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

[(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.