Yes, there is hope, even for The Idle Foundation! (That's a joke.)

At the penultimate moment of brain death our entire lives are resurrected and 'flash before us' - every sight, sound, taste, smell etc. Nothing is lost. But what appears to us as a rapid flicker of images and sensations at death, is on another level of our awareness, experienced in real time. (Remember Zeno's time paradoxes? The arrow that takes forever to reach its target if its trajectory is plotted at each point?)

When we experience Deja-Vu or precognition we are experiencing an overlap of memories from our previous life. Anthony Peake explains precognition by seeing it not as an indication of a future event, but as a 'memory' of a past life - as something that has already happened in the old consciousness and has sneaked into the newly replayed death movie. We don't really see the future, we see the past.

According to him and philosophers like Nietzsche, our lives are cyclic and spin through many incarnations in what Nietzsche calls 'The Eternal Return'.

But Peake differs from Nietzsche in that he believes free will can subtly alter our incarnations at different points in the replay. Enter Everett's 'Many worlds' interpretations of Quantum mechanics.
Like the fractal patterned landscapes of chaos theory, our lives are like strange attractors, bifurcating and branching off into more and more baroque patterns, self-similar but not identical.

We will never be condemned to a total groundhog life, just occasional Deja-Vu, premonitions and synchronicity's.

Rejoice, we are immortal! Pass the Mushrooms.

yes, I remember seeing this post next week!

(or was that just a wrong shroom)

So where does this leave the idea of karma?

If I have some kind of memory of a past life, however vague, do I have the opportunity to learn from it? So I could have been an unfulfilled wage slave with peptic ulcers in my past life, and this is why I'm so frightened of work now?

Mr Livered wrote:
So where does this leave the idea of karma?

So I could have been an unfulfilled wage slave with peptic ulcers in my past life, and this is why I'm so frightened of work now?

There is no question - if you believe in karma - that you were a wage slave with peptic ulcers, many times over. Likewise, you've been a slave driving boss, an idler, an entrepeneur, a 'state sponger' etc, etc, and will continue to repeat this probability til you attain full enlightenment.

Your fear of pointless alientaing employment now could well be a result of your past life residue as a 'wage slave'.

So, Mr Livered, sit down and don't stand up til your legs have dropped off. I'll bring you a cuppa, don't fret.

You can never experience deja vu for the first time.

I'm pretty sure I've heard all this before.