Late Night New-Age Rambling

• 11 Apr, 2020
• Paisley P. Peinforte
• Hits count 812

As usual, I’m having profound thoughts in bed, when I should be sleeping, ,or doing other, more pleasant, things. I was musing on the concept of history repeating… why do certain patterns like pandemics and the rise of fascism seem to recur at what feel like roughly consistent intervals?

Now, fair bit of warning, these thoughts are half-baked and wholly unscientific, premised on some new age conceptualities I picked up in my youth – it’s a thought experiment, nothing more.

In my dubious youth I devoured everything I could about the paranormal and supernatural (it was the X-Files era, you know? the good version, not the shite revival) – and one of the key bits of subject matter I'd keep coming back to waswas the meaning and purpose of life here on Earth.

A goodly lot of psychics and gurus maintained that we are here, born on Earth to learn lessons. That this planet is a "classroom" of some kind for our higher selves. 

Let’s pretend this is 100% true.

If this is the case, my sleepy brain says, then two immediate reasons for repeating history come to mind: 

1 – Repeating curriculum. 

In a normal school, students enter, learn a set number of things, then graduate and leave. The next set comes in, and learns the same lessons the last set did, with a bit of updating and revision in the pedagogical material. As such, a historian of the school could easily track, say, the discussion of trigonometry as a recurrent pattern in the school, which students would encounter say every 4 years. (Assuming no classes running in parallel.)

If Earth is a school, then maybe these historical fugues are the wake of a large scale curriculum as looked back upon by students in the current class.

2 - We are idiots who can't get anything right. 

The other possibility is that we as a species keep flunking the "tests" that would get us out of school and so we keep coming back and redoing things in a form of remedial education.

That’s all I’ve got, really. I did say it was a midnight ramble and you should ignore it. 

EDIT 27 / 6 / 20 -

THEN AGAIN

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