dé·jà vu.
Function: noun
Etymology: French, adjective, literally, already seen
1 a : the illusion of remembering scenes and events when experienced for the first time b : a feeling that one has seen or heard something before
2 : something overly or unpleasantly familiar
I was laying on the couch the other night, not able to sleep, and for some reason I started wondering about déjà vu. I heard once that maybe déjà vu is a phenomenon of random occurence due to collective memory. The way I understood collective memory is that every person who has ever existed has contributed to this univeral memory bank and we all have access to it. Every now and then we experience a moment that someone else has experienced and we get déjà vu, because we’ve drawn from this collective memory. It’s an interesting concept and I may not be relaying it in the same way that I heard it, but you get the idea.
I like the idea of a collective memory, But I started wondering if maybe déjà vu exists because we actually HAVE experienced that exact moment before. Bear with me here while I try to explain.
I thought okay, we have evolution. We mostly talk about evolution in terms of how humans came to be what we are. But we can think of it in broader terms as well, can’t we? Evolution isn’t reserved just for us here on earth. It gets really interesting when you look at evolution universally.
The Big Bang happens and we get expansion and things evolve; from primordial soup to everything we see today. Pretty cool.
So okay, thanks to the big bang, our universe has been cooling and expanding ever since. I’m in the camp that believes eventually the expansion will stop, reverse, and then collapse back in on itself. Kind of like these cool toys.
So in essence, I guess you could say that we will evolve so much we’ll make it back to the beginning. Like running a lap. And once the universe has collapsed back into that single point, the big bang will happen again. And evolution will take over and bring us down the road again. So I’m thinking that maybe this keeps happening. Just like that toy, it opens and closes, opens and closes. Big bang-expansion-collapse. Maybe this is infinity. We keep reliving everything, over and over again.
But, not exactly. With every new revolution, every new evolution, things change. Because even evolution evolves, right? There are variations and mutations that keep each rotation from being EXACTLY the same. But given infinity and the randomness of it all, there are bound to be moments the universe relives in precisely the same manner as some other time… Déjà vu. We’re remembering/reliving/experiencing a previous universal existence. Due to the sheer number of times we’ve done this, chances of déjà vu seem to me to be rather high. But not so high as to be constantly experiencing it. Just enough so that we think “wow, that’s weird, I feel like we’ve done this before.” Because maybe we have!
I don’t know, the whole thing is pretty trippy to think about. What if that were the case? Over and over we play the same part, only each time it’s just different enough so we never fully realize it. Except in those moments when we do realize it. It seems like a decent enough possibility. I don’t know enough about math and physics and the science of it to really have a solid theory or evidence to back it up, but it’s still fun to think about.
I look around and everywhere is a circle. Everything in life leads us to circles, leads us in circles. What goes around comes around. Starting at point A brings us back to point A. Only there really is no point A, no starting, no ending, just round and round we go. That’s the real beauty of the circle.
Can you imagine the possibilities? We’re talking infinite time here. So infinite that time doesn’t even exist. Who knows how many times I’ve been Christa, human on planet earth. I’ve probably been her millions of times, all with slight variations. And that’s just what I can identify with right now, given my present limitations. Maybe in other universe existences I’ve been air molecules or a bug or some sort of gas or…well, it’s just endless really.
It’s almost too crazy to think about, and when I do it for too long, my mind gets jittery and my stomach feels queasy and I get this really nervous feeling all over. And I realize that my mind puts up barriers. There is only so much that we can comprehend. For all that fascinates me, I lack the ability to truly understand and grasp the sheer complexity of existence. I don’t think anyone can, to tell you the truth. Sure, we get little bits here and there, but jeez. It’s like being in a torrential rainstorm, trying to catch all the raindrops with just a thimble.
But I think that’s okay, because the quest is more important than the answer. That we’re out there getting soaked and filling up our thimbles is enough. The journey, not the destination. Because the destination IS the journey. We’re in a circle here and where we’re going is where we already are.
This comforts me and scares me as well. But in a strange peculiar way, the scary part is comforting, too. Maybe scare isn’t the right word, but it’ll have to do.
Sometimes I wonder how I got this way. Why I think about these sorts of things, instead of shoes and weddings and clothes and teddy bears and ponies and unicorns.
This is my faith, this is my spirituality. I think about the objects that I hold in high regard, the symbols of my spirit. Trees, turtles, elephants, space and the stars. Things of longevity. Things that hold memories in them, the past, history. How do I pass this “faith” of mine to Ryland? We can’t go to Space Church or anything.
Maybe I should start one. Space Church. I like that.
Ive been in similar thought tunnels. Especially while aided by psychtropics. But that was a long time ago. If you are achieving this level of consciousness with out them, then you must be the chosen one.
Just saw Star Wars Three.. Excellent.
I realize I constantly play the spoil-sport on this blog, my apologies… but…
a) It’s been well documented at this point that the universe is in fact INCREASING it’s rate of expansion, not decreasing as was long thought. The reasons for this are still largely a mystery (dark matter, anti-matter, anti-gravity, or some mixture of the three have all been proposed). However, I don’t believe there’s much debate anymore. The universe will, in it’s current state, never re-collapse. Even if it COULD, it is not believed that the universe would be able to “rebound” very many times, as the total amount of available energy for work would be significantly decreased with each cycle. How many times “not very many” represents doesn’t much matter, as the Big Crunch is pretty much proven to be a false idea at this point.
b) Last I heard, deja vu is believed to be caused by a misfire or overlap of neurons between the short-term memory (things perceived to be happening NOW) and long-term memory (things perceived to have happened in the PAST) parts of your brain. I’m not a neurologist or anything, but the way I understand it is your brain momentarily starts playing with the long-term part of your brain when it’s supposed to be playing with the short-term part of your brain, causing a confusion between PRESENT events and PAST events. That’s the reason that people experiencing deja vu can never recall any details of a previous experience identical to the current one, because it never existed.
Imagine making a blog entry, and when it gets saved it accidentally gets saved with both TODAY’S date, and a date from the PAST. It appears as if you just repeated the same blog entry as before, but in reality it only happened once, and was simply copied to the wrong date.
Sweet relief
put your hands on your head.
there, don’t ever ask me to do it again…
But maybe Brasten, all that could mean is that the expansion of the universe has evolved to the point where it can’t really collapse inward anymore. That’s not to say that it hasn’t before, and numerous times. If the energy needed to do this does keep depleting then it would make sense that the expansion would have to evolve past this. So now we’re at the point, in this current state of the universe, where there will be no big crunch.
And maybe the rate of expansion is still increasing because we’re still so close to the time of the big bang that we haven’t started to slow down. Sure 13 or so billion years seems like a long time, but in the shadow of infinity, 13 billion years is a blink.
AND this brings me back to my whole point that we don’t really know what the hell is happening, because there are limitations of our brain functions, vastnesses and times we can’t comprehend. So maybe deja vu looks like our brain is just misfiring, because we don’t know any other way to describe the glitch of a memory of something that existed in another time, maybe even another dimension. who’s to say.
I am not saying I’m right or even that this is what I believe is happening or true, I just think it’s cool to imagine and wonder. And it’s the imagining and wondering that I consider my “faith”, not one set or particular theory.
ooh this is so exciting I love cosmology talk!
and I don’t think you’re a spoil-sport.
Perhaps with the right education and psychtropics Christa could meld physics and metaphysics into a new fold of reality in our present space and time?
At this point I think it’s pretty much a sure thing that our universe will not collapse again. Now, you’re right, it’s very possible that this is just the final, last cycle of a rebounding universe. However, most physical laws would seem to dictate that the ability of the universe to “bang” would diminish to the point where each cycle became shorter and shorter, and would NOT resolve in a final eternal expansion like we’re seeing now.
It is altogether possible that we’re interpreting what we’re observing entirely incorrectly, and that a better theory will surface in time, maybe even one that permits your idea. All science is open for discussion. Keep in mind that according to the “establishment” throughout time, the universe revolved around a flat Earth that was created 6,000 years ago.
Our ability to imagine and wonder is what makes us human. Keep the faith.
Hi everyone. I never post, but read often. Just thought I’d pipe in since this is a subject that fascinates me too. I agree with Brasten that the rules of physics dictate that the universe will probably not collapse again (although physics may turn out to be a crock pot of crap) but I do believe in the theory of parallel universes and in that respect, maybe there are millions of other universes out there right now expanding and evolving as ours has and maybe at different stages of that evolution. I also believe that at some point in the very distant future humans may develop the technology to time travel and communicate with aliens, so maybe I’m a little hokey, but I do think that at the rate that humans are coming up with new technologies, if we can survive as a species, humans will come up with something cool in 10-20,000 years. We’ve already thought it up in movies & TV so I’m sure someone’s already working on it.
I also have heard that deja vu is a misfire in the brain. Apparently people with temoporal lobe epilepsy experience deja vu during the seizure. So, definitely, some sort of brain misfire is happening. Just think what our brains could do if the whole organ worked the way it’s supposed to.
Maybe Christa’s theory could be worked into the parallel universe one that another Christa actually exists right now in a universe that evolved almost exactly as this one has.
Christa, I’ll come to space church with you!
Hey Michelle!
I agree if humans can keep themselves alive another 10,000 years, we’ll be doing some pretty incredible stuff, including possibly time travel, and most likely some kind of contact with aliens. Unfortunately at this point I don’t have a terrible amount of faith in our species’ ability to actually survive that long, but it’s altogether possible.
To be honest, I’ve never subscribed to the alternate universe theory, but a lot of people do, and at this point there’s certainly no way to disprove the theory. It would certainly create some very interesting — and at this point unimaginable — possibilities. The most obvious of which would be the possibility to interact with alternate universe along the lines of “Sliders” (A scifi show from the 90s dealing with that very topic.)
Assuming all of the above is true, i would porbably say that i believe that in 10000 years’ time, those of us left alive will have evolved to the point that we’re like Q from star trek. of course, by then there’ll be new worlds with new christas on them.
P.S. It’s 12:17 am here and i’m inebriated