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Collapsing the Consciousness wave
A Dark Philosopher -
Karl L Le Marcsemail
twitter
: www.twitter.com/CtCw_BIGTOE
Déjà vu, Consciousness, Time & English Pubs
“
If I had ever been here before I would probably know just what to doDon't you? If I had ever been here before on another time around the wheel I would probably know just how to deal With all of you. And I feel Like I've been here before……….We have all been here before.”
Crosby, Still, Nash & Young - Déjà vu
“Sometimes I feel like there has been a skip in reality and I get this overwhelming sensation thatI’ve been here, and lived this moment, before. I feel locked in a film, one I know I’ve seen before,and know just what is going to happen next or what those around me are about to say but I feel if I were to say anything at that time then the whole of reality would collapse upon me, and then I’mout of the moment and the sensation has gone…..”
Melanie, 29, New Hampshire, USA
Paramnesia
(from the Greek
para
(
parallel
) and
mnēmē
(
memory
)), in psychiatry, is adisorder of the memory or the faculty of recognition in which sensory experience or dreamsmay be confused with reality, often accompanied by the feeling that one has experienced thepresent moment before, but a more familiar term is
déjà vu
(literally translated as “
alreadyseen
”) which was first used by
Emile Boirac
in 1903 in his book “
L’Avenir des sciences psychiques
” (“
The Future Of Psychic Sciences
”).However, déjà vu is just one of a whole myriad of names given to a variety of such memory andsensory experiences and is often used incorrectly to describe what the individual isexperiencing and what the cause of such experience may be.I have been interested in déjà vu and all the scientific, philosophical and spiritual explanationsfor the phenomena for many years so I recently sent a questionnaire to a controlled group of scientists, philosophers, spiritual practitioners and people who live with déjà experiences inorder to collate some thoughts and opinion regarding the subject from a professional andpersonal perspective. What made my research all the more interesting is that I personally, havenever had a déjà vu, whilst around 70% of the population respond to having done so. However,something very strange did occur to me last year, which this year has proven to be true and I will outline that experience and my new term for it, within this paper.“
It happens when I am generally not thinking. I mean when I’m just doing normal things likemaking the bed or driving the car or shopping. Suddenly it’s like everything feels familiar, like I’mwatching a replay but I’m there, living in it and then it just goes again. 10 seconds at most and I look at the people around me hoping that someone else just saw that as well.
”
Lucy, Manchester, UK
Dr. Arthur Funkhouser is one of the world’s leading authorities in déjà experiences. He is a Jungian Psychotherapist in Bern, Switzerland and he defines three types of déjà vu experiencein an attempt to more clearly delineate between associated, but different, neurologicalexperiences. These are
déjà vecu
(
already lived
),
déjà senti
(
already felt
) and
déjà visité
(
already visited
). Déjà vecu is the most common déjà vu experience and involves the extendedtemporal sensation of having done something or having been in an identical situation before,combined often with a sense of knowing what will happen next. Whereas a déjà vu can be afleeting moment of sensation, a flash of memory or an immediate sense of familiarity, a déjà vecu has a longer time-span often utilising all the senses combined with an occasionalcognition of what is about to occur.
A Dark Philosopher
Page 1
06/11/2009
Collapsing the Consciousness wave
A Dark Philosopher -
Karl L Le Marcsemail
twitter
: www.twitter.com/CtCw_BIGTOEI’ve been honoured to know Art for a couple of years now and had access to some of the voluminous data he has collected on the whole spectrum of déjà experiences and it isinteresting to hear his thoughts on possible explanations, coming from a scientific andprofessional perspective but also from a personal one as he himself has had déjà vu.“
I do not have an explanation for how it is possible for my psyche to take a peek into the future, I just know that it can do so. I am aware of many hypotheses that have been put forward, but I have found no reason to choose one over another.
”“
For me, the events involved in such experiences are always very banal and ordinary. I would think that if my unconscious would want to show me a preview of some future happening, it would choose something memorable like the birth of my first child. That is why I question the extent of the control that my unconscious is able to exercise in giving me such previews.
”
Dr Art Funkhouser, Bern, Switzerland.
This seems to be a striking commonality in the responses I’ve received to my questionnaire andthe research conducted for this paper – the unremarkable nature of the moment in which thedéjà experience is experienced. Taking a psychological look at the neurology it is almost asthough such experiences require an
unconscious-competent
modality to connect with ourconsciousness.“
The last déjà vu I had was just yesterday. I was cleaning the inside of my kitchen window and suddenly my eyes went to a nearby tree as I knew exactly what was going to happen. As I stared atthe tree while continuing to clean the window, a large ball from next door’s garden hit the treeand knocked several leaves into my garden, right where I had just cleaned half an hour ago.
”
William, Cambridge, UK
Do these déjà experiences require a kind of lowered state of consciousness to connect with us?One where we are functioning almost on auto-pilot; an unconscious-competent state of activity which is largely unconscious in function thereby leaving our consciousness open to suchcommunication, or is it all easily explained with science and that most elusive of ephemera,Time?In 1963,
Robert Efron
published a paper entitled “
Temporal perception, aphasia and
déjà
vu
”, in which he proposed déjà vu was explained as delayed intra-hemisphere transmission over thecorpus callosum (
the central white matter within the brain that links the left and righthemispheres
). The Efron Thesis is still amongst one of the most suggested explanations for the whole of the déjà experience spectrum, but does it truly provide the answer?
A Dark Philosopher
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06/11/2009
The Four Psychological Stages Of LearningUnconscious - Incompetent:
You are not aware that you can’t do something!
(the person is not aware of the existence or relevance of the skill area)
Conscious - Incompetent:
You become
aware that you can’t do something!
(the person becomes aware of the existence and relevance of the skill)
Conscious - Competent:
You start doing the thing but have to think about it!
(the person learns it reliably but will need to concentrate and think in order to perform theskill)
Unconscious - Competent:
You do the thing without conscious thought!
(the skill becomes so practised that it enters the unconscious parts of the brain - it becomes'second nature')
Collapsing the Consciousness wave
A Dark Philosopher -
Karl L Le Marcsemail
twitter
: www.twitter.com/CtCw_BIGTOEThe human brain consists of two identical hemispheres connected by the Corpus Collosum andEfron suggest that what is presented to our consciousness is not what is actually perceived by our senses at that exact moment, in fact that our conscious awareness is functioning in atimeframe that is running behind the time of our observations, so what we see at any onemoment is not happening right now, but had already occurred just seconds before.This temporal time delay between what is observed and what is then presented to ourconsiousness via our senses has been experimentally documented many times since Efron’ssuggestion that this was the cause of déjà experiences.Noetic Scientist
Dean Radin
in his books “
The Entangled Mind
” and “
The Conscious Universe
”provides a number of experiments in which such time delay to cognition has been proven toexist, so could what Efron proposes be the explanation?He suggests that we initially observe the situation through one or both eyes and then this isprocessed in our brain crossing the corpus collosum to integrate the functioning of bothhemispheres before being presented to our consciousness as reality. What déjà vu is, thereforeaccording to Efron, is just a temporal skip within the neurology of our brain so we arepresented with the situation a fraction of a second after we have consciously become aware,and thus it appears familiar.However, recent investigations into the suggested explanations of the Efron Thesis haveproduced very interesting results, especially at Leeds University in the UK where
Dr ChrisMoulin
has been looking into more of the déjà vecu elements of continual déjà vu.In a paper published in the journal
Brain and Cognition
, Leeds University researcher
AkiraO'Connor
worked with Dr Moulin to relate how mundane experiences - undoing a jacket zip while hearing a particular piece of music; hearing a snatch of conversation while holding a platein the school dining hall, etc. were examples of how déjà vu experiences were triggered in asubject who was blind, and therefore receiving no visual input, on which the whole EfronThesis argument is founded."
“It is the first time this has been reported in scientific literature. It's useful because it provides aconcrete case study which contradicts the theory of optical pathway delay. Eventually we would like to talk to more blind people, though there's no reason to believe this man's experiences areabnormal or different to those of others.
"
Optical pathway delay is a quite antiquated theory, but still widely believed -- and was the basis for the déjà vu sequences in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22. But this provides strong evidence thatoptical pathway delay is not the explanation for déjà vu. The findings are so obvious, so intuitive,that it's remarkable this research has never been done before
."
Akira O’Connor – Leeds University, UK
O'Connor admits that to the person experiencing déjà vu, it feels almost inexplicable
.
"
And because it feels so subjective, psychology, in striving for objectivity, has tended to shy away from it. But psychologists have gone some way to illuminating things like the 'tip of my tongue' sensation when you can't think of a particular word. We just wanted to get to the same sort of understanding for déjà vu. We now believe that
déjà
experiences are caused when an area of thebrain that deals with familiarity gets disrupted
."In one experiment, students are asked to remember words, then hypnotised to make themforget - and then shown the same word again to induce a feeling that they have seen it before. Around half said this brought on a sensation similar to déjà vu – and half of whom said it wasdefinitely déjà vu.
A Dark Philosopher
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06/11/2009
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