Thread: Deja Vu

Have you never had deja vu? I've been looking for someone else who hasn't had it my entire adult life, and haven't found anyone yet who has not experienced this phenomenon. I've read that one possible explanation of deja vu is you are experiencing something from a previous life. Which would explain why I've never had it. A famous psychic (who went on to solve 100's of cases for the LAPD) once told my Mother that I was a 'new soul'. So, my first go around, if you believe in reincarnation. So, I have never had a deja vu experience, and have been searching for anyone else who has not had one, to no avail as of yet. BTW, I'm 57 years old, so if I were to experience this, I'm sure it would have happened already.

I think that questions are confusing, and that some potential answers are not mutually exclusive.

I think that being 57 and not having experienced something isn't by itself strong evidence that you won't experience it. Time changes, and context is pretty important for this sort of thing. There are experiences I have only had once in my life, and I'm over 50.

Deja vu seems to be similar to a premonition, except that the recognition of an event's place in the larger scheme of things comes concurrent with the event rather than before it. Being able to sense that seems to require something like a soul, and maybe having a soul also implies something like past lives. So maybe it is linked in that sense. I suspect that many experiences that are interpreted as memories of past lives actually are not, but I'm not sure about this. Like I said, an experience can be more than one thing at a time. Actually I think that all such experiences are more than one thing at a time.

Under some conditions, a person can experience something of what it is like to be someone else. And although that implies some kind of deep interaction between those two people, it doesn't necessarily mean that they share the same soul or something like that. This is also possible if one of the people has already died. So if I have what seems to be a past life experience, I don't know how to say whether that is "my" life or someone else's. And even if I am experiencing something in relation to a person who is still living, maybe resonance with my "past life" experience is part of what helps me do that, I do not know.

If it is true that you are a 'new soul', does that mean you have no karma? Or do you inherit karma from other people? If you inherit karma, then is your soul entirely your own, and does it remain entirely your own after you die?

Years ago I dreamed of being a German gangster in the late 1920s. Two women in this man's organization were killed as a necessary consequence of circumstances. He relived it over and over, seeking a different outcome, and it always came out the same. Is this my 'past life'? I doubt it. It means something though.

At the time, I assumed the dream was about an acquaintance, because there were similarities to a pattern in that person's life, and it seemed to have nothing to do with me. But then something metaphorically like that happened later in my life. Is this a premonition then, or karma? If it is karma, it seems to me to be more general than "my karma".

In the movie blade runner, two female 'replicants' are killed under the leadership of another replicant ('Roy Batty'). He regrets their deaths, and there was an image in my dream that alludes to the movie. The movie isn't narrowly about me though, it is about a lot of people. Artistic muses are like that. There is a muse, or an angel, so to speak, that has a story to tell, and this story is illustrated by that metaphorical image, which in different ways and degrees belongs to everyone. Is this karma? If so, then I think these karmic stories are not entirely personal, or owned by particular individuals.

If we have 'past lives', then I think that for the most part these lives do not reside in the historical past. I think it would be more accurate to place them in alternative worlds.

Psychics, famous or not, are limited by the assumptions they make about how the world works, and what they can see is limited by karma also. Psychics don't necessarily ponder these questions very insightfully. The psychic could in some sense be right about you being a "new soul", while also being largely ignorant about what that really means and what it implies.

Is a person with a new soul morally naive? Or is that not a kind of knowledge that is acquired with experience? I've had experiences which suggest that moral wisdom is to a large degree something that comes with experience, but my experiences could be misleading also. Besides not having deja vu, is there anything else that you think sets you apart from other people?

Do you have some other reason for thinking you will never experience deja vu? If so, then I think that knowledge would ironically be of the same kind, or at least a similar kind, that is involved with deja vu.

A primary purpose of gurus, is the guru is able to telepathetically introduce a person to a meditative experience which the aspirant is seeking. I think the dynamic between the aspirant and guru is usually unhealthy, and that it can be a sort of spiritual ponzi scheme, where the guru derives much of his power from the devotion of this followers. However, the ability to facilitate experiences like that is real. If you change some of your assumptions related to the part of yourself which is capable of experiencing deja vu, and open some doors, it seems plausible to me that circumstances will change so that you have such an experience. I'm not suggesting that would be beneficial or worth seeking, just that these things aren't necessarily fixed like physical height or something. I would guess that you would not begin to have such experiences often, and it might be bad if you did. But that doesn't mean you couldn't have one once or twice.