Gigi Young - The Psychic Experience of Time

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My reply:

When I was a student studying undergraduate mathematics I felt like I was travelling through the past, because all the mathematics I studied was from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and I was there at the end of the twentieth century thinking "how am I ever going to become a mathematician in real life?" It was because the theorems that I was studying became more and more sophisticated and needed a more sophisticated set of mathematical tools and mathematical notation to express. At that time I used to quite consciously feel that as I learned the mathematics of these men like Gauss, Euler, Cayley, Fermat, Lagrange, et al, I was reincarnating some part of their minds, because when I understood those theorems of theirs and could appreciate their beauty, I felt a great joy that must have been a kind of reflection of the experience they themselves had had when they first discovered those theorems and proofs, and it was clear to me that their minds were integrated, because they too were studying each others' work very carefully, and the result was this more or less joined-up body of human thought called mathematics. But then when I began to study mathematical logic I started to see that there were some fundamental disagreements between mathematicians concerning what truly belonged to this one body of thought we called mathematics. The chief amongst these areas of dispute was that between intuitionists such as the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer, who raised doubts as to the validity of certain logical deductions which most mathematicians claimed where self-evidently true. And the more I learned about mathematical logic the more I began to feel that I would never become a mathematician in real life, because what I had believed as an undergraduate, that there was one body of human thought called "mathematics" wasn't actually true on close inspection, because of these differences of opinion amongst mathematicians about what constituted a valid mathematical proof. So in mathematics it seemed that the timeline of evolution of thought had become divergent and the study of mathematics was not a progression to a higher state of abstraction and unity, but in fact it was divergent and increasing in density. Then around 2010 I started reading Aristotle and when I read Aristotle's logic I got the feeling that it was almost inhumanly perfect. And that was when I started thinking seriously about reincarnation of the soul, and it seemed to me that it was not at all impossible once you abstract away the accidents of a person's life, which are what define individuals in the context of the historical time and place where they actually lived. So that's my only psychic time-travelling experience. I tried to write about in an introduction to the philosophy of Aristotle. It's a rather strange "play" consisting of a series of conversations between different people who lived at different times. So I suppose it's a kind of community of spirits all talking to each other.

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See Terence McKenna on Shamanism With A Classical Context and Putin Refers to The West As "The Empire of Lies" where you will hear Alexander Solzhenitsyn talking about God, Humanism and Russian literature and the community of minds that produced it.