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

[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...

[(Anonymous)]

Do you know why this would be?

[ecosophia]

I have no clue.

[(Anonymous)]

If I may speculate here: it may be possible that we were the Celtic Druids a very long time ago, and the revival was set in motion by some of us. We played the parts assigned to us, so to speak, until we were ready to start to move on to Gwynfudd. Once ready, rather than follow an already existing trail, we recreated the tradition we followed a long time ago, probably with the help of some gods, and we're running through it again, now that we're ready to really use it.

For what it's worth, this is the teachings of a Druid Order that I can remember being part of in the late 1800s-early 1900s. I have no idea if it's true, but it does seem to make sense of an otherwise quite odd phenomena.

Why Druidry seems instinctive

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe the mystery isn't that we intuitively recognize the body of knowledge that you label as "Druidry", but instead that we label it at all. Over-generalizing, I'll assert that other religions (Protestant Christianity being the one I practice) exist as an apparently arbitrary set of traditional doctrines and social practices which evolved while transmitted through the centuries. Perhaps the combination of these historical religions plus the secular Religion of Progress have simply crowded out what should be the common knowledge of the sacred in nature. We discover Druidry when we recognize the reality that's been around us the whole time. It's OK to make it up as you go along, since it's all around you as you go. The only surprise is that it's surprising.

Re: Why Druidry seems instinctive

[(Anonymous)]

BTW: I forgot to sign my post: Lathechuck.

Why?

[(Anonymous)]

The same thing happens with people who are drawn to the Michael Teaching, Either someone immediately feels like "where have you been all my life" or "eh, what?" There's no in-between. As far as the MT is concerned, it's because Michael has a multi-lifetime teaching agreement with everyone in a certain block of Essences; I have no insight about what draws certain people and not others to Druidry.