Into the Afterlife I - Lent 2023: Day 33

We die - and then what? 

There's probably no greater question facing us all, however our lives are playing out. Whatever your position in our mammalian status-hierarchy, this unanswerable question visits everyone.

All I can posit from my own personal subjective experience is glimmers - short flashes - the briefest moments of low intensity that have been with me all my life that suggest to me that my Consciousness (not my Ego!) has had previous experiences of existence.

I have experienced these moments all my life; I cannot ignore or reject them. They are an integral part of my identity, the phenomenon is consistent and has been consistent all my life.

I would best describe this as being a strong déjà vu, a flashback, unbidden but often prompted by landscape and environment. Imagine, let's say, a childhood day by the seaside or childhood visit to the shops just before Christmas. An event that, in my case, could have happened 60 years ago. I experience the flashback perfectly, a simulacrum of the experience of the qualia of being there, congruent like a fractal, pleasant, familiar, utterly realistic. Being there. For a fraction of a second. Then the experience dissolves, leaving a delicious aftertaste in my mind.

The molecules that make up the soft tissue of our bodies is constantly being recycled. The hippocampus, the brain region involved in memory, undergoes a high rate of cell turnover; neurons in this region are constantly replaced; old ones die, new ones are formed. The time spent by molecules in these neurons as a part of your brain would be in the order of a few years. So those memories of qualia moments cannot be stored long-term without some kind of hand-over from old cells to newly formed ones. Persistence of long-term memories is still not understood by neuroscience and remain the subject of ongoing research.

Now I'll get weird. While I have trained myself to nail down déjà vus from childhood and adolescence, I also get déjà vus that are similarly familiar but not from this life. They feel exactly the same, but they are not qualia memories of England from the 1960s and '70s; they feel like America from the 1940s and '50s.

I had these anomalous experiences for as long as I can remember, and have often written about them on this blog over the years. With passing years, I hope to be able to describe them with ever-greater precision and nuance, placing them in the context of advances in consciousness studies, philosophy of mind and neuroscience. However, these experiences are entirely personal to me, and while sceptics may claim that they are merely the result of misfiring neural connections within my brain, to me they feel as real as qualia memories from childhood.

Living in London, these anomalous qualia-memory events were relatively rare, they stepped up in frequency when I moved to Warsaw, and then stepped up again after I bought the działka in Jakubowizna. I attribute this landscape and climate. Rural Kentucky? Ohio? These flashbacks happen more frequently and more intensely on cloudless days, and when the seasons are changing. Looking across the flat fields around Chynów, with radio towers, power lines and water towers on the horizon, is a consistent trigger for me. Over the decades, I have also had enough secondary and tertiary experiences dating back to Edwardian England, France in the late 19th century, Pripet Marshes in the early 19th century, 18th century Germany, Tudor England and even neolithic times, to suggest some form of spiritual continuity.

What's going on? I consider this to be an intimation of how an afterlife could look.

As biological entities, we are bodies, but we are also consciousness. The former, driven by biological imperatives, is powered by the ego, but the core of who we really are is our subjective conscious experience. I postulate that at death, the body and the ego die, but the consciousness survives.

I, for one, have had a lifetime's experience of this. I know that the vast majority of people haven't, so I don't wish to impose my view as a one-size-fits-all model of an afterlife. Still, I hold that sometime after my physical death, it is possible that a child will be born with anomalous, inexplicable, experiences of life in England in the second half of the 20th century and Poland in the first half of the 21st century. 

More tomorrow.

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