Constant Repetition / Deja Vu / Reincarnation

[lookin4waifu]

@mysteryofdungeon I've always been incredibly deja vu prone. Ever since I can remember I just get it a lot and it lasts a relatively long time compared to others. Since I don't know what your baseline is like, I don't know how it feels when you say it won't turn off but is just constant. I may experience something akin to that but just think it's normal because pretty much everything that happens has a sense of the familiar in it to me. I'm not sure what causes me to get it more often and more intensely than other people I've asked about it, but it hasn't seemed to be detrimental or anything, so I wouldn't worry about it too much unless you're experiencing this change in conjunction with other symptoms as well. Depending on your age, a lot of your neurology can still be somewhat plastic, so it could just be things settling into place. Or, as One suggested, maybe it has something to do with some kind of change like you not getting enough sleep.

As far as the recursive nature of existence goes, I'm not so sure about the idea that things have happened exactly this way before... They certainly might have... What I do think though is that reality is built out of a handful of underlying patterns and that these patterns are predictable. I tend to feel that nothing is really random, and on some level you can sense that a certain outcome will occur a little before it happens or even as it's happening such that it feels familiar. Though saying it out loud makes it sound like I'm postulating a somewhat superhuman ability of premonition. Perhaps more likely is that for one reason or another your sense of time "lags" and your mind double or maybe even triple feeds the same experience to you before you properly feel yourself experiencing it so that by the time you do actually experience it it feels highly familiar. If we could find a way to intentionally and reliably stimulate deja vu in people, it would be very interesting to test their reaction times while they're experiencing it and then compare it to subjects' baseline reaction times. I wonder what kind of effect we'd find. I think the most likely result would be no effect, which would be unfortunate cause it wouldn't tell us much. If it was that their reaction time was delayed however then I think that might point to their sense of time "lagging" as I've said. What would be truly fascinating though is if they reacted faster. That might indicate that they're somehow either processing faster than usual, or "predicting" things more effectively, or something like that. I really want to see some kind of study like this

Thank you for your thorough, extensive thoughts on this.
Do you believe in god or the supernatural to any degree by the way? And/or are you spiritual?

[AWellArmedCat]

Thank you for your thorough, extensive thoughts on this.
Do you believe in god or the supernatural to any degree by the way? And/or are you spiritual?

I'm interested in pre-Christian Germanic heathenry, the occult, and folklore in general. I was raised Christian so that's my background, but my dad fancied himself a "scholarly" theologian and so never really pushed his faith on us and still doesn't seem to care at all that I don't share his faith. I was one of those annoying, hardcore, new-atheist types for awhile, but I came to realize I'm way too interested in woo woo spooky stuff for that. I don't hold any active beliefs in anything and I like to think I'm difficult to convince when it comes to the supernatural, but I'm not dismissive of it. I tend to think the most supernatural thing about our universe is our own minds though, and don't really care so much about what's real or not real in the outside world. I think people are prone to thinking of the supernatural as though it has to exist in a concrete way, but to me that kills the whole thing. Our mental realms are much more real than anything going on outside. They're the only space that we can truly be said to exist in in a meaningful way. To be a bit more illustrative, if someone tells me a ghost story I'll be very interested, but I probably won't interpret their story to mean that there was some ghostlike entity in the external world (I think I'd be forced to reject that idea in most cases due to a lack of evidence). I'll hear that story (knowing that there is little reason to think it happened in the external reality) and be more interested in their internal experience of it which I consider more valuable. I'd never say "it's all in your head" in a pejorative way, I mean. Everything is all in our heads after all, and I think anyone claiming otherwise is proposing that they have access to some kind of impossibly objective lens free of their own subjectivity and biases.

I don't know what reality is real for you. It's in all likelihood not the same one that's real for me. We can move around in the outside world of matter and space and have all kinds of interactions there, but ultimately that represents very little of our actual experience so I pay proportionately little attention to it.

I'm not sure if this answered your question very well or even at all. My beliefs (and I really hate calling them that; perspectives is a much better word) are difficult and time-consuming to articulate until the inspiration strikes me. Hopefully seeing me try was entertaining at least!