Déjà Vu

Have you ever visited a place for the first time and felt odd as if you'd seen it before? Even the colors of the walls, the graffiti and even the smell around that place seem vividly familiar? Of course, I am not talking about having this feeling very frequently as I know it's attributed to epileptic conditions.

This topic really intrigues me. As much as we all want scientific proofs of such things there is a whole science out there yet to be found. I came across very recently about an ABC News article, dated April 2004, that was debated on Larry King Live show. The news coverage interestingly was about a 2-year old kid getting nightmares about the plane crashes. Turned out that 2-year old was remembering his days as a fighter pilot. His nightmares were traced back to the World War-II days.

I am sure there is some connection to having Déjà Vu feeling to reincarnation. I know it's getting even more harder and fascinating as if I am going head first thru a rabbit hole. I did some research (as you know, all research starts and ends with Google) on the topic and see if there are any smart scientists are after proving this phenomenon. I know from the religious faith that every soul travels from one living form to another after the death. This is true as much in Christianity, Judaism, Budhism and Hinduism.

Anyway, coming back to the scientific study, I came across an article written by Frank Poletti. Poletti nicely relates Biological Evolution to Mental and Soul Evolution. He quotes, if something like a soul does indeed come back and get re-entered into the system of soul-life, then reincarnation might be viewed as a higher iteration of the same process that drove the rise of complex biological life forms. In other words, the evolving universe created the reincarnating soul to accelerate learning and memory from life-to-life and thereby drive the rise of complex intelligence that spans across lifetimes. The very same process that drove the rise of biological life (closure and re-entry) may be responsible for the rise of complex mental life as well. In support of this potential homology between the evolution of life and mind, Poletti noted that Whiteheadian scholar David Ray Griffin has written about the unique features of the atom, cell, and human soul; they are novel emergent structures in universe. What distinguishes the soul is that it is an emergent form that allows memory to carry beyond and between precise physical structures (our bodies). The universe emerged souls that come back and reincarnate in different bodies with memory from past ones. A novel type of enclosure (the soul-body or subtle body) can continuously re-enter information into the larger system of mental life, or mind.

If you read the book, The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, you will quickly remember the whole faith in after life to the scientific proofs to prove that the soul has a weight that can be detected leaving the body on death. Stuff such as this is questionable to people who question everything for the sake of questioning but to me it's like a Déjà Vu all over again!