Eternal return

Mircea Eliade in his book Cosmos and History points out that so-called primitive peoples have a very different sense of time from that of western man. He makes the distinction between mythical time in which activities accord with pre-existent archetypal models, and profane time, which has no particular meaning. The latter is hardly reality. Important deeds, such as hunting, eating, procreation, war, and work, as well as ceremonial rituals, are all done in conformance to mythical patterns. The individual identifies himself during these functions with the god who set the pattern "at the beginning of time". Eliade says, "... the man of a traditional culture sees himself as real only to the extent that he ceases to be himself ..." (p. 34) 

Further on, he continues: 

" ... the life of archaic man ..., although it takes place in time, does not bear the burden of time, does not record time's irreversibility: in other words, in a consciousness of time. Like the mystic, like the religious man in general, the primitive lives in a continual present." (p. 86) 

If there is a consciousness of time, then it is cyclic. Life, like the seasons, like the phases of the moon, endlessly repeats itself. Events outside the pattern are ignored as being meaningless. 

The Chaldeans, says Eliade, had the idea of the Great Year, which later spread to Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. 

"According to this doctrine, the universe is eternal but it is periodically destroyed and reconstituted every Great Year ...; when the seven planets assemble in Cancer ("Great Winter") there will be a deluge; when they meet in Capricorn ... the entire universe will be consumed by fire." (p. 87) 

Probably Heraclitus believed in some version of the Great Year. "In any case~ it dominates the thought of Zeno and the entire Stoic cosmology." (p. 88) He says one can find similar ideas among the Indians, Persians, Mayans, and Aztecs. This is death and rebirth at the cosmic level, and it is still an open question in modern cosmology whether the universe will expand forever or eventually return in on itself to begin a new cycle. 

Eliade quotes from Henry-Charles Puech's article in the 1951 Eranos Yearbook, which speaks of Greek, and, in particular, the Platonic ideas of time. In the latter half of this quotation, one finds the following: 

" ... all cosmic becoming ... will progress in accordance with an indefinite succession of cycles in the course of which the same reality is made, unmade, and remade in conformity with an immutable law and immutable alternations. ... [T]he same situations are reproduced that have already been produced in previous cycles and will be reproduced in subsequent cycles -- ad infinitum. No event is unique, occurs once and for all ..., but it has occurred, occurs, and will occur, perpetually; the same individuals have appeared 055, appear, and reappear at every return of the cycle upon itself. Cosmic duration is repetition and anakuklosis, eternal return." (p. 89 in Eliade, pp. 60 - 61 in Puech) 

This is reminiscent of Solomon's contention that there is nothing new under the sun!

A few, more modern thinkers have also subscribed to the doctrine of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche had an idea of multiple worlds, replicas in the infinite universe of our world where the same lives were being lived as here. This, though, has little to do with déjà vu; and, as Priestley pointed out in Man and Time, p. 299, such a notion is even physically untenable. 

Ouspensky, however, an early pupil of the semi-Sufi Gurdjieff, taught the notion that when one dies, one is reborn again to relive the same life again. This is found in his chapter on eternal recurrence in A New Model of the Universe. Priestley remarks, p. 30S, that actually the recurrence isn't eternal, since Ouspensky taught that successful people would improve slightly each time around and eventually free themselves from "this plane of existence", while some others gradually degenerate and are not even eventually reborn. Thus the repetitions would slowly change. This is all very similar to the Vedic traditions of Karma and reincarnation. 

Here, though, is a ready-made explanation for déjà vu. One has the impression of having been in a situation before because one actually has, not once, but countless times. Therein lies also the difficulty of this explanation: in all instances of déjà vu that I know of, one has the feeling that this situation has only one antecedent, not many. One sees in the mirror of memory only one reflection, not an endless number of them. 

This does not, of course, exclude eternal return as a possible elucidation of déjà vu. It could be that some mechanism prevents our recalling previous lifetimes most of the time; and only occasionally slips up, permitting a brief glimpse of only one prior situation. However, the philosophical principle of Occam's razor says one should not multiply assumptions beyond the minimum necessary to account for all the observed facts. This would seem to exclude eternal return as an explanation of déjà vu until more evidence in its favor is brought to fore.