Question
Gramps,
Is deja vu related to the pre-existence?
Ray
Answer
Hi Ray,
Thanks for the question.
The experience of déjà vu , a French expression meaning “already seen”, is related to how our brains are structured and how we perceive reality. Here are my personal observations and beliefs I’ve come to over time.
Our perception of “present” is always offset by a fraction of a second from the “actual present”. This is because our conscious mind is made up of the top several levels of our brain hierarchy, which I think of as similar to the OSI networking model, except vastly more than seven layers (like maybe twenty or a hundred or a thousand), and not nearly as sealed off as are levels in the OSI model. It takes time for those interacting layers to process experiences and create the perception of consciousness.
Our perception also gets “filled in” by our brains as time passes, so our memory of a moment or event is usually more complete, and thus coherent, than our actual immediate conscious experience of that event. I’m talking like in the moments, seconds or less, following the event, not just hours or days afterward. Sometimes this filling-in provides false information, and we end up with a coherent, honest memory that is demonstrably false on some points.
Such are the complexity of human experience and human memories. It seems to me that it would be quite easy to find your brain in a certain state such that we register e.g. something someone is saying to us or an event happening, but don’t quite perceive it consciously for a fraction of a second. By the time our conscious brain processes the event or communication, it has already been stored into short-term memory, causing us to say, “Wait, this is very familiar. I’ve seen/heard this before!”
I’m not saying this accounts for every déjà vu experience, but I bet the average sort of déjà vu happens in some such manner. Specifically for this question, I do not believe that déjà vu represents any sort of recovered memory or experience from our premortal life.
Gramps
