Deja Vu

Sometimes I have the intuition, maybe you call it deja vu, that some deep knowledge that is surfacing for me - ostensibly for the first time - has been there all along. That something that resonates about the meaning of life is coming for me, not from out there, not from a book, but from inside myself, from the place where the universe and I are co-existent. It happened shockingly when I was six years old and had no context for it. I remember mentioning it casually to my sister and future brother-in-law home on spring break from college where they had been reading Plato and Hegel. They looked at one another with a mixture of awe and fear like they had wandered into one of those horror movies that features a creepy child. But when you think about it, how could it be otherwise? Our cells are the cells of weeping willows and salamanders. Nathaniel Hawthorne, my neighbor up the road when I lived in the Berkshires once wrote, our hearts beat with the universal throb. He had a way with words, Hawthorne.

In the Talmud there’s a midrash that suggests that before we are born into this life, we know everything. Can you get into that space? We have global awareness of all that is. Just before we enter into this delimited dispensation here on earth, an angel puts a mark above our upper lip. We all have one. This is the mark of forgetting. All the deep knowledge that we had in the womb is submerged. Then we come out and spend all our time trying to retrieve it in one way or another. And it’s hard work. For some people it might involve learning Hebrew or genuflecting at an altar or fasting and chanting or chastising themselves because they aren’t good enough. But what if these are all technologies, strategies for getting in touch with what we already know? Going back to the story about the angel for a moment, you don’t have to believe in supernatural beings to recognize the power of this image. You just have to consider how close all knowing and unknowing are to one another A hairsbreadth. We all have this awareness when we wake from a dream and are partly here and partly back there in the dream state. We’ve all had those experiences of peering through the transparency of the veil, getting a glimmer of the wisdom, the awareness that we secretly have of the flavor of holiness, of birth and death, our interbeing with the whole of life, even if we’re reluctant or afraid to admit our knowing.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

So what do we do? We start from scratch and devote all of our time and energy in the first half of life to accessing all the pedestrian expertise we can to distinguish ourselves from one another. We make discriminations based on what we look like, what kind of work we will do, where we will live, whom we will partner with. We take on the garments of a separate self because we think that is the learning we need to acquire. We pile on layers and layers of worldly knowledge to set ourselves apart. Then in the second half of life we undress. We strip ourselves of our markings, the characteristics that we believe make us who we are. It’s a striptease, but also a sort of roller coaster ride, climbing, climbing, anticipating a bigger house, more recognition for our work….until suddenly we get to the top of the mountain and let go, careening down and down again, the wind blowing in our faces, all notions of control of necessity abandoned. No one on a roller coaster is an astrophysicist or a movie star. Everyone is thrilled to be alive and very frightened, because somewhere deep down we know that this body, this collection of information, is not our most ancient being, that this provisional self will not go on forever and that a time will come when the real knowing will reassert itself.

And it does. The more we go down into the pool of life, the emptier it gets, because the deep knowledge is a knowledge of emptiness. David Whyte says: “The only choice we have as we mature, is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance.” I see now from the vantage point of seventy-seven years that I had a small advantage in learning how to do this swan dive. I could not for the life of me, as they say, figure out what to do with myself. Well into my fifties, when some people were already winding down, I had still not settled on a profession. I kept trying on different costumes, teacher, antiquarian, librarian, but none of them fit. I always felt fraudulent. Couldn’t make small talk in the break room, didn’t get excited by career advancement opportunities. This was because, even though I had to pay the bills like everyone else, I was secretly preoccupied with questions you normally don’t get paid for asking. How are we connected to one another? What will happen to us when we leave our bodies behind? It is indeed wonderful to be old enough to indulge myself in these speculations and to have the opportunity to engage with likeminded people in the perennial inquiry.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.