Deja Vu & The Universe

Today, while sitting in a training and orientation for my job, I experienced a pretty strong case of deja vu. I turned to a woman seated next to me and mentioned that I felt like I had been in that situation before. I don’t know why, but it seemed very important to have to share that notion. Another woman across the table began to talk about her own experience with deja vu. The whole thing got me to think about global consciousness, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and the archetypes that exist in our worlds.

So, here I was seated next to two women I had only known for the first time about 24 hours previous to the training. They were all part of the whole experience. The presenter’s face was all to familiar. Even the color, temperature, and mere aura of the room seemed so familiar. The paintings and newly hung large sheets of paper that she put on the wall, to the most minute detail had all been exactly where they were, once before, or at least seemed that way. Now, I’m not completely convinced that deja vu is not simply a manifestation of familiar settings overlapped and,somehow, tapping into the memory parts of our brains. Sometimes, I think there is a lot more to it, but does that have to mean anything at all.

In the world of mystics, shamans, seers, and psychics, one’s vision is not taken lightly. I imagine that a case of deja vu should be taken as a lot more than a simple case of someone’s memory reconstituting itself. This is an area of huge debate I’m sure, but the ideas that roam around our cultures are all so different with the experience. I’ve even heard from very wise people that deja vu is a sign that your life is on track. That same notion was what I shared with the two women sitting next to me today. Why did I state that to them? Do I really believe that or am I wanting to stir the pot a bit? The answer for me is, “No and yes.” I don’t believe that one’s life is in order because they have a lot of deja vu. However, I think their unconscious might be more aligned to their conscious during these times. Remember, this is only a theory and not gospel, even though some may even see that as theory.

As humans, we like to assign meanings to everything. The left hemisphere of our brains likes to assign names and labels, categories and definitions, for the many things we come across thr0ughout our days. In essence, our left hemispheres don’t like things to go unattended and unknown for very long without an uneasy and uncomfortable eeling that the things in our worlds are existing uncompartmentalized. This hemisphere is responsible for analyzing and tagging.

Our right hemispheres are not concerned with the analysis and descriptive labelling of the things around us. These hemispheres are more concerned in the effort to assign meaning and abstract thought processes to that which may be going on around us. In this respect, I often wonder if deja vu is more of a right brain activity. I also wonder if the right hemisphere is mostly responsible for our interpretation of deja vu, therefore, assigning it meaning, inappropriate or not. After all, the experience is a real one. The activity exists in our heads, however it is a matter of perception whether it exists in the universe.

So, the notion of deja vu leads me to believe in my more recent interactions with our vast universe. Is there a collective unconsciousness that underlies and encompasses our days and nights? Is this consciousness that we feel and know a real entity that exists in culture or in myth? Or is this simply fictional?  In the paraphrased words of Carl Gustav Jung, a collective unconsciousness does exist in and within the generations of any society and culture simply due to our knowledge and memories of archetypes and mythological figures in history.

To me, I agree and see this clearly since it’s hard to dismiss a world where things have inevitably happened in history, so my feeling is that we have to accept it. I feel that we have no choice and that we must accept the world before and around us, imperfect and all. The easier we can come to this notion, the better we can move along within it.  Looking at global unconsciousness in this manner gives it a left-brained, analytical name where we can be literal with it’s meaning and assign it some kind of tangible category or feeling. How and what we do with this information appears to be up to our more imaginative right hemispheres.

Perhaps, tying in a global phenomenon such as deja vu with universal constructs such as Jung’s collective unconscious is not too far fetched. It would make sense that the first thing that came to my mind after my experience today was this notion of connectivity. The universe is something we cannot control. If it innately leads us to connectivity, whether it be with another person, a memory, or even historical events, it posesses something far greater than just a thought. It possesses, by nature, a collective entity, and that is why I continue to believe in Jung, Campell, and a host of other believers in the collective unconscious. it’s an entity that changes exponentially according to and in accordance with everything that exists and everything that is. The discordance that one introduces into the everyday definition of something is the work of the right-hemisphere.

For all of you who like to know that there is always an answer, you my friends, are likely more left-hemisphere driven. For those of you who read this blog adn think, “Well, he’s got a point, it is a blog and it is what it is” and move on, you may also be left-hemisphere driven. However, for the folks who almost automatically decide that there is no one answer to all this and you’d rather take it to an unknown areas of further unknowns, you’re probably using your right-hemisphere and it’s allowing you to process, without coming to a conclusion. Sometimes, in therapy, I feel that it might be useful to constructively become one of my client’s corpus callosums, metaphorically bridging the hemispheres of the brain, all the while creating consonance and disonance to see new ways.

This, to me, is the way of the Universe and the secret to being okay with the world. Accept that which is not necessarily confounded as true in the Universe and consider that it could be and you’ve found a different plane, an altogether scientific and even spiritual theory of sorts. Go ahead, give it a shot. You can’t hurt anything and you’ll only be tapping further into your universe, and I promise, it doesn’t hurt to do that.