We all have these moments where, engrossed in some activity or other, you get a flashback to a split-second in time, and all of a sudden you are there - PAFF! on the beach in summer, the sun sparkling off the waves, cool seawater lapping on your feet, warmth of the sun on your skin. Or PAFF! walking into a frosty evening, out of a warm shop all decorated for Christmas, snow gently falling as you hurry home with bags of presents.
Many such moments you can quickly identify - ah yes - driving to my future parents-in-law, autumn 1987, trees and hedges speeding by in the drizzle... cycling briskly through the woods at dusk, Warsaw, 2007...
These are memories of experiences are called qualia - the first-person subjective experience of being there, the here-and-now as uniquely experienced by you. Sometimes you recall them, sometimes they are prompted (by smell, by sound). sometimes they come to you unbidden; they are as authentic as that time you first experienced them.
I have experienced such qualia memories, bidden or unbidden, all my life. And I have trained myself to pin down with precision the time and place when and where they occurred. Why do I do this?
Because I have also had, since childhood, strange ones that I cannot place within my life. Another time, another place. I call this strange phenomenon exomnesia - literally, memory from outside, from beyond. These are much rarer that current-life flashbacks; only several a month, but consistent enough to have become an integral part of what it is to be me. Having had these all my life, I have been seeking answers as to what these could be and what they could mean. It has been a long and sincere search.
Why do more of us not have exomnesia experiences? I'd say there are two main reasons.
First, you need to be observant, curious and sensitive to these experiences (if you get many current-life flashbacks - some use the term 'deja-vu' - you are sufficiently sensitive). Secondly, our contemporary Western culture tends to make us subconsciously reject such experiences as being intrinsically meaningless. This is for two reasons - because we have been brought up (since Newton) to be materialist-reductionists who believe that 'it's all in the brain', or we've been brought up to believe in a dualist material-spiritual worldview in which the afterlife is sitting at the right hand of God for Eternity after several decades of obeying religious laws.
A property of flashback events is that they are instantly familiar, they are comforting in that familiarity; they are not unpleasant. They are of how you felt, they are a record of your emotions of experience. They are not about you as an actor, they are not about events - rather they are what you witnessed and received.
I have mentioned William Wordsworth in this context - his poem Ode - Intimations of Immortality captures the sense I had in childhood of life being familiar, though not this one.
You need to strip away the ego. The memory of things you've done - in childhood, in adolescence - that still bring you shame and embarrassment today when you think about them. This is a function of the ego, and I believe that it gets stripped away with biological death. (The 'life review' that many people who report near-death experiences would be this; a final reckoning of the negative acts that a human has performed in life before ego and consciousness part company. Ego dies; consciousness abides.)
I have experienced memories such events from 'past lives' (to be confirmed!), but only in dreams, never in flashbacks experienced in my waking life. Dreams that do away with regular convention of 'disjunctive cognition', where people, places and things are familiarly jumbled up. My 'past-life' dreams fulfil the classic Three Unities, of Time, Place and Action. There are no anachronisms (cars and TVs in Victorian England for example). They are rare - I have several a year - but they are very real. A good example this Lent has been the dream of 1831 (see here).
My current thinking is that with every passing life, memories of the previous ones become more vivid, more real; there is a thread connecting the Eternity-long road from Zero to One. We are here, unfolding along with the Universe, evolving spiritually from the barbaric to the angelic.
We will get there; certainly not in one lifetime. It is way too short. The road is long, but finally, it will be All in God, God in All. We are all part of a continuous whole.
I hope that gives hope!
This time last year:
Accounting for talent(s)
This time four years ago:
Ten years of blogging
[14 years today]
This time five years ago:
Białystok the Dull
This time eight years ago:
UK's first town where Poles are a majority
This time nine years ago:
Lost legend of rock'n'roll: Johnny Kołyma
This time ten years ago:
Stalin's plans to escalate nuclear Armageddon
This time 11 years ago:
Warsaw's favourite weekend destination
This time 12 years ago:
We are two
This time 13 years ago:
Crushed velvet dusk in my City of Dreams
This time 14 years ago:
My second Jeziorki blog post, also from this day
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