Positive Liberty

Here is a fascinating article about déjà vu via Arts & Letters Daily.

The article gives more information on the phenomenon than I’ve ever seen in one place before. Based on new research, psychologists are asking themselves some intriguing questions:

Why does déjà vu become less common as people grow older? Why do political liberals report more frequent déjà vu experiences than conservatives do? And why do the majority of déjà vu experiences seem to occur when people are in mundane settings?

The difference between young and old might well be chemical, although I’m certainly not qualified to say. Come to think of it, liberals may be more prone to déjà vu for chemical reasons as well, albeit induced from the outside.

Or perhaps there is something more to it.

I often experience déjà vu firsthand, and I was struck by what seems to me a glaring ommission in this otherwise thorough article: I have always identified two very distinct types of déjà vu. Both are uncanny feelings of familiarity, but otherwise these two experiences are as different from one another as a grin is from a fit of convulsive laughter.

In the first type of déjà vu, I am simply but vaguely drawn to the idea that I recognize a place that ought to be unfamiliar. I cannot say how, but I feel like I know the place already. Then the feeling fades; the experience ends, and on the whole it merits not the slightest consideration.

The second type of déjà vu represents the closest thing I have ever had to a genuine paranormal experience. It goes something like this:

I am doing something ordinary. I may be in a familar location or a new one. Suddenly, I remember having done precisely that same ordinary thing at some previous time. Unfortunately, I cannot place it with any precision. Next, I recall that in that previous time, I also experienced precisely the same sense of déjà vu. I remember remembering, and I remember that I remembered it, and remember remembering that I remembered it.

Then something truly uncanny happens: I remember that this action will happen again in the future! The ordinary action that I have just performed suddenly ripples off toward infinity, connecting the purely mundane with the infinite dimensions of past and present. I feel an almost physical bouncing sensation, as my consciousness–for want of a better word–shifts forward and back again in time.

This second type of déjà vu gives me a sense, however fleeting, of the eternal recurrence, the Nietzschean and Hindu belief that at the end of time Somebody resets the celestial odometer, and we find ourselves once more at the first morning of creation.

Back in the present, the experience only lasts a few seconds–twenty or thirty at most. Then the feeling fades, and an overwhelming sense of loss replaces it. I have been severed from the cosmos, condemned to plod along in ordinary time once more.

I know from conversations with my friends that I am not the only one to have had this feeling. I can remember it from early childhood, and it happened very often during adolescence. Since then, it’s happened more rarely. Within the past year, for example, I’ve only had this feeling twice.

Interestingly, this second type of déjà vu also squares quite poorly with Christianity, and this may be the reason why conservatives report less déjà vu in general: Such experiences say one of two very difficult things to us. Either the eternal recurrence is real, and we live in just one of an infinite number of lifetimes–Or else the brain is a machine, a complex and marvelous machine, but one which, true to its type, is capable of complex and marvelous failures. Every so often, the gears of this great machine lock up. For a time, our soul doesn’t work in quite the way that it should, but then things go back to normal. This second type of déjà vu is seemingly either pagan or mechanist, but whatever it is, I’m fascinated.

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