of life in the early-20th century theatre and the traveling vaudeville shows make me feel like, "ah yes, I remember those days!"

I'm not "drawn to" the performing arts life in the sense that I feel like I have some talent that needs to be expressed, but rather in the sense that the theatrical life holds fond "memories." And I'm certainly not "star struck" by the modern performing arts scene. Which leads me to wonder, is a particular talent (like singing or dancing or acting) lifetime-specific? If I'm right about my past, then did I already "do" that life and so was born without any great performing talent in this life, even though I'm still drawn to the memory of that life?

[ecosophia]

That may very well be a past life trace. Since you're not drawn to the same thing in this life, it may be that you need to work on other aspects of your personality and your talents this time around, in order to balance what you learned as a theater artist in that previous life.

Another kind of déjà vu

[(Anonymous)]

Off topic for this post, but previously discussed on this blog: Vietnamese-American author Linh Dinh speaks about writing workshops and classes; I thought of you immediately when I read this:

“To write, one should read very carefully, that’s all. See all the different ways Hemingway or Annie Proulx build a sentence, for example. Teachers and writing workshops aren’t just useless, for the most part, but likely harmful, for you’re prone to be learning from not just a failed writer but someone who’s hustling for a deeply corrupt and intellectually crippling institution, an American university. On top of that, you’ll receive idiotic inputs from your fellow students. Although people can learn directly from Celine, Paul Bowles and Whitman, etc., at minimal cost, many are still willing to go into suicidal debt to receive instructions from a cast of dishonest incompetents, and they do this because they’re much more interested in networking than writing.

“Use what you learn from even the most unpleasant labor to inform your writing. Money is time, and since you need as much time as possible to observe, think and write, you must cut out all unnecessary expenses. Since it’s hard enough to just live, much less live and write, you must be willing to sacrifice many creature comforts, and even emotional ones, in the pursuit of a craft that may, in the end, yield no success whatsoever.”

http://www.neonpajamas.com/blog/linh-dinh-interview

Re: Another kind of déjà vu

[ecosophia]

I'm impressed -- enough so that I'm going to read some of Linh Dinh's writing as soon as possible.

[(Anonymous)]

JMG
It was late last night and I did not post this link straightaway, but the co-incidence cum synchronicity seems worth sharing still this morning.
http://ancestraltime.org.uk/what-is-ancestral-time-returning-to-ones-destiny/

By a chain of previous linkages – both personal and thematic - I was moved last night to check a website immediately after reading your Déjà Vu . This is a link is to an Edinburgh academic project that seems to have been paused since 2015. I had no idea Alastair had commented - I had met Alastair a few times back in the day – . It seems still this morning worth passing on his account of both a synchronicity and the word diachronic .

This is given a Christian context in the link, but spirit and time and relationship, err… cut across time.

best
Phil H in a different time zone adjacent the Scottish Border
PS I'm always astonished by your work rate, but Sartre seems to have been a good find - all 812 pages in one go! awed smile

[ecosophia]

Oh, it's not in one go. I read a page or so at a time and then brood over it while doing other things. I also have some light reading... ;-)

Schopenhauer

[(Anonymous)]

What a gripping post and disussion JMG!

It may be premature to ask if you are still reading it, but if not would you say Sartre's take on consciousness clarifies something missing from the likes of Schopenhauer's philosophy, or does it go against it all together, or neither?

Thanks

-Morfran

Re: Schopenhauer

[ecosophia]

I'm still fairly early in Sartre's book, so I haven't begun to test his thoughts against those of other philosophers -- I'm focusing now on following his ideas as clearly and thoroughly as I can.

Helpful video about Sartre

[(Anonymous)]

I found this to be a good "Sartre for Dummies" style bio on the existentialist philosopher:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bQsZxDQgzU

Re: Helpful video about Sartre

[ecosophia]

Thanks, but since I'm not a dummy and don't enjoy watching videos, I'll pass.

Colin Wilson

[(Anonymous)]

I had something like this feeling when I first read "The Outsider," by Colin Wilson. It was such a relief, and even invigorating, to read someone who shared some of the same experiences I had.

Also, I'm really enjoying the discussion on possible resonances with previous lives. It makes me wonder what I might come across in a future go-around that will strike me with an inexplicable sense of combined familiarity and strangeness. Maybe I'll shelter from a duststorm in a burned-out Target and be haunted by memories of material plenty and psychic isolation.
-Cliff

Re: Colin Wilson

[ecosophia]

I like that idea! You might consider writing a story on that theme and submitting it to Into the Ruins.