In the last few moments of your life, your consciousness — the quantum energy that “powers” your mind — will lose its ability to read and write to the physical structures in your brain. It will then come adrift — both physically and temporally — and become attracted to the point at which your brain was at it’s most vital — around the time of your birth.
Free from temporal constraints, your consciousness will gravitate there, and merge with the primitive version of itself that exists at that point. Much of your conscious memory by that point will have become dim or lost, but what survives will weakly imprint upon your infant mind. These faint memories will become your intuition, your sense of deja- or jamais-vu later in life. Stronger memories — related to painful experiences — will prevent you from harm or death, but may also saddle you phobias and inhibitions. It isn’t the spirit of a dead alien, just you, a prior version of you.
This double-edged sword may help you to be a better person the next time around, or may hinder you and make your life all about conquering the effects of those negative experiences from your last life, and making improved choices. Whatever happens, the person you become will influence your next incarnation — and the outcome of that, the next — and so on, and so on.
What evidence is there that this could be so? I’ve already mentioned intuition, inexplicable phobias, our ‘natural’ sense of danger (such as an aversion to spiders and snakes). But there are other things. The science surrounding our brain has much more to discover, but what it has surmised so far strongly suggests that our minds operate in a slightly different quantum ‘reality’ to that of our day-to-day physical existence, one where time could not so much be a constant but a measurement, something that can be manipulated and altered.
The notion that our consciousness is a quantum entity that is cast adrift when we die could explain our near-death experiences: the sensation of floating above ourselves, the sensation of travelling down a ‘tunnel’ to somewhere else. Re-incarnation that suggests we become someone else believes this tunnel to lead to that new body. But why would our consciousness, if it were free of temporal constraints, take the risk of another physical surrogate? How would it find such a surrogate anyway?
The easiest surrogate to find would be ourselves — our consciousness would know where to find it, know what it looked like, and be attracted to its familiarity.
What else? In the last hundred-thousand years or so, humanity as a species has evolved monumentally, in comparison with the other members of the animal kingdom. While we can attribute much of this to our knowledge of mortality and opposable thumbs, there still appears to be much unexplained ground. The rate of those of us who are lost to adolescent misadventure has dropped substantially over time — and not simply because the world has become a ‘safer’ place, or because parents have become overprotective. Some kids just seem to know when things are too dangerous for them, without any prior knowledge or experience. Just ‘intuition’. How can that be?
I would also point to aptitudes: talents children have that cannot be explained by genetics, or environment, or upbringing. These ‘inherent’ strengths that come with little effort — children who can read a textbook once and ace a final exam, or pick up an instrument and master it in a matter of days. Skills that are not evolutionary — not skills that we would have needed out on the savannah — but skills that are human skills, human talents that only matter to human society, to human development. These prodigies and geniuses have an obvious head-start… but how?
So, assuming my theory is true, assuming that you are the Nth you — how does this work in a universal context? If everyone is constantly re-living their lives, making different choices, shouldn’t the universe be too chaotic to exist?
To explain that, we have to posit that the universe, from this perspective, is an ever-changing place, one not bound to our idea of time, but instead an almost living entity, constantly adjusting to those changes made by people (and other entities) re-living their lives, over and over again. “Time” for the universe could be marked by these changes, by the actions made against it, regardless of when or where they occur in our physical perception of “time”, or even in our quantum perception of it, living our lives over and over again. In this way, with the universe marching along to a different drum to our own, there would be stability.
But wouldn’t we know when the universe changed? Our perception at any given time is the universe as how it is, and so we wouldn’t know (with a caveat that I will explain in a moment.) How it was, to us, would just be how it had always been. If a point of reference changes, you can’t judge it against what it replaced. To you, it will have always been how it is now, and will have never been how it was before. You won’t ever know the difference — except…
I imagine there to be two types of “memory” our minds rely upon when constructing our current perspective, the way we see the world at any given moment. While the changes to the universe would be updated and reflected in our “physical” memory, our “quantum” memory, that of our consciousness, wouldn’t be affected. This memory is less about knowledge and more about experience — in particular, events that are traumatic, or re-enforced, or pivotal to our lives. Events we associate with people, places and things we consequently come to strongly love or hate. In short, the essence of us.
It is from this quantum memory that those weak little sparks of intuition appear. When we recall them, if they are not as we believe them to be now, if they do not match what our “physical” memory and senses tell us to be “reality”, we may dismiss them as imagination, or hallucination — and for the sake of our sanity we often do. However, if we are intelligent about it, we may also heed them, speculate upon them, use them to make better choices, if we choose to entertain that they could be drawn from “past” experiences, if they could have come from a “past” truth.
I believe that it is important to our evolution as humans (and often for our safety) that we do.
So that’s my argument, in a nutshell: it’s difficult to explain how some people can be so advanced so early without having a “cheat-sheet” — “genetic memory” seems like a fallacy — and we all have a strong sense of intuition and experience things like deja-vu, so it makes a certain amount of sense that we could be living (and re-living) in some sort of “Groundhog Day” scenario, where hopefully we’re all getting a little bit more savvy at it each time around.
I think I’ll call this theory — this belief — “circularism”.
However, unlike most religions, I’ll close my theory of circularism with a disclaimer: …or, when you die, there could be nothing. So, even if you agree with me that there might be a second (third, fourth…) chance to do it all again, you should still do whatever you can to make the world a better place today.
You never know.
Melody Ayres-Griffiths 