Sometimes, it feels like some memories, habits, or even fears don’t quite belong to this life, as if we’re living a draft rewritten by something bigger. Is it just déjà vu, or could there be “edits” from other versions of ourselves? The idea of reincarnation usually sounds mystical, but what if it’s more like being re-drafted, not starting over, just arriving again with more (or less) memory? Curious to hear your thoughts:
Can identity survive “edits”?
Have you ever felt you were carrying memories that don’t feel fully your own?
Is self just a story that keeps getting revised?
Today I went to an event happening at the building I went to elementary school in decades ago. I was worried the directions weren't clear enough and that I might get lost, but when I got there everything felt immediately familiar and I could still walk on autopilot exactly where I needed to go.
There's parts of our mind that encode information like about places that aren't part of explicit memory. You may therefore "remember" something that you don't recall knowing. What if rather than being my elementary school, this was a building I'd been to once a long time ago but forgotten? Or maybe a building that I've not been to, but unbeknownst to me was designed with a unique style by the same architect as a building I was more familiar with? It might also seem oddly familiar.
Reincarnation by nature is hard to define, let alone prove true or false. So I couldn't really rule it out entirely. But given all the other explanations, I'd lean against it.