Soul Déjà vu

In the everyday course of life, our experiences can range from the comfortable and mundane, to the challenging, to the startlingly new. For children, of course, all of life is an exotic discovery, starting with the surroundings of home and family, to every new and enticing color, flavor, sound and sensation. With time, the freshness will fade to make way for the familiar, but perhaps never completely so…for even if things stay the same on the outside, our view of the world evolves, and we see it through ever changing lenses.

Somewhere along this stream of life’s interactions, most, if not all of us, might have at some time or other encountered an experience of déjà vu. Seemingly new situations on the surface, something about these déjà vu occurrences feels uncannily, even overwhelmingly familiar. As  a déjà vu situation unfolds, one feels like the past has vividly stepped into the present, resonating and triggering recall from distant archives of memory.

You happen to visit a place for the first time, and it feels like you are simply rediscovering environs you have known before. As a kid growing up in Chennai, I had heard of Mumbai and its famous Marine Drive. When I did visit this lovely beachside promenade for the very first time, everything about the place felt like I’d been there already.

Similar was an occurrence later in life when I first moved to New York City. As I hopped off the Manhattan subway into the bustling beehive of activity that is Canal Street, the sights and sounds and the overall ambience impressed upon me the very definite conviction of having been there before.

My very first Sanskrit class in primary school had a situation which in hindsight seems a little curious. Something about the teacher and learning a new language felt very naturally familiar, and got me all eager and attentive. At one point, the teacher paused to ask the class the word (in Sanskrit) for ‘I’. Though not consciously having heard of the word before, I fairly jumped out of my seat to answer ‘Aham’, as if by spontaneous recall.

I’ve often wondered what triggers this phenomenon of déjà vu, and from where it might bubble up. For a start, let us consider a fairly common ‘new’ situation, as happens when we shift residence to new surroundings, or start work at a new place. In the first few days the landscape is pretty unfamiliar, and we have to navigate our way around quite consciously as we try get accustomed to the environs. At some point though, the place becomes ‘known’ territory, and we slip into auto pilot mode and merge in with the surroundings.

There is one explanation for this shift from ‘new’ to ‘familiar’ which I’ve come across. It builds on the fact that each of us carries a unique vibrational imprint which we exchange with our surroundings. As these energetic impressions from us accumulate over a few days in the new place, the place gradually becomes less alien, as there’s enough of our own imprints now in the environment, to welcome and make us feel ‘at home’.

This explanation is indeed quite intriguing. If we extrapolated this hypothesis, with the possibility that some of these imprints persist long enough, perhaps to even carry across lifetimes, we might just have found a metaphysical explanation for déjà vu.

Generally speaking, déjà vu occurrences are specific to the individual. There is also however déjà vu that happens on grander scale, as is the case with places of sacred geography. People have taken a holy dip in the Ganges and other sacred rivers and lakes since time immemorial. One can imagine the collective vibration of humanity from ages past, waiting to greet everyone who visits these sacred waters today, with a crystalline flow of blessings. That collective vibration could well have included our own.

Likewise for the solitude of pristine nature, which is imbued with the vibrations of saints and mystics and angels that resonate with the harmonious vibrations of our higher nature. The high Himalayan ranges and open spaces of Tibet can thus be teeming natural hotspots for déjà vu, as those fortunate to have soaked in the vibrations of these magical places will heartily attest to.

I also think of the déjà vu of legend. Whoever heard the music of Krishna’s flute was transported by an ineffable sweetness. Whoever might hear such music today is transported similarly to the sweet pastoral Vrindavan of the mind.

Perhaps the ultimate déjà vu is afforded by the inward journey of meditation. Mystics through the ages have made the extraordinary inner journey of penetrating through the veils of personality, to gaze upon their innermost being. With one voice as it were, they speak of this vision as the supreme homecoming. In a sense, this place is wholly foreign and uncharted, as there is nothing so perfectly hidden from us as our very own nature. But once glimpsed, even if fleetingly, they who have dwelt in this grandest déjà vu of all have called it the most intimately familiar place in the universe.