Deja vu is commonly described as a sensation of knowing that what is experienced now has occurred before. For some, it's a positive omen, signaling that they’re on the right path, while for others, it verges on a mystical experience that stirs a subtle fear of the unknown.
Is deja vu plainly an echo from the past? Is deja vu our history meeting our future? Is it a premonition or a memory? Our perception is confined by the mind, which is conditioned by the restrictive models we hold about time and space. When deja vu strikes, it often manifests as a reiteration of past events, as though we’re reliving the past in the present.
But what is the "now"? One of my favorite teachers in non-dual awareness, Rupert Spira, posits that "the now is not a moment in time but eternity." He believes that we cannot truly experience time, for time is only ever "now." The present transcends mere temporal moments; it embodies the entirety of existence. Thus, we cannot experience the past or the future; we can only contemplate them. Consequently, they lack genuine existence.
In this philosophical framework, all of life is contained within the present. Recent theories in metaphysics and quantum physics support the idea that time is an unbroken continuum of "nows." Everything else serves as a means to make sense of what has come before and what lies ahead. All those moments before and after were once "now."
The value of an experience like deja vu lies in its ability to shatter our preconceived notions about time and the limiting models we've created to define it. We limit reality in our attempt to understand it.
Time refuses to adhere to a linear path; it appears to intersect with itself. We diminish the richness of an experience like deja vu when we declare that the moment has occurred before. This phenomenon seems to hold a more complex significance.
Deja vu is the closest feeling we have to experiencing timelessness, where everything is experienced in one moment. Deja vu is the intricacy of the infinite in a minute. Deja vu could be all the timelines of the universe converging into the singularity of one experience. Deja vu shows us that our understanding of time remains as elusive as the concept itself.
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